Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 27, 1993 TAG: 9301270009
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
LIKE TOURISM, TAPE RUSHES PAST US
Once again Roanoke stares at its morning-after image in the mirror and winces. We have stared the morning after Dominion Bank's dismantling and the morning after Gardner-Denver and the morning after Grumman and the morning after Blue Ridge Transfer.Now we face the morning after Sears Telecatalog and its 1,200 jobs.
Ours has become a calendar of mornings after, none cheery.
Now, tradition dictates, come the public expressions of angst, followed by hope, capped finally with the conviction that tourism can offset the loss.
We'll blather about the Roanoke Valley's blessed location between Interstate 81 and the Blue Ridge Parkway, though ours remains the easiest city in the country to unwittingly drive past.
But there is hope with a cassette tape recorded for I-81 motorists who are sick of listening to commercial radio's drivel.
Ride With Me tapes are sold for travelers to listen to while driving, giving them some inkling about the sights and places they're driving past.
We can assume that the target market for these tapes is not truckers, cocaine haulers or middle-level managers late for a meeting. The target market is the leisurely traveler, the gentle wanderer.
To wit, the potential tourist.
Masterminded by Bob Magee, a former personnel director for the Central Intelligence Agency, the tapes are smoothly narrated by Grover Gardner, an actor from Washington, D.C.
On them, you can hear for 30 minutes of the rich historic charms of Lexington on the Shenandoah Valley tape.
You can hear, too, for a minute about Buchanan (Bee-you-CANNON) and its pivotal commercial role prior to the Civil War.
There are a couple of minutes of precious tape devoted to the Appalachian Trail's crossing U.S. 220 at Troutville amid a pizza shop, an Exxon station and a novelty shop.
Motorists then hear about the genesis of road numbers in America (all north-south interstates have odd numbers, all east-west highways are even-numbered).
Smoothly, the monologue segues into the significance of three-digit interstate numbers (spurs and beltways), which of course leads us to I-581, which leads us to Roanoke, which prompts narrator Gardner to clear up the traveler's confusion between Roanoke and the Lost Colony of the same name off the North Carolina mainland.
Which leads us, of course, to two minutes devoted entirely to:
John Moomaw's frantic ride to Lexington to lure the railroad to Big Lick, and
The Hotel Roanoke, the first place in town to have a sewer line, and its swoon into the arms of Virginia Tech, "which, as I speak, is still pondering what to do with this fine old symbol of a grander age."
The tape then skips forward to Virginia Tech and a recitation of its vaunted athletic triumphs.
In a 120-minute narration of the 323-mile drive on I-81 from Winchester to Bristol, Roanoke merits two minutes.
This is hardly the authoritative guide for tourists, nor is it intended to be.
But its message is clear: If, in the grim grip of yet another morning after, Roanoke grasps again at the tourism straw, we know that our problems are very big.