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

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

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

The New Dominion - September 2009 edition

The New Dominion - August 2009 edition

Clarification | Factory Antique Mall is alive and well

A concern has been raised that the lead story in the July issue of The New Dominion Magazine (”Out of business: What felled NewBiz Virginia?“) might lead readers to form the impression that the Factory Antique Mall in Verona has closed.

To clarify, in fact the Factory Antique Mall, which opened for business in 1996, is alive and well. NewBiz Virginia, a business incubator funded in part by local governments in Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro, and operated out of a location where the Factory Antique Mall is also a tenant, closed in 2006.

We apologize for any confusion on that point that might have resulted from reading the story in the print magazine or online. Read more

The New Dominion - July 2009 edition

Out of Biz: What felled NewBiz Virginia?

Story by Chris Graham

It was the 1990s. The dotcom boom had everybody convinced that this new thing they were calling the New Economy was going to make everybody on the right side of the curve filthy rich.

The trick was figuring out how one could participate in the New Economy. Not even people who were profiting from it knew exactly what the New Economy was, other than it had something to do with technology. Read more

Under fire: A rough final year for Landes, NewBiz board

Story by Chris Graham

A lot went wrong with NewBiz Virginia, perhaps, as some of its former leaders have suggested, dating to the very start of the effort to try to get the publicly-funded business incubator off the ground, given the difficulty in getting such enterprises up and running toward success in the long term. Read more

The New Dominion - June 2009 edition

These routes are made for walkin’

Story by Chris Graham

Everybody knows Sophie. That, and it’s not as long a walk from the 500 block of Chestnut to Berkeley Glenn as I’d thought it might be.

“The point is you can do it. There are some obstacles. But you can walk a mile to school. That’s what we’re trying to get across here,” said Michael Freeman, a physical-education teacher at Berkeley Glenn Elementary in Waynesboro, which had its first spring Walk to School Week in April, with an estimated 60 percent of the school’s nearly 300 students taking part by walking to school at least three times in the five-day week. Read more

The New Dominion - April 2009 edition

The New Dominion - April 2009 issue

Living history: Recreating the Battle of Waynesboro

  

Story by Chris Graham

You want to be a re-enactor, spend a weekend with Fifth Virginia, Company L, out of West Augusta, where the guys take it to the extreme by living and eating like Civil War soldiers for two days.

“You come to the realization that they were some hearty people in those days. If they lived to adulthood, survived all those childhood diseases, they could survive off hard tack and soft pork for four years. Probably longer than that. We’re soft as a society today. We’d probably die from heart disease at 20,” said Bruce Houle of Staunton, who has been on the re-enactment scene for 23 years now. Read more

Video | The Battle of Waynesboro

  

The Battle of Waynesboro - March 2, 1865. It was a month before Appomattox, and what happened here had something to do with what happened there at the formal end of the Civil War. New Dominion editor Chris Graham explores the Battle of Waynesboro by telling the stories of those who help preserve the living history. Length: 8:40.  Read more

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