ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 29, 1995 TAG: 9512290077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
NOTE: below
IT'S PROBABLY A REACH to call it incisive commentary. Maybe it's just an oral fixation.
Lexington and Rockbridge County have earned nationwide attention in the past week. People from New Orleans to San Diego are talking about this small Virginia community.
What could it be? A sensational crime? An inspirational story of human courage? A stunning discovery by researchers at one of Lexington's two colleges?
No, nothing like that. It's those stupid toothbrushes.
Last week, somebody stuck 53 red toothbrushes in the front lawn of the Rockbridge County Courthouse in Lexington. The two evenly spaced rows ran along Lexington's Main Street and then turned to follow both sides of the walk leading to the main entrance.
This shocking tale of dental-hygiene instruments gone mad somehow caught the interest of the nation's news operations.
The mighty Washington Post, which once helped bring down a president, ran the story.
So did the New Orleans Times-Picayune, an appropriately named newspaper considering the subject matter (Webster's says picayune means "anything trivial").
The Tulsa (Oklahoma) World included it in a column titled "What in the World?"
The San Diego Union-Tribune mentioned Rockbridge County in the same breath - well in the same column - with Boy George, Martha Stewart and the 133rd anniversary of the sinking of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.
Rockbridge Circuit Court clerk Bruce Patterson was in church Sunday when somebody "hollered across the aisle" that the story had been on National Public Radio earlier that morning. He also heard from folks who'd seen it on CNN.
"I guess that was our 15 minutes of fame and glory," he said. "It was fun while it lasted."
The interest probably has something to do with the weirdness and mystery surrounding the display. Patterson said it may also have something to do with the fact that the Christmas season is a slow news time.
Will this fame create a tourism boom for Lexington and Rockbridge?
"Yeah, people are just pulling up in their RVs from Iowa - hundreds of them," Doug Harwood, editor of Rockbridge Advocate magazine, joked. "They're blocking Main Street."
Patterson and Harwood, who were quoted in The Associated Press version of the story transmitted across the nation, still haven't come up with an explanation for who put the toothbrushes there or why.
Patterson suspected some of the folks over at the local jail - one place that might have a large number of identical used toothbrushes on hand. "But they're denying any association," he said.
Some people thought it might have been the work of practical jokers at Washington and Lee University or Virginia Military Institute. But no evidence has surfaced to support that theory other than a general suspicion that college kids are always doing something crazy like kidnapping rival schools' animal mascots.
More than 30 Roanoke Times readers called or wrote the newspaper to voice their theories about the toothbrushes. They found the time to do it despite the strain and stress of the holiday season (or perhaps because of it).
Various explanations included a communication from space aliens, landing beacons for Santa Claus and a message about bad breath on the part of certain county officials.
One woman called in without leaving her name and simply said, "I think the toothbrushes are stupid."
Fair enough.
Barry Fitzgerald, a Roanoke native who was home for the holidays from Key West, Fla., responded to them in a different spirit. He called and offered this theory: "The toothbrushes are obviously a rather derivative piece of conceptual art similar to Christo's umbrellas to the sea, but done on a much smaller budget."
Reached Thursday at his home in Florida, Fitzgerald said he'd been telling the toothbrush story to lots of his friends in Key West. "Everybody thinks it's a riot," he said.
One friend even expanded on Fitzgerald's conceptual art theory. He said it must have been done by an artist named "Perry O'Donnell."
Will this periodontal mystery ever be solved?
Advocate editor Doug Harwood believes there's only one way to crack the case of the red toothbrushes: "I think if we're really serious about getting to the bottom of this we'd DNA-test them. Who knows? They might be O.J.'s. We need Marcia Clark here to get to the bottom of this."
Patterson left the toothbrushes in the ground for a week as a sort of holiday observance. On Tuesday, he went ahead and pulled them all up.
"They're here in a shoebox on a shelf if Doug wants to come and have them tested," Patterson said. "Maybe we'll put them out again next year."
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File/1995. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee livedby CNBhere, but Lexington's claim to fame now is the toothbrushes left on
the lawn of the courthouse. color.