Ray L. Garland

Despite his state senate defeat the previous year, in 1984, Ray Garland ran for Congress in Virginia's 6th district against Jim Olin, but lost. He then resumed working at the family's stores, as well as wrote a widely syndicated column during the 1990s.

Garland first won election to the Virginia House of Delegates (a part-time position) in 1968, as the Byrd Organization crumbled together with its Massive Resistance to school desegregation. Ray Garland would win re-election to the state house six times, serving alongside Democrats when it was a multi-member district, although he also advocated creation of single-member districts. In 1979 Garland unseated former Senate majority leader, Democrat William B. Hopkins but only served one four-year term before losing to Democrat (and hotel-keeper Granger Macfarlane. Meanwhile, his unassuming (but customer-savvy) pharmacist elder brother Bob Garland, in addition to expanding the family's drug store business, also served on Roanoke's city council for 24 years, from 1962 until 1966 (including a term as vice-mayor despite being one of the few Republicans), and then after selling his interest in the remaining drug stores, from 1970 until 1990 (during which he recruited Noel C. Taylor, a local pastor and activist who became Roanoke's first African American mayor, and the first African American mayor of a major Virginia city).

Ray Lucian Garland (born May 20, 1934) is a Virginia businessman and Republican politician who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly representing Roanoke, and who later wrote a syndicated newspaper column.