With another blessed Thanksgiving gathering receding into fond recollection, a reminder arrived that one of the first instances of a Roanoke County residence festooned with Christmas decorations this year was
The columnist gets to ask the question today.
Q: Who or what was Bob Kinseyâs aunt and her fellow nurse looking at?
A: The temptation is to speculate those two distracted staffers on the back row of a vintage black and white group photograph of the early nursing staff at Catawba Sanatorium were trying to catch sight of an incoming helicopter to take them home.
Alas, given that the circa mid-1910s snapshot of Kate Lavinder and colleagues, shot outside with the hospital in the background, no chopper was en route.
The rotary wonders did not come into production until 1939. Seeing as how the road over the mountain from the Roanoke Valley to the hospital in those days was frightful, helicopter travel would have been infinitely quicker and more comfortable.
By Ray Cox
Special to The Roanoke Times
Roanoke Red Sulphur Springs and its successor Catawba Sanatorium as historic havens for treatment of tuberculosis having been discussed here not long ago, that sparked additional inquiry.
Q: Edward A. Turpin, my husband, was a tuberculosis patient at Catawba Sanatorium in 1956 when he was 6 years old. Is there a list of doctors or other information about the hospital during that era?
Marsha Turpin
Wytheville
A: Hospital records from 1910-1972, when it operated as a state-run facility to treat TB (since then, it has been a state mental health hospital), are hard to come by. Tisha Parrott of the current hospitalâs administrative staff said finding such information, if such were even available, would take time.
Adair was born on November 9, 1884, at Red Sulphur Springs in Monroe County, West Virginia. She was the second of three daughters and fifth of eight children of Lewis Cass Adair and Rebecca Sidney Taylor Adair. The family moved to Richmond, where Adair attended Richmond Female Seminary and graduated from Richmond High School. At age seventeen she took a clerical job at an insurance company and enrolled in a course for teachers at Richmond High School. Adair and her sisters, who also became teachers, probably chose careers in education in emulation of other family members.
Adair began her career teaching at Elba Elementary School in Richmond in 1904. During the next fifteen years she taught at Nicholson, Robert Fulton, and Bellevue elementary schools and took summer courses at Columbia University, Richmond Normal School, and New York University. In 1921 she enrolled as a full-time student at the College of William and Mary, and two years later she received her AB degree. Adair joined