Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 23, 1993 TAG: 9303230007
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PUPIL ASSIGNS ROCKET MISSION
Not counting the exhibits' evacuation, the former Roanoke Transportation Museum building stood virtually untouched for a long time after the 1985 flood.The museum and its stuff fled to Norfolk Avenue. Left behind in Wasena Park were the museum building and a 67-foot-tall Jupiter rocketship. The rocket's been there for 28 years, given to the city by the U.S. Air Force.
Its nose cone peeks over the edge of the Wasena Bridge. Goofballs like me can childishly refer to the span as "the rocketship bridge," and everyone in Roanoke knows exactly where we mean.
Every now and then, rumors circulate about the Wasena rocketship being moved, as if mankind could accomplish what flooding rivers and high winds could not.
Stan Brosky, once the director of the Virginia Museum of Transportation - with the move downtown came a name change - used to covet the rocket. He wanted to wait until the city built a new bridge across the railroad tracks at Second Street, turn Norfolk Avenue into a pedestrian mall and use the rocket as a centerpiece.
Brosky has since moved to Louisiana, the Second Street bridge is still just a glint in a draftsman's eye and the rocketship bridge at Wasena is still the rocketship bridge.
The rocketship works that way. People, time and events come and go. The ship stands, rock-like. When you're as tall as an extra-point kick is long and weigh as much as 10 Nissans, you stick around as long as you want.
Like a generation of Roanokers before him, Hunter Elliott is growing up with the rocketship as part of his daily visual diet. The Mill Mountain Star, the city skyline, the St. Andrews church spires, the rocketship - together they blend into a landscape of familiarity that many of us shuttle to some forgotten cubbyhole of our minds.
Hunter is a sixth-grader at Lucy Addison Magnet Middle School. His freckled, rosy-cheeked face belies Hunter's special mind.
He is a political conservative, Hunter, and he enjoys - or seems to enjoy - spouting the kind of pointed rhetoric about homeless people and big government that would seem more natural on talk radio.
Hunter suggested at school that the Wasena rocketship would be a more appropriate knickknack outside Addison - which specializes in aerospace - than it is in Wasena Park, which specializes in lone men in cars cruising for sex.
Louise Castleman, who works in the Addison office, made a few calls on Hunter's behalf since Hunter doesn't have access to a phone while he is in school all day. Thank heavens - that Castleman made the calls, I mean.
Turns out the city parks department would love to part with the rocketship. The old museum is envisioned now as a nature center, and while that is still years from reality, no one can much figure a link between nature and a Jupiter rocket. A similar Jupiter rocket lobbed a pair of monkeys into space in 1959, but that's an awfully weak link for a Roanoke nature center.
And so, at the suggestion of Hunter Elliott via Louise Castleman via the parks department, the transportation museum has said it would part with its rocketship if Addison really wants it.
If Addison really wants it, it will probably have to pay a very big crane to move it.
This was Hunter's great idea. Does he have any financing ideas?
"Are you familiar with child labor laws?" he asks, deadpan.
The Wasena rocketship may move across town. Then again, it may stay exactly where it's been since 1965. It all depends on the money. What doesn't?