Elvin Cosby’s first job with Henrico County was carrying water to road workers in 1946. (Photo by Jay Paul)
At age 89, with 71 years of employment with Henrico County, Elvin Cosby says he still rises every morning eager to begin work and see what the day will bring.
“I always wanted to be something in life,” says Cosby, a senior labor foreman who has the longest tenure of any county employee in Henrico’s history.
The eldest child in a family of eight, he dropped out of Virginia Randolph High School after the ninth grade to go to work, when his parents told him they needed his help and another paycheck.
By then it was the middle of World War II, and Cosby, 15, successfully applied for a job at the Bellwood Defense Supply Center in South Richmond as a delivery boy. For a time, the government facility also housed German prisoners of war, and Cosby delivered mail between various buildings, often encountering the POWs on his route.
“You talk about scary,” Cosby says with a laugh, sitting behind his desk at the Public Works headquarters on Dabbs House Road.
Cosby has deep roots in Henrico. He says his uncle was an overseer at the Crump Farm on Mountain Road — now a county park that bears the farm’s name — and his uncle hired him to feed the family’s dog and help clean the house, beginning when he was 9 years old. During the Depression, Cosby’s father worked for the county under a government relief program to boost the economy. After the program ended, the county hired his father “because they wanted to keep the good ones on,” he says.
On April 23, 1946, the county hired Cosby to carry water to men working on county roads. The job paid 25 cents an hour, and he worked 10 hours a day.
“I went to some people who had wells and I would knock on the door and say, ‘Would [you] let me get the water?’ and some of them used to sic the dogs on me,” Cosby recalls. “So I went to some of the creeks and dipped water out of the creeks.”
With a steady job, he began courting a young woman in his neighborhood. He wanted to get married when he was 21, but his girlfriend’s mother insisted that there would be no marriage until her daughter completed high school.
“I was always afraid some other boy was going to take her,” he says.
But his girlfriend waited, and on May 5 of this year, Cosby and his wife, Lottie, celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. The couple became parents to two sons, both of whom have died, and five daughters. Cosby says he’s proud that most of his children were able to go to college. Two of his daughters recently retired, one as a nurse and the other as an Air Force colonel.
Cosby says it was hard getting the money together every year for school expenses, as well as for everyday living. That’s one of the reasons he asked Henrico for permission to take a second job on weekends, as a cook at what was then the Westwood Racquet Club.
“I made most of my hours on weekends,” Cosby says. “I used to work 10 to 12 hours on Saturday and 10 to 12 on Sunday.” Still, he’s always found time for church. He is a former Sunday school superintendent and retired deacon emeritus at St. Peter Baptist Church on Mountain Road.
Cosby rose through the ranks of Henrico’s Public Works Department, becoming one of the county’s first African-American foremen on Oct. 27, 1976.
He says that as a youth, he had dreamed of building and working on roads.
“My mother used to buy all kinds of [toy] trucks and things, and we used to get in the sand and build roads,” Cosby says. “When she would open a can of peaches or something, she would cut both ends out, and that was my pipe. And so I would put both pipes together and I would get tar and put around it so it wouldn’t leak. Then I would take sand and build a road over the pipe. That’s what I always wanted to do.”
Henrico is one of only two Virginia counties that maintains its own road system, and Cosby says there was always a project to complete or a new one to begin.
“Mr. Cosby is the finest example of old-school values that I can think of,” says Steven Yob, the county’s public-works director.
“He trains and mentors our younger employees,” Yob adds. “Mr. C is always there to help customers, and he demonstrates that Henrico County is customer-oriented first and foremost.”
Since 2015, the county has given an Elvin R. Cosby Award twice each year to recognize employees for their longstanding service and contributions to the county.
Cosby says he has no plans to retire. “If you feel good and active, just work a little longer,” he says with a laugh.
One of his only regrets is that his schooling ended prematurely. He wishes he could have finished high school and then perhaps had a chance to go to college.
“Maybe I would’ve been up the ladder a little higher,” he says.
His advice to young people is the same advice he’s tried to follow in his life: “Be humble. Don’t be too talkative, just observe. Try to reach higher places in life. Try to be a good role model.”
