Autographed photo of singer Wayne Newton calmed Roanoke native's mind (2024)

Some of the events in this saga happened in the 1940s in Roanoke. Others occurred as recently as a month ago in North Carolina. One thing that ties them together is legendary singer Wayne Newton.

Newton, who’s still performing and touring at 82, was born in Roanoke. As a young boy, he lived on Greenwood Avenue in the city’s southeast quadrant. And back then, one of his neighbors down the street was Doris Jean Bandy. A sixth-grader in 1943, she was a decade older than the famed crooner-to-be.

Doris and her future husband, Ray Swanson, met as classmates here in school. They graduated from Jefferson High in 1950. Four years later, they married. Ray was 22, Doris 21. Ray went onto a career with Norfolk Southern, and because he got transferred here and there, middle son Nathan and his two siblings grew up in the Midwest.

The Swansons returned to Roanoke relatively late in Ray’s career. Eventually, Ray took early retirement. He died in 2008, and Doris stayed here. By then, Nathan was living in North Carolina and working as an administrator in the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center.

It was sometime in 2009 that family members began noticing Doris was having memory problems, Nathan told me. And some of them sound heartbreaking.

“She started asking where (Ray) was,” Nathan told me Monday on the telephone. “She’d forgotten he had died. She started calling relatives to ask if he was at their house.”

On one occasion, “she called me 15 times in one day, because she had forgotten that she had called me earlier,” Nathan told me. (“Now,” Nathan added, “I miss those calls.”)

He looked for a retirement community near Durham and got Doris on a waiting list for the place that seemed best. It was 2012 before a residence opened up for her. Nathan moved her down to Durham that year.

By then, Doris had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. Failing to recall recent events, such as the death of a spouse, is one of the early indicators. Alzheimer’s is progressive.

As Doris’s condition worsened, she could easily get lost just walking her dog outside her retirement community apartment, Nathan told me. For that reason, the facility moved Doris into assisted living, which she couldn’t leave on her own.

“This transition became very difficult,” Nathan recalled in an essay he sent me about his mom. “She would become confused, agitated, even out of control. There were a couple of times she fought with staff and other patients and was taken to the emergency room.”

Though Nathan didn’t have a medical research background, at his job he was surrounded by top experts in psychiatry and geriatric medicine.

“So I started asking questions,” he wrote in the essay. And one of the suggestions he received from someone at Duke was to create a “memory book.”

Nathan spent hours arranging that, first as a slideshow in Microsoft PowerPoint. Eventually, he printed all the text and photos, page by page, and collected them in in a large, three-ring binder. It was stuffed with more than 150 pages.

Nathan described it as “a presentation-style notebook about mom’s life, with pictures, anecdotes, her travels and accomplishments.” The hope was it would improve communication among his mom, her caregivers and other family members.

“I included everything I could think of from mom’s history in the memory book,” Nathan wrote. “She had a nice life, was an artist, played piano, returned to school in middle age to become a nurse and was a full-time mother and grandmother.”

One memory Doris didn’t lose, despite her advancing condition, was growing up in Roanoke on the same street as Wayne Newton. Nathan called that “one unique memory.”

Nathan, now 66, remembers when he was a young boy in the 1960s. Newton was already a star.

Whenever the singer-actor had appearances on television, such as guest-star roles in the Western series “Bonanza,” or in the sitcom “I Love Lucy,” Doris would remind her family that she had grown up on the same street as Newton.

So in 2012, he wrote the singer a letter and included a black-and-white photo of Newton early in his career. The letter explained his mom’s condition and the history she shared with Newton in southeast Roanoke. Nathan asked the singer to autograph it.

Newton wrote, “Doris Jean, Greenwood St was great. Best Wishes, Wayne.”

Besides becoming an important page in the memory book, Nathan also placed a framed version of Newton’s signed photo on the nightstand in his mom’s room.

When Doris would act up, and the nursing staff sought to calm her, they would call Nathan. And on one of those middle-of-the-night phone calls, “out of desperation, I told them to point to Wayne Newton’s picture,” and her memory of Greenwood Avenue when Wayne Newton lived there.

It worked like a charm, Nathan told me. The autographed photo of Newton became an entry point for pleasant memories Doris retained despite the Alzheimer’s, Nathan said.

“Like switching a channel on the TV set, mom’s demeanor became calm and pleasant. She was being redirected to a childhood memory that was very positive in her life,” he said.

Doris died in 2019. Nathan never forgot Wayne Newton’s kindness toward his mom. Newton’s autographed photo, and the rest of the memory book, helped make Doris’s final years much more peaceful and comfortable, Nathan said.

But this story isn’t over.

Flash forward to earlier this year. Nathan learned that Wayne Newton was embarking on a 2024 tour at age 82.

Among the dates on his schedule was a July 19 stop at the Newton Performing Arts Center in Newton, North Carolina. (The small town — no relation to the singer — is a hop, a skip and a jump northwest of Charlotte.) Nathan bought a ticket and wrote Wayne Newton again, thanking him one more time for the photo from a dozen years previous.

Shortly before that show, “I received an invitation to meet the entertainer before the performance,” Nathan told me. “The first thing Newton said to me was, ‘call me Wayne,’” Nathan recalled.

“I told him what he had done for my mom, and he said he understood, that he also had a relative who had dementia. He said he lived on Greenbrier (Avenue) for about four years, during WWII. Shortly after that, his family moved to Arizona. He signed my album cover of his greatest hits “With Love and Friendship, Wayne.”

The show was great, Nathan recalled. And naturally, Newton performed his hits.

“His voice has deepened, but his pitch was still perfect,” Nathan said.

During the show, “I realized why his talent has been so enduring,” Nathan wrote in his essay. Newton “warmly relates to his audience. He makes you feel special, that he’s actually talking to just you. He appears to pick specific people and speak directly to them.”

During the meeting with Nathan before the show, Newton “motioned his hand upward saying, ‘I hope your mom enjoys the concert from above.’

“And with that I was off to enjoy his performance,” Nathan said.

It’s a moment he’ll never forget.