Legendary bulldozer driver 'Hamp' still running strong at 91 years old

The world has no shortage of unsung heroes. Last week I was lucky to meet one. His name is Charles Hampton Vest, but everybody he knows calls him “Hamp.”

They’ve called him that for a long, long time. Hamp will turn 92 in July. Living long is not necessarily heroic. But I’d submit that working full time in a quarry at his age makes him one.

It’s no paper-shuffling desk job. For 40 to 50 hours a week, Hamp operates a dump truck that’s so tall he must clamber up a ladder to get into the driver’s seat.

There are 35-year-old men who couldn’t do it with the grace and ease that he does. Until a little more a year ago he operated a huge bulldozer.

Did I mention Hamp has only one arm? That’s a bit of an exaggeration. He has only one hand. Doctors amputated the left one at his wrist in 1953, long after he’d injured it working on U.S. 460 between Shawsville and Elliston. More about that later.

He’s a husband of 66 years, father of four, and has so many grandchildren he’s lost count. The same goes for his posse of great-grandkids. “You’ll have to ask Louise about that,” he said, referring to his wife. She’s the one who keeps track.

The answer is nine and seven, respectively, Louise Vest informed me later. The grandchildren are ages 7 to 38. The great-grandchildren range from 4 to 12.

Hamp and Louise live in the Check area of Floyd County, on a 72-acre cattle farm off Alleghany Spring Road. He works at the Acco Stone Quarry off Jennelle Road, just outside Blacksburg in Montgomery County. It’s a huge, 400-acre limestone pit that sidles up to the Smart Road and employs 20.

I heard about Hamp from J. O’Brien, president of Salem Stone Corp., which owns the quarry.

“We think so much of him,” O’Brien said. “He’s an example to the other employees, in terms of lifestyle, work ethic and character.”

On a bulldozer, which he operated until he turned 90, Hamp’s skills approach the status of legendary.

Quarry Manager Dennis Tawney (who’s young enough to be Hamp’s grandson), says: “He could smooth a road to the point where you could plant grass on it. That’s high praise in the heavy equipment world.

Hamp calls Acco Stone “the best place I’ve ever worked.”

He’s worked at a lot of places, and for a lot of different companies, many of which are now defunct. Hamp helped build part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Before Lake Gaston, N.C. was a lake, he bulldozed large swaths of overgrown and viney swampland to help create it. He calls that “the hardest job I ever had.”

He also worked on John W. Flannagan Dam, just south of Breaks Interstate Park near the Kentucky border.

He turned the first lick (of dirt) at the site of the Corning plant in Christiansburg. Worked in coal mines down in far Southwest Virginia, on highways up in Augusta County, and helped build Interstate 295, the northern bypass around Richmond.

And that list barely scratches the surface.

It was on one of those jobs that Hamp injured his hand. He was driving a dump truck back then and one day in 1950 rolled over a rock. “Dump trucks didn’t have power steering in those days,” Hamp explained. His left thumb got caught when the rock gave the steering wheel a sudden wrench.

He nursed the mangled hand for three years, until it was so stiff and weak he couldn’t use it to open a car door. Then doctors discovered he’d developed a type of cancer, sarcoma, in it. Was that related to the injury? Who knows? The docs said it had to go.

Now he has a steel hook, which has served him fine for the past 60 or so years.

Why is he still working, at age 91? That was the first question I asked. Hamp offered three reasons.

The first sounded like a line you hear from mountain climbers who’ve summited Mount Everest. Because he can.

The second: Hamp and Louise raised two of their granddaughters. Next year, the younger one, Rebecca Gillespie, will graduate from the Jefferson College of Health Sciences.

“I’m trying to help her get through that,” he said.

The third? He really and truly likes to work. On that one there seems to be little doubt.

“His hobby is work,” Louise Vest told me. “When he’s home, he thinks he’s got to be doing something.”

Will Hamp continue working after Gillespie graduates?

“That all depends on how I feel — if I’m living,” he said.

What’s his secret to a long and productive life?

I don’t know of anything in particular,” he shrugged. “I go to bed at nine or nine-thirty and I get up at five. I eat what I want. I don’t drink and I don’t smoke.”

“Did you ever drink?” I asked. He rolled his eyes.

“That’s a crazy question to ask a miner,” Hamp chuckled.

He was the fifth oldest of seven children, and had three brothers and three sisters. He’s the only one of that bunch still living, although two of his older sisters lived into their 90s.

Hamp didn’t finish seventh grade, which was not too unusual for a farm boy who turned 12 during the depths of the Great Depression.

“I had to go to work,” he said.

His father raised “corn and everything else we ate,” just over the hill from where Hamp and Louise, 86, live now. He quit school to help his dad, who did a lot of produce hauling to the coalfields.

He served three years on a Navy supply ship in the Pacific during World War II. He and Louis married in 1946, after he got back from serving in the military.

I asked where they honeymooned and he snorted.

“Ha, we went to Salem,” he recalled. “I had $20 in my pockets. We got up Monday morning, bought some pots and pans, then went home,” he added.

“Twenty dollars went far back then,” Louise said.

Hamp got into the earthmoving business in 1949, and that’s pretty much all he’s done since.

Louise said he tried retiring in 1989, at age 68, but that didn’t go well. At that time he set about clearing his farm, but he worked himself into the hospital from dehydration.

Within a couple of months, people he knew in the construction industry were calling him, asking if he could help out when they needed some bulldozing in a pinch. The quarry hired him in 1992, when Hamp was 71. He’s been working there full time ever since.

In July 2011, on Hamp’s 90th birthday, he showed up to work just like it was any other day. But it was not.

Salem Stone Corp. had been planning a surprise birthday party. They hatched those plans on the big day, which Louise recalls was a Monday.

“I told him to shave that morning, but he didn’t,” she said. The party was in a large repair garage on the quarry property. All the workers were there, plus some former co-workers of Hamp who had long since retired, plus members of Hamp’s family.

They feted him with a huge cake, decked out with — what else? — bulldozers. And Hamp was definitely surprised.

“He walked in and said, ‘You all are crazy,’ ” O’Brien recalled.

Somehow, I don’t think so.

At the core of that celebration was a profound sense of admiration for a guy who embodies many of the qualities that made America great. Hard work. Devotion to family. Moderation.

To Charles “Hamp” Vest we should all take a bow.

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