Reflections on a career

After a lifetime of scoring, cutting and splitting glass, it is remarkable that Noah Toler doesn't seem to have so much as a scratch.

Toler, 66, admits that he's had close calls with sharp edges but nothing that bad.

"Thank the Lord," the owner of Noah's Glass Shop in Havelock said.

"I have had hunks cut out of me. I've been cut on my head and on my arm. In fact, there's not a week that goes by that you're not going to see some kind of cut."

But those little scrapes haven't kept him from working glass jobs in Craven, Pamlico, Carteret, Onslow and Lenoir counties for nearly 31 years.

"If it's got glass in it, we do it," he said. "Commercial, residential - we do it all."

Toler said working with glass only seems complicated.

"When you know what's going on, there ain't nothing in glass work that's going to be strange to you," he said. "But there are no two jobs alike."

But Toler wasn't born with a glass cutter in his hand.

Originally from Vanceboro, he attended Vanceboro Farm Life School but never graduated.

"Tenth grade was as high as I got," he said. "I was an old dirt farmer. Worked on the farm all my life. Well, until I got married.

"My eighth-grade teacher told me I wouldn't amount to nothin'. He said ‘Your gonna sleep your life away.'"

But, Toler didn't.

"I used to work in the log woods," he said. "I got tired of lugging that chain saw everywhere, and I just went out to get me a job, and Mr. Tull Register put me to work."

Register ran a glass shop on North Craven Street in downtown New Bern. Toler used to commute from Vanceboro to New Bern to work.

"They used to have a ferry there across the river - Street's Ferry," he said "I used to ride that many a day."

Toler worked for Register for nearly three years, then moved to Havelock to work in Shorty's Glass Shop, where he stayed for more than 11 years. Using the skills he learned while apprenticing, Toler opened his own shop on Sept. 12, 1977, in the old Shady Hill Grocery, which is where U-Save Auto is located now in Havelock.

Toler's been at his present location at 238 U.S. 70 between Stonebridge and Ketner Heights for three years and has brought in three generations of his family to help run the business.

Wife Agnes Toler does the bookkeeping, preparing records for the company's accountant.

"We've been married 48 years, and working on 49," Noah Toler said.

Daughter Lisa Woodall answers the phone, and gives job estimates from the front office.

"She can cut glass as good as I can," Noah Toler said. "She was working here before she got out of high school."

Noah bought his daughter a car while she was in school, and she paid it off working at the glass shop during the day, while going to night school at Carteret Community College for cosmetology.

"And, I haven't had a haircut at a barbershop ever since," he said. "She says she needs somebody to practice on. She does my wife's hair, too. I'd be lost without her."

Grandson Michael Woodall works in the shop with his grandfather.

"I love it," he said. "I've been here ever since I was born, and I still love it. I don't know anything else."

He will soon know the U.S. Navy. He is enlisting in September, but the glass business - and his grandfather - won't be far from his mind.

"I'd like to get a business degree while I'm in so when I get out I can get my own glass shop," Woodall said.

As for Noah Toler, he's past retirement age but still thin in the waist and healthy from a life of hard work.

And, he doesn't plan on retiring.

"If you retire and quit work, you'll be dead in two years," he said. "They'll be burying you, and I don't want them to be doing that."