Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 19, 1993 TAG: 9306190096
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
The meeting is at 9 a.m. Tuesday at the New Renaissance restaurant. It is the latest in a series of efforts that have turned Main Street and surrounding parts of downtown from empty business buildings to new enterprises gradually filling the spaces.
The efforts are being led by the Pulaski Main Street program, which has been headed for the past eight months by Roscoe Cox, who thought he moved to Pulaski to retire.
Cox, 70, was hired as the program's part-time executive director but has been working more than full time to bring antiques, art and music businesses and restaurants to Pulaski and then to advertise them properly.
It must be working.
"We're selling to local people as well as out-of-town people," said Jeanette Stephens of Main Street Galleries, which recently opened.
The businesses are working with Claytor Lake State Park and New River Cruise Co. to have them give out brochures on what is now available for visitors to downtown Pulaski. Likewise, the businesses help promote the park and cruise boat.
"We're doing for them what they're doing for us, so this is a joint effort," Stephens said. "We're just getting out a lot of literature in the New River Valley as well as up and down the interstate. We have advertised in different magazines in Greensboro [N.C.], Richmond and Washington, D.C."
She said ads in two issues of Midatlantic Antiques Monthly, distributed free to antique dealers in the region, have brought in 77 written responses.
Cox has approached Town Council about providing $19,000 in federal Urban Development Action Grant funds for ads and promotion of downtown Pulaski.
The advertising money would be part of $51,000 now included in the town's proposed 1993-94 budget for Main Street. A final version of the budget will be adopted at a special council meeting June 29.
One obvious believer in the program is Wade Lephew of NationsBank in Pulaski.
Lephew, a bank vice president who is also economic development chairman for Main Street, won a Leadership Excellence in Neighborhood Development award from NationsBank, which includes a $1,000 bank donation to a charity of his choice.
He picked the Main Street program.
More promotion will happen July 3 when Pulaski Main Street presents a music festival in the Kenneth J. Dobson Stadium at Pulaski County High School featuring Blood, Sweat & Tears, with David Clayton Thomas, Clarence "Strokin' " Carter, The Impressions, Power Force, Face to Face, and Don & the Deltones.
Tickets are $18 in advance and $20 at the gate.
by CNB