by Laurence Hammack | Jan 24, 2004 | Courts/legal issues
GALAX — Death loomed early for Logan Bowman, who weighed just 3 pounds, 15 ounces at birth. The premature infant’s father, Wayne Bowman, remembers holding his son in the palm of his hand and dressing him in clothes from a Cabbage Patch doll. “I...
by Laurence Hammack | Jan 18, 2004 | Addiction/drug abuse
Proposed legislation that would restrict methadone clinics from opening near schools and day care centers is so sweeping that it would bar the drug treatment centers from most of Roanoke. In filing bills that would prohibit new methadone clinics within a half-mile of...
by Laurence Hammack | Dec 8, 2002 | Race relations
CANA — A rolling pasture that separates the two Sechrist homes is the setting for a free speech battle now before the nation’s highest court. On the night of Aug. 22, 1998, during a Ku Klux Klan rally in the pasture, someone set fire to a 30-foot cross....
by Laurence Hammack | Nov 10, 2002 | Race relations
HILLSBORO, W.VA. — Erich Gliebe’s racism was forged in the boxing ring. “Blacks have thicker skulls,” said Gliebe, who called himself the “Aryan Barbarian” during his days as a professional boxer. “And my hands would hurt...
by Laurence Hammack | Sep 8, 2002 | Miscellaneous (mostly animals)
9 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001: Eileen Kennedy arrives at a beauty salon near her Smith Mountain Lake home for a manicure. The news is on. As soon as Kennedy fathoms the fact that an airliner has struck the north tower of the World Trade Center, she thinks of her son. Tom is...