Charles “Hamp” Vest, in front of the dump truck he drives at the Acco Stone Quarry, just outside Blacksburg. He’ll turn 92 in July, and works 40 to 50 hours a week. | By MATT GENTRY

The world has no shortage of unsung heroes. Last week I was lucky to meet one. His name is Charles Hampton Vest, but everybody he knows calls him Hamp.

They’ve called him that for a long, long time. Hamp will turn 92 in July. Living long is not necessarily heroic. But I’d submit that working full time in a quarry at his age makes him one.

It’s no paper-shuffling desk job. For 40 to 50 hours a week, Hamp operates a dump truck that’s so tall he must clamber up a ladder to get into the driver’s seat.

There are 35-year old men who couldn’t do it with the grace and ease that he does. Until a little more a year ago he operated a huge bulldozer.

Did I mention Hamp has only one arm? That’s a bit of an exaggeration. He has only one hand. Doctors amputated the left one at his wrist in 1953, long after he’d injured it working on U.S. 460 between Shawsville and Elliston. More about that later.

He’s a husband of 66 years, father of four, and has so many grandchildren he’s lost count. The same goes for his posse of great-grandkids. “You’ll have to ask Louise about that,” he said, referring to his wife. She’s the one who keeps track.

The answer is nine and seven respectively, Louise Vest informed me later. The grandchildren are ages 7 to 38. The great-grandchildren range from 4 to 12.

Hamp and Louise live in the Check area of Floyd County, on a 72-acre cattle farm off Alleghany Spring Road. He works at the Acco Stone Quarry off Jennelle Road, just outside Blacksburg in Montgomery County. It’s a huge, 400-acre limestone pit that sidles up to the Smart Road and employs 20.
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Toni Atkins, left, with the regular known on this blog as Cold n P | Photo by Thomas Phillips

You’ve read before on this blog about Tony Atkins, majority leader of the California House of Assembly. She was raised in Roanoke and is a 1980 graduate of Patrick Henry High School.

She’s one of the most powerful politicians in this nation’s largest state. She’s also a 1984 graduate of Emory & Henry College.

Atkins gave the commencement speech Saturday at Emory & Henry. Among its graduates was a young man named Dustin. He’s the son of the regular here who goes by the nickname Cold n P, and he got to meet Atkins at Saturday’s ceremonies. There they are on the left.

The last time I saw Cold he was covered in dirt after a mountain biking foray at Carvins Cove. You clean up well, Cold!

Congrats, Dustin! And congrats, Cold n P!

Erick and Whitney Anderson | Courtesy Whitney Anderson

For the past seven years, Erick and Whitney Anderson have tried and tried and tried to have children. They’ve prayed countless hours, struggled to put on happy faces when surrounded by friends with families, and at times isolated themselves in despair.

They’ve consulted doctors in Roanoke and Charlottesville: gynecologists, reproductive endocrinologists and a hematologist.

Whitney, 35, has had surgery twice. Three times she was artificially inseminated. Seven times they’ve tried in vitro fertilization. They’ve spent more than $40,000 in pursuit of a family, and they’re still spending.

The results? Five miscarriages, each more crushing than the last.

They formed an infertility support group here in Roanoke, and Whitney started a blog on the subject, whitneyanderick.com.

Whitney and I met at a coffee shop in Salem on Tuesday morning. She’s a Salem native and Virginia Tech graduate who works in Roanoke College’s public relations department. Read more »

Doug Thompson in 2009, left, and on Thursday, right.

Tuesday morning started as usual for Doug Thompson, the Floyd County-based journalist. He was out of bed at 5 a.m. First he edited some copy for Capitol Hill Blue, the longest running political news site on the Internet. The ex-Washingtonian launched it in 1994.

Next he did a little writing for his popular blog, Blue Ridge Muse. Then Thompson was off to cover an 8:30 a.m. meeting of the Floyd County Board of Supervisors. They’re deliberating on the coming year’s budget; the meeting took most of the day.

By early evening, Thompson had a draft of his story for The Floyd Press, a weekly now owned by billionaire Warren Buffett. He turned in the finished copy Wednesday morning; the paper publishes Thursdays.

Little of that would be remarkable for any veteran scribe. But less than three months ago Thompson, 65, was in Carilion Clinic following a bad motorcycle wreck on U.S. 221 near Poage Valley Road. For a time last fall, doctors didn’t know if he’d ever walk or talk normally again, or recognize friends and loved ones. Read more »

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.

Photo by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Sunday Column Reprise

Note from Dan: While I’m on vacation, I’m treating your to some oldie-but-goodie columns from the past. This column was published April 19. Stephanie Smith died the following September. Let’s hope there is liver cheese in heaven for this dear soul.

Stephanie Smith is 60 years old, and she’s not feeling too chipper these days.

The northwest Roanoke resident has a trifecta of autoimmune diseases. She also has end-stage renal failure, congestive heart failure and lung cancer, and she recently lost one eye and has a cataract in the other.

For all of that, she speaks with surprising vigor. Her voice is loud and clear. Her mind seems that way, too. She has old-fashioned manners and a keen sense of humor.

Somehow, she can still read this humble column. She says if her one good eye ever gets so bad that she can’t, she’ll hire someone to read it to her.

God bless you, Miss Smith.

She called recently to sic me on a story about the recent disappearance of liver cheese from grocery stores in the Roanoke Valley.

“What on earth is liver cheese?” I asked Smith. I had never heard of the stuff. Read more »

George “Papa Joe” Chrisofis, standing with his trusty baseball bat outside the old Papa Joe’s nightclub long after it had been shut down. | Photo submitted by Maria Christofis

Friday Column Reprise

Note from Dan: While I’m on vacation, I’m treating you to some oldie-but-goodie columns from the past. This one, published March 22, brought as much reader reaction as just about anything I wrote all year. VDOT hasn’t yet torn down the building, but that’s scheduled to happen soon, to make way for Roanoke’s second traffic circle.

Roanoke will lose a piece of its history later this year.

It’s doubtful to raise the ire of any Roanoke Valley preservationists when a nondescript building along Wise Avenue in southeast Roanoke (most recently the home of Vinton Roofing) is demolished to make room for the city’s first traffic circle.

However, in years past the two-story block, brick and stucco structure was one of the most newsworthy and notorious in Roanoke.

Back in the 1960s, it was Papa Joe’s, a beer joint reputed to be the first topless bar in the Bible Belt. Its fame — or perhaps infamy — stretched for hundreds of miles.

The proprietor was George “Papa Joe” Christofis, an Egyptian-born Greek who had a mind for business and an outrageous flair for publicity. On the side of his building, he painted in large letters, “The place that made Roanoke famous.”

That was not much of an exaggeration. Read more »

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 »

Some of the neighbors on Arlington Road in the Raleigh Court neighborhood who created an unusual and interesting coordinated holiday lights display. (Left to right) Spencer Duval, Madison Duval, Ella Scoville, Jane Bailey, Gibson Scoville, Ben Scoville, Olivia Burkett, Julia Burkett, Nicole Lenderking, Jack Lenderking and Nancy Duval . The display is in front of 10 homes near the intersection with Windsor Avenue. Photos by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times

On recent nights, the cars have been creeping along the 1700 block of Arlington Road in Roanoke’s Raleigh Court neighborhood.

It’s a narrow street anyway, but since Thanksgiving weekend, drivers there have been a bit more distracted. That’s because of the large, 18-inch or so diameter white-lighted balls hanging from the trees.

There are more than 40 of them, strung up in front of 10 houses on the block’s northern end at Windsor Avenue. They create an odd, almost otherworldly effect that’s pretty cool. I’ve never seen any holiday display quite like it in the Roanoke Valley.

Behind it are a handful of women who live there: Jane Bailey, Nicole Lenderking, Julia Burkett, and Nicole Duval,who lives a few blocks away. They love the block, and they and their neighbors have a lot of fun.

Call it a bit of friendly holiday-decoration competition with Westover Avenue, which is just a few blocks away. At least one house on that street has an elaborate Christmas lights setup that  looks like the Las Vegas strip.

“We decided last year we wanted to try something to outdo them,” said Julia Burkett, who’s lived on Arlington for six and a half years.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Photo by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times

Doug Thompson | Photo by Dan

When Mason Cass came upon the wreck along Bent Mountain Road the night of Nov. 9, the scene was surreal.

A black cow stood in the middle of U.S. 221, near the intersection with the Poage Valley Road extension.

A mangled Harley Davidson was tipped into a ditch on the right roadside about 50 feet away. Laying on his side below the animal was the leather-clad rider, right on top of the double yellow line. Between the cow, the bike and the motorcyclist, Doug Thompson was in the worst shape by far.

He was in and out of consciousness, struggling to breathe, bleeding from his mouth. “His face was a bloody mess,” Cass told me. “There was blood all the way from the center line to the side of the road.”

Cass was afraid to touch the rider because he feared he might have broken his neck. The driver in the car ahead of Cass, who was the first on the accident scene, tipped Thompson onto his back as the cow limped away.

Both men yelled at Thompson to stay awake until paramedics arrived.  They got there quickly, took one look at the accident victim and shoved him into an ambulance, which raced off to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

Thompson, 64, who lives in the Sandy Flats area of Floyd County with his wife of 33 years, Amy, is still there. Last week his condition had been upgraded to “good,” Carilion spokesman Eric Earnhardt said. Read more »