Joe Kennedy

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

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"You have more pennies in your pocket if you stay busy," Hazel Naff of Roanoke told me on Thursday.

In her 90 years she has worked at the coffee shop of the old Patrick Henry Hotel, sold men's clothes at Davidsons on Jefferson Street and at J.C. Penney at Crossroads Mall, reared three children and peeled, cooked and canned as many as 54 quarts of peaches in a single day.

Oh, and she was married for 44 years to the late Berlin Naff, a cabinetmaker from the Cloverdale (not Franklin County) Naffs.

Hers is a familiar story in these parts, one which, I fear, is disappearing all too soon.

Naff was raised in Callaway, one of nine children born to her mother and father, a carpenter.

The family had pigs, chickens, a cow and a huge garden. The children walked to school and back.

Young Hazel Mills worshipped with her family at Monte Vista Church of the Brethren, a 2.9-mile walk each way.

As an adult, she made her three children's clothes when they were in elementary school and beyond.

She drove until she was 80 and moved to the Eastwood Assisted Living Building at then-Friendship Manor on Hershberger Road in 2000.

Within a year of her arrival at Eastwood, she started to cut and sew cloth bags with straps so her fellow residents could carry books and belongings on their wheelchairs and walkers.

Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Hazel Naff is 90, and for about the past seven years, she has been sewing bags for fellow residents of the Eastwood Assisted Living center in Roanoke. The bags are meant to hang from residents' walkers.

She sells them for $1 to $3 apiece to cover expenses, though many residents offer her more money and many want more than one bag.

The bags have become fashion items. You can see them throughout the building.

When she went to Carrington Place nursing home for rehabilitation therapy after suffering some small strokes, Naff taught physical therapist Charles Christopher how to sew the bags. She has a photo in which he is wearing one on his head.

Now he has a sewing machine, too.

It's interesting to learn how people accomplished things. Naff said she simply asked retired clothier Sig Davidson for a sales job and he gave one to her.

Her next step?

"I went in and got to work."

She was the only saleswoman on the staff.

She talked of cooking big meals and training her kids to keep house. Her daughters, Dana Wimmer of Roanoke and Dotty Hopkins of Charlottesville, could prepare the family dinner before they were 12, they said.

Nowadays, she is big on bingo at the assisted living center, but largely uninterested in TV. Sewing keeps her busy and keeping busy keeps her out of trouble.

Not that she is without a minor vice: No M&M is safe within her reach. She keeps a jar full of them next to her sewing machine.

For her, this is bliss.