Personal Life
No one knows for sure whether Glen should be spelled with one or two n's; it's been done equally both ways throughout his life.
To say that Glen Roberts and his six brothers were born to humble beginnings, would be an understatement. Few today could visualize sweeping snow out of every room the next morning after a snowfall. Probably no one can remember newspaper as their standard wall paper. It was not an easy life for Charlie and Orlena Roberts and their brood of seven boys.
Children in those agrarian days were viewed as workhands as soon as they were old enough for a hoe to fit their hands. The average summer day on South Fork, located five miles (8 km) from Pound, Virginia, began before dawn with breakfast followed by hoeing, mowing and whatever else was needed on their farm that produced corn, potatoes and the ancillary crops needed for food. A few cows, hogs and lots of chickens rounded out their food sources.
Even though they could have been used full time on the farm, Mommy Roberts vowed her boys were going to get an education even if they had to walk to school; and walk they did. Glen Roberts started his five mile (8 km) trek before daylight with lantern in hand, leaving the lantern on the same barn each morning. There was always time for basketball each day before and after school.
Glen graduated from Emory and Henry College in 1935, where he was in the social fraternity Beta Lambda Zeta. And, rather than take one of the many offers to play professional basketball, opted to coach and teach at Norton High School for two years. Immediately after college he married Helen Joyce Keys and had three children, Glenn Jr., Mary Virginia and Larry Van.
After playing one year of professional basketball with Firestone (1938–39), he went to work full time for Firestone where he enjoyed a successful career, working his way up to being head of Firestone's "Time Study" Department. In 1963 he resigned from Firestone to join his son, Glenn Jr. in their new tire business in Norton, Virginia.
At the time of his 1980 death, this business and the eleven others in Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee had become the third largest Firestone dealer in the country and the largest consumer of Firestone retread rubber in the country.
Glen was a shy, humble and softspoken person who never had a known enemy. He very seldom showed anger and no one ever heard a single curse word emanate from his lips. In spite of living a healthy life by eating correctly and exercising, he developed colon cancer in 1978 and succumbed to it in 1980.
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