Harry McVay was forever a salesman

In the picture, Harry McVay is perched atop an office desk. He has the glimmer of success in his eyes, and his hands, poking out from the sleeves of a twill suit coat, appear large and capable.

Brother Warren McVay stands, leaning engagingly toward the camera lens, smiling confidently. They were the McVay Brothers, roofing and siding contractors. Theirs is an American success story, one that ended for Harry when he died March 29, at age 89.

“They got where they were through hard work,” said Harry’s son, Harrison McVay Jr.

The McVay brothers grew up in Mead just a stone’s throw from Mead High School. There were six boys in the family. Their parents, William Harrison and Mary Elizabeth, worked a small farm that produced just enough to feed the family and supplement the income of William’s job as postman. Their father also kept bees, a practice that is suspected of contributing to his death.

William McVay died suddenly of complications that doctors at the time didn’t fully understand. Harry, the fifth born in the McVay band of brothers, was just 17 at the time of his father’s death. One of the last things his father did was tell Harry to take care of Mary Elizabeth. The instruction started a working career that never really ended.

The Great Depression had just begun. McVay’s search for work took him 60 miles east to the mining town of Kellogg. He wasn’t in the siding the business then. He was working for a Spokane-based grocer and proving quickly that he might not have been suited for the way the company did business.

“Actually, he got fired in Kellogg,” said Rebecca Sua, Harry’s daughter. “He refused to cheat the customers. The manager said, ‘Fon’t give them a pound when they ask for a pound. Give them a three-quarter pound.’ Father wouldn’t do it.”

However, McVay did last long enough to meet the love of his life. Wilmae was a Kellogg girl with the reputation as a whip on the town’s public tennis court. Harry met her at the court and agreed to engage her in a match but soon wished he hadn’t.

“Mom beat the hell out of him,” Sua said. But McVay walked away from the experience believing Wilmae was the girl for him.

Meanwhile, one of McVay’s older brothers, J.D., had quit his job as a newspaper reporter for The Spokesman-Review and started a roofing-and-siding business in the old Peyton Building. In no time, brothers Ed, Warren and Harry were working for J.D.

After getting familiar with the trade, Harry and Warren set out on their own, forming McVay Brothers roofing and siding in 1956.

Harrison McVay Jr. remembers his father and Uncle Warren going to the far corners of the Inland Northwest to drum up work in those early years. The brothers would travel to Okanogan, Wash., and even Troy, Mont., looking for homes in need of new shingles or a better exterior. The brothers would go door to door, convincing homeowners that their houses needed a makeover.

McVay referred to the door-to-door sales tactic as canvassing and he was good at it. A client may have never though he needed siding, but after McVay knocked on his door, the man was sure he did.

“I’d say it was just two months ago that he was sitting in his chair saying, ‘Boy, I like selling,’ ” Harrison McVay Jr. said. His father stayed active in the business beyond age 80, though the company is now on its third generation of McVay owners.

McVay was a deal maker, though sometimes bargains he scored weren’t appreciated by all. Once he agreed to do some work in exchange for a painting of a horse that was several degrees shy of gallery quality. His children actually remember the picture as more of a paint-by-numbers art piece that wasn’t particularly done well.

He brought the painting home and instructed Wilmae to hang it up somewhere in the house, which didn’t please her. Nonetheless Wilmae obliged her husband – by hanging the painting in the closet.

“He didn’t think I was very funny, but I thought it was funny,” his wife said. The two got along well.

Around the house, McVay seldom slowed down. He was an avid gardener. Family members say he couldn’t leave an empty patch of yard alone; it had to support a plant of some sort.

And he didn’t shy away from community involvement. McVay was a Sunday school teacher at Millwood Presbyterian Church where he also was an elder. He participated in the Men of Millwood, a service group of the time.

Perhaps most significantly, McVay was a tireless contributor to the Union Gospel Mission. He served on the board of directors for years and was the first person to receive the Lifetime Service Award from the mission, which ministers to the poor and homeless, while also providing a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program for men.

McVay, Sua recalled, used to say that “If you want something done, you ask a real busy man.”

They didn’t come any busier than Harry.