May 31 through time
100 Years ago – 1925
A Red Cross Clinic for Crippled Children and Adults was held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Grammar School. It was the first such clinic open to adults; previously, those clinics were only for children under age 14. The clinic was conducted by specialist Dr. W.T. Graham of Richmond. A telegram from him was received on May 25 advising the local Red Cross that he’d be coming; they coordinated those free clinics.
50 years ago – 1975
Ginny Wray was a longtime Martinsville Bulletin editor who retired in 2015, and she and her husband, retired Bulletin photographer Mike Wray, now live in Richmond. Both worked at the Bulletin in the early 1970s. Ginny Wray then was Ginny Richards. She started working at the Bulletin in the Accent Department, and in April, she went from Accent Editor to copy editor and education writer. Jane Tarver Drewry, a native of Georgia who had written before for the Bulletin and for the Daily Advance in Lynchburg, replaced Ginny Richards as Accent Editor.
(By the way, you could say that Mike Wray was the inspiration behind this history column. He used to go through old newspapers on microfilm to compile a short column of snippets from the old newspapers which was published in the Bulletin. The writer of this column was the Bulletin’s Accent editor for many years, and then the newspaper’s editor. She started writing this column and publishing it on Page A2 starting the very week she became editor, and Mike Wray, who had been retired then for a few years, came down to the newsroom to give her some pointers on how to use the finicky old microfilm reader in order to do it.)
25 years ago - 2000
Martinsville High School junior Stefan Mlot, 17, scored a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). He scored 730 out of 800 on the math portion of the SAT. Fieldale-Collinsville High School senior James Bradley “Brad” Rogers of Collinsville scored a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT II. He planned to attend the University of Virginia and had also gotten acceptance letters from Harvard, Brown and Duke universities and the College of William and Mary.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.