William John "Buddy" Woolf was born on 24 May 1902 in Shorterville, Henry Co., AL; son of Charles Augustus and Agnes Elmira (Chambers) Woolf.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE - (correspondence from Daniel Murdo MacDonald, Jr. to Tracy Lynn DeVault):
[Referring to William John Woolf, Sr.'s nicknames.] Yeah, Pepa (to me) or William J. Woolf, was Buddy to a lot of people down in Ala and Ft. Gaines. His business associates called him Willy or Willy J.
As you no doubt know, I have very mixed emotions about him, mainly over Bill [William J. "Bill" Woolf, Jr.].
But I will tell you this, nobody anywhere in your genealogy trees, no individual you have ever researched, knew his job better than W.J. Woolf Sr.
He was the regional sales manager for the entire S.E. United States for the food additives, mainly lard and cooking oil and all that, for Armour and Company. I think he worked for them something like forty years, his entire working life. Armour never laid off a single worker in the Depression. They had to do two significant pay cuts, but they never laid anyone off. I cannot begin to tell you what this meant to a man who had two grammar school aged kids in the Depression. He would kill for Armour. As a kid traveling with him on his visits to plants, I’d have to stop him from covering up Swift products with Armour products on the grocery store shelves. It was like a war to him.
A plus and a minus in his career, simultaneously, was the one meat account Armour insisted he do for the company. This involved semiannual visits to the old guy up near Frankfort Ky., (before that, Corbin) to discuss the contract with him in his living room or on his big front porch. It was Colonel Sanders, when he still owned the business. I met him twice, although “met” is an exaggeration. What that amounted to was my grandfather pointed me out in the front yard next to the Armour car and the old chicken guy barely acknowledged me. I swear to you, he had the white outfit on, with the little black tie strap thing, both times. The second time I had the distinct privilege of watched a weasel or mink or something break into his personal chicken coops to the right of the house.
My grandmother Margaret DeVault Woolf would whisper to me that the main reason Pepa was assigned to the Col Sanders account was that he was the only Armour salesman who could handle the Colonel’s foul mouth. He apparently could not complete an English sentence without gutter profanity.
I would imagine, too, that Pepa’s overwhelming expertise was not lost on the Colonel. I don’t say this with no evidence: I witnessed dozens of encounters all over the Southeast, from Virginia to Mississippi to Kentucky to Florida, where the local managers gathered to get “Uncle Buddy’s” view on a problem or challenge they were facing. They clearly considered him the final word on any issue.
Pepa (my name for him which the younger kids in the family adopted and mangled) could tell a farmer what he was feeding a hog or cow by looking at the animal. He was NEVER wrong. The man knew farming and farm animals and farm products down to his bone marrow. If you were compromising something with the beef you took in, the last thing you wanted was for Willy J to come into your freezers and look at those sides of beef. And that, officially, was not his area of expertise. Nothing got past him.
We would always visit the grave of Man O War after each visit to the Colonel, and then go on to my favorite, Calumet Farms. At Calumet, in about 1957 or 58, I got to pet on the nose the last triple crown winner before Secretariat, Citation. I didn’t even understand what a Triple Crown Winner was at the time.
Pepa/Willy J/ Uncle Buddy worshipped Man O War. All you have to do is figure the overlap between them. Man O War won his 19 of 20 races, losing the one because he got turned around at the start, when Pepa was what, about 18-19. You would have thought Jesus was buried in that oval moated memorial off the road to Lexington. I think they have since moved his remains to the new Thoroughbred Memorial in Lexington, something that really disappoints me. His original gravesite was perfect, beautiful. He married
Margaret Elizabeth DeVault daughter of
James Miller DeVault and
Addie Belle Hickman, on 1 May 1924 in Bristol, VA. William John "Buddy" Woolf died on 14 October 1992 in Chattanooga, Hamilton Co., TN.
He was buried in October 1992 in Lakewood Memory Gardens East, Chattanooga, Hamilton Co., TN, Findagrave #114706893.
Occupation: Bookkeeper (1930), and credit manager (1940.