Dinks Avery: A Gordonsville institution

By Hannah W. Wever

Published: April 17, 2008

There are fixtures in Gordonsville—things that have been there as long as anyone can remember, and that everyone from around here can recognize—like the historic Exchange Hotel, the venerable old freight depot…and Dinks Avery.
Avery describes himself as, “an old young man.” He is, to be precise, about to turn 90, and has spent the better part of a century right in Gordonsville.
“Gordonsville,” he said, “was just about the same in the old days as it is now.” But once he starts remembering, the differences between the bustling crossroads town Gordonsville was in previous decades, and the quiet country village it is nowadays begin to take shape.
Tate’s laundry business used to be out on the other side of where the East Gate Apartments are now, he said, “but that was way back in the horse and buggy days.” Of course East Gate was farmland, then, and not apartments. Where High Street is now, used to be pastureland, and the site of the Acree Dairy operation, Avery said. Heading out of Gordonsville in one direction, there was nothing but a little orchard, he said, and out of town the opposite way, a tomato factory.
Obviously, there was no television back then, and not every household had a radio, he said. Almost nobody had a car in those days.
“Bus and train—that’s the only way you get to Orange or Charlottesville,” he said. “Very few people had a car.”
The number of trains, shuttling cars full of freight and passengers back and forth across the country through Gordonsville has dwindled since the time of Avery’s childhood. And the restaurants, hotels and services which thrived in those days have long-since closed down. Avery can remember the town when train whistles sang out every few minutes, marking the arrival of another load of travelers, and when rumbling engines were constantly playing background music to accompany a busy crossroads village.
“My daddy worked in the old depot and in the old C&O station,” Avery said. “And my brother was a porter on the train.”
Regularly, three of Gordonsville’s hotels: the Exchange, the St. John and the Old Oaken Bucket, Avery remembered, were full-up with guests, “way back when the trains were running.” And restaurants did a good business feeding folks who came through, he said. A popular stop was Hatty Eddins’ place right in the town.
“She had fried chicken and all that,” Avery recalled. “People from the trains used to stop there. She had a lot of customers—white and black.” Ms. Eddins’ legendary cuisine even brought diners from as far away as Richmond, Avery added. The southern recipes served by Ms. Eddins were part of a long tradition in Gordonsville, in which African-American women—during a time when precious little opportunity for entrepreneurship existed for minorities--prepared and sold provisions to hungry travelers.
And in fact, Avery said his own grandmother was one of the enterprising caterers of Gordonsville, who once stood on the platforms and sold food to train passengers.
“My grandma was one of the fried chicken ladies,” Avery said. “But that was way back before I was born.”
Avery was born in 1919, (that’s the year Prohibition was adopted, women got the right to vote, many localities were stricken by the lethal Spanish influenza pandemic, dial telephones represented the newest in technology, and a first-class postage stamp cost 3 cents), and he’s lived in Gordonsville ever since. He went to a four-room school house in Gordonsville, and later attended high school in Orange at a similarly-sized institution.
“I played around a little bit, but I did pretty good,” he confessed. He had good teachers, he said, who came from other cities and states to educate the African-American children of Orange County in tiny, sparsely furnished and under-equipped school houses scattered throughout the region.
But when Avery was still a youngster, the stock market crashed, spurring a nation-wide economic depression. Throughout America, banks failed, and a tide of unemployment and unproductive industry left folks scrambling to make ends meet and struggling to keep their families fed.
“We got along, but we had to work hard,” he said. He can remember the soup lines, populated by out-of-work and down-on-their-luck locals, when the Great Depression’s grip reached Gordonsville. There were few jobs to be had in those lean years locally, he said.
“When the trains slowed down, people were put out of work.”
The railroad industry had slowed to a crawl by that time, displacing scores of people whose jobs were dependent on the railway business.
“There were WPA jobs—cleaning out ditches, and working on the roads,” Avery remembered.
Avery’s first job, in 1934, was delivering groceries, and later clerking, at Yowell’s Main Street grocery store, he said.
“I stayed there for 25 years,” Avery said. 
But his workdays began long before his shift started at the grocery store. He delivered the Richmond News Leader to folks around Gordonsville, too. And later, when he wasn’t carrying food or news, or working at Preddy’s Funeral Home, he was up before the sun cleaning the Gordonsville Bank before the bank opened each morning.
“I worked all the time,” he said.
Well, apparently not all the time. He said when he first heard the news about the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he “was in Orange—running around.” But, he explained, “I was young then.”
A 4-F draft status keep him home while U.S. troops were abroad, fighting the Axis during World War II. Stateside, Avery maintained the long days of work he’d grown used to. After the war ended, Avery built the house where he still lives.
In the 1950s, Avery took a job at Preddy Funeral Home. His own children have already retired from their careers, but Avery dutifully shows up to work each day at Preddy’s. Gary Preddy is the manager of the family-run business now, but Avery said he remembers when Gary and his brother Randy, “bad little rascals,” were just toddlers.
“I looked after those boys when they where little,” Avery said. “I told Gary I should’ve grabbed him then!” he said with a chuckle. Now, there’s a new generation of Preddy boys who work at the family trade, but Avery’s still there.
It’s all those years of hard work, Avery said, that are the secret to his nearly nine decades of good health.
“If I wasn’t working, I don’t know what I’d do,” he said. Maybe, if he were to retire, he might sit and rest on his front porch. “I would relax,” he said. And then, in the next breath, Avery changed his mind and speculated that if he retired, he’d probably spend his free time doing yard work.
For now, though, “I wouldn’t be anywhere else but here,” Avery said.