Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508140005
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was an obvious idea: Come fall, you can't swing a corn dog in Western Virginia without running into a swarming mass of people hawking decorative flags, homemade potholders and apple butter.
Now, don't tell anybody this, but I can do without all the stroller-colliding and elbow-bumping. What I like best about the Roanoke Valley isn't that it has big manufactured events like Festival in the Park.
What I like most is the fact that you can wake up Saturday morning, sling your hair in a ponytail and drive down to Roanoke City Market, where there's a real festival going on - no crowd-control necessary - every single week.
That may explain why city planners from all over the country have come to our farmers' market to take notes, but few have managed to replicate its flavor.
It's like the best pot of soup you threw together that one time - you can't remember what all went into it. And you couldn't produce it again if you had to.
The City Market is a success precisely because it hasn't been manufactured. Since the 1870s, when farmers first started hauling cabbages down Bent Mountain by ox cart, the market's developed at a simmer - not out of some city planner's notes, but out of real people's dreams.
It is why some people move to Roanoke for a few years and never leave.
Because Pam, who works at Sumdat Farms, can tell you everything from how to can tomatoes to how to braise shiitake mushrooms.Because your buddy David once built an entire garden out of plants from the Walter's Greenhouse booth - in a shameless attempt to court a woman worker there - during ``The Summer of the Herb Lady's Daughter.''
Because of the old man who plays harmonica and guitar while thumping his feet, collecting quarters in a jar.
Because of the white-haired frame-maker, Mr. Chittum, who says things like: ``This peach here sure is pretty, but it's not as beautiful as you.''
Because hot dogs from the Roanoke Wiener Stand - after nearly 80 years of business - smell better than they taste.
Because Cappy at Brother's Bakery will ask to see a picture of your son, every single time.
Because those kids working at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea can be so charming, so interesting and so downright rude.
The City Market is Roanoke's soul - its past and its future. A collection of the old-timey and the off-beat. Your grandmother's musty attic and your skateboarding niece's closet.
Big enough to see perfect strangers, small enough to run into your best friend.
It's not mallish. It's not Charlotte.
It's not crafty-touristy. It's not Asheville.
It's what makes Roanoke Roanoke. It's real.
\ OK, so you've moved here recently and you've done the market. Now you're thinking: Well ... What else?
And who stuck that giant neon star up there?
Here, let's take a tour. We'll start off with Salem, my old stomping grounds (motto: ``Get it straight: We ain't Roanoke'').
First we'll go to downtown Main Street, where the antiques shops flourish and you still can get the best drugstore chocolate malt in the world at Brooks-Byrd Pharmacy - skim-milk lovers beware.
What makes Salem different from Roanoke? you ask.
Here's one thing: Buddy Reynolds.
Buddy's a barbecue maven and an independent contractor - Salem born and bred. The last time I saw him, his arm was in a cast - broken by a fall he took from a roof onto a concrete pad.
``Landed on my head and bounced three feet in the air,'' was how he put it.
Ask Buddy how he escaped without concussion, and he says it simply: ``Old Salem head.''
That's Salem in a nutshell.
Now, let's head over to the other side of Roanoke, to Vinton.
If Salem is football and antiques stores and chocolate malts, Vinton can be characterized by these three qualities: Big Lots, a gourmet restaurant called Georjoe's that is wedged into the side of a gas station, and iron skillets full of gravy at The Dogwood Restaurant.
Buy a head of radicchio at the Vinton Kroger, and you're liable to throw the clerk into a tizzy.
And that's OK. Everyone in the checkout line would laugh at you anyway.
Want to check out the pulse of Vinton?
Do what one hometown boy, Del. Dick Cranwell, does: Sop up some biscuits and gravy at The Dogwood Restaurant, where the wall decor is NASCAR and so is the topic of conversation.
You can only imagine the uproar a certain NASCAR-impaired newspaper writer stirred up at the Dogwood when she called driver Darrell Waltrip by his lesser-known name: Darrell Walker. It took them months to let me - I mean, her - cross back into town limits.
Let's get out of Vinton now before we gain any more weight. And let's stop by Miniature Graceland on Southeast Roanoke's Riverland Drive.
Here, in Kim Epperly's side lawn, is the most poignant and painstaking tribute to The King you'll see anywhere - from Barbie dolls drooling at the singer's feet at the Roanoke Civic Center, circa-1972, to an exact replica of Elvis's modest birthplace in Tupelo, Miss., front-porch swing and all.
Tour buses making the pilgrimage to the real Graceland in Memphis go out of their way to stop at the dwarf version in Roanoke. A native Roanoker recently saw slides of Mini-Graceland in her graduate art history class - at Indiana University.
And last winter, when vandals dared to deface the beloved civic icon, volunteers turned up in droves to get Mini-Graceland back on its feet.
Even if you don't love him tender, Mini-Graceland usually impresses the heck out of out-of-town visitors - especially at Christmas, when it's lit up to the hilt (and so is every third house in Roanoke).
Like the City Market, Mini-Graceland is homespun, small-scale and real. If it was the actual Graceland, it wouldn't work.
What we civic hand-wringers need to realize is, that's OK.
In fact, that's a plus.
\ Fourth of July 1995: A cookout in our neighbor's backyard that starts mid-afternoon and lasts until well after the last sparkler flares. Kids running all over the place - drinking from the garden hose, spilling chocolate ice cream on white T-shirts, sharing juice boxes and runny noses.
I don't know about your neighborhood, but my little corner of Wasena is a cross between ``Ozzie and Harriet'' and ``Friends.'' People actually sing on their front porches, mow each other's lawns, keep up with the fact that Frank's in the hospital with chest pains and Miss Woddy's there, too, getting her foot fixed.
A few years ago, Parenting magazine rated Roanoke the No. 1 spot in the country to raise kids. That pretty much nails it.
Single people gripe till they're green about Roanoke's lack of nightlife. I did it myself - until I met my husband one night, at a David Bromberg concert ... in a bar.
In fact, a lot of people gripe about Roanoke. It's part of our community culture, griping.
You can't pick up the Sunday newspaper without finding at least one exploration of Roanoke's inferiority complex:
Too much inter-municipality bickering. Not enough diversity.
Not enough jobs, not enough growth.
Too many rednecks. Too many deadheads/ravers/(insert fringe group here).
Nothing to do - we need a Banana Republic, a better dance spot. We don't even have a Thai restaurant, fer-crying-out-loud.
Quit complaining, and consider these points:
In Roanoke, almost every murder makes the front page of a section.
On any given obituary page, at least half of the people have a nickname listed in quotes.
Shawsville mystery writer Sharon McCrumb was asked by her New York editor where she comes up with the far-out plots that fuel her books. Her response: ``A subscription to The Roanoke Times can be very useful.''
You can tell by the paper alone that we're not Greenwich Village or Branson, Mo. But we're not Hayseed, Ohio, either, and we're definitely not Charlotte (puh-lease, enough already about Charlotte!).
We're a teeny little bit of all of them, and yet we're completely unto ourselves.
If you need proof of that, just look up to the world's largest neon star. It was erected in 1949, a Chamber of Commerce ploy to get Christmas shoppers in the cash-spending spirit. Organizers intended it to be temporary.
But like the City Market and Mini-Graceland, it warmed Roanokers' hearts.
Not only did it stick, it thrived.
You may laugh at it now, newcomers. You may even call it tacky.
But just you wait. The Star will grow on you, and not like a fungus.
You may even find yourself choosing a house - solely for the fact that your little boy can see it from his bedroom window.
And you will come to use the Star in your nightly ritual, somewhere between teeth-brushing and your fourth consecutive reading of ``Goodnight, Moon.'' You will point to it and say it out loud: ``LOOK, THERE'S THE STAR!''
And when it's foggy out, you will marvel at the way the Star seems to sit there, elevated in the night.
Like the rest of us, you will be hooked.
by CNB