Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 20, 1995 TAG: 9511200065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Former Roanoke City Manager Bern Ewert believes the people of the Czech Republic, where he has worked for more than three years, have something important to share with those striving to improve Roanoke's neighborhoods.
In a speech Sunday that brought a standing ovation from the Northwest Neighborhood Environmental Organization, Ewert sought to show that the Czechs, who are money-poor but rich in spirit, offer a positive example for those who would bring ``goodness'' back to city neighborhoods. He called for a revolution in thinking about community revival from the family unit on up.
Ewert, who was city manager of Roanoke from 1978 to 1985, lives in Charlottesville and serves as a research professor for Fairfax's George Mason University, working with the Czechs. He spoke at the Roanoke Airport Holiday Inn during a fund-raising dinner for a community housing grant.
He began with a recollection of his work in the Czech Republic, which he characterized as a ``land rich in history and a land full of pain.'' The Czechs have a wealth of educational and moral strength if not material things, he said. He told the story of a Czech friend, whose principled refusal to join the Communist Party had cost the man's wife her job, the man a promotion and their only son a chance to go to college.
Ewert then turned his talk to Roanoke and an indictment of the city's leadership, including that of this newspaper, before he arrived in 1978.
He characterized the Roanoke of the late 1970s as a ``city that had lost its hope and its way,'' a ``city controlled by the rich and powerful'' and a city whose government had been ``focused on excuses and not results.''
Roanoke also was a city ``full of kind and generous people'' and with a new City Council with new ideas, and a city with a government ``full of hard-working, honest employees,'' he said.
It was ``a time of great devastation in neighborhoods and downtown,'' Ewert said. In Gainsboro, the city was spending $100,000 a lot to destroy houses, an ``astounding waste of money'' and, at the same time, ``a very popular program,'' he said. It was enough money, he said, to build new houses on the lots and send a child from each house through college.
Ewert recalled how he and other city officials worked with the Northwest group as one of four pilot neighborhoods in the Roanoke Neighborhood Partnership. ``We worked together to bring goodness back to the streets of Loudon,'' he said.
He singled out Florine Thornhill, the group's president, for her leadership and for what she taught him. During its 15 years, during which it has received national recognition, Thornhill's group has spent hundreds of volunteer hours in the Gilmer neighborhood. By its own accounting, it has bought 30 run-down properties, helped people buy homes, provided housing to 17 low- and moderate-income families, cut by 80 percent the number of unkempt lots and by 50 percent the number of dilapidated houses, while helping increase overall property values in the neighborhood 600 percent.
If that kind of work is to continue, Ewert said, the American people need a ``revolution of the kitchen table,'' where parents and children sit down to eat and talk together. And returning to the example of his Czech friends, he said the country needs a new definition of poverty. ``Our television advertisements [with their emphasis on materialism] are a poisonous inducement for our children,'' he said.
America needs a revolution that will allow citizens to recommit themselves to standards, Ewert said, and ``reject the poisonous materialism that surrounds our lives.''
by CNB