Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 3, 1994 TAG: 9404080005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Margie Fisher editorial writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Also: 1 wad of steel wool. 1 electric extension cord. 1 plastic margarine tub filled with assorted bent nails, screws, safety pins and paper clips. 3 plastic whadzits mysteriously left over from a toilet-tank-flusher replacement kit that I installed myself. 1 ball of string. 1 1-ounce bottle of Elmer's Glue-All, dried up. 2 inches left on a 15-year-old roll of duct tape. The cork from a wine bottle (?). A pair of old panty hose, which I guess I used to tie something together while I hammered, glued or screwed it.
This list - the tool-box inventory of a do-it-yourself klutz - should help explain why I'm reluctant to write about Ronnie Janney of Boones Mill.
Janney, 44, is a genius, a Christian gentleman and a gentle man. I discovered him within hours of moving back to Roanoke from Richmond in 1990. It was love at first sight. I gave him a key to my house.
This was the man I'd been looking for for years: a sloooooooowww-talking, good ol' country boy with a well-stocked tool box who can fix anything, do most everything that's necessary to keep a house functioning properly and comfortably. And if he can't do it, he has a vast network of friends and relatives - good-ol'-boy plumbers, electricians and craftsman, most of whom you won't find in the Yellow Pages - who can.
Of course I'm reluctant to write about him! I don't want to share him. Such a man is worth more in the life of a single woman than a platoon of rich, handsome bachelors. (Janney, incidentally, is happily married. His wife, Sarah, who does his bookkeeping, is also my friend.)
The true value of Ronnie Janney is not just that he can fix anything. It's his trustworthiness. I don't know if this wells from his religious faith - he's a deacon and teaches Sunday school at Boones Mill Baptist Church - or from this area's salt-of-the-earth rural culture. Probably from both. But in a day when repair industry rip-offs and shoddy workmanship are common, what an absolute treasure is trustworthiness!
You can take it to the bank: Whatever the contract - small odd job or major renovation - Ronnie Janney will do it not only right but superbly. If he recommends you call another workman, you can be confident that person has passed Janney's reliability-and-integrity muster. And, by the way, I've found it also helps in getting other repairmen to come fast if Janney has recommended me to them.
(It seems he also briefs them on the idiosyncracies of my dog, Hedy Lamarr, including that she goes ballistic at the sight of those automatic snap-back metal tape measures. Just this week, I called a plumber, Leroy Collins. "Sir, you don't know me, but Ronnie Janney suggested ... ." "Oh, yes," said Collins, "You're . . . the woman with the dog who hates tape measures.")
Are Janney's charges reasonable? I think so, but then I never bother to get multiple estimates and go for the cheapest if Janney says he can handle a project. Because I have a job that I have to get to every day, I put a premium on quick access to know-how and can-do - of a type that may never be available on the Information Superhighway.
I need to know that if house things go wacko, I can put in a distress call - "Ronnie, I accidentally cut a wire on the outdoor unit of the air conditioner with the grass clippers. Will you come by and fix it?" I can go on to my office, confident that Janney will come, will let himself or above-mentioned friends and relatives in with his key, and will take care of whatever the problem.
In England last March, learning that Virginia had been hit by The Great Blizzard, the one call home I made was to Janney. "Ronnie, I'm in London. If you can dig out of Boones Mill and get to Roanoke, will you please go by my house to check that everything is OK?'' He is, in other words, an important part of my support system - as necessary as family, best pals and fine professional colleagues.
To call Janney a handyman is like calling Michelangelo a wall painter. Though his expertise in the area of house maintenance and remodeling is seemingly limitless, he is also a master at carpentry and cabinet- making.
They didn't teach him that at Franklin County High School, and he didn't go to some high-falutin college to get a degree in it. Janney learned his skills at the knee of his daddy, who learned them from his daddy - and so on back for five generations of Janney men who graced Floyd and Franklin counties with their talents.
The Janneys have a daughter, Rhonda, who's an honor student at Radford University, and they're mighty proud of her. But there's no son to whom Ronnie Janney will pass on the skills honed in his family for decades. He says, "I'm the end of the line." Sadly, he may also represent the end of an era.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for higher education for young people, the more the better. But as Janney observes, "If everybody was educated, there wouldn't be anybody to do the work."
Like him, I worry: If all our sons and daughters are going to be brain surgeons, financial wizards or rocket scientists, will there be anybody in the future who knows how to get into the bowels of houses and under the hoods of cars to take care of the mundane gone miserably amok? When things go klunk! in the night, who you gonna call - ghost-busters?
I feel lucky to be living now when there are still people like Ronnie Janney to call. Oh, no - I won't give out his telephone number. Don't bother to beg me.
by CNB