SUMMITT’S STAR
MUSIC HISTORY
Tennessee women’s coach honored
Guitarist shares stories of song legends
COMMUNITY, A-3
JAKE MABE, A-2
HALLS/FOUNTAIN CITY
Vol. 50, No. 2 • January 10, 2011 • www.ShopperNewsNow.com • 4509 Doris Circle, Knoxville 37918 • 922-4136
Hard times and tragedy By Betty Bean
M
ost days but Sunday, Roy Anderson is down on Broadway sitting in his green 1971 Chevy C-10 pickup truck in the old Fountain City Kroger parking lot, loaded down with firewood for sale. He’s got red oak, white oak and hickory plus bundles of cedar kindling. Frequently one of his 10 children is riding shotgun. He knows he could make more money if he’d find a spot out toward Farragut, but the Chevy only gets about 11 miles to the gallon, so he stays closer to his home in Corryton and does the best he can. He’s waiting for spring when he, his son Roy Jr. and his friend Randy Harwell will be opening up “Our Father’s Garden,” a landscaping supply, lawn maintenance, remodeling and construction business on Cunningham Road in Halls, at the site of the old Munsey’s Lawn Care. A pewter ornament that his wife, Sylvia, gave him hangs from his rearview mirror. It says, “I love you all dearly. Now don’t shed a tear. I’m spending my Christmas with Jesus this year. In loving memory, Samuel Anderson, 20062010.” The little pendant commemorates their youngest son who died of neuroblastoma – a vicious form of cancer – on Nov. 4. Not that Roy needs reminders. The boy is never far from his mind. Just over three years ago, Roy Anderson was a licensed Realtor, a general contractor and a successful builder/developer who had built and sold 19 houses and started Shiloh Gardens, a subdivision on Pedigo Road. He’d built his family a house that they only owed $21,000 on (and that was for the land) and he drove a big F-350 King Ranch dually that pulled a skid-steer loader. Samuel really liked that truck. The doctors at Children’s Hospital discovered Samuel’s tumor Aug. 31, 2007, and flew him to Vanderbilt for treatment. He was desperately ill from the beginning and spent more than 70 days on life support that year. His stomach swelled up like he’d swallowed
AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD Race Against Racism The YWCA’s Race Against Racism will be held 1-3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 15, at Phyllis Wheatley Center, 124 S. Cruze St. as part of Diversity Day. Pre-race entertainment begins at 11:30 a.m. The YWCA’s Diversity Day allows all community members to come together to celebrate each other. There will be entertainment, health screenings, a kids’ Home Depot workshop and free food. Info: 523-6126 or visit www.ywcaknox.com.
Roy Anderson and his daughter, Bethany, sell firewood in the old Kroger parking lot in Fountain City. Photo by Ruth White
a basketball and most of his vital organs, including his eyes, were compromised. Roy and Sylvia never left his side. “Down in Nashville they gave us a Ronald McDonald room about a quarter mile from the hospital. Might as well have been 1,500 miles away. We appreciated it, but we couldn’t be that far away from him, so we let somebody else use it. Every day they were telling us he wouldn’t live till tomorrow. The tumor didn’t shrink, he had breathing difficulties and they had to intubate him. But in January 2008, he went into remission, although with neuroblastoma, there’s really no remission. They just call it ‘No Evidence of Disease – NED.’ So we went back to work. “I was working as a trim carpenter and cabinet maker and I built our house debt-free as the Lord gave me the money. We cut down trees on our property for
lumber and every time I got paid, if I had any extra money, I’d put it in the house. I also built my daddy a house on the property.” Roy had nearly finished a couple of houses in Shiloh Gardens when the bottom fell out of the market. He mortgaged the family home for $280,000 and used the money to pay the interest on his business debts and for living expenses. Finally, the Andersons walked away from their home and his dad let them have the house Roy had built for him. Roy got a loan on his truck to pay off the interest on a construction note, but things kept going south on him and on April 3, 2009, the repo guys pulled up to take the truck. “That’s the one thing that bothered Samuel the most. He’d say, ‘Daddy, when are they going to bring back our truck?’ I told him that wasn’t going to happen and he’d say ‘We’ll get another truck,
daddy. I got money, Daddy.’ He got a Social Security check from where he’d been sick and he wanted to give it to me, but that money was just to be used for him.” Roy filed for bankruptcy in September, about the time Samuel’s cancer came back. “A week before he passed away, I’d saved up $1,400 but the guy was wanting $3,000 for this truck. Samuel had money in the bank that people had given him out of compassion, and he said, ‘Mommy, give Daddy some of my money so he can go buy that truck.’ When we got home from church on Wednesday night my wife said, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and buy that truck,’ and handed me money from Samuel’s account,” Roy said. The next day he and two of his other children, Joshua and Hannah, went to Sevier County to get the truck. They were on their
way back when his mother-in-law called and said that Samuel had quit breathing “I told her to turn his oxygen rate up and she said she already had. ‘He’s gone, Roy.’ My wife was crying, saying, ‘I’ve killed him. I killed him. He asked for a drink of water and he stopped breathing.’ I told her she didn’t kill him. How many times had she given her children a drink of water? “I didn’t even want the truck then, wanted to take it back. But she told me the Lord didn’t want me to be there because he knew that Josh and Hannah and I wouldn’t have been able to handle watching Samuel pass away. She told me not to throw the truck away, just fix it up.” So he kept the old green truck and got it into working order. He kind of wished it were blue because that was the color of Tommy the Tank Engine, Samuel’s favorite cartoon. One day he was working on the passenger side door and noticed something odd in the door jam – a strip of bright blue, which he realized was the truck’s original color. Restoring it is high on Roy’s to-do list. And he wants to make something very clear: “We’re born again and we’re trusting in the Lord and we realize that there’s trials and tribulations that everybody has to go through. This isn’t an accident that we’ve lost our business and our son. We know that we’ll see him again. We loved him as much as you could love anybody, so when we had to let him go back to the Lord, we gave him all we could. “We’ve got clothes, groceries, a place to stay and TennCare’s paying for our medical, so our needs are all met. We’d love to have your business, but we don’t need a handout. And we’re just thankful that God picked us to be Samuel’s parents out of all the billions of people to choose from.”
Goodwill contract up for approval By Larry Van Guilder A resolution approving a contract with Goodwill Industries to provide recycling services is on County Commission’s January agenda. The public works and engineering department wants to contract with Goodwill for five years, in one-year increments, to provide “comprehensive recycling and reuse services” at the county’s convenience centers. Significantly, the resolution states that Goodwill will have “responsibility for revenue and expense from the Halls conve-
nience center yard waste collection service.” In July 2009, an investigation by the Shopper-News revealed as much as $35,000 in funds collected at the center from consumers for recycling could not be accounted for. That same month, Diane Roach, a 12-year county employee, resigned after telling her supervisor she had stolen “about $1,000” from the cash collected at the center. Roach pleaded guilty to stealing $1,000 last August, and a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation probe to determine how
much money went missing continues. In addition to the admitted embezzlement, the Halls center suffered at least one burglary in 2009. A June 1, 2009, report filed with the Knox County Sheriff’s Office by Tom Salter, the solid waste director, stated that “an unknown suspect used a key to open the gate and the door of the office.” A lock box containing cash had been pried open. Bruce Wuethrich, engineering and public works director at the time, confirmed that $883 had
been taken. The proposed contract with Goodwill is consistent with a new direction for the county’s solid waste department. As we reported last month, interim public works and engineering director Dwight Van de Vate has notified Natural Resources Recovery that its greenwaste recycling contract with the county will not be renewed when it expires July 31. Gradually, Knox County is getting out of the recycling business and turning it over to private enterprise, a move which can’t come too soon.
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