If cancer doesn’t kill you, the hospital bill will: Delores Bishop

The American health care system reminds Delores Bishop of a giant trap. You get cancer, and the magic cheese saves you. Then the spring snaps, and you are caught like a rat.

Yes, we will fight your cancer, the system says, but in payment we will take all that you have saved, all your future income, and leave you and your husband destitute, without hope of recover, and racked by guilt, helplessness, and anger.

And guess what? This is a deal you can’t afford to refuse!

So when Mrs. Bishop, who has been successfully treated for lung cancer, watched President Clinton’s health care address the other night, she applauded. Her was a small lamp of hope being lit.

She got out a plastic grocery bag full of bills and opened a few to make her point. “I used to sit here and cry over them. Then I got this bag, and I just throw them in.”

She pulled up an unopened envelope. “I’ve got fabulous doctors in Richmond, but their billing is terrible. I went in one morning for a biopsy, and was back home thatevening. $6,200! They billed me as an inpatient! We get bills from the doctor and bills from the hospital. Now this one’s for $1,568, and that’s after the insurance has paid!” She threw the paper back into the bag.

“It hurts to know that you’ve got insurance, and then you’ve got to put up with all this stuff. It’s getting terrible. There’s so many court orders, and these bill collectors started calling and threatening. That’s what got me. I was I bed sick, and a guy called and harassed me. They get really nasty. They scared me at first, but then I learned to live with it. They were not going to mess me up!” said Mrs. Bishop, showing the strength and determination that had helped her beat the cancer.

But having won the battle, could she win the war? “I told the doctor the last time I went, that I felt like I couldn’t come back anymore (if I got sick again), because for 41 years, we’ve worked to get what little bit we’ve got. And I’d hate to see me get down and out, and my husband lose everything we’ve got.” Her voice cracked for the first time.

Carl Bishop retired from Fort Pickett this year, and now, after 47 years of Army and Civil Service, has to pay $330 a month for insurance, despite the government promise that at the end of his career he and his wife would be taken care of for the rest of their lives. It’s not that the Bishops don’t want to pay their bills. They are sending $50 a month to the hospital, but that’s like a drop in a bucket that never stops emptying. And they can’t afford to cancel their insurance. Caught!

“You keep getting these bills, and you don’t know what they are for. I went over there and told these people to get these bills straightened out because the insurance company is not going to pay them. But it just keeps going on. Here’s one: $850 for five minutes for a weekly radiation treatment!” She closed up the bag.

But Mrs. Bishop still feels lucky. At the hospital, she saw so many die, and seeing the children not come back was very hard, she said. She has friends who have been stripped of everything by the health care system. “I had a friend who was in the hospital for ten days, and they took everything he had.”

And there was another friend, who died from lung cancer. In fact, Mrs. Bishop was bringing her flowers while she unknowing was also sick with the same cancer.

“It was a year ago that I got sick,” she said. “Thought it was pneumonia because I had a pain across my back and couldn’t breathe.” She kept hoping it was bronchitis.

After the tests got back, that hope vanished. “When I got out of his office, it hit me. I had cancer! I just broke down and cried while my husband held me. “Alright, now we’ve got to go home and tell the kids,’ we said.” The Bishops have five children and 12 grandchildren, all in this area. Mrs. Bishop would no be without loving support.

When she got back to Blackstone and the life she had left there, everything was different. “Cancer changes your outlook a lot. I see things in a different way, and I appreciate my grandchildren more,” she said.

She had three chemotherapy treatments and radiation treatments following that.“The treatment doesn’t hurt or anything, but it does weaken your system. I did get real sick with the second chemotherapy. The worst part was the hour and a half drive to the hospital.”

Town workers just keep going…and going

Jap Hawkes climbed board the road grader and cranked it up for the last time. As the old diesel engine coughed and came to life, his smile widened a few more inches. Hawkes, 78, and the grader that was being sold to the school board, had come to work for the town for Blackstone back in the 40’s. Their flesh and steel had bonded by years of work—neither was going to retire before the other.

While younger members of the town’s street crew saw only the discomfort and indignity of operating equipment that had no heat, Hawkes still remembered how he felt when the equipment was new. “We didn’t have anything like that! Why, a piece of equipment that would do that kind of work! We didn’t have nothing but picks and  shovels!” Built simple and made to last, Hawkes and the grader had much in common.

Blackstone  has always placed great value in its heavy equipment and made sure there was advantage to be gained before replacing a piece. But when it comes to good workers, the town figures their value increases with the years. If you work for Blackstone no one turns your engine off before you are ready.

Hawkes is not the only town employee who has stayed behind the wheel long after retirement age. There’s Francis Johnson, 39 years on the Water Dept., and Ercelle Dewey, 41 years at the town office. And there’s 74 year-old Walter hart, 17 years with the town after 21 years with Garrett, Moon, and Pool.

For Town Manager Larry Palmore, having men like Hawkes and Johnson at his elbow when sewer and water lines have to be replace saves time and money. Better than maps, they can tell you not only where everything is buried but how it was buried. “When they say we used to do it this way, I listen,” said Palmore, who was hired by the town eight years ago to replace water lines. “Johnson could put his foot on every valve that was buried.”

But it is not only the knowledge these older workers possess that makes them so valuable: they also remind the younger generations of the pure joy of work. “When I first came here, Jap Hawkes said you don’t every have to worry about running out of work,” said Hart. Obviously, in the mind of these men, running out of work was like running out of food.

“I’ve been working since I was five years-old,” Hart continued. His lean ody didn’t have any excess and he didn’t have much use for anyone who looked forward to the absence of work. To Hart, the end of work was death.

“Epes Harris told me—see I’ve had two open heart surgeries—not to ever quit work…I know two or three people who retired at 62 and didn’t see 65. I know one man who died the day he retired.” Epes told him that sitting at home with nothing to do but think about himself would carry him away as quick as a bad disease.

“Retiring? I’ve retired two or three times and come back!” Hawkes laughed even when he wasn’t on the grader. “They don’t let me go…and I appreciate it. You take a man my age, don’t nobody want to fool with you.” Except Blackstone, that is.

Hawkes doesn’t operate a street grader anymore. Arthritis gets his knees, he says. But he does mow everything that grows on the town property during the warm months. “He’s just like clockwork,” Palmore commented. “Never cutting anything he shouldn’t and taking care of the equipment. No one ever complains about Hawkes.”

Town employment has been good for men like Hart and Hawkes. “I bought my home. Paid for that.  Bought three or four more homes around town, trailers and things…I paid for that, too!” said Hawkes.

When Hart came to work for the town, all three of his sons worked here. “I’ve had a good life,” he said, not meaning that it was over, to be sure. Hart grew up on a Dinwiddie farm. One of 15 children, and weathered the depression “better than those that had one or two children. Back then you raised everything you ate.”

Palmore laughed. “Hart doesn’t understand why the men should want a break.”

“When I come along, we didn’t have breaks…and it ain’t never hurt me!” Hart said, raising his eyebrows. Work in Hart’s mind was more the n just the means to a pay check—work was the pay check!

Palmore had more to say about the town’s older workers He said keeping their town running smoothly and helping people is what keep them going long after the expiration date of 65 years society has set up as the norm. “They are not here because they have to be, but because they want to be.”

Dentistry and ministry work side by side for Leroy Bradshaw

The tooth is out!
Once more again
The throbbing, jumping
Nerves are stilled.
Reader, would you avoid
This pain?
Then have your crumbling
Teeth well filled.

-David Bares (1810-1876)

The obscure poet, David Bates, who wrote the above lines may be forgotten, but his “throbbing, jumping nerves” are well known to anyone who has ever had a bad tooth and needed a dentist.

But where does a dentist go when the “Throbbing, jumping nerves” are his? That’s what Leroy Bradshaw wanted to know when he finished dental school and returned to Blackstone to practice dentistry with his father, Dr. T.C. Bradshaw

Leroy had everything a young man should want: a good profession, a beautiful wife, a nie house, healthy children…but he was miserable.

“For the first six or eight years, we were really dissatisfied here,” Leroy recalled, “I was in debt and our marriage almost failed.” This wasn’t where I was supposed to be, thought Leroy. What had happened to his dream of being a minister? He had let it go so easily.

“After two weeks at William and Mary, I decided going into the ministry wasn’t a good idea because I couldn’t get a good grade in English.” So Leroy took biology, got A’s, got approval, and ended up…a dentist.

Then he applied to seminary, and again slowed someone to discourage him.

Disparaging thought began to decay his self-esteem. Once more again the throbbing, jumping nerves…Now he had a major cavity. No dentist could remove this pain.

Fortunately, dentistry hadn’t kept Leroy from being active in the Baptist church. When he and his wife Sylvia went to a medial missions conference, they never suspected when he returned home he would be exulting: The tooth is out! And that their marriage would be repaired.

Leroy, now a minister of Jonesboro Baptist Church for the past five years, still visits that turning point in his life for inspiration.

“We were studying the Book of Jonah,” said Leroy, when his teacher startled him with a revelation: ‘You are just like Jonah, trying to go somewhere other than where God wants you to be.’”

Leroy had never linked himself personally to the parables in the Bible. He had always read them like he read biology: objectively, rationally…safely.

Now, without warning, like a monster from the sea, the Bible opened its great mouth and swallowed him. Instead of being outside reading it, Leroy was inside—being read by it!.

He was Jonah! Blackstone is where I’m supposed to be, he realized. Leroy gave up fighting himself and found peace.

Leroy frequently reaches down into the Book of Jonah to touch that pearl of wisdom he had been shown in the belly of the whale.

The painful tooth that was extracted had been transformed into a pearl of wisdom.

When Leroy came out of the Book of Jonah, he took charge of his life and gave himself permission to be who he was. It was OK to be a small town dentist and the minister he really wanted to be.

The similarity between the opened mouth of the whale and the opened mouth of the dental patient is not lost to Leroy.

The words of the dentist and the minister seem to come from one mouth: at some time in your life you have to surrender to God (and the dentist); at some point the pain of sin (a decayed tooth) is less than the fear of the Lord (the dentist); at some point, you have to let Christ (the dentist) reach inside and heal you.

“And the person has to accept the filling (Word),” Leroy added, happy to discover yet another metaphorical bridge between his worldly and spiritual life. “A person has to take responsibility for the care of his teeth (spiritual life).

“Through neglect and abuse, the teeth (one’s whole life) break down.” Everything about dentistry is perfect for teaching and preaching, Leroy discovered.

To bring this story back from the deep, having been inside one whale of a metaphor, take a look at how the Bradshaws have taken their dentistry/ministry abroad. “The more we give away, the more returns to us,” said Leroy, when asked why they go on missions.

Since 1981 they have spent their vacations in mission work, both in Appalachia and in Haiti, once and last month in Columbia. The Bradshaws have found this gift of their talents maintains the bridge between the ministry and dentistry.

Sylvia, who works as her husband’s assistant, picked up a fruit jar containing 188 decayed and broken teeth they had extracted from the mouths of the Columbian poor.

In place of these teeth, the Bradshaws hope seeds of Bible study had been planted “They will come with a tooth ache and at the same time get their spiritual needs answered,” said Sylvia.

CREST COLLECTION REMEMBERS ARMY UNITS FOR 23 YEARS

When soldiers arrive at Fort Pickett, the supply office is one of the first stops. Expecting the usual ritual forms and more forms, soldiers are always surprised by a collection of military crests covering the rear wall of the supply clerk’s office.

While requests are being filled, soldiers, whether reservists, national guard, or regular army, walk up to the wall and examine the emblems. Always driven by the same compelling questions, they want to know: Is my unit represented here?

Winter and summer, the scene never changes. The collection continues to grow like leaves on a tree. When Betty Branum, who has been collecting crests since 1971, pins new crest on her wall boards—no soldier has ever worn his crest more proudly—you can sense why crests keep coming.

A Supply Clerk at Fort Pickett for 28 years, Betty is remembered by soldiers from all over the United States, including NATO countries. She receives each crest given her as if it were the most important crest in her collection.

“It’s just amazing what they will give me,” exclaimed betty. The crests, which are issued for Class A uniforms are hard to come by and are not cheap.

While military units come and go, and army personnel change every year, Betty and her crest collection are a constant at Fort Pickett. Every soldier wants to have his unit displayed on her collection boards—which hold about 800 crests now, so many the office doesn’t have enough wall to hold them all.

In addition to posting the crest, she included the name of the unit and the soldier who gave it to her. Some have sent the history of their units, which she keeps at home.

This is more that just a collection of collar pins. Each crest is a miniature shield or battle flag, a symbol that soldiers have given their lives for since soldiers have given their lives.

The crests represent the greater whole of which each soldier is a part: that mysterious bond that gives each soldier his meaning, that “mother” who holds all her sons in one embrace.

“I get accused of knocking them down and ripping them off their lapels…But I really don’t do that,” she added, just in case a qualifying footnote was needed.

“I have crests to collect before I retire,” she said with a laugh. “They say there are about 11,000 out there.”

Johnny Johnson

^{Clucks replace moos for local dairy farmer}

Most people are familiar with the story about the flock of sea gulls that saved the early Mormons from starvation by eating the locust. But how may people know about the Nottoway dairy farmer who was saved by a flock of chickens?

In 1985 a double-fisted blow of drought and deteriorating farm buildings felled Johnny and Chuck Johnson’s dairy farm like a cow in a slaughter house. It was either go deeper into debt or sell the dairy herd which their Swedish grandfather had started in 1916 hen the bought 220 acres on Route 460 west of Blackstone.

In the following 70 years, two succeeding generations of Johnsons had built up the original farm to 660 acres and almost 250 dairy cows. But the times were not friendly to the Johnsons now.

“Why not chickens!” Johnson’s wife Patricia said as they were looking for some way to keep the land. She had crown up on a chicken farm across the highway. Here was something she could help her husband with. Intuitively, she knew that without his farm, her husband’s happiness would dry up like their corn had without rain.

And chickens meant Holly farms. “We decided on chickens in December, and by Jly we were pickin’ eggs,” Johnson said, still a little amazed at the speed the plan was hatched.

And picking eggs Johnson and his wife were, three times a day, seven days a week. Next to the decaying milk parlor and in the shadow of the empty silos, two long 400 foot “egg factories” lay. Inside 16,000 pullets and over 2,000 roosters produced approximately 10,000 eggs on a good day.

Part of the larger Holly Farm system, these eggs were picked-up twice a week, hatched and sent to another farm where they were raised as broilers. There were few variables left in the system. Weather and feed prices didn’t bother the chicken farmer.

Mrs. Johnson felt she had come home to a place she had almost forgotten. “The first time I walked in when we put the shavings on the floor of the houses I remembered walking through the sawdust as a child—the smell and the feel was the same.”

Johnson was wearing a dust mask while gathering eggs. “I missed the cows, but it was a good choice for the farm,” he said as his large fingers felt under the warm hens for the fragile egg. In the winter when the window curtains were shut to trap the body heat rising from the sea of white chickens, the dust and the shock of ammonia hit like smelling salts.

“Watch out for the roosters” Johnson warned. “They’ll jump you once in awhile.” They were hard to pick out because they were the only birds with feathers on their backs. Unlike cows, chickens will peck at anything.

“They’ll even pick th sunlight,” he said with amused disdain.

Johnson’s first flock was nine months old now. Holly Farms would pick-up the exhausted hens in May, coming in at night to catch them off guard and ship them to the soup factory Johnson thought. A flock just wasn’t as smart or lived as long as a cow.

“You can’t have the same relationship with a chicken you have with a cow. The sound of an egg dropped and the chickens closed in on it blindly. “You know the cows by name; chickens you know by the flock.” Johnson’s voice was almost lost as the 8,000 throats of his flock suddenly surged and crested a cacophony of clicking and crowing as if it were a single animal.

Yet something was missing. But when asked what, Johnson could only say “I don’t know…I just like cows.”

It wasn’t the money because Johnson had more spendable income now with the chickens than he had with the cows. It wasn’t the hours because he could gather the eggs at 6:00 a.ml instead of rising at two in the morning. And he didn’t have to spend his days growing feed for the chickens because Holly Farms supplied that. Nor were those freezing winters to be stoically endured because no matter how cold it was outside, he could work in his shirt sleeves in the enclosed chicken house. And when a chicken got sick, he didn’t have to stay up worrying all night with her like he did with his cows.

“But I just like the cows,” Johnsons said again looking down and toeing the ground with his foot.

He liked them so much that every other morning he was up at 2:00 a.m. to milk for a neighboring dairy.

“Johnny said th first time he milked down there he would have milked for free,” his wife said, trying to capture his private relationship wit the cows in words her husband didn’t have.

Johnson’s earliest memories were of work on the farm. His father had to work away from the farm during hard times. Before he was big enough to move the milking pot, Johnson was working weekends full time to help his mother run the dairy.

The land, the farm, the flow of continuity, the rhythms of nature, these were the bonds which could not be broken without severe consequences. It was not hard to imagine the anxiety Johnson experienced when he contemplated cutting away from the motherly source which had fed him and his family all his life.

The transition from cows to chickens had been smooth, Johnson said, like moving from spring to summer. But the chicken houses only took up a small piece of the farm and Johnson’s mind. He was planning to raise some beef cattle in the coming summer and he talked about automatic nests which would give him ore time for the farm.

And as for the future. “Well, some day I’ll build the herd up again,” he said, thinking of his son who wants to “fool with the cows.”

In May, the Johnsons will have a month without gathering eggs. Holly Farms will wash and sterilize the houses before new flocks are literally poured into the houses. It will take three weeks before the chickens start laying.

“Next time we’ll keep the dogs tied up,” Mrs. Johnson laughed, recalling the pandemonium when a few chickens leaked out into the yard and excited the dogs.

Johnson was sanding clean a dirty egg after the morning’s gathering. He looked up and laughed when it was pointed out that he was spending five minutes cleaning a two cent egg. He smiled and picked up another egg.

Chickens or cows, nothing had really seemed to change when it was the love and care of the farm that mattered.

“Of course, we do eat a few more eggs now, he said with a laugh.

Bill Jennings

POOR HOUSE STONES MAKE LUNENBURG MAN WEALTHY

If you measure wealth by money, status, or fame then you would never put your ruler next to Bill Jennings, who lives on the Old Poor House Road near Kenbridge.

On the other hand, if wealth were determined by the number of log cabins you have built, Jennings is rich. With nothing but the 25 acres his father gave him, its trees and stones, and a rock-hard will to independence, Jennings, now 65 had single-handedly lined his route 653 road front with no less than five compact houses.

The first he made of conventional cinder-block, the second (which he now lives in) a more attractive but still common brick…but the last three were individually designed houses of hand-hewn log and stone.

Pointing to the stone chimney which walled on end of his first log house—the one he called “Alice”–Jennings began a guided tour along his life’s work. “Those rocks came from the poor house that used to be on this road. I cleaned ‘em up and hand chipped ‘em…Took about a week part-time,” he added proudly, but not because of his craftsmanship. No, Jennings’s pride was I making use of the useless.

Nevertheless, these “poor-house rocks” were pure art, no matter where they came from. How did he get that perfect union of beauty and function? Small, large, round, flat, each rock looked a though nature had designed it for that particular chimney.

“I just let the rocks go the way they want to,” he said slowly with a grin. But was he talking about the chimney or the way he had let nature design his own life? His houses seemed like statements of rugged individualism as well as practical living spaces: “cool in the summer, warm in the winter and never needs paint.”

Although he had worked for salary like a conventional man once—three years as a brick mason in Farmville—being self-employed was his natural state. “When you’re working for somebody, you’re handicapped. You work for eight hours and when you get home you’re too tired to think.” And probably too tired to build a perfect chimney as well, one might add.

Built when “Kennedy got shot” and named for an aunt who wanted to be never lived there, “Alice” has hand-made shingles and a cement porch inlaid with pieces from a broken toilet which looked like expensive Italian tile after Jennings put down his trowel.

The charm of Jenning’s three cottages is their sculptured personalities. And that charm has put him in the small business of building summer homes for people who want originals. So far he has built a duplex in Chase city, a bungalow below Kenbridge, and another on Route 709.

Jennings’s artist expression didn’t break out, however, until a lack of funds forced him to rely on the trees and sones of his own land. After “Alice,” he threw away the blueprint and built “Brown’s Cabin” and then “Walter.” Brown was the man who had showed him how to shave logs with an x and Walter was the teacher who taught him carpentry. More than stone went into his houses.

“Brown’s” axed-shaved logs fitted on its stone foundation with the affect of an Abe Lincoln cabin. “That chimney (the chimney was made of horizontal logs) is what they used in the olden days,” Jennings pointed out. Everything he said or did demonstrated his love of the pioneer spirit and disdain for the assembly line. “Saw mill logs fit exactly…but the houses come out all alike.” He shook his head. (rest of story lost).

Music was her first commandment

At age six, Carleton Cunningham stood on a stool next to a piano in a church in Georgia and sang. At eleven, she was sitting at the piano playing for the church. Read more

Town’s most successful job training program

If you want to see what life was like in the 1950s, you don’t to go farther than the Dairy Freeze in Blackstone. While modem fast food restaurants compete by faster food processing and assembly line service, the old Dairy Freeze still makes fresh hamburger patties by hand and mixes its milkshakes like the old drug store soda fountains did. Read more

98-years-old and still in love with the earth

One mile deep into the Fitzgerald farm off Route 646 in Nottoway County table level fields of grain wave in the cool May breeze. The same current moves the honeysuckle as it begins another season of growth over abandoned farm equipment and buildings. Mrs. Petronella Turpin Fitzgerald, 98, stands among her rows of boxwood and shakes her head. “This was a pretty farm once. It doesn’t look it now…It misses Peter Harris.” Her voice cracked and softened to a whisper.

Read more

The Hurts of Blackstone

From Courier-Record archives: by Ed Conley

The home of Dr. Jethro Meriwether Hurt has long since disappeared in the pines and weeds along route 46 south of Blackstone. Only a picture remains of Auburn in which his wife and one of his daughters, Molly, stand in faded blacks and white. Read more

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