Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030110
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IMMIE JOURNETTE drives down 10th Street Northwest all the time, but she doesn't glance over at Shadeland Avenue, her old street.
"I never look at where my house was. I never look that way."
Her mother, Yellow Cab driver Dorothy Blair Brown, drowned there during the flood that put the entire street two stories deep in water.
Brown, 59, lived in a nearby apartment and dropped by 919 Shadeland Ave. often to check on her daughter and teen-age grandkids.
"She came to see about us every day," Journette says. "That's the way my mom was."
That Monday, Nov. 4, 1985, Journette was at work at Sidney's, a Roanoke women's clothing chain. The kids were gone, too.
Water from swollen Lick Run rose so fast on Shadeland that residents who'd waded in, thinking they could save somebody or something, became trapped in water over their heads. The force turned Journette's refrigerator and washing machine upside down.
It swept Brown's taxi to the end of the street, sandwiching it between two cars.
Journette figures her mother drowned trying to save Fluffy, Journette's mixed poodle, who was in the back yard. Brown's body was found at the back door.
"It was the best dog," Journette said. "I haven't had a dog since."
She has her mother's rings and other jewelry packed away. "I don't ever bother it," she said. "You don't want to think about it."
The city bought Journette's house and all the rest on Shadeland. Hers was moved to another part of Northwest Roanoke, but she hasn't been to see it and probably never will even though she still lives in that part of town.
Robert Lewis may have had the grimmest duty of anybody in the 1985 flood.
He's the one who went inside his house on Shadeland Avenue and found his mother's body. Then he went across the street and found Dorothy Brown, who also drowned that terrible Monday.
Lewis' relatives in Newport News, Tennessee and Washington, D.C., haven't heard from him since the funeral for his 72-year-old mother, Hazel Atkins Robertson. Other former drivers for Greyhound Bus Lines don't know where he is, either, but they think he moved away. Many Greyhound drivers lost their jobs after a bitter strike a few years ago.
A newspaper story from 10 years ago said creek waters hadn't seemed so threatening that Monday morning when Lewis left his mother and 19-year-old daughter, Stephanie, at home to drive another daughter to work and pick up a prescription for his mother.
When he got back, Lewis couldn't get his car anywhere near the house. He tried to swim in, but the current was too swift. He spent hours in a helpless panic. Somebody had seen Stephanie, but Lewis couldn't find her, and his hopes were even dimmer for his mother. She needed a walker to get around.
Finally, as he waited at a friend's house that evening, Stephanie walked in. As Lewis told a reporter back then, "We just held onto each other for a long time."
Stephanie had told her grandmother to climb up on the bed before Stephanie ran for help. But within seconds after she left the house, Stephanie was clinging to tree limbs normally high off the ground and listening to her grandmother's cries for help. A neighbor eventually rescued Stephanie in a boat.
That Monday night, Lewis forced his way into his wrecked home and found his mother dead, next to her bed. Then he found Brown under debris at the back door across the street.
Lewis' aunts say he should call sometime. They want to know how he is.
Edith Day rarely talks about the flood that killed her mother.
"It makes me very nervous, even 10 years later," she said. "It makes my heart just pound."
Day and her husband, Raymond, searched all that Monday, Nov. 4, 1985, for Annie "Pearl" Jordon.
They fought their way through flood waters to her house near Peters Creek Road. They grabbed Jordon's dog, J.R., as he floated in a chair in the flooded interior. Jordon's pocketbook sat atop her piano, but the 68-year-old Jordon wasn't there.
After a long search for an unflooded road, the Days finally reached their house in Summerdean Heights. Still no sign of Jordon.
It had been less than a year since heart attacks killed Day's brother and her father. She was scared to death she'd lose her mother, too.
At 5:30 the next morning, men came to tell Day that her mother had drowned many hours before. She had driven her late husband's old white pickup across a flooded Tinker Creek bridge near the Days' house. "She was trying to get to me," Day concluded.
Jordon, who'd lived on a Craig County farm before moving to Roanoke, was washed downstream in her truck. Though rescuers could see her inside the cab, the raging current wouldn't let them anywhere near her.
Day heard later that a police officer had closed off one end of the bridge at Clearwater Avenue Northwest, but was called away in the pandemonium before he could barricade the other end. Jordon couldn't see what she driving into.
The one thing Day figures people can learn from her story is to make plans for calamities like this. Set a place - and stick to it - where family members can meet, such as the grocery store where Day and Jordon always said they'd go.
"Like with Mama," she said, "if she'd gone to Kroger and waited in the parking lot until we could get to her. ... But she just decided she didn't have her insulin and she had to get to me."
Every time it rains more than a couple of days, Edith Day still walks the floor.
by CNB