Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310065
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He'd gone to work for the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1924, earning 34 cents an hour. He worked 10 hours a day, six days a week. He was stock keeper for 38,000 wooden patterns used to make all the parts for the trains.
During the Depression, he was given just one day's work a week. He said the Depression didn't affect the people of Northeast much. "With a few nickels and dimes put together, we fed the whole neighborhood."
He and his wife, Carrie Dickerson Meadows, brought up their five children at 604 Patton Ave. N.E. They were in the house 31 years.
Meadows paid off his mortgage and made $12,000 in improvements in the four-bedroom house. Altogether, he had $20,000 invested in it.
When the city forced him out in 1968, it gave him $7,800, plus $2,500 to help him relocate. Someone with the city told him his appraisal was low because of a rundown house next door.
Now, the land belongs to Roanoke Gas Co. Its buildings and eight acres are assessed at $2 million, the land at $67,000 an acre.
In Northeast, Meadows said, "The section was so unified at one time, you could start at the Norfolk and Western station and call the names of everybody on every street. We didn't need telephones. You'd just walk out and call somebody's name, or spread the word. `Hello, Brother John. Hello, Sister So-and-So,' hollering on both sides of the street."
People in Northeast stopped crime before it could develop, he said. They would get an inkling that something bad was going to happen and go to the families and nip it in the bud.
He went into debt to get the big brick house where he lives now on Staunton Avenue Northwest. He'd rather have the old one.
He's lost track of old friends. "We didn't know where my neighbor moved to, or where he went. They scattered them to so many different places, so the only time we'd see people we know was at a funeral.
"I saw people go to court and cry and try to protect what they had. But they died. I think the fathers of the city saw the city needing to expand. So where else do you go? Here are a bunch of poor people over there struggling. They just moved them out and scattered them around. That broke up the cooperation of fellow man."
by CNB