Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 23, 1994 TAG: 9411230092
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Donlan Piedmont is most probably one of these people, and he has written a book about the old hotel on the hill above the railroad tracks that dates back to its establishment before the turn of the century. A time when Roanoke knew steam whistles; when steam and passengers were part of American railroading, and trains meant romance as well as grime and cinders.
Piedmont is qualified to write such a book because the hotel has places in his memory - and those of a girl named Dorathy Brown, who is shown in the book to be suitably lovely in her wedding gown.
In 1953, Piedmont and Dorathy Brown had their first date in the hotel's Fountain Room - a feature of the hotel that bloomed and then died like so many others in its long history.
A year later, Donlan and Dorathy Piedmont held their wedding reception in the Pine Room - currently the dusty office of the contractor who is converting the hotel into a part of a very fancy conference center being developed by Virginia Tech and the city of Roanoke.
In July of 1989, Norfolk Southern Corp. announced it was giving the financially failing hotel to Virginia Tech.
No more fancy, nostalgic German Club dances there, but a revival of the old hotel nevertheless.
The title of the book speaks of the good times: ``Peanut Soup and Spoonbread: An Informal History of the Hotel Roanoke.''
Spoonbread may not have been invented at the Hotel Roanoke, but, by God, peanut soup was. Anybody who cares about such things knows that Chef Fred Brown gave the world Hotel Roanoke's peanut soup. Piedmont has included the recipe in his book.
There is going to be a strong temptation to call Piedmont's 140-page work a coffee table book. Indeed, it looks like quite like one. There are pictures that document the hotel's history - including the dreadful day in 1898 when it caught fire on the hill above the tracks.
But there are great stories in there. They are told skillfully and well by Piedmont - some of them, perhaps, unheard of by even the most nostalgic of Hotel Roanoke people.
There is the lovely story of Ava Scott, a Roanoke school teacher who retired and moved to Florida but never forgot the charm of the English-style hotel on the hill above the trains.
Ava Scott directed in her will that she be cremated and her ashes scattered on the hotel grounds. Her daughter contacted Janet Jenkins, then the hotel manager, and it was done.
While the daughter and a minister scattered Ava Scott's ashes around a magnolia tree on the grounds, Jenkins eulogized her in the hotel's Parlor D - where politicians often gathered for less inspiring reasons.
Piedmont, now retired as public relations manager for the Norfolk Southern Corp. - an organization that retains the memory of the old Norfolk and Western Railway under which the hotel operated for years - admitted that sentiment had a lot to do with writing the book.
The railroad offices were just across North Jefferson Street from the hotel then.
``In the railroad days,'' he said, ``I could look out the window and there it was.'' That, and the considerable matter of that first date in the Fountain Room more than 40 years ago.
In writing the book, Piedmont depended on the ``recollections from a number of people'' - employees, hotel managers and people who had been in love with the hotel for similar reasons.
Piedmont found a theme in these interviews - years after the fire, after the Fountain Room was no more, after all of the Miss Virginia contestants posed out front wearing discreet one-piece bathing suits, after steam and whistles and cinders.
People who remembered, he said, had ``absolute and undiluted affection for the place and for each other.'' They showed ``the affection they had for this place generation after generation.''
Piedmont was asked to write the book by the Virginia Tech Real Estate Foundation. ``Like a fool, I said yes,'' Piedmont said. Still, he said, ``It gave me great pleasure.''
It was a pleasure to write about how some Roanokers were given an astonishing introduction to a seven-course meal and to fiddleheads - a fern that was said to taste like beans, but did not as far as some diners were concerned.
This was in 1967, when six of Virginia's former governors came to the hotel to be honored in what a public-relations man called ``a six-pack of governors.''
The six were: William M. Tuck, Colgate Darden, Albertis Harrison, J. Lindsay Almond Jr., John S. Battle and Thomas B. Stanley. Sitting Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr. was there, too.
There is a picture in the book. All of them, at that time, were inventions of the Democratic political organization of U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. - an organization that then lay dying. Years later, Godwin would win another term - this time as a Republican.
At the head table that night was the Rev. Noel Taylor, a grandson of slaves and a Republican, who would become one of Roanoke's more memorable mayors.
And there was the sad, yet somehow triumphant, final banquet in November of 1989, attended by Roanoke's elite because invitations had to be limited to 600. The dancing stopped at 11 p.m. and then the doors of the hotel as the dancers had known it were locked.
Piedmont deals with the non-sentimental as well - the employee strike in the 1980s, and that cold December day in 1989 when the auction of the hotel's furnishings began - not including the portrait of Robert Edward Lee that hung in the lobby.
Piedmont said he found some bitterness about the sale of all those memories.
He quotes Bob Garland, former city councilman and lifelong Republican. Garland left the hotel. ``I could not watch as they disassembled and undressed her,'' he told Piedmont.
Another disgruntled witness said it was ``a rather tawdry garage sale.''
But the Pine Room and Peacock Alley will survive the renovation, and the hotel will still retain that English look there above the tracks that don't carry passengers anymore.
``It's kind of a monument,'' Piedmont said in an interview. ``Sentiment carved in brick.''
``Peanut Soup and Spoonbread: An Informal History of the Hotel Roanoke,'' by Donlan Piedmont. Beginning the first week of December, the book will be available at Ram's Head Book Shop; Books Strings & Things; Printer's Ink and the Roanoke Valley History Museum shop. The price is $19.95.
by CNB