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

DATE: MONDAY, March 20, 1995                   TAG: 9503200004
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

& NOW THIS

Salem's Logan Furniture is out of business, but Bob Logan isn't out of furniture. He'll still go antique hunting as he has done for many years; he just won't have a full-fledged furniture store in which to display his finds.

Competition had gotten stiffer, but Logan, 69, said he and his wife, Shirley, still were "making a decent living," selling mostly upscale furniture, which has been their specialty for many years.

"We decided to close while we felt good enough to quit," Logan said of the store, which opened 16 years ago.

"I'm going to keep my hands in antiques part-time," he said. "I like to go up in Pennsylvania and root around."

Minding their peas and cukes

Bill Wood, who runs Wood's Ace Hardware on Grandin Road Southwest in Roanoke, has his own economic indicator: gardening.

"I don't know if it's the interest rates or what," he says, but he's noticed a big surge of first-time gardeners this year who have come to his store for plants, seeds and, most important, advice.

"Fifty percent of them," he says, "don't know the difference between a pea seed and a grain of corn."

'C' for citizenship?

Politicians often are asked to accomplish the impossible.

Such was the case last Monday, when Roanoke City Council found itself on the receiving end of a petition from a group of third-graders.

The issue? Smoking in restaurants. They want it banned.

The message was carried to council by Councilman Mac McCadden, who that morning had spoken to a class at Fairview Elementary School. He was invited there by teacher Mercedes James.

"They want to know why we allow people to smoke in restaurants," McCadden told council, holding up the petition.

One person who probably didn't sign that petition was James.

"Knowing their teacher, a personal friend of mine, and the avid smoker she is, she must have been absent today," cracked Councilwoman Linda Wyatt, who also is a city schoolteacher.

The kids probably will find out that council can do little to prohibit smoking in public.

It's pre-empted by a state law - pushed by tobacco companies - that the General Assembly enacted in 1990.

"[Cities] can't do anything that's not already in effect at the state level," said Page Sutherland, a Richmond-based lobbyist for tobacco company Phillip Morris.

The current state law requires restaurants with a seating capacity of 50 or more people to have a designated no-smoking area sufficient to meet customer demand. However, the exact size of the area is left up to a restaurant owner.