The bulldozers and wrecking ball move into Victory Stadium in Roanoke today, starting their work to reduce the city’s historic landmark to rubble.

Voters in Roanoke sealed the stadium’s fate when they elected an independent City Council slate favoring demolition of the structure.

Built 60 years ago, Victory Stadium hosted sporting events, musical concerts, graduations and even weddings. I took a date there to see Herman’s Hermits in 1964 and covered musical events for The Roanoke Times from 1965-69.

I also shot many photos of the stadium while working for The Times but those images belong to the newspaper, not me, and I couldn’t find a single shot of the stadium among the negatives for that era.

Too bad. I should have paid more attention and headed for Roanoke this weekend to shoot a final set of shots of yet another landmark that fell victim to changes in attitude.