Signed photo of singer Wayne Newton calmed the Roanoke native

Newton, who still performs and tours at the age of 82, was born in Roanoke. As a young boy, he lived on Greenwood Avenue in the southeast quadrant of the city. And back then, one of his neighbors down the street was Doris Jean Bandy. She was a sixth-grader in 1943, ten years older than the later famous pop singer.

Doris and her future husband, Ray Swanson, met here as classmates in school. They graduated from Jefferson High School in 1950. They married four years later. Ray was 22, Doris 21. Ray had a career at Norfolk Southern, and because he was transferred back and forth, 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. At that time, Nathan was living in North Carolina and working as an administrator in the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center.

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

“She asked where (Ray) was,” Nathan told me on the phone Monday. “She had forgotten he had died. She was calling relatives and asking if he was at their house.”

One time, “she called me 15 times in one day because she forgot she had called me before,” Nathan told me. (“Now,” Nathan added, “I miss those calls.”)

He looked for a senior living facility near Durham and put Doris on a waiting list for the location that seemed best to her. It wasn’t until 2012 that a residence became available for her. Nathan moved with her to Durham that same year.

By this time, Doris had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. An early sign is that she cannot remember recent events, such as the death of a spouse. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease.

As Doris’ condition worsened, she could easily get lost just walking her dog outside her apartment at the senior living facility, Nathan told me. Because of this, the facility placed Doris in assisted living, which she could not leave on her own.

“This transition was very difficult,” Nathan recalled in an essay he sent me about his mother. “She became confused, agitated, and even lost control. There were a few arguments with staff and other patients and she was taken to the emergency room.”

Although Nathan had no medical research background, his work surrounded him with top experts in psychiatry and geriatrics.

“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 it all, first as a slideshow in Microsoft PowerPoint. Finally, he printed out all the text and photos, page by page, and collected them in a large three-ring binder. There were more than 150 pages in it.

Nathan described it as “a presentation-style notebook about Mom’s life, with pictures, anecdotes, her travels and accomplishments.” He hoped it would improve communication between his mother, her caregivers and other family members.

“I put everything I could think of from Mom’s past into the memory book,” Nathan wrote. “She had a beautiful life, was an artist, played the piano, went back to school in middle age to become a nurse, and was a full-time mother and grandmother.”

One memory Doris has not lost, despite her deteriorating condition, was her childhood in Roanoke, on the same street as Wayne Newton. Nathan called it “a unique memory.”

Nathan, now 66, remembers his childhood in the 1960s. Newton was already a star then.

In all of the singer and actress’s television appearances, such as as a guest star in the western series “Bonanza” or in the sitcom “I Love Lucy”, Doris reminded her family that she grew up on the same street as Newton.

So in 2012, he wrote the singer a letter and enclosed a black-and-white photo of Newton at the beginning of his career. The letter described his mother’s condition and the shared past she had with Newton in southeast Roanoke. Nathan asked the singer for an autograph.

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

Not only did Nathan make the photo an important page in the memory book, he also placed it in a frame on the nightstand in his mother’s room.

When Doris got upset and the nursing staff tried to calm her down, they would call Nathan. And on one of those phone calls in the middle of the night, “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 beautifully, Nathan told me. The signed photo from Newton became a starting point for beautiful memories that Doris kept despite her Alzheimer’s disease, Nathan said.

“As if I change a channel on the TV, Mom’s demeanor becomes calm and friendly. She remembers a childhood memory that was very positive for her life,” he said.

Doris died in 2019. Nathan never forgot Wayne Newton’s kindness to his mother. Newton’s signed photo and the rest of the memory book helped make Doris’ final years much more peaceful and enjoyable, Nathan said.

But this story is not over yet.

Fast forward to earlier this year. Nathan learned that Wayne Newton, at the age of 82, would be going on tour in 2024.

Among the dates on his schedule was a July 19 visit to the Newton Performing Arts Center in Newton, North Carolina. (The small town — which has nothing to do with the singer — is just a short hop northwest of Charlotte.) Nathan bought a ticket and wrote to Wayne Newton again to thank him for the photo from 12 years ago.

Shortly before the show, “I received an invitation to meet the entertainer before the show,” 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 mother and he said he understood that he too had a relative who suffered from dementia. He said he lived on Greenbrier Avenue for about four years during World War II. 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 of course Newton played his hits.”

“His voice got deeper, but his pitch was still perfect,” Nathan said.

During the show, “I realized why his talent has endured so long,” Nathan wrote in his essay. Newton “has a warm relationship with his audience. He makes you feel special, that he is actually speaking only to you. It seems as if he seeks out certain people and speaks directly to them.”

During the pre-show meeting with Nathan, “Newton pointed his hand up and said, ‘I hope your mom is enjoying the concert from above.'”

“And with that, I set out to enjoy his performance,” Nathan said.

It’s a moment he will never forget.