Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 15, 1994 TAG: 9410170043
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DRAPER LENGTH: Medium
The caller wanted to make reservations at their old two-story white frame bed and breakfast for the president of the Republic of Benin and his party.
"Just off the top of my mind, I thought she had made a mistake, you know, and was calling The Homestead inn at Hot Springs," Taylor said.
No, said the caller, it was indeed the bed and breakfast on Claytor Lake in Pulaski County where she wanted rooms through the weekend for the presidential party and a group of Secret Service escorts.
Taylor said the five guest rooms already were booked for a wedding party Friday and Saturday. But the representative still wanted all the rooms at the inn for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
It was hard to head off inquiries by curious callers about who was staying at the bed and breakfast, Don Taylor said Friday. But the Secret Service had told the couple that anyone driving down the long gravel road to the property those three days would be turned away or charged with trespassing.
"I was dying to say something to Momma," Judy Taylor said. She called her mother in Pulaski as soon as President Nicephore Soglo and his entourage pulled out Friday at noon.
Soglo became president of Benin, a nation slightly larger than Tennessee, in 1991. Before that, he had lived in Washington, D.C., for eight years as president of the World Bank.
The Taylors rarely saw him or his wife, Rosine, who took two upstairs guest rooms as a suite.
"Every morning at 6:30, he was doing some kind of dance," Don said, judging from the sounds they heard from below.
Soglo and his wife came down only for escorted outings (to Valley View Mall in Roanoke on Wednesday and Factory Merchants Mall at Fort Chiswell on Thursday) and for the breakfast they ordered - cornflakes, hot milk and a fruit bowl - which they ate privately. Their staff went grocery shopping and took over the Taylors' kitchen to prepare other meals.
"He took a walk on the New River Trail every morning, along with his Secret Service," Judy Taylor said. "We weren't allowed to sit and have a normal conversation. ... They wanted a quiet getaway, nothing close to a city, where they could be left alone, more or less."
The Secret Service jumped to the same conclusion that Taylor had. It sent advance people to The Homestead at Hot Springs. One stayed there for two days before he learned it was the wrong place.
Representatives of the presidential group arrived at the Claytor Lake facility Sunday night to check it out, and the Secret Service did the same thing Monday. It set up a command post in a downstairs bedroom.
"There were usually six agents here in that room at all times," Judy Taylor said. "And that's not counting the ones they had on the grounds that I don't know about."
Her husband overheard radio alerts to agents inside whenever a vehicle would approach, from an outside man he never saw.
"You don't know if he's a tree, in a tree, or what," he said. "You see all this stuff on TV, the FBI and the Secret Service. Well, a lot of what you see on TV is the way it is in reality."
The Taylors have had guests from other countries, but this was their first foreign leader. They were told that their establishment was recommended for the visit.
"But they wouldn't say where from," Don Taylor said.
by CNB