Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 18, 1994 TAG: 9408180124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL STOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
These were the same lawns where I played backyard football on countless afternoons. These were the same driveways where we shot basketball almost every day after school.
Only they weren't the same. Police cruisers, electrical trucks and telephone repair workers blocked those roads Wednesday.
For hours, visitors were banned from this small Ridgeway neighborhood - my neighborhood.
"The tornado hit my neighborhood - not just my hometown, but the subdivision I grew up in." I must have repeated that phrase a hundred times to various friends and co-workers.
Sheffield Terrace was my home from age 5 until I came home from my first year of college. That's when my parents moved across town, but I'll always consider Ridgeway home.
Watching television Tuesday night, I noticed that the tornado watch included Henry County, but didn't give it a second thought.
My pulse raced Wednesday morning when an editor told me a tornado had hit near Martinsville. I quickly called up the wire-service story on my computer.
I gulped at the second paragraph that said it happened near Ridgeway. But when I saw it had hit Sheffield Terrace, I was stunned. Things like that just don't happen there.
The closest thing to a weather disaster I can recall was when a storm in April 1984 pelted Ridgeway with golfball-size hail that shattered the windshield of my mom's car and forced my dad to buy a new roof.
As I read the story, my sister called from her office outside Washington, D.C., where she had heard on the radio that a tornado hit Martinsville.
"Not Martinsville," I corrected her. "Ridgeway. Sheffield Terrace."
Sheffield Terrace was the last storm-torn area I saw Wednesday. I was excited, but apprehensive because some volunteers in other areas of the county told me that the subdivision was hit hard.
The photographer in the car with me didn't hear my sigh of relief when I saw that my old brick ranch house on the corner suffered no damage.
Two blocks away, it was a different story. There were no kids playing basketball. No bikes riding by. No backyard football.
Just destruction.
Much like Arlington Heights, another subdivision in Ridgeway hit by the tornado, there were downed power lines and hundreds of uprooted trees blocking the roads.
Only this was different. These faces, I recognized.
We were there for less than an hour, but that was enough time for me to see half a dozen families I knew. Some didn't know me at first, since I haven't lived there in five years, but it only took a quick introduction before they remembered. The experience left me feeling sort of empty.
Murray Anthony, a friend of my family's who lives in Ridgeway, put it best when he introduced me to one Sheffield family I didn't remember.
"You may not recognize this guy, but he used to live just over the hill," he said. "I don't think this is the way Michael wanted to come home."
MICHAEL STOWE is a Roanoke Times & World-News staff writer.
by CNB