Bill Maxey *is* running again

[underpants]

At 86, Powhatan County’s clerk of the court, Bill Maxey, is running one last time.

At 86, Maxey has served six eight-year terms — and one initial two-year appointment — as the county’s clerk of the court.

And this November, he’s running again.

“I don’t hunt. I don’t fish. I don’t golf,” Maxey says. Retirement? “I couldn’t stand it,” he says. “I’d have nothing to do. I’d rather have this than anything else.”

Maxey’s seen the county balloon from 5,562 residents to more than 22,000, and collected every housing deed, marriage license and fee or fine to come through the courthouse. He recalls when county records were handwritten, he’s witnessed the evolution of typewriters and the eventual transition to computers. In 1992, his office moved into the main building from a small cottage on the court’s lawn.


“I’ve never had to answer that question,” Maxey says. That may have to do with the crowd he runs with. His friend E. Floyd Yates says he’s doing his “damnedest to see that re-elected.” He’s coordinating an advertisement for the local paper and plans to do a little fundraising.

Does Yates think Maxey is too old?

“No!”

Why not?

“I’m 104!”

Yates walks with a cane, not a walker, and addressed the 50th anniversary party in Maxey’s honor. At the party, he told the story of Maxey’s predecessor getting forced out of office after an audit showed the finances were off.

“I was the one who took him over to the judge and got him sworn in,” recalls Yates, who was elected to the House of Delegates in 1942 and headed the Powhatan Democratic Party for 40 years.

Clerk isn’t the only job Yates helped Maxey win. He’s responsible for Maxey’s first employment, too, at age 10, sweeping up the Yates Ford car lot on Route 60.

Maxey says he “barely” graduated from high school and served in the Army during World War II. He went through basic training on the Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California and practiced maneuvers in the Mojave Desert. He says his company crossed Europe with Gen. George S. Patton Jr., landed in Utah Beach and was in Nuremberg, Germany, at the end of the war.

Despite his close friendship with Yates, Maxey has always run as an independent. “It’s worked all right so far,” he says.

If he wins this next term, which, God willing, he’ll complete when he’s 94, he says he’ll finally retire