Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 22, 1995 TAG: 9505230042
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They moved to other parts of town in the 1970s, when hundreds of homes and more than 100 small businesses were torn down in federally funded urban renewal. Fires claimed many more houses, including Claytor's own childhood home, right behind his office.
Gainsboro became so desolate that some patients were afraid to drive to his clinic on Gainsboro Road, but Claytor and his assistant of 37 years, Virginia "Gin" Board, kept on going.
A year and a half ago, you could still walk in the foyer of the Claytor Memorial Clinic, near the plaque honoring Claytor's mother, Roberta Morris Woodfin Claytor, and on up the stairs to the waiting room. It was spic-and-span 1950s - linoleum floors, glass-brick windows, stainless steel furniture and old-time patient service.
Claytor wouldn't let Board book many patients in a day. He wanted plenty of time to talk with them, even if it cost him income.
Board remembers the first time she watched him fit a porcelain crown. It looked perfect to her. Claytor said it was off by the measure of a pin hole, something the patient wouldn't have noticed for years, if ever. Claytor made another impression.
It had to be perfect or he couldn't sleep at night.
He ran his own lab, making his own dentures, inlays and crowns. "He had the most delicate fingers in the lab you could see," Board said.
All through the black poverty of the Jim Crow years and on into the 1990s, Claytor fixed teeth even when patients pleaded, "Doc, I can't afford it. Take it out." He spread payments over paydays.
That's the way his physician father, Dr. John B. Claytor Sr., taught him to treat people. It was his father who built the clinic in the late 1940s, and five Claytor children worked there - two physicians, a lab technician, an accountant and Walter, the dentist.
Because theirs was a doctor's family, the Claytor kids seemed privileged to those who had less, but each one worked hard - milking the family cows before school and pulling their own weight when they went to college. Claytor grandchildren worked at the clinic on summer breaks and vacations, running errands and filling in for Board.
In the last years, with the rest of family dead or gone on to bigger cities, just Claytor and Board held down the fort, alone in one of two professional offices left in Gainsboro.
He retired in January 1994, at 68. Board packed up her starched white uniforms and went home.
Claytor worried. There had been three fires in his homeplace before the last one destroyed it. Fire took a family-run service station in Gainsboro, too, and there was one in the brick garage near the home site. Few of the fires were solved.
When he saw smoke rising over Gainsboro on April 22, Claytor was sure it was the clinic. He sent his son, Mark, over to investigate. It was the old First Baptist Church, a block away and unoccupied for years while an organization raised money to reopen it as a cultural center.
Saturday night, four weeks later, Claytor got the call he dreaded. The buildings next to the clinic were on fire.
Claytor and his wife, Kim, sped over from their home on Grayson Avenue Northwest. They watched the fire spread from two long-abandoned storefronts onto the clinic roof. Flames licked through his lab, his office, his treatment room.
Forty-seven years earlier, on breaks from Nashville's Meharry Medical College, Claytor had beaten up his hands hauling bricks to build the clinic. He is hurt, angry, tired - and suspicious about why fires keep claiming what's left of his community.
In 1950, before urban renewal, there were 15 businesses and professional offices on Gainsboro Road near the Claytor clinic. There were two lawyers, a notary public, three barbers, a shoeshine shop, a beer parlor, a beauty salon, a pharmacy, a funeral home, a grocery, a grill and a cafe. Plus, there was the YMCA's Hunton Branch, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 9672, Gainsboro Elementary School, the Association of Colored Railway Trainmen and Locomotive Firemen, Iron Side Baptist Church, Mount Zion A.M.E. Church and 39 homes. Of the 62 buildings, only five were vacant.
People walked along the street every night and every day. A fire would have been spotted in no time, and trespassers and arsonists would have risked the ire of the entire community.
Now, there is hardly anybody left to watch over properties or to caution children like the 16-year-old and the 11-year-old accused of setting the First Baptist fire.
No homes or businesses front along Gainsboro Road now in Gainsboro's central section.
There are no more Dr. Claytors, and Roanoke is all the poorer for it.
by CNB