ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 27, 1997 TAG: 9703270029
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY THE ROANOKE TIMES
White smoke will spell out the estimated jackpot in Friday's Big Game lottery: "$56million."
First, they turned our beloved star into an advertising gimmick.
Today, they turn our skies into a billboard.
Sometime between noon and 1 p.m. - prime lunch-hour viewing time - a stunt pilot hired by the Virginia Lottery will loop the loop over the Roanoke Valley, spewing enough white smoke behind him to spell out the estimated jackpot in Friday's Big Game lottery: "$56million."
With a little luck, and no wind, viewers will get a chance to see what is being billed as the first skywriting over Roanoke since .. well, memories are foggy on that score.
"To our knowledge," says skywriter Jim Butler, "Roanoke hasn't seen any skywriting since the 1950s" when Pepsi pilots barnstormed the country as part of a national advertising campaign.
Whatever the history, the particulars are the same:
"It's going to be like writing with a white Magic Marker on a blue sky," says Butler, who runs Aerial Sign Co., a Florida-based operation that will send two planes to Virginia for the day.
His appearance over Roanoke is part of a four-city tour he and his son are making on the lottery's behalf; they'll also hit Richmond, Norfolk and Newport News as the lottery tries to drum up interest in Friday's Big Game drawing, the biggest ever offered in Virginia.
The skywriting experiment is pretty big, too.
Butler says by the time he's done - actually his son, Jim Jr., will handle the Roanoke job in a single-engine 1958 Rowden - the words will stretch 6 miles across the sky. Each letter will be about 2,500 feet long.
The whole thing will be about 10,000 feet in the air and should be visible from six miles away. Butler suggests that viewers in downtown Roanoke look southwest; that means folks in Salem and west probably will be reading backward words.
Tough luck.
Speaking of luck, lottery officials - who are paying about $10,000 for the skywriting - are counting on some of their own, hoping that strong March winds won't blow their billowy billboard out of the sky before it's done.
"We hope by the time he finishes the 'million,' the dollar sign will still be in place," says lottery spokesman Ed Scarborough. "There's no guarantee of that. We could do this and it'll be gone in two minutes."
The National Weather Service, however, says the odds are in the lottery's favor.
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB