Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 11, 1995 TAG: 9501120019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Then, we were Roanoke, named for the Indian word "Rawrenock," a term for shell beads worn by the Indians that were used to trade goods. Roanoke - a railroad town, home to the world's largest mountaintop neon star, the capital of the Blue Ridge.
Now, it seems, we are The Giant Red Cardinal.
At least that is what it must look like to tourists and other pilgrims who travel Southwest Virginia. Just look at the map, which is available all along the I-81 corridor from Roanoke to Cumberland Gap.
The map, published as a tourism guide by Southwest Blue Ridge Highlands Inc., shows all of the region's major towns and cities and tourist attractions.
"Your guide to high adventure in the mountains of Virginia," it promises.
"You'll love what you see!"
There's Bristol and Wytheville, Mount Rogers and the Martha Washington Inn. There's Abingdon and Radford, Burke's Garden and the Blue Ridge Parkway.
There's even Rocky Mount (Rocky Mount?) and Smith Mountain Lake.
But no Roanoke. No Big Lick. No nothing.
Just The Giant Red Cardinal.
The cardinal - where, it seems, all roads from Southwest Virginia lead.
"It's a beautiful cardinal, isn't it?" said Catherine Fox, tourism development manager for the Roanoke Valley Convention & Vistors Bureau. She didn't even need to smirk to make her point.
Imagine the T-shirts.
Imagine a family vacationing from Boise.
"Where to now?" the father asks after a stop at the Settler's Museum in Marion.
"Daddy! Daddy! The Giant Red Cardinal!" the kids holler.
"The what?"
His wife, with the map she picked up at the gas station, speaks up: "It's up the road. It's huge."
"Well, what else is there?" the father asks.
"Nothing. Just the cardinal," his wife observes.
And they head home.
It's all enough to send tourism boosters like Catherine Fox into a tizzy. In fact, when she first saw the Blue Ridge Highlands map a year or so ago, she said she felt an immediate sense of "separatism."
It was a feeling Fox didn't like, even though, personally, she said she has a fondness for cardinals. So, she called up Kitty Grady, who was then the president of the Southwest Blue Ridge Highlands organization.
Grady explained what Fox already knew.
"It has been extremely popular," Grady said the of the map. "People are always calling us to get more for their businesses."
Some 200,000 copies of the maps have been distributed since it was first issued in 1993.
Grady said the reason Roanoke was left off the map was simple. Roanoke officially isn't a part of the Blue Ridge Highlands. Roanoke is in the Shenandoah Valley.
You know, side-by-side with Luray and New Market. (Since when?)
But Fox understood.
Roanoke is indeed a member of the Shenandoah Valley Travel Association, not the Blue Ridge Highlands.
Thus, the cardinal.
The picture of Virginia's state bird was purely for artistic effect, not a slap in the regional face. Likewise, Grady said the lipstick kiss that also adorns the map was not meant to circumvent the state of Kentucky.
"This is a membership-driven organization," said Grady plainly. "Our map represents our members ... it's not a state map."
Still, in Roanoke, Fox was disappointed, as were other Roanoke tourism people. Fox even received a letter of concern about the map and the cardinal from a board member on the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce.
However, there was precedent. Roanoke long ago allied itself to the Shenandoah Valley, calling itself the southern gateway to the area, a distinction still recognized by the Virginia Division of Tourism.
This affiliation was established when the Shenandoah Valley had an organized tourism outfit, before Southwest Virginia developed one of its own. This also was when Southwest Virginia was known more for coal mining than vacationing.
The choice at the time seemed obvious.
And the state went along when it drew up its statewide tourism boundaries. "We have absorbed what has evolved over the years," explained Martha Steeger, promotion and media development director for the Division of Tourism.
Today, the lines aren't so easily drawn.
Southwest Virginia now is flexing its muscle more as an outdoors wonderland. So naturally, Roanoke should want a part of the action, Steeger said. "An area that sits on the line as Roanoke does, it can play it both ways."
Fox at the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau sees it the same.
"Why not take advantage of both?" she said.
Of course, Fox acknowledged this sort of two-faced marketing can get out of hand if each region doesn't close its borders somewhere. Otherwise, before long, she said Virginia Beach would lay claim to the mountains and begin siphoning off our tourists.
But how nice it would have been for Roanoke to be represented on the Blue Ridge Highlands map by something more than a cardinal, Fox said dreamily. She cited last year's tourism statistics that showed 45,714 people visited the visitor information center in downtown Roanoke in 1994.
"Maybe we could have hit 50,000," she said.
Grady countered. "Now if I was going to complain, I could really complain. I mean there are lots of maps that end with Roanoke and that's it. There's Roanoke, and then the state just drops off," she said.
True. Until a year ago, for example, the Shenandoah Valley Travel Guide map stopped at Roanoke, with nothing else beyond.
That has since changed. The current Shenandoah Valley map includes an arrow pointing west. "To I-77 Wytheville," it offers generously.
As for the cardinal's future, well, the cardinal will remain, but Grady said the next edition of the Blue Ridge Highlands map will also include an arrow and an extra notation.
"To Roanoke," it will say.
Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
Capital of the Blue Ridge.
by CNB