| By Bob Weaver 2021
After failing to launch a career in journalism and radio, I got a job at Sinnett Funeral Home in Spencer as a worker and ambulance driver, later to become a mortician and funeral home owner.
As a young man in my 20s, my experiences in Roane County were eye-opening, learning about the human condition. I am forever grateful for that experience, going into every hill and holler in the 1960s, facing dreadful conditions suffered by families and experiencing death, violence, poverty, tragic accidents, suicide and murders - the worst of human suffering.
The funeral home ran over 1,200 calls annually.
Over the years I have written a few stories about my early years in Roane County driving an ambulance, recently recalling a tragic murder:
A man named Gene Pettry, 35, drunk, shot and killed his wife in 1964, saying the TV had become between them.
Pettry had been employed as a one dollar an hour relief worker.
The funeral home received a call for an ambulance at the head of Charles Fork, a few miles from Spencer, near the midnight hour.
I responded by myself, and before arriving to the residence encountered a 13-year-boy in the roadway who told me his dad had shot and killed his mother with a 30.30, shooting her in the head, indicating his dad said "television came between us." Two other small children were reportedly at the house.
We continued to the darkened house in which electric service had been disrupted, walking into the living room to discover Mrs. Pettry's body, her husband fleeing the area, otherwise the house was empty.
In the days before dial phone, I called the Spencer operator, asking her to call the police and a associate, with an hour passing before anyone appearing, the boy and me huddling close to the deceased body.
The State Police arrived telling us they arrested Pettry. Sr. C. R. Holbert reminded us the sticker on the ambulance was also dead.
We took Mrs. Pettry to the Red Warrior Cemetery on Cabin Creek, the steepest hillside cemetery I've ever seen, near an old coal camp.
The children went to the wind, I hope to have a decent life.
CHARLESTON DAILY MAIL 1964
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