Forty to Finish

July 9, 2019

By 7:20 a.m., I was ready for a hearty breakfast and to say goodbye to the sleepy town. Throughout the night, I’d woken up repeatedly to a scratching noise caused by some critter holed up beneath the floor. The Wyant’s Store looked as if time had stood still since the 1880s, when the family first built it. Inside, the warm country feel was a nod to the past. Pet food, fishing supplies, automobile oil, antifreeze, candy, soda, Gatorade, Advil, cigarettes, and even Little Debbie Cakes replaced “the horse and mule collars, horseshoe nails, farm hand tools, and plugged tobacco” that had been for sale in earlier days, when wagons passed by on their way to Mechums River, a railroad shipping point.98 Several white-framed pictures were on a stand in a side room. One picture of NFL officials posing on a football field raised my curiosity.

A man stood behind a counter at the back of the store. “Good morning, I’m Larry. I showed up last night after you had closed. I stayed across the street at the community center,” I began, reaching out to greet my new friend.

“Good to meet you. I’m David,” the older gentleman replied.

“Are you open for breakfast?” I asked.

“Yes. It will take a few minutes to prepare,” he responded.

“Can I get scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee?” I asked.

After he put the bacon on the grill and cracked open the eggs, he walked to the front of the store to wait on a young man who had entered shortly after I did.

I heard David say, “The same today?”

“Yes,” the man replied.

David prepared the usual order of three slices of fresh cheese. After the guy paid and walked out of the store, David shared how this man stopped in every morning to buy fresh cheese—a practice more common in the early 1900s when, according to an article in the Crozet Gazette, farmers and ranchers stopped in for their daily dose of molasses, lard, coffee, salt, sugar, and flour.99

David recounted some of the store’s past while I was there; other tidbits I learned were due to my own research after returning home. In the same Crozet Gazette article, Dr. Sidney Sandridge talked about growing up in a country store. “I could never figure out what children do who grow up in any other environment.”

My planned 30-minute breakfast break turned into an extended stay. I learned that David was the fifth-generation owner of the oldest, continuously family-owned country store in the United States. Built in 1888, with a dance hall on the second floor, his great-great-great-grandpa’s mission was to create a store for the community where people can mingle. The same attraction that drew people in the 1900s still holds today in this rebuilt and restored slice of small-town Virginia.

David was familiar with the bike race. His store had welcomed countless cyclists over the years. He told me Rolf had visited the day before, and he asked me to sign a guest book before leaving. I then asked about the picture of the NFL referees I had seen earlier. He told me he’d been an NFL referee for many years.

Okay, I thought, I’m not going anywhere yet. I asked him to tell me more about his background as an NFL referee.

He worked as an NFL official for 23 years; his last game had been the Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2, 2014, between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos (Seattle won 43-8). He had since retired but still served as a senior NFL recruiting official. He was flying to Dallas later that afternoon to attend some meetings.

I dove right in, asking, “How did you become an NFL official when you’re from such a small town in the middle of Virginia?”

He shared his secret to success: work hard, network, take advantage of every opportunity, and hope for a bit of luck.

“Do you know Kyle Brady?” I probed. “My youngest brother, Kevin, and Kyle were friends growing up in Pennsylvania.” (Kyle played for the Penn State Nittany Lions and later for the Jets, Jaguars, and Patriots in the NFL.) He said he knew of Kyle but that was it. He didn’t mind answering my onslaught of probing questions about the life of an NFL referee.

“I’d love to spend three more hours with you, but I’ve got to keep moving if I want to finish this race!” With that and a handshake, I signed my name in the guest book and was back on the road. I wonder if I can catch Rolf, I thought, the distance between us now less than 100 miles. I walked back across the street to retrieve Tank, glancing to my right and spotting a black SUV with a custom Virginia license plate: NFL SJ.

When I began my ride to Charlottesville at 8:00 a.m., I reflected on the conversation. David lived in the middle of a small Virginia town of less than 6,000, also traveling to big cities to experience the life of an NFL referee. I too found solace in the quiet surroundings of a small community after 30 years of flying from one big city to the next during my professional career.