Charles R. Wills

C. Roy Wills was born Aug. 21, 1936. He died Aug. 9, 2016. He was 79 years old and outlived all his male predecessors. When he was 18, he married Cecile Franella Chapman. She was 21 and a nurse at a hospital where he was an orderly. She was beautiful and gregarious and sought-after. She chose him because he vexed her, and she liked his feet. They had four boys, who are left to remember him. He was a great man, in that his presence was big. People followed him, not because he was aggressive, but because he was strong, and he put them at ease. When his youngest son was 5, he got a ship's rope and built a monorail in the backyard. His boys would climb to the garage roof and take the rope attached to a pulley, sit on the knot and whiz down to the bottom. It was a simple thing, but it was full of wonder. Nearly every place his family lived, there was a rope swing. Not a small one. Always one that carried magnificent possibilities. He was a pilot. He aimed to make his living that way, but he was hired by a man who started an industrial chemical cleaning company. Roy Wills was hired because the man saw his leadership and good will, and the fact that people were drawn to him. Wills spent his life doing the job of a chemical engineer, though he had only a high school diploma. He didn't feel comfortable in his job, because he kept being promoted beyond his skills. But he soldiered on to provide for his family. As a pilot, he once was practicing a hammerhead stall, and the plane didn't perform normally, and he found himself in a spiral dive. When he gained control of the plane, it was about 300 feet off the deck. He pulled back hard on the stick, lived to tell the story. Later that week, the chief of the Civil Air Patrol asked him if he knew anything about the bent fuselage of the Piper Cub. He never loved flying, because he knew all the things that could go wrong, and he was a reasonable man. His beautiful and magnetic wife lost her mind in 1984. He kept her with him, because he could not bear to put her in an institution. He lived with her madness until she died in 2009. There was a cat that one of his sons had left him. Hotshot was a mean cat, but C. Roy tamed him. He lived alone with that cat for several years. He taught him to fetch. When Hotshot was old and dying, he did what most animals do, he found a quiet, secret place to die. C. Roy found him and put him in a comfortable spot in the house and stayed with him until the end. And he mourned. And he mourned. One of his sons, about 12, shot a hole through a barbecue pit that belonged to a neighbor. When a police officer came, he saw that the two holes in the pit lined up exactly to the upstairs window from which the bullet must have come. Roy Wills cussed out the officer because he couldn't tell by the holes what caliber the bullet was. He gave him the bum's rush, and the officer went away ashamed. C. Roy never asked his sons if they did it. One of his sons was playing music loud out of an upstairs window. A neighbor came and knocked at the door. The son who was playing the music answered the door, and the neighbor started to chew him out. C. Roy came to the door and said something like, "Where I come from, you don't talk to a man's boy like that." Some yelling started and his boys had their noses pressed to the window. The neighbor, a bigger man, threw a roundhouse right at C. Roy. Wills ducked gracefully to his right, and with the energy that came with standing back up and turning, he hit the man with the whole of his force under his jaw, and the neighbor's feet came 8 inches off the ground before he fell flat on his back. His sons had never seen him fight, and they were thunderstruck. He leaves behind Charles Royal Wills Jr. and his wife, Pat; Daniel Paul Wills; Christopher James Wills and his wife, Sharron; and Timothy John Wills. His adoring granddaughters, by Dan Wills, are Mandy Childress and Sara Davies. His great-grandchildren are Marley Davies and Everett Childress. There will be a memorial gathering from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, Aug.12, at Levingston Funeral Home in Groves.