ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9607010021
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River journal
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY
Around these parts, my friend Hugh Penn told me, the world is divided into two major categories: Chevy people and Ford people.
Hugh knows firsthand: A Ford man in Pearisburg performed an act of small-town kindness for him last winter.
To set the stage, let's go back to October.
Hugh, a retiree from down South, stays much of the summer and some of the fall in Giles County at a beautiful mountain cabin and hiker hostel up Sugar Run Hollow, owned by a friend of ours, Mrs. Tillie Wood. Hugh arrives early to open up in the spring, and in the fall, helps prepare the place for winter before leaving.
Aside from being handy with tools and a wonderful talker, Hugh is notable for the car he drives: a nearly mint-condition white 1963 Mercury Comet. With more than 200,000 miles behind it and working on its third engine, the car is a thing of beauty.
But last fall, the Comet suffered a brake failure as Hugh drove up steep Sugar Run Hollow. As Hugh told it, he just did make it into the driveway of the cabin, called Woodshole and managed to stop with the emergency brake before he rolled into the bunkhouse.
Well, he called his mechanic at Bear's Garage and the only option was to tow the Comet back down to Pearisburg and work on it there. And so it went.
When Hugh picked up the car after the repair, he noticed that the left rear hubcap unfortunately had come off during the tow. The hubcap was nothing super fancy, but it was unique for that model year and Hugh missed it. So he hit the road. "I looked all up and down the Sugar Run Valley and Wilburn Valley," he remembers.
He walked the dirt and paved roads, looking in ditches. He enlisted the help of hikers to ride shotgun and scan the roadsides while he slowly drove the Comet.
But as the leaves changed color and began to fall, the time to depart Giles County came, and Hugh headed south after alerting the neighbors to the missing wheel ornament.
That missing hubcap bugged Hugh all winter. "I don't like an automobile with a hubcap missing," he says.
In early March, Hugh visited Atlanta and found a matching hubcap for the 33-year-old car. Later that month, he rolled back on up to Giles County.
He had gone down to the fruit stand on Wenonah Avenue in Pearisburg one day soon after arriving, when John Spaur of John's Auto Service Inc., walked over.
"John came up to me and said, 'Did you lose a hubcap?' I said yes. He said, 'Wait right here,''' Hugh recalls. John went back to his shop and emerged with the long-lost hubcap.
"John said that during the winter, somebody found it in Wilburn Valley. This man knew that John was a Ford man, and John knew that there was only one car like that around," Hugh says.
"He saved it for me," Hugh says. "Didn't charge me for it, either."
John says he recognized the hubcap as being from the '63 Comet as soon as a customer offered it to him last winter. "The guy just happened to have the hubcap in his car when I was doing an inspection," he recalls. "I laid it up and almost forgot about it until I saw [Hugh]."
Hugh now keeps the old hubcap as a spare and speaks warmly of John's neighborliness. Besides, in a world filled with Chevy types who joke that they'd rather push a Chevy than drive a Ford, there were higher loyalties involved.
"He's a Ford man through and through," Hugh says of John. The latter confirms that: "I've been messing with them all my life."
And Ford people have to stick together.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB