Bill Archer
Bluefield Daily Telegraph, W.Va.
(MCT)
BLUEFIELD — In the film noir gangster movies, guys who did the kind of work that Randolph “Randy” Phillips did would be called, “Screw,” a name for a prison guard that comes from the shackles that bound prisoners more than a century ago. But during 32 years of service with the Virginia Department of Corrections, Phillips, now 63, and retired, worked to help the inmates under his supervision work to straighten their lives out and become productive citizens.
“You wanted to make a difference with these guys,” Phillips said as he worked Friday morning to break down empty boxes in the box room of the Bluefield Union Mission basement. Phillips enjoys volunteering at the Mission. “We all make mistakes along the way. I said that to one corrections official I worked with, and he said that he didn’t make any mistakes. But I answered: ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ We cant lock them all up and forget about them.”
Phillips said that one of the prisoners he supervised had killed another inmate who had been disrespectful to his Bible. “He had a terrible temper. I sat and talked to him for a while. I didn’t know what to expect at first, but after talking with him, I realized that he really knew his scriptures. I visited several more times with him and understood just how deep his understanding was. I had to study up a little before our visits.”
Phillips said that after each of his visits, another inmate stuck his face in the window of his cell door and yelled at him, saying he shouldn’t talk with the other inmate. “I simply went to his cell and said: ‘You know, God loves you.’ He did it several times, and one day, he didn’t yell anything. I walked back to his cell and saw him sitting there with tears running down his cheeks.
“When I asked him if something was wrong, he looked up at me and said: ‘How can I find Jesus?’ We were both crying by then, and I told him I would go get him a Bible that afternoon,” Phillips said. “I hope he went on from there and had a productive life.”
Phillips’ mother, Dennie Phillips, taught elementary school in Mercer County and eventually retired from Ramsey School. His father, James Phillips started working at the Pocahontas Fuel Coal Mine in Pageton as a teenager. “He broke every bone in his body except his neck,” Phillips said of his father. “He got his leg cut off when he was 15 or 16. He got it pinned under a motor somehow. I don’t know how. He never talked about it that much. He had an artificial leg, but most people who knew him never knew.”
Although Bluefield had segregated elementary, primary and secondary schools when Phillips was going through school, his family lived near Preston Street School, so that’s where he started out. From there he went to Fairview Junior High School and Bluefield High School at a time when most black kids were attending Genoa Junior High and Park Central High School.
“It was a few of us attending Bluefield High School,” Phillips said. “Pete Wood graduated a year ahead of me. Petey was taking all of the heavy courses like chemistry and physics, but I was taking the more basic courses. I was in the choir when Mr. (Don) Kensinger was there. He demanded perfection. After I finished high school, I went to West Virginia State College Institute.”
Phillips graduated from BHS in 1969, the last class before Park Central closed and Bluefield schools were fully integrated. Before he completed his second year at West Virginia State, Phillips joined the U.S. Air Force where he served 4 years. “I am a Vietnam War era vet, but I didn’t serve there,” he said. “I was stationed in Thailand.”
After he left the service, he went to Bluefield State College to finish his college education. “That was when I found out that a tutor means a lot,” Phillips said. “My tutor helped me get through a statistics class, and when I got into graduate school, it really helped me a lot.”
After earning his undergraduate degree in social science at BSC in 1990, he went on and earned his masters degree in counseling from Marshall University. He spent most of his years with the Virginia Department of Corrections at the Bland Correctional Center, but also worked in leadership positions of counselor, assistant warden and warden at facilities including Wallens Ridge, Keen Mountain, Pulaski, Tazewell Camp 31, and retired at the start of 2013 as superintendent at the Appalachian Detention Center in Honaker, Va.
“We felt like we were really making a difference with those young me,” Phillips said of the boot camp-style facility. The center has a precision drill team that performs in parades regionally. The center also sends teams to assist residents during weather emergencies and has worked with Habitat for Humanity to build homes locally.
“We sent out teams of guys to cut trees when we had the tornado through this area,” Phillips said. “They went in with chain saws and cleared trees from a road to a home where an elderly couple had been blocked in for about two weeks,” Phillips said. “When I went inside, one of my toughest officers had tears coming down. All of the kids had tears coming down and the elderly woman was crying too. It was something to see.”
Phillips is married to Beverly (Anderson) Phillips, a retired Mercer County elementary school teacher. “She’s my beautiful playwright wife,” he said, noting that Beverly wrote a Christmas play for their church — Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church — where Phillips sits on the Deacon Board at the church. “I’m glad that Bev’s got the talent. She and Janet (Williams, her sister) are putting on a play for Lemonade Days at the Historic Bank Lobby.”
Phillips said that that the church is hosting a “Back to School Bash” on Aug. 2, from 11 a.m., to 2 p.m. “I would like to be able to talk with the students about the importance of getting a tutor to help them,” Phillips said. “I would also like to recruit some teachers to talk with parents about how they should talk to teachers. The way parents approach teachers can make a difference in how they communicate.”
Phillips started volunteering at the Bluefield Union Mission about 8 months ago. “There are some great people here,” he said. “They never turn anyone away. They are all seeing people who are in such distress.
“This is a great place,” he continued. “The longer I stay here, the more impressed I am with the way the people here work to help people. I’m blessed to be here,” he said.
Randy and Bev Phillips have a daughter, Rae Lee Phillips, 23, who graduated from BSC and is working on her masters degree at Concord University.
“She’s working at the Pocahontas Correctional Center as a counselor,” Phillips said. “She was walking across campus when an officer called out to her and asked how she was doing. She asked another counselor how he knew her, and he told her the officer had worked with me.
“Before she went to college, the only thing she ever talked about doing was going into a nursing program,” Phillips said. “When she graduated from college, her degree was in corrections.”
Along with his volunteer work at the Mission and at his church, Phillips was also among the group of volunteers who cleared brush from the Oak Grove Cemetery in Bluewell about 9 years ago.