Nov. 23 through the years

100 Years ago – 1925

 Millner’s Variety Stores announced “Santa Claus Headquarters. Beginning November 24th we will have a Santa Claus mail box in our store and all letters dropped in it addressed to Santa will be answered. … Get your Xmas candy here. We have the biggest assortment of Fresh Xmas Candy to be found.”

75 years ago – 1950

Charles R. Evans, 22, was shot and killed by a fellow hunter while bird hunting near Koger’s Orchard in the western part of the county. Thomas M. Ingram, who had shot Evans, told officers that he and Evans went to the home of Monroe L. Bryant to spend the day. They decided to go hunting and soon saw a covey of quail. After the men separated, Ingram saw movement in the bushes and, thinking it was from quail, fired. Ingram was set on a technical charge of manslaughter in County Trial Justice Court on Jan. 15. He was released on a $500 bond. All three men worked at Fontaine Converting Plant. Mr. Evans had lived with his wife and one child at 216 Moss St.

It was a quiet Thanksgiving in the area, with nearly all businesses and industry closed; three religious services; many hunters in the field; and hundreds of local sports fans in Roanoke for the VMI-VPI game. Public schools were closed from that Wednesday, the last day of the tobacco market, until the next Monday.

50 years ago – 1975

W.C. Bill Lynch, general manager of the Martinsville Theater Management Corporation, which operated four movie theaters in town, warned that new developments with television were hurting movie theaters. It was bad enough that there were three television networks to offer varied entertainment at home, so people had less reason to go to the movies, and Saturday morning cartoons, which children stayed home to watch, so local theaters had stopped showing movies on Saturday mornings. The latest threat was that the television networks had begun showing movies in the evenings and on weekends.

25 years ago - 2000

When poultry farmers Jay and Donna Gregory sat down to their Thanksgiving meal, the turkey on their table was from the story. Jay Gregory, a former Patrick County sheriff and in 2000 an investigator for Henry County, had raised thousands of birds, including turkeys, during his lifetime, but had never eaten any of those he had raised. His father, a cattle farmer, also never ate his own beef.

— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.