THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9412310039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRED KIRSCH, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
IT'S NINE O'CLOCK and Red Sutherland has been up for hours. Devoured his scrambled eggs and toast and devoured the morning paper.
He's out in the yard now, in a sweater and his ballcap, raking leaves.
Red, as he likes to say, has ``been around for awhile.'' He's been around for 18 presidents and about 63,000 scrambled eggs. He was born June 19, 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa.
Red still drives his Buick station wagon anywhere he wants, still has red in his hair, and still walks with the stride of a man who has places to go and not much time to get there. About the only thing old about Red is his hearing. You have to ``speak up'' when you talk with him.
``You go on ahead. I'll walk,'' he says, motioning up a long driveway and heading off toward the house in Norfolk's Edgewater section that he shares with his wife, Elvie.
``I don't how I got to be so old,'' he says with a laugh as he sits down at the dining room table. ``Maybe it was sleeping with the windows open. Had to have been something. ''
Probably had more to do with being interested in life.
``I'm interested in most everything,'' says Red, who is still a voracious reader. ``I can honestly say I've never gotten tired of life. People ask me if I want to be around for the 21st century. I'm planning on it. Wouldn't miss it.
``I can't wait to see what's going to happen. Think about all that has happened in my lifetime. Startling, isn't it?''
Wesley Burr Sutherland was born in a house with no electricity, no plumbing. There were 46 states then and, says Red, ``no such thing as income tax.''
``One of the first things I can remember is us getting a phone,'' he says. ``Our number was two longs and a short.''
Later, the family got the first car in the neighborhood. A Stanley Steamer that ``if it went 15 miles without a flat, it was a miracle. We'd go out for a Sunday drive and spend most of the time changing tires. I was driving it when I was 10. You couldn't hit anything out there but a cow.''
When he was 14, Red got a job - ``weren't any child labor laws then'' - at the Armour meat packing plant.
``It was a slaughterhouse, and they used kids to open and close the doors when they brought the pigs and cows in because they had to maintain a certain temperature,'' he says. ``I got 10 cents an hour, $1 for the whole day. I lasted two weeks. It was no place for a kid to be.''
After high school where he also worked as a stringer for the local paper, Red served briefly in World War I and then went to off to college.
The University of Illinois, Class of 1922 annual that he pulls from a plastic bag and hands his visitor shows that Red Sutherland played the cornet in the concert band, majored in banking and was senior class president.
Red got married one month before the Great Stock Market Crash.
``Talk about timing,'' he says.
He came to Norfolk in 1931 during the Depression.
``I had been working with a refrigeration outfit. That was the big thing. Refrigeration. Carbonated drinks.
``I was selling soda fountains. Well, when the Depression came, you couldn't give away a soda fountain.''
So he took a job with the Eastern Cotton Oil Company, buying up peanuts and cotton of companies that were forced to liquidate.
``We'd try to keep them going on credit for as long as we could,'' says Red, shaking his head. ``But when the price of peanuts got down to less than a $1 for 100 pounds, there wasn't anything we could do but buy them. That was a tough time.''
Later, he helped get the Better Business Bureau in Norfolk off the ground and for more than 30 years was in real estate ``before I gave up my broker's license three years ago.''
Red, who was married for 50 years and has three children, met Elvie in 1980, and married her two years later. At 88, Elvie is as spry as he is.
These days, Red lives comfortably in two worlds. He can sit there at the dining room table and tick off the starting lineup of the 1931 Athletics or talk to you about the baseball strike.
``Jimmy Foxx was at first. Max Bishop at second. Jimmy Dykes at third. That's D-y-k-e-s,'' says Red who frequently likes to stop and spell things out for young folks.
``Players today are making $5 million and then they strike. Hard to believe. That Cal Ripken fellow. He's like the old players. I don't mind them making money but it drives the price of corn flakes up for the rest of us.'''
While Red says the old days ``had an elegance and style we don't have today,'' he doesn't exactly see the world going to hell in a hand basket.
``There's a lot that's good today,'' he says. ``More opportunity for people. Especially for women. That's been good.
``The big breakthroughs have been in medicine and with technology. Computers and those things. Startling. I think we are going to cure things like AIDS and cancer or certainly slow them down a good bit.
``You know, just when you think we've reached the limit, we come up with something else. I guess if we've learned anything, it's there are no limits.''
One thing, though, Red doesn't see changing is human nature.
``We'll have the fighting. It might not be Ireland or the Middle East. But we'll always have it. There will always be conflict, I suppose.''
Red's been sitting awhile and it's time to get up and ``get going'' into the day. Time's a-wasting.
``Do you have any advice for those who will be around in the 21st century?'' his visitor asks.
``The best thing we can do,'' says Red, heading back outside, ``is to stay interested in our kids.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff
Red Sutherland and his wife, Elvie, top, emulate this 1933
photograph of Sutherland and his first wife.
by CNB