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

DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993                   TAG: 9305230019
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THEY BOUGHT CONCRETE MEMORIES

There were concrete bird baths - a sea of bird baths.

Not to mention the Buddhas, angels, frogs, dwarves, benches, fountains, columns, St. Francises, swans, gnomes, Virgin Marys, cherubs, tables, kittens, puppys, bluebirds and redbirds, lawn jockeys (actually grooms), flower pots and boxes, mushrooms, turtles, dragons, Little Miss Muffets, Tom Sawyers and candles, as well as assorted abstract Madonnas and other forms.

Today, they're mostly gone, no longer glorifying the yard at Shenandoah Avenue and 22nd Street Northwest.

Joyce and Charles Stinnett are selling off the business most recently known as Shenandoah Concrete and Lawn Ornaments.

The business inventory went Saturday. The house and other personal property will be auctioned Thursday.

Joyce Stinnett's stepfather, J.R. "Bob" Atkins, started the sideline business in the 1940s when he was working for the old American Viscose Corp.

After he was laid off there, the business became his livelihood, Stinnett said.

Atkins kept up the heavy work of pouring and lifting the concrete forms until about a decade ago, when the Stinnetts began taking over.

Atkins' wife, Rancine, also worked in the business, doing the fine finishing work - smoothing up seams from the molds and filling in irregularities in the concrete surfaces. She - and Joyce Stinnett later - also applied "antiquing" finishes to many of the forms to give them an aged copper or bronze look.

Atkins died at age 92 in November, two years to the month after his wife died.

The Stinnetts said they have always had all the business they could handle, and now they want to settle into retirement at their Smith Mountain Lake home.

Saturday, almost 100 registered bidders showed up for an auction of the remaining pieces on the small corner lot.

They came from as far away as Williamsburg, and they came to bid.

While some items went at bargain prices, others actually fetched more at auction than the retail prices listed on them.

A fancy pillar cap, for instance, that was marked $60, got a high bid of $100.

The hundreds of molds for the ornaments were sold as a lot for $11,000 to Sidney Floyd Jr., of Kenbridge in Southside Virginia.

Floyd said he's had a lot of success selling such ornaments at his business, Al's Farm, Lawn and Garden Center.

A friend with some experience in the field will help him expand into the manufacturing process.

Joyce Stinnett, a retired nurse, was hard-pressed to come up with a count of all the molded items. "It's a slew," maybe 1,500 different styles.

She's kept a few items as memorials to her mother and stepfather, as have her two grown daughters.

But her memories of the place won't just be stored in the cold, hard concrete imitations of life.

Stinnett dug up some of the flower bulbs her mother had planted all over the property.

Rancine Atkins "loved her flowers. There was something in bloom all the time."

Now some of those blooms will be opening up each year at Stinnett's Smith Mountain Lake home.

"Those really mean a lot to me."