The story below is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The ground-breaking Roanoker editor who began in 1976 looks back at some genuinely old days.
The Roanoker staff in the late 1970s. Front row: Brenda McDaniel, Jon Iott, Marty Snortum. Second row: Susan Bowling, Patti Phillips, Sara Boggs Bemiller. Back row: Jay Rowe, Richard Wells.
The first antique I ever bought was a little brass box. The dealer told me it was an antique because it was at least 50 years old and anything over 50 was antique.
Well…here we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the magazine I started working for in 1976 when I was 29 years old. The Roanoker was two years old then, just getting started. Please don’t do the math.
City magazines were hot back then. Every city of any size had one. A lot fizzled, but quite a few still publish, according to a quick Google search – an animal that, of course, didn’t even exist back in the day.
When I was writing for The Roanoker, I actually had to leave my office and go to the library for information, or even talk to people – in person! No email questions. No email. No computer! I had to come back with my notes and chisel out my stories on a rock and then send them off to a typesetter. The stories would come back as columns of copy on paper ready to be waxed on the back and pasted onto a grid. Once all the pages were assembled as we wanted them, they would be sent to a printer.
Brenda McDaniel
After some proofreading back and forth, eventually boxes of beautiful always high-quality Roanokers would be delivered to our office on the second floor of the big white house on the corner of Washington Avenue and Franklin Road in Old Southwest. Then the handful of us who made up the staff would drop whatever we were doing and assemble in a seated circle on the floor and there we would sit and affix mailing labels to the hot-off-the-press magazines. I can still smell the fresh ink. And there was something soothing about sitting there mindlessly slapping labels onto hundreds of magazines.
The next step floored me the first time I did it, but it makes for a good “geezer” story now. After labeling all the magazines, we would put them into dozens of dirty canvas post office bags, drag them over to the window of our second-floor office and heave the heavy bags out the window to plop onto the ground below. Then we’d go down and load them into Richard’s wife’s station wagon and she’d take them to the post office.
Of course, things didn’t remain this primitive, but those were baby days, and I am happy to have been a part of them. Sadly, three of the most important players in those early days – Norma Lugar, Susan Bolling and Carolyn Bratton – are no longer with us to celebrate this 50th anniversary.
A lot has happened to all of us since those days of tossing magazines out the window. I left The Roanoker in 1983 to work for First National Exchange Bank and Kurt Rheinheimer followed me as editor. He has done a fabulous job. The magazine has grown and improved as new people have come on board over the years. We all have become certifiable antiques, I guess, but I am honored and delighted to raise a glass to Richard Wells, the boy from Asheville who started it all and has kept it going. You did it, buddy! Congratulations on a monumental success. Fifty years!
Just don’t ask me to write anything for the 75th.
The story above is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!