TWO-FOLD GIFT
Christmas Day less than a week a way!
It seems impossible! It can't be true, and yet event indicate that it coming along anyway – ready or not!
The City of Harrisonburg, Virginia –“home town” for those of us who dwell at The Cave – received two fine Christmas presents this week. Added to the list of things Harrisonburg citizens and James Madison University students will be two brightly wrapped gifts they will share in years to come.
At Chattanooga, TN on Friday, December 18th, the JMU “Dukes” Football team won over the “Grizzlies” of Montana to become National Champions, NCAA Division 1-AA Football! The game was on TV 's ESPN2 nationwide and Mike Shickman, (WSVA) the regular radio voice of JMU, did play-by-play on the JMU Radio Network. The field is one every one who saw the games will remember, too – with tossed turf from the initial plays and bundles of it lying loose across the field like non-tumbling tumbleweed. The Montana teams set a fast pace and took to the air as much as possible. They scored first and when their pace paused the JMU moving wall made steady inroads with a 41-21 score as their reward. It was JMU's first try at a national slot; the fifth try for the Montana team. The poor field condition are said to have worked in favor of JMU who played the previous week defeating William and Mary College under muddy conditions.
Such a win can mean a lot to the University and to the Harrisonburg area where Coach Mickey Matthews is now an established hero-type college coach. In many ways this is his win, but it means a lot to all of us.
The Second Gift for the community this week was an announcement made at about the same time of the championship game which set forth plan to built a totally new Rockingham
Memorial Hospital! The present fifteen acre location in the city will be replaced with a completely new installation on a 254-acre site on the northeast edge of the city at Reservoir Street and Port Republic Road. It should be ready for use by 2009. The present hospital with his multi-storied parking decks will become part of ...guess what! Right! James Madison University just across a narrow street which now divides the two.
Both JMU and RMH are important to all of us. In a geographic sense the City of Harrisonburg and the growing village community called Weyers Cave are day-by-day, week-by-week become one and the same., soon to join add-on towns named Dayton, Bridgewater , Mt. Crawford, and Penn Laird, Virginia.
Two gifts in one week! A very Merry Christmas struck a week or so early in the year 2004.
A.L.M. December 20, 2004 [c475wds]
