GIVE YOU A SCHLANGER FOR A TOTA

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

DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993                   TAG: 9304110034
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: D-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
GIVE YOU A SCHLANGER FOR A TOTA
During last week's gala Frank Tota send-off, hordes of human smidgens regaled the Roanoke school chief with trinkets.
Students sang and performed skits, mimicked Tota and offered testimonials to ensure that when he leaves his job here after a dozen years Tota will remember the people whose lives he touched.
Perhaps the most significant gift of all was a life-sized cutout of Frank Tota.
There are people in Washington, D.C., who pocket significant salaries with life-sized cutouts. Tourists pay to have their photographs snapped next to the scale models of Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ronald Reagan.
While the market for photos with a Frank Tota cutout might be a bit soft right now, there lurks here a real potential.
Life-sized cutouts of popular or notorious Roanoke Valley figures could be the newest wrinkle on the trading card front. There are baseball, football, basketball and hockey cards. There are race-car cards, serial-killer cards, Andy-Griffith cards, Iran-Contra cards and dog cards.
The card market may be near saturation, but the cutout trade is blooming.
"Hey, kids! Collect the whole set! The rich, the famous, the powerful and the disgraced of Western Virginia! Swap 'em with your friends!"
Each card is a lifelike, to-scale replica of the genuine article.
Written on the back side - not the backside - of each cutout would be some career statistics and one chatty bit of trivia about the "player's" career on the local scene.
Frank Tota. Born: Hoboken, N.J.; Married, two children; Superintendent, Roanoke public schools, 1981-1993. Frank took a piece of Roanoke with him when he left for the top school post in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. - a $35,000 annual retirement bonus!
The Tota card will fetch two Elmer Hodges on the open market, though the Hodge card back side quip will be coveted by collectors: Elmer reigned as Roanoke County administrator as the county committed to millions of dollars in public-works projects. To save nickels and dimes, he withheld basic benefits - pensions, health insurance, vacation - from a dozen county employees by considering their 40-hour work-weeks as temporary assignments!
Most valuable now would be Joel Schlanger rookie cutouts; pre-Explore Bern Ewerts; and Mike Kavanagh cutouts depicting the former Roanoke County sheriff in full uniform. (Mike got really mad once when pranksters put a plywood cow cutout on the roof of his office!)
Bob Herbert and Lee Eddy cutouts would be large, but not as big as the George Lynch stand-up: "George could have garnered Roanoke some much-needed publicity when he led the University of North Carolina to the NCAA basketball championship in 1993. But do you think he mentioned his hometown once on national television? Nooo."
One George Lynch would be worth nine Warner Dalhouses: "Before disappearing from view, Warner presided over a pretty big local business."
And a single Dalhouse would bring three Jens Soerings: "Wherever he is, he's still maintaining his innocence." Which could be the same inscription as the Dennis West card.
You'd need 45 Dennis West cards to get a Tota.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB