Cara Modisett

About a half hour walk from my house there’s a little ice cream parlor called Pop’s. It’s a 21st century eatery with 1980s board games, a 1970s disco ball, 1950s-vintage accoutrements in a 1920s former library. It’s owned and run by a young husband and wife in a Roanoke neighborhood known as Grandin Village, around the corner from a natural foods co-op, a 1930s cinema and a ballet school.

I’m not sure you’d call it “authentic” anything, though there’s plenty in it that’s authentic, such as the mid-20th-century soda fountain, bar stools, sandwich grill and booths, purchased on eBay – it’s a mix of eras that covers nearly a century of time.
But it’s definitely real. It’s not trying to be anything but itself, serving up amazing ice cream that's made by Homestead Creamery over in Franklin County. Besides the ice cream, the menu includes nearly a page of grilled cheese sandwich variations served with a side of… popcorn.

A Roanoke Times article from 2006 tells the story of how the place was discovered and marketed – middle school students on cell phones. Its customers wear bicycle helmets and business suits. Dan Smith, a Roanoke writer and editor of the Blue Ridge Business Journal, describes it as “something remembered and something new.”

In this issue, we bring you the authentic, the real and the remembered. In our “Diners and Drive-Ins” feature, there’s the authentic – a 1948 Mountain View diner in West Virginia, captured on a photographer’s last roll of black and white film – and the remembered – a restaurant along Virginia’s Route 11 that celebrates the stars (and cars) of yesteryear.

On my trip to Mentone, Alabama, I discovered the real: Southern country cooking in a 17th century Indian Trading Post, and a stay in an old cottage that had no phone lines, but did have a remote-controlled gas fireplace.
Much in this issue seems to fall into a bit of a time warp, to borrow the words of Mentone potter Valinda Miracle. What about the mysterious Welshmen said to have ventured into the Appalachian mountains… three centuries before Columbus ever landed? And jump ahead six more centuries to meet an artistic duo who’ve turned a 1960s ranch into a sunlit, art-filled 21st century home.
Also in this issue: The historic Appalachian Trail, the wilds of southern West Virginia, the arts of the Shenandoah Valley and the devastating Nelson County floods of 1969.

Read on for a trip back in time.

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