By Gary Lee Stuber
Any given morning you’ll find her there, like a fixture behind the cash register, at GoMart in Clay. Her familiar face greets customers as they come in for coffee or gasoline. She is loud, boisterous, and always helpful, and she has been here at this GoMart since the doors opened. I don’t mean today; I mean August 26, 1991. With over three decades at GoMart, she is 74 and would not ever think of retiring.
“If you retire, you are sitting all the time.” Judy Rowe says, “I couldn’t do it. I am up here all shift standing behind the register, making coffeea or whatever needs done.” Yes. She is old school that way.
Judy was born Judy Osborne to Hershel and Grace Legg Osborne as their youngest daughter. She has three older sisters, Colleen House, Kay Graham, and Laraine Payne, and two brothers, Teddy and Charlie Osborne. Kay, who lives in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Charlie, who lives in Summersville, are the only siblings presently living outside the county. Although for about a space of 17 years, Judy was living in Ohio while her second husband worked at the Ford Motor Plant.
“I came back to Bickmore and me and my son lived with my mom.” She said, clarifying that her son Chad Hickman was the son of Buck Hickman her first husband, and the father of her only grandson, Dominic Hickman, who just turned 14. She is also proud of her step-granddaughter Mikia Jackson, a phlebotomist at Raleigh General Hospital.
From high school Judy graduated with a scholarship, which she did not use as she knew her parents could not afford the expense of sending her to school. She had aspirations of being a merchant or a hairdresser. For her first job she was a teacher aide at the Bickmore School working for John Gencey. Upon her return from Ohio she found work at Hills on Patrick Street in Charleston as a cashier, working minimum wage of $3.87 an hour and driving to Charleston from Bickmore and back every day. Her next job was closer to home when she worked for her brother-in-law B. A. House at the Hartland Superette, a very small convenience store that sold gasoline, groceries, and beer. After that she managed a grocery store in Dixie for B.A. House, and when that was about to close she thought she might have to go back to work in Charleston.
However, the present manager of Clay GoMart #65 Lolita Nutter, who everybody at GoMart calls ‘Lo’, back when she managed a GoMart in Burnsville, called for Judy to come in and interview for the first GoMart they were opening in Clay. Since thenJudy has been a fixture here.
“I’ve worked everything since I have been here. I used to work evening shift, now I work mornings. I’ve done every shift but night shift. I won’t work any shift that I am afraid. I don’t do night shift,” she insists. Over the years, this location has not closed its doors, even during the derecho, snow storms that put power out for weeks, and the infamous 2016 Thousand Year Elk River flood.
“Before we got the generator here, there were times we would come in, sit in these booths wrapped in blankets.” She laughs, “When we had power out for days, we would hand write out everything that was bought, keep the cash and make change. Then when the power came on, we would have to go down the list and pull items of the shelf and ring up every purchase all over again, so that accounting and inventory could be kept current.”
She has seen many employees come and go, and pretty much knows every Clay County resident by name. “I love my job. I love the people I work with and the people I serve.” She tells me about some of her favorites, “Phil Shuman was one of my managers here once, and now he is General Manager over all the GoMarts.”
“Judy has been a very valuable employee,” Lo brags, “She has been here whenever I have needed her, in fact she often comes an hour early.” And Fannie Woods, a 27-year employee who has managed the deli forever, echos, “Judy always comes an hour early, and that is something I learned from her, and she is right, coming in early makes it easier on you. I come in a half hour early and it makes it easier on me.” Fannie says she has been friends with Judy for the 27 years she has worked closely with her and knows her embarrassing stories.
“I worked one day here and my stomach was hurting me.” Judy told me, “A coworker drove me to the hospital in Charleston where they admitted me for 34 days. Cancer.” She says, “Colon Cancer. I’m a cancer survivor. I had surgery where they took out eight inches of my colon and then I had chemotherapy for a year.” She explains, “As soon as I was healthy enough to stand again, about five months after surgery, they let me come back to work. I would take off a day just to go get chemo.” That was 30 years ago and it has never come back. That is where Fannie and Judy’s lives dovetail. They are both cancer survivors. Lo adds, “Both of these women had cancer and took chemo. And yet they still came in to work.”
“Music is my life now,” Judy insists, “and dance. I go to a lot of live music events.” And she often does it with her sister Colleen. “I’ve got some great sisters. We do as much together as we can. Every year I go to Myrtle Beach to stay with my sister Kay for 11 days. This year Colleen is going with me, and for the first time we are going to fly down.”
She does a lot of local events with Colleen. The girls are quite close. “They all take care of me. My momma made them promise that they would look after me and they do. But we are all close.” That is good to know there are still families that stay close in an era where many families don’t even speak to one another. “What’s the saying?” she asks then answers her own question.“Momma raised us well.” Indeed she did. Again, another old school value.
Clay GoMart is without a doubt, the busiest enterprise in Clay. Whether it’s for coffee, gasoline or some of the counties best deli food, serving chicken daily, as well as a daily special, almost everybody in Clay stops in there on a regular basis. Judy feels healthy enough to put in another decade, and I believe she could. She has too much to live for and too many friends to serve to think about quitting now. Tell Judy hello the next time you see her behind her register.