Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995                   TAG: 9501310078
SECTION: STREET BY STREET                    PAGE: 9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

THE LOSS STILL STINGS

Beulah Dennis was in one of the new houses, a small ranch at 334 Madison Ave. N.W. She is still there.

Dennis, 83, was one of the first black clerks at the Heironimus department store downtown. She ran the elevator at first, then the kitchen. She remembers that she was wearing a brown plaid dress the day a co-worker suggested she apply to be a sales clerk. She got the job. It was 1963, the early days of Roanoke's desegregation.

She lived most of her life at 9 McDowell Ave. N.W. in Gainsboro, with her mother and her sister, Edna. She has snapshots of the neat white wood-frame house with green trim and a glider on the porch. "It was our castle."

She said a white man with the housing authority arranged to buy her old house, tear it down and get her the new one. "He was the nicest thing."

The authority worked it so neighbors on McDowell still were neighbors in the new houses on Madison, so Dennis' next-door neighbor from the old days still is next door. Their old block was demolished.

Dennis still marvels at having central air and central heat. When Heironimus had a sale about the time she moved, she acquired a new couch and a framed still-life print of flowers. The picture and the couch, upholstered with gold flowers on a beige background and still good as new, continue to be the centerpieces of her living room.

But her prize is the small white dogwood she brought as a sapling from her old yard on McDowell.