By TIM THORNTON
THE ROANOKE TIMES

W.J. Keeling's hands shook as he offered the fading and peeling photographs.

"The county's calling it a tire dump," Keeling said as he shuffled the pictures. "You don't build up a place like this if you're just making a place to dump tires." Keeling's evidence is a black-and-white image of himself and another man looking at what appear to be blueprints, as if they are planning and directing a grand and important endeavor. "It was a whole factory going in here, is what it was."

ERIC BRADY / The Roanoke Times Keeling's encampment.

Gray buildings, not quite finished, rise behind the men in the photograph.

The buildings behind Keeling's house look nearly the same as they do in that 38-year-old picture. The most visible difference is the colony of vines climbing over them now. Keeling waived a hand toward the empty, roofless ruins. "This used to be some of the prettiest place you've ever hoped to see."

Now it's a multimillion dollar cleanup project.

Using a $1.41 million grant from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, Roanoke County has hired the Blacksburg firm of Draper Aden Associates to figure out how to get millions of tires safely off Keeling's south county land. None of those tires is likely to leave the Starlight Lane site before late summer.

"It's not like one big tire pile," said Lynn Croy, the engineering firm's project manager. There are lots of tire piles - automobile tires, motorcycle tires, lawn mower tires, earth moving equipment tires - spread out over more than 100 acres. "Right now some of them are just kind of encased in kudzu," Croy said.

It's Croy's job to figure out how many tires are in those piles and the best way to get them out of there.

"We've been real clear to them that we don't think the state's funding is going to remove all the tires from the site," Croy said. She expects removal costs will run about $2 per tire. For the tires left behind, she said, "Fire is the big risk."

There have been at least a half-dozen fires on Keeling's property, beginning with a Thanksgiving blaze in 1974. There was a brush fire there last week that came close to some of the tires.

Dan O'Donnell, the assistant county administrator overseeing the project, doesn't like to talk about tire fires. He was county administrator in Berkley County, W.Va., in 1993 when 3 million tires caught fire there. They burned for weeks, despite the efforts of 250 firefighters who converged on the little town of Inwood. About 7 million tires caught fire near Winchester on Oct. 31, 1983. They burned well into 1984.

Keeling planned to build a tire recapping plant and a factory that would recycle old tires into rubber for new ones. He also had plans for a laboratory that would find new uses for old tires.

"This place might have been different," he said. "There could have been jobs over here. I tried to get three industrials over here and I would have got away with it if I had any help."

But county officials said they didn't want industry so close to upscale housing developments, such as Hunting Hills.

ERIC BRADY / The Roanoke Times Keeling's tires, before the March fire.

Nevertheless, Keeling got the recapping business going in 1964. He hauled in truckloads of tires. Some were in good enough shape to sell without recapping.

"People used to come in here like it was a yard sale six and a half days a week," he remembers. "On Christmas Eve, we'd have to lock the doors and turn people away."

But the rubber accumulated much faster than Keeling's customers carried it off. There are at least 3 million tires scattered on his old farm, he said. There might be as many as 7 million.

Keeling's isn't the only tire recycling plan that's gone wrong around here. In 1993, a company called Tireslingers planned to shred 5,000 tires a day on part of the old American Viscose property in Roanoke. Instead, the company collected tires and its owner was convicted of operating an illegal tire dump. In 1995, Virginia Rubber Recycling, a Rocky Mount company, ran into similar problems, then burned.

Keeling says he's 70 years old, a survivor of one heart attack and three strokes.

In the old photograph, he is a strong and straight-backed man with a clear and determined expression. Now he's stooped a little. He doesn't like to stand for too long. The bright white stubble of his beard stands out against his dark brown skin. His soft brown eyes seem lively at times, but they fade when he looks toward the unfinished buildings that were meant to be his factory.

If Keeling's business had developed like he planned, his life might be far different. He is convinced his ambitions failed because "The damn dirty rich want this land."

Even before he started building his factory, an aunt told him he shouldn't do it, he recalls. If he built a successful business, she said, white people would try to take it. "She told me if they can't get it they'll destroy it," Keeling said. "That's exactly what happened."

It was shortly after he turned down an offer for his land and business that his troubles started, Keeling says. He's convinced "rich men" have hired vandals to steal from him, to harass him, to tear up his property. So he's encased his home's brick walls and concrete roof with thick sheets of solid steel. The front of the building would offer a beautiful view of mountains rolling into the distance if it had any windows.

Some nights, Keeling said, he sits with a shotgun across his knees waiting for men he's sure will be coming.

"The vandals is still coming," he said. "The vandals come in here for more than 40 years."

Keeling knows he won't live forever, but he talks about keeping his adversaries at bay even after he's gone.

"They made villains out of me," Keeling said. "People have lied on me and tried to say I was wrong. I wasn't wrong when I come here.

"I lost my whole life's work over here and got nothing but a bad name out of it."

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