Angels among us

Community effort gives local family a new start

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

The angel came to Mary Martin not in a vision, but on the phone.

“We’re putting an addition on the back of your house, and you can’t say no,” the angel told Mary, mother of Joseph, in our modern-day retelling of the Christmas story an active Waynesboro 12-year-old who is wheelchair-bound due to complications from cloacal exstrophy, spina bifida and chiari malformation.

That the Martins’ two-story Maple Avenue home isn’t wheelchair-friendly wasn’t an issue when they moved there in 2001. Up until a couple of years ago, Joseph was walking with crutches, and a physical therapist was working with him to improve his ability to get around without the aid of a wheelchair.

“And as abnormal as it seems, for us that was normal. This is what we live and breathe. I wasn’t thinking that he would lose his legs. He was getting stronger. He was building up his ability to do things. I wasn’t thinking about him being in a wheelchair. That wasn’t the way I was seeing his life going,” Mary Martin said.

One of the 40 surgeries that Joseph has had to undergo to date in his young life rendered the work with the crutches moot, inserting rods along his spine to keep his upper body in proper alignment. The surgery also made even basic things like getting upstairs to his bedroom and getting ready for school in the morning difficult if not next to impossible without help from Mom.

“After he was born, I became his primary-care nurse. Which wasn’t easy for an English major,” joked Mary, now a freelance writer after serving for several years as a weekly-newspaper editor in Charlottesville.

It was the constant demand for attention to Joseph’s daily needs that pushed Mary from the full-time work world, straining the family finances to the point where the new normal for the Martins was a mortgage on a home with more than $100,000 in medical bills rolled in that Mom could neither afford for financial reasons to sell nor for physical and emotional reasons to continue to live in.

And then came the phone call, a turning point in a months-long effort that began with a video by Berkeley Glenn Elementary School teacher Suzanne Nesbit that was sent to “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Extreme Home Makeover” with the goal of trying to entice one of the TV shows to provide financing to make the Martins’ home wheelchair-accessible.

“My initial thought was, We can’t wait for Oprah or Ty. There’s some things that we can gather together as a community to make this happen,” said Jeff Fife, the angel on the other end of the phone call in our story, and the executive director of the Waynesboro Family YMCA, one of several community organizations taking part in a local project, called A Safe Haven, that is giving the Martins a new start.

Volunteers from Crozet Baptist Church have taken the lead in fundraising, collecting $100,000 in pledges to get the construction work on the project under way this summer. Rebuilding Together has provided the on-site project management and the financial vehicle in the form of its nonprofit status for the collection of monies. The local Lowe’s and Home Depot stores have kicked in money and materials and hundreds of hours of volunteer labor. And the YMCA provided the catalyst in the phone call from Fife, who had to do some convincing to get Mary Martin on board with the idea that he had in mind. Read more

Dinner with the First Family

Local chef assists with state dinner at the White House

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

Mike Lund found himself a few feet away from the First Couple at the November state dinner held at the White House in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur.

President Barack Obama broke away from small talk with First Lady Michelle Obama to talk with the people in charge of preparing the dinner, and Lund, the executive chef at Zynodoa in Downtown Staunton, had to take the lead after a fellow chef had trouble finding words.

“I said, Doing good, sir. He said, Well, everything’s looking great,” Lund remembered of the conversation with the president at the Nov. 24 state dinner, which Lund helped prepare at the invitation of White House executive sous chef Tommy Kurpradit, a fellow alum of the prestigious The Inn at Little Washington.

Lund, who took over as executive chef at Zynodoa in August, spent two days in the White House working with White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford and celebrated New York City chef Marcus Samuelsson on the meal, which featured on its menu red lentil soup, roasted potato dumplings and green curry prawns, among other items.

It was difficult at the outset for Lund to get to work. “It’s one thing to go on a tour of the White House and get to walk around the exterior. But to actually get to go down on the inside and see what most people don’t get to see, that in itself is kind of distracting at first,” Lund said. Read more

The psychology of gifts

Is it really better to give than to receive?

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

Leslie Chisnell will never forget the candles that she pulled out of the red box with a satin bow - not so much for the candles, but for who gave them to her.

It was her future husband, Kevin, who came red box-with-satin bow in hand for Christmas dinner.

The box and the bow are still around, as are the candles, “burned down,” Chisnell said, but they occupy a prominent place in the mantel of their Waynesboro home.

Psychologists refer to gifts under the category of flashbulb memories. It can be similar to how you can remember where you were and what you were thinking on 9/11, according to Mary Baldwin College psychology professor Louise Freeman.

“These are memories for special emotionally-relevant events in our lives, events that can tend to be remembered very well because of the emotions that the gift brings up,” Freeman said.

What makes the memory stronger, Freeman said, is how often you revisit the memory. With 9/11, for instance, a lot of us shared our experiences from that day because it took on the life of a mass event, and the more we shared what we were doing and thinking that day, the more the memories seared into our memory banks.

“If it’s a gift you end up using, for instance, if it’s your favorite toy, a doll or stuffed animal that you sleep with for many years, that pair of roller skates that you used until they wore out, you interact with that object many, many times, that memory gets very, very solidified in your brain, so you can remember it years later when you’re a grandmother, and you can remember back to the Christmas when you were 5 years old, and you got that Raggedy Ann doll that you’d always wanted,” Freeman said.

Which is why it’s so easy for Julie Crone of Fishersville to remember her favorite Christmas gift, because it’s with her every minute of every day. She had taken her boyfriend, Gary, home for the holidays to meet her father and grandparents. Read more

Follow the Red Brick road

Arts and culture district holds promise of growth in Staunton

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

It’s not the yellow brick road, but Staunton’s new Red Brick District could put the Queen City on a path toward a kind of economic Oz.

“Tourism is a lifesaver in this economy in a city like Staunton right now. A lot of other industries are hurting, but tourism is the one industry here that’s been on the upswing,” said Erik Curren, the director of marketing at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, and the driving force behind the new Red Brick District, a partnership of arts and culture organizations and City Hall that will promote the arts and promote economic development at the same time.

The effort grew out of an attempt to adapt a similar undertaking up the Valley Pike in Harrisonburg to fit Staunton, and it has fit like a glove given the city’s stock of arts and cultural offerings, from Shakespeare to the run of galleries and music venues downtown.

The name Red Brick District is itself distinctly Staunton. “We’ve got the red bricks in the sidewalks that they’ve been laying down in the historic district, and of course we’ve got the red bricks in the Victorian buildings, and that’s something that Staunton is known for. We thought the name Red Brick District would encompass both those things, both capture what’s good about Staunton and suggest that this is the kind of place where you can get that arts and culture atmosphere,” Curren said.

The initial focus of work for District organizers has been on developing and distributing a marketing brochure highlighting the District’s offerings. The brochure is an example of how the District has been from the get-go a ground-up initiative, with the member organizations footing the bill for the development and printing of the brochure, and planning ahead to bear the costs of additional marketing early next year.

“We’d talked about having more organization, an executive director, all of that. I said, You know, we don’t need all that,” said Beth Hodge, the executive director of the Staunton Augusta Art Center, and an early participant in the informal arts and culture council that gave birth to the Red Brick District.

“The reason why I feel like we don’t need that is, even if we had the money, look around this table. These are people who are leaders in this community. They’re volunteering their time. We can get a great deal accomplished without having to have a structure to work under. We never felt like we needed the organization. We just went right on,” Hodge said. Read more

How they do the TV news

It’s 24-7 at TV3

Story by Chris Graham

It’s 9:30. Make that 9:32, actually. The staff is already gathered round the small table in front of the whiteboard near the entrance to the newsroom.

Ed Reams wants to know what the WHSV-TV3 news team has, and the answer is - plenty. It’s the morning of the United Way of Greater Augusta campaign kickoff, which would work well for noon. As would an update on the victim of a Staunton trolley accident. Reams asked aloud if anybody had any ideas on local reaction to comments made by former president Jimmy Carter on race and President Barack Obama, which was a local story because Carter was about to be honored by James Madison University for his work on international peace initiatives.

For close to a half-hour the staff, including morning weather anchor Mallory Brooke, updating the group on what was news in the world of meteorology, pitched story ideas to Reams and assignment editor Calvin Trice.

Then it came time to winnow it all down to what would make the air at noon, five, six and 11.

“You have the events that are scheduled. You have the breaking news. Then you have the enterprise things, the things that are exclusive to us and are born out of an idea or issue or that type of thing. We spend a lot of time looking forward, not just where we are right now. We have to be prepared,” said Reams, who has been the news director at TV3 since 2006. Read more

Experience is the emphasis at 29

Story by Chris Graham

Bureau chief is a sexy job title, but being the bureau chief means you end up doing things like spending the morning at a middle school making sure the station can do live web-streaming of a House of Delegates debate scheduled for the next night.

WVIR-NBC29 veteran Ken Slack eventually got around to doing some reporting work, setting up an interview with Augusta County Board of Supervisors Chairman Larry Howdyshell to discuss county emergency services, and editing an interview with another Board of Supervisors member, Nancy Sorrells, for a report for the news at noon.

Slack is a key member of the NBC29 news team, a fixture at the station since the mid-1990s. Stability is sort of the name of the game at 29, as is the station’s decision to use its newscasts to bridge the Rockfish Gap, so to speak, linking the Valley to Central Virginia. Read more

Democrats aim high

Marrow, Curren face steep hills to climb

Story by Chris Graham

A candidate for public office needs to shake as many hands and slap as many backs as possible. A Democratic Party candidate in the bright-red Shenandoah Valley has to work twice as hard to have a shot on Election Day.

“You’ve got to beat the streets, pound the pavement,” 25th District Democratic Party candidate Greg Marrow said before a meet-and-greet with voters in Waynesboro earlier this month. “I’ve gone through two pairs of shoes already. You’re hot, sweaty, tired. You want to go home and play with your children. But you just know that it’s worth it. You have to believe that it’s going to happen.”

Marrow is trying to do the next-to-impossible - Republicans have held the seat in the 25th, which represents Waynesboro and portions of Augusta County, Albemarle County and Rockingham County, dating back to the 1960s, which is to say, dating back to when Virginia was a solid, solid Democratic Party state.

It’s to the point where seven-term incumbent Steve Landes hasn’t even had a Democratic opponent since his first run for the seat to replace his mentor, Pete Giesen, in 1995. But Marrow seems to be making some inroads. An agitated Landes made headlines at a debate in Waynesboro in September when he forcefully interrupted a Marrow answer to a question, then backed out of a second debate that had been proposed by the News Leader and WHSV-TV3 citing what he claimed were issues with editorial fairness on the part of the News Leader.

Democrat Erik Curren over in the 20th District, which represents Staunton, portions of Augusta and Rockingham and all of Highland County, is facing having to climb an even steeper hill, if that’s possible. The 20th was carved out of the Valley in the 2001 legislative redistricting by the majority Republican Party with the idea that it would be a solid GOP district. Curren’s task was made less daunting when Chris Saxman, who had represented the district since the ‘01 redistricting, decided against seeking a fifth term, but in Dickie Bell, Curren is facing a candidate who has won four elections to the City Council in Staunton, the only independent city in the district and the only real potential base of power for Democrats in the 20th. Read more

‘A true community’

Once a fixer-upper, Staunton’s Newtown now shining light in Queen City

Story by Chris Graham

People thought Michael Organ was crazy. That old home in Newtown was jaw-dropping beautiful, sure, but who in their right mind would stay at a bed-and-breakfast where you were as likely to get your hubcaps stolen or run into a prostitute or drug dealer as you were to enjoy the sunrise over Betsy Bell and Mary Gray?

“Gutsy” is the word Organ uses to describe his idea of the popular view of his move in 1982 to develop what has become the Belle Grae Inn, which encompasses the bed-and-breakfast, apartments designed for longer-stay corporate guests and an 80-seat restaurant.

There were people buying and rehabbing properties in Staunton’s Newtown neighborhood before Organ, but his move at the Belle Grae Inn is seen as a turning point in the historic neighborhood’s rebirth. More than 200 homes and business storefronts have been renovated in Newtown since 1982, and a recent tour of the neighborhood led by Newtown Neighborhood Association president Craig Peterson reveals that things are really just getting started to that end.

“There’s still a lot of potential here,” said Peterson, who bought his 703 West Beverley home in 2001 and set to renovating the structure that dates to 1792 immediately.

It ended up being a project several years in the making. “The half over here was livable. This one was not. We just thought, Well, we’ll fix it up and move in in 90 days. A year and a half later, we moved in,” Peterson said.

“It’s as finished as an old house is ever going to be,” Peterson said. “The older it gets, the more work it’s going to need. And it probably will need work forever. But what we’re doing now is the fun stuff.”

Part of the fun stuff is being a part of a neighborhood that has an active neighborhood association. You don’t get that as much - or at all - in subdivisions.

“It’s a neighborhood in transition, and in our experience neighborhoods in transition have a lot of opportunity for people to either build their personal life there, renovate a home, renovate an apartment or something, or conversely start a business that then becomes an anchor in the neighborhood. We sort of took both routes,” said Brian Wiedemann, who opened the George Bowers Grocery just down West Beverley Street from the Petersons last November and is engaged in an ongoing Newtown home renovation at the same time. Read more

One cool cat

That Richard Adams fellow does it all

Story by Chris Graham

It’s hard to imagine Richard Adams stifled. Or without a gig.

But Adams, who you can see several nights a week in Staunton and Waynesboro playing Shenandoah Pizza or the “River City Radio Hour” or doing local community theater, felt stifled by what was shaping up to be a solid career in education and left his counseling job without another gig lined up.

“I just determined that I was going to do the things that I really liked to do. I just went on that,” said Adams, one of the more adaptive and creative people you will meet, who turned being an unemployed band teacher and guidance counselor into a thriving career providing motivational programs for school systems up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and in the process unleashed a free spirit on a world that would have had no idea what it was getting.

“A former teacher was at one of my I CAN MAN shows, and he said, I’m just amazed. You hardly said a word the entire year you were in my class,” said Adams, who is I CAN MAN by day and by night and weekend is the front man for The Boogie Kings and The Washboard Wonders and a member of the popular local band Wanda and the White Boys.

The leap of faith for Adams came when he was attending a seminar led by a motivational speaker who started her talk with a simple question. “She said, How many of you are doing exactly what you want to do? And maybe a tenth of the room raised their hands. She’s this persnickety old woman. She says, Well, why the hell not? You heard some murmuring. She said, Well, that’s not a good enough reason,” Adams said.

“I finally just said, I’m going to do what I want to do and see what happens,” Adams said.

Which isn’t to say that Adams’ leap of faith was anything close to being immediately rewarded. Running low on funds, he went ahead with a scheduled visit to the dentist, “and I’m sitting in the chair, and my health insurance had run out, and I’m wondering how I’m going to be able to pay for this,” Adams said. Read more

The boomer senior tsunami: Are we prepared for the coming tidal wave in the senior population?

Story by Chris Graham

Paul Lavigne is one of these baby boomers on the verge of wreaking havoc on the senior-services system as he ages into senior status, at least theoretically speaking. But at 61, Lavigne isn’t ready for the rocking chair on the front porch of the old-folks’ home just yet.

Lavigne, to the contrary, went out and bought a racquetball racket earlier this year, and though he hasn’t started playing regularly, the racket has him at the Waynesboro Family YMCA a few days a week getting in shape for his eventual return to the court. Read more

‘Mad’ Mark? Cline will make you smile

Story by Chris Graham

The man responsible for the herd of fiberglass elephants up on the ridge overlooking Waynesboro earlier this year has been entertaining people here since his days in elementary school in the River City doing impressions of characters from popular television shows like “Green Acres” and “The Andy Griffith Show” in front of classes at the behest of amused teachers. Read more

Our own ‘Julie and Julia’

Story by Theresa Curry

It was an ambitious undertaking, so we split it up. Three Waynesboro women made five dishes from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking;” and we served them on Aug. 15, which would have been her 97th birthday. Sylvia Woodworth, a retired educator, realtor Dixie McClenahan and I prepared a four-course meal chosen by Bon Appétit magazine as a meal from “Mastering” that would come together well. Read more

Time for change? Embattled treasurer seeks re-election in face of critical audits, slew of citizen complaints

Story by Chris Graham

Three years of audit reports have suggested that her office is in disarray - with bank deposits made late, cash and checks left sitting in envelopes on desks and counters unsecured, wire transfers being handled improperly, tax records making it hard to tell what had been collected and what hadn’t been.

And still Sandee Dixon tries to see the bright side of things.

“The next audit is going to be my best one yet. I just have a good feeling. I know we’re making improvements,” said Dixon, who was elected the treasurer of Waynesboro in 2005 after working in the office under long-time city treasurer Nancy Beverage for five years. Read more

Burnett up to the ‘challenge’

Story by Chris Graham

It’s hard to say Augusta County has done poorly for itself in the economic-development arena, with the likes of Hershey and McKee Foods and MeadWestvaco, among others, setting up shop in the county and doing good business here. Read more

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