The Senior Boom: Are we ready to expand services to increasingly aging population?

Story by Chris Graham

It was hard enough getting Kitty Lough to go into an independent-living facility, harder still to get her to accept the change in her lifestyle.

She never would have guessed back then that she’d miss it as much as she does now.

“She’s finally gotten over the stage of saying, I just don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t understand why this all had to happen,” said her son, David, talking about his mother’s forced departure from a retirement community in Waynesboro, in January. Read more

Queen of the Queen City: Rita Wilson retiring after 16-plus years on Staunton City Council

Story by Chris Graham

She wasn’t trying to be Rosa Parks.

“We were just tired of the separate-but-equal thing. Because it certainly wasn’t separate-but-equal,” said Rita Wilson, who is retiring from Staunton City Council on June 30 after 16-plus years on the job, and who a generation ago made her first foray into public life by rather casually visiting the principal at Bessie Weller Elementary School to talk to him about enrolling her eldest daughters.

“I went to Bessie Weller like I didn’t know anything, and I went in, and all the white mothers were standing around, and the lady said, May I help you? And I said, I came to enroll my girls in school. And they said, Where do you live? And I said, On Jackson Street. And she said, Your children should go to T.C. Edmonds on Johnson Street. And I said, I think you’re mistaken, because my next-door neighbors go to this school, and if my next-door neighbors go here, my girls should go here, too,” Wilson said. Read more

Back to school daze: What is the value of a college degree?

Story by Elizabeth Geris

“Mary Baldwin College Bookstore, this is Elizabeth.”

It was all I could do to answer the nearby phone at this 166-year-old private school’s only campus bookstore, while apologizing to the 23-deep line of extremely patient young women that started at my cash register – young women whose arms were struggling to contain their own individual towers of burdensome, outrageously expensive textbooks.

On the other end of the phone was yet another student enrolled in the college’s statewide, updated version of the correspondence-style of higher education known as the Adult Degree Program. Read more

Field of Dreams: But will economic realities nip proposed $20M stadium in the bud?

Story by Chris Graham

But I do it to try to make you consider something that you might not otherwise. Namely, that the whole idea rests on the notion that a Downtown Waynesboro baseball stadium could draw 4,000 fans a night, 70 nights a year, when nobody involved in the behind-the-scenes on the project has the slightest inkling as to whether even a single person will ever turn the turnstiles. Read more

Economic immunity: Are the Valley and Central Virginia recession-proof?

Story by Chris Graham

The Shenandoah Valley is recession-proof. Charlottesville is recession-proof.

I’ve heard people say this for years.

As the argument goes, the local economies have two big things going for them - major universities and agriculture.

Kids still go to school in recessions. And kids and everybody else still eat in recessions.

But …

Is that enough to make us recession-proof?

I thought I’d ask around to get a sense of what those who would seem to be in the know might have to say about this idea. Read more

No more fun and games: How will downturn affect tourism, theater sectors?

Story by Chris Graham

Your first instinct during a recession is to cut back on extras like eating out, going to the theater, going on vacation.

Or is it?

“The recent press has amplified a growing anxiety that is out there about home finances. But for the most part, Americans tend to see their leisure time and vacations almost as a birthright. So it may change a little bit, but it won’t be something that they would give up quickly,” said Mark Shore, the director and CEO of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau. Read more

The Edge

Links to stories included in The Edge from the Spring 2008 edition of The New Dominion Magazine …

- Third-year conversion
- Farm-a-cology
- Happy Birthday, JMU!
- Aaron’s Song
- Perriello brings Fifth into play
- Staunton native brings Civil War heroes to life
- Headlining Carnegie Hall - the Waynesboro High School Concert Choir
- Book tells author’s tale of personal redemption, acceptance