Photos by KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

Having lived long enough to see his views return to fashion, Cabell Brand is giddy about the return of so-called big government.

Cabell Brand (left), founder of Total Action Against Poverty, watches as Selena Childress, director of Head Start, gets hugs from children attending the Betty Lou Brown Head Start Development Center in Northwest Roanoke.

Cabell Brand talks to teacher Marcella Archuleta (from middle), Debra Steelman and Eugene Stanford at a Total Action Against Poverty employment business office training class held in Roanoke."Just study hard, get a good job, and have a great life. That's how you can pay me back," Brand said.

If Cabell Brand has his way -- and he very often does -- here's how President Obama's economic stimulus package will play out in the Roanoke Valley:

More than 100 kids on the Head Start waiting list will finally go to preschool. Toilets installed in public buildings will flush with rainwater collected from the rooftops. High school dropouts enrolled in GED and job training programs will winterize more than 600 area homes.

As the Salem businessman and anti-poverty activist views it: Welcome back, big government. What took you so long?

In 1965, Brand founded Total Action Against Poverty, a community action agency that's brought more than $300 million to the Roanoke Valley. For more than four decades, he's preached the benefits of economic and racial equality, relying not only on his rare blend of bleeding heart and steely backbone but also on his ability to call up governors, congressmen and presidents -- and get them on the phone.

When the naysayers burned a cross in his yard and called him "that n----- loving Communist on Main Street," Brand soldiered on with relentless zeal, a millionaire with a social conscience.

He thumbed his nose at the conservative old guard, whether it meant persuading pediatricians to treat Medicaid children, helping blacks "bust up" white neighborhoods or falling in love with another man's wife.

"He reminds me of the T.S. Eliot line, 'Teach us to care and not to care,' " says Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. "Cabell cares about others, but he doesn't care what they think about him."

Having lived long enough to see his views return to fashion, Brand is giddy about the changes afoot. Echoing Obama's call for volunteerism, he's even written a book, half memoir and half call-to-action -- which he sent to Obama, of course, through Kaine.

He may be an 86-year-old with an unsteady gait and faulty hearing aids -- which is OK, friends say, because he never listens anyway.

But Brand is still very much in the game.

Forging a way

Why? That's always the first question people ask. Why does a Virginia blue blood commit his life to fighting poverty?

It starts with the family home in the heart of Salem on Second Street -- a proper home, with servants on loan from the state-run orphanage nearby. Across the street was the Ortho-Vent Shoe Co., a door-to-door shoe venture started in 1904 by Brand's grandfather, who was Salem's postmaster and the state's Republican Party chairman.

Another universe resided at the house next door, where Brand's best friend lived. The boy's father, a Yellow Dog Democrat and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's No. 1 fan, gave Brand a sticker for his bedroom window -- a blue eagle emblazed with NRA, for the National Recovery Administration, part of FDR's New Deal. Brand's father spanked him when he saw the sticker and made him take it down.

Not in this house, Gerald Brand scolded, and 10-year-old Brand obeyed. In 1934, when FDR's motorcade passed the house on its way to the Salem Veterans' Hospital dedication, the boy watched the parade reverently -- from the privacy of the roof.

He would forge his opinions, based on his own experience, not his father's. He knew, innately, that he was far more blessed than the white servants from the orphanage or the black children at the back of the bus.

At segregated Andrew Lewis High School, where athletics reigned, Brand was small for his age. He excelled in academics instead, leading his debate team to the state championship.

But it was persistence, honed by the Virginia Military Institute rat line, that would come to define his life's work. If a young man could will his way through that torturous obstacle course for first-year cadets, he could do anything. Never say die, VMI.

But Brand's studies at VMI were interrupted in his third year. Called to serve in World War II, he was haunted by the suffering of the French families he helped liberate, the sight of emaciated rescued Jews, the hollowness of the bombed-out villages.

After the war, he graduated from VMI and returned to Europe to marry his first wife, an Estonian he'd met in the war. He worked for the U.S. State Department in West Berlin, where he helped implement the Marshall Plan to rebuild devastated Europe. Brand's job was to buoy employment by navigating the delivery of raw materials during the first Soviet blockade of the then-divided German capital.

He saw firsthand: Government had a responsibility to right wrongs, to put people to work, to build business.

Before he returned home in 1949, Brand's father sent him a letter, urging him to go into politics -- anywhere but Virginia. Brand was too liberal to make a name for himself in Salem, he warned.

But Brand went home anyway, confident that he could save his dad's failing business and determined, finally, to make his opinions known.

Calendar control

Whether he was selling his shoes or his ideas, Brand had a devilish ability to talk people into things. Within a year, his father handed over the reins.

In two decades, the staff at Ortho-Vent's Salem plant grew from four to 1,000, with 200,000 part-time salesmen fanned out across the country, knocking on doors and hawking Brand's father's signature Spring Step shoe cushion. To help them clinch the sale, Brand developed a snappy "two-minute demonstration."

At the Salem plant, he offered flexible hours for working mothers long before the term "flex time" was coined, not just to help families but also because it improved worker retention and his bottom line. To make his catalogs more appealing, he launched his own ad agency and gave the shoe enterprise a more sophisticated name, Stuart McGuire.

When customers complained that his chlorophyll-packed inserts turned their socks green, Brand inserted a label that read: If the color comes off on your socks, it shows you're getting the full benefit of the chlorophyll.

With gross profits of more than $1 million a year before taxes, he took the company public in 1970 -- one of a handful of homegrown Roanoke Valley companies to do so. As buying patterns changed, Brand shifted the business away from door to door toward mail-order and eventually added a distribution center to the enterprise, making him a pioneer in the mail-order distribution field.

Success gave Brand what he calls "calendar control," the ability to schedule business appointments around his real passion: volunteering 20 percent of his time to fostering social change. It's a theme he hammers repeatedly in his 2008 self-published book, called "If Not Me, Then Who?"

In the early '60s, a few years after the landmark school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, Brand took it upon himself to urge the VMI superintendent to admit qualified blacks.

"He said there weren't any and laughed at me," Brand recalls. A few years later, he volunteered to raise the scholarship money himself if VMI would at least admit black athletes, but again he was turned down.

Brand washed his hands -- and his checkbook -- of the institution for the next quarter-century. VMI didn't admit blacks until 1968.

"He felt like VMI was failing itself," says Roanoke developer Ed Walker, a Brand protege. "At a time when the business world revolved around the railroad and the bank, he was just not a Shenandoah Club lunch guy."

Brand refused to join the elite downtown club until 1998, after blacks, Jews and women were invited to join. Even then, "A lot of the corporate people avoided him," explains Salem businessman and longtime councilman Howard Packett, who worked at Brand's ad agency.

"We used to go to cocktail parties, and people would say, 'Why the hell are you working for Cabell Brand?' "

Social change, the young maverick learned, was a much tougher sell than shoes.

Big things

Brand was on the Council of Community Services board in 1965, the year after President Lyndon Johnson declared his unconditional war on poverty. "A federal boondoggle" was how one conservative member of the planning agency's board described it.

But Brand lit up with LBJ's call to action. "Big things always attracted him, whether it was big money or big buildings or big ideas," says Dave Herbert, the council's director at the time.

Brand took two months off from the shoe company to study the legislation and figure out a plan. He and Herbert held community meetings for anyone who would listen -- PTAs, Rotary Clubs, rural black churches.

Their pitch was this: They were launching TAP, a community action agency, using the motto "A Hand Up -- Not a Handout." Tackling poverty would not only help people, it would help businesses, too.

"He did a lot of 'rising tide floats all boats' speeches, including to people who thought that taking federal money was communist," Herbert recalls.

But Brand was Brand, which is to say: He was relentless. "He'd pick out the one positive thing they might have said out of 40 things, and he'd build on that positive -- to the point where they were just amazed at what they'd said."

He also did his homework, flying to Chicago and Cleveland to study anti-poverty programs. He went to Washington, too, figuring out ways to claim Roanoke's piece of the federal pie.

Brand says it was coincidence that he "just happened to be roaming the halls" in 1965 when he met the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Sargent Shriver, the late John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law. Impressed by Brand's stack of letters from community leaders -- and no doubt feeling cornered -- Shriver suggested that TAP begin by establishing free day care for poor children, called Head Start.

That 15-minute conversation led to a decades-long relationship between TAP and federal poverty officials. Within two months, TAP was running one of the nation's first Head Start programs, with classes in Roanoke as well as Botetourt and Roanoke counties.

Six years before a federal judge forced integration in Roanoke's elementary schools, TAP had pulled it off with preschoolers.

By this time, Brand had teamed up with a personality even more forceful than his own. He'd hired Roanoke elementary school Principal Bristow Hardin -- with a Burl Ives beard and a master's degree in acting -- to be TAP's first director.

Hardin was already a legendary figure in town: Fed up by the inactivity of the parents at his school, he had fired the PTA. Later, when Hardin found himself blackballed from the Virginia Inland Sailing Association at Smith Mountain Lake -- for his reputation as a radical -- he responded by making a white flag emblazoned with a black ball, which he flew on his boat as he zigzagged the lake.

The winds of change were definitely shifting. And where the breeze refused to cooperate, Brand and Hardin simply changed course. If there was no wind, they rowed.

Frick and Frack

TAP headquarters was hippie central, a dusty old flour mill on Shenandoah Avenue where the staff sat on pillows instead of chairs, and secretaries were forbidden to screen phone calls.

Brand had convinced the bank that owned the building to lease it to TAP for $1, in exchange for a tax deduction. TAP could not only use the space, it could also count the value of the building as the match required for the federal poverty grant.

From the moment he entered the cavernous wreck of a building, a flashlight in hand, Brand was "like an appraiser gone wild," Herbert remembers, counting every brick and tallying the match in his head.

Hardin was the boisterous implementer while Brand made the behind-the-scenes deals. "With Cabell it was 'Know your enemies,' and push against the grain to force change from within," recalls Hardin's daughter, Ginny Hardin.

Brand had pushed the same boundaries in his private life, when he fell in love with Shirley Pence, the wife of a prominent South Roanoke lawyer. The scandal, by all accounts, rocked Roanoke society. Both were separated, Brand says, when they decided to marry and blend their two families in 1964.

"Cabell was considered a threat to people -- to families, to the general economic and political systems, to how your children were going to grow up," recalls Salem-born Anna Logan Lawson, a civic leader and former TAP board chairwoman.

Not only was TAP forcing integration in the valley, it was also providing jobs for blacks -- as Head Start aides, office workers and community organizers. The old guard didn't care for that much, either.

"At one party I went to, this woman said to me, 'Can you imagine? My maid is now a teacher in Head Start?!' " says Phyllis Olin, the widow of former Congressman Jim Olin, D-Roanoke, and an early Head Start psychologist.

When Brand approached the Roanoke Bar Association about starting the Legal Aid Society of Roanoke Valley, the lawyers voted it down, saying they were already providing pro bono services to the poor.

"To hell with them," Hardin fumed. He already had the funding and more than enough moxie to pull off the project behind their backs. But Brand ran an endgame instead, convincing the handful of supportive lawyers to join -- by offering them a board majority. Eventually, the bar came around.

"It was a matter of making them feel it was their idea!" Brand says, gleefully.

But he was not afraid to play hardball. For TAP's first director of education, Hardin recruited Bedford native Osborne Payne, a black educator who had run schools for the U.S. State Department in Liberia.

Within weeks of his arrival, Payne and his wife, Famebridge, butted up against the establishment by applying for a home loan from First National Exchange Bank, one of the city's most formidable institutions. When the bank rejected the loan, Brand paid a visit to Ed Ould, the bank's president and a longtime power broker.

Although Ould died in 1979, the Paynes and Brand remember the story well: The banker turned the loan down because he didn't expect TAP to survive. When Brand offered to endorse the loan himself, again Ould refused, saying he didn't want to "bust up" the neighborhood, which was near Lafayette Avenue and all white at the time.

"Ed, segregation's illegal, and I don't think you want the publicity of turning down a loan because a person's black. If you do, I'll take this to the newspaper," Brand recalls telling him.

"You sonofabitch, you wouldn't."

"Watch me, Ed."

The loan was approved -- but not before Ould pulled Stuart McGuire's line of credit, Brand says. The two never spoke again.

Friendly fire

By the early '80s, TAP's core funding was on the chopping block, a victim of President Ronald Reagan's trickle-down theory. Brand took the threat personally, arguing his way into congressional offices to lobby and pulling strings to come up with other sources of funds.

At the same time, he was under attack in Roanoke -- but this time not from the city's old guard.

TAP had already spawned some failures, including a short-lived credit union, a seniors program and a theater program for prisoners. Hardin and his successor, Ted Edlich, were white, and the organization had also fended off periodic charges of racism.

In 1980, the Roanoke chapter of NAACP called for the resignations of both Edlich and Brand. They were sued for eliminating the position of the deputy director -- allegedly because she was black. The case was dismissed in federal court, but not before the Rev. Carl Tinsley, the chapter's vice president, accused Brand of being "dictatorial, threatening and irrational."

(The two would later make amends, with Tinsley joining the TAP board and sometimes accompanying Brand on lobbying missions. "After getting to know him, you see that he's been a blessing, really, to the black community," Tinsley says.)

But TAP was criticized more in Roanoke than in Washington, where it was considered a star among the 1,100 community action agencies. Brand made sure of that.

"In the '80s, when a lot of people in Cabell's position were withdrawing from community action, he actually doubled his commitment" of time, says David Bradley, who heads the Washington-based National Community Action Foundation. (Bradley recently worked with the Obama administration to obtain $1 billion of the federal stimulus package for the community action network that includes TAP.)

When Reagan and his successors tried to eliminate community action funding, it was up to Congress to get it restored. Brand took it upon himself to convince them why. As Bradley puts it, chuckling: "Cabell was always the one thinking, 'Senator So-and-So would be lucky to know me; let's go meet him.' "

Brand didn't just exude confidence. He invented it. "To him, rejection ... just means you work harder to sell your point of view," Edlich says.

When Brand was honored at the Kennedy Center in 1980 as the American businessman who'd done the most to combat poverty, a Roanoke Times editorial called him "a prophet not without honor -- save in his home area."

Kiss the ring

So it went that the Salem shoe salesman rowed through the rocky shoals of Reagonomics, not only immune to the criticism but in fact energized by it. "If he felt strongly about something then you were going to feel the strength," recalls former state delegate Chip Woodrum of Roanoke.

In the coming decade, Brand guided the national replication of the TAP-founded Virginia Water Project, which had already brought running water to more than 77,000 homes in the state. He pushed for statewide expansion of Virginia CARES, a TAP re-entry program for ex-offenders. And he was the chief force behind the statewide replication of Roanoke's Child Health Investment Partnership, designed to provide medical management for low-income children.

"People from all political backgrounds take his phone calls because they know that when Cabell Brand's for something, he's usually right," says Dr. Doug Pierce, the pediatrician who founded the Roanoke Valley CHIP program.

"But he irritates people because he has no tolerance for something he doesn't want to hear," Pierce adds. "I love him, but you're either with him or you're not."

And woe unto the politician who doesn't snap to when summoned, whether it's to attend Olde Salem Days or to hear his latest policy plan. While Brand is nowhere near the top of Virginia's campaign donor list, his influence to marshal other resources is legend -- which may explain why every Democratic governor since Charles Robb has spent the night in the Brands' home. "It doesn't matter who you are. If you're running for office and you're a Democrat, you stop by Cabell and Shirley's place to kiss the ring," Woodrum says.

Woodrum will never forget being called to the tiny CHIP office on Luck Avenue, along with a cadre of state and federal politicians. They were summoned to hear Brand announce a $2.2 million Kellogg Foundation grant he'd orchestrated for CHIP. The politicians simply had to implement CHIP across the state, he urged, and make it a line item on the budget -- to guarantee it regular funding.

"At the time, I'd never heard of CHIP, but by golly I heard about it that day," Woodrum says. "He'll Oliver Twist you. ... He'll make it so if you say no to him, you'll think you are literally denying a poor child a crust of bread."

Tender underbelly

In the library of his sprawling Salem home, Brand catalogs his life's work. A man in his twilight, he has stories to share, lessons to impart.

As a complement to his memoir, Brand has amassed 192 scrapbooks, all of them indexed and color-coded -- even the date books he still relies upon for calendar control.

There are pictures of Brand with presidents; United Nations research papers he wrote about poverty in Bangladesh and Brazil; yellowed clippings of trips to China, where he paid factories to manufacture shoes long before that was the norm.

In 1986, Brand sold Stuart McGuire to Home Shopping Network for $18.1 million. Because it was a public stock company, he says he pocketed a fraction of the sale.

Brand is a very much a man of wealth, though, with his Millennium Jaguar and his silk-lined suits. The waiters at the Shenandoah Club know him by name.

The house on Main Street where the cross once burned is now a museum of the Brands' travels -- art hauled back from more than 100 countries, including 13 trips to Africa.

But by far his favorite treasure is a humble wooden plaque given to him in 1992 at VMI. Called the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award, it's named for the VMI valedictorian who was murdered in Hayneville, Ala., in 1965, while shielding a young black girl from a bigot's bullet.

Brand calls the Jonathan Daniels honor the finest moment of his life -- made all the sweeter because it was given to him by the association of black cadets, whose acceptance he had long ago lobbied. Five years later, Brand had a monument installed honoring Daniels, an Episcopal Church martyr, in the Hayneville town square.

"The awards are great, but mainly they just prove that if you do the right thing over time, people eventually come around," he says.

While Brand enjoys looking back, he can still talk with emotion about the needs of the nation's poor. It bothers him that 15,000 homes in Virginia don't have running water, a minimum of 20 in Roanoke County alone.

His favorite story on TAP, taped for a 1989 "CBS News Sunday Morning," features an elderly Hollins woman who had hauled water for 60 years talking rapturously about her new "precious bathroom," installed by the Virginia Water Project.

Watching the tape recently, Brand wept openly. He may live in a house with five bathrooms and an indoor tennis court, but he views his wealth with a mixture of guilt and pride and, above all, gratitude.

"He thinks that but by the grace of God, I would be the guy without the fresh water or the parents who could educate me, or the confidence to run my own business," says Martin Skelly, his former assistant.

Indeed, the liberal lion has a very tender underbelly. He cries when his kids come home to visit, when he witnesses a GED graduation ceremony, when he talks about how instrumental his wife, Shirley, has been in his life and work.

There has been much to cry about in recent years. The Brands have buried four of their eight children, two of whom committed suicide as adults. On a recent tour of a Head Start center in Salem -- a converted train station Brand finagled the railroad into donating in 1968 -- a teacher pointed to a plaque honoring his stepson, Richard Pence Jr., who killed himself in 2006. In lieu of flowers, the family requested donations go to the Salem Head Start, for a tricycle path.

"My dad casts a pretty big shadow," says Caroline Mateja, the Brands' youngest, now a nurse in Virginia Beach. As a child, she was expected to earn straight A's, mirror her parents' social values and, above all, hold her own in a debate.

The family has grown closer in recent years, holding annual poolside "fun fests" for the 13 grandchildren. Mateja says her dad frequently greets her with tears in his eyes, telling her, "I'm just so g-------d happy to see you as a mom, to see how you've grown."

"Sometimes I wonder how they put one foot in front of the other," adds Liza Pence Urso, Shirley's daughter and a Dallas lawyer. "But they are eternal optimists, getting joy out of the grandchildren and knowing that the family will go on and the Earth will go on."

And that every afternoon at 5, the two of them will share a cocktail on their rooftop sunroom, talk about what's going on in the world -- and what Cabell Brand is going to do about it.

'Like God's visiting'

Until recently, Brand worked out of the eponymous Roanoke College center he established to research peace, poverty and the environment. Now, he works from his kitchen table, where politicians still call upon him for help penetrating bureaucratic snags.

Of course, his back gets scratched, too. Brand was the force behind the decision to recycle rainwater at the new Western Virginia Regional Jail. Edlich uses him regularly as a pipeline to the governor, who makes time for annual Brand meetings and quarterly Brand phone calls.

"He comes prepared with a list of six or seven things," Kaine says. "Things he wants me to do, things he wants me to tell the president."

Cathedral-building, Brand calls it, a reference to the centuries it took to build the world's largest cathedrals. Whenever the latest poverty statistics roll in, Brand reminds Edlich that, slow though the progress may be, they are on the right side of history.

Though his cathedral is far from complete, Brand didn't have to go far recently to witness his work-in-progress:

When he walks into Head Start, a toddler peers up from his napping cot and grabs the old man's hand. "It's like God's visiting," one teacher whispers.

At the Roanoke Higher Education Center, home to TAP's job-training programs, students applaud when Brand enters the room. "You go back to work, get yourself a good job and lead a good life," he tells them.

But the most telling exchange of the day comes in front of a tiny ranch house in Garden City. TAP is holding a weatherization demonstration, an opportunity to show the public what the stimulus money can do. When Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte arrives for the dog and pony show, Brand shuffles up to him with his arm outstretched.

"You've been a good friend to TAP, Bob, but I wish you would have voted for the stimulus bill," he says, to the nervous delight of the TAP staffers.

Goodlatte assures him he's looking forward, not back, and will do what he can to leverage the region's share of the money.

Cane in hand and grinning like the proud patriarch he is, Brand soldiers on to his next stop. He may have a replacement shoulder and two artificial knees, but there is a newfound spring in his shuffle.

Cathedral-building. Only death will stop him from laying the next brick.