ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 23, 1996 TAG: 9612230051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: & Now This
SOURCE: DAN CASEY, LESLIE TAYLOR, CHRISTINA NUCKOLS AND RICHARD FOSTER
A regulation Bowers bow
Mayor David Bowers gets called on to give a lot of speeches and cut plenty of ribbons. But probably the strangest request for service he's ever received was the urgent plea to rig a bow tie - for a corpse.
It happened earlier this year. Bowers says it's near the top of his list of "the most unusual occurrences of 1996.''
The request came from Oakey's Funeral Home, which is across the street from Bowers' Church Avenue law office.
Oakey's had a problem. A man had died, and his family requested the corpse be dressed in a bow tie. The trouble was, the person who knew how to tie the darn thing was off that day. Suddenly, somebody had a brainstorm.
He knew that Bowers sports a bow tie every now and then. So a worker ran across the street with the tie and asked the mayor to rig it.
It wasn't that easy, the mayor recalls. As anybody who has ever tried it knows, tying a tie for somebody else is an entirely different proposition from tying one on yourself. It's kind of like using a mirror to watch yourself jot something down.
Finally, however, the mayor got it fixed up, the employee took it back to the funeral home, and it was clipped to the corpse. The wake went off without a hitch.
Bowers says he never learned who the client was, but he won't forget the Oakey's worker's comment as he walked out the door: "You are for sure our full-service mayor."
- DAN CASEY
Bounty of bikes for boys and girls
Slam Duncan's final tally on the "Bikes or Bust" campaign: 1,511 bicycles.
The J-93 radio personality topped the goal he'd aimed for when he began a 100-hour broadcast from a trailer dangling 125 feet above a parking lot at Tanglewood Mall Dec. 12. He set out to raise 1,000 bicycles for the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve's Toys for Tots program by Monday, Dec.16.
"It was a tremendous event, and we couldn't have asked for a better response from the community," Duncan said. "We were worried about being able to get 1,000 bikes, and to actually get 500 more than 1,000 is really amazing."
Duncan and Staff Sgt. Steve Gardner - who coordinates the Toys for Tots program for the Marine Corps Reserve unit in Roanoke - lived in the fully equipped trailer for four days. The campaign drew statewide and national attention.
Morning talk show host Regis Philbin of "Live with Regis and Kathy Lee" called the first day of the broadcast. He and Duncan talked about their first bicycles. (Philbin's was a Schwinn.)
Duncan carried his broadcast two hours longer than the planned 10 a.m. Dec. 16 cutoff, just to thank contributors. A couple of hours after he went off the air at noon, a woman walked up to the trailer and donated $1,000 cash to buy more bicycles.
All 1,511 bicycles have been given to needy children through the Salvation Army Roanoke Corps.
Total value of the bikes? $135,990.
- LESLIE TAYLOR
Sweet smell of possibility
Some people who live near the old Rutrough Road landfill think it smells like rotten blueberries, but a North Carolina businessman says it smells like money.
Bill Brinker, president of Enerdyne Power Systems in Charlotte, N.C., hopes to collect methane gas from the landfill and turn it into electricity. He's negotiating with the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority, which owns the landfill, for permission to conduct the project.
Enerdyne already collects methane from nine landfills in North Carolina and one in Kansas. The gas is used to operate engines that turn a generator on site. The electricity is sold to local power companies.
Landfills emit a gas that is roughly half methane and half carbon dioxide. In comparison, natural gas is 96 percent methane. Brinker estimated the methane in the Rutrough Road landfill could generate energy to heat and cool 2,500 homes for at least 12 years.
Nathan Simmons, who lives near the landfill, said he can smell it from his home and when he rides his bicycle along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
"It smells like rotten garbage," he said. "My mother says it smells to her like rotten blueberries."
The resource authority will have to spend $1 million to collect the gas itself if it doesn't find a company like Enerdyne to take care of it, said executive director John Hubbard. The gas has been released through vents since the landfill closed in 1994, but Hubbard said better odor control is needed because the Roanoke River Parkway leading to Explore Park will be within sniffing distance.
- CHRISTINA NUCKOLS
A Merry Christmas for museum
The proceeds from an auction of the estate of Bedford historian Kenneth Crouch will help the Bedford City-County Museum make some renovations, including the addition of a display space for a recently donated historical painting.
The Dec. 7 auction in Maryland of part of Crouch's voluminous autograph collection fetched more than $25,000. Crouch, who died in October 1995, asked that the proceeds be split between the museum and his church, Quaker Baptist.
The top-selling item at the auction was a signed photo of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, which brought $2,100. Other top sellers included signed photos of President John F. Kennedy, $1,400; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., $1,300; golfer Bobby Jones, $1,000; The Three Stooges, $550; Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, $475; and Judy Garland, $350. A hand-drawn sketch of Dick Tracy by cartoonist Chester Gould sold for $280.
Ellen Wandrei, the museum's director, said she hopes to use the museum's share to add an elevator and renovate the museum's third-floor storage space into an exhibit area. She hopes to display a portrait there of Bedford Circuit Court Clerk James "Jemmy'' Steptoe that recently was donated to the museum by a Lynchburg family.
The portrait, painted by 18th-century Virginia portrait artist Harvey Mitchell, is one of only two known paintings of Steptoe, who was clerk of the court in Bedford for 54 years, from 1772 to 1826. The only other known portrait of Steptoe hangs in the chambers of Bedford Circuit Judge William Sweeney.
- RICHARD FOSTER
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