Joseph 'Dave' Dunn of Baskerville - and one of Harry's uncles - died on September 31, 2002.

As a child, Joseph Daves "Dave" Dunn began working at Jot Em Down Store, the country store his grandfather established in Baskerville early in the 1900s.  He swept the floor and helped make flues that conducted heat through Virginia tobacco barns.

He was a fifth grader when he took over the store's operation after this father contracted typhoid fever.  He ran the store for more than six years while his father lay ill in the nursing home and later owned it until three major strokes forced him to close it in 1988.

A retired tobacco farmer and warehouseman and a Baskerville resident who served on the Mecklenburg County Board of Supervisors.  Mr. Dunn died of cancer in a Richmond hospital.  He was 67.

A family spokeswoman explained the name of the family store.  " 'Jot Em Down' mean 'credit,'" she said.  "The store sold a little bit of everything - furniture, fertilizer, chemicals, groceries, shows, clothes, old-fashioned cheese in rounds that had to be rotated, nails and hardware, plows, even caskets at one time."

The store once had the only telephone in a 15-mile radius, said James Crowder, owner of Crowder-Hites-Crews Funeral Home in South Hill.  "People would walk for miles to use the telephone to call a doctor.  The railroad used to drop a load of fertilizer there.  The store was a real nerve center for the community."

Mr. Dunn served as Mecklenburg County supervisor during the 1970s and early 1980s.  "He was always trying to cut budgets and save county money," the spokeswoman said.

Mr. Dunn was also on the boards of the Virginia and Mecklenburg County departments of welfare and of the former Central Fidelity Bank.  After the series of strokes paralyzed his left side and part of his right side in 1988, he undertook arduous physical until "no one could tell he had ever had a stroke," the spokeswoman said.

After this retirement, Mr. Dunn served as a host at Kahill's Restaurant in South Hill, where he had many friends and told colorful stories about the people and history of the area.

A Danville native, Mr. Dunn went to Hampden-Sydney College for 4.5 years and "got the best education he could get, other than books" before going to work in the family store.

He was a an Army Reserve veteran and a member of the South Hill American Legion Post. He was a 32nd-degree Mason at South Hill Masonic Lodge.

Survivors include two daughters, Martha Newton and Carol Dunn, both of Baskerville; two sons, Richard K. Dunn, of Fredericksburg and Joseph E. Dunn, of South Hill; a sister, Mary Carroll Rognerud, of Winston-Sale, NC; and five grandchildren.

Uncle Dave was buried at Bethany Baptist Church in Baskerville.