Month: July 2003

Hazardous waist
Super-sizes and not-so-super exercises have born one nation under lard

It’s a fat, fat world. More than 60 percent of all American adults are categorized as overweight or obese. And Virginia is expanding right in line with the trend. According to the Virginia Department of Health, 36.7 percent of adult Virginians are overweight and 20.9 percent obese (obese means 30 pounds or more overweight—a 5’4” woman would weigh more than 175 pounds and a 6‘ man might tally in at more than 220). One decade ago those percentages were a comparatively slender 29.4 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively.

But the price is more than personal. Studies show that bulging bellies are an inflating burden to employers in the form of medical costs, absenteeism and on-the-job performance to the tune of $117 billion annually (for more on this, see “Big numbers” on page 14). What’s worse, today’s teens and young adults could be the first generation in a century to live fewer years than their parents because of weight-related health problems.

The problem can be summed up in two words: Over-consumption and inactivity. If we’re not in line at Billy Bob’s Sizzlin’ Barbeque Buffet, we’re parked contentedly on the couch absorbing 75 hours of television per week while packing away the simple sugars and complex carbohydrates.

We literally are eating ourselves to death and not moving a muscle to do anything about it.

Some claim that this fatty epidemic really started with the Industrial Revolution, when automation began to make humans far less active. Others blame it on the 1970s, when moms went to work and frozen foods or McDonald’s became the norm for rushed dinners around the TV. Whatever the principal indictment, there is one factor that weighs heavily in all this fat: Portions are out of control.

“We’ve become accustomed to these immense portions when we eat,” says Rita Smith, who is a registered dietician at Martha Jefferson Hospital. “Inexpensive buffets have become the accepted norm, and we think nothing about getting the fast food jumbo sizes.” This kind of distortion might be acceptable if we were all consuming oranges and broccoli, but much to health professionals’ dismay, this is rarely the case.

In a study recently concluded by The American Medical Association, for instance, researchers found an average soft drink has increased to 20 fluid ounces and 193 calories, from its original 13 ounces and 144 calories in 1977. An average cheeseburger now comprises 7.3 ounces and 533 calories, increased from 5.8 ounces and 397 calories nearly 30 years ago.

“We’re consuming snack foods that are non-nutritious and high in calories, along with sodas instead of water, all day long,” says Smith, who has spent 25 years in the good food field. “These days, as opposed to 25 to 30 years ago, we eat out of bags and containers instead of at the table.”

Another alarming trend is modern-day youngsters who are not only accustomed to eating out several times a week, but just plain expect it. Fewer families today dine around the table where food types and portions can be better controlled. Furthermore, family traditions such as Mom’s apple pie are quickly becoming a thing of the past: Satisfying desserts made with real butter, milk, eggs, sugar and flour are being replaced by boxes of candy with refined sugars, chemicals and ingredients like hydrogenated oils, soy lecithin and cocoa processed with alkali. If children and teens command what’s for dinner (or worse, what’s tossed into the grocery cart) chances are higher for childhood obesity, which leads, research shows, to adult obesity.

Aggressive advertising campaigns are also to blame. The Mars Company, for instance, spent $13 million in one recent year to advertise the Snickers bar. Meanwhile, the Chicago Times reports that Burger King, the second-largest fast food chain in the nation, forks over $350 million annually for ad costs.

 

Then there’s the question of the tuber on the davenport—in other words, the couch potato who lurks inside most of us.

“People today put no emphasis on exercise and our lives are largely dormant,” says Smith, noting that the combination of healthy food and exercise (even as little as 15 minutes a day) could significantly reduce obesity’s rising trend.

Statistics also show that American neighborhoods built within the past three decades are not conducive to walking: Although 25 percent of all trips made on a daily basis are less than one mile away, 75 percent are made by car, according to The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Albemarle County has its share of such subdivisions (West Leigh, Forest Lakes), but there may be some hope for our chunky selves in the County’s much-vaunted new neighborhood model, which, in theory, designates growth areas as mixed-use, walking-friendly neighborhoods. Still, building a sidewalk and getting people to use it are not one and the same.

If we continue to waddle along our present course, severely overweight and obese Americans (and those headed in that direction) will self-destruct in five years. Maybe even less. The Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center predicts that at the current rate of expansion, nearly 40 percent of Americans will be obese by 2008. Furthermore, physicians today are fearful of the growing number of young adults with diagnoses traditionally linked to aging adults, such as high cholesterol, diabetes and heart attacks.

“Life isn’t easy for overweight or obese children in so many ways,” says Smith, adding that it’s not much easier for obese adults.

As a society we need to take the stairs, walk to work and stop at one bowl of Cap’n Crunch. But Smith and others forecast obstacles along the way that have as much to do with social structure and economics as they do “Must See TV” and Big Gulps.

“Over the last 20-30 years, there’s been a whole change in family structure and food preparations,” says Smith. “We must change that.”—Kathryn E. Goodson

Slim Chance

UVA Hospital surgeons offer the severely overweight hope, but not without risk

A couple of years ago the San Francisco musical duo Matmos released A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, an album whose opening track “Lipostudio…And So On” layers the squeal and gurgle of suctioned fat with beats and loops. It’s more than a testament to our national obsession with body modification—it’s a surprisingly gorgeous piece. The surgical riddance of fat is an art form, and Americans, it turns out, are mavens of this particular grace.

Fifty years of experimentation and innovation in bariatrics, the medical field devoted to obesity, have yielded the gastric bypass operation, also known as stomach reduction surgery, in which the stomach is stapled to create a small upper pouch about 10 percent of the stomach’s original size. Surgeons then sever and reconnect the small intestine to the pouch. A smaller stomach means smaller meals are needed to sate hunger. Doctors consider the operation a final resort. Dr. Bruce Schirmer, a bariatric surgeon at UVA, and his group perform between 20 and 25 of the operations each month, each at a cost of about $35,000, and the number of surgeries keeps growing. The American Society for Bariatric Surgery estimates a four-fold increase in the number of operations performed since 1992.

“Typically, we see patients first off that have done a number of things to lose weight on their own, like Jenny Craig, some type of diet pills, Slim Fast, etcetera,” says Dr. Rebecca Evangelista, an instructor of surgery with a one-year fellowship in Schirmer’s office, “and despite those things—going to a nutritionist and having been put on weight reduction programs—patients still considered morbidly obese we evaluate for surgery.”

When asked if these patients remain overweight after the surgery, she quickly responds, “Absolutely.” Successful gastric bypass surgery, Evangelista notes, reduces a patient’s excess weight by half and allows him or her to maintain that loss, which she claims nearly 90 percent do. For example, an obese 5’10” man who weighs 236 pounds, but should weigh less than 167 pounds, could expect to maintain a weight of roughly 200 pounds, disregarding exercise and strict dieting.

“What we’re trying to do,” she says, “is get them out of the range of morbid obesity.”

The risks associated with morbid obesity, such as heart problems and diabetes, trump the possible hazards of surgery, such as infection and death, in the minds of many doctors. Most of these surgeries are performed laparoscopically—that is, with a video camera’s aid—and require no large incisions.

“There are anywhere from five to six small one-centimeter incisions. Through those incisions we use instruments and a camera to do the operation,” Evangelista says.

Not all operations go as smoothly as NBC weatherman Al Roker’s or singer Carnie Wilson’s, the celebrity poster girl for stomach reduction surgery. Avid People Magazine readers will remember the obese former member of Wilson Phillips who underwent a high-profile surgery four years ago. Avid Playboy readers can ogle Wilson’s newly svelte figure in the August issue.

Some patients die, as with any operation. According to Evangelista, between 1 percent and 2 percent of those who undergo surgery develop serious complications, which sometimes lead to death. Blood clots, in the legs especially, can break free and lodge fatally in the arteries of the lungs, known as a pulmonary embolism. Alternately, the new stomach may leak its contents into the abdominal cavity.

The Adjustable Gastric Band (AGB), another more elegant procedure, has gained popularity in Europe and Australia. The AGB cinches the stomach into an hourglass and thus also creates a small upper pouch, without staples or severed intestine. Doctors adjust the band’s aperture, injecting saline solution through a port just under the skin, to control weight loss. With either procedure, patients must strictly monitor what and how much they eat—too much food or the wrong sort will be vomited.

Besides wound infection, there are other, less dire problems associated with such rapid weight loss, like drapes of excess skin, which plastic surgeons like UVA’s Dr. Thomas Gampper can tuck.

“I just saw a teenage girl who lost 100 pounds on her own, so she had all that extra hanging skin,” says Gampper. “So we did a tummy tuck and a tuck on her arms as well. That’s really where plastic surgery falls into weight loss. A lot of people aren’t told that—that, ‘If I lose a lot of weight, what’s my skin gonna do?’ Self-image is where we come in.”

Gampper warns that liposuction—the other popular hallmark of the plastic surgery trade—involves body contouring, and while it is about the loss of fat, it is not explicitly about the loss of weight. Nevertheless, the excessively overweight occasionally approach him in the hopes that the suction wand can collapse their waistlines.

“Somebody shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of pounds, but more like ‘I don’t like a bulge here or a flap there,’” he says. “People are looking for a magic bullet. That’s an American thing. We want an easy solution—just like when we want an antibiotic for a cold, even though it won’t work. [Liposuction’s] not a carte blanche to go and eat whatever you want or not exercise.”

Apparently many Americans disagree. Liposuction ranked as the most popular cosmetic surgical procedure performed last year, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

“It’s becoming more and more popular. I think people’s overall desire to have the figure they want is still strong and growing,” says Gampper.

Needless to say, some obese people feel trapped in their eating habits and oversized bodies: Their urge to have the figure they want and their desire for good health cannot prevail.

Evangelista sympathizes with her patients.

“The more I do of this, the less I believe that people could or should control this on their own,” she says. “People come in and say ‘I know I eat too much,’ but even so…. This is sort of the kick start to change some of those behaviors.”—Aaron Carico

 

Lunch lady land

When the lesson is about adopting a healthy lifestyle,
most schools don’t make the grade

Schools are institutions of learning. They’re supposed to be modeling the most healthy behavior,” says Peggy Brown Paviour. She’s a chronic disease consultant for the Virginia Department of Health and co-chairs the local Childhood Obesity Task Force. A recent study by the COTF found that about 42 percent of public school third-graders in Charlottesville were either obese or overweight.

Paviour is trying to find ways that schools can teach the value of healthy eating and exercise. But when cash-strapped school districts need to trim the fat out of their budgets, good food and physical education are some of the first things to go.

The weekly menu for City and County public schools reads like Jenny Craig’s no-no list––chicken nuggets, hamburgers, tacos, pizza. Some schools also offer á la carte options as well, with chips and ice cream the most popular choices.

“Don’t be too hard on us,” says Alicia Cost, nutrition administrator for Charlottesville City Schools. “Fresh foods and vegetables are expensive, and the money we get from the government doesn’t go very far.”

Charlottesville public schools charge for breakfast and lunch, which are discounted for low-income students. (Breakfast costs $1 at full price, 30 cents at reduced price. Lunch is $1.50 in grade schools and $1.75 in high school, or 40 cents at reduced price.)

The Federal government reimburses local school systems for the lunches they sell. Next year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Charlottesville school system will receive 21 cents for every lunch it sells at full price, $1.75 for every lunch it sells at a discount, and $2.19 for every lunch it gives free to the lowest-income students.

This money pays for food as well as staff labor and benefits. And Cost says local school officials want the meal programs to be self-sufficient, so she can’t dip into the general fund for better meals. The reality of school nutrition is that nutrition is a luxury. “We’re limited on how creative we can be,” Cost says.

More money for healthier foods isn’t necessarily the answer, says Cost, citing the well-known trait of children to refuse anything adults say is good for them. A tray full of red cabbage and carrots would likely go straight into the garbage.

“We tried to use low-fat ranch dressing once, and it bombed miserably. The kids knew we changed it,” says Cost. “We’re taking baby steps. That’s all we can do, because if the kids know what we’re trying to do, they won’t eat it.”

Paviour says kids need incentives to change their eating behaviors. “There’s a tension between what students are familiar with and what they’ll consume, and with what is healthy,” Paviour says. “Some have never been introduced to these foods. The key is to make it fun, not pedantic or judgmental.”

At Buford, for example, Paviour and Cost worked together on a project where a grant from the Virginia Department of Health was used to build a climbing wall at Buford Middle School. Then, the Buford Student Council launched a campaign encouraging students to buy baked potato chips instead of fried, with all the profit from baked chips used to buy hand-holds for the climbing wall.

Paviour cities the project as a way to encourage not only healthy eating, but an active lifestyle as well. With some schools struggling to pass Virginia’s Standards of Learning requirement, courses like physical education no longer receive much emphasis.

“Seventy-five percent of the school day is devoted to academics,” Paviour says. “The rest is divided between physical education, art, music, computers, guidance and the library. There’s no state mandate for physical education or recess.”

There’s little that Paviour and the Obesity Task Force can do to offset the ubiquity of junk food advertising or the popularity of couch-potato pastimes like video games. But with parents also succumbing to the ease of a microwave dinner and a night in front of the tube, Paviour says schools bear some responsibility to show students healthier alternatives.

“Once we get their interest, we can maybe go a few steps further to change their attitudes and behaviors,” Paviour says.—John Borgmeyer

Big numbers

Overweight people cost Americans billions in healthcare

Over the years countless studies have been done on the negative health effects of being overweight and obese. But recently number-crunchers have started looking at the more tangible consequences of unhealthy living: how it affects Americans’ checkbooks.

The Surgeon General’s website reports that obesity in the United States cost about $117 billion in the year 2000. That number varies depending on which group you look to, but compare it to the average of $157 billion spent on smoking, the great bogeyman of the American medical profession. For just $40 billion more smokers are pariahs and shunned from restaurants and airplanes while the obese are welcomed with open arms—a double-standard for the double-chinned?

Those medical bills are the result of a variety of weight-related maladies, says George Pfeiffer, president of the WorkCare Group, a Charlottesville-based company that works with businesses to promote better employee health. “Obesity is what is called a co-morbid condition. If you’re obese, it’s most likely you have a higher probability of arthritis, heart disease, Type-2 diabetes, kidney disease, gall bladder and hypertension and sleep apnea and stroke,” he says.

And those are just the most apparent side-effects. Pfeiffer says that serious weight problems have an even bigger impact on economics when taking into account indirect costs in the workplace, including absenteeism, loss of productivity and “presenteeism,” where the worker is on the job but not engaged 100 percent. “Research shows that these indirect costs can be anywhere from three to six times the direct costs,” he says.

With smoking, several players in the tobacco industry were eventually forced to shell out big bucks to some states to cover medical expenditures the companies’ products were found culpable for. But it’s more difficult for taxpayers to recoup the extra money spent on weight-related health costs, Pfeiffer says, because “the major thing is it’s not addictive. With smoking, you’re getting people hooked. But with this it’s free choice and that’s what it comes down to: There’s a number of reasons why we’re becoming an overweight society.”

Indeed, lawsuits claiming fast food giant McDonald’s products led children to a life of weight-related health problems have been thrown out of court because, as U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet said in a January 2003 decision, “it is not the place of the law to protect [people] from their own excesses.”

In the private sector, employers have been taking a more proactive role at reigning in corporate health care costs due to obesity too, Pfeiffer says. Typical corporate health-promotion programs with weight and nutrition components have a “pretty dismal record due to recidivism,” he says, and instead groups including the American Diabetes Association and others are trying to partner with businesses to offer ongoing support.

“There’s a groundswell happening now because we are in an epidemic and the economic implications of this are going to be huge,” Pfeiffer says. “A quarter of obese individuals are over age 65, and the chronic health conditions are only going to impact medical costs, and with Medicare it will be out of taxpayers’ pockets.”—Eric Rezsnyak

 

Gonna make you sweat

ACAC’s Phil Wendel has brought accessible fitness to Charlottesville’s masses

Meridia diet pills, Lean Cuisine, Cooking Light Magazine, Slim-fast, Jenny Craig, Sweet-n-Low, weight loss camps, Thigh Master infomercials, the Atkins Diet—according to Global Information, Inc., the business of staying slim is a $39 billion industry. As the economy continues to decline, the weight loss industry skyrockets.

Charlottesville’s economy is not immune to the plump business of staying slim. Besides having our own church basement versions of weight loss meetings and counseling groups, the locally owned ACAC Fitness and Wellness Center enrolls 10,600 Charlottesville members at roughly $75 per month, not including start-up fees. You do the math.

Membership numbers have grown significantly over the past five years—in 1998, ACAC had no more than 3,000 members on its books. Sole owner of the mega fitness palace Phil Wendel believes the local fitness craze is one part media, one part marketing.

“Twenty years ago the health club industry did a really poor job at portraying an image,“ says Wendel. “You’d have a giant picture of a perfectly tall, fit beautiful woman jumping in the air with a pencil thin waist.

“It was all about the price and nothing about the results.”

But over the past decade, the trendy health club atmosphere has been significantly altered. Today’s members are looking for buffer abs through weekly Body-Pump courses, higher muscle tone by attending the Athletic Conditioning Express and to drop those extra 10 pounds after weeks of deep water runs and Cycle Reebok Expresses, not obtain a date for Friday night.

Furthermore, the late 1960s and early ’70s saw gender specific gyms with dimly lit boxing rings and dusty punching bags. Women and men were only allowed in on specific days with minimal machines available and even fewer group classes.

“The decision to make these clubs available to both men and women at the same time was truly a historic event for the industry,” says Wendel.

An exercise fanatic growing weary of the search for a full-facility club to work out in, Wendel opened the first ACAC location on Pantops in 1984. (ACAC had many residences in the few years to follow, including what is now Blockbuster on Hydraulic Road and ACAC’s present outdoor pool location on Four Seasons Drive.) At that time, studies deemed 80 percent of the population inactive. Wendel knew he had to attract three-quarters of that group who were interested in getting physical, but in need of a little nudge.

“We were forced to appeal to a demographic we call ‘the interested de-conditioned,’” says Wendel.

According to Wendel, studies have shown that more than 65 percent of the population wishes they did more, while only 20 percent are categorized as full-fledged active exercisers—or involved in some physical activity 100-plus times a year. The other 15 percent could care a less either way.

But it wasn’t until Wendel opened ACAC’s flagship location at Albemarle Square, the 64,000-square-foot palatial fitness castle in June of 1998, that his business finally began to appeal to a broader base of those same interested de-conditioned.

Besides providing a massive fitness facility, indoor aquatic center, walking and jogging track and three group exercise rooms, the Albemarle Square facility offers modern-day pampering amenities such as well-appointed changing rooms, private massage studios, a café appropriately dubbed the Trackside Café and a full child care facility.

“Albemarle Square is more of a medical model,” says Wendel, “offering things like physical therapy and cardiac rehabilitation.” Which might explain its attraction to the most active growing gym demographic in America today—seniors.

Recent statistics from the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion show that 25 percent of today’s seniors are active, compared to only 12 percent of today’s teenagers.

“It’s a great phenomenon we’ve seen within the last few years,” says Wendel. “One hundred years ago the life expectancy was 45 years old, now it’s in the high 70s.

“We’re living 30 years longer than our grandparents did and we want to make them good years.”

But ACAC hasn’t toppled the million-dollar mark solely because of its attraction to older Charlottesvillians. It appeals to entire families with numerous activities for all ages, driving home the important balance of not only shedding those extra pounds, but keeping them off. Furthermore, ACAC fulfills Wendel’s evangelistic tendencies towards proselytizing what he considers to be the last word in health: Be responsible.

“The fact of the matter is, if you’re going to eat more, you have to move more,” he says. “If we as a society are not going to manage our food intake, then we must have the discipline to exercise.”

Along those lines, ACAC has few nudging tricks up its sleeve. “When members haven’t been in within a 21-day period, we add them to what we like to call the Code Blue List,” says Wendel, explaining they get friendly phone calls from the staff asking when they’ll be coming back in. He adds that encouraging people to come back in is the key to keeping them as members. “It’s twice as expensive to get a new member as it is to keep an old member,” he says.

Moreover, Wendel and his more than 300-person staff are cognizant that the average newcomer requires three months of constant attention and vigilance on their part before she can truly exercise independently. If Wendel had one mission statement to new employees, it would be “Make the experience as pleasant as humanly possible,” knowing that adherence to an exercise plan is the toughest discipline to uphold.

“Far too many of us will exercise like hell for three months straight, then take time off,” says Wendel.—Kathryn Goodson

 

 

Meridia diet pills, Lean Cuisine, Cooking Light Magazine, Slim-fast, Jenny Craig, Sweet-n-Low, weight loss camps, Thigh Master infomercials, the Atkins Diet—according to Global Information, Inc., the business of staying slim is a $39 billion industry. As the economy continues to decline, the weight loss industry skyrockets.

Charlottesville’s economy is not immune to the plump business of staying slim. Besides having our own church basement versions of weight loss meetings and counseling groups, the locally owned Atlantic Coast Athletic Club Fitness and Wellness Center enrolls 10,600 Charlottesville members at roughly $75 per month, not including start-up fees. You do the math.

Membership numbers have grown significantly over the past five years—in 1998, ACAC had no more than 3,000 members on its books. Sole owner of the mega fitness palace, Phil Wendel, believes the local fitness craze is one part media, one part marketing.

“Twenty years ago the health club industry did a really poor job at portraying an image,“ says Wendel. “You’d have a giant picture of a perfectly tall, fit beautiful woman jumping in the air with a pencil thin waist.“It was all about the price and nothing about the results.” But over the past decade, the trendy health club atmosphere has been significantly altered. Today’s members are looking for buffer abs through weekly Body-Pump courses, higher muscle tone by attending the Athletic Conditioning Express and to drop those extra 10 pounds after weeks of deep water runs and Cycle Reebok Expresses, not searching for a date for Friday night.

Furthermore, the late 1960s and early ’70s saw gender- specific gyms with dimly lit boxing rings and dusty punching bags. Women were only allowed in on specific days with minimal machines available and even fewer group classes.

“The decision to make these clubs available to both men and women at the same time was truly a historic event for the industry,” says Wendel.

An exercise fanatic growing weary of the search for a full-facility club to work out in, Wendel opened the first ACAC location on Pantops in 1984. (ACAC had many residences in the few years to follow, including what is now Blockbuster on Hydraulic Road and ACAC’s present outdoor pool location on Four Seasons Drive.) At that time, studies deemed 80 percent of the population inactive. Wendel knew he had to attract the section of that group who were interested in getting physical, but in need of a little nudge.

“We were forced to appeal to a demographic we call ‘the interested de-conditioned,’” says Wendel.

According to Wendel, studies have shown that more than 65 percent of the population wishes they did more, while only 20 percent are categorized as full-fledged active exercisers—or involved in some physical activity 100-plus times a year. The other 15 percent could care less either way.

But it wasn’t until Wendel opened ACAC’s flagship location at Albemarle Square, the 64,000-square-foot palatial fitness castle, in June of 1998, that his business finally began to appeal to a broader base of those same interested de-conditioned.

Besides providing a massive fitness facility, indoor aquatic center, walking and jogging track and three group exercise rooms, the Albemarle Square facility offers modern-day pampering amenities such as well-appointed changing rooms, private massage studios, a café appropriately dubbed the Trackside Café and a full child care facility.

“Albemarle Square is more of a medical model,” says Wendel, “offering things like physical therapy and cardiac rehabilitation.” Which might explain its attraction to the most active growing gym demographic in America today—seniors.

Recent statistics from the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion show that 25 percent of today’s seniors are active, compared to only 12 percent of today’s teenagers.

“It’s a great phenomenon we’ve seen within the last few years,” says Wendel. “One hundred years ago the life expectancy was 45 years old, now it’s in the high 70s.

“We’re living 30 years longer than our grandparents did and we want to make them good years.”

But ACAC hasn’t topped the million-dollar mark solely because of its attraction to older Charlottesvillians. It appeals to entire families with numerous activities for all ages, driving home the important balance of not only shedding those extra pounds, but keeping them off. Furthermore, ACAC promotes what Wendel considers to be the last word in health: Be responsible.

“The fact of the matter is, if you’re going to eat more, you have to move more,” he says. “If we as a society are not going to manage our food intake, then we must have the discipline to exercise.”

Along those lines, ACAC has a few nudging tricks up its sleeve. “When members haven’t been in within a 21-day period, we add them to what we like to call the Code Blue List,” says Wendel—they get friendly phone calls from the staff asking when they’ll be coming back in. He adds that encouraging people to come back in is the key to keeping them as members. “It’s twice as expensive to get a new member as it is to keep an old member,” he says.

Moreover, Wendel and his more than 300-person staff are cognizant that the average newcomer requires three months of constant attention and vigilance on ACAC’s part before she can truly exercise independently. If Wendel had one mission statement to new employees, it would be “Make the experience as pleasant as humanly possible,” knowing that adherence to an exercise plan is the toughest discipline to uphold.

“Far too many of us will exercise like hell for three months straight, then take time off,” says Wendel.—Kathryn E. Goodson

On May 9, 2002, Rob Schilling sat at his home computer and created a pair of posters lettered with the words "Thank You." With his wife—and constant companion—Joan, he then spent the sunny Thursday afternoon standing on the corner of McIntire and Preston, waving the signs and smiling at rush hour traffic.

Two days earlier, Schilling had defeated Democrat Alexandria Searls for one of two contested seats on Charlottesville’s five-member City Council. He won 2,169 votes, 359 fewer than the overall winner, incumbent Blake Caravati. Only 11 percent of the City’s registered voters had cast their ballots for Schilling, so out of the hundreds of motorists who saw his posters, probably only a handful understood the message. The rest had to wonder, who are those people? (For many, the answer would come in the following morning’s Daily Progress, which lapped up the traffic stunt with a front-page color photo.)

In case it wasn’t obvious from his shoulder-length hair, the street-corner gesture proved Schilling was no ordinary Republican. Darden Towe, the City’s last Republican Councilor, had left office in 1990. A revered figure in Charlottesville and Albemarle, the courtly Towe was honored by a public park, but he never stood at an intersection waving homemade placards. Although Schilling’s politics are similar to Towe’s, his style couldn’t be more different from that of the respected insurance executive who died in 1992.

During the past year, Schilling has used his knack for public relations to cast himself as the outsider on Council. He’s crafted his image as a man-of-the-people watchdog, yet he’s never burdened himself with a clear vision for the future of Charlottesville.

Now some Democrats on Council say they’re fed up with Schilling’s self-promotion. They say that for all his supposed watchfulness and the many times his picture has appeared in the ever-faithful daily newspaper, he did woefully little work during his first year, even for a rookie Councilor. Schilling had it easy, the Democrats say, but it looks like the honeymoon is over.

If he’s aware of what fellow Councilors have in store for him, it’s not disturbing Schilling’s preternaturally smooth-going demeanor. All the things that make him stand out from his fellow Councilors—his strict ideology, his itinerant professional life, his public manner, his hairstyle—serve his agenda: He wants to distinguish himself from everyone else on Council by claiming the heart of the little guy. Even without clear Council victories to call his own, Schilling has parlayed his back-to-basics conservative slogans into name recognition and constituent loyalty. More than that, even those who vehemently disagree with Schilling’s platform know who he is and the stripped-down kind of government he stands for. He might not be the smartest guy in City Hall, nor the most prepared or dedicated, but with his ability to spin criticism into selling points and stay on message for his supporters, Schilling could very well be Charlottesville’s best politician.

 

"Non-issue" or single issue?

A few months ago, Caravati met Rob Schilling at the Mudhouse, a popular locale for political huddles. "I told him that I intend to manipulate the hell out of him, and that I wanted him to manipulate the hell out of me," says Caravati. "That’s called realpolitik."

Caravati, a construction contractor, says this was his way of encouraging Schilling to participate more fully on City Council.

"My greatest disappointment with Rob has been his unwillingness to share the workload. That offends me," says the veteran Councilor and former Mayor. "Nothing has shown me he can keep up. If you’re not engaged, what good are you? He’s becoming a non-issue."

Caravati keeps his voice low as he utters his assessment, leaning across the table. Councilors rarely disparage fellow members of the team in public—until now. "It’s kind of embarrassing," Caravati says of Council’s infighting.

Other Democrats also seem fed up, and maybe a little uneasy. During the past year, Schilling alienated his colleagues by refusing to craft policy through one-on-one negotiation or to serve on his share of committees. Schilling explains this behavior as an attack on the philosophy that guided Council during the 1990s, namely that government should use its power and money to leverage the private sector for a liberal notion of the public good. (Those ideas are set forth in Council documents like the 2020 Vision paper, which establishes among City government’s obligations the "courage to embrace positive change for the common good" and "promote educational excellence and an intellectual climate" to "nourish the spirit.")

"He’s questioning a couple of the basic philosophies we operate under," says Mayor Maurice Cox, "that Council is a collaborative effort, that each member of the Council is part of a team and that government has an activist role. He agrees with the things we pursue, but not how we pursue them."

Schilling’s contrariness first went on display last July 1, the day the first-time public servant was sworn in. Also on that day, Council had announced their appointees to the City school board. In his thank-you address Schilling launched into criticisms of the process, reiterating his campaign assertions that the board should be elected, not appointed. Some wondered about the harsh timing of such a gesture—casting aspersions on the achievements of new school board members as he reveled in his own surprise accomplishment. In the year since, Schilling rarely has attended school board meetings to observe whether an appointed board exceeds his expectations.

Indeed, aside from making the school board issue the center of his 2002 campaign, Schilling has done little to advance his view. "He never tried to develop his idea as a pitch, or showed the rest of us examples of how an elected school board has helped other communities," says Councilor Kevin Lynch. "Building consensus for a proposal involves more than just stating that proposal. You have to make a case."

Reflecting on his own experiences as a Council newcomer, Cox says it’s not uncommon for freshman Councilors to adopt a critical posture, especially if they’ve never held public office before.

"When I started, I thought that through the persuasiveness of my argument, the other Councilors would say, ‘Oh, that’s how you do it.’ Well it doesn’t work that way," says Cox. "I wanted to help Rob around that experience."

But Schilling has persistently shunned one-on-one negotiation, preferring to air his criticisms in public. For example, a recent proposed ordinance to raise water rates caused plenty of disagreement among the Councilors, but Schilling waited until the regular meeting to engage his peers, reading before the public a list of detailed questions. Cox reprimanded Schilling, asking him to have his questions answered beforehand, and to come to the meeting prepared to comment on the proposal.

"I would give him an A for public relations," says Councilor Meredith Richards, "and a D-minus for effective action. He reserves his participation on Council for when the cameras are rolling."

Schilling has shown himself able to reject even the strongest persuasion. Cox asked Schilling three times to sit on the housing task force, an influential new board currently re-evaluating Charlottesville’s housing strategy. And three times Schilling, a real estate agent who manages several rental properties in Charlottesville, refused the Mayor’s request. Either he’s oblivious to protocol or he’s stubborn.

Schilling’s snub further irritated his colleagues. Council Democrats consider their work on boards and commissions to be among the most important they do as elected representatives, because it allows them to craft policy side-by-side with citizens.

But Schilling has his own way of reaching out to constituents. His most aggressive maneuver to date occurred three months ago.

On April 15, Council met to approve the City’s $93 million budget for 2003-04. During the meeting, Schilling voted against fee increases designed to fund five new community police officers and repairs on City school buildings. Although he says public safety and education are his top priorities, Schilling explained his opposition to increasing meals taxes and vehicle decal fees by saying "I agree with the City’s goals, but not the means."

Then, as the other Councilors gathered to celebrate Jeanne Cox’s 20th anniversary as Council’s Clerk, Schilling—clad in a lavender suit and cowboy boots—led reporters whom he had alerted to his intentions that morning to the sidewalk outside City Hall. Reading from a prepared statement, he said Council could have worked harder "for the people in this community" by reducing spending on architecture, social services and the McGuffey Art Center.

"From Belmont to Greenbrier, from 10th and Page to Alumni Hall, I hear you loud and clear," he declared. "Enough is enough."

As Schilling walked away with his wife, Joan (who is never far from his side during public meetings or events), Lynch offered this rebuttal: "If Rob had spent as much time getting his ideas across to Council as he does getting in front of the camera, he might make some progress."

But "progress" is a subjective concept. Though Schilling has consistently retreated from the messy grunt work of building policy through argument and compromise, he has won adherents. Certainly his reputation has advanced among some of the City’s electorate. In late June, for instance, Charlottesvillian Charles Weber Jr. wrote to this newspaper in praise of the new Councilor.

"Schilling has rightly argued that the budget process needs more discipline," Weber wrote. "I hope the citizens of Charlottesville will recognize the value of Schilling’s service and elect a few more Councilors willing to challenge the status quo."

The simple view of Schilling as Council’s official gadfly fails to take into account the many split votes among the Democrats and their mosaic of consensus building. Yet Schilling’s shrewd public relations skills fuel the notion that he is a Republican St. George fighting back a fiery Democratic bully.

"It’s easy to be a political minority in one regard," says Cox. "You don’t have to generate policy. All you have to do is react. All [Schilling] has to do is be perceived as the one on Council who keeps those Democrats in line.

"But I hope he’s got a greater ambition for his time on Council than that," Cox says.

 

God, Reagan and a stray comment

The mercury on a recent Sunday morning hit 87 degrees by 11am. With heavy humidity in the air, parishioners streamed into St. Thomas Aquinas Church on Alderman Road, smiling blissfully, inspired by the air conditioning.

In the front of the sanctuary, Schilling, who leads the choir every Sunday, received a signal from the priest, glanced at his choir, and drove a pick through the 12 strings of his acoustic Takamine guitar. The priest and a small entourage walked slowly down the aisle toward the altar as the congregation sang the opening hymn. Voices, guitars, piano and flute joined in perfect harmony.

"Rob is a really accomplished musician," says alto vocalist Ann McAndrew. "He can be a firm leader, but he keeps us focused. He can hear when something’s off and get to the heart of what we need without wasting a lot of time."

Who can say why one note is wrong and another is right? You know it when you hear it. In choir rehearsal, when Schilling hears wrong notes he stops the song and works with the offending singer or instrumentalist until the part is right. "When the voices and harmonies go together a certain way, I just love the way it makes me feel," he says.

Music was Schilling’s first love growing up in 1970s Pasadena, California. He and his friends didn’t even know how to play when they started their first band in high school, but in only one year they were gigging on the local club circuit. Schilling’s star reached its zenith in the mid-’80s, when his band, The Prime Movers, toured the United States for one month, opening for Thomas Dolby, the one-hit wonder behind "She Blinded Me With Science."

Schilling met Joan Carlin in 1986, when he was 24 years old. By the time they were married in 1991, Schilling was burned out on the rock scene. He turned his talent to God, directing and writing music for Catholic Mass.

Music is his longest-running vocation. Otherwise, Schilling has held a wide variety of jobs––advertising, teaching, property management, computer consulting––that allowed him to arrange his life around music. Now a licensed Realtor, he maintains his work-at-home lifestyle.

"My goal is spending the most amount of time I can with my wife," he says. Joan returns the loyalty, faithfully attending nearly every City Council meeting and always staying to the bitter end.

"It’s a way of being part of his life," she says.

Music wasn’t his only sustained interest in California, however. He admired Ronald Reagan and listened avidly to talk radio—and the unwavering ideological spin he gives to Charlottesville politics seems to draw directly from both of those sources.

But the West Coast started to lose its appeal by the end of the ’90s, and in 1998, he and Joan decided Southern California was too big and too crime-ridden. They packed up and headed east. Ironically for a pro-market Republican who thinks government should stay out of business’ way, Schilling says they rejected Raleigh, North Carolina, because it was growing too fast. They moved to Fluvanna County and after one year bought a house in Charlottesville’s Greenbrier neighborhood.

One afternoon he made an idle comment to his new neighbor, City Republican Party leader Bob Hodus. "If you ever need a candidate," Schilling said, "here I am." By February, Schilling’s name was on the ballot.

One of Schilling’s first acts as a new City Councilor was to give his colleagues a copy of his CD, Sing a Psalm, a collection of rock and soul numbers performed by the Glory Express, a choir Schilling directed in Southern California. Schilling wrote the lyrics by adapting verses from ancient poems collected in the Old Testament.

Sing a Psalm is not in any of the Democrats’ CD players right now, but perhaps it should be. Schilling’s politics are uncannily similar to his musicianship. As a choir director, Schilling can tell exactly when a note sounds wrong to him. He points out the mistake politely, and performs the correct melody confidently.

That’s what he does on Council, too. If a policy sounds flat to his Reaganite ear—if it’s too expensive, or it smacks of back-room dealing—Schilling shakes his head and says, "I can’t go along with this." His voice is somehow humble and arrogant at the same. His message is always simple.

"He’s a natural politician," says Rosamond Casey, president of McGuffey.

At his April press conference, Schilling claimed the City "allocated" $400,000 to McGuffey; he questioned whether it wasn’t a waste of money, a remark that prompted former Mayor Virginia Daugherty to write to C-VILLE in dismay. "That figure is the projected rental value of the building" if it went into private hands, she wrote. "How can he be so confused?"

Casey invited Schilling to a meeting to correct the erroneous figure, which she says doesn’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital improvements to the former school that the City would have to undertake before even contemplating turning it over to developers.

"I’ll never forget the furnace blast of anger that opened our conversation," says Casey. She says Schilling had her and McGuffey artist Robert Bricker "pinned against our chairs for about 10 minutes while he used McGuffey as the whipping boy to make the point that Council was in need of an overhaul.

"I felt he was dangling McGuffey as a luxury that doesn’t benefit the common man," Casey says.

Once she and Bricker took Schilling on a tour of the building’s many studios, however, Casey says the meeting took on a different tone. "It was very friendly. He said he likes McGuffey and didn’t want anything to happen to it."

Casey says she and Schilling made progress, and Schilling now says he wasn’t criticizing McGuffey per se, but rather the way Council fails to scrutinize its spending. But Casey is still uncertain about Schilling’s true opinion.

"He appears to be a man of the people, but there’s a feeling that he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing," she says. "He cultivated this friendly, ‘I’m-on-your-side’ attitude, but with an agenda underneath that nobody is going to get at. He’s unshakable on certain points.

"Any good conservative would be, right?"

Schilling’s unwillingness to compromise is precisely what appeals to Republicans.

"That’s a quality I happen to like," says Kevin Cox, an active Republican who compares the all-Democrat City Councils of the 1990s to "a homeowners association in some planned community.

"I like to see somebody who’s committed to his beliefs and ethics," says Cox. "Screw consensus. Sometimes that just means you get something that nobody likes."

 

Back to basics

"My election was a backlash against the perception of insiders running City Hall," says Schilling. "I see myself as a watchdog. It’s the job I was elected to do."

In his first year, this determined alienation has cost Schilling the chance to make his mark on big issues, such as housing. But his Republican supporters seem content to let the Democrats continue to shape long-term policy, as long as Schilling works as a thorn in the donkey’s side.

Hovey Dabney, the former chairman of Jefferson National Bank who donated $500 to Schilling’s campaign, can’t name an issue offhand to which Schilling positively contributed. "I could probably think of one if I tried," he says.

"I’m really a member of the Mugwump Party," he says. "Their slogan is ‘Throw the bums out.’ I voted for Schilling because he provides a different view. He’s not one of the usuals. I think he’s done a great job representing my interests."

And even if, when Schilling invokes "the working people" or "the neighborhoods" whose voices he claims to hear, the Democrats struggle to keep their eyes from rolling back, they would be wise to look past his rhetorical cheesiness. For although he doesn’t say it directly, Schilling is addressing the people who feel like outsiders: those who don’t agree with City Council’s intellectual bent; the developers who have their projects rejected by the Board of Architecture Review; the people who speak at public hearings and only receive a polite smile from the Mayor and a reminder that their three minutes have passed.

When the Democrats say Schilling doesn’t do the work, they do not mean he is lazy. The hours that he might spend on commissions or kibitzing with fellow Councilors he says he spends instead talking with citizens, gleaning their views on particular issues. And he reads City documents closely—his 2"-thick binder on the new zoning policy is blooming with yellow Post-it notes that highlight important paragraphs.

"I have my own style," Schilling says, shrugging off his colleagues’ criticism.

And the style suits his anti-activism—that is, his narrow view of the role of government.

Schilling says education and public safety are the primary obligations of government. "Beyond that, we need to question and justify everything we spend money on. I have more faith in people doing things than in government doing things."

Anyone who has watched in frustration while Council allocates $40,000 here and another $70,000 there to fund exploratory committees or design studies that seem to yield no discernible results after years in the City incubator has to give at least a passing nod to Schilling’s point. But many a Councilor who has first taken to City Hall with a fixed view of how the system ought to work has eventually had to open his mind to another, perhaps more entrenched and definitely more collaborative way of working. Schilling gives no indication that a broader perspective is in his future.

"There are some things about this city that need fixing," he says. "And I’m not here to be a rah-rah champion for the status quo."

 

The temperance society

Whether Schilling is the best politician in Charlottesville, he’s certainly been loyal to the people who voted for him, and to the party whose ideology he espouses. And he has been effective at building an easy-to-understand public image, and communicating it to his supporters through the media.

In the past year, Schilling has done what he was elected to do—irritate the Democrats. The conflicts over his political method aren’t likely to ease before next year’s Council elections. Nor is it likely that Schilling will begin contributing more ideas on Council, committed as he is to casting himself as "the other." Partisan differences will probably grow more heated as the May election for three open seats draws closer.

In that election, the seats currently occupied by Meredith Richards, Maurice Cox and Kevin Lynch will be up for grabs. Neither party has yet put forward candidates to run for them. But both parties surely have taken home lessons from the 2002 election, when, cocky and under-organized, the Democrats miscalculated how many people would vote against them by voting for Schilling.

"Schilling’s election was a wake-up call," says Lynch. "Hopefully that underestimation won’t be repeated. There’s certain usefulness in that role as official complainer. It makes everyone do their homework. But my challenge to voters is that we can’t afford to have another Republican on City Council."

From the look of it now, the chances are middling at best that Republicans will be able to step forward to lead the City. Indeed, there are only "about 10" active Republicans, says John Pfaltz, who ran for Council under the GOP banner in 2000. And none of them have articulated a clear vision for the City, other than to say they want more money for police and schools and less money for everything else. Even Schilling, with the benefit of a full year in government to learn the ropes, says he has no specific ideas what he would cut from the budget.

By contrast, the Democrats have a strong machine and a wide—critics might say too wide—range of expertise. Architects, engineers, builders, environmentalists, lawyers—the Democrats offer all this and more.

"The Democrats have a lot of depth in a lot of areas," says Pfaltz. "It’s easy for them to specialize."

Complain as some might about Democrats, in tones that echo Rush Limbaugh-style anti-intellectualism, voters have repeatedly chosen these experts to lead the City. Maybe in Schilling voters found just the right dose of conservative caution to temper—but not destroy—liberal ambition.

Charlottesville needs an activist government to protect the public sphere from an unchecked pro-business agenda. Under a hypothetical Republican rule where art, architecture, and urban planning are suspect, there would be little to distinguish Charlottesville from Lynchburg or Danville.

Suppose, for instance, that a Republican majority voted to disband the Board of Architectural Review, much maligned by conservatives. Free from government control, developers could turn Downtown into a stucco-and-neon strip mall. [Don’t think some haven’t tried. See, for instance, C-VILLE’s June 17 cover story on the saga of D&R Development, which was a $500 contributor to Schilling’s campaign.]

And consider this—both Schilling and Republican Chairman Bob Hodus say they wouldn’t have spent the $6.5 million Federal grant the previous all-Democrat Council secured to build a bus transfer center and plaza on the Mall’s east end.

"I don’t think that’s an appropriate project," says Schilling. "I would have given it to some other community that could use it properly." Hodus says he would erect a bus shelter instead of a commerce-generating hub.

Fortunately, absent conservative input, Charlottesville is in line to get a cool new building and a swanky new amphitheater to further invigorate Downtown. If the Republicans had been in charge, we’d be awaiting the unveiling of a Plexiglas shelter surrounding a metal bench. Sure, it might be cheaper, but in politics—as in many other areas—sometimes cheap comes at a high price.

For a small Southern town, Charlottesville’s looking mighty international these days. Locals can taste chicken souvlaki, examine a Panamanian carving, sip Indian tea, and watch a weaver repair a Persian rug—all within a couple of blocks of the east end of the Downtown Mall. In fact, the area is growing into an enclave of internationally themed businesses that arguably lend it a different atmosphere than the Mall’s western arm. As Scottie B. (born Scott Williams), who is a partner in Garden of Sheba, an African diaspora-themed restaurant soon to open, puts it, “Once you pass the fountain there’s a whole other culture going on.”

Take, for instance, the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, universally called “the teahouse” by devotees. Whereas on the Mall’s west end, the favored places to sit and sip are coffee-centric, the teahouse flavors the east end with rooibos tea and plates of pistachios and dried mango. Ed Luce says that when he and Matteus Frankovich opened the teahouse on the second floor of 414 E. Main St. last fall, the east end of the Mall seemed like the best fit. “It made more sense to us to put the teahouse here,” he says, “because it’s tranquil, it’s serene, and that would get lost and consumed on the west end.”

As it evolves and new businesses settle in, the feeling on the east end can escape definition. Geographically, the cultures represented there are far-flung, from the Middle East (the falafel bar at Bashir’s Taverna, for example) to the Caribbean (jerked fish at the Garden of Sheba). Trying to corral these places under labels like “Third World” or “non-Western” misses the mark. There are too many cultural and economic factors involved to fit one tag.

Yet there’s no mistaking the evidence on a busy summer night. Walk past the Second Street crossover on the Mall’s west end, and likely you’ll notice movie marquees, the smell of pizza and menus filled with Euro-continental or American cuisine. Meanwhile, up on the east end the trees seem a bit shadier, the crowds a bit mellower. Storefronts glow softly with the patterns of tribal textiles. “There is something exotic, something ethnic on this side of the mall,” says restaurateur Bashir Khelafa of the eponymous Taverna.

 

Luce likes to call the Mall’s east end “the front of the bus,” an apt description, it turns out, as the City undertakes a major development project in the area of the Amphitheater, namely, a $6.5 million bus transfer center. If Luce is right regarding the private enterprise on the east end, then that “bus” is headed for a diverse and sophisticated future, and a group of passionate businesspeople are at the wheel. Both Saul Barodofsky, owner of Sun Bow Trading Company, and Frankovich at the teahouse use the phrase “missionary work” to stress the educational aspects of their businesses.

“It’s our passion,” says Frankovich of the surprisingly large body of knowledge surrounding tea. “The depth of tea is here if you scratch the surface. If you come in a peaceful time we can talk to you about brewing techniques and so on.”

Frankovich and Luce say travel is what inspired them to open Twisted Branch. Frankovich recalls “billowing, tapestry-filled restaurants” on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula with “palm tree dividers and low cushion seating. You can spend the whole day there swimming off the back porch drinking tea.

“I wanted to share that with our people here,” he says, “because it just created such a pleasant state of being in me to while away the day in these types of atmospheres.”

Barodofsky, too, built a business out of his experiences abroad. “I set up the business based on a certain number of criteria of what I wanted from a business. Travel was right on that list,” he says. Since the 1960s he’s made nearly 100 trips to the Middle East—Turkey, Pakistan and Chinese Turkistan, among many other countries—to buy carpets, kilims and other textiles.

He sees his shop on the corner of E. Main and Fourth streets as an educational venue as much as a business. “Sun Bow is an art project to introduce tribal rugs and women’s textile art,” he declares.

Indeed, Barodofsky lectures at Washington D.C.’s Textile Museum and at rug conferences around the country. Perhaps more importantly, in the shop itself, Barodofsky and his employees offer cups of tea and the knowledge gathered during years of travel—making Sun Bow truly a place to learn (buying is, of course, welcome).

“I was having my car serviced and I heard the mechanic having this discussion with someone about the value of tribal rugs versus non-tribal rugs,” Barodofsky recalls. “I realized he had come through our world and was giving it out with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Sun Bow and Mead’s Oriental Rugs have been exposing Charlottesvillians to Middle Eastern and Asian artifacts for decades—Mead’s since 1974 and Sun Bow since 1977. As Americans generally have become more knowledgeable about world cultures and immigration has increased, Charlottesville has seen its international offerings multiply. “Our level of diversification is beginning to accelerate a little bit,” says Joe Mead, who owns Mead’s Oriental Rugs. One need only try to get a seat in the teahouse on a Friday night to recognize the widespread appeal of Eastern cultures for Western consumers.

And the growth continues. The mall’s east end is about to gain another pair of cultural missionaries when Scottie B. and Abba Watts open the Garden of Sheba later this summer. The two say their place at 609 E. Market St. will serve up entertainment and food—vegetarian and fish dishes from Africa and the African diaspora—but, just as importantly, awareness. “What we find really special about the space is that you can throw a stone to the old slave block,” says Scottie, referring to a site on the southeast corner of Court Square, which bears a small slate marker. “We’ve been chosen to help people wake up and realize there was a slave market right there.”

Scottie—who has been studying African music since 1990—and Watts want to present African and African-roots cultures in a family setting. The space will be smoke-free and the entertainment will include kid-friendly events like storytellings. “We’re just trying to promote as many positive things in the culture as possible,” says Scottie. “Africa is a very rich, wealthy, healthy continent.”

The idea for the restaurant grew from the pair’s experience in producing local music and cultural events (recently putting together a month of concerts and dances in the storefront on Water Street now occupied by make-up boutique Blush), as well as from travel in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. The first time he visited Africa, Scottie says, was a revelation: “I began to realize that Africa is bigger than what I was shown as a kid—Tarzan, people starving in the street, people living like savages. I cried for a whole day because I had been misled.”

Watts, too, says travel has changed his perspective. “It’s one thing to be poor in a rich country,” he says. “It’s something totally different to be poor in a poor country.” During his studies of Caribbean cooking in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, he remembers, “We would have to go and harvest food before we ate it—climbing trees for breadfruit, digging up casava. We don’t take any of this for granted.”

 

The question of authenticity can’t be avoided when non-Western cultures—particularly those with poor economies—are being sold to American consumers. “I think it’s important to hear about a culture from someone from that culture,” says Watts. “Not only just living there” is vital, he adds, “but having the experience of the world looking at you as if you’re from that culture.” When cultural transactions meld with commerce, the attitudes of clients and business owners alike can cheapen or enrich the exchange.

For example, since 1997, Bashir and Katherine Khelafa, whose backgrounds are Algerian and Hungarian, respectively, have served a wide variety of cuisines—Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, Spanish—under the general heading “Mediterranean.” In their new location next to the post office (previously they operated from the ground floor space below what is now the tea house), they’d like to expand even further, especially into Hungarian dishes. But they say it’s important to stick with cultures into which they have genuine insight. Says Bashir, “We’ll never go beyond the ones we know.”

Across the street, Frankovich and Luce say they struggle with the responsibility of presenting cultures—Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern—they weren’t born into. Asked if there’s any danger of exploitation in their venture, Luce says “There definitely is. It’s a fine line that we walk in here, probably.”

Frankovich agrees. “This place does turn into a cool nightclub scene at times,” he says. “I have struggles with the missionary work as opposed to just ‘Here’s your tea.’”

 

Like many business owners on the Mall’s east end, Simon Harvey has traveled extensively, if in markedly posher conditions. He says the idea for Read & Co., the shop just a few doors down from the Tea Bazaar that he and his wife Lisa run, was born of his experience captaining yachts for wealthy employers. “I would help not just on the yacht, but with their land-based houses,” he says. “I would go out and buy artifacts, arts, décor, to help them furnish their houses and their yachts. I was buying into the tens of thousands of dollars.” Having kept up his worldwide contacts in the art and antiquities markets after coming ashore, he says it was a logical move to open an import business.

The resulting shop, opened in 2001, has a definite air of colonial times gone by. Inlaid wooden furniture from India sits next to Australian aboriginal didgeridoos and British rugby balls. Harvey takes a rosy view of the multicultural pastiche he’s created. “We’ve had a lot of customers say ‘When we come in here it’s like stepping into another world,’” he says. “There are so many cultures put together in here. Everyone likes to be romantic.”

Holding a small wooden carving made by residents of the Panamanian rainforest, he says, “They’re very primitive and it’s un-commercial. A kid could probably do it. But they’ve got the soul in it.”

Harvey estimates his customer base is 70 percent tourists, but also “professional people: doctors, lawyers. They’re the people that travel, and read and watch TV about the stuff they have.”

Mead finds a similar demographic among the clientele at his Fourth Street shop: “very refined, artistic individuals who’ve already been through the first and second stages of fine object appreciation.” Business owners may be loathe to use the word “wealthy,” but the fact is that much of the merchandise offered on the Mall’s east end is not aimed at a budget-minded crowd. For example, a relatively elaborate Panamanian carving at Read & Co. is priced at $800, and textiles at Sun Bow can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

By contrast, the restaurants are affordable outposts in a Downtown market that is steadily moving to higher tiers. Dinner at Bashir’s Taverna could come in at under $10 per person, for instance, and the teahouse experience has rapidly become a community center for young artsy types as well as families with children. “In other cultures, the teahouse is historically a meeting place,” says Frankovich. “It’s not niche-based, it’s not clique-based. It’s where everyone from grandmas to babies come to hang out.”

Garden of Sheba promises to be another democratic venue. Watts says, based on the response to cultural events he and Scottie have produced in the past, he believes there’s a need in Charlottesville for the kind of meeting space the restaurant will provide. “It’s kind of like an underground movement,” he says. “There are people out there that want to see it go on.”

 

If the Mall’s east end hosts a higher concentration of non-European, internationally themed businesses, many people see it as pure coincidence. Katherine Khelafa says the neighborhood resists umbrella categorizations like “Eastern” or “Third World,” pointing out nearby restaurants like C&O, a French-Southern standard-bearer, and The Nook, Downtown’s answer to the lunch counter. Her husband worries that “Third World” has inaccurate, negative connotations. Simon Harvey points out that Willow 88, which sells Chinese furniture and Asian and aboriginal art, is situated on the Mall’s west end. All of the business owners interviewed for this article cited practical considerations—rent, storage, wall space—as the key factors in choosing their locations, rather than larger Downtown trends.

Yet some also say that, by luck or design, the area has a more sophisticated, quieter feel then the other end of the Mall. “It seems to have a little bit more of a soul,” says Mead. “I’m next door to Sandy McAdams, the sage of Charlottesville [and owner of Daedalus Books]. I share the same building with a Chinese restaurant [Peking].”

Gregg Davis, a Charlottesville police officer who patrols Downtown on a bicycle, says the majority of situations needing his attention occur on the west end. “It’s just slow on the [the east] end,” he says. “It seems like if you want to be seen you’ll be on the west end.”

However, newer, more youthful factors are beginning to change the face of the east end. Nearby Belmont is fast becoming a hotspot of gentrification and is a quick walk away from the teahouse and other east end attractions.

Last fall, the Khelafas moved Bashir’s to a new location in a City-owned building at the mall’s extreme eastern end. Most business owners agree that when the building emerged from renovation and new shops moved in, the east end was given new vitality.

Carol Troxell, owner of New Dominion Book Shop, prefers to think of the mall as a whole, rather than comparing one half to another. Still, she agrees that the new shops have “added new interest in that block, definitely, which is good.”

And most also happily anticipate further City-fostered expansion of the area. The Khelafas are staking something on that idea. With the completion of the transfer station, Bashir says, the Mall’s center of gravity—and its heaviest traffic—may shift eastward.

“It will be much more dynamic, much more interesting,” he says. “This is the future of the Mall.”

All that separates Tina Awkard’s front lawn from a chemical graveyard is a few hundred feet and a chain link fence. Yet Awkard, who moved here with her children three months ago, wasn’t aware that the “waste and lagoon treatment center” next door is a toxic dump with a file at the Environmental Protection Agency that’s as thick as sludge.

Welcome to Newtown, a place where streams meander, children play and the main street is the bucolic Summerest Lane, tucked into the foot of Afton Mountain. It’s about the last place on earth you’d expect to find a Superfund site—an area so contaminated by toxic wastes the EPA considers it a threat to human health. Yet, demographically, this tiny town with its population of about 35 black families is all too typical of one. The pastoral nature of the century-old village is matched only by its poverty.

Charlottesville lies barely 20 miles east, but few of its residents have ever heard of Newtown. You won’t find it on any “10 best places to live” list, but thanks to Greenwood Chemical Company, you will find it on the National Priorities List among the nation’s dirtiest sites.

That puts this otherwise picturesque village overlooking the Rockfish Valley right in line with a dirty national trend. Numerous studies have shown that toxic sites are disproportionately found in poor and minority communities.

The term “environmental justice” first gained prominence in 1994 with an executive order issued by President Clinton that directed Federal agencies with programs affecting public health and the environment to meet the nondiscrimination requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In effect, it merged civil rights with environmental policy.

But justice is not what happened in Newtown.

For years, people lacked the resources to do much of anything but watch and wait, according to Janet Sims, who grew up on Summerest Lane and now lives in Charlottesville. At the other end of the short stretch of road sat the 18-acre chemical company, the community’s only industry, which employed less than a dozen workers at a time. For years, “nobody cared,” says Sims, of the neighborhood’s reaction to the factory that perched like an elephant on their doorsteps. Apathy was understandable. Families here struggled to obtain everything from food to fuel. Many had already lost their homes to make way for the construction of Interstate 64 in the late 1960s.

In 1992, at the age of 44, Sims received the first definitive diagnosis of a long-standing lung condition, sarcoidosis. Recently, the disease worsened and she underwent a lung transplant, moving to Charlottesville to be near the hospital. Another term for the condition that reduces lung capacity and has left her gasping for air at times is “minority lung disease,” as it occurs more often in blacks. Yet it isn’t considered hereditary, and the American Lung Association can only suggest the cause of the disease to be “an immune system defense reaction against some unknown substance.”

Sims vividly recalls dark, mysterious clouds that filled her years in Newtown. By the 1970s, her mother had begun to worry, she says, while their neighbor, Don Nobles, started telling people to wash everything touched by the crystal residue that drifted down like snow from the plant after explosions occurred, sometimes several times a month. A neighbor’s dog, seen wandering on the unfenced site, died the same afternoon, its legs paralyzed.

On another occasion Sims and her son, searching for a Christmas tree, wandered onto the property and encountered one of the five waste water lagoons. “Solid green,” she says, describing the impenetrable surface where a dead squirrel was floating. The smell was unbearable.

“We were afraid to breathe.”

Throughout Greenwood Chemical’s decades of production, regulatory agencies were also questioning what was in the waste lagoons’ stew. Built in 1947 by former Dupont chemist F.O. Cockerille, the company, which went through three changes of names and owners over the years, considered its full inventory a matter of “trade secrets,” according to the EPA. Even after closing in 1985, the company refused to disclose its products to State and local officials.

Many of the chemicals were pesticides and pharmaceutical agents. Former workers, including Sims’ friend Percell Carr, told the EPA about the production of military gases. Some said Agent Orange might be buried there. In fact, it was impossible to identify many compounds, according to EPA documents. Those identified are a litany of poisons with unknown effects if mixed. They include carcinogenic solvents like trichloroethylene, volatile organic compounds such as toluene and deadly inorganic chemicals like arsenic, another carcinogen. Documents from the Bureau of Toxic Substances show that the company used between 1 metric ton and 10 metric tons of cyanide each year.

But when the plant “went off,” as Sims describes the explosions that often had people jolting from their beds at night, no one asked what made up the thick smoke congesting the heart of Newtown. The question that echoed through the 10 or so households on Summerest Lane was “Where do we go?” says Sims.

On various occasions the fire department would arrive and tell everyone to clear out. “How far?” asks Sims, incredulously. “Where were we supposed to go? How far was far enough?” Residents had been warned by the Crozet Fire Department that the explosions represented a hazard even to Crozet, four miles away.

Closer still was the town of Greenwood with its sweeping lawns and patios—and drinking wells. It was hard to know what to fear most: the fire, ash or water. All around, fields irrigated by groundwater produced products they consumed, including milk, meat and fruits.

Like residents, State and County officials were casting a wary eye on the company long before the EPA arrived on the scene. It was determined in the early ’70s that the plant was responsible for fish kills that occurred in Stockton Creek whenever rain would cause the poisonous lagoons to purge, leading to absolute stillness along several miles of streambed. Not a sign of life, said an inspection report from the State Water Control Board. A note of alarm runs through several such reports as County officials demanded answers to the massive aquatic kills. Even cows in nearby fields perished mysteriously.

Greenwood Chemical continues to drain into a stream that runs along Summerest Lane, a tributary to Stockton Creek that makes its way to Mechum’s River, the South Rivanna—and the County’s drinking water.

 

Greenwood Chemical’s dubious business practices eventually caught the attention of the EPA. But a 1982 “Desktop Preliminary Assessment of Greenwood Chemical Dump,” a report by a New Jersey consulting firm for the environmental agency, reveals that no action was taken. The document compiles the findings of two inspections by the Virginia Department of Health’s Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste Management, one of four agencies in charge of regulating the company. The others included the State Water Control Board, Virginia Department of Health and the Bureau of Occupational Health.

In 1978 and again in 1979, a State inspector had found “no problems with the site.” The inspector did find, however, 60 to 70 55-gallon drums in a 30-foot-long trench the owner claimed were there for “further chemical breakdown.” Had the official raised an eyebrow and requested further investigation, one of the company’s many dirty secrets might have been unearthed: Hundreds of barrels leaking wastes.

The EPA later hauled away more than 600 drums, while documents state that in 1985 aerial photos revealed an area where drums had been buried in trenches for more than two decades.

Other secrets had already been exposed: There were numerous reports of fires, explosions, injuries—even fatalities. And even though the inspection noted the 1971 fish kill caused by the plant’s waste water lagoons, there was no mention of these unprotected holding ponds, themselves. No barrier prevented the seven poison lagoons from spilling over when it rained—or seeping into the ground.

The consulting firm’s desktop assessment is filled with inane contradictions. While the “apparent seriousness of the problem” wasn’t even marked as “low,” and the box checked as to seriousness was “none,” next to “waste characteristics” the document’s preparer didn’t check “inert” or “unknown,” but rather, “toxic, ignitable and highly volatile.”

These reports concluded with a strange recommendation: “No action needed (no hazard).” If that weren’t enough to dismiss the chemical company from scrutiny, the assessment provided an even better argument for doing so. The consulting firm, Ecology and Environment, Inc., declared that the State hadn’t followed up on, or prosecuted the plant for, the vast fish kills in Stockton Creek.

Case closed.

Residents, though, weren’t assessing the hazards of a toxic waste plume from behind a desk. They were in their backyards. Groundwater beneath the steeply sloped, 18-acre chemical site links to all of the drinking water aquifers within three miles.

Beneath the surface, the aquifers joined Greenwood and Newtown, neighborhoods which at one time didn’t even share the water table. Back when blacks weren’t allowed to attend Greenwood’s well-equipped school, Newtown was without running water.

That changed after the Newtown Community Center was born in 1980. Fostered by the Monticello Area Community Action Agency, an anti-poverty group, the goal was to bring services to the isolated village. Pictures show Newtown residents hard at work fixing up the former schoolhouse across the road from the Greenwood plant. The plan was to create a meeting hall and bring it the amenities the school never had: a toilet and well.

Later, chromium would be detected in the community well, bringing a whole new meaning to the issue of running water.

“Everyone here, without exception, gets their water from a well,” says Greenwood resident Scott Peyton, who was assistant director of the Greenwood Citizen’s Council, which served as a community liaison with EPA in the early stages of cleanup. When testing of the chemical property’s soil, rock and water got underway in 1987, it showed extensive migration of contaminants into all of these materials. On-site tests showed pollutant levels that were “off the scale,” says Peyton.

EPA documents corroborate this, describing chemical concentrations near one lagoon that exceeded the capacity of the equipment. But on January 5, 1988, the agency announced in a public meeting that sampling of residential wells had not detected contaminants related to the site.

“It was a notion the community held very suspect,“ says Peyton. “Testing of private wells was always a source of controversy.”

In fact, correspondence to residents revealed that the wells initially contained substances found in the EPA file on Greenwood. A letter to Newtown resident Don Nobles from the EPA claims that the following chemicals were detected in his drinking water in 1987: Cadmium, 14 parts per billion (EPA’s “safe” level is 5ppb), the pesticide Endrin and a concentration of lead—a suspected carcinogen—of 123ppb, more than twice the maximum level allowed in public drinking water in 1987, and more than eight times what is allowed today. In the same letter, though, the EPA said that since the samples were from an outdoor spigot, they might not be of the same quality as the water inside the home. A follow-up test was done and the water declared safe for consumption.

But the news was not reassuring. The EPA still cannot say just where off-site contaminants might migrate at any given time.

Joe Washington also received letters concerning his well. He and his wife have lived in the same house in Newtown for 33 years, but Washington says he wasn’t too worried because he lives on the other side of the freeway—more than half a mile away. Nevertheless, initial tests detected low levels of cyanide (12 ppb) in his drinking water. In 1988 the EPA considered that amount below the less stringent “health standard” of 200ppb, but today that guideline level has dropped to .2ppb, according to Paul Shoop of the County Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

Greenwood resident Peyton considers the site an ongoing threat to groundwater, despite the treatment facility which has been in place the past few years. That structure is expected to remain for 35 years, according to Gary Funkhouser, who works at the site 40 hours a week as an employee of OMI, Inc., a Denver-based waste water treatment company. He isn’t surprised by the lengthy clean-up.

“It took 40 years to get that way,” he says.

But EPA documents state that the groundwater on site may never return to drinking water quality.

“There’s a limit to how deep you can dig,” says Peyton. “You can pump and treat, but rain will continue to carry it through.”

EPA spokesman Phil Rotstein agrees, conceding that the wastes can not only travel for miles, but in unpredictable patterns due to the area’s complex geology.

 

Soon after Greenwood Chemical became an official Superfund site in 1987, the EPA held meetings at the Newtown Community Center, today a ramshackle hollow along Route 690. By then people were voicing health concerns related to both water and airborne particles. Ailments like rashes, sores and headaches were attributed to the plant.

Jimmy and Frances Steppe have lived next to the community center and across the road from Greenwood Chemical for more than 40 years. Frances recalls attending at least one meeting, but for the most part says she’s kept to herself about it. “I’ve always been concerned, but people have their own way of dealing with things. When it comes to testing and getting involved, I don’t do that.”

Steppe adds that she knows many people in Newtown who have gotten cancer. Off the top of her head, she says she can think of 12 in this village of about 35 families. Peyton also claims that there seem to be a large number of degenerative diseases in the area, while Janet Sims knows of five others from Newtown who’ve been diagnosed with the same lung disorder she has—sarcoidosis. Some have died from the disease, she says. Based on the average occurrence rate cited by the American Lung Association, the expected number of cases in this tiny population would be less than one. Sims’ son also had childhood seizures, and other residents report diseases ranging from asthma to cancer.

Jeff McDaniel, who works at the County Department of Health, received a grant a few years ago to look into how Greenwood-Newtown has fared since the plant’s closure, but says that a survey sent to 300 residents was returned by only three. Steppe claims she did receive—and return—a survey, but later got a letter stating that she hadn’t returned it. No follow-up has been pursued.

But it wasn’t the contamination of residential wells or the public water supply or concern for the health of a community where children play in almost every yard that ultimately sent Greenwood Chemical and its shareholders packing.

On April 18, 1985, Sims was walking up Summerest Lane to meet her son at the bus when a huge explosion rocked the plant 50 feet away. Soon after, four men came running out, engulfed in flames, she says. They were racing toward the road, screaming, while a fifth man followed, throwing water from a pail at them as they fled.

Terrified, Sims ran next door to the church where her friend, a member of the rescue squad, was working that day. After calling for help, they carried sheets and water back and had the men sit down. Sims was horrified: The flames were out but the men’s faces were raw and their boots and clothes had melted into their skin, which was peeling from their bodies in strips. The women had to cut away the charred material before wrapping them in sheets soaked in water.

Conscious and talking, the men asked in disbelief, “How could this happen to us?” recalls Sims. Looking closer, she realized that she was looking into the torn face of a friend she’d known for years.

“It’s me, Janet…Maurie.”

“It took them forever,” says Sims, suddenly angry, remembering the long wait for the ambulance.

None of the four men, who ranged in age from 26 to 41, survived: Maurie Clark, Keith Woods, John Harper, Charles Ward.

Three years earlier, following an inspection of Greenwood Chemical, the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry recommended, but didn’t mandate, that the company comply with a law it was found to be violating. The law, recognized at both State and Federal levels, requires the installation of spark-proof electrical equipment.

What caused the explosion and fire that left nine children fatherless and four men sitting by the road, bodies seared, wondering in their last moments how this could happen to them? The accident was caused by electrical equipment lacking State-required safety devices, say EPA reports.

There were no goodbye ceremonies for Greenwood Chemical Company. What the company buried may never be laid to rest. Not for Janet Sims, not for Newtown or its once pristine surroundings. It gave the world a few more products people apparently can’t live without. More pesticides, more drugs, all with a grand tab well over 30 million dollars and climbing, says the EPA. Then factor in the hidden costs: death, loss and sickness are still dirty secrets. The toll will rise, but no one will ever know for sure. You can’t prove it.

It seems Greenwood Chemical was counting on that.