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 »

Beth Handley (left) and yours truly — aka Team LSD. | Photo by Dan Smith

On the right is yours truly with Beth Handley, a former copy editor at The Roanoke Times. We were teammates in the Scrabble tournament-fundraiser Thursday night hosted by Blue Ridge Literacy. The third member of the Letter Scrambling Demons (aka Team LSD), former Roanoke Times writer Kevin Kittredge, was a no-show.

This is a fun event for a good cause, and dozens of teams filled Fitzpatrick Hall at the Jefferson Center for bragging rights. Each team plays two timed games (one rack of letters per team); one team in the first round and another team for the second game. The team with the highest point total over two rounds is declared the champion. Local restaurants donate a large dinner buffet.

Beth and I barely won our first game, by 3 points, and were assigned to play the Scrabble Dabblers in the second round. They are three women — Carol, Denice and Cheryl — and were the reigning champs from last year. They won the tourney last night, too. They are brutal Scrabble players. (Sorry, no pic of them).

In their first round, the fearsome Scrabble Dabblers scored an astounding 493 points. They played all their letters twice.  In the second round, against us, they scored 431, and played all their letter twice again. Beth and I didn’t break 300 in either game. Hell, we scored only 199 in the first game — that’s a rotten score.

If you’re considering playing next year, it’s $100 per team (George Kegley generously underwrote our entry fee this year). There’s also a Roanoke Valley Scrabble club that meets the second Tuesday of each month at the South County Library; all are welcome to that.

And if you play — watch out for the Scrabble Dabblers!

Wikimedia Commons

Your daily Letter to the Columnist — Feb. 7, 2013

Note from Dan: The LOA’s Soup for Seniors collection drive ends this week. For more info on donating, click here.

Hello Mr. Casey -

I love your column in the paper. I still kick it old school and read the print version of The Roanoke Times every day – sometimes to start my day, sometimes to end it, but I always have to have my news fix.

I always really enjoy your insights and comments on the state of things in and around where we live here in the Roanoke Valley. I want to say I especially appreciate how you support the Soup for Seniors project.

I teach at Read Mountain Middle School, and for the past two years we have challenged our students to participate. Last year we collected over 400 cans for the project. For this year’s project, as of today, we have collected 783. Our goal is over 1,000 cans, and we hope to reach that tomorrow, on our final collection day.

I ran off your article for all the teachers to read to their homerooms, and our Rachel’s Challenge Club here at the school has kept on top of motivating the kids. One homeroom alone brought in 100 cans!

It is wonderful to see our young ones reach out to support our older members of the community, and I wanted to thank you for your help with this!

Heather Simmons
BOTETOURT COUNTY

Photo by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Rachel Craft has lived in the Edinburgh Square retirement complex in northern Roanoke County for six years. She never married, has no kids. After decades as a retail worker here in the valley, she changed careers and became as a certified nursing assistant at Friendship Manor retirement community. She’s 86, but she doesn’t sound like day past 50 on the telephone.

God bless her, she probably can’t read this column, because she’s lost a lot of vision to glaucoma. But that was no matter when the subject came to Soup for Seniors. It’s a program she’s grateful for, especially this time of year.

“I appreciate the soup that the [Local Office on Aging] sends us,” she told me Thursday.”It’s a wonderful service. I’m going to eat it, and enjoy it, on these cold, cold days.”

Craft is one of 3,000 people in our region who benefited last year when the LOA distributed 32,246 cans of soup, tins of tuna and servings of applesauce, as well as 3,500 boxes of crackers. All of that was donated by valley residents.

This year, the LOA has expanded its goals, and is hoping to collect 42,000 food items, enough to serve 3,500 seniors.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE:

Darren Jones, outside his house in southwest Roanoke County, as agents from MKB Realtors build a ramp so he can get in. Jones was disabled by a 1994 motorcycle accident. | Photo by Don Petersen

Many of us walk around through everyday life taking a heck of a lot of things for granted. Consider buying (or renting) a place to live.

The big factors are price, location and size of the house or apartment. Some smaller ones might include the color of the walls, or whether there’s enough closet space or whether it has a dishwasher.

But for disabled people there are many other much more basic concerns. Today have a window into those, via Darren Jones.

He’s 41 and works as a data analyst in Roanoke County’s Geographic Information Systems department. Jones hasn’t walked since Nov. 13, 1994, when he lost control of his motorcycle and crashed on Yellow Mountain Road. He’s used a wheelchair ever since.

He drives a Scion sedan outfitted with hand controls. For years after the accident, he lived with his parents. Since about six years ago, he’s rented a one-bedroom apartment off Colonial Avenue. But he wanted to buy his own place.

By 2011, Jones was earning enough to purchase a home. So he went to MKB Realtors, where veteran agent Tina Hannabass agreed to help him look for a house.

That turned into an 18-month quest. It wasn’t so much a matter of finding the perfect place that was the right price and size in the right neighborhood, with the right color walls.

The question was finding one that wasn’t all wrong for a person in a wheelchair. That was more far difficult than either of them had anticipated.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

TraumTeufel666 / Foter / CC BY-SA

Your daily Letter to the Columnist — Dec. 18, 2012

Dan,

Thanks for writing the nice article about the wonderful kids at James River High School. As a parent of three children who have attended school in Botetourt County over the past seven years,  I have had my share of complaints about the Botetourt school system.

However, I can’t say enough great things about James River. It’s a true gem. The teachers and staff are dedicated and fabulous in just about every way.

The student body seems to be a close-knit and friendly group of  students without the cliques and bullying often found in schools. The Key Club has done a lot to give back to the community over the years, and I’m not surprised by their efforts to win this concert for Staunton River.

Love your column. I read it all the time. I was moved by the story about your daughter’s struggles with an eating disorder.  I hope she’s doing well at JMU. Parenting can be agonizing sometimes.

Pam Kessinger
BOTETOURT COUNTY

Note from Dan: Erin is doing a lot better, thanks. She just finished her penultimate semester at JMU and will graduate next spring.

From the Veterans Green Bus Facebook page

Roanoke’s own Bill Hudson delivered!

Note from Dan: This was an email forwarded to me by Bill Hudson, a musician and regular reader of this blog.

By Gordon Soderberg
The Veterans Green Bus Driver

December 7, 2012: I’m sitting on the Veterans Green Bus in a parking lot in Rockaway, NY. I got here a month ago to assist Team Rubicon’s efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy. They requested I bring the bus from Detroit to Chicago to pick up tools and crew members and drive them to New York. They asked me to do this because of my experience in establishing Forward Operating Bases for large scale disaster-relief efforts.

Arriving on Nov. 2 in Rockaway, the sand was piled 10 feet high in the streets and the people were just beginning to come back to find what was left of their former homes, and to begin the long hard work of removing the sand from their basements and the contents of their waterlogged houses.

The Veterans Green Bus was loaded with tools and supplies chosen for this type of work and a crew of six veterans. They immediately began working to help residence with the heavy work.

Team Rubicon USA is a national nonprofit that uses veterans to bridge the gap between the time natural disasters occur to when long-term recovery efforts and the organizations that run them come in. In this case it took a little over a month. This was the biggest recovery effort the organization has been involved with and why they called for the Veterans Green Bus. Read more »

Stephen Barker Liles, left, and Eric Gunderson, who comprise the country music duo Love and Theft, who will play a free concert early next year at the area high school that wins WSLC-FM’s Toy Mountain holiday contest| AP Photo

Today we have a nifty and ongoing story about multiple tragedies, Christmas, a do-gooder charity, country music and some students’ concern for their grief-stricken peers.

It’s almost guaranteed to warm the iciest of hearts.

It involves radio station Star Country 94.9, aka WSLC-FM, Staunton River High School in Moneta and James River High in Buchanan.

Staunton River, as you probably have heard, has had a rough fall. Three students there — Jacob Baird, Katie Thurston and Ashley Barton — died in car accidents in the past few months. That’s taken a heavy toll on the 1,100-student Bedford County school.

WSLC is part of Wheeler Broadcasting, which is headquartered on Electric Road in the Tanglewood area of Roanoke County. For the last decade or so, they’ve been running a Christmas-season contest among our region’s high schools to gather toys for the charity Toys for Tots.

Each year, the school that contributed the most toys per capita has won a free concert by a country artist at their school. In recent years the entertainers have included Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum and Blake Shelton. The winning school this year gets a concert from Love and Theft, which currently has the chart-topping hit, “Angel Eyes.”

James River High, which has about 500 students, has won the contest for the last five years under the leadership of former teacher Lori Sibley, advisor to its Key Club. She’s no longer with the school.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

AP Photo

By Mark Jurkevich

Since 1947 the charity Toys For Tots has brought joy and priceless smiles to millions of needy children who otherwise would have felt passed over by Santa on Christmas morning. The U.S. Marine Corps operates this wonderful charity. However, for decades the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club has been such an enormous patron of it that many people erroneously believe they are the chief sponsor.

The Hells Angels contribution to Toys For Tots is warmly appreciated. At a charity drive in New York , they were joined by the Leathernecks Motorcycle Club of active and retired Marines. The Leathernecks, who were there representing the charity, presented the Hells Angels with a certificate of thanks for their contributions. The Angels also donated the $10 entrance fees to the Salvation Army.

The volumes at Hells Angels Toys For Tots drives are enormous. The Chicago Tribune details a drive some years ago that raised more than 40,000 toys from 6,000 bikers in one day. Read more »

Thanksgiving is an American holiday, and 44 years ago, give or take, American folksinger Arlo Guthrie gave this country the ultimate Thanksgiving song: Alice’s Restaurant.

It’s more spoken-word than song, and it’s also a largely true, hilariously reverse-Catch 22 saga of why the Army refused to draft Guthrie into the Vietnam War. It was because he had been convicted of littering — one Thanksgiving Day in Stockbridge, Mass.

For more on the the story behind the song, and Alice, and the restaurant, look here.

My all time favorite radio station, WHFS-FM, used to play this 18:34 tune every year on Thanksgiving. Thanks to reader and fellow HFS fan Andrew Thacker for reminding me of that.

Enjoy, folks!