(Left to right) Gordon Soderberg, Bill Hudson of Moneta, and Jacob Kimmel outside the disabled Veterans Green Bus on a tow lot in northeast Roanoke. The bus caught fire and almost burned up Wednesday night. | Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times.

Just a little more than two months ago, Gordon Soderberg and the Veterans Green Bus pulled into Roanoke, fresh from a months-long relief effort on Long Island following Superstorm Sandy.

Then disaster struck the bus, which has been elaborately retooled to run on used cooking grease. Its starter system caught fire, necessitating more than $4,000 in repairs.

Soderberg picked up the fixed bus from the Virginia Truck Center in Cloverdale May 15. It has a new starter, battery cables, air lines, fuel lines, and U-joints. He paid the bill with money he raised from online and cash donations from readers of The Roanoke Times.

The final $1,200 toward repairs came from Archie Gordon. A Vietnam veteran who lives in Cave Spring and is retired from the telecommunications industry, Gordon said he hooked up with Soderberg after reading of his plight in this newspaper.

“He needed it,” Gordon told me Wednesday. “That was all that was keeping him from getting [the bus] to the west coast. “It’s the brotherhood.”

Now Soderberg is preparing to head out of town to the next big disaster scene — Moore, Oklahoma, which was decimated by a gigantic killer tornado on Monday. And he needs your discarded grease.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

The Old Lick Cemetery is on Orange Avenue, directly across the street from the Roanoke Civic Center.

Polly Steptoe died in 1907, at age 70. Amelia Lawson, who was born in 1864, left this world at age 60.

Their gravestones are among scores stretched along an easy- to-overlook plot of land along Orange Avenue, tucked between a motel parking lot and the northbound Interstate 581 on ramp. Right across the street from the Roanoke Civic Center, it’s called Old Lick Cemetery.

Partly sun-drenched and partly hidden by spots of deep shade, the roughly four-acre cemetery (my eyeball estimate) is owned by First Baptist Church of Gainsboro. Nobody has been buried there for decades.

In that time the inexorable growth of weeds, trees and grass has slowly taken it over. The place is looking a lot better these days, thanks to five local Girl Scouts.

Let’s give a hand to Hannah Stewart, 14; Savannah Lindsley, 13, and MacKenzie Duncan, 15, all of the Bonsack area; Jasmin Wilhelm, 13 of Monterey; and Sami Graham, 13, of the Reed Mountain area in Botetourt County.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE

(Left to right) Gordon Soderberg, Bill Hudson of Moneta, and Jacob Kimmel outside the disabled Veterans Green Bus on a tow lot in northeast Roanoke. The bus caught fire and almost burned up March 20. | Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times.

The background is here and here.

This just in from Gordon Soderberg:

“Saving the bus and the musical instruments from the fire was a complete success. We just got word that the bus is fixed and the maintenance and servicing is done.

The repairs, servicing and towing charges are a little over. $5,000.00. An expensive repair and valuable lesson learned.

The live fire experience provided invaluable information about our crews ability to respond effectively and the organization’s abilities and weaknesses to support them.

They put out an electrical fire that had the entire entire lower half of the engine surrounded in flames on the side of the road in the middle of the night. They saved the bus and the donations put in their care to transport.

That mission continues. As soon as the bill is covered they’re headed to Rockaway Beach, NY. to deliver the instruments and complete the mission.”

(Left to right) Gordon Soderberg, Bill Hudson of Moneta, and Jacob Kimmel outside the disabled Veterans Green Bus on a tow lot in northeast Roanoke. The bus caught fire and almost burned March 20. | Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times.

By Gordon Soderberg

I want to tell everyone who has contributed to the Veterans Green Bus Project how grateful I am to all of you.

–To Veterans Green Jobs for believing in my concept of biodiesel and used cooking oil to fuel disaster relief efforts. They invested in my first bio diesel plant in 2009. And they purchased the Veterans Green Bus “Large Marge” for me to take veterans from across the country to attend the Veterans Green Jobs training programs in Colorado.

While I was with them they learned about energy conservation and sustainability and how to rebuild historic log cabins for the National Parks and Forest Service. They secured contracts and began weatherizing 1.200 homes a year in 9 counties of the Alamosa Valley and the City of Denver, Colo.

By April of last year that ended for me because of funding dried up from the government with one month’s notice — proving to me that my concept of the Veterans Green Bus Project would not be sustainable under federal funding contracts.

So, I purchased the bus from Veterans Green Bus and folded the program under United Peace Relief, Inc., who thankfully has been helping me since 2006 when after hurricane Katrina I started to design my first biodiesel plant with Steve Richter. We fueled a tractor and cleared lots in the Lower Ninth Ward for people who wanted to rebuild. Eventually Brad Pitt and his Make It Right NOLA program began building sustainable energy homes on the very lots we saved from being seized by the city.

–To Team Rubicon USA for believing in my concepts of using my military RADMF Team development and Veterans Green Job experience to establish an energy sustainable disaster response efforts after hurricane Sandy at forward operating base Hope in Rockaway, N.Y. Read more »

Robin Giodano takes aim at the bullseye at Saturday’s Salem Red Sox game. |  Photo by Shannon Abell

In Thursday’s column I brazenly predicted Roanoke Valley residents were such rotten pitchers that none would be able to drop me into the tank of a dunking booth at Saturday’s Salem Red Sox game.

As with many other matters, I was wrong about that. Before my hour was up, I was soaked from my thinning noggin to my pinky toes.

Old ladies got me and so did pint-sized kids. The insults I hurled no doubt egged them on.

“Which girls baseball team do you play for, sport?” I asked one young whippersnapper who showed up in a baseball jersey.

“Check out the suicide blonde – dyed by her own hand,” I announced as one woman wound up.

“This young man is a quarterback,” I said as one teenager took aim. “When he tried out for the football team, the coach gave him a quarter and told him, ‘Catch the bus back home, kid.’ ” Read more »

цогоо | Wikimedia Commons

One way you can judge the fabric of a community is the willingness of its residents to recognize a problem and work together to try to solve it.

There’s no shortage of such examples in the Roanoke Valley. The latest comes from the Blue Ridge Chapter of the Porsche Club of America.

The issue is a life-and-death one that concerns teen drivers. Specifically, it’s that too many lack skills necessary to handle emergency situations on the road. This was on tragic display last fall, when six teenage drivers in the Roanoke region died in a series of traffic crashes over a three-month period.

The problem isn’t merely a local one, however. Nationally, in the first six months of 2012, fatalities of teen drivers who were 16 and 17 increased 19 percent after ticking downward over the previous decade.

So members of the Porsche club asked themselves, “What can we do?” The answer was a daylong class, aimed at drivers aged 16 to 18, that will debut locally May 4 at the Salem Civic Center . They’re putting a lot of volunteer hours and effort into it. Some local police agencies and doctors are participating.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Wikimedia Commons

There’s no shortage of people around the Roanoke Valley who have claimed over the years that yours truly is all wet.

Now, they’re getting an opportunity to put their money where their mouths are. They get a shot to dump me in the drink.

For an hour before Saturday’s Salem Red Sox game, I’ll be perched above a water tank in a dunking booth, lobbing insults at you weak-armed Willies who think you can throw.

It’s a fundraiser for Meals on Wheels, the volunteer-driven enterprise that provides nutritious food five days per week to hundreds of home-bound elderly residents of the Roanoke Valley and beyond. For $5, you’ll get three chances to send me plunging.

Not that I have much to fear from the best the Roanoke Valley has to offer. The Earth has more red-headed Eskimos than there are baseball talents who’ve emerged from the Big Lick. Read more »

(Left to right) Gordon Soderberg, Bill Hudson of Moneta, and Jacob Kimmel outside the disabled Veterans Green Bus on a tow lot in northeast Roanoke. The bus caught fire and almost burned up Wednesday night. | Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times.

Navy veteran Gordon Soderberg and the Veterans Green Bus arrived in Roanoke one week ago, after nearly five months on Long Island.

There, the bus served as a command center for disaster relief efforts in Rockaway Beach following Hurricane Sandy, and it achieved some measure of fame. Former president Bill Clinton took a briefing on the bus late last year. It was on the TV news in New York. Soderberg’s face and the bus appeared during the televised 12-12-12 concert for Hurricane Sandy relief.

Locally, you may have seen the olive green bio-diesel behemoth along Grandin Road outside the Roanoke Natural Foods Coop, or in the parking lot of Home Depot on Hershberger Road, or parked outside The Roanoke Times on Campbell Avenue.

Now Soderberg, 50, finds himself stranded. Now he’s the one who needs some help. Wednesday night, the bus caught fire and almost burned up. Read more »

Remember this guy, Gordon Soderberg? Last year I had a blog post about him, the Veterans Green Bus and efforts local musician Bill Hudson made to get them a guitar as they volunteered in Hurricane Sandy relief efforts on Long Island.

Now, Soderberg is the one who needs help. He and the Veterans Green Bus showed up here last week for a charity concert promoted by Hudson. The bus caught fire Wednesday night, and that’s left Soderberg and the bus stranded here.

Read more about this in my column Tuesday!

Shayley Martin, 12, of Floyd County

For the third year in a row, Shayley Martin, a 12-year-old from Floyd County, triumphed in the regional spelling bee. It was probably the longest and most grueling in the history of that match.

Saumya Sharman of Radford placed second and Abrahm Clear of Smyth County placed third. There were 17 spellers in all on the stage at the beginning.

Sponsored by The Roanoke Times, the bee went more than 40 rounds — and lasted almost 3 hours. A large chunk of those rounds were with only the three crackerjack spellers above on the stage.

Among the words that trio spelled correctly were: cynosure; jnana; blitzkrieg; taiga; fennec; intaglio; corpuscle; maraschino; witloof; gesundheit; apartheid; Baedeker; cappelletti; garcon; philhellenism; voortrekker (which is pronounced FOR-treker); and uitlander (pronounced ATE-lander). Seven of those 17 words my spell-checker is marking as misspelled, by the way. Read more »