Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 10, 1993 TAG: 9309100251
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
From the confectionery's cramped shelves, you could buy the fundamentals of daily life: shampoo, dish soap, doughnuts, paper towels, bread, steel wool, soda pop.
When she could have been thinking about retiring, in 1958, Lugie Saferight took over the store. She kept running credit tabs for some of her working-class customers - "kept a lot of them from starving," says her grandson, Leroy Dewberry.
"She's been there all this time, refusing to sell beer and wine," said Leroy. "She could've made a lot of money on it."
Lugie ran the store with her daughter for a long time, but in the past few years, she worked alone.
The neighborhood got rougher.
At least twice in the past couple of years, thugs tried to fill their pockets with money the easy way. They tried to strong-arm Lugie Saferight at the store.
One got her in a headlock, but Lugie grabbed the gun she kept under the counter and chased him out. Another asked if she was going to shoot him, and she told him she wouldn't fire if he left. He left.
"We approached her two years ago, to buy the store," said Joy Sylvester-Johnson, the director of development for the Rescue Mission of Roanoke. The Rescue Mission is in the back yard of Jot Em Down Confectionery. "She didn't want to sell, but we told her `When you're ready to retire, let us know first.' "
Lugie Saferight is 90 years old, and Jot Em Down was getting old, too. Seven days a week, carrying the cash register money home alone at night, a deteriorating neighborhood - it all added up. It was time to leave.
Jot Em Down went up for sale. The Rescue Mission offered $20,000, planning to tear down the old store. Lugie wanted to sell it as an operating store - which is what is was to her - and she asked for $35,000.
That's where the two sides hunkered.
"We don't need it, and don't have to have it," said Sylvester-Johnson. "I assume someday we'll have it." The Rescue Mission owns most of the rest of the block, including the land out the Jot Em Down back door that is to become a playground.
This summer, the mission hired a grading company to rip out old concrete slabs and footers to make way for the play area.
The contractor unwittingly pulled up a chunk of concrete with a pipe inside it.
It was Lugie Saferight's sewer line. She claims it was a legitimate line feeding into the city's sewage system; the Rescue Mission believes it was an outlaw line draining into the buried grease pit of a long-vanished corner filling station.
Regardless, left without a sewer line, Jot Em Down was forced to close in July. Lugie Saferight hired a lawyer.
"I couldn't sell it," she said. "Who would buy a place like that?"
The Rescue Mission put up a 6-foot wire fence around its new lot and planted grass seed on the fresh dirt. The fence doglegs around Jot Em Down, just a couple of feet from the brick walls.
"I feel bad for this little old lady," said Sylvester-Johnson. "I feel terrible. [The Rescue Mission] is not the type of profit-making corporation that would try to knock off an old woman. Our whole job is to take in people who've been knocked down by the system, not to knock them down ourselves."
Lugie has no mind to go back into business at Jot Em Down. She's done with the place. She'd like a new sewer line and a buyer with a yen to run a neighborhood grocery.
The Rescue Mission contends there never was a sewer line and won't let Lugie put one in across the future playground because the playground might someday be needed for a building.
It's not a happy ending.
"Sometimes," says Sylvester-Johnson ruefully, "bad things happen and nobody's to blame."
by CNB