John Holland was a man you had to be careful not to misjudge.

The first thing you’d miss if you’d just met him and judged by his looks and his demeanor was the size of his bank account. He sometimes came across, in the words of a 1999 profile in the Virginian-Pilot, as “the last of the cowboys” and “a wild man.” He ran a landfill in Suffolk, where he kept an office in a shabby trailer that smelled of cigarettes and staleness. There were often beat-up old bikes sitting outside the trailer, saved from being buried with the rest of the garbage dumped at the site.

There was something irrepressible about the man, something that seemed to refuse the modern conventions of wealth. He didn’t dress the part, and he didn’t talk the part. He was widely known as someone willing to roll up his sleeves and get a little dirty, something that’s hard to avoid at a landfill.

Yet John C. Holland Enterprises, his landfill and real estate company, had been very successful through the years, allowing him to spend millions of dollars to restore the historic Oak Ridge Estate, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and to be a partner in one of the largest private companies devoted to restoring wetlands in the nation.

To much of the public here in Hampton Roads, John Holland was the gruff-talking, somewhat intimidating character who stood up to the Southeastern Public Service Authority and lost, or the one who stood up to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and lost. In each case, he could have backed down and saved a lot of money. But it was Mr. Holland’s nature to stand up for what he believed in.

In Suffolk, that meant that he often fought against SPSA, which he considered an unfair competitor in the landfill business. But it also meant that he supported — with little or no fanfare — some major charitable causes in the city. For more than 20 years, Mr. Holland helped Driver Volunteer Fire Department with emergency funds. And the Cheer Fund, administered by this newspaper, has received tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from him, meaning thousands of children around the city received toys at Christmas because of Mr. Holland’s generosity.

Mr. Holland was one of those people who cut a wide path in life. But the luckiest of those people who crossed that path were the ones who got to know him well enough to see the kind and generous man behind all the bluster. He will be greatly missed.