Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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Slideshow of photos of Oddie Barnes

Oddie Barnes' memory isn't as good as it used to be.

Every time junk mail arrives touting him as a possible winner in one contest or another, he believes he really is a winner, and he cannot be dissuaded from that view.

His health issues have included poor circulation, congestive heart failure and the loss of his two big toes.

But he is doing pretty well for a person who entered the West Virginia coal mines at age 14 and who turned 100 years old today.

He lives in a nice home in Boxley Hills in Northeast Roanoke. He answers his telephone in a high, faint voice. He talks all the time to Jean, his wife of 12 years, who is 34 years his junior.

"When he's quiet," she says, "I wonder what's going through his mind."

Possibly it's memories of the coal career that started when he was a 240-pound teenager and ended some 35 or 36 years later, when he showed up for work, received some papers from his boss and thought he'd been fired.

A clerk explained that his working days were done -- because he'd reached retirement.

Only work

Barnes had no idea. He never went to school, still can't read or write but can tell stories of his days underground and his days spent fishing once he put the work behind him.

His co-workers used to wonder how he filled so many cars with coal, he says. The answer was easy: He used a No. 4 shovel and they used No. 3s. And he never stopped to rest.

"I was trying to put my kids through school," he explains.

He and his first wife had eight children, and he had another one on the side.

"Mining is a good job if you ain't scared," he says. But his children weren't to do it.

Today, five generations of his family will honor him at the Salem Senior Citizens Center. Some 175 people have been invited to the party. Despite his illiteracy, Barnes was a deacon in his church in McComas, W.Va., and is an honorary deacon at Shiloh Baptist in Salem.

Steady effort

One thing that comes through his conversation is his persistence. It kept him working in the mines, helped him catch so many fish he never had to buy any and brought about his marriage to Jean in 1995.

They met at the home of her father, his close friend. She left Crystal, W.Va., and became a social worker in Philadelphia.

The third time they met, he had lost his wife and she had lost her husband. And, he says, with a laugh, "I found out she's a good cook."

The marriage did not come about easily. Eventually he visited her at her home. "I just stayed till I had her," he says, smiling.

Jean explains the marriage this way:

"This was a man who needed to come from where he was and experience things in a different way. This man did not need to be living alone" in West Virginia.

"He had been in our family since I was a child," she says. "I could not see somebody who'd been kind suffer."

They moved to Roanoke in 1997 to be near her niece.

You've paid some dues by the time you reach 100. Barnes' health problems kept him in a nursing home for a year. He walks with a walker, despite his missing toes.

He hasn't lost his spirit. He says he carried a gun until he was 80, so nobody would mess with him -- and nobody did.

He enjoys the limelight. Thursday afternoon, Bud Conner of the Boxley Hills neighborhood association stopped by to take a photo to send to the newspaper. Earlier, association members paid a visit and gave him a birthday cake.

He took it all in with delight.

"I'm hoping to be what I pretend to be," he says. Nobody is perfect, he says, but "my record, in black and in white, says 'I'm a good boy.' "