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

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

No smoking

Story by Chris Graham

Until Augusta Health made it public that its campus had gone smoke-free this summer, it hadn’t registered with me that the regional hospital had been effectively facilitating smoking all these years by allowing employees to take smoke breaks on the clock and setting up designated smoking areas for visitors outside.

Turns out it’s not as easy as you’d think for a hospital to go smoke-free. Read more

Vet student goes wild

Story by Chris Graham 

They’re about as big as a 6-foot tall male, a tad bit thicker - up to 600 pounds - and when stressed, you don’t want to find yourself sitting on top of a wildebeest.

Which is precisely where second-year Virginia Tech graduate veterinary student Becky Davis found herself one day in Africa recently.

“He was darted, but if he’d wanted to get up, he could’ve gotten up. The person in charge of game reserve said, If he tries to get up, you have to lay on him, whatever, you can’t let him get up. You’re in charge. That was a little scary. You definitely didn’t want him to get up,” said Davis, who joined a group of 12 veterinary students on a three-week trip to South Africa in June learning how to treat wildebeests, buffaloes and big cats including lions and tigers. Read more

Not the foosball you play

Story by Chris Graham

Alan Cribbs is a world-champion foosball player. Yes, they have world championships for foosball players.

Cribbs is also a foosball visionary and entrepreneur who has modeled a U.S. foosball circuit after the PGA Tour and hopes that one day top foosball players will be recognized on the street like stars in other sports.

“That’s the way the game is treated in Europe,” said Cribbs, the owner of the Pinnacle, N.C.,-based Bonzini USA, which markets custom foosball tables and organizes foosball tournaments across the country, including the Thunder in the Mountains Foosball Spectacular at Byers Street Bistro in Downtown Staunton that was held last month. Read more

Young, younger, youngest

Story by Chris Graham

Tim Williams is young for a city mayor at 43. But Williams, entering his second year as mayor of Waynesboro, has nine years of experience in city government under his belt dating back to his term on the Waynesboro School Board.

That makes him the grizzled veteran of the young mayors trio in the Charlottesville-Greater Augusta-Harrisonburg area.

“And that experience can be a big help,” said Williams, who was re-elected to Waynesboro City Council last year and was sworn in as the new mayor in the River City on July 1, 2008. 

Read more

The new man in charge at Blue U.

Story by Chris Graham

The world has turned over several times at least since John Downey first stepped foot on campus at Blue Ridge Community College in 1992. Few had heard of the Internet by then, for example. And the handful of us who had cell phones had to leave them in their cars, except for the occasional guy who carried around a device as big as your average brick.  Read more

The morning paper revisited

Story by Chris Graham

“We’ve created a very strange situation for ourselves,” News Virginian editor and general manager Lee Wolverton said of the ongoing handwringing among us media moguls about what we need to do to get our industry back on track after a sustained period of losing print readers used to paying for the news to the Internet where people have come to expect information to be readily available for free. 

“It’s really the equivalent of saying to somebody, You can drive to Burger King and pay for your sandwich, or we can bring it to your door and give it to you for free. And then the funny thing about our industry is, we’re all mystified as to why that isn’t working,” Wolverton said. Read more

The ACV is back

If I want to know what’s going on with the Artisans Center of Virginia, the easiest way for me to find out is to get up from my computer, walk down the hall toward my old office on the other side of the Augusta Free Press Publishing building and ask Sherri Smith, the ACV’s new executive director.

Smith and the Artisans Center have set up shop at AFP Publishing as they begin the work of reorganizing the Center following the decision of the Center’s Board of Directors earlier this year to shutter the once-thriving ACV retail gallery in Waynesboro in the face of the economic downturn that seemed to hit the Artisans Center particularly hard.

Read more

A real free choice

George Waksmunski has seen it happen. “Workers are terrorized when they attempt to organize a union,” said Waksmunski, the national representative for UE Local 123 in Verona. “Bosses tell them from day one, You’re going to lose your job, the plant’s going to close, the union’s going to go on strike, you’ll get nothing, we won’t negotiate,” Waksmunski said.

To Waksmunski and millions of labor supporters, the Employee Free Choice Act will level the playing field between workers and management by giving workers the ability to form a union by voting with their signatures on cards, then giving them a shot at binding arbitration that would without doubt put an end to protracted negotiations that can go on for years unabated right now. Read more

Growing up at FMS

Liam McNamara remembered being “a little scared, a little timid” at his first graduation weekend at Fishburne Military School as an eighth-grader.

“Seeing the valedictorian, it had a high place in my mind,” said McNamara, a day student at the Waynesboro prep school. “Being up there giving the valedictorian speech to a new class of eighth-graders is kind of humbling,” McNamara said. 

A lot can happen in a few years. McNamara went from a scared, timid eighth-grader from Augusta County to a graduate with an appointment at West Point and a chance to walk on to the football team at the University of Virginia who passed both of those opportunities up to accept an academic scholarship at Division III Washington and Jefferson, where he will also play football for the powerhouse Jeffs.  Read more

Hart ready to make noise in 26th

Story by Chris Graham

Lowell Fulk was Al Weed. Gene Hart wants to be Tom Perriello.

“Lowell Fulk’s runs in 2003 and 2005 laid the foundation for what we can do this year. We couldn’t be successful if Lowell hadn’t run and lost in 2003 and 2005,” said Hart, 46, a Harrisonburg attorney and presumptive Democratic Party nominee in the 26th House District who will challenge Republican incumbent Matt Lohr in November.

Fulk is the chair of the Rockingham County Democratic Committee who challenged long-time State Del. Glenn Weatherholtz in ‘03 and then Lohr in ‘05 and came thisclose both times to turning the seat representing a portion of the county and the entirety of the city of Harrisonburg blue. “Lowell reinvigorated the Democratic Party in Harrisonburg and Rockingham, and those races and those losses were necessary for us to get to where we are now,” said Hart, like Fulk a centrist Democrat whose campaign is focused in ‘09 on crafting solutions on issues like education and particularly transportation that have been held up by the partisan gridlock in Richmond the past several years. Read more

Video Extra | Gene Hart on unemployment insurance

26th House District Democratic Party nominee Gene Hart speaks Thursday, April 23, 2009, at a Results, Not Roadblocks rally addressing the vote of House Republicans to block the receipt of federal stimulus monies for unemployment benefits at the Harrisonburg Virginia Employment Commission office. Read more

Gotta know the warning signs

Story by Chris Graham

The sensation was like “pouring warm water starting from the top of my head all the way down to my toes on the left side.” And it scared Chris DeWald, but not the doctor who treated him initially.

“They said, Oh, you must be having a migraine headache, and sent me home, and didn’t do any tests,” said DeWald, who was about to turn 50, had just been nominated for a regional award for his work in the Public Works Department in the city of Staunton, and whose life was about to change forever.

DeWald had had a stroke that day, it would be discovered, when he landed back in the hospital after collapsing at home following a second stroke three days later. That was in May 2006. That he’s here three years later is a miracle. “They told me I should have died,” DeWald said, counting himself among the lucky ones, along with Karen Bess of Fishersville, who is four years into her post-stroke new life. Her experience was similar in some ways to that of DeWald - she suffered a series of four strokes that she said she wrote off at first as being headaches caused by stress from a move and then had written off like DeWald by a doctor who misdiagnosed what was happening. Read more

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