Maxyne Trompeter, special writer
From the February 28, 1985, edition of The Salem Times-Register
The day Kip Connelly’s father died, Kip was about to embark on another vagabond adventure. It was in his nature, he said, to be a wanderer, a rogue and irresponsible.
With Bill Connelly’s sudden death, however, the 22-year-old son did a sobering personal turn-around and at his mother’s prompting, took over the family business.
“I prevailed upon Kip,” said his mother, Elizabeth Connelly Hobbie. “Give me one year and let’s see what we can do.”
“That was 12 years ago,” said Connelly, now 34 and president of W.S. Connelly and Co., Inc., a Salem based business that uprooted its Ohio Street office last month and replanted it in Roanoke’s Gainsboro Industrial Park.
Under the guidance of Hobbie and three of her six children, the former feed and seed business has grown into the parent corporation for: Erosion Control, involved in highway work; Hydro Lawn Spray, with over 3,000 lawn care customers; Landscape Supply; a wholesale distributorship, and Southern Lawn, still in the formative stages.
The Connelly connection with Salem goes back to 1958 when the family purchased the old Starkey House at 715 West Main Street, adjacent to the duck pond.
“I always resented the fact that people thought we were rich,” Connelly remembered, “just because our house had 19 rooms. And everybody thought we owned the duck pond. We didn’t.”
This spaciousness, however, not only housed the family of eight, but led the older Connelly to move his Roanoke business into their living quarters in 1970.
Bill Connelly had been in the “feed and seed business” since the mid-1940s, according to Hobbie. He had been with the J.M. Harrison Co., then in business with Frank Agnew on Roanoke’s city market, and eventually he concentrated on his own garden supply and landscape retail store at the former Virginia Railway Station on Roanoke’s Jefferson Street.
From there, he went into hydroseeding, a process in which seed and mulch are applied in a one-step operation.
Beginning with the Blue Ridge Parkway, Connelly progressed to state and federal highway contract work in the early 1970’s, according to his son.
Things looked promising, Hobbie recalled, but when her husband died in 1973, “it became a question of selling what we had or trying to do it ourselves.”
Just after the Connellys decided to stick it out, “highway work took a different turn because of the oil embargo and we were really struggling,” Hobbie explained.
It got to the point where we would either have to give in or diversify. Being fighters, we diversified,” she said.
After a move from the Main Street house to the Ohio Street office and two years of research, their lawn maintenance subsidiary, Hydro Lawn Spray, was put on the market in 1976.
“We were the pioneers in selling the lawn care concept to the valley,” Hobbie pointed out. This concept involves complete lawn renovation, and can include seeding, thatching, core aeration, and weed, insect and disease control, according to one of their advertisements.
Today, there are nearly one dozen lawn maintenance specialists listed in the Roanoke-Salem-Vinton phone book, “but we’re the leader,” Connelly said.
He credits a large part of the company’s success to the 12 years spent on Ohio Street, “because that’s where we became the prominent name in what we do.”
And that’s one of the reasons that just after the company’s move to Roanoke, Connelly wrote a letter to Salem’s city manager, William J. Paxton, “expressing our appreciation as corporate and family residents of Salem for the past 16 years.”
“I’m also a Virgo and a romantic fool,” laughed Connelly, explaining “nostalgia” as another reason for the letter.
“Salem is a great place to grow up…and retire,” said Connelly, who along with his sister and brothers, attended Salem public schools from elementary through high school graduation.
“It’s small town America, the most efficient system in the world,” he said. “I consider Salem home and feel strange driving through it now.”
If Salem is so “efficient,” why the move to Roanoke?
After a loud laugh over the anticipated question, Connelly answered, “visibility and access. We had no visibility where we were and now we have access to a major intersection (Routes 460 and 581).”
But by Connelly’s own admission, this family of eight was almost always visible in Salem, “whether we wanted to be or not.”
And while doing business in Salem, Connelly had access “to the people who run the city at any time. These people made themselves available and I could fuss at them whenever I wanted.”
“I don’t think it will be like that in Roanoke,” he added.
-Prepared by Shelly Koon
