ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 7, 1996 TAG: 9603070067
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
SOURCE: BETH MACY
The bylaws of this Ladies Auxiliary club: There are none.
Its mission, in the words of founder Shelia Rose Dooley: ``To have beers, talk and gossip.'' Oh yeah, and to plant flowers.
Funding for materials: A $400 line item on Roanoke County's budget.
Conflicts among the 13-women membership: arguments over fertilizers, weed-killers, pre-emergents, and who's going to climb on top of the truck to prune the big tree.
Also: Who's going to buy the beer later.
Shelia Rose Dooley is the unofficial president of the Coffee Pot Ladies Auxiliary - the group responsible for planting and maintaining the Brambleton Avenue Triangle, the flower garden in the road just north of Cave Spring Corners.
If she and the other ladies aren't exactly who you had pictured out there digging in the dirt - not quite the embodiment of Laura Ashley flouncing among the perennials - well, get over it.
``The auxiliary is a joke,'' Dooley says.
The joke dates back so far that Dooley can't remember when the phrase was coined. ``I've been going to the Coffee Pot since I was 18, back when you could drink 3.2 beer,'' the 48-year-old says.
Shelia Rose and ``the girls,'' as everyone calls them, formed the auxiliary during midnight excursions from the Coffee Pot to other bars across town. ``When we'd do that, we'd say we were going out for a Coffee Pot Ladies Auxiliary Club meeting,'' she recalls. ``This is back in the wild days.
``Course, you can't do that today. They'll lock you up.''
Gardening was added to the group's daytime - i.e., sober - activities sometime later. A zoning inspector approached Dooley at the county's building permit office, where she works as a clerk. The triangle's current volunteers were giving it up, he told her. Would the auxiliary be willing to take over?
Dooley approached the girls at The Pot during their next Friday-night meeting. ``They'd had a few beers,'' she recalls. ``They thought it was a keen idea.... We had to go to the county and the Brambleton Merchants Association, who used to fund us, and say how we wanted to give something back to the community.
``I remember one of the bank managers in the group, he just rolled his eyes.''
Nonetheless, the idea took.
And like crabgrass, each spring and summer it spread.
Now a fancy sign identifies the Coffee Pot Ladies Auxiliary as the triangle's caretaker. Last year the group was recognized officially with a resolution and a plaque at a planning commission meeting.
Members have been recruited from the nearby Brambleton Deli. And occasionally passersby even donate flowers - the triangle's irises were a gift from retired Roanoke Times reporter Jerrie Atkin, who died last year.
In recent years, the auxiliary has confined its weekly meetings to the Coffee Pot rather than bar-hop across town.
``The law's gotten a lot tougher, and you get older, but we still go there and hold our meetings and talk and gossip,'' Shelia Rose says.
Occasionally, the ladies even discuss gardening.
``But mostly we just go out to the triangle with the plants, stand there scratching our heads and say, `Now where are we gonna put this stuff?'''
After all these years, you could say the group has become as addicted to gardening as it is to beer and gossip.
``I don't know if it's making us any healthier, but it gets us outside,'' Shelia Rose says.
Coffee Pot owner Carroll Bell is proud of the auxiliary's work.
``A lot of people look at the Coffee Pot and people who come here as people who would not be responsible or give back to the community,'' he says. ``It's a shame so many people wanna throw a label on people and places.''
But in a grand comeuppance, Bell's getting ready to do some labeling of his own. On March 20, he goes to Richmond to pick up The Coffee Pot's official National Historic Landmark designation.
One of the few continuously operating roadhouses still in existence, Roanoke's 60-year-old log-cabin bar will not only have its own garden club. It's also gaining historic prestige.
Now there's something worth noting in the Auxiliary Club minutes.
If only there were such a thing.
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Members of the Coffee Pot Ladies Auxiliary gather atby CNBtheir "clubhouse": (From left, back) Bobbye Behrens, Deborah
Harrington, Diane Bogard, Judy Jennings; (From left, front) Jan
Killgore, Sharon Theede, Donna Hensley, Shelia Rose Dooley, Lydia
Aldrich and Diann Bateman. (Not pictured: Susie Spiers, Emalee Hall,
Peggy McIlhany and Lynn Webb.). color. Graphic: Robert Lunsford.
color.