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MOUNTAIN VALLEY–After a lifetime of chopping firewood and hauling water, Vernon Gilbert is looking forward to electricity and running water in a house neighbors are having built for him.

The man known far and wide as “Koony Frog” has lived all his life in the house in which he was born, which has stood practically untouched through time. The 67-year-old used to be able to keep up with the physical demands of living that way, he said, but health problems are slowing him down.

“I was running like a Chevrolet. Now I can’t stand running like a Ford,” he quipped in his lyrical Southern drawl, words rolling merrily into each other.

People have been talking about helping Gilbert for a long time, said Rick Carter. In June, a plan developed.

“Something in my heart told me I need to help him,” Carter said. “The more I got into it, the more people became involved in it. I think this community’s going to get together on this one.”

Jesse and Lucille Shelton donated an acre of land for him on Pine Meadow Lane, and Carter started the process of applying for a house through Total Action for Progress (TAP) in Roanoke.

The neighbors don’t want Gilbert to be alone through the cold of winter. Chad and Kristie White asked him to move into a trailer used in the summer by migrant workers, just down the hill from his house. It hadn’t been used in cold weather before, so local men installed a furnace to keep him warm.

His clothes, bed, trunk of notes and music collection were all he had worth taking from the house when he moved into the trailer on Oct. 29.

The family home

You wouldn’t find Gilbert’s house if someone didn’t lead you out there. The address doesn’t show on GPS, and you can’t see it from the road.

Before Gilbert was born, his father used a roller to drag an old wheat packing house onto his 45 acres off North Fork Road, and added a kitchen off the back of it and a narrow porch off the front.

You approach it through a long gravel drive, past another house, a trailer and some farm buildings. There it sits around a bend and up a rise.

It’s shaped like a Dr. Seuss drawing, jaunty and tilted, with a small window on either side of its front door. Foam-backed vinyl tacked to the original wood siding helps keep it insulated and somewhat waterproof, and a tin roof dips and rises in waves above it.

There the parents raised five children, and as the years went on, Gilbert became the caretaker of his widowed father and, occasionally, his adult siblings.

Gilbert looked into getting power to the house years ago, “but they wouldn’t put none in here because the house is too old,” he said.

Even in daylight, it’s hard to see inside the house. The kitchen, its walls now gray with smoke, has a few old cabinets and a camel-back couch, its only bright spot of color the white metal tabletop with red designs. A small window opposite the door lets in a little light.

Plastic milk jugs are scattered about, some empty, some with water. Every day, he would drive his small red pickup truck to Keith Jackson’s nearby farm buildings, where he filled about 30 or 35 of them at a time with water.

He kept his food cold in coolers, which ran him $357 every 60 days for ice, he said.

The center of the house, the former wheat house, was his bedroom. Gilbert’s bed and clothes are now at the trailer where he’s living temporarily, until his house is built. The woodstove he used to heat with and cook on remains in that room, as does a small table which holds his well-used oil lamp.

Though the house never has had electricity, it once had phone service; the line is still on the wall, phone jack vacant. Gilbert now uses a flip-style cell phone.

On a shelf sets a smooth round rock. Gilbert said he brought it home from the creek when he was a boy, and it’s amazing that his father held on to it and it’s still setting there, on that shelf, all these years later.

‘A walking encyclopedia’

Gilbert is a meticulous record-keeper, with decades worth of statistics on music, racing, the weather and jobs he’s had. Much of that information comes from newspapers and the battery-operated radio. His notes fill thousands of pages.

During the week, he tunes into AM 650 WSM in Nashville. He takes copious notes as he listens, on any and all statistics the DJs give.

“On Saturday nights, if I don’t go anywhere, I’ve got my ink pen and my tablet on my bed,” he said. He writes down information first from WAKG in Danville (103.3), then, from 10 p.m. to midnight, WBRF in Galax (98.1).

His notes are in folders and notebooks in a large plastic trunk. He randomly picked a yellowed and crinkled page and pointed to it: Patsy Cline. “I couldn’t sleep. I just sat up and wrote it. I had to write it down fast, though,” to get all the information down, he said.

“There ain’t too many songs I ain’t heard,” he said. He has more than 300 cassette tapes of songs he’s taped from the radio, and a large collection of CDs, too.

“He is a walking encyclopedia of bluegrass and original country music,” Gayle Johnson said. Until Gilbert’s house is ready, she and her husband, Vance, are storing the trunk of his notes for him at their house, about a mile away.

Gilbert picked up another notebook: “It’s got race cars, drivers and all kinds of stuff in here.” Then a manila folder with papers: “A whole lot of writing in here. I just wrote it and put it in here.”

Calendars saved through the years have his records of each day’s temperature and “what it snowed, what it rained, was it clear, was it cloudy, how hot it is and all kinds of stuff.”

Others are notes from his day: “Planted tobacco on May the sixth 1996,” and again, “Finished planting tobacco at John Hall’s May the 14th, ‘96.”

A lifetime of work

“I’ve got everybody’s name I helped in tobacco since I was 6 years old,” he said. He pulled tobacco for 65 farmers in three counties, until he quit in 2000.

His first job at public work was at Marvin Kendall’s saw mill. He worked at American Standard Homes twice, he said, the second time from 1976 to 1982.

He also has worked as a grave-digger. Over the years, “I buried thousands and thousands of people” at Roselawn and Henry Memorial Park, he said. He and his bossman would work seven days on, at the ready whenever they were called, and seven days off, when the other crew would work.

“We had to be there rain or shine, snow or sleet,” he said.

The outdoor life

Outside, Gilbert points across the rolling hills all around.

“Daddy paid for this land. He owned all this right here, everywhere,” Gilbert said. The 45 acres cost $445 back then, “and ain’t no telling what it’d be now.”

His father sold the family property in the 1990s, but gave lifetime rights on a 17-acre tract which includes the house and outbuildings to Gilbert and his brother, Paul Gilbert, who since has passed away.

As he does with all dates, Gilbert easily recited the milestones: His father went into a rest home on Sept. 1, 1990, and died on Feb. 14, 1994.

The simple shack has deteriorated through the years. “I ain’t no carpenter. I know how to put in a mortuary house,” Gilbert said, but not a residential one.

The sturdiest structure on his property is an old log smokehouse that was there before the house was. “It ain’t never leaked all them years,” he said, pointing proudly to the roof. It’s the building where his father used to keep hog meat, and he now uses it for storage.

It’s getting harder and harder to deal with firewood, Gilbert said. He had rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart valves, when he was 22. He’s had heart attacks.

A few years ago, he broke his right hand in a fall. It took the doctors 10 ½ hours to operate on it, he said. In September, he fell and broke his left arm, making it difficult and painful to lift it. All that makes it almost impossible to chop firewood. It took him 8 ½ hours to stack the latest amount of firewood in its outbuilding, he said.

Despite those serious health issues, he’s never had headaches, backaches or heartburn, he said proudly.

Once, a nurse asked him why he never had a headache. “I ain’t never been married,” he told her. “She went and told every secretary up there,” he laughed.

“So far, I’ve been happy all my life,” Gilbert said. “I’ve had some bad days in the hospital, but not here.”

A caring neighbor

“Vernon is a legend of sorts in Mountain Valley,” Gayle Johnson said. “He knows just about everyone in his community … If someone has been in the hospital or fallen ill, he often has mown their grass and/or trimmed their yard or offered his assistance for free.”

“He’s a really good guy,” said Dean White. “He weed-eats for my dad and he won’t take a penny, because he said my dad let him use his truck years ago to take his dad to the hospital.”

“Vernon never meets a stranger. He’s always wearing a smile. He is also a very kind, sweet and humble man,” Gayle Johnson said.

The house in which he’ll spend his golden years is a 10-minute walk through the woods from the house he was born, in the community where “I know everybody, every road, every house,” Gilbert said.

Now the neighbors and churches in Mountain Valley are raising money to cover the costs of having the land surveyed and excavated for the house, and for the land to be perked for the well and septic tank. They’ll pay for the deed and title search, and once the house is built, will furnish it and put up an outbuilding.

“I didn’t want to move to start with, because I’ve been over here so long,” Gilbert said. “But Rick said he didn’t want me to stay over here by myself.”

He gave in, he said, because he’s been in the hospital 63 times, three of those times in the past 60 days. Maybe it’s time to live an easier life.

‘A team effort’

A checking account, which can accept donations, is set up at BB&T as “Gilbert House Fund.” Lucille Shelton and Vance Johnson are the administrators.

The first major amount to go into it was $1,500 last week: $1,200 from a love offering at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, $200 from Mt. Olivet Ruritan Club and $100 from Milton Kendall, White said.

The next love offering was taken up on Sunday, at a community Thanksgiving service between Mt. Vernon, Granbery United Methodist and Valley Chapel Pentecostal Holiness Churches.

The survey on the lot was completed last Thursday. Next, men will move the fence that runs across that one acre. Soon the perk tests can be done, with the results given to TAP, Rick Carter said.

Construction on the house will be put out to bid, and they are hoping to get at least four bids, Carter said.

He explained that TAP will own the house in the beginning, while Gilbert makes payments of $25 each month on it, plus pays the taxes and insurance. After 10 years of good payments, ownership would be transferred to Gilbert.

The house will have two bedrooms and one bathroom, and a front and back porch, and be covered in vinyl siding. Vance Johnson said it probably will have solar panels, so the power bill may not be any more than $25 a month.

Gilbert said he doesn’t expect to use a lot of electricity: “I don’t sit up all night like a lot of people.” He will, however, accept the gift of a used television one of the neighbors promised him, once he gets settled.

He gets a surprisingly small amount from Social Security, and was just approved for food stamps, but they haven’t arrived yet. The Johnsons said that they and other neighbors have pledged to help pay his bills on months he might run short when he’s living in the new house.

“It’s a team effort,” Carter said. “We’ve got a bunch of good people behind it.”

Holly Kozelsky reports for the Martinsville Bulletin. She can be reached at holly.kozelsky@martinsvillebulletin.com

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