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boomers70
In July of 1986, the year the first baby boomers turned 40, The Roanoker’s cover story was devoted to that passage. We checked in on where some of the subjects are now.
Cover models Hampton and Bonnie Martin had been married five years when they were photographed with a 1957 Thunderbird. “We were younger and a lot thinner,” laughs Bonnie today. Hampton turns 70 in November and Bonnie is 66. They still live in what was then a four-room log cabin in Roanoke County. “It’s been modified several times,” says Bonnie.
They have a daughter and a new grandchild.
In 1986, Peter Ostaseski was 10 years into ownership of Bolt Advertising, which he founded. He continued with the successful company—taking on partners, including Dale Poindexter—in the process. When the principals split in 2005, it was Poindexter/Bolt.
Ostaseski earned his commercial real estate license in 2005 and has been with Poe & Cronk, a commercial real estate firm in Roanoke, since then. He has been with his partner Anne Lee Stevens (married, divorced, back together), a Realtor and real estate advisor, since 1977. Of 70: “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
Carol Tuckwiller was comfortably mid-career in 1986 as the head of the Virginia Room at the Roanoke City Library, an extremely popular and well-known research librarian. She retired from the library in 2000 and six months later, became director of research and archives at the D-Day Memorial in Bedford. She was also with the History Museum of Western Virginia for two years, digitizing its collection.
These days she is still involved as a volunteer, working at the VA Hospital in Salem. “I knew when I left the D-Day Memorial I wanted to volunteer with veterans,” she says, as a way of paying them back for their service. Tuckwiller never married and has no children.
Dan Smith (the writer of this piece), was, in his words, “at the very bottom of my roller-coaster career in 1986,” as editor of the tiny weekly The Vinton Messenger, having been fired after 10 years at The Roanoke Times. He bounced back and in 2010 was named to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame, after being named Virginia Business Journalist of the Year in 2005. He is still working regularly.
“Some years ago,” he says, “I wrote a column about my mother turning 70. I quoted Paul Simon: ‘How terribly strange to be 70.’ I think Simon was 25 when he wrote that. How the hell could he possibly know? But he was right. It is terribly strange.”