BLACKSBURG -- Two address books -- one at his office, one at his home -- contain many of the telephone numbers Jim Cavanaugh has accumulated in 38 years as a football coach. Some of those numbers also reside, through technology far too complicated to fathom, in the BlackBerry that he now carries almost everywhere with him.

He used the device to send recruits text messages, when the NCAA allowed it. But he hunted and pecked with his index finger instead of pounding the keypad with his thumbs. He spelled out and punctuated every word instead of using Internet abbreviations: ur, cu 2nite, g2g.

"I can't do that," he said. "I'm the old-school way.

"Everybody gave me a hard time. They said, 'Oh, Cav, he's an old this, and he's an old that.' People said, 'Ah, he'll never learn to text.' Well, [shoot], it was recruiting. I damn well better learn. So I did."

This is how Cavanaugh, who turned 60 on Aug. 4, survives in what is quickly becoming a younger man's profession. By bending with the years and accepting some of the changes they brought. By refusing to become a slick-talking assistant coach. By, most of all, sticking to a grinder's ethos -- born in Queens, N.Y., from a father who rode the train four hours roundtrip every day for 20 years to work long-lines communication for Western Electric in Manhattan.

Cavanaugh's personality is well known in the Richmond area, which he has recruited every year -- save for the six he spent at Maryland -- since 1973, when he was a graduate assistant at North Carolina State. He has been Virginia Tech's strong safety and outside linebacker coach since 1996 and its recruiting coordinator since 2002.

A man develops a reputation over time. Cavanaugh is proud of his, and he's not shy about saying that it is the foundation of the trust he has built with high school coaches and recruits. He is not shy about saying much.

His recruiting philosophy is as blunt as the way he chooses to describe it: "I am not going to blow smoke up somebody's [butt] just to get him." His thoroughness seeps into every part of his life, whether he is straightening his papers just so on his desk, or calling an opposing coach to chastise him for violating an NCAA rule, or inviting his son's disadvantaged friend to live with his family.

"He's a black-and-white person," said Darrell Moody, Cavanaugh's best friend for 35 years, who is now a scout for the San Diego Chargers. "And there's a lot of gray in the world today. He hasn't figured that out yet."

Second Lt. James Cavanaugh and his infantry unit received their orders: They were off to Vietnam.

Cavanaugh was in ROTC at William and Mary, graduated in 1970, taught and coached for a school year at Newport News High, then went to Fort Benning in Georgia for infantry school in 1971. He had watched the draft pluck young men from their homes and ship them a world away, so he joined ROTC thinking, "Hell, if I'm gonna go to Vietnam, I might as well go as an officer."

Then the Pentagon Papers surfaced in June '71. The whole fiasco was collapsing on Richard Nixon, and he reduced troop levels, placing Cavanaugh's unit into reserves. The Army officer suddenly needed a job.

His father, Donald, wanted him to return to New York City and become an accountant. Cavanaugh would have no part of it. Not after watching Donald ride the Long Island Railroad every day from the family home in Massapequa Park. Not after commuting three hours roundtrip himself to an all-boys Catholic high school.

Coaching already had sucked him in. He played under Marv Levy and Lou Holtz at William and Mary, and helped Holtz part-time in 1970. So Cavanaugh hooked on at Denbigh High in Newport News in 1971 and followed Holtz to N.C. State the next year.

Away he went. From N.C. State to Virginia Military Institute, back to State, to Marshall and Virginia and Maryland and North Carolina before finally settling at Tech. Assistant jobs at every stop, perhaps because one of his strengths spooked athletic directors looking for a smooth head coach willing to bite his tongue and say all the right things.

"Tactful -- I don't think you'll ever hear that word used in describing him," Moody said. "I think that's probably one of the reasons that he's never been a head coach."

But the approach has worked for Cavanaugh in recruiting. He landed Michael Vick, arguably the greatest player in Tech history. (Vick's address at Leavenworth Prison hangs on Cavanaugh's wall. Cavanaugh has written to him a couple times.)

"I guess he knows what you want to hear, but not really what you want to hear is what he's gonna tell you," said Tech freshman quarterback Joseph "Ju-Ju" Clayton, a Hermitage graduate whom Cavanaugh recruited.

Cavanaugh has learned a few things while sitting in hundreds of living rooms and high schools around the state. One is how to deliver bad news, such as when he tells parents he's not recruiting their son or pulling a scholarship offer.

Nine years ago, he sat in a recruit's living room and watched the kid act "like a spoiled brat" to his parents. Upon returning to Blacksburg, Cavanaugh told head coach Frank Beamer he wanted to retract the kid's scholarship offer. Then Cavanaugh called the boy's coach and parents, and told them just why he did it. That's another thing he learned over the years -- always break the news directly to the parents and early in the conversation.

"The honesty is what pays dividends because you remember that later on," said Highland Springs athletic director Rudy Ward, the school's former football coach, who has known Cavanaugh since he started recruiting in Richmond.

You realize quickly when you've done wrong by Cavanaugh, and he prefers it this way.

He once admonished a newspaper reporter for making him sound like "Willie off the pickle boat," an expression from Cavanaugh's old neighborhood (a man can modernize only so much). The reporter had quoted a recruit as saying Cavanaugh told him something that didn't jive with what Cavanaugh said he actually told the kid.

Two or three times in his career, Cavanaugh knew an opposing coach was violating a major NCAA rule, so he called the coach to tell him. One coach, unaware of the rule violation, was appreciative. Another, according to Cavanaugh, broke a rule by taking a recruit to lunch off campus during a quiet period. This coach snapped back when Cavanaugh called.

"You worry about your stuff and let me worry about my stuff," the coach said.

"Oh, I will," Cavanaugh said. "Trust me."

***

It's not that he worries. Just that he seems to obsess over order -- getting things right, keeping them straight. "I don't do anything happenstance," he said.

Start in his office. Look in the corner at the three boxes labeled "kicking," "out of state" and "in state." They are filled with recruits' highlight DVDs. In his desk drawer is a typed phone list for the coaches at all 88 schools he recruits, divided by district. (He also recruits the Peninsula and Fredericksburg.)

He keeps a sheet of paper for every player he recruits. On it he jots notes about the kid, including his parents' and siblings' names. (Recruit the mom, he always tells Tech graduate assistants looking for advice.)

Cavanaugh's office and locker are so neat that colleagues mess with him by turning his phone to the side or changing the order of his shirts just because they know he'd notice. "He's anal," Tech defensive line coach Charley Wiles said.

Head out on the road. Watch Cavanaugh spend seven hours on a May evening breaking down defensive coverages with the staff at Douglas Freeman, which has never sent a player to Tech, just because coach Bob Brinkley told Cavanaugh he needed some tips.

Sit at the dinner table in Chapel Hill, N.C. Marvel at a black teenager named Alonzo wolfing down his dinner. Cavanaugh and his wife, Marsha, invited Alonzo -- who played football with their son, Ryan -- to live with them when they heard about his home life. Drugs and domestic abuse had ravaged it, Ryan said recently.

Some of Cavanaugh's colleagues at North Carolina questioned the decision. "We never wavered," Cavanaugh said. "We just did it. We thought it was the right thing to do." He treated Alonzo like his second son. Alonzo posed with the Cavanaughs for a family picture in Carolina's media guide.

But after a year and a half, Alonzo left -- in part, Ryan said, because his friends ridiculed him for living with a white family. Alonzo got in trouble with the law but later wrote the Cavanaughs a letter to thank them, Cavanaugh said.

"He knew he was better for being with us, and he knew we were right in dealing with him," Cavanaugh said. "So we felt better about that."

***

Cavanaugh's reputation precedes him everywhere now. His grandkids -- Ryan has two children, daughter Lauren has three -- refer to him by only one name: Coach.

Cavanaugh dotes on them, partly because he looks back on these 38 years and feels guilty about how often coaching pulled him away from his kids, though Ryan and Lauren used to love tagging along on recruiting trips.

Every June, the family reunites at Emerald Isle, N.C. "It's the one place I think Dad really relaxes," Lauren said. He builds sand castles with the grandkids and goofs around, just like he used to when a boy called the house for Lauren, only to hear Cavanaugh growl, "This is the butcher. What's your beef?"

The reunions offer a glimpse of a slower life that many 60-year-old men would love. But Cavanaugh isn't ready to retire. His health is good. He dropped 30 pounds since April by jogging and cutting back from 14 Diet Cokes a day to three. He wants to coach at least through next season, his 40th, and eventually go out with a winning year.

He swears he'll quit when he can't stand grinding through a trip he still enjoys, despite making it hundreds of times.

On six Fridays every fall, Cavanaugh spends all day recruiting at a school -- he's there when it opens at 7:30 a.m. -- and the evening splitting time between two games. Then he begins the three-and-a-half hour drive back to Blacksburg. He chugs up Afton Mountain, slicing through the fog and darkness, midnight creeping closer, alone with the sound of his radio and a reputation earned from all these miles.