THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 5, 1994 TAG: 9408030129
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Ida Kay's Portsmouth
SOURCE: Ida Kay Jordan
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
A young woman down near South Mills, N.C., has lived most of her life a few hundred yards from U.S. 17 on one side and the Dismal Swamp Canal on the other.
But she told me that she didn't realize that both of them were international highways until she started volunteering at the Dismal Swamp Visitors Center just below the Virginia line.
She meets many people from across this country and around the world, answering questions and offering help to the visitors. Most of the people she meets either just passed or soon will pass right by Portsmouth either on the Elizabeth River or the interstate highways.
Thousands of people stop at that little center and only part of them are beach bound. Many are travelers who do not stop over on the Outer Banks. They come year round through the region from all directions.
Judging from the questions they ask at the visitors center, there's a good chance a large number of them would be interested in Portsmouth.
People from other parts of the United States are extremely fascinated by the history of a region as old as this country itself. Portsmouth has more history than most places.
Certainly many of those on boats journeying up and down the Intracoastal Waterway are more than mildly interested in naval history. Portsmouth has a lot of that too.
Actually, thousands more pass here by both waterway and highway than pass the visitors center in North Carolina because some take another route through Great Bridge.
So how do we get the word to these travelers?
Tourism director Keith Toler is doing a lot on a limited budget to pick up tourists lured to the area by the huge advertising campaigns of Williamsburg and Virginia Beach. But many who pass here are not even in that group. Rather they are travelers looking for new places and out-of-the-ordinary sites.
People from other places in the United States have heard of Edenton, a colonial capital of North Carolina, and ``The Lost Colony,'' the first English attempt to colonize the country. The world travelers know about the Wright Brothers and the first airplane flight.
As for curiosities, many have heard of the old World War II blimp hangars near Elizabeth City. One of them is listed as the largest wooden building in the world and now houses a commercial blimp manufacturer. Tourists love it.
Edenton has a wonderful collection of historic buildings with an interesting past. But so does Portsmouth, a different place from Edenton but just as intriguing.
Airplanes and blimps are fascinating. But so are ironclad ships, carriers and battleships, all designed and built here. And if blimps are fascinating, what about nuclear submarines?
At every turn, Portsmouth seems to have comparable offerings for visitors.
But how do we get them to believe they'll find things to do and see in Portsmouth?
Because we can't lasso the boats and haul them in or set up roadblocks to detour the motor vehicles into the city, how do we get the people here?
Every time I see all the boats and cars at the visitors center on U.S. 17, I re-examine the question.
North Carolina does a good job of promoting places throughout the state, and the region just south of us benefits from that. It seems like I'm always reading stories in national and regional publications about one place or another in the area.
A volunteer effort aimed at being nice to passing boaters has brought an untold amount of free advertising to Elizabeth City, thanks to efforts of Fred Fearing and his Rose Buddies whose free time and energy are consumed by greeting boaters. People from all over the world tell Fearing they read about him in travel or boating magazines.
Currently, Portsmouth is maintaining a staff of three persons in City Hall to handle public affairs. Mainly, their efforts consist of doing in-house publications and sending out letters to civic league presidents, things like that.
More than $300,000 a year is a lot of money to pay for what essentially amounts to flacking for the city manager and other city officials. That money ought to be spent to make more people elsewhere aware of the city, its history and its tourist curiosities.
In all of the budgeting gyrations and throughout the recent layoffs, the existence of this department never was questioned publicly.
Using that amount of money for constructive promotion would accomplish a whole lot more than simply generating more meaningless paper.
KEYWORDS: TOURISM by CNB