Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 25, 1990 TAG: 9007250236
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FIELDALE LENGTH: Long
A day away from his 85th birthday, Fieldale Police Chief J. Alfred Stegall is still wheeling his brown Ford LTD cruiser around this little mill town.
He's still got his bone-handled .38 Smith & Wesson revolver by his side.
And he still has that crazy blackjack in his car - the one that everybody knows can fire a bullet from a hole out the end. (Yep, there really is a .44 shell in it.)
"People are more afraid of this than they are of my revolver," he says, but truth be told, he only uses it on snakes and mad dogs.
He retires Thursday - when he turns 85 - and that night the whole town and the people at the Fieldcrest-Cannon mill are throwing a big shindig in front of the community center.
The Virginia State Sheriffs Association thinks Stegall is the oldest active officer in the state. Ross Mirmelstein, director of operations for the National Sheriffs Association, has never heard of an older one anywhere.
Something bigger is happening here than just the retirement of an old character who might make the cop record books.
What we have here is the departure of a man who for 56 years has taken to heart the safety and well-being of everybody in Fieldale. "Not much went on that Mr. Stegall didn't know about, and as a result, not much went on," said former high school principal Ronald Iler.
And not just that. He thought it his duty to figure out what was troubling any criminal he caught.
"A lot of time you don't know what that is," he said this week on a ride around town. "You have to go to him and tell him how good the Lord has been to you. Try to work that good out of that man."
Stegall gets praise from his neighbors, black and white, young and old.
He doesn't care for the TV image of cynical cops.
"Police work is so important. It's just like the work you do in the church - to help people just like the church does, to help them know we love them," said Stegall, a member of Fieldale Baptist Church. "You go out with a prayer on your lips. You go out with love and kindness."
Howard Joyce, who owns Fieldale Grocery, remembers running a red light or doing something wrong when he was a boy. "Son," he remembers Stegall telling him, "we can't have that in Fieldale."
"He would give you a chance," said Joyce.
But Stegall tolerated no monkey business in this town of 1,200, spread pleasantly along the Smith River.
Wherever people got into mischief, he sniffed it out, from the bootleg joints and moonshine stills to the scenes of less serious lawbreaking.
"One of the rites of admission into manhood in Fieldale was to swim in the community pool at night, and you can imagine how they dressed for it," mill personnel manager Steve Culligan said. "Mr. Stegall has probably run every young man out of the pool sometime in his life."
When the shifts changed at 3 p.m. at the mill, Alfred Stegall was there.
When the little kids boarded their buses at the elementary school, Alfred Stegall was there.
They called him Eagle Eye. "There wasn't a time Mr. Stegall wasn't around, and it's been that way ever since I've been here," said Iler, who's been in town more than 40 years.
"Stegall would work in the county, but Fieldale was his town," said former Henry County Sheriff Charlie P. Witt. "He didn't want nothing to happen in Fieldale. He wanted everything to be perfect over there."
Stegall was 11 when his parents moved here. There was no community of Fieldale at all then, just country land. "No houses, no streets, no mill, no nothing," he says.
He's distinguished himself in many ways. He played with a string band after his mother gave him a Gibson guitar in 1927 and he was a pitcher for Fieldale's semi-professional team, playing in the Piedmont and Bi-State leagues.
Pneumonia and lingering weakness prompted him to give up baseball and go to work at the mill. In 1934, the mill manager asked him to be policeman for the town, and that's what he's done ever since.
He and two nighttime officers are still paid mostly by the mill, with help from the county Sheriff's Department.
Stegall's office is a tiny, narrow room next to the town fire station. A copy of the Lord's Prayer and an open Bible sit on his desk.
A short man with light blue eyes and blond hair streaked with white, he walks with a limp. His foot was mangled in a 1964 car accident. It brought circulation troubles and his leg below the knee was amputated in 1976.
"I thought this would be the end of my career," he says, but people wanted him to keep his watch over the town.
He's shot two men - a robber and a car thief - but they survived. He never killed anybody. He can't remember the last murder in Fieldale.
His advice to law officers is this: Give full attention to your work. Don't moonlight and don't watch the clock. "If you're looking for payday and for quitting time, you can't make a police officer."
Investigations know no schedule, and Stegall's wife, the late Lottie Virginia Stegall, was patient with his long hours. They had eight children. "She understood my work and she worked with me good," he says.
Barefoot children stopped on the street to wave when Stegall drove by early this week. "All these little boys and girls know me real well." Nearly every other driver on the roads greeted him.
He's not maudlin about the end of his career. It's time to quit and he knows it.
"It's been hard work. It's been dangerous work. It's been beautiful work," he says. "It's been work I believe with all my heart the Lord wanted me to do."
by CNB