Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 23, 1994 TAG: 9412230123
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Would that I were buzzing to the islands right now, provided I could find a flight-worthy aircraft out of Roanoke, by no means a foregone conclusion.
So since I'm not going anywhere except into a holding-pattern orbit around the shopping mall, I would like to convey seasons greetings to one and all and suggest some gift ideas.
Not that I'm in any position to be bestowing these presents myself. Caught up in the Republican takeover of Capitol Hill and the Richmond statehouse, the taxpayers who dwell at the Cox mansion have wielded the budgetary ax with the vigor of Vikings on steroids.
But as many people who known me personally or have followed my work over the years can tell you, I'm an expert at dispensing advice to those who don't seek it.
So if anybody out there still needs to pick up some last-minute items before the retailing world as we know it shuts down for good on Saturday afternoon, some suggestions:
Blacksburg High's Bill Brown Stadium needs a new press box. They went and spent a ton of money for a new concession stand and toilet facility big as a bus station. Of course, that's great if you're interested in a nutritious buffet of popcorn, hot dogs and Super Bubble or you need a place to straighten your cravat. But what good would that do if the press box topples off its feeble moorings and into the customers below, sending you and your entire family to your destiny in the Great Beyond?
As a matter of fact, they might as well go ahead and build a whole new stadium and be done with it. The whole tottering structure is going to collapse like a house of soggy cards any day now.
Somebody please give Christiansburg High a new basketball floor. Apparently, nobody told the locals over there that they play ice hockey in Roanoke. Christiansburg never had a chance at hockey (the town's citizens aren't sufficiently bloodthirsty). Still, they maintain this multiuse floor (slick enough to do figure eights on, flat enough on which to play hoops ) in the apparent hope that they'll be granted an East Coast Hockey League expansion franchise.
Let me be the first to break the news to you: It ain't going to happen. So go ahead and give those poor Christiansburg High kids who have to run around in their underwear while bouncing a ball in front of an audience a new floor to play on.
And how about giving something else to the bored youth of Montgomery County? Take that entire, monstrous parking lot that runs along Virginia 114 at the New River Valley Mall and turn it into a skateboarding arena. Now that they've blacktopped what once was a verdant little pastoral scene, they might as well get some use out of it. Heaven knows, you don't need 17 zillion parking spaces for a joint that services about 24 customers on a good day.
Here it is the height of the Christmas shopping season and as I gaze out at our magnificent mall from the luxurious penthouse offices of the bureau of this newspaper, it looks like an abandoned mausoleum surrounded by an oil slick. Imagine that vast black wasteland populated with skateboarders. Better there than on 114, where one crazed kid on wheels almost ran me off the road the other day.
Montgomery County isn't the only place that needs capital improvement. I've been on them at Giles High to get rid of that fraud of a baseball diamond for years. They don't want to listen, though. The last time I brought this subject up, somebody suggested a necktie party with me as the guest of honor. In all honesty, that would be a gentler fate than that the baseball coach's wife had in mind for me the last time we chatted on the subject.
Journalists don't take some sort of oath like doctors and judges (the kind of oaths many of my colleagues utter aren't fit for mixed company), but we do have a certain frayed sense of honor. As such, I can't really respect a fellow who puffs up his chest like a Myrtle Beach blowfish after he taps a ``home run'' over a 100-foot fence. So to the good people of Giles, I say this: Build a new baseball field or take up croquet.
Down in Pulaski, they have to do something about that municipal rubble heap they call Calfee Park. Forget putting another professional baseball team in there. Not even the Pittsburgh Pirates were interested. As we know, the Pirates have spectacularly low standards when it comes to minor league facilities. After all, they put up with that Salem slum called Municipal Field all those years.
No, the Pittsburghers hanker after Huntington these days. Anybody who'd want to take up residence in that monument to humidity clearly suffers from taking one too many beanballs to the temple. But the Pirates won't be denied. Now all they have to do is sell the major league franchise so they can afford gas money to West Virginia.
Which brings us back to Pulaski. Now that we've written off all hope for baseball, we could turn Calfee into a UFO landing pad. A spaced-out idea, you say? Haven't you been watching "The X- Files"? Besides, why should Wytheville have all the fun? They way I hear it, the skies down there are so dark with flying saucers that it looks like LaGuardia at rush hour. Folks in Pulaski need something to do between the high school football playoffs and the opening of August practice.
So there. After this, I'll have community boosters and politicians from six localities ready to roast me at the stake. What do I care? To borrow a line from the patron saint of poison pens, Jim Murray, they're the ultimate in un-civil servants.
Merry Christmas to you too dudes and hold the matches and barbecue sauce. There's a better way to get rid of me.
You could fly me to the Caribbean.
Ray Cox is a Roanoke Times & World-News sportswriter.
by CNB