Pension went up in smoke in peanut company's fire

The mid-October blaze that swept through Old Dominion Peanut Co. did more than disrupt the Norfolk company's peanut brittle business. It apparently has cost Frances Waymire her monthly pension check.

White-haired and 90 years old, Waymire worked for the peanut candy company for about 27 years as the owner's secretary before retiring in the early 1980s and moving away.

Slowed by a heart attack during the past year and needing a walker to get around, Waymire now resides in what she calls a modest retirement home in Phoenix. She lives near her son, Mel, a construction superintendent who gives her money for groceries, prescription drugs and other living expenses.

When the Norfolk native left Old Dominion, Waymire said her boss, the late Townsend Brown, promised her a good pension. The year she retired, the company set up individual retirement accounts for workers, and later created a profit-sharing plan. But for older, long time employees such as Waymire, all they had after they retired was whatever Brown had agreed to provide and their Social Security money. She knew a factory worker who received $50 a month.

In the beginning, Waymire received $250 a month. Brown's son, Tim, who took over in 1994 after his dad died, boosted that to $350. The son ran the business until he sold it to a group of local investors in 2004.

Waymire's pension check remained at $350 for years, arriving by mail in the middle of every month - $4,200 a year.

About three weeks after the fire swept through Old Dominion's peanut brittle production facility on 24th Street, Waymire received a letter, dated Nov. 8, from William Del Chiaro, president and chief executive officer.

Her check was not there. It was about the blaze, which she had not heard about until then. The company, Del Chiaro wrote, suffered substantial damage from the Oct. 14 blaze, forcing it to shut down more than half its production capabilities during October and November, the peak months for sales.

"This huge loss has adversely affected our ability to sustain many things we would desire to do," Del Chiaro wrote.

Much to Waymire's chagrin, one of those things was her retirement money.

"It is with deep regret we have made a very difficult but necessary decision to discontinue your pension commencing January 2008," Del Chiaro wrote.

Hoping to change his mind, Waymire wrote back, telling him that she relied on the pension to help cover the cost of the retirement facility.

"I am 90 years old and probably have only a few years left," she wrote. "I can only pray that you will please reconsider."

In a telephone interview this week, Waymire said Del Chiaro had not responded to her Nov. 18 letter.

"I know it doesn't sound like that much money, but it was a lot to me," she said. "My son has to help me out and buy my medicine and whatever I need, which I don't like, but he has to do it."

Contacted at his Williamsburg office, Del Chiaro declined to discuss Waymire's situation.

"I've never met Mrs. Waymire, so I think it's just best for me not to say anything," he said.

Del Chiaro said Old Dominion is still rebuilding after the fire and that he expects the company to resume full production of its peanut brittle and hard peanut candies by early March.

Tim Brown, the former owner, said Friday there's probably three or four other retirees like Waymire who had been receiving pensions awarded by his late father. He recalls Waymire sending thank-you notes to say "how much she appreciated and how needed that money was for her support."

"They don't have any ties to the old employees," Brown said of the current owners. "They just look at the bottom line. There wasn't any obligation."

This weekend, Mel Waymire, 62, plans to move his mother from a three-room apartment at the Phoenix retirement home into a one-room studio in another section of the facility.

At $1,416 a month, the larger suite is too expensive without the pension money. Her only source of income, beyond what her son provides, is $1,146 a month from Social Security, he said.

"She had a nice little apartment, and she was really enjoying what she was doing and where she was," Mel Waymire said. "We'll get by. This is just kind of an awful thing to happen to her."

Jon W. Glass, (757) 446-2318, jon.glass@pilotonline.com