A Night in the Harrisonburg (VA) Jail

This story was related to me by my brother, Stan Colla, in October, 2019.  We has just returned from a family gathering in Luray to remember our deceased cousins, George and Shirley Seely.  This event kicked up many memories, mostly sweet and funny.  Here's one.
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The year is approx 1955.  My family is now living in Buffalo NY, and my grandparents, Albert and Alice Lewis, had retired years ago and moved to Luray VA.  My brother Stan Colla (Jr) is 11 years old.  I was away at college.

Albert had a stroke and was in the hospital in Harrisonburg, VA, about 30 miles south of Luray.  My mother Dele had taken Stan Jr with her, and driven to Luray to see her dad, Albert.  Many of the roads were two-lanes only.  Dele could be an aggressive driver, and did not seem to mind the drive to visit her parents.  She probably enjoyed it.

From Luray, Dele with Stan Jr in tow drove to the hospital in Harrisonburg to visit Albert.  Visiting hours were late in the day, after the dinner hour.  After seeing Albert, they started the drive back to Luray.  It was late in the day, and Dele was probably going pretty fast.  She got pulled over by a cop in Harrisonburg VA.   He charged her with speeding, and told her to follow him to see the local justice of the peace.

When the arresting officer and my mother got there, the judge was sitting in the rear seat of a parked car in a closed-for-the-night gas station along the side of the road.

This "judge" told Dele that the fine for speeding was $40, which she could pay in cash.  The alternate penalty was a night in the Harrisonburg jail.  She chose, for herself and her 11-year-old son, a night in the Harrisonburg jail!  The jail cops were at a lost as to what to do with an eleven-year-old, and so gave him a lot of candy during his stay in the clink. The next day they were released and went on their way returning to Luray, and later home to Buffalo.

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Stan's note: My guess is that Dele was mad for two reasons: (1) that she got caught in the first place because it was dark and this was clearly a "speed trap", and (2) that they tried to run this out-of-state scheme on her after hours when who knows where the cash would go. (Had we been taken to a well-lit public building, the outcome might have been quite different.)

Coleman's notes: In those days, it was a given that many small towns everywhere often relied on citing out-of-town motorists and fining them more or less on the spot, as a source of funding for the town government.  Some were notorious as "speed traps".  Perhaps Harrisonburg was one my mother had not heard about.

At the time that my grandfather, Albert Lewis, was in the hospital at Harrisonburg, my cousin Ada Humphreys was a nurse there.