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The following story is from the
Roanoke Times & World News, Sunday, August 26, 1979.
When hot weather comes to the Roanoke
Valley each August, bringing bugs, humidity and a possible increase
in the effects of our modern-day irritants, Irvin and Thema Wertz
get away from it all by sharing work and fellowship with friends in
their Roanoke County peach orchard.
It’s no ordinary gathering of farm
workers, but a communion of folks who have known and liked each
other for years. They come together to perform a chore that is
seasonal, profitable and so enjoyable that it barely qualifies as
work at all.
"You’ve got to have a Medicare card
to pick with us," Mrs. Wertz says, as she plops down beneath her
striped umbrella and awaits the half-bushel baskets of peaches
she’ll grade.
That’s about right. The gang of
helpers consists of a half-dozen retired men form the Villa Heights
Baptist church, as well as a few other friends.
Nearly all have reached their 60’s,
and some will soon turn 80. But they talk and work with enthusiasm
too seldom associated with people of years, and they graciously
welcome this volunteer, an order that prove difficult to obey in
both respects.
"The main thing is, don’t drop any
and don’t eat any," they said, by way of instruction, an order that
proved difficult to obey in both respects.
As usual, the sun was hot. Peach fuzz
mingled with sweat on exposed skin to simulate the bites of a
thousand jiggers. The half-bushel baskets filled rapidly. Soon, Mrs.
Wertz was surrounded by mounds of fruit, which she sorted steadily
before pitching it into large baskets.
"I just live it up here," she said,
surveying the five-acre hillside. "When I die, you know what they’re
gonna do?"
"They’ll lay you out with a peach in
your hand," someone said from the trees.
"Right," she said. I’ve always said
it would e a peach or an egg, one."
The Wertz name is a familiar one in
this part of southwest Roanoke County, even nowadays when
subdivisions have sprung up in view of the orchard itself.
Irvin Wertz was born in a farmhouse
down the road in 1902. John R. Wertz, his father, bought the land he
lives on shortly after that, and Irvin has farmed it since 1936. He
worked a the American Viscose plant in Roanoke form 1927 to 1954,
raised chickens on the side form 1936 to 1945, and in 1954, he went
into farming full time with additional chickens, tomatoes, corn,
peaches and other crops.
At one time he kept 5,000 laying hens
that produced 3,600 eggs per day. He sold many eggs wholesale and
dispensed others on a door-to-door retail route he covered twice a
week.
"It was a seven-day-a-week job, kinda
like dairyin’," he says. "In 1970, I was old enough to go on Social
Security, so I gave it up."
But he kept the land and its 300
peach trees that he planted in 1950, and he added a few beef cattle
to keep the fields down. Now he has seasonal income and enough work
to make him lean and sunburned at 77.
He’s a familiar sight of Roselawn
Road, sitting atop his vintage tractor equipped with bulldozer’s
treads that cling tenaciously to the hillsides. His old wooden spray
tank makes regular runs through the rows of trees, and his green
Chevrolet pickup truck carriers varying loads of fruit, or hay, or
whatever piece of equipment may happen to require attention.
"I expect this will be the last year
we’ll fool with it," said Mrs. Wertz, sitting in the orchard and
singing and old refrain.
"You say that every year," someone
told her.
"I know it," she laughed. "You know,
this is our life."
It’s a different world, up there
among the trees. Below, younger residents speed along in fancy
vehicles, with little knowledge of who the Wertzes (and the Grissos
and the Hawleys and other old-timers) are and what they mean to that
section.
Some newcomers may take the area for
granted, not realizing that the road once was muddy, rutted with
wagon tracks and so seldom traveled that when Irvin Wertz got his
first car stuck in a puddle one night in 1923, he simply waited
until morning to bring the horses over to pull it out.
No one complained, he said.
In the early part of the century,
when John R. Wertz bought a portion of the old Steve Henry place,
"it was a dirt road all the way into Roanoke," Irvin said. "I reckon
it was 1918 or ‘19 before they got (U.S.) 221 graveled.
"Then they put a tollgate on it. The
toll was 15 cents one way, and 25 cents for the round trip." At one
time travelers were required to pay three tolls between Roanoke and
the top of Bent Mountain."
In summer, John R. Wertz and his
fellow farmers rode in Roanoke daily. A two-hour trip in their
horse-pulled wagons. They often left at 2 a.m. to reach the market
in time for the wholesale business at 4 a.m. Sometimes they would
sell all of their produce before the sun came up. Sometimes they
stuck around to make retail sales, and returned home at 5 or 6 p.m.
The chores were performed by the
family. Irvin Wertz was one of 11 children, and most other farm
families were large.
Irvin like that kind of work, and saw
how exercise could improve a mans life. His grandfather lived to 97;
his father died at 84.
"At Viscose, when people got ready to
retire, they’d say, ‘All I’m gonna do is go to the mailbox,’" he
says. "They’d go off good man and in two or three years the nerves
would go bad and they’d be dead."
His helpers feel that same way. Leona
Hardy has worked with the Wertzes peach time since he retired form
the U.S. Postal Service 10 years ago.
"If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t
come," he said. "I think a lot of Irvin and Thema."
Ray Wiley, a Greyhound bus driver who
takes vacation time to work in the orchard, says, "I like to help’em
out. They good people."
And Elmer Neinke, Irvin’s first
cousin who once raised peaches himself, says he does it "just for
the fun I can get out of it."
Gordon Bryant has been coming longer
than anyone; Jimmy Moore, a former teacher and coach at William
Fleming High School is a regular, joined this year by Wilson
Prillaman, Irvin's neighbor, Clyde Colwell, young Bernard Arthur and
briefly, the Rev. J. Landon Maddex, who recently retired after 35
years of service to the Villa Heights Baptist Church.
Irvin pays most of them $3 per hour,
but everyone agreed with Wiley, who said, :I don't care whether they
pay me or not."
"Me and Irvin rode to work at Viscose
together, grew up together, knew each other since we were kids,"
said Elmer Neinke. "And I know one thing: You'll never find a better
fellow than that - your preacher or nobody."
To everyone, he was "Mr. Wertz," not
simply Irvin. And yet he and Mrs. Wertz are neighbors too, the kind
of people who take note if your car stays parked for a day or two
and call you to maker sure nothing is wrong.
On Monday, while Irvin took a pickup
load of peaches to Martin Bros. Produce on the City Market (where he
was paid $5 for each of 45 bushels or large peaches and $4 apiece
for four bushels of smaller ones), his helpers savored a country
lunch of homemade ham biscuits, chicken salad sandwiches, potato
salad and oatmeal-marshmallow cookies.
Then they worked into the afternoon,
filling 125 bushels for the day, getting a good start on the
expected total of more than 1,000 bushels and exchanging banter the
whole time.
They talked of good things and bad,
of an old still discovered up the road nearly three decades ago and
of funerals and other church-related topics.
The Irvin returned to dole out the
money and pick up another load. Everyone promised to come back the
next day, leaving Thelma to reflect on what she'd just witnessed.
"I've always said, if you don't have any
friends at the church, you don't have any friends," she said.
"That's where your friends is."
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