Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 28, 1990                   TAG: 9005280048
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: HOLIDAY 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHAMY'S OUT TO GET YOUR GOAT

It has been quite some time since this newspaper tackled the ever-thorny goat issue. We're human, too, and ever since the militant American Dairy Goat Association swept through Roanoke last fall, we have been goat-shy.

But there have been too many goat-related developments of late to ignore this issue of crushing social importance any longer.

And so, in a feature not found in most metropolitan daily newspapers, here is a goat update:

ITEM: Willie the Goat, frightened by a dog, escapes last week from Lee East's farm in the Mason's Knob area of Southwest Roanoke County. Billy, his chum, stays put. Willie is gone for three days, disappeared into the great Nubian Nowhere, somewhere in the mountainside thicket at the edge of the East homestead.

Thursday, "I was out talking to Billy and I heard a `baaah,' " said East. "I knew it wasn't him, and sure enough, I looked around back and there was Willie."

Willie the Goat, home, where he belonged.

Same week, Northeast Roanoke. Eugene the Goat escapes from Joanie Martin's Ridgefield Street home. Eugene, a pygmy goat, is gone for five days.

A passer-by spots the goat-on-the-lam and captures Eugene. He calls Joanie Martin. Martin and Eugene are reunited.

The kicker - Eugene comes home the same day as Willie.

Sure, it's a strange coincidence. We're talking goats.

ITEM: The U.S. Postal Service, always eager to improve service and raise rates, sends out a questionnaire to rural Botetourt County residents asking about package-delivery service.

Question 6 from that questionnaire:

"Do you have hazards - dogs, goats, etc.?"

ITEM: In Floyd County, a 4-H club recently chooses in a hotly contested vote to change its name from the 4-H Goat Club to the 4-H Goat Patrol.

ITEM: Countryside & Small Stock Journal, a magazine, angrily decried Roanoke's treatment of the American Dairy Goat Association in an issue earlier this year.

One problem was the Hotel Roanoke's refusal to permit goats in the ballroom, the first time a hotel was brazen enough to refuse livestock equal access to a ballroom, according to the magazine.

Another problem was a column (or two) that I wrote about goat folk.

"Anyone who found anything funny about it - regardless of how they feel about goats - has a serious problem," someone wrote in the magazine. The article had no byline.

ITEM: The goat association has moved its 1990 convention to California, as far from Roanoke as possible. You're welcome. It took no small amount of grief to make the Roanoke Valley once again safe from large-scale goat assaults.

ITEM: As Congress haggles over the upcoming 1990 farm bill, one struggle has emerged over dairy-goat research funding. One heavyweight is U.S. Rep. Kika de la Garza, D-Texas, who wants Prairie View A&M to be the nation's leading goat-research institution.

Upstart Langston University in Oklahoma has other ideas and challenges Prairie View's historic supremacy.

At stake: $100,000 in annual funding.

Stay tuned.