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

DATE: TUESDAY, July 11, 1995                   TAG: 9507110021
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LOYAL LION FLIES TO S.KOREA FOR 45TH STRAIGHT CONVENTION

Daniels, a Norton plumbing and heating contractor and friend of Bill Clinton - the president - passed through Roanoke Regional Airport recently on his way to Seoul, South Korea, to attend his 45th consecutive Lions Club International Convention.

Daniels' attendance at these worldwide meetings must be a record; but the fact he and his wife, Ethel, are making the taxing trip to Seoul this summer is even more remarkable considering that the 76-year-old Daniels has survived a near-fatal heart attack and serious car wreck in the past two years.

For several years, Daniels led an entourage to the yearly conventions that included members of his own club in Norton and others from Bluefield and Roanoke. They called themselves the ``Bearded Beauties.''

Whiskered for the occasion, they dressed up in bib overalls and long underwear, chewed on corncob pipes, set up a moonshine still and lay around drinking from jugs on downtown streets in places like Chicago. They did their best to perpetuate the ``hillbilly'' stereotype - all in good fun.

Daniels is someone who in common parlance could be referred to as ``a character.''

He met Bill Clinton in Moscow back in 1969 when the future president was still a student at Oxford University; the two have been friends ever since. Daniels was in Moscow helping Norton lawyer Carl McAfee, who was working to free the crewmen of the spy ship Pueblo from their North Korean captors.

Clinton calls him every week or so to check on his health, and Charlie and Ethel sit on his re-election steering committee, Daniels said.

In 1946, after his discharge as a World War II navigator in the Army Air Corps, Daniels started what became a successful business in Norton. That same year, Sister Anne Christiania arrived in the Wise County community to establish St. Mary's Catholic Hospital to provide medical care in the coalfields.

Daniels is an admirer and close friend of the 84-year-old nun who is still the driving force behind the hospital and, he said, still makes occasional rounds on the patient floors. He couldn't take Sister Anne with him to Korea, but he's carrying her framed picture in his briefcase so he can introduce her to Lions dignitaries from around the world who will pass through his hotel suite.

There's another picture in Daniels' briefcase. It's one of him buddying with country singer and fiddler Charlie Daniels. In it the plumber is wearing the singer's trademark big-brimmed cowboy hat. He can show that picture to any stranger - in the likelihood he ever meets one - who might confuse him with that other Charlie.