By James and Ellen Perry
The weather forecast for today, September 27, 1948, is a high of 75 degrees with clear skies and going down to 52 degrees with clear skies. Annie Crawford, wife of Sam Crawford, birthed a boy child, her fourteenth. Little did Sam and Annie know this baby would grow up to greatly affect the lives of people from an island nation over 1400 miles from Union County, Tennessee.
The baby was named Lee Roy Crawford. Their first child, a girl they named Lucille, was born on August of 1923. Lucille was a good singer as a child and later appeared on the popular live audience radio show, The Mid-Day-Merry-Go-Round which aired on WNOX radio of Knoxville, Tennessee, from 1935 until 1961.
Two years after Lee Roy’s birth on Christmas Day December 25, 1950, their last child, a girl they named Linda, was born. So, two-year-old Lee Roy had a sister for the next 15 years to grow up with. The Crawfords at this time lived on a farm on the upper side of Walker’s Ford community in Union County on the shore of Norris Lake. Lee Roy and his sister, Linda, played together. They played childhood games, tag, and would swing on grapevines and enjoy the carefree times of growing up in a rural environment.
Lee Roy and Linda attended different grade schools as they had chores and worked in the fields. In 1955, the Sam Crawford family moved about 10 miles south to what was then the Atticus Buckner Farm on Buckner Road which runs from Hickory Valley Road east to Hwy. 33. At this time Lee Roy and his older sister Ruby and Linda attended Rose Hill Grade School. In about 1958 or 1959, Rose Hill Grade School was cut back from the first eight grades to one through six. At this time Ruby, Lee Roy and Linda were transferred to the Maynardville schools.
Most of the community grade schools were being closed and students moved to the four bigger county district schools. I don’t agree with this Union County Department of Education’s decision and will write on it in a future article. Lee Roy quit school in either the sixth or eighth grade. At that time, Lee Roy could not read or write at more than a third or fourth grade level.
In the 1960’s, the Crawfords moved into the Daw Buckner house to look after Daw Buckner who was becoming sick and needed someone to care for him. Daw Buckner and the Sam Crawford family had been close friends for years. Atticus and Daw were brothers, with Atticus being a few years older.
Lee Roy is now a middle teenager. I was told that Lee Roy started working for a meat packing company in Knoxville sometime after quitting school. But I couldn’t find out the name of the company.
Lee Roy had started a life that was taking him into despair. Lee Roy’s first marriage had produced a son but ended in divorce. A short time after his divorce Lee Roy went to a bar. Later that night he called his brother-in-law and asked him to come pick him up. Lee Roy told his brother-in-law that the Lord had talked to him, told him to change his life. Lee Roy told his brother-in-law that he would not drink anymore ever again. And Lee Roy did not. He quit his drinking, started reading the Bible and going to church, and he began a new life.
Lee Roy was now working third shift at Carlisle Tire and had started a roofing business which he would come in from his job at Carlisle, change clothes, meet his work crew and roof houses ‘til afternoon, go home get sleep, then go back to Carlisle for his third shift job.
Before Lee Roy’s job at Carlisle, he had worked at East Tennessee Packing Company. There Lee Roy had met a co-worker named Robin Herrington. They married and remained married until Lee Roy’s passing. Lee Roy was getting more involved with his church and taking part in teaching Sunday School and venturing into preaching.
About this same time a Haitian by the name of Bethune Louisjuste had started an organization in Haiti dedicated to caring for orphaned children, of which there were many. The USA contact for the voice of Children was Zion Baptist Church in Powell, Tennessee. After connecting with donors, missionaries, and medical volunteers in the USA, The Voice of Children helped expand health care to thousands of Haitians, providing meals to children and widows and providing Vacation Bible School to over a hundred children each day.
From the inception of The Voice of Children 30 years ago, it has, with help of volunteers’ missionaries and donors, built eight churches, five schools, and opened an orphanage and a medical clinic that serves over 1,000 people. The only salaries paid are to permanent Haitian school teachers and cooks. Each school serves one good meal at lunch.
Now back to Lee Roy Crawford, who was born into a large, poor (by our standards) family, who had some wayward years until he was changed one night in a bar. He began seeking a better life through his religion and belief in God. Lee Roy and his family met and became friends through their church with Arnold and Brenda Smallen, Thomas Berry and his daughter, Janice Berry, Charles and Diana Whaley, who was a volunteer nurse, and others who all became volunteers, missionaries through The Voice of Children, USA. There would be an average of 20 people who made trips to Haiti to help the children and widows in dire need of help. All had to pay their passage to Haiti and could only carry 70 pounds of supplies, clothing and tools with them. Haiti is a voodoo-practicing country and as soon as the volunteers arrived in Haiti the voodoo witch doctors would try to put a spell on all. They tried to intimidate all Christians.
Lee Roy told his wife, Robin, that he thought he was poor as a child but the people of Haiti had nothing. On one of his many trips to Haiti, Lee Roy saw a very young boy with a brown stain around his mouth. Lee Roy asked the boy what caused the stain. The child said he had been eating dirt because he had no food.
On one trip to Haiti, Lee Roy and other volunteers built a new church and found a old PVC pipe. Lee Roy took a saw and cut the pipe from one end to the other and made gutters from the four-inch PVC pipe to run the water from the roof to a cistern for the church to use for cooking and drinking water. On one trip a girl child was dying from pneumonia. A voodoo doctor had put items on her body to cure the child. Her mother carried her to Diana Whaley who took all the silly items off her and gave her a penicillin shot. The girl survived with Diana’s care.
Lee Roy’s volunteer crew took some generators to a school/church six miles on top of a mountain. They would turn lights on at night, play music, and Haitians would walk/climb the six miles to the church/school by the hundreds. Across the valley on the other mountain the voodoo people would build fires in circles, beat drums and chant to put spells and curses on the missionaries and Haitians across the valley to the church/school. The reason it’s called a church/school is because during school days it’s a school and Sundays it’s a church.
Lee Roy’s wife Robin told me when he would start home from Haiti, he would leave everything he had taken. He would come back with only the shoes, pants and shirt he was wearing. He left everything else for the Haitians. Robin said Lee Roy never complained about anything. After seeing Haiti no one could complain.
On one of Lee Roy’s trips to Haiti, a Haitian EMT got very sick and had to ride a donkey six miles down the mountain. Then was put on a motorcycle to get to a clinic.
No one that I talked to knew how many trips Lee Roy Crawford made to Haiti to help the Haitian people, mainly the children. But it must have been many. He gave freely of his time and the money that it cost him and never asked for recognition or praise. Lee Roy proved that a man can change. He is still revered among the Haitians today, but most people, even his kin folk, didn’t know what Lee Roy did for the poor Haitian people. This article cannot begin to cover Lee Roy Crawford. Lee Roy died from a brain tumor March 2008.
See you next month.