By Roger Barbee
Painter’s Helper
The oval, green mat lies at the garage entrance of our kitchen door. It is just a regular cotton mat placed there for folks to wipe their feet if necessary before entering our home. But James Taylor, Jr., a student of mine years ago, showed me that it is more than a door mat.
During the late 1970’s Jim was a student in one of my 7th grade English classes in what was the Lower School, grades 3-8. Jim was a small boy who, like his classmates, usually followed directions, always wore his tie as loose as possible, diligently did his homework/assigned reading, and couldn’t wait for athletics at the end of his demanding academic day.
Sometime during the late spring of 1984 Jim re-entered my life, and I remember his entrance into the same classroom in which he had been a student. Grading papers, I heard the door open , and in walked Jim. Standing at the door he greeted me, looked around the room, and asked, “Has the room always been this small?”
He was graduating SSSAS that June and had been accepted to UVa. Needing a summer job he had heard that I owned a small painting company and asked if I needed any painter’s helpers. Jim was one of the best hires I ever made and each summer as an undergraduate he worked as a helper, good painter, gardener at my home, driver of paint vans, and managed everything when I was away When I would return from a trip, customers or contractors we painted for, would say, “Go away! Jim does a great job.”
During one of his earliest fall years in Charlottesville, Jim borrowed a van to use moving items. A roommate and he were building bunk beds for their room, and he wanted it to take items back to campus and to carry lumber needed for the beds. Weeks later when he returned the van he explained that the windshield had been replaced. It seems that a 2×4 had slid forward and put a small crack in the original windshield. He paid for a replacement. I told him that my insurance would have covered that accident, but Jim said, “Yea, but I broke it.”
At UVa Jim and Alice met, and after graduation they asked me to read 1 Corinthians 13, St. Paul’s great description of love, at their wedding. I read from a KJV Bible that had belonged to Rev. Emmett Hoy, the deceased and beloved headmaster of SSS when Jim was a student there. After the ceremony I gave Alice and Jim the Bible.
Jim and I always stayed in touch while Alice and he lived their shared lives in Richmond. When I worked at NCS, outside my office was a wrought iron landing and stairs that led to a flagstone patio. It was, I think, a fire escape for the original school building. On pleasant days I kept the door open that led to it and like he had in the late 70’s, Jim, one fine, spring day, just walked through the door to visit. I never asked him, a resident in Richmond, how he knew where to find me; I simply enjoyed his presence. Years later Jim sent me a video of him standing on a long extension ladder as he placed Christmas lights on their Eastern Shore home. It was a happy reminder of where/how he had learned to safely use a tall ladder.
A year ago he called me to plan for Alice and him to stop in Woodstock for lunch on their way home. By then he had been the CEO of a NYC firm for several years, spoken at a SSSAS commencement, commuted to NYC from their home in Alexandria, and stayed in touch all the time. After our lunch, my wife Mary Ann rode home with Alice to show her the way to our home, and Jim rode with me.
I had often asked Jim about his work managing a large company that owned open-air shopping malls, and he always was patient and used exact examples to illustrate his methods. In my view, success came from his attention to detail, his compassion, and a bit of developed raw talent, but his work ethic more than anything. For instance, on our brief ride from the Woodstock Café to our house, he shared how, if he were visiting one of the company malls to see how it was functioning and noticed a dropped receipt in the parking lot, he always picked it up. “Why, for goodness sake?” I asked. “To check its date and determine if the folks you’re paying to clean the lot are doing it right,” he explained. A CEO, it seems, is not too proud to pick up trash, at least not Jim.
When we arrived at our home, Jim and I went through the garage to enter the kitchen door. He was in front of me and as he began to open the door he glanced down at the green mat. He stopped, looked at the mat deciding that something about it was wrong and bent over to correct it. Jim then opened the door and walked once again into my life. But this for the last time.
Jim died June 14, 2026.
