Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 21, 1993 TAG: 9306210085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's no joke.
The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority has created a flier that touts the train and landfill as a state-of-the-art waste disposal system that is the first of its kind in the nation.
The Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau likes the flier and plans to include it in promotional packets.
The new system will include a transfer station in Roanoke and a tipper station at the landfill. Both buildings will resemble old railroad stations. They also will serve as community centers.
The flier urges conventioneers to tour the facilities while they are in the valley.
A real gender bender
Most of the recent big\ embezzlement cases in the Roanoke Valley have involved women.
The federal government suspects Martinsville banker Susan Stone of embezzling upwards of $1.5 million from a trust account client. Two women at Roanoke's Total Action Against Poverty have been indicted on charges of taking $1,600 from the agency. A secretary at the Harrison Museum of African American Culture pleaded guilty in May to taking $42,000 from the museum. In 1990, Roanoke bank teller Cheryl Benson Perry was found to have embezzled $2.5 million from Charter Federal bank.
Back in 1956, in Virginia's largest ever bank embezzlement, Minnie Mangum was sentenced to 20 years for embezzling nearly $3 million from a Norfolk savings and loan.
But the FBI's Uniform Crime Report shows that men are more prolific embezzlers than women. In 1991, 10,602 people were arrested for embezzlement. Of those, 61 percent were men.
Wolf watch
It was February when we last tuned into the love life of a pair of\ red wolves at the Explore Park in Roanoke County.
She was fresh off a flight from a zoo in Tacoma, Wash., a frightened 2-year-old. He was from Wheeling, W.Va., a stud in the truest sense.
Hopes were high. They would mate, conceive and - somewhere around Memorial Day - produce some wolf pups. It would be a big success for the endangered-species breeding program at Explore.
The wolves may have mated, but there are no pups. Breeding season is long past, and the wolf's handlers will fall back on the Bell old baseball adage: Wait till next year.
Wedding bells
One of the Roanoke Valley's most prominent eligible bachelors soon won't be.
State Sen.\ Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, recently became engaged.
His bride-to-be:\ Laura Kilgore, a communications student at Hollins College.
Bell and Kilgore, who's from Roanoke, met last year when she took time off from school to work on Bob Goodlatte's campaign for Congress.
The wedding probably will be in June 1994.
Whither Hegira House?
The battle may not be over for a group of Northwest Roanoke residents that just said no to plans to relocate a drug-treatment home on\ Andrews Road.
Last week, the residents won a two-year legal fight when the Virginia Supreme Court reversed a decision by the city's Board of Zoning Appeals to allow the move.
But attorneys said the ruling may not stop the home from re-entering a dispute that pits Andrews Road residents concerned about crime against\ Hegira House administrators who want a bigger home.
If the Board reconsiders the variance request, it could grant approval in a way the Supreme Court would not oppose.
But\ Henry Altice, director of the Second Street drug-treatment home, said other locations are also under consideration. "Nothing has been ruled in or out," he said.
Open and shut case
Cameras in the courtroom got an unexpected use last week at a murder trial in Roanoke County Circuit Court.
It turned out that some witnesses waiting to testify at the Nancy Lee Campbell trial got a sneak preview of the action inside the courtroom via a closed-circuit TV monitor.
Judge G.O. Clemens called a recess when he learned that several witnesses had wandered down the hallway to a media access room and - through an open door - peeked at a TV monitor of the trial proceedings.
Broadcast journalists seated in the room were wearing headphones and did not realize immediately that the witnesses were looking over their shoulders.
Clemens let the trial continue after the witnesses said they had not heard the audio. But the judge advised broadcast journalists to keep the door shut.
"Learn something every day," Clemens said. "We'll have to see it doesn't happen again."
by CNB