ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, August 27, 1996 TAG: 9608270160
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
She grew up on a farm near Chatham with a ``mother who didn't drive and a daddy who didn't boil water.''
She remembers her introduction to sewing in the fall of '44, when her mother and four sisters were creating a wardrobe for the oldest sister, who was leaving for Madison College.
The women found some old chicken-feed bags, bleached them and directed her to make a blouse. Needless to say, it didn't become a part of her sister's wardrobe. ``The only place they'd let me wear it was to the mailbox and back,'' Faye Armstrong says.
Armstrong is an institution among the inner-lining of Roanoke's suits, pants and jackets. From her basement cubbyhole at Wheeler's Cleaners, amidst a sweaty backdrop of billowing steam and hot irons, this seamstress can tell you a lot about people - from what they forget to take out of their pockets.
Not counting the lint, she's found a veritable Valentine's Day wish list of stuff: wads of money (always returned), contraceptive devices (big blush here), letters, candy and even diamonds.
Mark Fink of Fink's Jewelers once left a diamond ring in his suit jacket, price tag and all, she says. Owner Eddie Wheeler couldn't wait to call and tell him about it because Fink's granddaddy had done the same thing decades earlier.
For almost 20 years now, Faye has been sewing back tugged-off buttons, hemming up pants and stitching busted seams. She's been sewing ever since that first feed-sack dress, going on to major in clothing at Virginia Tech under the tutelage of Miss Oris Glisson, ``who had just come from studying in New York City,'' Faye recalls. ``We were taught the very latest techniques in design and construction.''
Faye quit Tech halfway through the program. ``I got my Mrs. degree instead,'' she says. For 26 years, she never looked back, sewing clothes for family and friends, relishing her homemaker role.
Not until her husband divorced her, she says, did she regret not finishing her degree. She found herself alone, with no income and no work experience. She figured sewing was her only employable skill.
Shirley Wheeler, who had long admired Faye's clothes, knew she needed work. ``The Wheelers are good at taking in strays,'' Faye says, ticking off a list of folks the family has fed, housed or employed when times were tough.
So in 1979, at the age of 44, Faye went to her first job, behind the trusty Singer in the basement. Retirement plans are not part of her future.
She enjoys her work - and the camaraderie of her steam-cleaning colleagues, who are constantly interrupting with a split seam that needs attention.
A few garments stand out from the thousands:
A local judge regularly brings his sportcoats to Faye for alterations. ``One of his arms is shorter than the other - and I'm always so nervous I'm not going to get it right. But he's never complained.''
A church friend of Eddie Wheeler's was frantically searching the stores for more BVD's, which Faye describes as sleeveless union suits. ``I had to cut a pattern from one of his old ones and make him a new one. It took hours.''
Faye has also made her fair share of gussets, or panel inserts, most of them for aging men suffering Dunlap's Disease. ``One guy wanted me to take the cuff out of his pants to make a gusset with it - for the same pants,'' she says, laughing.
``I said, `Listen, your wife wouldn't let you out of the closet wearing that.'``
And she'll never forget the special-order sleeping-bag zipper that nearly drove her crazy. ``I told Eddie, `Don't you ever take another one of those.' I had to get one of the counter boys to hold it still while I sewed.
``It was like holding a wild bull back.''
Older men are the worst at trying to squeeze another season of wear out of a threadbare garment. Faye remembers the matching shirt-and-swimtrunk set that eccentric newspaperman Fred Loeffler wore in the '60s, when they both attended the same pool.
``When I came to work here, he was still wearing it - and bringing it in to be fixed - every year until he died. All the threads were rotting, but he kept wanting it put back together.''
Faye's eye doctor is amazed by her near-perfect vision: At 61, she only wears magnifying half-glasses for close-up. Threading the 40-year-old Singer sewing machine by hand isn't even a chore - except on exceptionally hot days, when the thread sticks to the sweat of her finger.
It's her main gripe about the job: the lack of air conditioning.
That, and shoulder pads. ``They disintegrate in the cleaning,'' she says.``And they are practically impossible to sew back up.''
Earlier this year I wrote about Katie George, the 8-year-old twin who was killed in a car wreck in South Carolina last summer - en route to a family vacation at Disneyworld.
The Rev. Chip Gunsten, a neighbor of the George family, had initiated a fund-raising campaign to build the Katie George Memorial Track next to Mountain View Elementary, where Katie would have been a fourth-grader this year. Friends, neighbors, businesses and readers chipped in $20,000 for the walking track.
Wednesday, at 1 p.m., the entire school will gather to dedicate the facility, including Katie's parents, Debbie and Scott George, and her twin sister, Emily.
``The track zigzags around the contour of land, and there's a playground in the middle where the kids can play while the parents walk,'' said principal Tom Hall.
Debbie George says she enjoys riding by and seeing kids rollerblade and play on the track. ``It's still just a really hard thing to deal with,'' she said of Katie's death. ``But it makes me feel good that something good came of it.''
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. Faye Armstrong has been a seamstressby CNBat Wheeler's Cleaners since 1979. color.