Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 24, 1994 TAG: 9408240015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PRICES FORK LENGTH: Long
Crippled and confined to a wheelchair, the burly ex-coal miner owes medical bills from his wife's lengthy fatal illness.
It won't be easy to catch up living on his monthly fixed income of $674, a humble pie already sliced thin to cover payments on his trailer, utility bills and medicine for his aching legs and food.
Price's specially equipped van died last winter, too. With it, he could drive anywhere, by himself - even to hunt deer, an autumn ritual he loves.
Without it, Price is grounded. Floored, he's not.
"I'm not one to complain much. Ain't no use," he says. "I'm not a quitter."
Price diligently paid off his first van with proceeds from seven years' worth of monthly yard sales, $200 or so at a time. Because the bank wouldn't lend him any money to equip his replacement van, a refurbished 1978 Chevy, he's back to scrounging second-hand items to resell for a modest profit.
The van is nearly street-legal. His sons and in-laws have installed some wood paneling and the hand controls Price uses to drive. Soon he could be chatting on his CB radio (handle "Boss Hog") and cruising again, to the store, to church, to the mall.
The last hurdle is getting in and out of the van. Once inside, Price shimmies from his battery-powered wheelchair into the driver seat and he's good to go. What he lacks is a motorized platform to lift him from the ground.
New platforms cost as much as $3,000. "The thing's not cheap," Price says.
There's a woman in Pearisburg willing to give Price a good deal on a lift that's barely used, for about a third of the cost of a new one. The catch: he needs to come up with the money before the end of the month.
If you're Sam Price, $1,000 adds up to a lot of yard sales and not much time.
All of this might overwhelm Price if he were the fretful kind. "I never worry about my condition. There's handicapped people out there in worse shape than I am. I've got to be thankful," he says.
His congregation, Fairview Community Church, began a fund-raising drive on Price's behalf - pretty sizeable undertaking for a group of 35 members.
A large portrait of Jesus, painted on a black-cloth background, watches over his shoulder as Price, 56, sits in the living room of his cozy home, surrounded by shelves of ceramic animals and framed color photographs of family.
On a nearby sofa is his minister, Jimmie Lee Price, (also Sam Price's cousin) who believes Sam Price's current challenge - and his will to overcome - is characteristic: "He's had to scratch for things all his life."
Hard times began when Sam, age 6, lost his father in the 1946 explosion that killed 12 McCoy miners. Thereafter, young Sam went to work on a farm and recalls earning $28 one summer, enough to help his widowed mother buy school clothes and some groceries.
In his early adulthood, Price worked in several Montgomery County coal mines, at the Lynchburg Foundry (the "pipe plant") in Radford and as a heavy equipment operator.
At age 29 he noticed a problem with muscular control. A family scourge - multiple sclerosis - began to creep through his body, gradually deadening the nerves of his limbs.
Price hobbled about on crutches for years until he fell and broke bones in his feet too often. Now, both legs are limp and his right arm barely moves. For the past two years he's been in the wheelchair, which he controls by manipulating a joystick.
But, as he says, the disease "just put me in a wheelchair. It didn't stop me from going. I enjoy what energy I got."
Up early each day, Price bustles himself around his family's compound of trailers, located at the end of Thomas Lane, just below Price Mountain and beyond the "End State Maintenance" sign.
This summer, with the assistance of his 12-year-old grandson Matt Gallimore, Price has been planting trees and flowers. During deer season, his sons and son-in-law have rigged a wheelchair up like a backwoods rickshaw to pull Price into the woods, where he waits, motionless, with his gun.
The antlered buck's head hanging in his living room attests to his patience and marksmanship. "That's what I look forward to every year," he says.
Without the lift on his van, Price has an old metal screen once used to sift coal that acts as a ramp. But it is dangerous to use ("It'll throw you off like a horse," he says) and, once inside the van, he can't pull it up.
So he's pinning his hopes on the yard sales at his usual spot on Peppers Ferry Road near Belview Elementary School and the church's fund drive. "I never was the type to go out and beg. But I'm not ashamed of getting help. I'm not going to down myself. I didn't ask to be this way," he says.
Price's resilience compensates for what he's been denied in life. Of the lift, he says, "I'll get it - eventually."
Contributions to the Fairview Community Church's collection for Sam Price may be mailed to the Sam Price fund drive in care of 817 Glade Road, Blacksburg, Va. 24060.
by CNB