Virgil Lee Fiveash

Services July 24th, 2012 at 10:30 AM

Greenlawn Funeral Home

4300 Beach Blvd, Jacksonville, FL 32207

Born December 16, 1917 – Died July 8, 2012

3rd child of Joseph Benjamin Fiveash and Jewell Anderson Fiveash

Stepmother, Ida Dent Fiveash

Virgil graduated Landon High School in 1935 and married his high school sweetheart, Maude Ellen Coutant, in 1938. Their Daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 1940. Virgil is survived by that daughter, Elizabeth Fiveash Gilmore, a granddaughter, Lee Gilmore-Meiners, and a great grandson, Spencer Meiners.

Virgil spent his formative years with his grandmother, Georgia Edna Dent, mother of Ida Fiveash and Helen Tresca, in then rural St Nicholas in So Jacksonville. He worked at many occupations over his life: from stocking at O.C. Landon’s Grocery during high school to driving a rural Georgia bread truck route out of Callahan. Due to a blind right eye from birth and having a new baby, Virgil spent the World War II years working in the rail yards at the Florida East Coast Railroad. He moved on to manage the paper warehouse for Graham Jones Paper, later Meade Paper, and retired from there continuing for a few years as a consultant with a specialty in large warehouse relocation. His management style today would be called, “management-by-walking-around” and he

was fondly nicknamed by his staff, “The Spider.”

He was a leading light in every community to which he belonged; fighting, and winning, a planned development too near existing homes in a problem drainage area, making sure neighbors knew each other and helped each other, helping a friend from church reclaim a deteriorating home and balance finances and planting flowers at the entry of a neighborhood in Ponte Vedra Beach.

Up until his last years he took care of his yard, pool and house himself finally relinquishing the yard when he was 92 and the pool when he was 94 and was looking for help in the house just before he died. He was much loved and respected by all who knew him.

His family requests that, instead of flowers, anyone who wishes to pay respects please make a donation to a charity of their choice in his memory.