Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 1, 1993 TAG: 9309050309
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
They figure a fair number of babies have been conceived here;
That a teen-ager getting drunk on one beer may be sobered by the presence of a police cruiser;
And that the longest a person can stand to be cooped up in the trunk of their car on a hot summer night is 15 minutes, max.
That last tidbit, Richard Beasley recalls, came courtesy of someone at the trailer park next door, who spotted a carload of boys stuffing people into their trunk - in juvenile-delinquent lingo: sneaking into the drive-in.
The snitch called Beasley at the entrance gate, who in turn called his wife at the snack bar, who in turn paid a visit to the car "just to strike up a conversation."
"She stood there talking 15 to 20 minutes, and you know they were about to smother to death. Till finally, they couldn't stand it any longer and started hollering," Beasley recalls, laughing.
The Starlite is pure small-town Americana: the smell of chili dogs wafting from the crowded snack bar; the row of barrier pine trees Beasley himself planted along the road in '53.
On one corner of the lot is a house - the Beasleys'. On another corner is another house - their daughter Peggy's. "When our children were young, my mother-in-law tended to the kids at night. I'd put a speaker in the house so the kids could sit in the picture window there and watch movies," Richard Beasley, now 70, says.
With only two drive-in theaters close by (the other is Hull's in Lexington), the drive-in experience harkens to the days when cars were big and American, and no one minded if you rustled your Snicker bar wrapper or laughed too loud or accidentally leaned on the horn.
It's like a movie theater with twice the atmosphere - and half the rules.
Open April through September weekend nights only, the Starlite hasn't changed much in 40 years. The price has gone from $1 per carload in '53 to $1.50 per person in '93, 50 cents for kids. (Call 382-2202 for the movie-schedule recording; movies, all second-run, change week to week.)
Frankie Sarver still starts the projector when it gets dark, then rushes down to the snack bar to cook the French fries. And Dorothy Beasley is still in there spooning her homemade chili over hot dogs - an item so popular that some neighbors drive through the drive-in regularly just for takeout.
While the Beasleys turned over ownership of the drive-in to their daughter, Peggy, a few years back, the couple has never taken time away from their own ticket-tearing duties to watch a movie in its entirety.
"We bought our sound system secondhand in '53, and one of the amplifiers has already burned out," Richard Beasley says. "You can't get parts for them any more, so I told my daughter when the other amplifier blows, that's when we oughta quit."
\ WILLIS - The plumbing supplies are next to the cigarettes.
Elliston's premium biscuit flour - Virginia's Best - is sold here in 25-pound bags.
And the hottest-selling video rentals go by the names of "Sizzlin' Slabs" and "Invading Big Buck Bedding Areas."
That much will probably never change here at Moran's Meat and Grocery, a Floyd County institution best-known for its bang-up custom meat-processing business.
But in two months or so, look for the white-frame building with the long front porch to come tumbling down, and along with it 100-plus years of memories.
Owner Shirley Moran is bringing things up to code with a brand-new store, right behind the old - complete with air conditioning, handicap accessibility and floors that don't wobble with loose wooden boards.
"There's a lot of reminiscing going on about it now," Moran says of the store, formerly Harmon's. "Used to be people would try to get the change out of the floor cracks. People are really gonna miss this; they stop by all the time to take pictures."
Butcher Michael Keith, for one, is looking forward to the new digs. He's 30 years old and has been working at the store exactly half his life, in the beginning mowing grass and cleaning the meat room. Hunters from Floyd to Hillsville bring him their deer, beef, pork and lamb to cut, wrap and freeze.
"We did 500 deer this past season," Keith says. Add to that statistic 90 beef cattle a year, 1,500 pounds of ground beef a week.
When Moran took over the store 15 years ago, there was an elderly lady she used to deliver groceries to who would call up sometimes - just to order "nickel cakes."
"By that time, the cakes were 49 cents, but she still thought they were a nickel, so that's what I charged her," says Moran, who still deliveries groceries for the elderly.
"When I get old I hope somebody remembers that," she adds, smiling.
\ PEMBROKE - "Does killing things bother ya?" Clate Dolinger asks, just before inserting one of his many homemade VCR tapes, this one showing the slaughter of a deer.
If the killing doesn't really whet your appetite, you can choose from Dolinger's array of other videos. There's an interview with the town drunk, footage of the town character, numerous bluegrass music shows and a video of the old and controversial Pembroke Bridge.
A born storyteller, Dolinger uses his barber's chair at Barton's Barbershop to show off his one-man video productions, a kind of documentary of the town and its people.
Oh yeah, and he cuts hair, too.
Customers come from as far as Washington, D.C., and Bluefield for Dolinger's $3 haircuts, which include a trim of the eyebrows plus a close shave over the top of the ears.
They also come for Dolinger's supply of cut hair. "I haven't thrown any hair away since I-don't-know-when," he says. "Hair doesn't rot."
Sure enough, there it is. Piles of it, mostly gray, swept over into one corner of the small, cinderblock shop. Town residents use the hair to keep the deer out of their gardens. They bury it just barely under the ground.
"They were eating my beans up before I put the hair out," says Alfred Kast, who stopped in to talk and watch videos. "You've gotta keep putting out new, though, because the rain will take the human scent away from the hair."
Dolinger specializes in what he calls the "regular little boy's cut" and the "regular man's cut."
There's also the flat top, high and tight: "So many of the teen-age boys, they want you to take it down like a day-old beard, it's so short. I had to order a special blade to do it."
Which is good news for Dolinger, in one respect: The boys have to come back every 10 days or so to get their 'dos redone.
\ GLEN LYN - He's the one they call when the cat gets stuck up in a tree.
If someone gets sick and doesn't have transportation to the hospital or doctor, he's on the scene, too.
If any one of the 250 town residents can't reach officer A.W. Skeens at his police-department number, they know his home number by heart.
He's the lone arm of the law here, a one-man posse on call 24 hours a day.
"There used to be a couple of elderly ladies here that would call me about twice a month in the middle of the night and claim someone was breaking into their house," Skeens recalls. "I'd go over and search the area, but there was never anyone there.
"By the time I was finished looking they'd have the coffee pot on and want me to come in and visit, and we'd stay up all night talking."
Don't insult Skeens by calling him a Barney Fife. He carries a gun - with bullets - and he knows how to use it.
The worst incident the 46-year-old recalls from his nine years on the job was a traffic fatality involving a drunk driver. When Skeens went to arrest the man, he had to call a bomb squad to help out. There were six sticks of dynamite - ready, aimed and sweating - in the back of the man's truck.
Another sticky call involved a tractor-trailer coming into Glen Lynn from West Virginia on the East River bridge. The truck "low-shifted and rolled into the river," Skeens says, dumping out a trailer full of liquid Tide. Skeens was on duty for 36 hours straight orchestrating the cleanup.
Literally a stone's throw from West Virginia - which sells 3.2 percent-alcohol beer only - Glen Lyn gets its fair share of Mountaineers who come into town just to buy Virginia's 6 percent beer. So a lot of Skeens' job revolves around chasing beer-drinkers out of the town park, which is something else you can't quite picture Barney Fife doing, at least not very successfully.
Skeens is so tied down to his job that he earns part of his salary in rent; he lives in the town fire station, on the second floor.
"I'm part of the volunteer fire department, too," he says. "So when the fire whistle goes off, I'm already right here."
\ What's your favorite small-town feature? Is it the Friday-night auction, the corner diner or the flower baskets hanging from the streetlamps? Next month, we'll target Bedford and Franklin counties. If you have any suggestions for places to drop by, leave a message at 981-3435 (long-distance: 800-346-1234, ext. 435), including your name and number in case we have questions.
\ GOING TO TOWN is a monthly series spotlighting some of the best features of area small towns.
by CNB