Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 27, 1993 TAG: 9304270122
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Mary Bishop
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Stegall was 85 when he retired Stegall nearly three years ago. He was said to be the oldest working chief in Virginia, and one of the oldest in the nation.
He said in a 1990 interview that it was his duty to try to figure out why people went wrong, to "try to work that good out of that man."
Police work was like church work, he said. "You go out with a prayer on your lips. You go out with love and kindness."
Clamping down on a range of misdeeds from running red lights to running moonshine stills, Stegall looked over his little town of 1,200 with intense solicitude.
More than 1,000 people came to his retirement party in July 1990. Some had been children whose safe passage across village streets Stegall had monitored a half-century earlier. Some, as boys, he had hauled from midnight skinny-dips in the town pool.
Stegall played guitar in a string band and pitched for Fieldale's semi-professional baseball team in his youth. Illness ended his baseball playing, and he became police chief in the 1930s.
He once said that in his long career he shot two men, a robber and a car thief, but he never killed anybody.
Until a recent stroke, Stegall, 87, still kept an unofficial watch over Fieldale. "He drove through the village every single morning," said Steve Culligan, retired personnel director at the Fieldcrest-Cannon mill in Fieldale.
Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. today at Fieldale Baptist Church, B with burial in Roselawn Burial Park in Martinsville.
by CNB