Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 7, 1995 TAG: 9501090036
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHLEEN WILSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``Here comes someone with more money than brains,'' commented one customer peering out the window while eating at Macado's in Salem on Thursday night.
In walked Brandon Bourne, who found the comment amusing.
He was wearing a pair of shorts. White shorts.
Was Bourne, 18, aware of just how cold it was outside?
``I'd guess it's probably about 12'' degrees, he said.
Light winds had the wind chill hovering near zero.
You'd think that indelible memories of last winter - with ice storms that at one point left more than 200,000 homes without heat, light, water and telephone; the Roanoke Regional Airport canceling all 54 outgoing flights one day for the first time in a decade; and the battle-weary workers who spent months cleaning up the aftermath - would have shaken folks up a bit.
That with the issuing of the first winter weather advisory of the season, they'd be climbing all over one another to buy shovels and ice and antifreeze. That Kroger would be its usual bedlam on a day the sky and the National Weather Service threatened a 70 percent chance of freezing rain mixed with sleet and snow.
Bourne, a Roanoke native, just shrugged.
``I think how cold you feel is all mental,'' he explained of his anti-winter attire.
Could it be that we've become as stoic as New Englanders about winter? That we've adopted a more laissez-faire attitude? That we're acting not like Southerners, but more like - gulp! - Yankees, now that we know Mother Nature probably can't serve up anything worse than what we weathered last year?
Friday morning, the 17-degree temperature didn't send Betty Yopp of Roanoke into a tailspin to get to the grocery store to stock up before the predicted precipitation started.
``This is an every-week thing,'' she said as she sat in a chair to have her hair done at Bettye's Beauty World in Vinton. ``If I can get here, I get here.''
Bettye Ridgeway had just finished up Dot Tanner's hair.
``I've been coming here every week for 25 years,'' Tanner said. ``And as long as I can drive in it, I get here.''
Although Tanner has lived in Roanoke all of her life, she changed her attitude about Southern doomsday panic at the approach of snow after her daughter moved to Connecticut.
``Up north, they are so prepared,'' she said. ``I'm not worried about the storm. I figure [officials] have to have learned something from last year. They'll be more prepared.''
In Connecticut, she adds, ``they don't go crazy and close the schools just because they hear it's going to snow.''
``Cave Spring Christian, Montgomery County, Botetourt County...,'' listed a radio announcer just minutes later.
All closing two hours early. Or one hour early.
One school was closing in 30 minutes.
Neither Tanner nor Yopp had any plans to break land-speed records to make it to Kroger.
In fact, they had no plans to hit the grocery store at all.
``I already went the first of the month,'' Yopp said, ``just like I do every month.''
That's the day her Social Security check arrives.
On Main Street in Salem, 76-year-old Dandridge Hurdle stood outside St. Paul's Episcopal Church, sweeping away stray leaves and the needles that had dropped from the two Christmas wreaths still hanging on the church's doors.
It was 26 degrees, yet Hurdle wore only a cardigan - an unbuttoned cardigan, at that.
``If I'd known it was that cold, I wouldn't have gone out,'' he admitted. ``But it didn't feel that bad.''
Didn't he recall the bitter cold and ice of last winter?
``Sure I do. I stayed in the house,'' he said.
Hurdle, a church volunteer, had a mighty powerful parka somewhere inside the church, but didn't want to take the time to put it on.
Besides, he said, he wasn't outside all that long, adopting 18-year-old Bourne's ``it's all mental'' theory.
In the zero-degree wind chill Thursday night, Bourne wasn't the only one with a devil-may-care attitude toward the cold.
Todd Walters of Roanoke was strolling into Macado's with the top four buttons of his shirt open.
Where was his coat?
``It's in the car.''
But why wasn't he wearing his coat from the parking lot to the restaurant?
``Because I'll be hot once I get inside.''
Only David Smith seemed to have a reasonable explanation for his ability to hang around outside and answer a reporter's questions in bitter cold temperatures.
He moved here two years ago from Alaska. Temperatures there this time of year could well be 75 degrees below.
``This feels like summer,'' he said. ``We'd be going swimming in weather like this.''
by CNB