Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9007010232
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ROCKY MOUNT LENGTH: Long
The problem was finding a site for a new Municipal Building that Woody had promised voters when he was first elected mayor in 1970. A lot on Donald Avenue looked ideal, but Peoples National Bank was reluctant to sell.
Woody didn't give up. In a private meeting with W.C. Brown, the bank president, Woody mentioned that the Municipal Building could be situated so that the Police Department would face a corner lot where the bank - now First Virginia - planned to build a branch.
"I told him it would help protect his bank," Woody recalled.
The town ended up with the land at the cut-rate price of $3,000.
A former tobacco trader, Woody drove hard bargains for Rocky Mount in his 20 years as mayor and de facto manager of this town of 4,200. His legacy is a budget surplus that would be the envy of municipalities 10 times its size.
In the process, the blunt-spoken Woody bent the town government to his will and got even with anyone who dared cross him.
"I never forget what anyone ever did for me, and I don't forget what they did against me, either," Woody said. "That may not be the Christian way, but that's the way I am."
Woody, who retired Saturday, said people can take issue with his methods, but they can't argue with the results.
During his tenure, the town built a municipal building, opened a new water plant, developed an industrial park with Franklin County and recruited several large industries. At the same time, the town built up an $8 million budget surplus.
Woody's answer to his detractors: "The proof's in the pudding."
Woody, 69, decided to not to run for re-election this year. Battling emphysema and recovering from several eye operations, he decided the time had come to leave public life.
"I've seen men at tobacco auctions, going up and down those rows of tobacco long after they should have been gone," Woody said. "If I started to slip, I didn't want everybody to know it before me."
Born June 5, 1921, in Rocky Mount, Woody was the oldest boy in a family of six children.
His father was a tobacco man who worked for a time as an independent speculator traveling from auction to auction in the South. In 1934, Woody went with his father to south Georgia for his rite of passage into the art of buying and selling tobacco.
They flagged down a Greyhound bus in front of their house on South Main Street and rode all night long. Thirteen-year-old Woody was too excited to sleep.
The trip ended in Adel, a small town north of Valdosta. His father took him to inspect the tobacco waiting to be auctioned in the local warehouse. The idea was to buy bales of tobacco, then resell them at a higher price.
His father taught him how to enhance the value of tobacco by throwing out the inferior leaves from a pile and placing the best leaves on top. "What my daddy used to call it was `putting Sunday clothes on it,' " Woody said.
Father and son spent the summer selling their spiffed-up tobacco for a profit. "I was getting to be a tobacco man," Woody said.
After Woody graduated from Rocky Mount High School in 1939, his father made him a 50-50 partner. At 21, Woody became the youngest buyer the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. had ever hired.
World War II interrupted Woody's career, although the local draft board did give him a six-month deferment through the 1942 season.
Woody was inducted the next spring and married Louise Foster of Rocky Mount before shipping off to Europe as a supply officer. After he returned in 1946, Woody said, he stayed drunk the better part of two years. He remembers scoffing at a group of Rocky Mount men who asked him to join the Alcoholics Anonymous group they had formed.
"I knew deep down that I should be with them," Woody said. "I knew damn well my life was gone if I kept on."
One day, Woody was nursing a fifth of whiskey when men from the AA group visited the apartment that he, his wife and the first of his three children were renting on Diamond Avenue.
Woody poured himself a drink and dumped the rest down the drain. "And that was the last drink I've ever had. That was Aug. 13, 1948."
Back on his feet, Woody put his tobacco business in high gear. He traveled the Southern circuit and later opened a warehouse in Rocky Mount that helped revitalize the local market.
Although he continued to live in Rocky Mount, Woody moved his business in 1959 to Martinsville, where he and his brother, Buck, operated a successful warehouse.
Woody entered Rocky Mount politics in 1966, winning a council seat. He was elected mayor four years later in a three-way race against two popular candidates, Henry Robinson and Emmett Bennett.
His tenure coincided with federal revenue sharing, a program that sent hundreds of millions of tax dollars to local governments.
Although he was philosophically opposed to such giveaway programs, Woody took advantage of every federal dollar that the town could get.
Woody delighted in the ease of getting money out of Washington.
"If I could call the plays for the federal government, 90 percent of the grants would be cut out. But as long as I was mayor of the town of Rocky Mount, I fought like hell for every nickel I could get."
Woody found inventive uses for federal money. When the MW Manufacturers Inc. plant burned down, Woody obtained a $1.1 million "imminent threat" grant to build a water line to the plant.
The amount of the federal grant was based on the cost of hiring a contractor to lay the lines. But Woody obtained permission to do the work in-house, allowing a large portion of the grant money to go toward salaries of town employees and expenses of working on the project. Town tax revenues that had been earmarked for the employees' salaries were put into the town's growing budget surplus.
In 1987, the surplus enabled Woody to take advantage of the federal government's generosity again. The Farmers Home Administration offered to discount a $4.2 million loan on the Rocky Mount water treatment plant if the town would pay off the loan early. The deal saved the town $1.5 million.
As of last month, the surplus had grown to $8,065,373.68. It will enable the town to pay cash for a new $9 million sewage treatment plant on the Pigg River.
Not bad for a town with an annual budget of just under $3 million.
Though his accomplishments are many, Woody may be remembered as much for his style.
His speech is often peppered with profanities. And while he'll gladly take cash from Washington, he won't put up with what he calls make-work government regulations. "If I don't do something exactly the way some regulatory commission wants me to do, I don't give a damn," Woody once told a reporter.
Woody also ignored state purchasing regulations from 1986-88, buying from favored local contractors without competitive bids required by law.
Headstrong, Woody would not tolerate dissent from Town Council. He made recommendations, and council invariably went along.
People trying to push issues that were not on Woody's agenda went nowhere. "I found that people were afraid to speak their minds," said Wanda Osburn, a newcomer to Rocky Mount who vainly tried to interest Woody in downtown revitalization several years ago. "If the mayor didn't want it, it just wasn't going to happen."
With Woody presiding, the monthly Town Council meetings could be political theater. In one of his most memorable performances in January, Woody - mixing fury and self-pity - lashed out at council members who wanted to cut his health insurance benefits after his retirement.
Woody, whose investment portfolio included more than $300,000 of R.J. Reynolds stock, accused council of leaving him destitute. "Why, they feel that the mayor and his wife don't need maintenance, food, shelter and medical attention," he said.
Critics said the health insurance issue was nothing more than one last chance for Woody to show everyone that he - and he alone - runs Rocky Mount.
Woody acknowledges that he and his wife could get by without taxpayers' assistance. But the health care benefits, he said, were a matter of principle. He felt he had done so much for the town that he deserved something in return.
Last week, Town Council voted 3-1, with one abstention, to approve health insurance for Woody and his wife through June 1991.
At the end of the meeting, Woody cut short his farewell speech to take parting shots at the two council members who did not support the retirement benefits.
His attack on Wayne Cundiff was expected. Cundiff became the Mayor's No. 1 enemy after Cundiff was elected to Town Council in 1986.
But no one thought Woody would go after Hunt Cooper, who abstained on the budget. The two men had been friends for more than 50 years and had served together on council since 1966.
His voice full of indignation, Woody said that Cooper's business, Lynch Farm Equipment, had three unmetered parking spaces on Franklin Street where Cooper and his employees parked free.
"I can't to save my life see why a member of council, one member, should be provided free parking on a public street, and nobody else is," Woody said.
Later, Woody acknowledged that he had known about - and condoned - Cooper's free parking for years. But he raised the issue to get back at Cooper for failing to stand by him to the end.
"If you cut my throat, I'll start to think of how I can cut yours. But I'll tell you this, if you stick with me, I'll walk the last mile for you."
Woody said it would be difficult to let go of the reins he has held so tightly for so many years.
"I had to stop drinking, and I did. I had to stop smoking, and I did. I had to get out of the tobacco business, and I did. I'll adjust."
by CNB