Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 1, 1993 TAG: 9309010099
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Now I said, `This would be a nice place to bring old people who've never been anywhere,' " Willis said.
She liked the nearby Imperial Motel, too, with its yellow draperies and yellow carpeting.
So she went into the tour business. For three decades, she has taken busloads of Roanokers to the falls, and to the Canadian motel, now called the Comfort Suites Imperial Hotel.
Willis is 97 and still running tours. Some springs, she goes to Disney World, too.
On Sept. 15, she and her favorite driver from the Lynchburg Bus Service Inc. escort yet another group of vacationers to Niagara. Some people go every year.
Willis took homemade cakes to the Imperial staff for years.
Last year, the hotel named its fanciest room atop its new 10-story high-rise for her. The Naomi Willis Suite, with a brass plate bearing her name, goes for $180 a night.
"I go back 20, 21 years with her," said Pat Covelli, manager of the Imperial. "She hasn't changed one bit - looks, attitude toward life, anything." His father, the manager before him, always visits when she's in town.
Her tour career came after 59 years of caring for three Roanoke families. She worked for the first for 27 years, another for 16 years, and yet another for 16 years.
She drove them around in their cars, managed their households and stuck by them through good times and bad. Some remembered her in their wills.
She reads the newspaper every day, and keeps up with local and national news. You needn't raise your voice to discuss it with her, either.
"I don't know anybody else I do business with who's more precise than she is," said Mary McConville, owner of the Lynchburg Bus Service, where Willis charters her buses. "She's right on top of everything she's doing. Very business-wise."
Willis' world has changed dramatically, but she doesn't shy from change or dwell on nostalgia. "There are so many new things now," she said. "It's like living in a new world."
People's unkindness bothers her, though. "They ought to be praising the Lord. Instead of that, we're biting each other in the back. We're not thankful enough, and it's like that all over the world," she said recently on her breezy, geranium-filled porch in Northwest Roanoke.
She was born at Dixie Caverns, one of 10 children. Walking a mile to Sunday school one morning from her parents' 116-acre farm, she saw a dark, dog-like thing up ahead. It was a bear cub, sitting outside a cave.
Her father died when she was young. Her mother got a dollar-a-day job taking lunch to officers at a bank. "I felt sorry for her," Willis said.
So Willis got her first job with a family. For decades, she made $2 a week. "Then I got $5, and I thought I was rich."
Her spirituality and her church, Greater Mount Zion Baptist, are central to Willis' life.
She woke up one morning in the 1940s with an inkling that Burrell Memorial, the hospital that cared for black Roanokers for most of this century, needed something.
She learned it needed an incubator for premature babies, so she went door-to-door and collected dollar bills until it could buy one.
Through the years, Willis longed to travel. When one of her employers died, the woman left Willis $5,000 for her first trip.
Since then, she's been to Spain, Israel and almost every state in the nation. She's unfazed by the discomforts of travel, but a 10-hour plane ride to Jerusalem taxed even her. "You couldn't think of anything but the water down below and the sky up above you," she said.
Willis is a woman of many facets.
"Did she tell you she's a poet?" asked her pastor, the Rev. Antonio Thomas. She can recite epic poetry for about 10 minutes at a stretch.
Researchers have concluded that people who live the longest are often positive thinkers with a sense of humor.
That's the way with Willis.
She couldn't get out of bed one morning four years ago. It frightened her, but finally she got her legs going. Next day, she caught a bus to an emergency room and learned she had arthritis.
It didn't get her down.
"I don't stop. I go right on," Willis said. "When Fizer [Funeral Home] gets me, that's when I quit going."
by CNB