85-year-old woman still manages Southeast Missouri flooring business

DEXTER, Mo. -- There is not even a hesitation in her step as she climbs aboard the 1976 model forklift to move a roll of carpet.

"We're both antiques," laughs Ellen Russom, who marked her 85th birthday in October.

Russom is the sole employee at Stan's Carpet in Dexter. The store is a sister store to a bigger Stan's Carpet in Sikeston, Missouri, which is owned by her daughter and son-in-law, Helen and Ron Beardsley.

At the age when most folks are looking toward retirement, Russom began her career there in the carpet business but moved to the Dexter location when it was bought in 1999.

Russom is no stranger to hard work. While she said she loves what she does, there is one job she loved even more.

"When I was small, growing up in Canalou," she said, "my dad dug mussel shells for a living. He let me and my brother help him. Sand shells were the highest-priced ones at the time. They made buttons out of them. We'd play on the sandbar and throw the mussel shells in the boat. It was 1937, and it was the best job I ever had!"

The shells were cooked, sorted and weighed.

"Once a week," she recalled, "a barge would come down the river and pick them up, and dad would get paid by the pound. That's how he made his living."

Russom was born in Pocahontas, Arkansas, in 1930. She still was a child when the family picked up and moved to Canalou, Missouri, on the eastern edge of Stoddard County.

"I had an uncle who told my dad we could do good up here in Missouri picking cotton, especially with three kids to help pick, so that's how we ended up just west of Canalou in a little place right in the middle of a cotton field. It was 1941, and I was almost 11."

She remembered the hot sun, picking cotton bolls in burlap sacks and trying to beat everyone else's weight of cotton picked.

"We picked when it was pickin' time and chopped when it was choppin' time, and the rest of the time, dad dynamited stumps because it was newly cleared ground out there."

Retirement is nowhere on the horizon for Russom, but she said if she decided to step down from her role at Stan's, her dream job is to start her own home health agency and sit with the elderly.

"We speak the same language," she said. "Everybody's got to have a dream, and that's what I dream of doing someday."

In the meantime, Ellen reports to work five days a week. She takes no medications except for a pill for her blood pressure. She keeps in step with the youngest of her customers with no apparent problems, and most of her customers call her "Grandma."

"I like my Saturdays off," she said, "so the place is closed that day."

The tools of Russom are as simple. There is no computer on her desktop. Instead, there are an electric calculator and a notebook of lined paper.

When a customer comes to her door needing carpet, she shows him or her the samples and rolls she has and gets to work making an estimate.

"What size room you got?" she asked a couple Wednesday morning who were remodeling an older home.

When told the unusual sizes of the rooms, she was quick to tell them, "Well, that's just right enough to be wrong, isn't it?" -- referring to the square footage that would require seaming to be done.

Accommodating describes how Russom deals with her customers. For her efforts, she has a significant business with local contractors and return visits from homeowners.

Her notebook opens once she's given a room size, and the sketching and tapping on the calculator keys begin.

She won't hesitate to tell a customer what she thinks is a good choice and what might not be a good choice, either.

"I didn't know diddly-squat when I started over at Sikeston, but when my husband died, I worked at a laundry," she said. "I was 62. My daughter called and told me that work was too hard and asked if I'd come to work for her at the Sikeston store. I told her I didn't know anything about selling carpet, but she said I'd learn."

Learn she did. In the process, she also has taught a generation or two about not only the value of learning a new skill, but diligence, integrity and, in many instances, common sense.