ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260005
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: N-7 EDITION: METRO
10 years ago (1986)
Sept. 4: Roanoke City Councilman James Harvey says he'll recommend that City Council consider a moratorium on rezoning for new shopping centers for two or three years. "I really feel like this is overkill," he says. His concern arises from a proposed new center on U.S. 220 that has been approved by the city Planning Commission.
Sept. 20: The Elmwood Park amphitheater is the scene for "Rock Against Racism," an all-day concert protesting Ku Klux Klan rallies in Christiansburg and Radford. "This is not a hate rally for them [KKK] or anybody else. Although the Klan has the right to say what they feel, we feel that we have the right to say in our own way that they're wasting their time," says Billy Foster, a concert organizer.
Sept. 24: Frank Fox, president of Mountain Park Inc., owner of Salem's Lakeside Amusement Park, announces the park will close permanently Oct. 19 because "it is no longer economically feasible to run the type of park we want to run." Lakeside has been a major Salem attraction since 1920.
25 years ago (1971)
Sept. 3: Since 1921, Bill McDaniel has worked at Dixie Caverns. He's shoveled clay, carried rocks, crawled through tunnels on his stomach, and been a tour guide. He married his first wife in the caverns. "I didn't know what I was getting into when I started out here," he says of his cave career. "I thought I'd stay on for two or three weeks back when I was 17, but I got started and sort of took ahold and stayed with it."
Sept. 14: Roanoke Memorial Hospital is developing a cardiac hemodynamic laboratory that will provide the Roanoke Valley with highly sophisticated diagnostic techniques. Until now, Southwest Virginia residents could obtain heart catheterization diagnoses only at university medical centers.
Sept. 23: "This mayor is not going to sign anything anymore with Roanoke city. The [Town] Council will have to authorize someone else to do it," Vinton Mayor Gus Nicks tells the Vinton Chamber of Commerce board of directors. The board had approved a resolution opposing any contract with Roanoke for valleywide sewage treatment, a reference to a State Water Control Board directive that valley localities come together on an agreement.
Sept. 27: The Gay Alliance, an organization seeking new legal and social attitudes toward homosexuality, has been created in the Roanoke Valley. The group will seek to decriminalize all kinds of sexual activity among consenting adults, and end what it sees as discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace and concerted police harassment.
Sept. 30: The American Theatre, Roanoke's principal film palace since 1928, closes. Civic centers, television and the suburbs have cut into its audience. "Wings," the Academy Award winning silent film of 1927, is the theater's final offering. Other films that have played there include "Gone with the Wind," "Ben Hur," "The Graduate," and "The Ten Commandments." The Jefferson Theatre now is Roanoke's sole downtown movie house.
50 years ago (1946)
Sept. 8: Roanoker Bob Gleason, formerly a combat infantry lieutenant with the 47th Infantry Division, helped guard the Nazi defendants before the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Rudolf Hess, he feels, was "broken, tired, pale and not the physical man he once was." Herman Goering seemed the only one "able to take it."
Sept. 10: The Roanoke, Williamson Road, Salem and Bedford Life Saving Crews each furnish one iron lung for use in a polio epidemic currently raging in Des Moines, Iowa. The lungs are flown to the stricken area. Richmond supplies two other lungs.
Sept. 15: Roanoke resident Ernest Lawrence recently participated in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini atoll in the Pacific, representing the O.D. Kelly Co., manufacturer of lead boxes that protected photographic equipment used to record the tests. Describing his reaction, Lawrence says, "As I began to realize that 'it was all over,' boy, I'm tellin' you, I was really relieved!"
Sept. 18: Commonwealth's Attorney C.E. Cuddy declares that no state law or local ordinance exists to prevent football ticket scalping. Cuddy believes that scalping won't intensify in Roanoke this fall, if it does exist. Police Capt. H. Clay Ferguson had received a complaint that someone was selling tickets to games above admission prices.
- MELVIN E. MATTHEWS JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 78 linesby CNB