A Love of Labor. Nothing and Nobody Keeps Lorraine Davis from Going to Work Every Day. Not Broken Bones. Not Heartbreak. And Certainly Not the Passing of Years.

Elizabeth Leland

By Elizabeth Leland
Charlotte (N.C.) Observer
Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005

Charlotte, N.C. -- Lorraine Davis is 84, long past the age when most people retire. But she is not about to.

She steadied herself on a metal walker one recent Friday morning and navigated the upstairs hall of her retirement center, then rode the elevator down, rested in a chair five minutes, got up and steadied herself again. She walked outside to her Buick and her son drove her to McGee Lumber Company, where she has worked 34 years and would just as soon work another 34, the good Lord willing.

"Oh!" she said in delight, finally back after seven weeks off with a broken arm and a broken leg. "It's good to be home."

She took her place at a tattered wood desk, cluttered with papers, in an office cluttered with samples of tongue-and-groove flooring, custom millwork and ready-made thresholds, where the linoleum floor has worn to the subfloor in places and dust swirls around chair legs. "A bunch of junk," she thought when her husband suggested in 1971 that they buy the lumber yard on North Graham Street and go into business together.

Now, she often slips up and calls it home.

It is hard to separate Lorraine Davis from McGee Lumber Company, difficult to say whether she is there because she loves to work, or whether she keeps going back because she loves the eccentricities of the old office, with its weathered siding and old-fashioned cash register. Strangers come to order redwood and Douglas fir and Southern yellow pine, and become such regular customers, friends really, that they call her "Mom."

The company's motto is: "Only the lumber is fancy."

Working there, Lorraine believes, keeps her young.

Starting out

Lorraine was a working mom long before women's liberation.

She left her parent's farm in northern Iredell County in 1939, rented an apartment on Charlotte's East Boulevard, enrolled in secretarial classes at King's College and, eight months later, took a job at Huttig Sash & Door Co.

She married in 1940, and kept working as a secretary until a few months before her daughter, Sally, was born in 1943. She stayed home until 1947, when John was less than a year old.

That year, the boss's daughter called and asked her to fill in for a month.

Just a month, she assured her husband, Dewey, and hired a nanny.

A month became a lifetime.

Lorraine loves to work. She enjoys helping customers, meeting new people, getting out in the world. She adores her children, but she just couldn't stay home every day.

Dewey worked at Charlotte Lumber until it shut down in 1951 and then took a job at McGee Lumber. A favorite expression of his was: If a man pays me, I want to give him a good day's work. That was Lorraine's philosophy, too.

Up at 4:30 a.m.

When Clarence McGee decided to sell his lumber yard in 1971, Dewey and a co-worker decided to buy it. They asked Lorraine to join them. She was working then at Miller Millwork Corp.

It seemed like a step down to Lorraine, from her plush office on Rampart Street to the homespun one on North Graham.

But she grew to love the lumber yard even more than Dewey did.

They would wake at 4:30 a.m., drive to North Graham Street and walk across to Tatsis Restaurant, where they ate the same thing every morning, an egg over medium for Dewey, scrambled for Lorraine.

They opened for business at 6:30 a.m., an hour and a half earlier than Clarence McGee had opened up, and that was Lorraine's doing. When they arrived at 8, customers were often there ahead of them, and Lorraine said it was ridiculous to be sitting at home while someone was waiting to spend money at the lumber yard. She and Dewey prided themselves on good service and high-quality lumber.

They had their moments, when they disagreed, and they had their hardships, Lorraine's diabetes, the recession, a grandson who died at 16. But when Lorraine looks back, she can't think of anything else she would have rather done.

One more season

Dewey turned 69 in 1978, and they decided to retire. They would sell the company and move to 30 acres in northern Iredell County, where Lorraine grew up.

Lorraine was 10 years younger than Dewey and not ready to quit work, but she went along with the plan.

Then their son, John, announced he wanted to buy McGee Lumber.

No you don't, Lorraine said she told him. She couldn't imagine John there; he worked as an international banker in Atlanta for Trust Company of Georgia and jetted to the Far East several times a year.

Yes, I do, John assured her. He was tired of traveling, ready to move back home to Charlotte.

Dewey and Lorraine agreed to work one more season, to help John get started, and then they would retire. He told them they could work as long as they liked, but they didn't believe him. For the first few years, Lorraine expected any day John would ask them to leave, and, by then, she realized she didn't want to.

He didn't ask, and they didn't leave.

Dewey probably would have been happy to quit. It was Lorraine who kept him going back.

Help for heartache

Dewey's last few years at the lumber yard, he was just as likely to fall asleep in the front office and there he would be when customers arrived, an old man snoozing, head tipped back, mouth open. The regulars walked on by. They were used to "Pop" falling asleep on the job.

Newcomers, already puzzled by the office's dilapidated appearance, didn't know what to think.

Then a slim woman with short gray hair and a self-assured voice would call out: May I help you? She talked lumber like a pro, about 2-by-4s and 2-by-2s, vertical grain and kiln-dried, fire retardant and No. 1 treated.

One day in the spring of 2003, Dewey became too sick to go in to work with Lorraine. He had colon cancer. He had been away from the office several weeks when Lorraine said he told her one evening: I've got to get back to work. I don't know if John's keeping the bills or not.

He died a couple of weeks later.

They closed McGee Lumber for Dewey's funeral. The following morning, Lorraine was back at work.

"He had always told me when our parents died, and when our grandson died, that the best thing to do is get back to work, to get your mind off of that," Lorraine said. "I took his advice."

She answered the phone, wrote down orders, and it helped ease her heartache.

Hobbled by frustration

Another year passed and on Nov. 30, 2004, Lorraine got up from her desk at the lumber yard to take out the garbage and, as she walked out the front door, she fell. She broke her left arm and left leg, and had to move from her house at Aldersgate United Methodist Retirement Community into the infirmary.

Far worse, her doctor and her children wouldn't let her go to work.

Her convalescence was as hard on everyone around her as it was on Lorraine. She felt frustrated and impatient and she let them know it. How many times, she scolded, have customers hobbled into the lumber yard on crutches? Why can't I?

A prison, she called it.

Out of work, Lorraine felt herself slowing down. The lumber yard, she believes, keeps her mind and body fit. Wonderful medicine, she calls it. She felt herself slipping toward a place she didn't want to go: old age.

The winning ticket

On her first day back, Jan. 21, John put a stack of sales tickets on her desk and asked her to check them over. He might have handed her a winning lottery ticket, she looked so pleased.

"There is nothing in this world for an 84-year-old lady like getting up in the morning and having something to do," Lorraine said. "I have to work."

John, who is 58, said he will keep working as long as his mother does. And then? He said he has no desire to work at McGee Lumber Company until he is her age.

Of course, Lorraine once said that, too.

Aug. 31, 2006: Writer at Charlotte Observer Wins Second Sifford Prize Elizabeth Leland, a reporter for the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, is the 2006 Darrell Sifford Memorial Prize in Journalism winner. The Missouri School of Journalism administers the prestigious award. Leland also won the Sifford Prize in 2001. [More]