Page 6 - MFM Nov Dec 2021

A QUIET MAN

QUIET MAN DID UNKNOWN GOOD A PRIVATE MISSION

In the city, especially, no one knows what goes on He'd got on with the Southern Railway, this short,
behind closed doors. People live, people die, almost slender fellow with sun crinkles already around his
anonymously. Lonely people. People who worked piercing blue eyes, and he worked the freight and
hard, lived lean, never saw a payday of more than the baggage. A handy "fixer," he finally became a car
$100, and are buried in the red clay of their beginnings inspector, inspecting for "flat wheels." Sometimes all
with hardly an obituary. day, sometimes all night, and no matter the weather,
he'd walk the tracks inspecting wheels, hundreds and
Friday, a lawyer in uptown Charlotte was shuffling the hundreds and thousands of wheels for flat surfaces.
last papers of just such a man. The estate had just If one needed changing, he was responsible for the
been wound up after two years. The lawyer would changing.
write two checks, mail them, and look forward to a He must have had friends, for he was amiable
restful weekend. enough, but maybe he outlived them, or they were
as anonymous as he. But he didn't go places and do
"Toy Roscoe Voyles," he said, "you never heard of. I things. He had a private mission.
don't believe your paper had an obituary. He lived
alone most of his life at 15149 4th. St. Never married. The friends he had must have been startled when, in
He was 80 years old when he died in a Gaston County 1928, he went out to the Ford plant here and bought
nursing home. He was buried in the share-cropping a new roadster for $525 cash, and with saved time he
country he came from in Jackson County, Ga. That went back to see his mama and daddy and that sickly
was two years ago. But just now it is finished, all brother down in Georgia.
wound up."
Somewhere, back there, he had become a Mason.
From the lawyer, from former neighbors Willie That's all. He never joined anything else. He said he
N. Rhodes and Harrel J. Auten, a sketchy portrait didn't have the time or the money. And truly, he was
emerged of Toy Voyles, a child of a time of simple near retirement in the '50s before he made $100 a
values. week.

Sometime in the '20s, he showed up in Charlotte, Except for that first trip back to Georgia, the Ford
came up the road from the Georgia poor country never ran much except to the grocery store on
where his mama and daddy and a sickly brother tried Saturday and downtown on payday until, as the Big
to scratch out a living on shares. Depression ended, Toy drove back to Georgia in the
same little Ford.

Montana Freemason Page 6 Nov/Dec Volume 97 No.5