Keeper of the gate

Virgil Griffin is 84 years old and his job requires him to get up and move around constantly. But he doesn’t mind; he prefers that to sitting around all day. Virgil is the gate keeper for the Daviess DeKalb Regional Jail.
He opens the gate and closes the gate. He opens the gate for family coming to visit inmates, service trucks, lawyers, whoever needs to get in or out.
Some days he gets up to open the gate around 100 times. Other days it’s closer to 150.
He also walks the perimeter of the jail twice a day. He keeps an eye on all the property, not just the fence.

Virgil and his wife Carolyn are both semi-retired now, and on this windy, chilly winter day are staying warm while doing “whatever we feel like … maybe going back to bed” at their home in the tiny town of Coffey.
Virgil was a trucker for 30 years. He sat for many miles and long hours without moving around. As he got older an arthritic hip began bothering him.
His doctor told him to get a cortisone shot to relieve the pain and inflammation. He got the shot, but the doctor hit a nerve. He couldn’t walk or use that leg for six months. “I drove twice to the east coast and liked to never got back,” he says.
With his trucking days behind him in 2017, Virgil sold his truck. In the fall he started feeling better and decided that when spring came, if he still felt good, he would find a job.
Someone suggested he try the jail.
He called the jail’s director, Ed Howard, who set him up for an interview with Assistant Director Tim Carter, who hired him part-time that same day in April of 2018.
“The jail is a great place to work,” Virgil says. “Everybody’s friendly. And the job didn’t require training. They asked me if I could open a gate. I told them I’d opened a few in my lifetime.”
Virgil says the administration at the jail has a thumb on the place and they do as good a job or better running the facility as the bigger prisons around. Nobody has ever given him much trouble at the gate.
“Occasionally somebody will come and be disappointed and get aggravated,” he says. “There’s a dress code — no shorts, no flip flops. Most of the time we try to work with people, but you’ve got to have rules.”
He adds that the jail’s administration doesn’t discriminate and is very good about giving older employees and disabled employees a job.
“Officer Griffin’s work ethic is outstanding,” says Deputy Director Carder. “He’s always in a cheerful mood and is ready to do whatever you need him to do. I wish that I could find 20 more employees with the values that Officer Griffin displays every day at work.”
Virgil was born and raised north of Brimson. He went to three little country schools, Lake Elementary, Knights Town School, and Brimson School. He went to Gilman City until his freshman year of high school. His family moved to Pattonsburg and he graduated from there in 1954.
After high school, he took off for Wyoming. He worked two years on a sugar beet ranch. In the winter, he worked on an oil well rig drilling for uranium.
He joined the army and was stationed at Butte, MT. He was two years in the infantry.
He and Carolyn were married in 1960.
“She graduated and married me on Friday, May 13,” Virgil says. “It was her lucky day.”
Virgil bought a place east of town in 1963 and farmed until the early eighties, then they moved to town.
“I trucked and everything else for the next 30 years,” he says.
He drove a car carrier with eight to 11 used cars, to the east coast. He worked for one dealer out of Omaha for most of those years.
The east coast, as you can imagine, was a crazy place to drive. Virgil just parked at 3 p.m. and waited until around 10 p.m. to get back on the road. “You can’t get anywhere anyway,” he says.
Carolyn went with him nearly all the time.
“I was there to argue,” Carolyn says. “I didn’t drive the truck. But I’d drive cars onto the ramps.”
They had a lot of fun and some precarious experiences.
One of worst was when Virgil backed an SUV on the trailer. He couldn’t get the key out. That was because he didn’t have it in park, but he didn’t know that. He got to the rail of the carrier to get down. Here came the vehicle. He swung over the rail to get out of the way. The SUV came all the way down, rolled another 200 feet, and hit the back fender of a parked car.
“There was no real damage, but it could’ve crushed me,” he says.
The winters on the coast were as bad as those in the Midwest. Virgil wore heavy insulated boots. On some models of vehicles, he couldn’t tell if he had his foot on the brake or the foot-feed. He had a jeep once that he got stopped right before it went over the edge.
One time, coming out of Syracuse, NY, he’d loaded up to come home after picking up cars at an auction. They ran into bad weather. Carolyn stayed in the cab out of the cold while he pinned the ramps so they would drop down. They were just driving along, when he slammed into an overpass bridge and raked the top of a truck that was on the carrier. The truck was riding too high. He’d pinned the ramps in the wrong direction.
“I looked back, and there was stuff flying through the air,” he says. “I saw the roof of that truck coming down the highway after us. I took a chunk of concrete out of the bridge.”
During one of the worst winters, they sat for three days in a motel. The area got 27 inches of snow in three days. Snow was above the running board, trucks were stranded, going off the road, and the interstates were shut down. One time there were so many wrecks, the highway patrol ran the interstate backwards.
“Some inexperienced drivers go too fast and won’t pull over,” he says. “You’ll find them off in a ditch somewhere.”

It wasn’t all bad weather and mishaps. One time they parked the truck for two weeks and took off and saw Vermont, Maine and into Canada.
“We had a lot of good times out trucking and saw a lot of country and made a lot of friends,” says Virgil. “There was a lot of expense, a lot of hassle. We missed out on church on Sunday … that was the biggest thing.”
They go to the Coffey Baptist Church. Coffey has a post office, a city hall, and the Baptist Church is the only church in town. There were four churches when they first moved into town.
“There was a time when our church could have closed its doors, but it’s doing good now,” Virgil says. “The best we’ve seen in a long time with 40 to 50 members.”
Virgil and Carolyn will celebrate their 60th anniversary next year.
They have a family of four, two sons and two daughters. Doug lives in St. Joe; Randy lives in Coffey; Teresa is the new postmaster in Gallatin; Tammy lives near McFall. They have nine grandchildren; 11 great-grandchildren; and six step-grandchildren.
In his spare time, Virgil likes to train horses. He has started a lot of young horses. He has two horses now, one for the buggy and one for riding. He and Carolyn also raise two nice gardens.
“Mom and Dad are never in the house,” says daughter Teresa Faulkner. “People call them to help do the darndest things for people their age. Dad helps mow when it’s 90 degrees out. Dad mows his yard, mine, the neighbors’, the church, half of Coffey during the summer. Mom runs the weed-eater. He has a tractor with a blade so he scoops driveways in the winter. They’re everybody’s go-to if something needs done.”
Virgil quit trucking because he had pain in his hip. But he discovered that when he sat around at home in the rocking chair, he got just as stiff.
His job as gatekeeper at the jail is just right for what ails him. Now he gets up around 5 a.m., he’s there by 7 a.m., and works 12 hours two days out of the week.
He has a little shack near the gate to stay out of the weather.
“It’s got a coffee pot, a heater, an air conditioner, a microwave, all the comforts of home,” Virgil says. “I open the gate and let them in. I get exercise and I get paid.”