ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 16, 1996 TAG: 9605160027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Mayor David Bowers wasn't sure how he would handle the uncertainties.
His re-election bid was one thing. But the future of a downtown Roanoke institution, Guy's Restaurant, weighed on him like too many sausage biscuits.
Guy's was where the mayor and other lawyer-types used to meet every morning at 11 to "talk legitimate business and, parenthetically speaking, gossip," as the mayor puts it.
A coffee klatch for the good-ol' guys, a blue-plate haven for the blue-suits. The Coffee Club has been meeting for more than 40 years - long before the mayoral crown was ever a glimmer in Bowers' eye.
But, alas, a dip in business here, a broken blue plate there. Guy's, as of three weeks ago, closed up shop.
"We were like lost souls today," Bowers said a few days after the closing. "We were out wandering the streets.''
While Guy's is supposed to reopen soon under new ownership, the Coffee Club has been making do at other downtown establishments. And herein lies my post-election scoop:
The mayor and his boys are lousy - make that really lousy - tippers.
"At first, I felt like I needed to pander to them because I thought they might come here for lunch," said one waitress whose downtown restaurant was recently graced by the club's patronage.
But no such luck. When the gang comes in, there's just coffee ordered all-around, then free refills, then everyone scatters like cockroaches under lights.
"When you serve 10 people, you expect to find more than a quarter and a dime on a table when you go to clean it," the waitress said.
Asked how the group behaves, she said: "They're just being themselves; they're quite contained. They're harmless, really - but cheap."
Except there was that one time, another waitress recalled, when the group paraded in under the direction of Bowers, who was warbling "The Boys Are Back in Town."
Waitresses all over downtown are holding their collective breath, waiting for the mid-June reopening of Guy's - where the boys can be boys again.
And the tips are as low as they go.
Speaking of important civic matters - and vintage rock songs - the Wasena bridge rocket should-it-stay-or-should-it-go debate came out this way:
Let it be.
Callers responding to my recent column on the plan to reunite the rocket with its downtown mothership, the Virginia Museum of Transportation, favored keeping the rocket in Wasena by a margin of nearly 2-to-1. Several had suggestions for its upkeep, though:
* ``I think it should be painted and fixed up," said Frances Molter. "And whoever wants to paint that sucker purple, I'll paint them purple."
* Chris Miller, a Wasena Neighborhood Forum officer, suggested donating the rocket to his group. "In return we could apply for a minigrant to have it repainted and have `WASENA' stenciled on the side," he said.
* David Jones added: "They should hook up a natural gas flame and a water jet underneath, so that ... at intervals the flame would ignite, turn the water to steam and generate billowing clouds as if it was blasting off."
* And my personal favorite: Madeena Leonard says her family loves the idea of holding an annual contest in which contestants stand on the Wasena bridge and try to toss a hula hoop over the rocket's nose.
Bonus points if you hit a pigeon.
Whatever happens to the rocket, points out museum curator Elizabeth Bishop, it has to "reflect favorably" on the U.S. Air Force, which technically still owns the Jupiter. (It's officially on long-term loan from the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.)
And here's some interesting FYI from Virginia Tech industrial design professor Bill Green, who was in on the initial proposal to move the rocket downtown:
There are four similar Jupiter relics scattered around, including one at a space museum in Huntsville, Ala., and one that's used as the focal point for an artists' community in Fremont, Wash., where it's also featured on the town stationery.
"The rocket is going to be a little incongruous - anywhere you put it," Green says. "I don't think that's weird. A town is a combination of a lot of slightly incongruous things that people somehow have opinions on and relationships with."
Roanokers may love their rocket where it is, he adds. But at least we're not as rocket-crazy as Huntsville, which was home to Baker, one of the two test monkeys launched into orbit - and safely back home - by the Jupiter in 1959.
"Baker just died two or three years ago," Green says. "He was a squirrel monkey, 10 inches long, and they've put up a granite memorial to him.
"In Huntsville, that rocket is really their thing."
LENGTH: Medium: 93 linesby CNB