Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 9, 1993 TAG: 9304090106
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SOMEBODY IN HILL CITY IS ALL WET
A few shorties for you to chew on:Some of Ed Watts's friends shook their heads the day they read here about Tracy Overstreet Spangler's tangle with the Lynchburg Water Department. Tracy's state income tax refund was short $33.41 because Lynchburg was pinching a piece of her money. The Water Department believed she owed more than $450 for using, but not paying for, water in 1988.
Tracy was 16, living with her parents in Roanoke that year. She'd never been to Lynchburg until she had to go clear this up. Lynchburg's collection sleuths got the wrong Tracy Overstreet Spangler.
Ed Watts's friends mentioned the item to him and he went home to Moneta and opened his mail. Missing from his income tax refund was $148.
Reason? You guessed it. The Lynchburg Water Department's long arm was once again pickpocketing the wrong suspect.
"I haven't lived in Lynchburg in 40 years," complained Watts.
If your tax check comes up short and you haven't had anything to do with Lynchburg water or have never even been to the Hill City, call 804-847-1470. That's the city's Collections Department.
\ Trout-fishing season opened in 1968 during the first week of April. It'd been kind of dry that year, and the district forester in Salem urged anglers to act wisely as they waited for the rod to bend.
He suggested fishermen should throw their cigarette butts and cigar stubs into creeks or rivers to avoid forest fires.
Here we are, just 25 years later, and smoking probably will be banned along trout streams before much longer.
\ Last year's Roanoke Valley telephone book had 28 pages of customer-service pages as prologue to 215 pages of residential listings.
The new 1993-94 phone books are out, with 38 pages of riveting phone-company consumer updates before 217 pages of residential listings.
The Yellow Pages grew by two pages.
The final tally: Two pages more of home phone numbers. Two pages more of businesses. Ten pages more of regulations.
The phone book has become a microcosm of American life - tiny advances smothered by avalanches of rules.
\ And finally, as one of the leading trademark outlaws in Western Virginia, I owe an apology again, this time to the Day-Glo Color Corp. of Cleveland.
In February, I described Scooch's, a Williamson Road bar and restaurant uniquely painted a startling green, as Day-Glo succotash.
Not good enough.
Day-Glo is a trademark, and comes now a letter from their vice president for marketing. He suggests "Day-Glo" fluorescent succotash.
I can't use that, of course, because the painters didn't use "Day-Glo" fluorescent succotash paint.
Let's call it Magic Marker Succotash. No, strike that.
Call it green. Really bright.