Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 23, 1993 TAG: 9312250108
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY JO SHANNON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He was 15 then, and his father, C.W. Ruble, and two partners had just bought the bakery from S.V. Maddox and C.A. Jennings. Those owners had started it in 1903 on Salem Avenue.
Earl Ruble didn't plan to, but he spent 56 years around what is now Rainbow Bread Co. He stayed on with the bakery, watching its growth and relocation in 1948 to Liberty Road and Hollins Road. After the move, 186 employees were baking 700,000 pounds a week.
He was there, moving up the ranks, when the bakery was sold to Campbell Taggert Bakeries of Kansas City in 1935 and became Rainbo Bread Co. of Roanoke. Ruble was president and general manager for 20 years, retiring from that job in 1978. Afterward, he served as chairman of the board until 1984.
While Ruble was chairman, Rainbo was sold to its present owner, Anheuser Busch Co. Ruble is spending his retirement hunting and playing golf. He says he doesn't miss his work.
``I loved every day I worked,'' he says, ``but when I quit, I quit.''
But Ruble, who was a Lee Junior High School seventh-grader when he started at the bakery, recalls going to the bakery on Central Avenue after school and working well into the night.
``I did the full job of a man,'' he says. ``They didn't have laws then that kept young folks from working.''
Besides greasing pans, he also helped shape hamburger and hot dog rolls by hand. ``Today, they can turn out 400 a minute by machinery.''
The ovens are also mechanized. Pans enter filled with raw dough, move continuously through controlled heat and emerge bursting with hot, fragrant loaves. In Ruble's youth, however, the moving was done by hand; pulling the long handle of a peal oven kept the loaves in motion.
Bread was wrapped in waxed paper by hand and then run over a hot sealing plate.
``We used a meat slicer to make Roanoke's first sliced bread,'' recalls Ruble. ``Slicing added half a penny to a loaf of bread.''
As Ruble's experience grew, he began making cakes and doughnuts. The only doughnuts available, however, had been the cake type.
``One day a fellow came by looking for a job and said he knew how to make raised doughnuts. He made some, and they were great. But we knew he wouldn't last long because he was a drunk. So one night Howard Hale and I weighed all the ingredients of those doughnuts and wrote it down. Sure enough, the fellow disappeared a day or so later, but we knew how to make the doughnuts.''
But, a mishap with pies almost cost Ruble his job. He not only helped make the fruit and meringue pies, but also delivered them on a rack on the side of his motorcycle. The rack held 54 pies.
``I had just delivered two pies to City Lunch,'' he says, grinning as he recalled the incident, ``when I saw a pretty girl on the other side of the street. The car in front of me stopped, and I piled into the back of it.''
Fifty-two pies rolled all the way to Salem Avenue, he says. ``Someone asked my boss why he didn't fire me, and he said he would've but I could do the work of three men.''
Once when he was delivering to the Fincastle area on a two-lane road, the brakes on the truck failed. The truck plowed into a herd of cattle, killing three. Although there was no flagman, and the farmer driving the cattle had stopped to talk to someone, neglecting his job, the bakery offered to pay for the loss. The offer was refused, and a suit ensued.
``The judge found in our favor, and the farmer ended up with nothing,'' Ruble says.
He has another cattle story, but this time the cows saved his life. It was during the days the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s. Ruble left at 4 a.m. one snowy day to deliver at the camp on Barber's Creek. The road was slick and the temperature freezing, he recalls.
``I got to the last curve on top of Catawba Mountain and the truck stopped. There wasn't any other traffic on the road, and my window was out, and I almost froze. I walked down to the valley and found a barn with some cattle. They kept me from freezing until someone was able to come looking for me.''
Ruble says he now goes by the bakery ``once in a while for a lump of dough to make some sweet rolls.''
Since he's retired, he bakes sourdough bread, sharing the starter with innumerable friends who have requested it after tasting the product.
Every year he attends a reunion of former managers and department heads of Rainbo and other Campbell Taggert bakeries, missing only one - last year's, when he was battling cancer.
Last month, Ruble flew to Dallas, the present headquarters of the parent company, for the reunion. He attended a party Monday night, played golf Tuesday and attended another party Tuesday night.
The requirements for the reunion, he says, are simple: ``You have to be retired, fired or quit. No current employees are allowed.''
by CNB