Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
If you live in or work in a building in Pocahontas County that was built after 1975, chances are Tom Kinder installed and maintained the furnaces in them. He was THE heating and cooling man for all the county for five decades until he finally, and reluctantly retired last year.
Kinder, of Durbin, has been quite the renaissance man in his 89 years on Earth. He was born in Spring Hill, now part of South Charleston, on the Kanawha River.
September 13, 1958, he married his wife, Mary.
“They say the thirteenth is bad luck, but we got married on the thirteenth,” he said, laughing.
Thirteen did seem to be lucky, for the Kinder’s at least, who welcomed their son, Tommy, on their anniversary a year later.
“That was strange, wasn’t it?” he said. “You couldn’t plan that.”
In Charleston, Kinder worked for Broughton Dairy as a wholesaler. He sold milk for five cents a gallon and remembers that one of his customers, the Open Air Market, in Charleston, purchased 1,000 gallons a week.
He left Broughton to work at Union Carbide until 1975 when the Kinders moved to Durbin.
They lived on a farm on Back Mountain Road that was owned by his cousin. Kinder had already established his heating and cooling business in the county, doing a few jobs before they moved to Durbin permanently.
In addition to operating his business, Kinder had 32 head of Polled Herefords on the 351-acre farm that he tended.
As the only heating and cooling guy in the county, Kinder stayed busy. His memory is like a rolodex, filled with the names of individuals and businesses he worked for through the years.
“It’s not just a few, it’s hundreds because nobody did this work,” he said. “These old farmers, they get up at three in the morning. I’d have them call me at that time, saying ‘my furnace is out,’ or this or that.
“Bill Curry, I put a furnace in for him while we were coming up here [before moving] and Henry Hevener out there,” he added. “He used to be the Sheriff of Pocahontas County.”
Several of the businesses in Pocahontas County have Kinder to thank for their heating and cooling, including Mountain Quest, Snowshoe Mountain Resort and IGA, in Marlinton.
“Mountain Quest, down there, I don’t know how many furnaces I put in there,” he said. “Jeff and Kevin Shaw, they built that Mountain Quest down there. There were probably fifteen to eighteen furnaces in the buildings there, in all the rooms.”
As Snowshoe added new condo complexes, Kinder was the one they called for the HVAC systems.
“I worked up there for Danny Seme, he was over Snowshoe then,” Kinder said. “He was the boss there and you didn’t do nothing if Danny didn’t approve it.
“They called me one night,” he continued. “This was about ten p.m. I went up there and the snow was flying. You couldn’t see. We pulled up and parked at the Shavers building and it said no parking; security and fire department.”
Kinder stayed parked where he was and went in the building to fix the furnace. It wasn’t long until he heard someone yelling down at him asking if that was his vehicle parked outside. Kinder told the man it was his and if they wanted him to move it, then Danny Seme could find someone else to fix the furnace.
“He said, ‘oh, no, don’t say nothing to Danny,’” Kinder recalled. “He said, ‘I’ll give you a sticker you can put on there and you can park anywhere on this mountain you want.’
“I had a lot of fun up there with the people,” he added. “I got a lot of work out of Snowshoe.”
Kinder also worked at the former FasChek and Foodland, now IGA, both in Marlinton. He worked on the coolers and freezers at both grocery stores and even gave some good advice to Rob Hilleary whom he met at FasChek.
“Rob was the meat cutter at FasChek back then,” Kinder said. “When FasChek closed, I told him to go apply to be the meat cutter at IGA.”
The two talked about it and eventually, Hilleary did take the job and later bought IGA from the Tottens.
After the 1985 flood, Kinder said he had to replace all the equipment at the grocery store.
“All that equipment that’s in there, all that refrigeration equipment, I bought all of that and put it in,” he said. “We had to buy everything brand new. They bought it from me. We didn’t lose too much.”
It wasn’t enough for Kinder to have a full-time job of installing and repairing heating and cooling systems and running a farm. He also bought the market in Durbin and named it Kinder’s Market.
“Red Kane put that store in there in 1942,” he said. “They started out in Cass and they moved. It was Red Kane and his brother. Red sold it first to Donnie Curry and John Bosley.”
Curry didn’t like being in the business, so he sold his share to Bosley who later sold the business to the Kinders.
“I got hooked up with a wholesaler that was out of Salem, Virginia,” Kinder said. “This salesman came by and talked us into going with it and it wasn’t nothing after we got started with them. We sold a lot of groceries back then.
“People didn’t drive across the mountain.”
Kinder was joined by his sons, Tom and Mark, in his business ventures. They both helped with heating and cooling jobs, and Tom ran the market until it closed. His daughters, Mary and Emily, opted out of the family businesses.
For 10 years, Kinder also drove a school bus, when he wasn’t busy with everything else.
“A guy by the name of Whit Hull worked for the board of education [Assistant Superintendent] and he was over the school bus drivers,” Kinder said. “He talked me into being a school bus driver back then. Today, if it gets a little frost on the roads, they call a delay. We never had a school delay. He’d call me at three in the morning and he’d say, ‘you better get your chains on,’ because of the snow.
“If that school bus went past your stop, you better be on it,” he continued. “If we didn’t go down your road, like down in Hosterman, if we didn’t go past their stop, those kids weren’t counted absent.”
After all those jobs and businesses, and more than a lifetime of hard work, Kinder isn’t ready to slow down at all. He may be retired, but he still gets up every morning and has a project to work on around the house.
While his wife, Mary, spends time in her sewing room, working on afghans and quilts for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Tom is fixing something in their home in Durbin.
Kinder is glad the family came to Durbin and made Pocahontas County home.
“It’s been an interesting place being here,” he said. “It’s been fun.
“I’m almost old enough to retire,” he added, laughing.
Great guy. He always amazed me climbing those ladders in his golden years. Happy retirement!