College Inn – Blacksburg, Virginia 1975

Chapter 6

Tidewater, home to the. Navy’s east coast-based fleet attracts graduates with ties to Virginia’s mountains. In 1957 Margaret ‘Peg’ Ballew counted among young Virginians relocating from the Blacksburg – Christiansburg area to Tidewater.

Navy resupply is a novel concept given warships spend more time at sea than in port. Nearly half of the Navy’s east coast fleet is home-ported near Norfolk, Virginia; their crews numbering from dozens to thousands of sailors and Marines, thereby creating a complex demand for supplies satisfied by a sprawling industrial complex or naval supply center whose commander was responsible for nearly two million square feet of storage space and hundreds of civilian workers.

In 1957 Norfolk’s Ocean View and Willoughby neighborhoods were home to generations of naval supply center employees. Any visit to a Granby street grocery or one of 1st View’s pubs would reconnect supply center employees turned shoppers. Loose zoning requirements created a jumbled assortment of apartments, cottages and duplexes flanked by payday loan outlets, pawn shops, pizza take-outs and taverns.

Christiansburg’s high’s guidance counselor favored success stories featuring former students who more recently were employed at Norfolk’s Navy supply center. He used Christiansburg High stationery to pen Margaret ‘Peg’ Ballew’s recommendation for supply center employment.

Mondays witnessed employee recruits in supply center classrooms devoted to orientation lectures, out-of-town new hires typically taking copious notes while Navy-connected Granby high graduates dozed. Peg’s effective hire date was established as 1 June 1957, only days following her high school graduation. While uninvited, single Navy and Marine Corps personnel, mostly enlisted men, peered in the classroom open door, sizing up new-hires.

Tidewater’s rental agents sought out hiring officials given their capacity to answer ‘…you wouldn’t happen to know anyone renting out a studio apartment, would you?’ Peg’s 3rd View flat was short on space and occasionally even dependable hot water but was on the Shore drive bus line, making supply center attendance a given. She lasted there almost two years, the conclusion of her Ocean View – supply center time the result of an oddly-failed romantic tryst with a 6th fleet sailor she met.

An out-patient visit at Norfolk General Hospital explained a missed menstrual period, she was pregnant. Despite repeated telephone calls to an Adams-class destroyer, the USS Rodgers, she could not locate the baby’s potential father.

Twenty weeks pregnant, Peg abandoned Tidewater’s beaches in favor of Virginia’s mountains, a place she called home, trading stenography pads for a short order pad and a waitress apron, ‘College Inn, Blacksburg, Virginia.’ The Inn’s owners welcomed her, a slightly more mature person than the highschooler who had bused tables there earlier.

Learning of the newest waitress’ pregnancy, Blacksburg’s church ladies rose to her aid, arranging a baby shower, one featuring booties, cute knitted caps and baby blankets plus thick greeting card envelope. The card included a note from the Inn’s owners that her base wage would continue for a few weeks until she could arrange day care for her baby, they had also converted a pickle jar’s coins and singles into a short stack of twenty-dollar bills.

Peg and infant son Trace’s Blacksburg-based living and transportation resources were modest, a two-bedroom flat in downtown Blacksburg and a used khaki-hued Studebaker Lark she had purchased from a Norfolk Military highway car dealer. An elderly cousin who lived nearby and a nearby day care allowed Peg to return to work only three weeks after Trace was born.

Weeks, months and years of weekday breakfasts drop-offs at an early morning day-care place chronicled Peg and Trace’s progress toward Blacksburg a redefined normalcy status. Whether at the elderly cousin’s or day care, Trace timed his mother’s arrival via the Lark’s exhaust note, its motor confirming its dependability.

While Peg have appeared the recipient of concern, she more typically served as a provider, some said a ‘dish-er’ of compassion. Blacksburg residents increasingly slid into one of Peg’s assigned booths, there for large helpings of concern, frequent hugs and laughter.

Dates penciled on the flat’s kitchen door frame, chronicled Trace’s vertical growth progress. While slightly shorter than some of his sixth-grade classmates, he made progress. Recognizing twelveyear-old Trace’s curiosity regarding his father’s identity, Peg chose a quiet Friday night to explain some, but not all pertinent details. The thrust of her words, ones appropriate for a boy was that Trace’s father had chosen not to be in their lives, wasn’t necessarily a bad person, just someone unable to accept responsibility. Trace turned out to be more curious than concerned, recognizing nobody could love him more than Peg.

Raising a boy turned teenager circa 1973 while restaurant employed might have appeared to be a tall order but one Peg Ballew and Trace grew to accept. Early morning waitressing duties and school drop-offs precluded late evenings, the pair’s activities largely concluding ahead of even WDJB Roanoke’s ten o’clock news. Everything considered, Blue Ridge beauty and Blacksburg-based small-town coziness more than compensated for modest finances. Across years Peg and Trace became a fixture of Blacksburg life.

Evenings in the flat were dominated by Trace’s homework. Library staff at both the city library and the one at Tech greeted Trace and Peg by name, an outcome linked to frequent visits. Trace and Peg, for that matter, broadly discussed topics extending from Gettysburg to the number of divisions in Napoleon’s army. And then came the coin collecting avocation. Following the homework wrap-up, at approximately eight p.m. Peg retrieved her work apron, one featuring three broad coin pockets, spreading dozens of coins across their kitchen table.

Their initial sorting separated silver pre-1965 coins from their copper clad successors, the former considered more interesting. Even as a smaller child, Mercury dimes and Walking Liberty half dollars had fascinated Trace. While such entries might have been rare in more populated Washington, D.C. or even, Richmond, they were common in Blacksburg, a place where farm people secreted even ‘Morgan’ or ‘Peace’ dollars in coffee tins or cigar boxes.

Evenings took on a customer – appraiser character as Peg used a library-donated copy of ‘Yeoman’s Guide to United States Coins’ and a jeweler’s monocle to determine a coins’ worth.

Trace’s fascination with mathematically-based puzzles possibly originating in their coin sorting process. Whether homework assignments, mathematically-based puzzles or even engineering calculations, Peg helped as much as she could before turning the matter over to a reference librarian and, if both of those solutions failed, she adapted a College Inn guest check and relied upon the kindness of one of the Inn’s many professor-type diners.

While the professors could have chosen to be annoyed, they were more often flattered by her inquiries, one of them going as far as to gift the young mother with the previous year’s ‘Chemical Rubber Corporation Mathematical Handbook.’ Whether from coin collecting, the puzzles or the consults, by the time Trace was fourteen years old he had performed well on every version of standardized achievement examinations, scheduled to graduate at the top of his Christiansburg high school class.

The first hint of new problems arrived on a chilly April 1975 morning when, as Peg showered, she noticed what felt like peashaped lump, one oddly tethered to the outer features of her left breast, causing her to seek local medical attention. Following prelunch conclusion to her work day the following Tuesday she drove the Lark to Richmond, Virginia’s Massey Cancer Center.

While another visit was required to definitively isolate what was going on, Massey doctors were clear in explaining the necessity for a radical mastectomy, meaning removal not only of the left breast but lymph nodes, too. A major step certainly, but one preceding three cycles of chemotherapy, drugs delivered as intravenous infusions.

Massey doctors performed the surgery only days later. Despite expected pain and discomfort Peg appeared to do well. A female Inn patron, someone who had earlier undergone a similar sequence, suggested that the infusion ‘chemo’ drugs could be locally administered, sparing Peg further trips to Richmond.

Trace did everything he could for his mother across weeks that passed as mainly a frightening, horrific blur. As if to establish normalcy, they continued their evening coin sorting routine, although sortable coins originated with Trace’s fill-in efforts at the Inn. Massey appointment cards magnetically pinned to their refrigerator door became a staple, the rest of the process dominated by trips, fitful sleep and quick trips to the flat’s single commode, followed by retching.

Less than one month following her surgery, appearing pale and weakened, Peg returned to work at the Inn, hugs and handshakes frequently substituting for yet-verbalized concern. Despite traycarrying, that had shifted from her left to right shoulder owing to the surgery, little had changed.

If transforming events had ended, or at least stalled there, the experience might have been chronicled by little more than a series of outdated refrigerator notes, some absent breast tissue and scarring, but some aberrant cells directed another course, an inevitably fatal one.

Peg’s breast cancer re-appeared a year and nine months later, the first time she coughed blood. Massey’s appointment staff wasted no time in booking a new appointment. A rather prescient scheduler there, familiar with the process, blocked five more dates and times extending over a two-month period, apparently aware of survival possibilities.

Elizabeth ‘Peg’ Ballew died in February about three months short of Trace’s high school graduation. Given his eighteenth birthday would not arrive until April the school dispatched a track coach –history instructor to Peg and Trace’s flat following work each evening, a welfare check of sorts, one that precluded further social services intervention.

During the span between Peg’s first and second rounds of breast cancer Trace posted an admission application to Tech, questioning the rationale for doing so given his circumstances. Confirmation of a promising outcome originated in a back booth where three male admissions counselors anticipated a Wednesday spare rib special while their counterpart settled for a less greasy chicken salad on toast points.

She offered a seemingly unhinged comment. ‘Trace, how skilled at you at performing a Hokie gobble?’ Trace returned a grin but no gobble.

She had brought news. ‘We processed about fifty freshman acceptance applications this morning, including one from a Ballew kid. Trace, you’d better learn how to gobble!’