Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 31, 1992 TAG: 9201310082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
JACK'S GONE, BUT RHINO WILL RETURN
Were it not for the rhino, the rooster's story would be too sad to tell.But they balance each other. We can tell both.
The rooster:
Jack Henry arrived one day, without announcement, at Frances Scott's back door. This might not be unusual but for Mrs. Scott's home being in a densely populated neighborhood of Northwest Roanoke. Wandering roosters are not generally a problem on Vancouver Lane.
Frances took Jack in, fed him chicken dumplings. Jack slept with the dogs, ate tomatoes off the vine, and from time to time he crowed.
That was his downfall.
Somebody in the neighborhood didn't like Jack's crowing.
The law was called in. Frances Scott heard that she could be fined and decided a better world waited for Jack Henry somewhere else.
She packed his bags and sent him on his way to a farm, somewhere out Smith Mountain Lake way.
He was the city rooster in the country. A harem of 20 hens was supplied to service Jack's every whim.
It seemed best for everyone involved.
Until a couple of months ago.
Word has just now drifted back that Jack Henry is no more.
This rooster may have crossed the interstate highway. He may have escaped and survived the wilds of the city - the traffic, the cats and dogs, the hungry citizens.
Jack Henry retired to the solitude of the country and there could not elude the fox's jaws or the owl's talons.
It fell to me to advise Frances Scott that Jack Henry was no more.
"That was some rooster," she said. "I kind of miss him still."
The rhino:
A couple of weeks ago the region's only one-eared, red-eyed rhinoceros was run down. He stood outside at the corner of U.S. 460 and Wheatland Road, just west of Bedford. He was chained to a pole.
A van creamed him. Really got that rhino good, laid him out in a few dozen pieces. The driver of the van wasn't seriously hurt. He would have been if the angry mobs had got a hold of him.
People in Bedford County take their rhinoceroses seriously, and with good reason. Decent people have got to draw a line somewhere. A rhino is as good a place as any.
Danny Johnson, who owned the rhino, vowed to get it back on its feet, even if it meant months of therapy or all of Johnson's skills as a craftsman.
The world drew a horrified gasp. Johnson is not a very good artist.
A little chicken wire here, a fiberglass mesh there, and Johnson could make a rhino look like a demented spaghetti squash.
Mark Cline intervened. He drove from Natural Bridge, his home, to Bedford and loaded the mortally wounded rhino into his pickup truck.
Cline is a fiberglass wizard. He built the world's biggest little apple, which shines proudly over Johnson's store in Thaxton.
"I built a triceratops once and people thought it was a rhino," says Cline. "This rhino I didn't build, but everybody thinks it's a triceratops. I guess I can fix it."
Jack Henry is dead. Long live the rhino.