ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 15, 1996 TAG: 9608160005
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: N-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
It was 1923 when L.S. and Fannie LeGrande moved their growing family into a four-room farmhouse five miles from downtown Roanoke.
The home and five hillside acres - which came with chickens and a horse - were just what L.S. LeGrande wanted. He'd been searching for three years for a place out in the country but still close enough so he could get to his job at the Norfolk and Western freight station.
"I wanted to get where I could raise a garden, get out in the fresh air," says LeGrande, who turned 100 on July 31. "I wanted to hunt and fish and raise my own dogs."
Now it's 73 years, 37 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren and one great-great-granddaughter later. The LeGrandes - who've been married 78 years - still live in the red house on the hillside.
A few things have changed, of course, during their lifetime of working hard and raising a family. U.S. 220 is now a four-lane highway with cars whizzing by at all hours. Tanglewood Mall and Wendy's and Showbiz Pizza and Wal-Mart and a slew of other businesses have sprung up all around them.
Still, one of their sons continues to tend a herd of cows on the rocky, sloping field outside their home. If he's not around and the cows get out, L.S. and Fannie Le-Grande have been known get out on the road and shoo them back inside the fence themselves.
"I don't want to leave this old place," says L.S. LeGrande, who has fought glaucoma in recent years but still gets around with a cane. "I know there comes a time when people have to do what they don't want to. But I'd rather be here."
He was born in 1896 in Richmond County, N.C. Fannie DeBerry, born in 1900, grew up a few miles away in Montgomery County, N.C. They met in church and married during World War I.
He was drafted into the infantry and was heading to France when the Armistice was declared and the troop ship turned around.
In 1919, he took a job at Norfolk and Western as a laborer for 38 cents an hour, then brought his family up from Carolina. A friend told him about the farmhouse for sale in Roanoke County. The owner wanted to wait to auction it off, but LeGrande came by every evening for a week and "broke him down."
The man agreed to sell it for a $450 down payment and $25 a month for eight years, LeGrande says. "I always wanted to get a place where I wouldn't walk backwards - if I take a notion to sell it, at least I'd get what I put into it."
The LeGrandes doubled up their payments and paid off the house three years early. He added rooms as his family grew. "I just started patching, building and building. The children came so fast."
He worked for the railroad for 34 years before retiring and going on to work as a chauffeur and caretaker for a number of well-to-do families around Roanoke.
They had nine children; seven are still living. When they celebrated his 100th birthday two weeks ago at the Holiday Inn-Tanglewood, more than 90 people attended, with children and grandkids coming in from Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, California and even England.
Fannie LeGrande celebrated her 96th birthday Jan.27.
Her secret, she says, has been simple: "Trying to live right, treat everybody right. I have always said: `I want to live so that God uses me. Any time. Any way.' And that's about it."
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PHILIP HOLMAN/Staff. L.S. and Fannie LeGrande have beenby CNBmarried 78 years and still live in the house they bought in 1923.
It's near U.S. 220 and five miles from downtown - rural when they
moved there, but now the city has built around them. "Trying to do
right," says Fannie LeGrande, is the secret to keeping a marriage
going, "and doing unto him as I would want him to do to me." color.