Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 12, 1994 TAG: 9402140316
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
J.B. Cruise is busy outfitting the interior of the store on Pulaski's Main Street for a planned opening in the spring. It is an expansion of a Blowing Rock, N.C., carpet store operated for years by Charles Travis.
Travis was recruited by Pulaski Main Street Executive Director Roscoe Cox to open another store in Pulaski, and Travis soon recruited Cruise.
In fact, it was Cox who brought them together. ``Roscoe told me, `You need to talk to him,''' Cruise recalled, as they were sitting in Cox's office one day. ``In fact, I need to call him,'' Cox added, and did so introducing them over the phone.
Cruise and Travis hit it off, and Travis asked for Cruise to send him a resume. Cruise did so, and only learned later that Travis never received it.
He wondered why he had never heard anything more from Travis. They met in person when Travis was high up on a ladder painting the front of his new Pulaski store.
``That's the first time I saw him,'' Cruise recalled, although he did not realize who it was at first.
``He's still Charlie. I mean, he doesn't mind working,'' Cruise said. ``You wouldn't expect to find the owner out there on the street painting.''
After learning that his letter went astray, Cruise talked with Travis and visited him a couple times in Blowing Rock. Back in Pulaski when Travis was having lunch in the Main Street Cafe with Cruise, he said, ``Well, I decided you're the man for the job. When do you want to go to work?''
``A handshake with him means a whole lot. I found that out very quickly,'' Cruise said. ``Knows his business. Built it from the ground up. Knows his customers. Those people in Blowing Rock, he treats `em like family.''
Cruise grew up in Carroll County, and was in the last Woodlawn High School class before school consolidation in that county. He graduated from Virginia Tech in animal science, which seems a long way from selling carpets.
But Cruise has been involved in cattle, horses and other aspects of agriculture most of his life, from when he worked a three-horse hitch plowing fields when he was so little he had to stand on a bucket to harness the horses.
Both his father and grandfather were carpenters. ``I broke that chain,'' Cruise said, although he worked with his father on one job as recently as last summer. He has also managed livestock and real estate properties, and worked for a few years in Danville and Durham, N.C., before deciding to relocate back in Southwest Virginia.
``I've done some things in here I've never done before,'' Cruise said, gesturing around the vast empty space that he is helping to prepare as a store. In particular, he said, he learned the drawbacks of using something called floor leveler to even the flooring in the building.
``Add water and stir, just like Kool-Aid,'' he said, except the stuff dries so quickly that he barely has time to apply it. ``The store in Blowing Rock is maybe a fourth this size,'' he said of the space where he is working.
The plan was to have the store open in mid-January. ``That didn't work,'' Cruise said. ``Of course we didn't predict this weather.'' But the snow and ice have not kept him from commuting from Carroll County to Pulaski six days a week so far.
by CNB