March 15 through time
By Holly Kozelsky and Pat Pion
100 Years ago – 1924
The Red Cross gets special rates at the Shackleford and Lucy Lester Hospitals to take care of unfortunate cases, and there is no fee whatsoever for surgeons when an operation is found necessary. To raise money to pay for those rooms, the Red Cross held sales. On Saturday, March 15, in the vacant store room adjoining the Quality Shop in the Hamiliton Theater Building, the Red Cross sold all kinds of flowers, including plants, ferns, coleus and cut flowers; and also sold cakes, pies, candies and dressed chickens. A similar sale was planned for March 22 at Roberts Drug Store.
Saturday evening, March 15, Dr. Rowland of Richmond presented the lecture “When a Fellow Is in Love” in the Social Room of the Methodist church. Admission was 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children. The event was sponsored by the Methodist Church Auxiliary.
A special called meeting of the Kiwanis Club was held Saturday night, March 15, to consider action by the Club on whether or not to hold an election to determine if the town government should be changed from its present form to that known as the Commission and City Manager form of municipal government. However, there was objection on two angles: one, unless the club would say it approved of such a change, it would be doing an unnecessary and meaningless thing to ask for such an election; and second, it would probably cause too much disagreement between members so the whole thing was better left alone.
75 years ago – 1949
A three-story frame apartment building on Trent Hill in Bassett was on fire, caused by a coal heater used inside one room of a basement apartment.
1960
Jack Gilley of Ridgeway constructed a snow zoo in his front yard, to the delight of friends and neighbors. His hobby of oil painting came in handy as he put the finishing touches on Dumbo, his 8’ x 3’ snow elephant, his 7’ cat and other figures. As many as 10 carloads of sightseers took in the menagerie, a fitting salute to the recent deluge of snow. More of the fluffy white stuff was in the forecast again. School children cheered the thought!
50 years ago – 1974
Computerized traffic lights were being installed in Martinsville at a cost of $130,000. The lights would be controlled by detectors in the pavement near the lights. That would cause them to change when it was warranted by traffic, not at arbitrary set times. The first ones already had gone up at the intersection of Commonwealth Boulevard and Fairy Street.
25 years ago - 1999
Hampton Industries Inc. of Martinsville was making 90 percent of men’s bathrobes sold in the U.S. Judy Coggin was the plant manager.
The trailer of a tractor-trailer got stuck under the canopy over gas tanks, and knocked over gas tanks, at People’s Gas Station at 1315 S. Memorial Blvd.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin accessed on microfilm at the Martinsville Branch Library.