Posts by Tim Carr

Perhaps no Roanoke-born individual has touched the lives of so many as an almost unknown young African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks (1920 – 1951) The story of Henrietta is amazing and mysterious: mysterious because the details of her tragically short life are mostly lost to time, and amazing because of the far-reaching effects…

It wasn’t long after we moved here that we made a shocking discovery about who we shared our neighborhood with. No, I’m not talking about the local teenagers; I’m referring to something less noisy and more wily that, we realized, was also prowling about the neighborhood. Our neighbors first warned us to be on the…

As we embark on the longest stretch of winter, with a polar vortex on the horizon, I’m remembering back 25 years to the biggest winter event in my lifetime, and one of our country’s most devastating on record: the Blizzard of January 6-8, 1996. Over those days, a massive winter storm plastered our entire state,…

2020 was certainly a year that changed our lives. So many developments of global proportions; so many seismic shifts in our everyday existence. Will life ever quite be the same? In any event, it’s worth recalling some of the ways – good and bad – that 2020 will forever stand out in my memory. Here…

Lessons from Quarantine Here’s a few things I’ve learned during this recent season of life. Food delivery apps are good. Interestingly enough, we had never used such apps before this year. (Yes, yes, I know, welcome to the 21st century!) This is not the place to argue the comparative merits of DoorDash, GrubHub, and UberEats.…

“Tonight I am going to give you a lesson in Astronomy. At dead of night two noble planets, Tarva and Alambil, will pass within one degree of each other. Such a conjunction has not occurred for two hundred years, and you will not live to see it again. … Look well upon them. Their meeting…

In 1907, scarcely a generation removed from the Civil War, the South was marked by widespread racial discrimination, Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised black voters, and constitutionally enshrined segregation through the “separate but equal” doctrine (which in practice established anything but equality).  One hundred years later, in 2007, the final Harry Potter book was published,…

Christmas season 2020 is here, and if it follows the course of the rest of this year, it will be unlike any other Christmas in our lifetimes. Fortunately my kids are up for the challenge, and have been busy inadvertently modifying Christmas songs just to accommodate a Covid Christmas. Please take no offense to any…

Following the pattern of loosely interpreting “Roanoker” to mean someone who has influenced Roanoke’s development, let’s consider…  Dr. Charles T. Pepper (1830 – 1903) A doctor and pharmacist from nearby Rural Retreat, Dr. Pepper is renowned for his greatest medicinal creation: a concoction of herbs, roots, and… you guessed it… carbonated water. This beverage would…

Wet and Wicked Weather in Western Virginia – Part 1 Roanoke is my adopted home, not my birthplace. I am, however, a proud native of the mountains of western Virginia, despite the time I spent down in the flatlands in that other city that starts with an “R”. When we moved to Roanoke, one fact…