The story below is from our September/October 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Editor-in-Chief Kurt Rheinheimer takes a look back at 45 years of The Roanoker and its subjects.
One signature aspect of The Roanoker over its first 45 years has been its variety and eclecticness—its tendency to go all current-events civic one issue, celebrity worshippy the next and then be really hungry the next.
In that context, and in looking back over the 357 issues before this 45th anniversary edition, here’s a look at each five-year chunk from the perspective of the people who could be seen as defining those segments, at least through the lens of The Roanoker.
1974-1979: Roanoke Mayor Noel Taylor
Noel Taylor, born in Bedford County in 1924, came to Roanoke in 1961, to become pastor of High Street Baptist church, a position he held until his death in 1998.
He also came to a town, which, over the ensuing few years, would distinguish itself for the peacefulness of becoming at least ostensibly integrated. As he put it: “We never had biting dogs. Not one person had a fire hose. We never had people dragging us along as we refused to be arrested.”
The key to that avoiding of the horrors that occurred in so many Southern cities was a 12-person biracial committee—six white and six black—that met on Monday mornings, with the whites leading: “Where are you seeing problems?” they asked their six counterparts. And then the committee members planned how to address each.
The names from that coalition are some of the most prominent and renowned white men of modern-day Roanoke: Gordon Willis, John Hancock, Arthur Taubman Sr., Frank Clement, to name but a few.
And rising toward a place in history among the black men: Reverend Noel C. Taylor.
The committee’s work—peacefully integrating the downtown lunch counters, for example—left a lasting enough impression on enough people that Taylor was chosen by the Republican Party (the Democrats had said they were “five years away” from a black candidate), to run for an open city council seat in 1970.
The rest, in the form of the longest mayoral term in city history, became, well, history: Taylor won the seat, and was “shocked” when, in 1975, he was chosen by his fellow council members to serve out the term of Roy Webber, who had passed away.
Roanoke, Virginia had its mayor. And would keep that mayor until 1992. Taylor’s blend of practicality, religion, innate gentleness and gentlemanliness rendered him the perfect preacher-mayor as the city moved through a period of unprecedented growth and change.
THE PERSONAL NOTE: My brief visits to the office of the mayor, from the mid-’80s to the early ‘90s, were all very much the same. He came around the desk to shake my hand and then returned to his chair with a look of interest in what I wanted to talk about. His precise dress and manner and his sort of patrician, east-Virginia speech pattern delivered a clear message, along the lines of Thank you for coming, let’s get to what you’d like to talk about and then we’ll both be about our business of the day.
1979-1984: Roanoke City Manager Bern Ewert
Bern Ewert began his tenure as Roanoke City Manager at the beginning of 1978, at age 35, arriving here after a turbulent two-year stint as city manager for Stratford, Connecticut.
His immediate impact was such that this magazine ran a piece in the middle of that year—”The First Hundred Days”—in which writer/associate editor Brenda McDaniel talked about things like “a budget the likes of which has never before been slapped down on a City Council table” and “his Kennedy-like charm and charisma.”
And that was just the beginning.
The two most-attributed Ewert work-personality traits—vision-infused energy paired with abruptness with those who disagreed with him—soon began to have repercussions in heretofore sleepy l’il Roanoke. By mid-1980, with a new and more conservative council to work with, Ewert found himself under seige for moving too fast in too many directions.
Another McDaniel piece—the cover story for the October 1980 issue—was headlined “Can Bern Ewert Hold On?”
He did, and in the process left a legacy that lives on today: The sprawling, 250-page, 59-project Design ‘79 plan outlined changes to downtown and to neighborhoods, called for things as disparate as predestrian bridges and building canopies, revamped traffic patterns and new tree plantings, new parking garages and new parks, new residences and new farmer stalls on the city market.
And, as perhaps its crowning idea, the bringing together of “four community cultural groups—the Fine Arts Center, the Mill Mountain Playhouse, the Historical Society and the Science Musuem—into a downtown center for the Allied Arts and Sciences.” The plan touted the MacGuire Building as the best of the five sites considered.
Center in the Square was born.
The energy and vision of Design ‘79 defined the early to mid-1980s in Roanoke, until perhaps the closest we’ve ever come to a local day-where-we-remember-where-we-were-when-we-heard: July 3, 1985, when Ewert announces he will resign his position, effective August 2, to take over what is envisioned as a mammoth tourist attraction called Explore Park.
To which the governmental and citizen reaction would render his city council battles relatively small potatoes, though recent progress and developments at the park are realizing at least some parts of the original and ambitious plan.
THE PERSONAL NOTE: My experiences in the presence of my maternal grandfather, as a boy of 10 or 12 visiting him in Radford—a blend of the tentative, afraid-to-make-a-mistake, will-I-understand-what-he-says—came strongly to mind as I sat across the desk from Bern Ewert’s city manager desk in 1984 to interview him for the magazine’s October 1984-issue Man of the Decade piece on him. He was gracious, patient, informative and kind, but exactly as with my grandfather who shared those traits, I proceeded with a dread built of admiration and a fear of somehow failing the man before me.
1984-1989: The Fitzpatrick Family
Our February 1988 cover blurb said it simply: “What a Family!”
And maybe the easiest way to get at the essence of the five people who then and for long after were as close as Roanoke came to a First Family was to listen to matriarch Helen proclaim: “Well, the best thing I’ve ever done is to surround myself with all these wonderful men.”
Those men:
• The late Beverly Sr., who was then recently retired as chief judge of the Roanoke Municipal Court, and who not only “knew when I was 8 and she was 5” that Helen was the girl for him, but also spent 13 years of Thursday nights with her conducting a non-paid Honor Court for those the judge had given the choice: Go to jail or come share coffee and doughnuts with us on Thursday evenings.
• Bev Jr., recently retired from running the Virginia Museum of Transporation, and who at the time was employed by Dominion Bank, from which he had been given permission by CEO Warner Dalhouse to “go run the Jaycees” and also to help out with Design ‘79. Since those days, he has also enjoyed careers in economic development and on Roanoke City Council.
• Broaddus, perhaps the most serious of the three Fitzpatrick sons, who was then at Dominion Trust after a brief stint at Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore. He’s now retired from his return to the law, and has built a civic life around his love of the outdoors, having served on various boards associated with the Blue Ridge Parkway, served as a disaster relief volunteer and a land conservation activist.
• Eric, then an artist, now an artist. And not just any artist. In addition to working in many media and on countless themes and focal points, he also paints with both hands, the result of a 1988 injury to his right arm. His works are on display all over Roanoke as well as in 19 other nations.
There’s no definitive information on where and how Roanoke earned its number-one positive trait, “the friendly people.” My theory is that it began in the 1930s and ‘40s, as Helen and Bev, Sr. came into adulthood, and has been kept alive not only by them, but also their kind, charming, community-oriented progeny.
THE PERSONAL NOTE: Which is what my wife, Gail, and I have received, at least a dozen times and not all at Christmas, from Helen Fitzpatrick since I spent a bit of time with her some 30 years back.
1989-1994: The Brazilian “Italians”
As if the magnificent food wasn’t enough, the sheer numbers told the story of the high point of the Brazilian-owned mostly-Italian restaurants in the Roanoke Valley.
In 1989, there were eight: Chef Carlos, Jarbas, La Galleria, Luigi’s, Norberto’s, Sugar Loaf, Taste of Brazil and Tastings.
By 1994, the number was 13 (including two in Charlottesville and one in Winchester and a Brazilian chef staff at Montano’s): Carlos Brazilian International, Copacabana, Ipanema, Luigi’s, Mediterranean, Italian & Continental, Norberto’s, Rio Doce and Vanucci’s.
The seed of them all, at least by often-conflicting accounts from many of the principals here in town during that five-year period, was a Jarbas de Almeida/Luigi’s start in 1978, with presence along the way from Norberto Silva and Israel Marques. Then there was an early, short-lived branch with Jarbas; and then family tree began to flourish in earnest in the mid-’80s, with the coming of Norberto’s, a second Jarbas, Fruit of the Sea and Chef Santos.
The survivors today: Carlos Brazilian International, under Carlos and Maggie Amaral, and Luigi’s, under Maristane Roche. At both, the cuisine remains exquisite, consistent and delightful, these several decades after the state of Governador Valedares, Brazil began sending our way the first of the people who built an amazing and lasting dining tradition in Roanoke.
THE PERSONAL NOTE: Shy person that I am, I suppose it took a good measure of the wine that Walter Vanucci so generously poured for my wife and me during the several years his restaurant was on the corner where the Deschutes tasting room is now, for me to be able to stand up in a full dining room on his last night in operation and ask those assembled to rise and toast our so-gracious host. And some years later, my determination to do the same for Norberto Silva—who fed Gail and me an embarrassingly huge number of times over his 25-year run—was thwarted by his desire to quietly hand off Norberto’s Ristorante to a new owner and to even more quietly slip out the back door to go home to his beloved mother and his beloved home country.
1994-1999: C. Richard Cranwell
It’s hard to single out a lone five-year period as Dick Cranwell’s most impactful for us in the Roanoke Valley. Our 1987 cover story, for instance, was headlined, “The Most Powerful Man in Richmond . . . Lives in Vinton.” And the lead-in to our 1998 profile talked about “Who is this guy with so much clout . . . besides the Democratic house majority leader, chairman of the Finance Committee and the state’s top-rated legislator?”
The 1987 story, written by David “Mudcat” Saunders, touched strongly on Cranwell’s dual reputations as a master coalition builder (“Best I’ve ever seen,” according his late and long-time house colleague Clifton A. “Chip” Woodrum III), and a ruthless power broker (“I understand the legislative process,” Cranwell told Saunders in the 1987 story, “and when somebody does me in, when it’s their turn, I take their heart out.”)
That 30-year career in the Virginia House of Delegates also included a stint as minority leader, and was marked by late-‘90s characterizations including:
• “If you want something done, go to Dick Cranwell.” —Larry Sabato, Virginia’s long-time political analyst.
• “He’s easily the smartest guy in the General Assembly of Virginia.” —Don Beyer, 1997 gubernatorial candidate and U.S. Representative for Virginia’s 8th Congressional District.
• “I think Dickie is capable of doing whatever he wants.” —Then-Governor Gerald Baliles.
Cranwell’s advocacy for this part of the state was also the stuff of legend, and was perhaps encapsulated by his view that “we’ve got to run twice as fast [as those in the crescent from Northern Virginia to Richmond and Tidewater] to stay in the race. It amazed me that the pro-Explore Project were worried that the airport funding might hurt them, and the pro-airport project people thought the same thing about the Explore Park funding. Why not think positive and want both?”
Today, Cranwell continues to practice law from his hometown of Vinton.
1999-2004: Frank Beamer
As with Cranwell, it’s hard to pick a single five-year period as the apex of Frank Beamer’s hall-of-fame career as Virginia Tech football coach.
But the presence of quarterback Michael Vick (1999 and 2000 seasons) certainly left its mark amid these five, during which the Hokies played for a National Championship (losing to Florida State, 46-29, after the 11-0 1999 season), won bowl games against Alabama and Clemson and averaged a #13 final AP Poll finish for the five seasons.
Beamer’s role in taking a long-independent mid-range football program to not only conference championships (three Big East and four ACC), but into national prominence can’t be underestimated. Nor can his role in Blacksburg becoming not only a dreaded destination for any visiting team, but also perhaps the signature Saturday gathering point for the western half of Virginia now for more than 30 years. The energy in Lane Stadium, from even before the blare of “Enter Sandman” through the noise level on every defensive series is, simply, what college football is all about.
Add up all the five-year periods of one of the most-accomplished homegrown talents we have (grew up in Fancy Gap, played high-school ball at Hillsville High, started at cornerback for Tech, began his coaching career at Radford High . . .), and you have a career that culminated with a 2018 induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.
And a lasting presence that sees the friendly, folksy Beamer appearing around the region in contexts ranging from TV ads that won’t get him into any additional halls of fame to Tech athletic contests, private speaking appearances and pretty much anywhere else one of the region’s most recognizable and admired faces is asked to show up.
2004-2009: JJ Redick
The machine that is JJ Redick certainly reached some level of national prominence as a Cave Spring high schooler (where he was a McDonald’s All-American and was the 2002 McDonald’s All-American Game MVP as he scored 43 points to lead the Knights to a Virginia state championship). But it was not until his high-scoring years at Duke (2002-2006) that he entered true national prominence, albeit as perhaps the most-hated college basketball player of the era, carrying on the tradition established by Christian Laettner and later expanded upon by Grayson Allen.
Among his accomplishments at Duke:
• National Player of the Year, 2004-5 season.
• NCAA record for three-pointers (since broken).
• First team All-American Team, 2005, 2006.
• All-time ACC scoring leader.
• His Duke #4 jersey was retired in 2007.
He was the #11 overall pick in the 2006 NBA draft, despite questions about his defense, size and athleticism in the context of the big fast NBA.
And his pro career began in that context, as an off-the-bench, occasional DNP role player for the Orlando Magic. He did not start a game until his third season.
But since playing in all 82 games in the ‘09-10 season, Redick has built himself into a star. His scoring average—9.6 point per game that year—has improved in every season but one since, culminating in a career-high 18.1 PPG in the 2018-19 season with the Philadlephia 76ers.
Over that period, Redick’s unrivaled dedication to fitness and routine transformed not only his game, but also his body. He is known as possessor of the most disciplined and unyielding of practice and other athletic rituals in the National Basketball Association. One result: A two-year $26.5 million contract with the New Orleans Pelicans beginning with the 2019-20 season, notable in part because JJ Redick turned 35 in June, an age when most NBA players are on a serious decline or are out of the league. His departure from the 76ers was marked by a full-page ad in the Philadelphia Enquirer, thanking the city and its fans.
THE PERSONAL NOTE: I have never spoken to JJ Redick, but in an interview with his mother for a From the Editor column (March/April 2016), she recalled that as he entered middle school, he began a pattern of “getting up every morning before school to go shoot in the gym for two hours. Other parents would ask, ‘how do you get him to get up and do that?’ And the answer is that we never asked him once.”
JJ Redick: Role model for all of us, a hero for me.
2009-2014: Ed Walker
Before Roanoke could go all outdoors-hip, it needed some infrastructure to attract the kind of people who ride bikes, walk to work, enjoy fine food and drink and like to live in cool urban environments.
Enter Ed Walker and his visionary golden touch, to look upon buildings and other spaces so long neglected or abandoned as to be nearly invisible beyond being a sharp eyesore if you did cast your gaze in their direction.
A 2012 New York Times profile of “The Virginia Developer on a Mission to Revive His Town,” opened with one of Walker’s smaller, deftly elegant projects, the Kirk Avenue Music Hall (since evolved to the Spot on Kirk), and its accompanying free night-or-so for performers.
But Ed Walker, a lawyer by education and the son of a prominent family, rode not only his own energy and charm, but also events like CityWorks (X)po to elevate the number of residents in downtown Roanoke to what the NYTimes piece characterized as “nearly 1,200 residents this year, where once there were fewer than 10.”
The fact that downtown Roanoke is now home to some 2,000 people is simply testament to the measure of Walker’s work and its legacy. With The Cotton Mill, the Patrick Henry Hotel, the Grand Piano Building and the Colonial American National Bank Building, Walker took moribund spaces and transformed them into places where the likes of Roanoke favorite-son Warner Dalhouse would plunk down just under $1 million to live, and elsewhere, where other Roanokers could rent for under $1,000 a month.
The big downtown residential projects were what put Ed Walker on the developer map. What gave him his own unique niche were the smaller touches that have helped give our city not just living spaces, but the fine touches that would make the likes of ‘80s visionary Bern Ewert proud. A few:
• The long-abandoned ice house along the Roanoke River being transformed into housing, a trendy restaurant, an outdoor consignment shop and a climbing gym.
• Just down Roanoke in Grandin Village, the semi-curmudgeonly James Tarpley continues to spend his days tending Tarpley Park, a kids-with-parents-only sliver of land purchased by Walker for that purpose.
• 101.5 The Music Place, Roanoke’s first and only Americana music outlet, was long sustained by Walker.
• Rehabbing the 600 block of Day Avenue to create living spaces with rents 15 to 20% below market.
We could continue—on to the Valleydale building in Salem, on to the whole downtown of Buena Vista and whatever Walker is doing now that we haven’t yet heard about. But you get the picture.
Were it only that the nation as a whole could have the benefit of such enlightened aristocracy leading the way.
THE PERSONAL NOTE: Our 2011 cover story on Walker got me in as hot a tub of water as perhaps anything in the 35 years I’ve been privileged to do this work. Walker wanted a cover shot that included those who worked with him; he was adamant that they be included. And we shot that shot. And we brought that shot back to the shop and we decided it was a great story opener photo, but not a cover. The resulting dismay from Walker—in reaction to his face only on the cover—was immediate and forceful, to the extent that I have not tested if he has decided to start talking to us again.
2015-2019: Nancy Howell Agee
You look at the behemoth that Carilion Clinic has become and appears poised to further become, and you picture a hard-charging, enlightened executive.
Which is exactly what President and CEO Nancy Howell Agee has been since taking over those positions in 2011.
But she’s also—in the best tradition of home-town heroes—someone who comes from the “people” side of things, and who built that status growing up in Roanoke, having been born in the building that would become Carilion-predecessor Roanoke Memorial, having attended Roanoke’s Virginia Heights Elementary, returned to Roanoke Memorial as a cancer patient and then as a candy striper and taken her first paying job there as well, as a nurse.
The rest, as they say, is history. And history as gloriously full as to include not just the advancement of Carilion Clinic to its national-class status, but also collaboration with Virginia Tech in the establishment of the ever-expanding Virginia Tech Carilion Health Sciences and Technology campus. One result of that Tech-Carilion joint-venture medical school is Tech’s ninth college.
Agee is immediate past chair of the American Hospital Association and past chair of both the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association and the Virginia Center for Health Innovation. She is a member/former member of Roanoke-area boards of directors ranging from the Taubman Museum of Arts to the Virginia Business Council and many in between.
For those of us well-removed from such posts and responsibilities, the influence of Nancy Agee is nonetheless about us. The interface with Carilion—highlighted perhaps by MyChart communication, better punctuality with appointments and what seems to at least one consumer to be a more people-oriented health care provider—is simply better, cleaner.
As is the space that Carilion’s headquarters looks down upon. We may lament things like the long-ago passing of Victory Stadium, or of this building or that along Reserve Avenue. But the look of the land from on Carilion Roanoke Memorial’s upper floors—to the west and to the north—is, well, cleaner. It’s filled with either muscular new buildings that represent our economic future or else it’s green. Green and in waiting for more construction or green and in use for recreation. And that view to the north, the route of our semi-goofy municipal “trolley,” is one where the green-and-clean moves steadily through old industrial spaces being transformed as our health care giant reaches gently toward downtown.
And who better to lead that march than hometown hero Nancy Howell Agee?
Where’s Warner?
Wait, 45 years of the famous and notable of Roanoke, and no Warner Dalhouse?
Not hardly, as who has done more over that time to embrace, encourage, enlighten and enliven the Roanoke Valley than he who grew up in Northwest Roanoke, was selected “Most Versatile” in his senior class at Jefferson High (the site where, decades later, he would serve a major role in the creation of the Jefferson Center) while working as a part-time messenger at First National Exchange Bank, attended Roanoke College and then, after getting his degree at UVa, began a march toward what would culminate with his position as CEO and chairman of Dominion Bankshares, (which was subsequently absorbed by a series of larger banks, most recently Wells Fargo)?
The answer, at least from the 35-year perspective from this desk, is no one.
Because while being head of the area’s major hometown bank gave Dalhouse a significant local profile, his roster of board memberships and other civic involvements elevated him to something like Roanoke Citizen #1, 1974-2019, with the start date tied to this magazine’s debut more than to the onset of his contributions, as he began full-time work at FNEB in 1956.
By the 1970s, when this magazine’s inaugual cover image was the under-construction 15-story FNEB building as it rose toward becoming downtown’s then-tallest building, Dalhouse was well on his way up the ladder. By 1977, at 42, he was FNEB’s youngest-ever president, and also first executive vice president for parent-company Dominion Bankshares.
Over the more than 40 years since, Dalhouse’s name has been closely associated with Roanoke Valley successes as widely varied as the Grandin and the Taubman, the Higher Education Center and Center in the Square, plus countless more. And, more recently, the mammoth Virginia Tech-Carilion partnership that he has called “the most transformative thing to happen in the Roanoke Valley since the railroad came.”
One lesser-known realm of Dalhouse’s full life is that he wanted intially to be a journalist, and had been accepted into W & L’s School of Journalism only to have to face the reality that the family could not afford W & L.
And one tiny fallout of that boyhood goal is that I have served, several times over the decades, as Warner Dalhouse’s editor. Perhaps most poignantly, his piece in the March/April 2013 issue of this magazine revealed a deeply sentimental guy, who included with his submission not only a painted portrait of his late dog, Lucy, but also—toward the end of his loving lament—this sentiment: “She was the dearest, sweetest little person we have ever known.”
And—editor’s note—the need for brevity that J-school would have taught Dalhouse has never been apparent in the pieces he has sent along to us.
But then the other side of all the detail, passion and perspective that marks his writing is perhaps tied to something he noted in an interview to the late Norma Lugar in the March/April 1977 issue as his personal credo: “If it ain’t fun, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
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