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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 5, 1995                   TAG: 9504060025
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A FEW LAST WORDS ABOUT THE HOTEL ROANOKE OPENING

Waugh is with the Roanoke Valley Preservation Society, and she had hoped to see a story in Sunday's paper on the Hotel Roanoke print the society is selling to offset costs of cleaning old murals at the hotel. A story about cleaning the murals was published last week.

The print was copied by Floyd artist Joan Henley from a painting in the hotel's Pine Room. Numbered prints are being sold by the preservation group to pay costs of restoring the Pine Room mural and several others in the hotel. Prints are $75 unframed and $150 framed. For information, call 989-0146.

Nothing has rejuvenated the Roanoke marketplace recently more than the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center, and someone was certain to be left out of the limelight shed by its opening Monday.

Waugh's group wasn't the only one disappointed. Bill Huffman probably had the same reaction. A story that staff writer Sarah Huntley wrote on Huffman and his work in maintenance at the hotel also didn't get into a special section on the reopening of the historic hotel and its new conference center mate.

Huffman, a native Roanoker and retired trainmaster for Norfolk & Western Railway, said when asked how he felt about being hired by the hotel:

"You mean right past 'Yahoo'? Extreme pleasure, and I guess a sense of fulfillment."

He has booked rooms for his mother-in-law's birthday at the end of April.

But since this column looks in on the marketplace, it is a fitting forum in which to dispel at least one rumor about the hotel and collect some odds and ends.

The rumor squelched: Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center is not a smoke-free facility, despite the story circulating in the smoke at a downtown Roanoke tobacconist.

The conference center is smoke-free, but the hotel has smoking and no-smoking rooms; the Regency Room has a smoking section; and smoking is allowed in the Pine Room Bar.

Now, the odds and ends:

Wanna pay for a pool? When the hotel renovation first was bid, costs came in more than $1 million over budget, so construction plans had to be scaled back to cut costs.

Among the changes, special ceiling moldings were deleted, and the indoor swimming pool became an outdoor pool.

Architect Richard Bartlett has a portfolio of the changes, with prices attached, in case someone wants to donate the cost of returning to original plans. If you want the pool covered, that'll cost about $200,000, please.

The name of the conference center is The Conference Center of Roanoke, although in conjunction with the hotel, it can be written as Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center.

Engraved bricks still are available. Kim Duncan Carico of the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission staff got 1,016 people to pay to have their names engraved on bricks used to pave the patio of the hotel's new Wells Avenue entrance, but she has several thousand more available. The cost has gone up, however, from $50 to $75. Contact Carico at 981-1170.

Kim Carico, by the way, no longer is Kim Duncan, which is how she was identified in the special newspaper section. She used to be Duncan before she married Kipp Carico.