Utility infielder
When it comes to local baseball, nobody pitches in more than Darrell Gardner
Charlottesville enjoyed a taste of spring sunshine on March 6 and 7, and, fittingly, the Lane Babe Ruth baseball league held its preseason tryouts that very weekend on Darrell Gardner Field at Lane Park on McIntire Road.
After the tryouts wrapped up on Sunday, 71-year-old Darrell Gardner—clad in a dusty black baseball cap promoting “The G Field at Lane Park”—parked a small lawn tractor near third base and hooked a rusty metal drag to the back. The tractor started with a sputter and Mr. G, as he’s known around the diamond, putt-putted toward second base at a painstakingly slow pace, the iron smoothing the dirt behind him.
In a town where many local sports venues bear the names of wealthy donors, Gardner’s investment in the local ballpark is measured in decades, not dollars.
“He eats, sleeps and drinks Lane League baseball,” says attorney Bruce Maxa, a local coach and longtime friend of Gardner’s. “He’s the backbone of the league. I guess that’s why they named the field after him.”
For 30 years, Gardner has coached, umpired, kept official statistics and belonged to the board of directors for the local Babe Ruth baseball league, for players ages 13-19. He is perhaps best known as the longtime groundskeeper who has overseen Lane Park’s evolution into one of the region’s best youth baseball fields. In 2001, the Lane Babe Ruth Board of Directors voted to name the field—which is owned by Albemarle County but maintained by the league—in Gardner’s honor.
“The board must have had a mental lapse when they did that,” chuckles Gardner, a lifetime baseball fan who “bawls like a baby” every time he watches Field of Dreams. “Having a farmer’s background, I like working with the grounds,” Gardner says.
Gardner is the first to admit he’s had some help making the field what it is. In the early ’90s, the league added grass to the infield. Later in the decade, local Boy Scouts renovated the bleachers, bathrooms and scorekeeper’s booth. And, in 2002, the league added a 25-foot fence along the McIntire Road side of the field to prevent home runs from hitting passing cars.
Jon-Mikel Whalen, who will play in the Lane League’s 14-15-year-old division this spring, calls Gardner “the father of the field.
“I played all around the state on a traveling team this summer,” says Whalen. Gardner Field, he says, “is definitely the nicest.”
Although Gardner has spent the past 53 years in Charlottesville—where Major League loyalties seem split between Baltimore and Atlanta—the Illinois native remains a staunch St. Louis Cardinals fan.
“I used to hitchhike down to old Sportsman’s Park,” says Gardner, who keeps the left fielder’s glove he used in high school tacked to the wall in the scorekeeper’s booth, which serves as a display case for Gardner’s baseball memorabilia.
After a stint in the Army that sent him to Korea, Gardner returned to Virginia to attend Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). In 1960, he began a 22-year career teaching marketing education to Albemarle High School students. As his three sons went through the local Babe Ruth League, Gardner discovered that hanging with kids on the diamond could be a lot more fun than doing it in the classroom.
“He would always ask us about the field. He would ask ‘How’s the mound? Does it need to be wider? Taller?’” recalls Larry Mitchell, a former Lane Leaguer who pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies from 1992 to 1997 before returning to coach baseball at Charlottesville High School.
“What comes to my mind is [Gardner] out on that tractor cutting grass on hot sunny days,” says Mitchell. “He’s a tireless worker. He’s definitely trying to build the field of dreams on a daily basis.”
For both farmers and ballplayers, spring is a time for sowing seeds. As the teenage players work out their arms and practice their swings in hopes of reaping victory this summer, Gardner tends the park as his gift to the future.
“I want to make this the best field I can for the kids,” he says.—John Borgmeyer
Bypass, what bypass?
Lynchburg has road worries of its own
Like most Virginians, Lynchburg residents get worked up over roads. However, the stretch of pavement that most rankles ’burg residents might not be the proposed U.S. 29 Western Bypass around Charlottesville, which has agitated lawmakers in Richmond of late, but the bypass currently being built in Madison Heights, a Lynchburg suburb.
When asked about the Charlottesville bypass debate, Dorie Smiley, who was strolling down Main Street in Lynchburg on a recent morning, quickly switches gears to gripe about the Madison Heights construction, which she says has created “impossible” traffic problems. Smiley has heard about the fuss over a Charlottesville bypass, but admits she knows little about the dispute, “other than that it’s taken 100 years.”
The battle over a stalled plan for a western bypass around Charlottesville is an old one, dating back about 17 years. The latest volley in the General Assembly last week resulted in a relatively toothless bill in support of the bypass. But the road war between Lynchburg and Charlottesville goes back further than 17 years, to an old spurning of the southern neighbor.
“It’s not so much about Charlottesville as it is that we’ve been bypassed, so to speak,” says Darrell Laurant, a longtime columnist for The News & Advance in Lynchburg, of resentment stemming from the 1961 decision to run I-64 through Charlottesville instead of Lynchburg. The State had endorsed the Lynchburg route, but was overruled by the Feds. Smiley and others cite a legend, popular in Lynchburg, that Charlottesville may have exploited a local resident’s connections with President John F. Kennedy to snag I-64.
Regardless of whether Lynchburg was cheated out of I-64, Laurant says some locals still carry a grudge about the decision. He jokingly says that all of the town’s woes are blamed on the lack of an interstate.
Lynchburg, a city of 65,000, certainly has its share of problems. According to Mayor Carl B. Hutcherson Jr., the city faces a budget gap of “unprecedented proportions.” Hutcherson supports the building of a bypass around Charlottesville, saying it “would enhance transportation all the way down the corridor” from Washington, D.C. to North Carolina. However, Hutcherson, who spent some time at UVA and whose daughter went to the University, says the money crunch and several local construction projects, including the local bypass, have surpassed the Charlottesville road on his list of priorities.
“We’ve had so many other issues that we’ve had to deal with,” Hutcherson says. “We’re looking at our own transportation. We’ve got to concentrate on that.”
But across town, in the office of the Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce, fighting for a bypass around Charlottesville is Job One. Rex Hammond, the chamber president, calls U.S. 29 “the lifeblood of our community” and says the manufacturing town depends on truck traffic, tourists and salespeople that travel on the road.
“These groups are not being served by being forced through a bottleneck,” Hammond says of the string of traffic lights along the road in Albemarle County.
Hammond’s main beef with Charlottesville’s leaders is that he claims they are pulling out of a longstanding agreement among several localities to build bypasses along U.S. 29. Hammond says he understands that the “political undercurrents” are different in Charlottesville than they are in Lynchburg. But though he says it’s prudent for Charlottesville’s leaders to listen to the “pro-environmentalist, anti-growth voices” that oppose the Western Bypass, he thinks it’s wrong “to have progress stymied by these opponents.”
The Lynchburg media has covered the Charlottesville bypass debate, and many local residents there are aware of the issue. But the mayor laughs at the question of whether people are stewing with anger at Charlottesville. As columnist Laurant sees it, if Lynchburg residents reflect on Charlottesville at all, they might think only that the neighbor to the northeast is expensive and perhaps a little liberal.
“We don’t even pay that much attention to Roanoke,” Laurant says. (Roanoke is about 55 miles east of Lynchburg.)
In a worst-case scenario, Laurant says, people sometimes lump Charlottesville in with Northern Virginia.
Angie, 45, of Lynchburg, calls the bottleneck in Charlottesville “a pain in the butt.
“It’s almost like being in Washington, D.C.—that one spot,” Angie says, adding, “Charlottesville’s screwy. You get lost there.”
But Angie, whose daughter attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute and who would not give a reporter her surname, may harbor resentments that go beyond bypass brawls. The schism over college allegiances is a common one in Lynchburg, with Laurant claiming that the town is split evenly between Hoo and Hokie fans. If you lean toward Tech in Lynchburg, perhaps you’re simply inclined to dislike that college town up north.—Paul Fain
Choice across party lines
Midwifery, it seems, is a reproductive issue many can agree on“
I can legally have a baby at home by myself, but it’s illegal to have a skilled professional assist me,” says Charlottesville mother Julia Weissman, who had her boys, Jonah and Tim, at home. “Does that make sense?”
Not legal, yet not prosecuted, home midwifery is underground in Virginia. But new light is being shed on its practice, due to bi-partisan support of an issue that traditionally divides legislators: a woman’s reproductive rights.
“Birth is part of the reproductive process,” says Delegate Phil Hamilton, R-93rd District, chair of Virginia’s House Health, Welfare & Institutions Committee. “If women have the right to abort, what about the right to birth?…A woman ought to have the right to choose the birthing method she wants.”
Earlier this year, Hamilton co-sponsored H.B. 581, a bill to legalize midwifery in Virginia and allow certified professional midwives to perform out-of-hospital births, as is done in all but seven states.
Interestingly, Hamilton and co-sponsor Delegate Allen Dudley, R-9th District, both Republicans, are endorsed by the Virginia Society for Human Life (VSHL), a pro-life lobby. The bill’s third sponsor was Adam Ebbin, a Democrat from the 49th District endorsed by the National Organization for Women, a pro-choice PAC.
“It’s not political,” says Hamilton of the unexpected alliance. “It’s a policy issue.”
According to state records, in 2002 there were 404 home births in Virginia. Legislators were facing an empirical reality. “People finally got the message that there were more and more of these births occurring,” says Hamilton.
In committee, Delegate Rob Bell, a Republican who represents Albemarle and whose sister was born at home, laments midwives’ current legal limbo. “The current legal structure is the worst of both worlds We should license it or outlaw it,” Bell wrote in an e-mail, adding that he favors the former. “If a woman wants to home birth, we should set up a system so she can do it.” Delegate Mitch Van Yahres, a Democrat from Charlottesville, agrees, as do many constituents in Charlottesville, which had 30 home births last year. Van Yahres says, “This issue generates more e-mail than anything else.”
The House passed H.B. 581 by a vote of 91-9. However, it was subsequently killed in the Senate Committee on Education and Health by a vote of 10-5.
What stopped the bill? “The medical lobby,” Hamilton figures. Among the “nays” was Senator Russel Potts Jr., R-27th District, chair of the Senate Committee, who received more than $50,000 in contributions from the Virginia Medical Society and the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association PAC.
The bill’s detractors largely follow the position of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), that childbirth presents hazards that can only be addressed by a hospital setting. In 2002, ACOG reported that the risk of death to infants delivered at home is nearly twice that of newborns delivered in hospitals.
Midwifery advocates cite major flaws in ACOG’s report, noting a previous study using virtually identical data that found no difference in outcome between home and hospital birth.
“It’s a draw,” says Jen Downey, a Charlottesville mother who gave birth to her daughter Lil at home, and testified in Richmond in support of the bill. “Anyone who looks at the data cannot help but accept that they appear to be on par.”
Coincidentally, ACOG is supportive of a woman’s right to birth choice—when it comes to cesareans. In a recent statement, ACOG disregarded evidence that c-sections lead to more complications, and suggested that doctors cannot ethically deny a woman an elective cesarean. But, by the same token, can they, or the State, ethically deny them a midwife?
“You get this feeling that everyone’s saying, ‘We can’t let these poor mothers make decisions for themselves,’“ says Weissman.—Brian Wimer
Turning the Page
New owner saves Batesville’s general store
For Realtor Norm Jenkins, it was more than a store. Sure, Page’s Store in Batesville was the town’s single outlet for grabbing a quick snack or beer. But as Jenkins and the rest of the town knew, as the last business in town Page’s also literally defined Batesville—and if someone didn’t buy the property soon the town would lose its identity. So with no other good options in sight, he bought it himself.
As C-VILLE reported last year [“Batesville RFD,” Fishbowl, May 6, 2003], the clock was ticking for Page’s Store. In 2001, the general store/post office, originally opened in 1914, closed shop. As the two-year vacancy mark approached last year, so did the impending loss of its grandfather clause exception to rural area zoning laws. If no commercial entity moved in it would revert to residential zoning, and Batesville would lose its own ZIP code and identity, like so many other hamlets before it.
The town’s response was informal and off the record, but residents yearned for the store to reopen as rumors floated about its next incarnation, everything from new housing to a recording studio.
The ideas just didn’t sing to many, especially not Jenkins. A resident of nearby Afton, who at one time lived in Batesville, Jenkins was disenchanted with the proposed transformation of the town center. So in January he bought the building for $200,000. Now, with help from Charlie Page, who ran his family’s former store from 1970 to 1994, he’s revamping its interior and stocking its counter with such modern delights as deli sandwiches and Greenberry’s coffee. As he prepares for the March 20 reopening, surrounded by new wood and old furnishings, Jenkins wants to make sure nothing gets lost along the way.
“Page’s has always been the place where, at the end of the day, people stop by to pick up a few things and catch up,” he says. While it may have been the only place within five miles to grab a quart of milk, the little market where neighbors said hello also served to remind people they were living in a community that isn’t defined solely by its conveniences.
Yet Jenkins knows that without those conveniences the center would not hold, but move outward, leaving Batesville less intact and self-sufficient than it was decades ago when it counted five stores among its businesses.
“It was my love for the store,” says Jenkins of his decision to cheat the clause and keep Page’s alive. “My love for Batesville.”—Sheila Pell