Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502080004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The poll asked some of those again this year, too.
But it also asked a lot of questions about not just what we think, but how we live.
For starters, when you have visitors from out of town, where do you take them?
For technical reasons too complicated to explain here, the poll couldn't handle open-ended questions. So this isn't a "Top 10'' list. Instead, the pollsters picked 12 places in and around the Roanoke Valley to ask about. Some are the obvious ones that likely would turn up in a Top 10 list - the parkway, the star and so forth. Others were intended to be, well, fun.
Were they ever.
But we'll get to that later.
First, let's get the serious number-crunching part of the poll out of the way.
Think of a poll as the statistical equivalent of your grandma's casseroles. There's what's on the outside and then there's what's inside. The crust may make the dish look like one thing, but what's inside may be quite another. Often, it's the filling that's more appetizing, unless, of course, it's her cauliflower surprise.
Same here: The poll seems to show that there are some places that just about everybody seems to take visitors:
73 percent say they take their guests to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
69 percent say they show them the Mill Mountain Star.
It's hard to argue with numbers like that.
Except, when you stick a fork in them, it turns out those attractions don't quite have the universal appeal we may think they do.
We don't want to say that the parkway and the star are exactly hoity-toity. But the poll does show that people with more education and more income are more likely to visit them than are folks with less schooling and smaller paychecks.
Case in point: 91 percent of those who have a college education say they've taken visitors to the parkway; only 55 percent of those who dropped out of high school say they have.
Or the star: 81 percent of those making $40,000 or more per year have taken their out-of-town guests to the star. But only 52 percent of those making less than $10,000 say they've taken visitors there.
Turns out, our most popular tourist attractions are heavily weighted toward the educated and the affluent.
Maybe that's simply a function of money: Poor folks don't have the cash to travel around a lot.
There may be some other class differences at work, too. The poll asked about where we take visitors from out-of-town. John Keyser, interim director of the Roanoke College center that conducted the poll, suggests that the affluent may also be more mobile - and thus more likely to have family connections out of town.
Class isn't the only factor at play, though. Age makes a difference. We like to think of downtown Roanoke as everybody's neighborhood. That may be true for those over 30; most of those age 30 or older take their visitors to the City Market. Most of those under age 30 don't.
Fact is, just about all of the tourist attractions we looked at had some marked demographic imbalances.
Except one.
The one attraction that draws a true cross-section of society, the one place where old and young, rich and poor, college graduates and high school drop-outs meet in almost equal numbers?
It's down at the end of Lonely Street ...
Riverland Road Southeast, actually.
Miniature Graceland - the elaborate outdoor model of Elvis Presley's mansion that's been lovingly built and maintained over the years by the No.1 Elvis fan this side of Memphis, Kim Epperly - may not be the biggest tourist attraction in the Roanoke Valley.
But it may be the one with the most consistent appeal across all demographic groups.
Epperly's not surprised.
"I think Mini-Graceland is for all ages," she says. "It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor, you're all the same. Elvis was just a special person. All walks of life like to see the way he lived."
Even the mayor of the Star City confesses that Miniature Graceland is one of the places he regularly takes his out-of-town guests. Why? Why not? Miniature Graceland says something about the soul of Roanoke, David Bowers believes. "There's a good sense of humor in the people of Roanoke. Life is serious enough, and it's important to have some levity in life."
Bowers, it seems, is practically an unofficial Miniature Graceland tour guide. He stopped by three times during the Christmas season. And that's not all.
"I even took a date there once," he says.
Love me tender, love me
true ...
So, Mr. Mayor, it seems we have a public policy issue here. Not your love life, how we spend our tax dollars.
If the Roanoke Valley wants to put itself on the map as a tourist attraction, just how should we be trying to do it? That seems to depend on the type of tourists we want to attract. Do we want to target a niche market of the educated and the affluent by promoting the parkway and our museums? Or do we want to try to appeal to everyone?
If so, maybe we should plunk down promotional dollars on Miniature Graceland. Heck, local governments help subsidize Center in the Square, Explore, the Transportation Museum, you name it. Maybe they should help underwrite this tourist draw, as well.
Bowers is too clever a politician to touch that one.
So is Epperly.
"No, no, I wouldn't know how to go about doing that," Epperly says.
Once, she says, she wanted to build a privacy fence so her neighbors wouldn't be blinded by the spotlights shining on Miniature Graceland. Epperly says she thought about going to some of the big hardware stores in the valley and asking them to donate sections of fence. In return, she'd put up a sign, "Courtesy
of ..."
But she never got up the gumption to ask. "I didn't know whether to do it or not, so I didn't."
Keywords:
ROANOKE VALLEY POLL
by CNB