The first sign of change at Spencer’s 206 is the pert display of DVDs at the register. They’re the right kind of DVDs, of course—Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, the Heads’ Stop Making Sense—but they signal the sort of infusion of new merchandise that says “reinvestment.” Then there’s the tidier aspect of the Water Street shop—actual sweeping seems to have occurred in recent days. Yes, local musician and longtime record-seller Spencer Lathrop is still sitting at the counter, but his shop, Spencer’s 206, has changed hands.
Lathrop sold the CD store on January 23 to Vickie and Cal Glattfelder. Cal’s neat haircut and well-pressed aspect make him the B-side to Lathrop’s sheepdog appearance. But like two sides of a 45 single, Glattfelder and Lathrop are clearly related—in their passion for music and their interest in making a go at small-time retail. The difference is that after 10 years, Lathrop is getting out of Charlottesville’s small-business market and Glattfelder is just getting started.
Lathrop opened his shop late in 1992 at 206 E. Market St. He had returned to Charlottesville, where he had been a student of Russian at UVA, after his teaching gig in San Francisco dried up. His plan for survival was minimal, but his intentions were straightforward: “I was really tired of asking people for a job,” he says, “so I decided to ask people for money, instead.”
Capitalizing on undergraduate years spent earning a living at a Barracks Road CD store, Lathrop stocked a small number of CDs in the tiny triangular space at the back of the Market Street building. In the early days, he rounded out his offerings with espresso and a performance space that got frequent use from bands and poets.
Between 1992 and 1999 when he relocated the store to its present location at 218 Water St., Lathrop scraped by. But if the dough was skimpy, the other rewards of owning the business that first introduced “listen before you buy” to local CD-shoppers were great. “Early on, somebody came in and said, ‘Oh, Lucinda Williams. I’m so glad you have that. I can’t find it anywhere,’” he recalled recently as he nursed a blizzard-related sprained knee and ankle. “It’s affirming when you share musical loves with people.”
Indeed, the legions of Spencer’s faithful who have relied on Lathrop and some of his star personnel (such as legendary local DJ Patrick Reed) to keep them stocked with hard-to-find or offbeat music can attest to the joy of obsessively debating the merits of The Strokes versus the White Stripes or praising the arched harmonies of Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersch. For a decade, Lathrop has been the local equivalent of Rob Fleming and his shop has been our Championship Vinyl, the idiosyncratic proprietor and record store of Nick Hornby’s classic pop novel High Fidelity. On a recent afternoon, 10-year customer Frank McCue neatly summed up his relationship with Spencer’s while fingering his latest purchase, Du jazz dans le ravin by French composer Serge Gainsbourg. “Music is an addiction,” McCue said, “and they’ve been dealing to me for years.”
However enriched he might have been through the years by his rapport with his clientele, Lathrop never really got a secure financial foothold, he says, and about four years ago he started to consider selling the place. His ambition grew more intense, he says, in the past year as his third child was coming due. Besides that, it just started to feel to him that time was up. “Doing retail is not what I want to end up doing when I’m 45,” says 43-year-old Lathrop.
Enter Cal Glattfelder, a contract airplane pilot and self-described audiophile who says he’s always wanted to be in business for himself. Wisely, he’s arranged for Lathrop to stay on as an employee for the next year while he learns the names and tastes of the Spencer’s acolytes, a duty he concedes is “a little intimidating.” Sure, it’s good to be addressed personally when you walk through the door, but what about the music? Well, if it’s any indication, recently Glattfelder had Ry Cooder’s Mambo Sinuendo playing in the store. And on his system at home, he claimed, were discs by Robert Johnson, Southern Culture on the Skids and Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks. Not a note of Avril Lavigne to be heard.
Lathrop, who has not yet made plans for life after Spencer’s, gives the Glattfelders a ringing endorsement. “The beauty of me going into the business was that I was naïve enough to do it,” Lathrop says. “Shoot, if I can do it for 10 years, Cal can do it as long as he wants to.”
—Cathryn Harding
Front-seat drivers
VDOT cedes control of Meadowcreek Parkway
A few years ago, any local conversation about the Meadowcreek Parkway included plenty of invective against the Virginia Department of Transportation. For years, City and County officials saw the State road builders as a bully that pushed its outdated, one-size-fits-all highway designs past any local opposition. VDOT has eaten its humble pie, however—and it tastes like financial ruin.
In 2002 Governor Warner appointed Philip Shucet to head the bankrupt agency; among his budget-trimming measures, Shucet will allow more local control of road projects.
“The current tenor of VDOT is dramatically different. They are accommodating us,” said City Public Works Director Judith Mueller, during her report to City Council last week on the Parkway project. “VDOT is saying that it’s our road, and they’re working with us. We all know that wasn’t the case three or four years ago.”
The Parkway––planned to link Rio Road with McIntire Road––has been mired in controversy and politics throughout its 30-year gestation. Conceived in the 1970s as a way to directly connect Downtown with County subdivisions in the north, the Parkway has long been a target of alternative-transportation activists who object to the destruction of parkland and say the road will promote urban sprawl.
In the 2000 election, current Councilors Kevin Lynch, Meredith Richards and Mayor Maurice Cox courted the anti-road vote by voicing their opposition to the Meadowcreek Parkway. But their stance was arguably all politics, since both VDOT and Albemarle were already committed to building the road.
Council’s real battle concerned the Parkway’s design. VDOT envisioned four lanes of fast-moving traffic and interstate-style interchanges. Charlottesville wanted a slower, more aesthetically pleasing two-lane road. Council wanted a true parkway, it said, not merely a road through a park. Albemarle simply wanted a finished road, period. Since the road would wind through the City and County, everyone had to agree.
The parkway design favored by Charlottesville was created in the late ’90s by the local design firm Rieley & Associates. Last week Albemarle’s chief engineer Jack Kelsey said the County’s portion of the road would match Rieley’s design.
During its regular meeting on Tuesday, February 18, Council approved a new study of interchange alternatives based on Rieley’s work––in typical City fashion, leaders endorsed a study to complement a study. The fact that the City and County are designing the Parkway and will instruct VDOT on how to build it marks a drastic change from the days when the massive agency built whatever and whenever it wanted.
Mueller predicts construction could begin on the Parkway by 2005. Given that the road’s planning phase is already three decades old, perhaps some skepticism is in order. Partly because the road is so long in coming, Cox says Council should proceed with caution. He called for the creation of a steering committee to oversee the Parkway design and construction, but other Councilors said this would mean more delay (not to mention more committees to oversee plans to make plans, etc.). While it seems inevitable the Meadowcreek Parkway will be built, anti-road activists can maybe take solace in the fact that we all might be driving hydrogen-powered cars by the time the concrete starts pouring.
––John Borgmeyer
Where’s the do re mi for ABCs?
Special ed and teachers’ pay fuel fat funding request
When asking for money, one should always aim high. Or so voted the Albemarle County School Board on February 13. With the State’s purse strings in such a knotted mess though, the School Board is certain that Superintendent Kevin Castner’s 2003-2004 funding request for $105,322,108 will be returned to them by the Board of County Supervisors for revision. That’s $1,927,551 more funding than is currently projected, by the way.
But a School Board can dream, can’t it?
“Our charge by the State code is to represent the needs of the school system,” says School Board Chair Diantha McKeel. “We intend to do that.”
After an hour of debate during the joint meeting of the School Board and Supes just the day before, it was obvious that not everyone would be budgeting the three Rs at the same level. Indeed, on February 13, two School Board members cast dissenting votes.
“The two members who didn’t approve the vote to send the funding request in as is,” says McKeel, “thought we should make cuts prior to sending it, before [the Supervisors] do it.” But in the end, Pamela Moynihan and Kenneth Boyd were overturned by a 5-2 vote. More likely a case of frustration than wishful thinking, approving board members chose to offer an effortless “aye” in place of shredding the current proposal in the weed-whacker.
For the current fiscal year, school funding has been reduced by just more than $900,000 from its original budget of $99,589,820, a problem that would have been exacerbated had the School Board not had $1.9 million tucked away under its mattress. Projected enrollment growth of 134 students for 2003-2004 should take care of those extra funds, however. Besides growth-related needs like gifted programs ($18,862), textbooks ($270,733), replacement busses ($255,000), upgrades in technology ($209,609), education of the homeless and (who can forget about) water, the fattest operational cost for 2003-2004 is special education. To meet legal mandates, an additional $204,234 is required as it stands now. With more student growth, that figure could sharply rise. And we didn’t even get to the question of teachers’ compensation and benefits.
The increased cost of health and dental insurance is projected by Castner as $1.24 million, about one-third of the $3.67 million requested for salary and wage increases for teachers and “classified” school employees such as bus drivers and cooks. During the joint meeting, not all County Supervisors were convinced that the lion’s share of greater County funding should go straight to teacher pockets. While School Board member Stephen Koleszar described County teachers as doing “a wonderful job,” citing details like “every home in the County is getting a report card,” Supervisor Sally Thomas, for one, did not see teachers’ efforts as exceptional among County employees.
“We require our County staff to be an urban government for a rural area,” she said. “They’re working extremely hard, too.”
The hierarchy of under-appreciation may remain in question, but the Supes and School boards can agree on one thing—no one wants to raise taxes in order to meet market salaries.
“These salary increase studies were done with the caveat that there’d be enough money to fund the increases,” said Supervisor Walter Perkins. “Now, where‘s the money going to come from?”
—Kathryn E. Goodson