Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 25, 1995                   TAG: 9504250101
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WANDERING LIFE ENDS FOR CITY MARKET'S `WIG'

Though he shared a father with two successful Roanoke businessmen, Haywood Edwin Roberts chose a life as a wanderer, and later as an eccentric but well-known denizen of the Roanoke City Market.

Sunday, the hunched-over 71-year-old died an anonymous death from cancer. Anonymous because - while nearly every merchant and regular of the market recognized him - few knew his real name, at least not well enough to recognize it on the obituary page of the newspaper. They just called him "Wig" for the ill-fitting hairpiece that most distinguished his appearance.

Wig was as much a part of the market as the vegetable vendors, many say. He smoked cigarettes in a long holder, took his shoes off in the public library while he read The Washington Post each day, and always was peddling trinkets of one kind or another. No one knew where he got them.

At the City Rescue Mission, he came in nightly for supper and to watch a little television. He's remembered there as a guy who would offer you his cigarettes or half of his Coke without your even asking.

As far as anyone can remember, he never caused much trouble. He liked talking about current events and watching trials and hearings in the Roanoke Courthouse.

But ask just about anyone on the market about Wig, and they'll say, "Oh, the cab company guy."

Rumors abound that his half-brothers, Jack and Bill Roberts, who still operate the Yellow Cab Co. just a few blocks from Wig's old haunts, denied Wig part of the family business. It's rumored that they shunned him because of his lifestyle, that they paid him a weekly allowance to stay away.

But Wig's younger sister, Sylvia Roberts Arthur, says that's not so.

"He had a choice of the way he lived," she said.

Sylvia and Edwin, as his siblings called him, were their father's second family. They lived on 12th Street Southeast.

When their father died, he left the cab company to his sons from his first marriage, Jack and Bill, who were older. Sylvia and Edwin, ages 8 and 11 at the time, moved to Bedford with their mother when she remarried. After school, Edwin joined the Navy. When he got out, he was overcome with a case of wanderlust that stayed with him for life.

Sylvia said he never expressed an interest in the family business.

"He knew it wasn't his," she said.

Edwin's travels eventually led him back to Roanoke, where he settled on the market. He stayed in a rooming house on Tazewell Avenue, across from the Rescue Mission. He relied on Social Security checks, though some say he often gave much of that money away.

When Sylvia wanted to see Edwin, she went to the market. Her children and grandchildren did, too.

Once, about four years ago, she wanted to bake her brother a birthday cake and take it to him. She called half-brother Bill to help her find Edwin.

"He said, `How you going to find him, carrying a birthday cake around the market?''' She knew he was right, so she gave up on the idea.

When Edwin became ill, Jack arranged for him to stay in a nursing home for a while. But Edwin snuck out in the middle of the night.

She has accepted that her brother was where he wanted to be, and she's proud of him.

"He was a Christian. He always read his Bible," she said.

And though Edwin's path diverged from his brothers' early on, they recently crossed again regularly.

Jack Roberts has a ministry at the Rescue Mission. Brother Edwin was on the front row the second Tuesday of every month, Jack said.

"I sometimes asked him if he needed anything, but he always said no."

Sylvia said he just wanted to be where his friends were.

Monday evening, when visitors could view the body at Oakey's Roanoke Chapel, a combination of family and those friends from the streets filed by the casket. Some came to see Edwin, some came to see Wig.

Sylvia seemed pleased.

Though they drifted apart, she never forgot he was her brother.

"I knew him pretty good," she said with a bit of a sob. "I just want the world to know he was good and I love him, and his brothers love him, and my children and grandchildren love him. They always talk about Uncle Edwin."