ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612030125
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WILLIAMSVILLE
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
For nearly the last 100 years, there have been two constants in Williamsville - the river and Uncle Pee Wee.
Now there's just the river.
The Bullpasture River rushes through this tiny Bath County town, its brown body wrapped about Williamsville's main road, cutting through the gray shale hills and thick, black river mud, filling the air with a soothing roar and chilly breeze.
In much the same way, Andrew Emmett "Uncle Pee Wee" Stephenson's life flowed over and around this community, forging the landscape slowly and subtly with its gentle course, while remaining seemingly impervious to the many changes around it.
When he died in August at age 97, Uncle Pee Wee was by far the oldest man in town. His passing took with it Williamsville's last link to a lively past, and his death was noted far beyond the mountain village.
Williamsville was still dirt roads freshly carved in the shadow of the Allegheny Mountains when he crossed the Bullpasture by log as a boy to get to school. When he was a young man and the northern timber companies came to town with their voracious appetites for oak and ash and elm, Pee Wee led teams of horses into the forests to harvest the river's slopes.
And in later years, he ran the general store on the river bank, then retired to farming, but even that was anything but quiet. At 94, Pee Wee was rounding up cattle and waded into the Bullpasture's choppy waters to look for a lost calf, and was knocked down.
"It carried him downstream a ways. It was winter, and it was cold as blue blazes. It would kill a younger person, and he came out of it, and did he ever even get a cold out of it?" asked his nephew, Bobby Marshall, a 62-year-old carpenter who lives in Williamsville.
Most folks remaining in the community are too young to remember Pee Wee as anything but an older man, an uncle to the whole town, and that's what they all called him, kin or not.
Only a few can still remember the dashing figure he cut as the Knight of Williamsville, jousting on horseback in statewide tournaments until he was 76, spearing brass rings with his hand-whittled lance.
He was the type of person who is mortally grieved for at home - the church was so full at his funeral that a crowd stood outside on the street - but whose passing usually goes unnoticed by the world at large.
Yet, Uncle Pee Wee, the Knight of Williamsville, is now known to the nation.
Best-selling author and National Public Radio commentator Don McCaig, a Highland County sheep rancher, wrote an elegy to his friend and neighbor and read it in October on NPR's "All Things Considered."
"He was the last of that last generation of old-timers, and he was old to some of them," McCaig said recently while tending his sheep. "What it does, I think, is it really disconnects things. You don't have a sense of your past. When you lose somebody that age, there's not a lot of 97-year-olds to fill the hole. This community was completely changed by that man."
In a community with a long memory that means a lot. Folks in Williamsville still remember that Federal troops once stabled their horses in the local church - and they still get offended by it, McCaig said.
Pee Wee was the person to talk to about local history, McCaig said, mainly because he had witnessed much of it.
Pee Wee leased McCaig's farm before McCaig bought it, and kept hay in McCaig's barn for years afterward. The two developed a quiet friendship over the years, through Pee Wee's visits to the farm and both men's volunteer work with the local fire department. Even in his 80s, "you couldn't keep him from fighting a fire," McCaig recalled with a smile.
McCaig's essay to Uncle Pee Wee is as simple and homespun as its inspiration, but it drew the attention of radio listeners everywhere, including television comedy pioneer Steve Allen, who wrote McCaig a letter to say how much he enjoyed it.
It was "radio at its best," said Allen, who called the essay "a delightful, thoughtful tribute."
"It was really charming. There have obviously been many things lost in our culture, and some of that is understandable and some of that is inevitable, but there was something so charming about this brief account of a man's life," Allen said in a telephone interview. "I thought of the Norman Rockwell vision of America and this was consistent with that."
Uncle Pee Wee probably wouldn't have known what to make of the attention. His home was 3,000 miles from Hollywood, and he was just as far removed from thoughts of anything but his farm, family, faith and community.
"He was an everyday man," said Bobby Marshall, Pee Wee's nephew. "He put on his suit clothes to go to church, but the things of the world, the material things, were not on his agenda. That's what's a lot wrong with the world today - people are crazy about the material things and they go out and obligate themselves beyond their means to keep up with the Joneses, but Pee Wee was never that kind of fella."
"You realized with him, I guess, that he was a living argument for another way of looking at the world," McCaig said. "Uncle Pee Wee lived in a time when everybody knew everybody else, everybody knew who was related to who else, and who had good families and who was not so reliable. I would be surprised to hear that he ever did a business deal by any method other than a handshake."
In fact, McCaig recalled a time when Pee Wee wanted to buy one of McCaig's books, and the older man handed McCaig his checkbook, trusting him with a blank check and his life savings. "I filled it out, did the deduction, balanced the books, and gave it back," McCaig said. "He was just honest and presumed that everybody else was, too."
* * *
Pee Wee Stephenson was born Nov. 8,1898, on a farm outside Williamsville on Bullpasture Mountain in Highland County. The third youngest of 10 siblings, he grew up on the old McClung place, a big historic house that was the site of a Civil War battle 35 years earlier.
During his boyhood, the two most respected men in town were former Confederate officers, and Pee Wee spent many hours listening to their stories. He and his brothers also were known as good square dancers and one was a fiddler.
"They all loved life, they had a sparkle and a twinkle," said Joe Ray, a 72-year-old retired Singer Co. executive who lives in Bath County and grew up near Williamsville in the 1930s. "They had a reputation as being a strong, close-knit, honorable family. I don't think there were any horse thieves or black sheep, despite the numerous progeny. They had a good, solid reputation."
Nobody in Williamsville today is quite sure how Pee Wee got his nickname, but the story goes that when Pee Wee was a teen-ager, a salesman came to town briefly and gave Pee Wee the moniker that stuck with him the rest of his life. It suited him. Pee Wee was a short man, no more than 5 feet 5 inches, and wiry, but deceptively strong.
His strength proved handy when the logging companies came around during World War I. While working at a camp in the adjoining Bath County village of Scotts Town Draft in 1917, he battled influenza.
"A lot of people died that year," said his daughter, Mary Lee Jackson, a 33-year-old housewife who lives on a farm about six miles from Williamsville. "He was awful sick and couldn't eat for a long, long time, he told me, but he come out of it."
According to local lore, Pee Wee left Williamsville for the only time in his life in the 1920s to punch oil pans on an automobile assembly line in Detroit, but he was soon back. In 1924, he married his first wife, Elva. For much of the next 20 years, Pee Wee ran a logging mill, employing a crew of local men. In 1942, he and Elva bought a 100-year-old white farmhouse on a six-acre plot on the Bullpasture, and a few years later, Pee Wee bought the general store in town. Adults now in their 50s and 60s remember ice cream on Saturday nights at Pee Wee's store as the social event of their childhood week.
Folks remember Pee Wee as a ruggedly handsome man who always looked young for his age, frequently smoked a pipe and always wore a black fedora. In fact, shortly before his death when the rescue squad came to his house, the local paramedics didn't recognize him at first because he wasn't wearing the hat.
Pee Wee's wife, who had always been sickly, died in 1959. Two years later, he met his second wife, Pat Ramsey, a 40-year-old single woman who lived on a family farm about 30 miles away in Augusta County with her father and sister. Pee Wee was 64. Their daughter, Mary Lee, Pee Wee's first and only child, was born in 1963.
"Everybody thought I was the grandchild," she said. Pee Wee and her mother met when Pat and her sister stopped to ask directions at the local post office, where Pee Wee was sitting on the porch.
"Mom and my aunt come over for a funeral," Mary Lee said. "They didn't know where the graveyard was. Daddy was the one who came out and gave them directions, and he said, 'foller me.' Mom always said she'd been follering him ever since."
Pee Wee, Pat and Mary Lee lived in the white house for almost the next 20 years, much as he had all his life: with outdoor plumbing and river water piped in for bathing. A spring a half-mile away provided drinking water.
Mary Lee remembers that in later years, he bought Pat an automatic washer at a sale to replace the old wringer washer they had. "He didn't think too much of it at first," she said. "He thought it used too much water."
In 1973, he and Pat took in their 4-year-old nephew, R.E., after his parents died less than a year apart of cancer and a heart attack. Pee Wee raised the boy like his own son for the rest of his life.
Fifteen years later, in 1988, Pee Wee was inducted into the National Jousting Hall of Fame and was marshal of the parade that year at the country's oldest jousting tournament, which has been held in Natural Chimneys Park in Augusta County every year since 1821.
Jousting was a tradition that dated back to the Civil War in the Williamsville area, and Pee Wee learned it from people who were old timers in the early 1900s. He jousted in tournaments for 47 years, hefting his 6-foot wooden lance above his horse.
"Here was this man with a banker's hat perched like a jockey or a flea on top of this 18-hand horse, going full-pace down this track," recalled Joe Ray, who jousted alongside Pee Wee. "He was distinctive. You could distinguish Pee Wee from anybody else because of that funny fedora of his. They were inseparable."
Pee Wee won at least six tournaments and placed in many others over his life. In a 1988 interview, he told The Recorder, the weekly newspaper for Highland and Bath counties, "I like to ride and if I won, I won. If I lost, I lost. It didn't matter. The next tournament that came up, I'd be in it. I like to ride."
* * *
Change was slow to come to Uncle Pee Wee, though it was all around him.
In its heyday - and Pee Wee's - Williamsville had been a bustling timber town. There were two churches, two stores, mills, garages, a blacksmith's shop. Sunday school classes were 100 strong.
But after World War II, like a lot of small mountain towns, Williamsville got smaller. By the time of the Depression, the virgin timber had already been cut and the lumber companies all moved west. When the war came, and paved roads came to Williamsville, the men moved away, too, looking for better jobs and better opportunity.
Today, there are fewer than 100 people living around Williamsville and less than 12 in town. Some folks work for the phone company in Williamsville or the nearby state trout hatchery, or commute to factories like Bacova Guild near Covington and Clifton Forge. Some work at The Homestead Resort. But most of the young people have moved away, and no one seems to move in to live.
"When I was a boy, this church was largely full on Sunday morning," said Bobby Marshall, pointing to Williamsville Presbyterian, where Pee Wee worshiped and was an elder. "Now there's hardly enough to open the doors for.
"Now these people like Pee Wee have passed on, and the younger people have moved because there's nothing for them to do. It's a vastly different place than it was many years ago. The town is as dead as 2 o'clock."
Pee Wee was something of an anachronism in a town where family farms are being sold to hunt clubs because no one can afford to live off the land. He was among the last to squeeze a living from agriculture.
"He never stopped farming. He did everything he could until he died," McCaig said. "It was just more interesting that way. In later years, he probably spent more money farming than he made. Mary Lee would say, "Why don't you give it up, Pop?' No, not a chance."
But life did change for Pee Wee, in spite of his vigor. His wife Pat died of cancer in 1994. Some people say it was just a matter of time for Pee Wee after that, but he battled against his age and his own illnesses, still driving himself to the doctor for blood transfusions just two months before he died of kidney failure and pneumonia on Aug. 25.
Reflecting on his friend, McCaig said, "I think the people I know who have aged well are the ones who believed as he did: He believed he was just going to keep on going."
"Pee Wee was a simple man," said his grandnephew, Barry Marshall, a 33-year-old auto mechanic from Williamsville who got his first repair jobs on Pee Wee's farm as a boy.
"As far as great tasks or deeds, I can't say I know of anything in particular, but he was my hero because I thought he had the right attitude. A lot of people spend their whole lives trying to make that buck and don't take time to be real. He was real."
LENGTH: Long : 233 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. Mary Lee Jackson (above) grew up inby CNBthe 100-year-old farmhouse her father, Pee Wee Stephenson, bought
with his first wife in 1942. color. 2. CYNTHIA JOHNSON, 1976. Her
father (above, left) lived to be 97 years old. color. 3. Family
photo. Pee Wee in 1969 at a Luray jousting tournament. 4. Family
photo. A black fedora was one of Pee Wee's trademarks. 5. Family
photo. He was inducted into the National Jousting Hall of Fame in
1988. 6. DON PETERSEN/Staff. ``He was my hero,'' says Barry
Marshall, Pee Wee's grandnephew, ``because I thought he had the
right attitude.''