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 Keeping a Sweet Dream Alive
 
 By Paul Duggan
 
  WINCHESTER, Va. -- A lot of people in Ginny Hensley's staid and upright home town regarded her as plain hillbilly trash back when she was poor and coming of age here in the Shenandoah Valley. This was just after World War II and into the 1950s, when she'd sing in any beer dive with a stage, when she worked regional radio and the Moose lodge circuit and boasted she'd get to Nashville.
 
 Her betters liked to gossip what a hussy that young Virginia Hensley was, going around right in front of folks with her ruby lipstick and her short pants, crawling under the covers with this one and that one. . . .
 
 "For instance, she would go to our drive-in theater and try to perform," says Judy Sue Kempf, 60, a tour guide. "She would get up on top of the roof of the concession stand, and do you know what happened? The people would actually throw things at her."
 
 Kempf pauses, standing in the aisle of a bus packed with women in their sixties and seventies, grandmothers in leisure polyester and cushioned shoes. They've traveled two hours from Baltimore to see where Ginny Hensley came up, where she was no lady by local standards, on her way to being the fabulous Patsy Cline. This was before "Sweet Dreams," before "So Wrong," before that pure lonesome voice on the nickel jukeboxes the grandmothers sang with ages back.
 
 This was before "Crazy."
 
 Hurt looks come over some of the seniors, hearing the drive-in story, but the bubbly Kempf, Miss Shenandoah Apple Blossom of 1961, says not to fret: "Her roots are in Winchester, and there are some of us, at least, who are proud of that. And, by golly, we will get a museum for her, one way or the other."
 
 Climb aboard for one of her Patsy Cline motor coach tours in Winchester, 75 miles west of Washington, and you'll soon realize this is her theme: that Patsy's strait-laced home town looked down on her, back when she was Ginny and later when she was making records; that Winchester couldn't abide a brassy, ambitious woman from the wrong part of town, especially one known for her loose ways.
 
 Now, 42 years have passed since her plane plunged into storm-soaked Tennessee woods, and Kempf figures this city of 24,000 ought to have a museum celebrating its very own Nashville legend. It's a project she and some other folks here have been working on without success since 1994, hampered by a shortage of money, occasional disorganization and a lukewarm public response in a region where tourism is mainly about the Civil War and the annual Apple Blossom Festival, which is this weekend.
 
 They dream of restoring Patsy's girlhood home and opening a downtown exhibit hall for the best Patsy memorabilia collected from scattered hands -- temples for the pilgrims who roll in from time to time on Highway 7 and the few hundred fans trekking here on Labor Day weekends to observe her birthdays.
 
 Until then, though, you'll have to look for Pasty in her old places. And she's not always around.
 
 The bus pulls to the curb on Pleasant Valley Road in front of radio station WINC (92.5 FM/1400 AM), where Ginny Hensley is said to have made her broadcast debut shortly after World War II, at age 15 or thereabouts. This is the first sight on the Patsy tour, and Kempf says that unfortunately the women won't be allowed inside. "It's too small," she tells them.
 
 Anyway, they wouldn't see much of Patsy in there, just a photo of her hanging by the reception desk, taken when she was a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
 
 Kempf relates that young Ginny walked into the station alone one day, found a deejay called Jumpin' Joltin' Jim McCoy, and told him, "If you let me sing, I promise not to charge you." The grandmothers get a chuckle out of the story. Kempf likes it, too, and doesn't mention it's probably apocryphal. She says McCoy was so taken with Ginny's sweet vocals that he invited her to be a regular on his show.
 
 Now she tells the women about another WINC deejay, Phil Whitney, who recorded a candid interview with Patsy after she got to be famous. "He usually comes out and talks with us and shares that recording," Kempf says.
 
 But he passed away this spring.
 
 "So we'll just have to move on."
 
 The motorcoach eases into downtown and across a rail bed to the wrong side of the tracks, where Ginny Hensley came from.
 
 "South Kent Street is today as it was in Patsy's day," Kempf says as the tour stops at No. 608. The house is white with black shutters, a two-story clapboard box hard by the sidewalk. It's in a ramshackle neighborhood, so once again the seniors won't be getting off the bus.
 
 They stare through the windows at the house, which is rental property now, owned by a real estate company, and there's hardly a sign of life, just a phone bill stuck in the mailbox and some stubbed-out Marlboros in an ashtray by the door. The Hensley family settled here in the late 1940s, having moved in from the countryside. It was around the time Ginny's father, a blacksmith, up and ran off for good. Her mother didn't earn much as a seamstress, so Ginny quit school to work and wound up a counter girl at Gaunt's Drug Store.
 
 At night she sang, at roadhouses, fire halls, racetracks. And from the way she carried herself loose around Winchester, it was plain she liked men a lot, particularly men who might help her, and they sure liked her back.
 
 "Therefore, she was not looked upon kindly in this area," Kempf says to the seniors. In 1994, though, about a dozen people, Kempf included, "formed a group called Celebrating Patsy Cline. And it's our job to keep her memory alive by opening a museum."
 
 There's plenty to exhibit. The group's collections chairman, Phil Hunter, 60, a campus security officer, keeps track of Patsy memorabilia all over the country, and says fans would gladly offer collectibles on loan. "We got a letter from one club that bought the dress she wore at Carnegie Hall," he says. "They're willing to put it in a case for us and everything."
 
 At auctions in New York and Beverly Hills, the group spent $28,000 for two of Patsy's blouses, two of her cowgirl outfits and a Western hat she wore. There's a sizable collection of lesser memorabilia filling a room in Hunter's townhouse, including record albums, posters and more stuff in 15 three-ring binders. Open one at random: "This is an X-ray receipt from the hospital," he says. It's dated Sept. 12, 1955. "That was one time when she hurt her knee."
 
 Hundreds of photos in the binders show Patsy at every stage of her career. The 1950s were bad times and better ones for her, as she joined the popular "Town and Country Jamboree," airing regionally out of Washington, and her first marriage, to Gerald Cline, fell apart. She became Patsy (from Patterson, her middle name) and won the wide acclaim she craved in 1957 with a sensational performance on CBS-TV's "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts." Four years later, just after Hunter's high school graduation here, Patsy topped Billboard's country chart for the first time, with "I Fall to Pieces."
 
 There's fresh hope for a museum, Kempf says. The group's new president, Philip Martin, 54, is "a ball of fire," an entrepreneur with dynamic ideas for marketing and fundraising. Hunter's fiancee lives in Virginia Beach, and he had planned to move there this summer to get married. He even had a job lined up. But all that's on hold now. "This project is my passion," he says, "and I want to see it accomplished."
 
 At Gaunt's, not far from 608 S. Kent, the grandmothers finally step off the motor coach, greeted by Harold "Doc" Madagan, who says: "Welcome to Winchester and welcome to the corner drugstore. I'll begin by saying Patsy worked here in 1950 and 1951."
 
 Block out the McDonald's next door, the Midas across the street, and Gaunt's is pre-CVS Americana, a pharmacy with no food aisle or racks of beach chairs, just mainly medicines, balms and aluminum aids for Winchester's frail and sick. Ginny worked the soda fountain counter, which is a relic now, jammed deep in a storage room that's too dim and cluttered to be part of the tour.
 
 "Well," says Madagan, 65, "let me show you my little picture museum. . . ."
 
 He started here as a clerk in 1958. He'd see Patsy when she came back to visit. And after he bought the store, he hung a dozen photos of her behind the cash register. The seniors gather close, and he says, "Right here's a little picture, about 1957. . . ."
 
 There's a story with each. There's one of Patsy in a cowgirl outfit waving from a convertible in a local parade, before she made it big. Madagan says she wasn't invited by the parade committee. She butted in, and folks booed. By the door, next to a row of walkers, there's a life-size wooden cutout of her in just such an outfit, smiling and waving her white cowgirl hat.
 
 Madagan says he'll be retiring soon and doesn't know who'd want to take over the place.
 
 "Most everything I have I hope ultimately will go in the museum," he tells the women as they head to the bus, bound for Shenandoah Memorial Park, Patsy's last stop and theirs, too. "Hopefully, we'll get things off the ground; I don't know."
 
 She was flying home to Nashville after a benefit in Kansas when the four-seater went down in a thunderstorm -- March 5, 1963. The crash killed her manager, Randy Hughes, who was at the controls; Opry stars Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas; and Patsy.
 
 Who was 30.
 
 "I had just gotten out of the bathtub and, for some reason, I don't know, I turned on the radio," says Marlene Gair, who's on the tour. That was how she heard. "I couldn't believe it. I was numb. I was cold. I got chills all over me."
 
 At the cemetery, just south of Winchester, Gair is off the bus with the others, and they're staring down, conversing in reverent whispers. In the distance, a bell tower erected by fans rises near the gates, and at the women's feet is a flat bronze marker reading, "Virginia H. (Patsy Cline) 1932 -1963. . . . Death cannot kill what never dies."
 
 "I sing her songs all the time," says Gair, a West Virginia miner's daughter born seven months before Patsy. She's 73 now, a retired nurse, a grandmother of nine, a great-grandmother of four. "I'm all Patsy Cline," she says. "I do everything Patsy. I loved Patsy."
 
 That day, after the news sank in, Gair says, she called the nursing home where she worked -- said she wouldn't be in, she wasn't feeling well. When her boss asked what was wrong, "I said, 'I don't know, but I just can't work today.'. . .
 
 "Now, had I told them the real reason, they would not have accepted that." So she just hung up the phone, and stayed home playing records, and cried some.
 
 
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