Dave Morris (who himself holds a 17-1 record, mainly from UFC-sanctioned events) opened the Charlottesville MMA Institute as a training ground for both amateur and pro fighters. A team of 20 in-house and visiting instructors hold black belts and champion wins in a variety of disciplines. Photo: 621 Studios
It’s 5:30pm and the gym of Charlottesville’s MMA Institute is alive with the leathery crackle of boxing gloves and the muffled, scuffle-thud rhythm and squeak of bare feet on padded flooring. There is the litany of sharp nasal inhalations and grunts as well as the barked instructions of a squadron of coaches. Housed in the back half of a warehouse on Greenbrier Drive, the gym consists of one large padded room—maybe half the size of a basketball court—that, but for a back wall equipped with a rubberized chain-link fence and another wall of torso-level mirrors, is reminiscent of a wrestling training facility. The institute features the largest team of both professional and amateur mixed martial arts fighters in the state (mixed martial arts is a full-contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques).
And on this night, despite the fact that these men arrived less than half an hour before, already there is the reek of hard, physical exertion. Sweat.
The fighters—eight amateurs and three professionals—are each paired with a partner of the same weight class (e.g. bantamweights ranging between 125 to 135 pounds), while five coaches watch every move. The men circle one another with focused intensity, only their eyes are devoid of any lust for violence; theirs is the gaze of an artist immersed in the calm seizure of the moment. Rather than angry, these men come off more like collaborators, like muscle-bound tango partners engrossed in a rehearsal for a high-level competition.
“The biggest problem facing the mixed martial arts scene is one of perception,” says 46-year-old Jay Colligan, a longtime gym member and promoter/ringside announcer for Charlottesville’s Main Street Arena Fight Night Challenge events. “People have this notion of MMA events as some kind of seedy, barely legal form of human cockfighting, and it’s just not true.”
Dave Morris, left, watches as Ginseng Dujour uses the flying-knee technique on his opponent, Carlos Martinez. Photo: 621 Studios
For the uninitiated observer, the combative nature of the sport can overshadow the deep mutual respect fighters on this level have for one another.
“Your opponent is like a mirror,” says Dave Morris, 45, owner of the Charlottesville MMA Institute and a former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighter. “He reveals the flaws in your form…which should be viewed as a gift.”
In the far corner of the room, Ginseng Dujour, 30, and Carlos Martinez, 21,—two of the gym’s most promising fighters—are sparring. With his grizzled beard, mane of shoulder-length dreadlocks, gleaming skin and chiseled figure, Dujour demands attention. He is the room’s visual anchor. Martinez—a bit taller, baby-faced, padded by the slightest vestige of adolescent pudge—unleashes what is an astonishingly swift flurry of jabs. Ducking behind a shield of forearms, Dujour dances a retreat. Just before the jabs stop coming, as if anticipating the first flagging instant of their climax, Morris barks a command: “Knee!” Dujour plants his feet and with the terrifying agility of a big cat launches himself upward into the air, hurling his right knee toward Martinez’s chin. Although the blow does not land, clearly it catches Martinez off guard. Jolted, he’s forced to make an unexpected defense—a sort of cringing sidestep as fists and forearms seek to ward off the knee.
Clapping and smiling broadly, Morris intercedes, congratulating Dujour on his listening ability and flying-knee technique. He steps between the men and begins instructing Martinez on the flaw in his punch combo that made this potentially devastating counterattack possible. Meanwhile, grappling coach Ray Cadell has left his position leaning cross-armed against the padded wall to instruct Dujour on another potential option—the flying-knee strike was a risky gamble that could have ended disastrously—for deflecting Martinez’s onslaught.
“What you saw happening there was two-fold,” Morris explains later. “On the one hand, you saw a fighter exhibiting the ability to listen. Both of those guys are great developing fighters. But while Carlos is on the verge of being ready to go pro, Ginseng’s already there.”
Listening, Morris says, is a major indicator of a fighter’s readiness to make the leap from the amateur to professional circuit (a jump he compares to playing JV basketball versus playing in the NBA).
“When you’re fighting, you’re totally focused on your opponent,” says Morris. “Your corner can use his experience and visual advantage to exploit weaknesses. When you hear him make a command, you have to react instantly. No hesitation at all. That trust can be the difference between winning and losing a fight.”
The second crucial thing the Martinez and Dujour vignette reveals is the institute’s—and Morris’—philosophy of instruction.
“We have a team of instructors with a range of backgrounds broad enough to cover the spectrum of martial arts useful for this kind of competition,” says Morris. “The idea is, while my training leads me to approach a situation one way, a guy with a different background may come at it quite different.”
Fighters and coaches often cite the chess match metaphor. What makes the game—and this sport—so interesting is there is no fixed, predesignated approach. Participants have the ability to exhibit an astonishing array of styles, with many having little, if anything, in common with one another.
“The thing is, with such a broad range of fighting techniques available,” says Colligan, “while great fighters tend to master one particular form, they then augment that style with others, hoping that, in doing so, they reduce its inherent vulnerabilities, as well as enhance its various strengths.”
With each fighter commanding an incredible repertoire of stylistic fluency, any given situation—in Martinez’s case, a boxer-like attack—becomes the inspiration for an infinite array of possible defenses and counter-offenses. At the MMA Institute, a team of about 20 in-house and visiting instructors hold black belts and/or championship wins in disciplines ranging from judo, American freestyle karate, Brazilian jiu jitsu, sambo, Greco Roman wrestling and muay Thai.
“Rather than one solution to a given problem,” says Morris, “our guys are presented with a variety of options that can open doors to new technical possibilities.”
In the past, each school featured a master trained in one particular discipline, but MMA (and UFC) fighters must draw from multiple styles and schools to be competitive in the cage. How this shift occurred is key to understanding the MMA art form.
Through cultural migration, the advent of television and the Internet, martial arts forms that were once isolated to particular regions and cultures were made available to audiences that otherwise would have had no access. This process was bolstered by the popularization of mixed martial arts combat as embodied by the Ultimate Fighting Championship tournaments in the early ’90s, and had much to do with the efforts and successes of three-time UFC champion and hall of famer Royce Gracie (who helped found UFC). With the fights offered on international pay-per-view and heavily marketed to combat/contact sport audiences and Gracie being both a wildly entertaining fighter and an avid practitioner of Brazilian jiu jitsu, when he won the first, second and fourth UFC competitions, this fueled increased interest in the form. Suddenly, would-be fighters all began studying the technique, and gyms popped up en masse. As new fighters and champions emerged, historically or geographically obscure techniques such as muay Thai (a centuries old, hybrid version of kickboxing from Thailand), capoeira (a dancing, acrobatic technique purportedly developed and practiced on the sly by 16th-century West Africans enslaved in South America) surfaced.
Ginseng Dujour practices a hold technique with a spotting partner at the Charlottesville MMA Institute. Photo: 621 Studios
Mixed martial arts’ popularity increased steadily through the early 2000s, and when Fox Sports Media Group struck a deal to carry UFC and MMA fights in 2011 (on its FX, Fuel TV and Fox Sports Net networks), the sport exploded: In 2015, Fox Sports News reported an average viewership of 964,000 for its UFC preliminary fights, a 22 percent hike from the year before.
This newfound notoriety led to better conditions for up-and-coming amateurs (for instance, the widespread development and syndication of amateur fighting leagues with official rules—hence Charlottesville’s Fight Night Challenge), and better pay for professionals (for whom Morris says regional appearances pay around $500 for showing up plus $500 for a win; whereas, according to ESPN, UFC rates range from $10,000 for a beginning, entry-level fighter, to top-draws such as champion Georges St. Pierre’s $4-5 million per bout).
But, as Morris can testify, getting to this point was a long, hard climb.
“Back in the ’90s, fighting in a regional match meant you didn’t always know what you were getting yourself into,” says Morris. “It was kind of like the Wild West.”
Of the many horror stories, one details the time Morris showed up for a fight that turned out to have no rounds. While nowadays, an MMA main event or championship fight runs for a maximum of five, 5-minute rounds (with non-main events clocking in at three 3-minute rounds), when Morris arrived at one purportedly premium promotion, he discovered the championship bout was slated to run straight through.
“We fought for nearly 19 minutes straight!” he laughs, shaking his head. “It was insane. You talk about exhaustion!”
Elsewhere, similar discrepancies were occurring. This had much to do with the fact that, as the sport was still in its infancy and was just beginning to catch on, there was no officially sanctioned governing body to enforce a collective set of rules. As such, much like the early days of American football, a money-hungry promoter could easily lease a respectable-seeming venue, promise a classy event and put on what amounted to brawls.
“There were a lot of bad promotions,” says Morris. “You had to be careful. A lot of companies would put together good, reputable-looking materials, then round up street-fighters and throw them together in the ring.”
Of course, when matched against a master, these unsophisticated fisticuffers didn’t stand a chance.
“It was really a turn-off to see that kind of thing going on,” says Morris, whose own record was 17–1 while competing mostly in UFC-sanctioned events. “For a long time we did what we could, but it really helped things when the sport became popular, which led to the adoption of rules, an educated viewership and the creation of sanctioning bodies that could vet the fights.”
Still, there remained much room for abuse. After years of seeing phony promoters putting on bogus (not to mention dangerous) events, when Morris was approached in 2010 by Mike Stanley, owner of Louisa’s MMA Institute gym, and offered the opportunity to develop an amateur-just-on-the-cusp-of-going-pro MMA fight series—the Fight Night Challenge—with the new owner of Charlottesville’s Main Street Arena, Mark Brown, Morris leapt at the opportunity.
“What really made me want to do this was, just before Mike got in touch with me, I’d brought three of my amateur fighters to an exhibition up in Staunton,” says Morris, “and it was bad.”
By bad he means the promoter had Morris’ guys matched with barroom brawlers, some of whom showed up reeking of booze. As the whole point of an amateur fight is, for serious practitioners, gaining experience—i.e. getting a feel for being in the cage with a well-trained combatant, honing one’s skills and preferably getting a win yielding video footage marketable to pro venues such as the UFC—Morris was offended. He refused to participate in such a spectacle, packed up his guys and went home.
“With the arena we had the opportunity to build an event series from the ground up,” says Morris. “I’d been fighting and training fighters for going on 20 years,” and running the MMA Institute for eight, “and finally had the opportunity to do things the right way. Like, if you were going to make the most respectable, fighter-friendly environment possible, what would that look like?”
The first thing Morris did was ask Stanley to handle the matchmaking.
“The thing about matching amateurs,” says Cadell, “is you have to be able to put guys together who are [size-wise] pretty equally matched and have complementary or [comparatively] interesting skill sets. That’s what makes a fight entertaining to watch.”
With Stanley’s integration into the state’s fighting community, Morris’ reputation for integrity and their mutual knowledge of MMA, this meant the two could easily convince upper-echelon developing fighters to perform at the new venue.
In the beginning the FNC was to feature solely amateur fights, with plans to expand the event schedule to include professional state championship matches, but Morris wanted to make sure fighters were treated as professionals from the get-go. His reasoning was that, although they were amateurs, the kind of guys he wanted to attract were those who—like Martinez—were on the verge of making the leap to the big leagues. (Here, it’s useful to think of the FNC as roughly the equivalent of an upper collegiate-level venue where athletes hoping to attract a pro contract go to compete, with the major difference being that MMA amateurs can get sponsorships—from, say, a local car dealer, nutrition supply store or sports equipment dealership—and trade teaching classes at gyms for memberships, training sessions and other various perks.)
“Fighters should feel respected,” says Morris. “A venue like ours gives fighters the opportunity to gain experience and practice their craft.”
In effect, the FNC was conceived of as an extension of the smaller gym communities, a place where enthusiasts could tap into the bigger regional and state community while putting their skills to the test and readying themselves to compete in larger, professional venues in Richmond, Northern Virginia and beyond.
“We worked hard to create an atmosphere more akin to an Olympic event than a prizefight,” says Colligan.
Which brings us to the venture’s other integral component: It had to be family-oriented.
“Dave’s wife runs the desk, and sometimes his daughter,” says Colligan. “We have classes for 4-year-olds on up. We have entire families that come in together to train. When he retires, Ginseng”—a first-generation immigrant from Haiti—“wants to return home and found his own gym and create an extension of this community there. Above all, our gym is based upon family values.”
Morris wanted this vibe, this sense of an inclusive group camaraderie to be extended to the Fight Night Challenge, which attracts about 1,000 spectators to each event.
“We made it kid-friendly,” says Morris. “We try our best to book the kind of fighters that, if a kid walks up to them after a fight and expresses interest, they’ll smile at them and let the youngster know what the mixed martial arts are all about.”
–Words by Eric J. Wallace, Photography by Studio 621
It’s a mouth-watering time to be a food-lover in Charlottesville. The solid foundation of our dining landscape—built by C&O, Mas, Fleurie and others—has paved the way for a new generation of culinarians. Now, we’re reaping the benefits of past and present as we head into our foodie future with scene-stealing newcomers like the little Neapolitan pizza joint that could, the critical darling second-floor French spot and the neighborhood butcher with more know-how than you can shake a spare rib at (to name a few).
But for this year’s Food & Drink issue, we went back to basics—the ABCs—by creating an edible alphabet of our own. Twenty-six of our current favorite eats and drinks and the folks who make them, from a specialty sandwich shop (p.33) to a sweet and sour cocktail (p.29) to a guy who just wants to make more turtle soup (p.37). Like we said, it’s a great time to dine. Just be sure to clean your plate—you’ll need to make room for more.
If you care about whether Albemarle expands its growth area or what Charlottesville does about the Belmont bridge or whether you pay more in meals tax or any other myriad local issues that directly affect your quality of life, this is the election to head to the polls. Sure it doesn’t have the star power of a presidential race, but for the day-to-day issues that hit you where you live, this is the time to exercise your power as a voter.
A total of 45 candidates are running for 21 seats in the November 3 Charlottesville and Albemarle County races. Several of those are uncontested—hello gerrymandering in the case of four General Assembly races—but don’t let that deter you.
As much as Americans love to complain about government, they’re pathetically passive about exercising the hard-won right that actually lets them have a say where it counts. If you don’t like the job current officials are doing, fire ’em. If you think someone would do a better job, hire ’em. And if you want a tiny percentage of registered voters to call the shots about what happens in your city, county and state government, sit back and watch “American Idol.” We’re kidding. Get out there and vote.
Toss-ups
We’re not Larry Sabato by any means, but according to our crystal ball experience as longtime local election watchers, of the 21 races only a handful could go either way, and all of those races are in the county.
Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney
Constitutional officers don’t operate under the glare of regular public meetings and usually fly under the radar. This year they are among the most hotly contested races, and none more so than the Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney race, which hasn’t been contested since 2007, when incumbent Denise Lunsford ousted Jim Camblos, who’d held the office for four terms.
A big factor in this race is the Mark Weiner case, which gained national attention. The former Food Lion manager spent two-and-a-half years in jail for an abduction conviction until Lunsford moved to set aside the verdict in July when the alleged victim’s credibility was further strained by an accusation of selling cocaine. “The Mark Weiner case clearly is an issue to people,” says challenger Robert Tracci. “My opponent does seem focused on a single issue that is much more involved and nuanced than he seems to understand,” responds Lunsford.
Tracci, a Republican and former federal prosecutor, claims broad bipartisan support. “When I go door to door, people say, ‘Thank God we have a choice.’” And he reiterates his motto: “integrity, judgment, fairness.”
Lunsford questions Tracci’s qualifications—in federal court, 97 percent of indictments result in plea bargains—and says she takes his challenge seriously “because I am very concerned about my opponent’s ability to do the job when he has never tried a case in state court and has very little experience at all.” She says his trial experience as a federal prosecutor “is so limited that he would only meet the requirements for an entry-level position in the office he is campaigning to lead.”
Tracci issued a press release calling for more public forums before organizations such as the League of Women Voters or the NAACP, and accuses Lunsford of ducking those to attend private fundraisers—even though those organizations haven’t scheduled such events. Lunsford, who faced Tracci at the Senior Statesmen and the Fraternal Police Order forums, replies, “To date, I have not received another invitation to participate in an open forum, which are always organized and scheduled by civic groups.”
Whoever is elected will have a lot on his or her plate: The capital murder trial of Jesse Matthew is scheduled for next summer.
Denise Lunsford-D
Age: 51
Education: BA Middle Tennessee State University, JD Washington & Lee School of Law
Legal experience: Twenty-five years as a trial attorney in local and federal courts including eight years as commonwealth’s attorney and 17 years as a defense attorney.“I have tried thousands of cases involving virtually every type of charge from petty larceny and DUI up to and including rape, robbery and capital murder. Hundreds of these cases were jury trials where I have served as lead counsel.”
Most difficult case you’ve ever tried: My first capital case involving the murder of a local jeweler.
Skills that make you well-suited to be commonwealth’s attorney: I am a trial attorney and have been for my entire legal career. In addition, I cultivate relationships with law enforcement, community groups and others to make improvements in the criminal justice system.
Top donor: My children, who have given up family time and the privacy that others enjoy.
Legal hero: Virginia commonwealth’s attorneys. Their daily lives are dealing with the worst moments in the lives of both victims and the accused, and they are charged with making the difficult decisions on whether or not a case is pursued and to ensure that justice is served.
What are you reading now:The World’s Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key and Sisters In Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.
If you could change any law, which one would it be: I would allow the creation of local problem-solving courts including mental health courts so communities could better address the issue of persons with mental illness in the criminal justice system.
Robert Tracci-R
Age: 43
Education: Ohio Wesleyan, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1994; University of Illinois College of Law, 1999
Legal experience: Special assistant United States attorney, deputy assistant attorney general, U.S. Department of Justice; chief legislative counsel and parliamentarian, chief antitrust counsel, U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
Skills that make you well-suited to be commonwealth’s attorney: Experienced prosecutor, sound legal judgment, a clear sense of justice and a commitment to apply the law firmly and fairly while upholding the public trust and dignity of the office. Most difficult case: Murder for hire, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, solicitation, unlawful possession of a firearm, drug distribution and conspiracy; co-counseled and authored Fourth Circuit appellate brief.
Top donor: My immediate family and I, because I would not ask anyone to support a campaign we were not fully committed to.
Legal hero: Attorney general, Supreme Court justice and United States Nuremberg tribunal prosecutor Robert H. Jackson: “The citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes and who approaches his task with humility.”
Reading now:Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Cases Go Wrong by Brandon L. Garrett.
If you could change any law, which one would it be? Support Sheriff Chip Harding’s effort to expand the DNA database to improve criminal investigations and reduce wrongful convictions.
Albemarle Clerk of Court
The state audits were bad enough, then the indictment for embezzlement of a longtime staffer in the clerk’s office put a target on incumbent Debbie Shipp’s back, with challengers coming out of the woodwork to take a job that involves handling the Albemarle Circuit Court’s papers and around 800 duties from marriage licenses to property recordation to criminal records. The job’s attractiveness probably isn’t hurt by what it pays—Shipp earns nearly $139K a year—and the term is eight years. Well over a year ago, Shipp was challenged by a fellow Dem and she decided to run as an independent.
Clockwise from left: Debbie Shipp, John Zug, George Foresman and Franklin Micciche
George Foresman-I
Age: 53
Occupation: Current business/ former government leader
Why run? To restore integrity to Albemarle’s Circuit Court Clerk’s office. The pattern of waste, financial mismanagement and criminal scandals is the reason the office has dropped from top-tier performance only eight years ago to the most problem plagued of Virginia’s 117 clerk’s offices.
Skills that make you well-suited to be clerk: The experience and skills from serving as a successful leader of small and large government organizations and businesses in Virginia for over 30 years that led to my recruitment as a top administrator and under secretary of Homeland Security.
Biggest challenge facing the clerk’s office: Lack of oversight and experienced professional leadership capable of delivering modern services to taxpayers.
Top donor: Self financing campaign.
Who inspires you? Those who place service to others above being self-serving.
What are you reading now?Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal and The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Eradicate hunger.
Franklin Micciche-R
Age: 61
Occupation: Recently phased out of position of area manager for Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Currently helping them on an on-call basis.
Why run? To turn around an office in need of help. I’m ready for the next challenge in my life.
Skills that make you well-suited to be clerk: I have the ability to create cohesive, caring teams that are dedicated to customer service, quality and performance. I am the only private sector candidate.
Top donor: No donors. Self-funded atypical campaign.
Biggest challenge facing the clerk’s office: Restoration of customer service, efficiency and attention to detail. Creating a place where people enjoy working.
Who inspires you? Honest, hard-working public service people at all levels.
What are you reading now?War in the Pacific by General Jerome T. Hagen.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Provide people with the education and training to become self-sufficient.
Debbie Shipp-I
Age: 57
Occupation: Clerk, Albemarle County Circuit Court
Why run? Love my job, love interaction with attorneys and public.
Skills that make you well-suited to be clerk: Experience, dedication, knowledge for needs of upcoming renovation project of the courthouse.
Biggest challenge facing the clerk’s office: Staffing, lack of space.
Top donor: Waiting to see who makes that list.
Who inspires you? Parents.
What are you reading now? Currently no time for books.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? World peace and feed the hungry.
Jon Zug-D
Age: 54
Occupation: Assistant commonwealth’s attorney
Why run? Because there is a need, and I have the leadership to turn things around for the clerk’s office.
Skills that make you well-suited to be clerk: My legal experience and organizational skills.
Biggest challenge facing the clerk’s office: Bringing it into the 21st century and establishing online records and filings.
Top donor: My parents have been my biggest donor and supporter as well as my greatest inspiration.
What are you reading now:A Street in Arnhem: The Agony of Occupation and Liberation by Robert Kershaw.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would eliminate poverty and institute equality for all genders, races and religions.
Albemarle Board of Supervisors—Rivanna District
Ken Boyd’s decision not to seek another term has thrown the Rivanna District into a highly competitive race with three contenders who could tip the growth/no growth balance of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors.
Richard Lloyd, Lawrence Gaughan and Norman Dill
Norman Dill-D
Age: 61
Occupation: Business owner, Rebecca’s Natural Food
Issue that made you want to run: Protecting our county.
Skills that make you well-suited to be supervisor: People skills, finance and 30 years of working in this community.
Best decision the Board of Supervisors made in the past year: Enthusiastically protecting the Rivanna Watershed.
Worst: Not fully funding early education for children in need.
Top donor: My wife—generous with emotional and technical support.
Political hero: Creigh Deeds.
What are you reading now?Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Eradicate polio—anything too dramatic would have inevitable unintended consequences.
Lawrence Gaughan-I
Age: 48
Occupation: Founder/director of GOV360 (nonprofit, nonpartisan community/voter engagement foundation), film and TV actor/director/producer
Issue that made you want to run: Lack of voter participation (on average, only 20 percent of citizens vote in local elections), with both Democrats and Republicans pandering to developers and big business, leading to 40 years of poor planning, out-of-control growth, high taxes, looming debt, budget shortfalls (especially with our schools) and a complete lack of environmental and economic sustainability.
Skills that make you well-suited to be supervisor: Years of political experience (including the organizational capacity to win a contested congressional nominating process in 2014), a relevant advanced degree from Pepperdine University’s graduate school of education and the ability to listen to constituents and thoroughly understand their individual needs.
Best decision the Board of Supervisors made in the past year: None available.
Worst: All.
Top donor: Ludwig G. Kuttner.
Political hero: Teddy Roosevelt.
What are you reading now?Congressional Primaries and the Politics of Representation by Marni Ezra.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Fire the editor of C-VILLE and replace all forms of yellow journalism with responsible, thorough and genuinely informative election coverage that actually promotes civic engagement on a local level.
Richard Lloyd-R
Age: 64
Occupation: Retired businessman.
Issue that made you want to run: I wanted to reattach to my community where I can contribute.
Skills that make you well-suited to be supervisor: I managed sales and marketing for divisions of Fortune 500 companies. I have dual degrees in engineering. I started and ran my own manufacturing company for 12 years.
Best decision the Board of Supervisors made in the past year: To hire Faith McClintic as director of the Office of Economic Development.
Worst: To build the grade-separated interchange at 29 and Rio.
Top donor: Support has come from a wide assortment of individuals and community businesses.
Political hero: Ronald Reagan.
What are you reading now? I am wading through the Comprehensive Plan.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Give me some time to contact the Miss Universe Pageant for ideas.
Albemarle Board of Supervisors—Scottsville District
The Scottsville District has seen tumultuous turnover since it elected in 2011 Dem rising star Chris Dumler, who was convicted of sexual battery barely a year into his term. One of the men running for the seat, Earl Smith, is the guy who petitioned the court for Dumler’s ouster; the other, Rick Randolph, was appointed to the Planning Commission by Dumler and sought appointment to fill his seat when Dumler finally resigned, but bowed out in the 2013 special election won by current chair Jane Dittmar.
Rick Randolph and Earl Smith
Rick Randolph-D
Age: 68
Occupation: Owner of Keswick Home Services, planning commissioner, Scottsville District
Issue that made you want to run: The need to develop more sustainable, measurable, long-term financial health for Albemarle County.
Skills that make you well-suited to be supervisor:Problem-solver, consensus-builder, committed to transparency in government, strategic thinker.
Best decision the Board of Supervisors made in the past year: Tie: 1) To create committees to research policies regarding proffers, stormwater management and fiscal health of county; 2) To not make the decision on the Sweetspot Comprehensive Plan amendment without Planning Commission oversight first.
Worst: To not undertake more of a publicly visible, unified effort with other counties to increase pressure on state legislators to fulfill their obligations to fund public schools at levels beyond the current near 2007 levels.
Top donor: Sonjia Smith.
Political hero: Martin Luther King Jr.
What are you reading now? James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do?Arrest and send to The Hague the following: Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and North Korea’s Kim Jung-un; persuade four high-tech companies to locate in Albemarle County, two of which will be in Scottsville; and convince the General Assembly that they should increase funding of public schools.
Earl Smith-R
Age: 51
Occupation: District manager
Issue that made you want to run: The encouragement and support I’ve received the past two years from folks here in the county to be the voice needed for the Scottsville District.
Skills that make you well-suited to be a supervisor: Common sense, problem-solver, open-minded, tenacious, smarter than the average bear.
Best decision the Board of Supervisors made in the past year: Hiring [director of economic development] Faith McClintic.
Worst: Increasing property taxes.
Top donor: CAAR.
Political hero: George Washington.
What are you reading now: Comprehensive Plan.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Ban GMOs.
Wild card
Charlottesville City Council
Oddsmakers will say the race is a given for the three Democratic candidates in the Dem majority city. If—and only if—Republicans, independents and disenfranchised Democrats single-shot Anson Parker, there’s a remote chance that he could get a seat on council. But single-shotting is tricky because people don’t understand that if they vote for even one other majority-favored candidate, they further sink the chances of their favorite. And people don’t like to not use votes. It’s a long shot but it happened before when Republican Rob Schilling won a seat in 2002.
Alvin Scott Brandy, Mike Signer, Kathy Galvin, Anson Parker and Wes Bellamy
Wes Bellamy-D
Age: 28
Occupation: High school teacher
Issue that made you want to run: Community engagement, increase in diversity on Council. I lost the last election by five votes, and I couldn’t give up that easily. Besides, I knew I couldn’t let all of the kids who were looking up to me see me quit just because I didn’t get my way.
Skills that make you well-suited to be a councilor: Proven leader, community connector, internal optimism, decision-maker and energy.
Best decision City Council made in the past year: Approve the changes to the ground lease for the YMCA.
Worst: Not enough decisions made to answer this question. We need more action.
Top donor: Roberta Williamson.
Political hero: President Barack Obama, John Lewis.
What are you reading now? Soar: How Boys Learn, Succeed, and Develop Character by David C. Banks.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? 1. Create a system in which everyone was treated fairly in the justice system regardless of race, color, religion, age or sexual orientation 2. Allow everyone who lives in poverty to experience what it feels like to be wealthy. 3. Magically instill the confidence in every child under 18 so that they know what it feels like to chase your dreams without fear.
Kathy Galvin-D
Age: 59
Occupation: Architect and urban designer
Issue that made you want to run: While on the school board, I saw poverty impact student achievement. We need healthy neighborhoods where all children (and parents) thrive, and meeting that need is the responsibility of a city council.
Skills that make you well-suited to be a councilor: Getting different people to the table to solve complicated problems, a skill honed by being an architect.
Best decision City Council made in the past year: Buying the Hope Community Center for the School Division (now the Lugo-McGinness Academy) to provide a better alternative learning environment than Henry Avenue.
Worst: Allowing the former director of Neighborhood Services, Jim Tolbert, to continue work on the Belmont Bridge with his preferred engineering and design firm with no timeline for work products. That engineering firm went out of business a few months later and the Belmont Bridge still does not have a replacement firm under contract. The project was a campaign issue four years ago and it still is.
Top donor: Richard M. Hewitt ($2,000) and William A. Edgerton ($1,000).
Political hero: Abraham Lincoln.
What are you reading now? In between books as I just finished Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and The Great Debate by Yuval Levin.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Stop the carnage in Syria.
Mike Signer-D
Age: 42
Occupation: Attorney and author
Issue that made you want to run: A range of experiences made me want to serve the city, from working with local tech companies in my law practice to serving as president of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association, to serving as chair of the Emergency Food Bank.
Skills that make you well-suited to be a councilor: My experience in nonprofits and government leadership will help me bring collegiality, professionalism and strategic vision to council; as an attorney, I also will bring attention to research and detail.
Best decision City Council made in the past year: I support the continued implementation of the Growing Opportunity program, which develops apprenticeships and hiring programs with local employers for low-income residents.
Worst decision City Council made in the past year: I’m not interested in spending time criticizing City Council, particularly as we’ll be colleagues going forward.
Top donor: New Dominion Project PAC
Political hero: Fellow UVA Law alum Robert F. Kennedy, for his courage, compassion and concern about the future.
What are you reading now? For pleasure, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner; for the seminar I’m teaching at UVA now, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
Anson Parker-R
Age: 37
Occupation: Web developer
Issues that made you want to run: Transparency is a global issue, so work done in Charlottesville may help other municipalities and countries.
Best decision City Council made last year: Fixing the bathrooms in the public library, feeding kids before and after school.
Worst: Continued inability to handle Halsey Minor’s failed erection on the mall (while authorizing several other hotels).
Top donor: $300 from my mom … really didn’t want anyone’s cash … hard to say no to the madre.
Political hero: TJ. Who else has the guts to edit the Bible to 15 pages?
What are you reading now? Tech support manuals.
If you were ruler for a day what would you do? Release nonviolent drug offenders, implement a clear-cut path for legal immigration, go inner-tubing at Goshen.
Alvin Scott Bandy-I
Age: 54
Occupation: Retired/hobbyist photographer
Issue that made you want to run: Employment (whether with or without the career ladder and bell-whistle attached status advances) the holder can rely upon to sustain his or her family’s livelihood.
Skills that make you well-suited to be a councilor: My warped sense of humor.
Best decision City Council made in the past year: To advance transient lodging (homestay) ordinance amendments.
Worst: Raising the meals tax to supplement funding allocation.
Top donor: The Libertarian Party.
Political hero: Political? No comment.
What are you reading now? When it isn’t C-VILLE Weekly, The Essential Lincoln: Speeches and Correspondence.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Abdicate.
Toss-ups
Albemarle School Board
Three of the county’s races are contested, while unchallenged incumbents Jason Buyaki and Steve Koleszar cruise to re-election.
Michael Basile, Jonno Alcaro, Dolly Joseph, Brain Vanyo, Catherine Lochner and Graham Paige
Skills that make you well-suited to be on the school board: Taking complex projects from concept to fruition; listening to all interested parties and asking clarifying questions; thoughtful deliberation; decision-making; budgeting; planning.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Commonwealth funding has remained flat since 2008 even though we have added close to 500 students during that time.
What are you reading now?Go Set a Watchman.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? If I only had one day, then I couldn’t make lasting changes. So…I’d like to buy the world a Coke! And three good meals.
Dolly Joseph
Age: 41
Occupation: Chief facilitator, Building Experiences
Skills: I’ve been an educator in the Albemarle County area for 15 years. I’m a keen observer, able to identify root problems and key issues and a creative problem-solver who can connect people and resources in novel ways.
Biggest challenge facing schools: How to create and maintain excellent education experiences when there is less money flowing to the schools and enormous pressure to measure all student outcomes in short-term quantifiable ways.
What are you reading now? Ms. Marvel, a comic book series about a Pakistani Muslim teen superhero.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Make sure I had a really good vice president in place.
Catherine Lochner
Age: 53
Occupation: Family support for children and youth with special health care and special education needs.
Skills: Mentoring parents to be advocates, educating parents of their need to make informed choices through advocacy training. Connecting parents to local resources.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Growth, seat capacity, program efficacy, maintaining high-quality teacher staff, appropriate positive interventions and differentiated teaching techniques with modern tools.
What are you reading now?Algebra for the Utterly Confused, Larry Stephens, On Their Own, Anne Ford.
If you were ruler of the world for a day: There would be a sharing of ideas, acceptance of diversity.
Samuel Miller District
Michael Basile
Age: 49
Occupation: Electronics production
Skills that make you well-suited to be on the school board: I taught student aviators for eight years, started a nonprofit to fight child abuse, am tenacious, motivated, hardworking and great at finding solutions in the community to problems we face.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Getting our school board to direct county public schools to teach our kids responsible personal finance, inspire them to build wealth for their lifetime and cut wasteful spending.
What are you reading now?Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, and Bryan Vanyo’s The American Ideology.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Take the day off, add to my website votemikebasile.com, then cook out with my kids.
Graham Paige
Age: 69
Occupation: Retired
Skills: I taught for 30 years in Virginia public schools—25 of those in Albemarle at Western Albemarle and Jack Jouett. Serving on the Long Range Planning Advisory Committee provided me with insight on budgeting issues and other needs within the system.
Biggest challenge facing schools: 1) Finding the funds for renovation and modernization of facilities. 2) Redistricting. 3) Improving/developing pre-K programs.
What are you reading now?Edward Coles, Pioneer of Freedom by Leichtle and Carveth.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would eliminate the political, racial and cultural issues that divide the peoples of the world.
Brian Vanyo
Age: 39
Occupation: Intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency
Skills: In many respects, I’m paid to be a critical thinker. I’ll bring that same disciplined, unbiased analysis to every issue before the board.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Efficiently managing the budget. In the last decade, the school’s inflation-adjusted budget has remained flat while enrollment has increased by 800. The board will face similar challenges in the future.
What are you reading now? What does an intelligence officer read? It’s classified. Actually, I read many policy and opinion articles, and I’m reading The American Ideology again as I work on an updated edition.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? After first achieving world peace, I’d throw a big party and give VIP access to everyone who votes for me for school board (wink, wink).
White Hall District
Steve Koleszar, “C.J.” Carroll Jordan Hatcher, Jason Buyaki and David Oberg
“C.J.” Carroll Jordan Hatcher
Age:64
Occupation: Educator
Skills: Administrator, educator, business owner, leader, author of 33 educational books, education policy adviser to Nevada governor, member Albemarle Long Range Planning Advisory Committee.
Biggest challenge facing schools: In 1983, the Department of Education issued a report titled “A Nation at Risk” that determined we had fallen behind other nations in terms of educating children. Three decades later, statistics show our children are hardly, if at all, better off today.
What are you reading now?The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would rid the world of terrorism and those with evil intentions, so that we have a safer world for future generations.
David Oberg
Age: 46
Occupation: Attorney
Skills: I am a team-builder and leader who possesses a combination of intelligence/strategic thinking, exceptional communication skills (including being a great listener) and a fundamental courtesy and respect for others.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Providing a top-quality education to each and every student.As a public school system, we must welcome all students, meet their needs and help them to achieve.
What are you reading now? My daughter and I are reading Lord of the Rings together, and I am reading The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Public Schools.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Resign—I am woefully unqualified for such a position.
Rivanna District
Jason W. Buyaki
Age: 42
Occupation: Model maker, sculptor, artist
Skills: I am a creative problem-solver who seeks alternate, economically viable solutions for education.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Enrollment growth coupled with lack of strong future economic growth in Albemarle.
What are you reading now?1491 by Mann, Day of Wrath by Forstchen, Envy by Schoeck.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would shame journalists who ask inane and irrelevant questions and would encourage deep, thoughtful, neutral reporting on the issues of our day, written at a high cognitive level.
Scottsville District
Steve Koleszar
Age: 68
Occupation: Retired accountant
Skills: My 20 years on the board give me a wealth of experience, which enables me to effectively lead the system to new heights.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Preparing our children for their future. The education of even 10 years ago is completely inadequate for the challenges our students will face in their futures.
What are you reading now? Mostly U.S. history.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Nothing. Top down leadership never works. A leader inspires people to be their best.
Wild card
These are the races in which we’d pretty much give it to the incumbent, only one never knows. Perhaps something extraordinary could happen and shake up the predestination.
17th Senate District
This district includes all of Fredericksburg and Orange County, much of Louisa and a weird eastern swath of Albemarle that snakes around Charlottesville to jump west of the U.S. 29 Bypass near Barracks Road. Albemarle School Board member and Democrat Ned Gallaway takes the leap to challenge Spotsylvanian Republican Bryce Reeves, who’s seeking a second term. The seat is not totally a given—it was previously held for seven terms by Dem Edd Houck, who lost to Reeves by 226 votes in 2011.
Ned Gallaway-D
Age: 41
Occupation: Sales manager, Brown Automotive Group
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: Father, former teacher, Albemarle County School Board member, doctorate in education, small business sales and management experience.
Best decision the General Assembly made in the past year: The effort to enhance mental health services in Virginia.
Worst: Constitutional amendment on charter schools grants the Board of Education authority to establish them, which is currently held by locally elected school boards.
What will you do to address gerrymandering? I support an independent, nonpartisan commission to oversee redistricting and will work to achieve the formation of such a commission.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: I will work to build on this milestone moment to continue to provide equal rights in all contexts.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: Positive impacts from allowing production of industrial hemp and authorizing medical marijuana have broad public support. Virginians should be open to discuss the social and economic impacts behind decriminalization and legalization.
Top donor: Joe Daniel.
Political hero: Abraham Lincoln.
What are you reading now?Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education by Sir Ken Robinson; Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Protect all children from violence and abuse and then provide each child with food, a home and a quality education.
Bryce Reeves-R
Age: 48
Occupation: Senator, small business owner
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: Through my experience in the Army Rangers, as a police officer and as a small business owner, I understand how to take the initiative and become a leader in a variety of situations. I have experience serving a constituency from my time as chairman of the Spotsylvania County Republican Committee, and I have a heart for service and a constant desire to continue my education and understanding of the world.
Best decision the General Assembly made in the past year: The General Assembly was able to pass a balanced budget again this year, demonstrating responsible governance and fiscal conservatism. By working effectively and efficiently, we were able to adjourn sine die one day early.
Worst: The strong partisanship that often served as a barrier to common sense legislation or even rational debate of important issues.
What will you do to address gerrymandering? I believe that natural boundaries and population densities should determine legislative districts. As a legislator, I have supported Virginia2021 initiatives. It’s up to every elected official in Virginia to work towards making redistricting a free and fair process.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: As a legislator, it is my duty and responsibility to uphold the Virginia Constitution, and the rule of law.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: As a former narcotics detective, I have seen firsthand the difficulties associated with marijuana. It would be an incredibly difficult drug to regulate, meaning that it could be potentially very dangerous for users. Options should be available for individuals needing medicine, which is why I advocated for “Right to Try” legislation, opening up medications awaiting approval by the USDA to terminally ill patients.
Top donor: GOPAC.
Political hero: John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
What are you reading now?Killing Reagan and Exceptional
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I do not have aspirations to be a dictator at any level. I believe that government works best when it is limited and representative of the people it serves.
House of Delegates 25th District
Conventional wisdom says Democratic newcomer Angela Lynn doesn’t have a chance to unseat Republican incumbent Steve Landes, who’s seeking his 11th term, in the heavily gerrymandered Augusta/ Rockingham-centric district, with a western chunk of Albemarle thrown in. But Lynn says she’s finding in her door-to-door campaigning, which focuses on new subdivisions with younger voters, that people “are not happy with career politicians and they’re not happy with not having options.” The fact that Crozet is represented by a resident of Weyers Cave is a sore point for many on this side of the mountain, and Lynn says Landes voting down an independent commission for redistricting is “not fiscally responsible.” Landes told C-VILLE a few weeks ago that ingoing door to door, “People haven’t seen [Lynn] much in the Shenandoah Valley.”
Steve Landes-R
Age: 55
Occupation: Public relations consultant
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: I am a thoughtful and principled legislator who is committed to serving my constituents to the best of my ability and always doing so while remaining faithful to the U.S. and Virginia Constitutions.
Best decision the General Assembly made in the past year: Passing a responsible, conservative budget that addressed the needs of Virginians, while ending the year with a $553 million budget surplus.
Worst: [no response]
What will you do to address gerrymandering? I would introduce legislation which would codify criteria for the General Assembly to observe in drawing districts, including respect for political boundaries, equal population, racial and ethnic fairness, contiguity,compactness and communities of interest.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: Continue to advocate for policies that respect traditional family values and work to ensure that individuals’ religious liberties are not infringed upon.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level and Virginia law reflects that fact. I would be willing to look at possible changes to the law, for use for legitimate medical purposes in Virginia, as federal requirements will allow.
Top donor: Nova Technology Council & Virginia Bankers Association.
Political hero: President Ronald Reagan.
What are you reading now?The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Ensure that all enacted legislation was well thought out, fully funded, and its potential impacts thoroughly explored before being implemented.
Angela Lynn-D
Age: Why does it matter?
Occupation: Retired
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: Master’s in higher education from William & Mary. Certificates from the Sorensen Institute, U.S. Institute of Peace and the Emergency Management Institute. I serve on the Department of Social Services Advisory Board and the Public Recreational Facility Authority, which governs easements.
Best decisionthe General Assembly made in the past year: Reforming sexual abuse and assault.
Worst: The continued decision to reject Medicaid expansion for partisan reasons.
Whatwill you do to address gerrymandering? I support an independent redistricting commission to restore faith, trust and transparency back into the process. Legislation like this was proposed to the General Assembly, but my opponent struck it down in subcommittee.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to:Continue to work to ensure that every Virginian, regardless of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation or other reason, is fully protected and represented.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: Look more into the issue and facts. If states like Colorado and Washington seem to have success in this process, the General Assembly should commission a study assessing the effects in Virginia and if the outcome seems positive, vote on the issue.
Top donor: My husband, not a PAC or special interest.
Political hero: John Kennedy.
What are you reading now?Gray Mountain by John Grisham.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would outlaw anyone being able to rule the world.
Shoo-ins
These are the races in which voters have only one option.
25th Senate District
Creigh Deeds-D
Age: 57
Occupation: Lawyer
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: I listen and am accessible to constituents, and I use the legislative process to solve problems.
Best decision the General Assembly made this year: Modernizing and streamlining the transportation funding allocation process.
Worst: Continuing to refuse to expand Medicaid.
What will you do to address gerrymandering? Since at least 2003, I have introduced bills and resolutions any number of times to put redistricting in the hands of a bipartisan commission precisely because I believe that the General Assembly has an inherent conflict of interest in drawing lines. Litigation, such as is occurring in Virginia right now, might be the answer.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: Adhere to the law and support changes to Virginia law that remove anachronisms.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: Watch carefully what is happening in both Colorado and Washington. Early reports suggest that the number of young users in Colorado has not increased, but the revenue figures from both states are disappointing. Ultimately, this is going to require change at the federal level. As long as marijuana is a Schedule I drug, banks and other financial institutions will be wary to invest in or service companies that deal in marijuana.
Top donor: Sarah H. McWilliams of Millboro, Edward Hart Rice of Vienna.
Political hero: Former governor Gerald Baliles.
What are you reading now?Three Roads to the Alamo by William C. Davis and Sycamore Row by John Grisham.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Decree that peace shall exist forever more in the Middle East.
57th District
David Toscano-D
Age: As old or as young as I feel on any particular day
Occupation: Small-town country lawyer
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: Thick skin and good heart.
Best decision the General Assembly made in the past year: Pass a budget.
Worst: Failed to address climate change.
What will you do to address gerrymandering? Continue to push for an independent redistricting commission that is charged with drawing the voting district lines and address requests for “fixes” in between the constitutionally required decennial redistricting.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: Continue to argue for nondiscrimination in employment and housing and ensure that same sex couples have equal rights.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: Cautiously review the evidence and move first to permit medical uses of marijuana.
Top donor: My wife and son.
Political hero: Abraham Lincoln.
What are you reading now?The Impossible Will Take a Little While.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Eliminate nuclear weapons and the ability to make them.
58th District
Rob Bell-R
Age: 48
Occupation: Lawyer
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: Live here, work here, have two kids in school here. My past work as a prosecutor helps me understand how bills will function if passed.
Best decision the General Assembly made in the past year: Passed campus sexual assault bills, with work and input of dozens of students, law enforcement, advocates and interested citizens. Members of our community were especially helpful in this effort.
Worst: Wish we could have overridden Governor McAuliffe’s veto of the Tebow Bill.
What will you do to address gerrymandering? Review all proposals and suggestions from my constituents regarding districts and district boundaries, both here and elsewhere.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: We will continue to review the impact of the Obergefell decision on Virginia citizens and on existing Virginia laws.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: Last year we changed laws for medical use of marijuana for Virginians with intractable epilepsy. We will continue to review changes to medical marijuana laws.
Top donor: Richard Gilliam.
Political hero: Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill.
What are you reading now? Just finished Pegasus Bridge by Stephen Ambrose.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Resign immediately. I don’t trust anyone with that much power.
59th District
Matt Fariss-R
Age: 47
Occupation: Farmer and livestock market operator
Skills that make you well-suited to be a legislator: I am a small business owner and that has taught me how to negotiate and make a win/win for everyone. I am also a seventh-generation native of my district and plan to help maintain the commonwealth as a great place to live and do business for my children and generations to come.
Best decision the General Assembly made in the past year: Defeating Medicaid expansion. That system is ridiculous and it will break this country. I believe we need to fix Medicaid before expansion.
Worst: Not defending the state constitution on same-sex marriage.
What will you do to address gerrymandering: I must say that I love my all-rural district.
Now that same-sex marriage is legal, in the General Assembly you’re going to: I plan to vote for legislation to make it official.
Many states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Virginia’s response to that trend should be: I believe this needs to be studied more. There is a huge problem with how we will regulate testing of people who will be driving, etc.
Top donor: Local small businesses.
Political hero: Ronald Reagan.
What are you reading now? Outdoor Life and Working Ranch [magazines].
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would stop the fighting in third-world countries and change the way women, children and the weak are treated in these areas. I would try to feed all of the starving children in the world and tell them about Jesus.
Albemarle Sheriff
Chip Harding-R
Age: 64
Occupation: Sheriff, Albemarle County
Skills that make you well-suited to be sheriff: Forty-five years of experience working in the criminal justice system using my social work background and communication skills—helping people while holding them accountable.
Accomplishment of which you’re proudest: Continued expansion [of the] DNA databank.
What you’d still like to accomplish: Expand databank further and see law enforcement and prosecutorial practices improved by lessons learned from DNA exonerations.
Top donor: I did not solicit any donations because no opposition and have no plans to run for public office again in four years.
Law enforcement hero: Frank Serpico, who fought corruption; Brandon Garrett and John Grisham for bringing attention to wrongful convictions and the need for criminal justice reform.
What are you reading now?True Stories of False Confessions and Fly Fishing for Permit.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Heck of a question. You cannot accomplish much in a day—guess I would order a day of complete peace worldwide and have leaders of all cultures meet at my house for dinner so we could share a drink and have a discussion about why Jesus Christ was the greatest leader that ever lived and why we all learn from his example.
White Hall District, Albemarle Board of Supervisors
Ann Huckle Mallek
Age: 65
Occupation: Natural history educator, grass-fed beef farmer and supervisor
Issue that made you want to run: In 2007, the county was changing so fast that many did not recognize the place in which they lived a few years earlier. I ran because I hoped to get a better discussion at the BOS on land use issues. I never expected to win.
Skills that make you well-suited to be supervisor: I listen very actively and carefully to constituents and to colleagues. I have strong opinions about many issues yet try to build consensus. If we dream big and are very careful, we can achieve great things.
Best decision the Board of Supervisors made in the past year: Supporting the concept that improvements needed to be made in our county effort for solid waste and also to control stormwater.
Worst: The board did not complete the light industrial land evaluation begun in 2012 during the completion of the Comprehensive Plan.
Top donor: Richard Hewitt, Leo Mallek, my spouse of 44 years, who pays the bills for the family so I may do this fascinating job.
Political hero: Emily Couric. She listened to people of all viewpoints, had a long-range optimistic view that we could always do a little better than we are today.
What are you reading now?A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden by Peter J. Hatch
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Stop the spread of wireless antennae to every nook and cranny in our urban and rural environments. There are many more…but this is why I am best at the local level, where decisions are about our neighbors, our resources, our scenery and our local future.
Little-known races
Whether you’re a farmer, interested property owner or just frankly agree that conserving natural resources in the city and county is important, soil and water conservation
districts provide a local voice for the 1935 federally created service. This year, Albemarle’s race is uncontested while three candidates are vying for two spots in Charlottesville.
Why run? A lifelong resident of Albemarle County, I have a vested interest in the conservation and preservation of all aspects of our community.
Skills that make you well-suited: As a district director since 1991, I have the institutional memory and relationships to help continue the successes of our district in providing technical help and educational programs to all citizens.
Who inspires you? My parents.
What are you reading now? National Geographic.
Lonnie M. Murray
Age: 41
Occupation: Applications programmer
Why run? I played a role in the district’s development of urban programs like Turf to Natives that incentivize homeowners to adopt practices that prevent stormwater runoff, benefit pollinators and help conserve water, and feel there is more work left to do.
Skills that make you well-suited: I’ve served many years locally working on conservation issues, including being a founding organizer of Charlottesville Earth Week and the chair of the Albemarle County Natural Heritage Committee.
Who inspires you? Lorrie Otto, who helped organize scientists to ban DDT and who started the natural landscaping movement. Also, Lady Bird Johnson who played a big role in conservation of native wildflowers and protection of wild places.
What are you reading now? I’m reading Lord of the Rings again with my oldest daughter.
Charlottesville Soil & WaterDistrict (vote for two)
William H. Lucy
Age: 76
Occupation: Professor emeritus, urban and environmental planning, University of Virginia
Why run? Water pollution is a significant problem within the Central Virginia area and an enormous problem by extension as pollution from this area and other parts of Virginia and nearby states damage the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay. I would like to work on reducing these problems.
Skills that make you well-suited: I have many years of experience advising elected officials about policy and planning problems, and I have devised methods of analyzing several problems that provide more useful information to facilitate policy choices.
Who inspires you? Sylvia Earle, deep-sea explorer.
What are you reading now? Jonathan Cannon, Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would make dramatic increases in solar, wind and geothermal energy production and distribution capacity.
Joseph Thompson
Age: 66
Occupation: Environmental and agricultural consultant
Why run? I believe that soil and water conservation districts provide a great opportunity for a locally elected board to identify the most critical natural resource issues in our area, and to obtain and direct appropriate resources to address them.
Skills that make you well-suited: Thirty-five years of professional experience in conservation and environmental restoration programs in rural and urban environments including soil and water conservation project planning, facilitating conservation easements, wildlife habitat improvement and organic crop production and marketing. I have served on natural resource boards and technical advisory committees in Virginia.
Who inspires you? Aldo Leopold, Pope Francis, Dalai Lama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonardo da Vinci
What are you reading now?The Tao of Leadership, The Lacuna, A Sand County Almanac
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Follow the leadership of Bhutan and establish Gross National Happiness index in place of Gross National Product.
Clement “Kim” Tingley
Age: 70
Occupation: Engineer and developer
Why run? I would like to assist in the development of techniques that are both effective and easily integrated into new construction to help make implementation of the Chesapeake Bay regulations better and more cost-effective.
Skills that make you well-suited: As a developer, engineer and former government official, I am uniquely suited to make a significant contribution to effective implementation of the new regulatory process.
Who inspires you? Jim Hanson—he has been sounding the alarm about climate change for years.
What are you reading now?The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Create a unified, effective, implementable world response to the causes of climate change.
Charlottesville School Board
City residents, your school board representatives are pretty much set. Incumbents Amy Laufer and Jennifer McKeever are joined by two newcomers for the four open seats on the city school board.
Adam Hastings
Age: 34
Occupation: Education administrator; dean of business, mathematics and technologies at PVCC
Skills that make you well-suited to be on the school board: Broad K-12 background; in-depth understanding of the issues of and realities facing K-12 education; effective and efficient with processes and systems related to K-12 and board leadership
Biggest challenge facing schools: Funding at a level that ensures highest quality teaching and learning for all students in all schools all of the time.
Who inspires you? My wife, my family, my colleagues, my friends; those who serve our community and country in the military and/or as police/fire/rescue workers; anyone who lends a helping hand.
What are you reading now?The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I’m not sure if I’ll ever have the opportunity to find out.
Sherry Kraft
Age: 67
Occupation: Clinical psychologist (semi-retired)
Skills that make you well-suited for the school board: Thirty-five years working with children, families and community agencies, understanding of mental health issues, handling conflict, working collaboratively, experience with my two children in the Charlottesville School System.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Achieving sustained success for all students in a diverse school population.
Who inspires you: People who are genuinely motivated by enhancing the well-being of others; artists/musicians/writers who pursue the creative process to produce works of extraordinary beauty.
What are you reading now:Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink; Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Okay—I also listened to Girl on the Train as an audiobook while driving).
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do: Start with a breakfast—the best coffee—with advisers, staff and supporters to gather ideas. End with an elegant dinner to thank these same people for their support and wish my successor all the best.
Amy Laufer
Age: 43
Occupation: Chair Charlottesville City School Board, cofounder of Women Leaders of Virginia, former middle school math and science teacher
Skills that make you well-suited to be on the school board: Great listener, team player, enjoy reading reports and analyzing information and have knowledge of schools.
Biggest challenge facing schools: Maintaining and increasing student achievement and engagement at all levels.
Who inspires you? The teachers, staff and students of our school division.
What are you reading now?Starting & Building a Non-Profit, Helping Children Learn and The Astronauts Wives Club.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? I would declare a truce in all regions of the world. I would ask all families to reunite with their loved ones and grant everyone enough food to sustain themselves for at least a year.
Jennifer L. McKeever
Age: 43
Occupation: Attorney/mother
Skills that make you well-suited to be on the school board: Leadership—determination to use a fair/transparent process for decisions and willingness to make difficult decisions. Problem solving—look for solutions that balance the myriad of challenges/concerns.
Biggest challenge facing schools: The decrease in literacy and math achievement when transitioning from one school to another school (fourth to fifth grade, sixth to seventh grade and eighth to ninth grade).
Who inspires you? I am inspired by stories of strength and grace.
What are you reading now? Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and listening to Brene Brown’s Rising Strong.
If you were ruler of the world for a day, what would you do? Pray for wisdom and guidance.
Election 2015 facts
Election Day: Tuesday, November 3
Polls open: 6am to 7pm
What to bring: A photo ID
Last day to register: October 13
Number of registered voters in Albemarle County: 71,572
Turnout in 2014: 46 percent
Number of registered voters in Charlottesville: 32,122
Turnout in 2014: 33 percent
–Lisa Provence and Samantha Baars, Photography Courtesy of Subjects
A little more than a hundred years ago, in the rural foothills of Nelson County, an ambitious band of five brothers—Will, Doc, Dick, Sam and Massie—were devoting themselves to the hard, prefatory dirty work of chasing a dream. Specifically: The men were spending their mornings and afternoons scouring the forest, field and countryside trapping rabbits. Droves of them. The skins of which they stockpiled, intent on, once the cache was big enough, selling to the local trading outpost for a respectable sum of cash.
Their plan?
Use these hard-earned funds to purchase the seeds, equipment and livestock necessary to transform the Piney River homestead their grandfather, Massie “Big John” Saunders, had settled along with his wife, Sallie, in 1833 into a working agricultural powerhouse. Of course, like many would-be, turn-of-the-century entrepreneurs bent on effecting a rags-to-riches metamorphosis, when the brothers finally cut the red ribbon on the 800-acre farm, they were well aware the odds were stacked against them. However, having as a role model a man who built the family cabin from the timber he cut, planed and cured himself, and having from day one collectively pitched in to work the land that cabin rested upon for their sustenance, a do-or-die self-reliance was the only philosophy these men knew. As such, the brothers were confident they possessed the grit and determination needed to ensure their business’ success.
More than a century later, the brothers’ dream of a prosperous future rooted in their grandfather’s beloved Piney Creek acreage has proved itself more than viable—it has become, in fact, robustly realized. Having weathered umpteen droughts, two world wars, a natural disaster (1969’s Hurricane Camille), various economic downturns, the ever-increasing mega-corporatization of agriculture and slews of other less world-crushing obstacles, under the innovative watch of second-generation CEO Paul Saunders (son of original brother Sam), Saunders Brothers Inc. remains alive and thriving, operating on a scale well beyond anything its founders could have imagined. Alongside Paul labors a crew of blood relatives ranging from four of his own seven sons, their wives, their children, various cousins, second cousins and even a couple of descendants of original (read, hailing from way back in 1915) family friends. Together, they work to grow, care for and sell approximately 5,000 bushels of apples, 20,000 bushels of peaches (much of which is designated as specialty varieties to be sold to local Virginia markets, featuring a toggled harvest season from mid-June to mid-September) and many other complementary nursery products (in the form of more than 1,000 types of plants, divided into different tiers and products including azalea, holly, mums, rhododendrons, geraniums, pansies, etc.), including many thousand boxwoods.
Although it’s obvious a century’s worth of shifting markets, acquisitions and technological innovations have led to overhauls of the farm’s day-to-day methodologies and business strategies, the heart of the operation—its company culture and moral integrity—remains completely intact.
“When I was growing up, my daddy always advised me, ‘Be careful. Try to make a good name for yourself. Mind your reputation!’” says 82-year-old Paul Saunders. “He was as honest a man as I have ever known, and he was trying to impress upon me to be the same. He’d tell me: ‘Son, there is only one thing that you will take with you when you leave this world—your name.’”
Within the first few minutes of a chat with Paul Saunders, it is clear the man regards this philosophy of honor and integrity—giving folks the proverbial fair shake—as comprising the moral centerpiece of the Saunders Brothers operation.
“Both my daddy and my uncles always told me to give people the full measure,” says Paul. “Originally, the brothers were dealing with wholesalers and brokers who were members of the community, not to mention the local stores, so it was important they run their business based on the ideal of doing unto others what you’d have them do unto you.”
In other words, customers were in no way, shape or form to be considered in terms of the statistically convenient, but humanistically degrading language of consumerism. Instead, they were to be treated as individuals. As friends. Neighbors. Family.
Growing a business
At 82, Paul Sanders, son of original brother Sam, serves as CEO and patriarch of the Saunders Brothers farm. The farm’s harvest season from mid-June to mid-September produces 5,000 bushels of apples and 20,000 bushels of peaches, along with more than 1,000 varieties of plants. Photo: 621 Studios
“[The original brothers] always insisted that no matter what kind of product you’re selling, you have to make sure what your customers are buying is of the best quality,” says Paul. “They told me to always be strictly straight and honest, the way I would with my own family. They impressed that upon me. And I believe that’s the way a business should be run. And I also believe that putting this notion into practice [has] led to our business’ success and its longevity as well.”
Indeed, for Saunders Brothers Inc., these sentiments have become more than an implied employee guideline or tacitly agreed upon code of conduct. To get a feel for how serious Paul and company takes the philosophy—that is, to see how it informs and has become the keystone of an entire company culture—a quick perusal of the company’s website yields the following four bullet points, plucked directly from the mission statement:
• Honesty and truthfulness are foundational to our business.
• Every team member is a part of the Saunders Brothers Family.
• To have a positive impact on our employees, customers, suppliers, community and environment.
• To be a premier supplier of superb-quality plant material for garden centers.
Considering the above, when it comes to understanding the development and lasting success of a company that has become one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s major suppliers of produce and nursery products (an operation that employs more than 100 workers), the list’s key point is the capitalized proper noun: Family.
Because Saunders Brothers began on such a small scale, serving, as Paul recollects, the immediate geographic community with the brothers functioning as participants and members thereof, interacting with customers on anything other than a first-name basis would have seemed ludicrous. Furthermore, in those originating times, when additional labor was needed that assistance was A) typically only seasonally necessary, and B) often enough provided by the teenaged sons of said community. Thus, with these traditional values and attitudes firmly entrenched, even as the company grew and began to supply an ever-expanding number of local, then state, then tri-state, then full-on East Coast-wide markets with wholesale produce/nursery products and in the process came to employ more and more seasonal (and increasingly migrant) workers, the brothers never considered adapting a sense of their company as something other than a “family” organization. By this rationale, it was natural to extend this concept to include the new relationships with new workers and business partners.
Nowhere is this ideological framework—not to mention the uncanny penchant for adapting to the demands of changing times—more visible than the very-much-against-the-industry-grain tract Saunders Brothers took when dealing with the increasingly intensive labor demands of its fruit orchards.
“For decades upon decades, the peach harvest at Saunders Brothers was circled on many local calendars,” wrote former The News & Advance columnist Darrel Laurant in a piece detailing the work history of Nelson County. “Whole families turned out with their work clothes on, often three generations’ worth… They depended on the [Saunders Brothers] harvest to provide the supplemental income that would see them through the year.”
Adapting to change
Bennett Saunders, who manages the company’s field production, replaced the overhead sprinklers in the orchard with underground drip lines, reducing, by his estimate, the farm;s water consumption by upward of 75 percent. Photo: 621 Studios
In the late ’70s, an altered work climate—i.e. local teenagers developing a preference for air-conditioned jobs over intensive physical exertion amid the indiscriminate summer heat—threatened to leave a whole season’s worth of peaches unpicked.
Confronted by imminent catastrophe, for the first time in more than 50 years, the Saunders family was forced to consider doing what pretty much all the other larger-scale farms had already done: Outsource labor to migrant workers. But Saunders Brothers decided that, if it was going to make the leap, it was going to do so with the same integrity it’d always practiced.
Initially, the brothers used imported labor in the traditional manner—hiring transient crews that arrived for the harvest, took care of business, then departed in a mass exodus seeking the next orchard or field. However, it didn’t take long for Paul and his sons to recognize the extent of the newcomers’ work ethic. After a bit of discussion, they collectively decided to gamble on the notion that, if they treated these workers well and provided them with steady work and the opportunity for advancement, they might convince some of the workers to become regular fixtures.
“We paid them three dollars an hour over what any of the other farms were willing to pay,” Paul says. “Then we went around the county and fixed up some houses for them to live in, with everything they needed. If these guys were going to work for us, they were going to become a part of our family. We were looking to build lasting relationships.”
Along these lines, Tatum Saunders, Paul’s wife, began encouraging the workers to bring their families along with them, going so far as to set up childcare services for the kids, help build soccer fields for recreation, organize multiple weekly potluck dinners and provide transportation to church services and other area events.
“We started trying to really encourage them to sign on for nine-month contracts a year in advance,” says Paul. “We offered and encouraged opportunities for advancement. Then we expanded our nursery and boxwood operations, which allowed us to offer many of them year-round work.”
Unlike other ag businesses built on well-documented models of exploitation, Saunders Brothers sought to provide its workers with the opportunity to pursue their own version of the American Dream the company itself was founded upon.
“As a result,” says Paul, “we’ve been able to create loyal relationships based upon trust. At this point, most all of our workers have been with us for over 15 years, a few for nearly 30. Some have become naturalized citizens, bought houses nearby and took on a greater responsibility in the company. I feel confident in saying our employees are the most reliable in the business.”
And when it comes to withstanding the sometimes inimical twists and turns of a bad growing season, Saunders is quick to point out that team mentality can be the deciding factor between charting in the black or in the red.
Another aspect of how this family-first initiative has worked to give the company a leg up on the industry has to do with a knack for adaptive innovation, which seems to derive from a broad diversity of interests among the farm’s management. From the get-go, Paul’s seven boys were all included in the daily doings of the farm, but it was their father’s (himself a graduate and avid supporter of Virginia Tech) insistence on the pursuit of a higher education that led each of the four eventual partners to develop a particular specialty and, in turn, bring that specialty back home to the farm.
Jim Saunders runs the wholesale nursery, orchard and farm market with his father, Paul, and three of his brothers. Photo: 621 Studios
“My wife, Lyn, and I met while working in a nursery in Cairo, Georgia,” says Tom Saunders, head of the farm’s container nursery. “I was an intern in horticulture from Virginia Tech and she was a Clemson horticulture graduate working as the propagation manager.”
Once the couple decided to tie the knot and began looking for somewhere they could work side by side while putting their cutting-edge agricultural know-how to the test, returning to Piney River was an obvious choice.
“We went to work incorporating engineering advances like solenoid valves, cell-phone-activated irrigation controllers and mechanized conveying systems,” Tom says. “Additionally, we implemented encapsulated fertilizers to feed our product more predictably and efficiently.”
When another third-generation Saunders brother, Bennett, began managing field production, he replaced the overhead sprinkler units in the company’s orchards with underground drip lines, reducing, by his estimation, the farm’s water consumption by upward of 75 percent.
But this tendency toward innovation was nothing new.
Early on in the farm’s operation, with the stock market headed toward a crash and the apple, cattle and vegetable markets floundering, one of the original brothers heard a tale of a bushel of peaches selling for a dollar (at that time a whopping sum). Without hesitation, the five brothers took action, shifting their operations toward peaches. While pickings remained thin for quite some time, once the peaches (of the then-popular variety Elberta) began coming in, the farm was bolstered to new life.
When Paul officially took the helm in 1981, the orchard was expanded to encompass more than 150 acres planted with an ever-increasing diversity—presently including 30 varieties of peaches, 13 types of apples and Asian pears as well. Additionally, Paul pursued his interest of boxwood cultivation, laying the foundation for what would become one of the largest landscaping nursery operations in the Mid-Atlantic, supplying wholesalers and private clients (a list that includes the Kennedy administration’s White House) with many thousand individual plants each year. Through copious research and many trips abroad seeking new strains, Paul earned a reputation as one of the world’s foremost boxwood experts, founding the National Boxwood Trials, an organization dedicated to the research and propagation of superior specimens and horticultural expertise.
With a century’s worth of surfing the shifting agricultural tides under its belt, the present Saunders Brothers crew doesn’t see itself going anywhere. In fact, everyone is quite unanimous in their expectation: The business will continue so long as they keep their values in mind and folks keep needing to eat.
Market share
For more information about the history of the Saunders Brothers family farm, visit www.saunders brothers.com, drop by the Farm Market at 2717 Tye Brook Highway, Piney River, or pick up a copy of Paul Saunders’ memoir of life in Piney River, Down on the Farm (available online).
What does it take to be a true local? We think a commenter on Facebook said it best: “The truly quintessential Charlottesville experience isn’t actually available to tourists. It’s having lived here long enough that you can’t go anywhere without running into someone you know, yet still feeling like you live in a decently sized city.” Of course, if you’ve just moved here and want to fit in, that ain’t gonna help ya much. So, in addition to a few (real, tangible) classic Charlottesville experiences, we’ve compiled the quickest ways to earn your Charlottesville cred, some Charlottesville life hacks and, if you’ve been here long enough, ways to gauge your localness. You know what they say: Wherever you go, there you are. Might as well try to fit in.
Earn your Charlottesville cred
Let’s say you’ve just moved to town.
What do you need to know? Where do you need to eat? What should you experience to make like a true local? We’ve got some ideas.
Take your kid to peewee soccer
If you’re the parent of a 4- or 5-year-old, odds are good that you—along with hundreds of your friends and neighbors—will find yourself at Darden Towe Park or Crozet Elementary School on fall and spring Saturday mornings. Yep, we’re talking Hot Shots, the program that introduces wee ones, in their oversized yellow, green, red, purple or teal SOCA jerseys, to the sport of soccer. There are no tryouts, nobody keeps score, and the teams are formed around schools and neighborhoods so friends can play together. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Take in a polo match
Photo: Molly Angevine
Forget what you think you know about polo matches—wide-brimmed hats, sundresses and bow ties belong in Pretty Woman, not at King Family Vineyards, where every Sunday from Memorial Day through mid-October you can watch the Roseland Polo Club duke it out on the 300-yard field while wearing your weekend casuals.
Don’t show up in the afternoon though, newbie. Gather your friends early and park the car tailgate style around the field (pop-up tents encouraged). Thirsty? Flag down the golf cart for a glass of King Family wine to knock off the morning chill. Just don’t get too sloshed. You’ll have to stomp the divots at half-time, à la Ms. Roberts.
Eat at the hot spots
The best way to sink your teeth into a new place? Dine at the oldest, most popular, most talked about and highest praised haunts. Here are four you should know about immediately.
Bodo’s Bagels
It seems counterintuitive to order a Caesar salad at a bagel joint, but what can we say? It’s a universal favorite. Start there, then experiment with bagel sandwiches until you find your personal favorite combination.
Bamboo House
Though somewhat David Lynchian in its décor (think taxidermied foxes and geese in a windowless room), this 29N mainstay produces a perfectly decent Chinese meal—delivered on a rolling cart, even if you only ordered one plate of food—and plenty of fodder for your out-of-town relatives.
The Spudnut Shop
Made from potato flour (get it?), these sticky sweet treats are an early-morning staple. And we do mean early—the Avon Street shop opens at 6am and you’d better believe there’s often a line out the door.
Timberlake’s Drug Store
Make your way through the old-school drugstore up front and take a seat at the back counter. Order a ham salad sandwich and an egg cream and don’t forget to tip the nice ladies behind the counter.
Tube down the James
Photo: Tom Daly
Sure, the scenery on the James River, which meanders through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is something to behold. But views take a backseat to the party once you’ve rented your tube (consider getting one for your cooler too!) at Scottsville’s James River Reeling & Rafting or James River Runners. After you’ve been shuttled to the river, it’s time to, ahem, go with the flow—and enjoy a long, lazy float down the barely moving river with your nearest and dearest (and funnest). Forget your troubles, come on get happy. Just don’t forget the sunscreen.
Attend Foxfield
Photo: Aaron Farrington
You can’t properly claim your Charlottesville cred without having experienced the festive splendor of the Foxfield Races. Every fall and spring, Foxfield patrons—all dressed in their best Southern prep attire—are regaled with equine entertainment with the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop. Dozens of plots are awash in a multitude of bow ties, floppy hats, Lilly Pulitzer dresses, cold beverages, corn hole and infectious laughter (usually brought on by said cold beverages). Heck, if you’re lucky you might even glimpse a horse race or two.
Go to a UVA football game
Nothing generates quite the same euphoric feeling of camaraderie as being a drop in a sea of orange on game day at Scott Stadium. Every ’Hoo down in Hooville gathers after a morning of tailgating in the best of spirits, greeted by the Cavalier Marching Band, and eager to watch Virginia take on whatever team dares step foot on Wahoo soil. Whether you come decked out in blue and orange spirit gear or don “pearls for girls and ties for guys,” the feverish energy will have you singing “The Good Old Song” loud and proud…after every single touchdown scored.
Know your Brad Savage facts
Photo: Brianna LaRocco
Brad Savage was standing in the control room when 106.1 The Corner launched its initial signal in 2006. Nine years later, he’s helped shape the station’s vision and become the most recognizable voice in local radio (earning high marks in C-VILLE’s annual Best of C-VILLE readers poll as “Best local radio personality”).
Now he’s headed for a bigger market, taking the reins as program director at 91.3 The Summit in Akron, Ohio, but the impression he’s leaving on Charlottesville will be felt long after he’s gone. You’d do well to know a few more things about him.
What will you miss the most about Charlottesville?
Charlottesville greatly outperforms its size and population. The music and touring bands the city receives—amazing! Plus all the arts and festivals and the foodie scene. This is a great town.
What is your least favorite thing about Charlottesville?
Traffic! In the afternoons especially. We’ve outgrown our land area and road system. The city has gotten a lot bigger than its days decades ago.
What are some of your favorite local bands?
So many great local acts around here. This is another space where Charlottesville has more than you would think. Shout-out to Erin & The Wildfire, Sally Rose Band, Lord Nelson, Born Crooked, Astronomers and so many others!
If you could pick any musical genre to describe yourself, what would it be?
I like to think I am “pre-1991 UK indie pop”—the pre-Nirvana/grunge modern rock sound.
What song will remind you of Charlottesville?
I have two. One is the new Dawes song, “All Your Favorite Bands,” because the lyrics mention Charlottesville in the first verse. Second is Michael Franti & Spearhead’s “Say Hey (I Love You),” which is basically the biggest hit song in the history of 106.1 The Corner.
Attend the naturalization ceremony
Photo: Jack Looney
Tracey Ullman might have said it best during her speech at the 2010 Monticello naturalization ceremony. She told the crowd gathered on Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop estate that steamy Independence Day that she became an American citizen in 2006 because “I realized how much I loved this country.” And she wanted to vote. Turns out she’s not the only one.
Since 1963, thousands of people from all over the world have taken the oath of citizenship at Mr. Jefferson’s house—and, like Ullman, they each have a story to tell about how they got here. “I wish every American could hear and listen to these new citizens, what it means to them to be a citizen of the United States of America,” Governor Terry McAuliffe said last July.
Do yourself a favor and listen to the guv: Get out of bed early next July 4 and head up the mountain to plant yourself on one of the folding chairs set up on Monticello’s west lawn, where past keynote speakers have included architect I.M. Pei, former President George W. Bush and homegrown musician Dave Matthews. You won’t regret showing up for this unique, moving reminder of what it means to be an American. We swear.
Hike Old Rag
In Bossypants, Tina Fey’s 2011 memoir, the award-winning actress-comedienne sums up her time as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in a chapter titled “Climbing Old Rag Mountain.” Things didn’t go well for Fey when she attempted to scale the mountain, probably because she made the trek at night, with an asshat of a bro she called Handsome Robert Wuhl: “The first leg of our journey was the walk from the parking lot to the beginning of the actual trail,” she writes. “By the time we got to the foot of the mountain, I was already nauseous from overexertion and trying to hide it.” Come back, Tina! You’re older, wiser and fitter, which means you will have no trouble doing the entire nine-mile loop—during the day (arrive early to beat the crowds). And when you’ve finally made it up Old Rag’s granite staircase, we’re certain you’ll have only good things to say after taking in the idyllic view from the summit.
Download the C-VILLE app
Part of being a Charlottesville resident means staying in the know. Download the C-VILLE app to your Android or iPhone to gain mobile access to the latest headlines, Best of C-VILLE results and info on more than 400 places to eat in our area.
Charlottesville life hacks
No matter how long you’ve been here, there are a few tricks of the trade every local should know.
How to: Make a quick trip to Whole Foods
The quickest way to get in and out of Whole Foods in under 10 minutes? Stay focused, don’t get distracted by anything you don’t need (asparagus water, we’re talkin’ to you) and, above all, go early. At 7am, when the store opens, it’s a desert oasis of eco-minded foodstuffs. More of a night owl? The hour before it closes (9-10pm) is a good second choice.
How to: Get the cheapest gas
Running on empty where both your wallet and tank are concerned? You’ll find the cheapest gas at the WilcoHess stations (there’s one on Richmond Road and two on Seminole Trail), but the Kangaroo Express (at 1099 Rio Rd.) and Kroger, Costco and Sam’s Club (if you’re a member) all boast budget fuel, too.
How to: Find parking downtown
With dozens of top-notch and varying eateries, live music on any given evening and a wealth of unadulterated local culture, there are no lack of reasons to head downtown for business or pleasure. But there does remain one big reason not to: the dreaded (and seemingly impossible) task of finding a spot to leave the car. The most obvious options are the two parking garages: one on Water Street and one on Market Street. This is the best choice for ventures that take less than two hours, as more than 100 businesses downtown validate parking. After 6pm, the lesser-known free locations are street parking on Water Street, Garrett Street and a few spaces off East Jefferson and High streets, if you don’t mind walking a few blocks.
How to: Get in to a sold-out show
Photo: Jack Looney
For those lucky souls working or volunteering at (or cohabitating with someone who works for) one of the area’s entertainment biz outposts, getting a ticket to the hottest show may seem like an inborn right. The common concertgoer, however, still needs a miracle, unless she has the diligence to try these tactics recommended by unnamed industry insiders.
1. Presale/onsale: Tickets are held for both of these sales to the public. Camping out for tickets now means sitting at your desk and clicking repeatedly, while dialing on the phone and getting all your relatives to do the same.
2. Radio station: While you are clicking and refreshing and dialing, you should also be keeping an ear on radio giveaways and checking station websites. There are rules about how many times people can win—and only so many people who like your band. Do the math.
3. Sad face: If, even as a superfan, you find yourself ticketless on show night and are hanging around the venue, giving the sad face to every person in your vicinity will sometimes pay dividends. Be sure to wear a concert tee and have cash in hand.
4. Scalper: Scalpers suck, and are part of the reason you don’t have a ticket, so don’t use them.
You know you’re a local if…
Remember Krishna’s Kitchen? The Mineshaft? The Ridge Drive-in? If you answered yes, you’re a true local. Here are some other ways to measure whether you’re a townie.
…you correct bad pronunciations
When you first move to the area, you learn quickly that Charlottesville has its own language for a lot of things (or you don’t and people constantly correct you). First years not freshmen, Grounds not campus, final exercises not graduation at UVA—those only scratch the surface of our city’s unique lingo. See if you’ve been saying it wrong all along.
Rivanna River (Rye-vanna): The river, a tributary to the James River, was originally named after Queen Anne of England.
Monticello (Mon-ti-CHELLO): Thomas Jefferson first referred to his home as Monticello in his garden book in 1767. The word means “hillock” or “little mountain” in Italian.
Rio Road (Rye-oh): Some historians say the name comes from the fact that railroad stop No. 10 was near the road (written R.10).
Other names to know: Staunton (Stanten), Crozet (Kroh-ZAY), JPA (Jefferson Park Avenue), CHO (Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport).
…you rode the Holly Trolley
Photo: File photo
Beehive hairdos, Mac PowerBooks—some things are better left in the past. But the Holly Trolley is not one of them. A charming addition to Charlottesville’s holiday scene, the trolley took passengers through some of the most fantastically decorated neighborhoods in Charlottesville. Come late December, you’d get your tickets early and if you couldn’t hop aboard, you’d drive your car behind it.
When the city stopped running the trolley in 2009, Gingerbread Express bus rides took its place. Staff at the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville say the Gingerbread Express is in the works for this winter, but we know one thing, regardless of the next iteration: It’ll never be the same.
…you’ve taken a selfie with Dave
Photo: Courtesy subjects
So you’ve spotted Dave Matthews downtown. What do you do? If you’re a true local, you ask him for a pic. After all, he puts his pants on one leg at a time, too. These 14 folks were gutsy enough to nab a snap with our local star.
…you went to the original Albemarle County Fair
Once upon a time there was an Albemarle County Fair that was not billed as a three-day agricultural celebration that “emphasizes the deep human, natural and agricultural resources of Central Virginia.” It was held on Plank Road in North Garden, and every August white tents went up, and I took a ride on a big ol’ Ferris wheel with a view of, well, everything. If I was feeling especially brave, I’d go for a spin on the Hounddog, which tossed me all over the place while sitting face-to-face with my husband inside a cylinder mounted to a spinning carousel that whipped ’round and ’round. Then I’d head for the Cannonball, where a dude with homemade tats strapped me in for a ride 100 feet up a pole, only to drop me a few seconds later. It was a years-long love affair with fear (and deep-fried batter) that ended when the owners of Bundoran Farm canceled the fair’s $1-a-year lease and it—sans Hounddog—moved to the sedate grounds of Ash Lawn-Highland.
…you’re still asking the Film Fest theme
Ask locals about their favorite arts festival and many tell you that it’s the Virginia Film Festival—they may even add a personal story about running into Jimmy Stewart, Jean Stapleton, Oliver Stone or Will Forte on the Downtown Mall.
And at least once during the lead-up to the annual fall event, a longtime resident will ask, “What’s the theme of the festival this year?”
Rewind to the inaugural days of the fest when the coordinators chose a different programming theme ranging from “Music & the Movies” to “Wild Spaces, Endangered Places” to “Aliens,” and ending in 2009 with the theme of “Funny Business” after the hiring of festival director Jody Kielbasa (now also the UVA vice provost for the arts). Kielbasa came to town with extensive Hollywood connections, raising the international profile and cachet of the fest, along with increasing attendance each year since his arrival and putting C’ville on a map for the stars.
This year’s lineup, sans theme, will be announced on September 29.
…you can point out John Grisham
Photo: Jack Looney
Dave Matthews may be our most recognizable local star, but relative anonymity is what makes a sighting of John Grisham—the bestselling author who keeps an office on the Downtown Mall—earn you even more cachet.
“Have you ever read The Firm?” you’ll ask of out-of-towners over a plate of grilled banana bread at Bizou. “That’s the guy who wrote it.” Or maybe you’ll see him overtipping a busker (he’s rumored to have once dropped $100 into a performer’s bucket) and you can say, “Oh, he does that all the time.”
…you reject the name “Midtown”
Not long ago a friend suggested I meet her for lunch in Midtown. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I can’t go to New York on Wednesday.” Long pause, followed by, “Blue Moon Diner isn’t in Manhattan.” And that’s how I learned the stretch of Main Street that runs from downtown to UVA—a section of Charlottes-ville I’ve called West Main for more than two decades—is now referred to as Midtown. Turns out this Midtown has a Facebook page, a business association and an annual street fair. Whatevs—it’s all West Main to me.
…you remember movies before Stonefield
Photo: Ed Roseberry
I enjoy watching Daniel Craig on an IMAX screen as much as the next girl. And stadium seating? Bring it. But I also really enjoyed living in a city that had more than one place to take in a movie. Okay, maybe the 29 North Regal and Carmike had both seen better days (shortly before the Regal closed, a chunk of ceiling came crashing down on the seats next to me and they didn’t even stop the film), but my daughters and I saw many a Pixar movie at those two theaters. Then there was the University Theatre, Greenbrier and the Jefferson, where, for a couple bucks, I caught some terrific second-run features. But I think I miss Vinegar Hill and the downtown Regal most of all. Instead of staring at my iPhone while waiting in line to buy popcorn, I’d discuss Beasts of the Southern Wild, A Separation or The September Issue with complete strangers who were as passionate about movies as I. Remember when Charlottesville was flush with independent movies, foreign films and documentaries? Hurry up and open already, Violet Crown!
…you have a ticket stub from Satellite Ballroom
R&B act Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings miss it. Promoter Danny Shea misses it.
And if you’re over a certain age and have a special place where you keep concert mementos known as ticket stubs, you probably miss the Satellite Ballroom, too.
If you are a true fan, you possess a handmade, screenprinted ticket stub. “As a passionate upstart trying to make a splash, tickets for most shows over the first year or so were screenprinted in my garage,” says Shea, who ran the venue since its inception.
The Ballroom, as it came to be known, kicked off in a space renovated by Plan 9 records on the UVA Corner in April 2004 with a live scoring of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and operated through May 2008 when the lease was lost to the CVS drugstore chain. The venue held numerous first appearances, as well as memorable sets by indie favorites.
“There were many real fun nights there,” says Shea. “Peaches with Quintron & Miss Pussycat, Caribou, !!!, Mogwai, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo (storyteller show) with Kurt Wagner, Girl Talk, Boris, Acid Mothers Temple, Battles and, of course, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. There were many more.“
Shea (now a booker for Starr Hill Presents) was known for multitasking at the venue, from booking the bands to running the door and even providing distractions between sets, as depicted in one of his favorite memories.
“Arm wrestling David Yow [legendary Jesus Lizard frontman, artist, actor and personal hero] on the floor of the dressing room/storage closet and winning,” says Shea. “That was a truly magical moment for me and would have been (probably more) magical had I lost.” And to Shea, we say, “Touché!”
–Samantha Baars, Sherry Brown, Tami Keaveny, Jessica Luck, Susan Sorensen and Caite White
Mr. Pride of America, Jason Elliott, says that dating in Charlottesville can be tricky, but it’s “versatile” when it comes to the dating pool. Photo: Jen Fariello
For those in the LGBTQ+ community, there are still challenges ahead. Legally, Virginia law doesn’t prohibit the discrimination of gay people in areas of housing or employment. Gay seniors are ducking back into the closet as they enter conservative nursing care. Homosexual (and pansexual and gender queer and transgender…) teens still feel ashamed to be themselves, even in our changing times. In this issue, we explore what it’s like to be gay in our area—from teenagers and minorities to senior citizens and those seeking a safe haven to practice their faith. Most of the people we spoke with agree there’s a lot of work left to do, but the progress is undeniable. We profiled a same-sex couple who waited a long time to get the state’s stamp of approval, who married after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in October 2014 that would have reinstated the ban on same-sex marriage. Their message —and the message of so many others—is clear: No matter the struggles still to overcome, #lovewins.
Proud to party
Join the LGBTQ+ community Saturday, September 19 at Lee Park for the fourth annual Pride Festival. From 11am to 6pm, take in live music (rock, hip-hop, singer-songwriters, drums), attend an interfaith ceremony or participate in a Buddhist prayer and check out more than 70 local vendors’ giveaways and activities. There’s even a children’s play area with a book nook from Barnes & Noble, a bouncy castle, free face painting, balloons and buttons. Can’t get there? There’s a free (limo!) shuttle—so no excuses. Visit cvillepride.org for more information about the festivaland other opportunities to let your rainbow flag fly throughout the weekend.
Have we met?
Despite its small-town feel, Charlottesville’s dating scene is versatile
Gay, straight, man, woman, trans, what have you—putting yourself out there and intentionally sitting at a bar with a stranger can be hard and, frankly, exhausting. We sat down with Mr. Pride of America Jason Elliott, who happens to live here in town, and picked his brain about his perspective on dating in Charlottesville as a gay man.
Elliott, a health counselor at the Virginia Department of Health and Pride of America pageant winner, has his share of story-worthy dating experiences just like the rest of us, like the guy who pulled a single orange rose out of his shirtsleeve at dinner and traveled across the state to retrieve a bouquet of bacon roses for Elliott for Valentine’s Day.
“Dating in Charlottesville can be as uptight and stressful as you want it to be, or as relaxed and carefree as you want it to be,” says Elliott.
He describes the Charlottesville area dating pool as “versatile,” and notes that whether you’re into the grungy look, outdoorsy girls or wine-wafting guys in bow ties, chances are you can find your people in this town.
Despite its versatility, though, Charlottesville is a small town. Everybody knows everybody, and as a single person looking for someone to date, the one degree of separation between everyone is definitely a double-edged sword. Elliott isn’t on Tinder or Grindr (anymore), but he says if he were, he would expect to constantly swipe through familiar faces—dated that guy, know someone who slept with him, work across the hall from this one, etc.
On the other hand, the ever-expanding web of who knows whom in this town means that friends and colleagues can vouch for each other and make introductions that might not happen otherwise.
“It is a small community, so people know people. All the time, people say, ‘Hey, you should meet so-and-so.’ ‘I think you would like so-and-so,’” he says. “It’s definitely kind of a referral basis around here.”
And that’s part of why, for him, meeting in person is more preferable than chatting someone up on a screen.
“I put a lot of stock in getting to know someone face-to-face,” he says. “I think there’s a lot to be said about the nonverbal communication cues and what someone’s aura is.”
And, speaking of Elliott’s dating life, you can learn a little more about it in an upcoming BBC documentary, which followed him going out on a date with a trans woman.
Meet market
So where exactly can you meet fellow eligible LGBTQ+ singles in this town? We’ve got a few suggestions for you.
Gay bars/clubs
Escafe is the obvious one on this list, but Impulse Gay Social Club has also been making a name for itself. A nonprofit social club located on Emmet Street, Impulse holds special events like burlesque and drag shows, and of course a dance floor and liquor license.
Meetups
Like online dating but for groups, meetup.com will match you with other people in the area who have similar interests. For example, the CVille Lesbian Outdoor Group, currently 46 members strong and regularly active.
Pride Festival
This might go without saying in the annual Pride Issue, but the Saturday, September 19 festival will be a prime spot for meeting people of similar interests. Whether it’s someone manning the Derby Dames booth or the cute stranger in the grass next to you watching the performances, you never know whom you’ll meet—and extra points if she has a rainbow butterfly painted on her face.
Dating apps
Unless you’ve been living (and dating) under a rock, you’re probably already familiar with OkCupid, Tinder and Grindr. But what about the apps specifically for queer women, like HER and Dattch? Or Hornet, which allows you to have both public and private photos on your profile? Or u2nite, the quick-to-use app that suggests safe, neutral meeting places for you and your matches? Don’t rule out the whole world of online dating based on a few (okay, several) horror stories you may have heard.
“Somewhere you never go”
Jason Elliott’s dating advice is to go somewhere completely new. Force yourself to sit down at a bar where you’re not a regular and won’t be tempted to gravitate toward the people you already know.
Prime Timers Central Virginia
This private membership organization allows “mature” gay and bisexual men to get together for social events and general support. Shared interest groups within the organization include antiques, gardening, bowling, cooking and sports.
Double minority
Rapper Tasia White (Lady Taij) will perform at the Charlottesville Pride Festival on Saturday, September 19. Photo: Ron Paris
Being gay and black is twice the challenge
The LGBTQ+ community in Charlottesville has become increasingly more vocal and active over the past several years. And as a city with a complicated African-American history, there’s a lot to discuss when it comes to race and discrimination here. But what about where those two minority communities overlap?
“There’s not a large LGBTQ+ minority community here,” says Albemarle High School teacher and youth mentor Wes Bellamy. “And whenever you don’t have an affinity group, other individuals to relate to and identify with, that makes it difficult.”
Being gay is still pretty taboo in some African-American communities, Bellamy says, and he wonders how many racial minorities remain in the closet for that reason. So much of it stems from cultural upbringing, he says, but he can’t help getting frustrated when he encounters homophobia among a minority group that is still battling for its own civil rights in a lot of ways.
“How can you be African-American, with the history we have in this country, the way we were mistreated and still are mistreated, and still look at somebody else who’s different and say they don’t deserve the same rights?” asks Bellamy. “After all we’ve been through being different from the majority.”
According to the Office of Human Rights Community Outreach Specialist Charlene Green, who’s worked in the fields of diversity coordination and human rights for 20 years, it’s crucial to remember where everyone at the table is coming from.
“I have a deep respect for where people come from religiously, and I think that’s really important to consider,” Green says. “I try to engage people about different aspects of diversity, and people’s belief systems and values affect how they make sense of things. To pay attention to that, to me, is really important.”
Green notes that in a larger city, due to the sheer number of people, LGBTQ+ minorities are more likely to have access to an array of support groups. Charlottesville has come a long way in terms of services available to all minorities, Green says, but she and Bellamy agree that there’s still plenty of work to be done.
“We’re moving forward,” Green says. “Not at break-neck speed, but we’re moving forward.”
For Tasia White, though, Charlottesville is a breath of fresh air. As a 24-year-old black lesbian living in Staunton, White says she doesn’t have many gay (and certainly not black and gay) friends in her area—she comes to Charlottesville as often as she can, and she’s been overwhelmed by the amount of support she’s found here. A rapper whose stage name is Lady Taij, White originally began visiting the area to perform in shows, and she says she found people here to be much more receptive to what she does.
“I ended up doing the Harrisonburg pride festival, and that’s when everything opened up,” she says, adding that she’d never been to anything like a pride festival until then, despite being an openly gay woman who came out as a teenager. “And I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, these people are so welcoming and loving and accepting. Where have you been my whole life?’”
White will perform at the Charlottesville Pride Festival on Saturday, September 19. Although she’s never made much music about her life as a gay woman before, she now she feels much more compelled to do so.
“Now it’s time to make music for this crowd. Really dig deeper, talk about who I am as a lesbian woman and what I go through,” she says. “I know other people are going through the same thing, and I didn’t really feel that way in Staunton.”
Love thy neighbor
Sojourners Pastor Melanie Miller says the church is about “opening the circle rather than circling the wagons.” Photo: Brianna Larocco
Local religious institutions address same-sex marriage
The reaction of faith-based organizations to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that made same-sex marriage the law of the land has been as diverse as the spread of churches themselves, from conservative institutions that consider homosexuality “an abomination” to those that see it as another example of God’s love.
Locally, that spectrum ranges from Sojourners United Church of Christ, whose core value is that of “radical welcome,” according to Pastor Melanie Miller, to Lighthouse Charlottesville, which has Pentecostal and Apostolic ties, the same movement to which non-gay-marrying Kentucky clerk Kim Davis is a member.
Even among Baptists, reactions vary. First Baptist Church on Park Street, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, added a statement about where it stands on same-sex marriage to its bylaws after 98.4 percent of members voted to do so, says the Reverend Don Hicks. “We were not willing to cut out of the Bible what God has said, that marriage is between a man and a woman.” If the church didn’t have it in its bylaws and someone wanted to have a wedding there, “that could be a problem,” he says. And although homosexuals would not be hired to work at the church, says Hicks, they are welcome to worship there.
University Baptist Church Senior Minister Michael Cheuk says, “At this point, we don’t have a policy. As a Baptist church we have members on both sides of the issue.” University Baptist is a member of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which Cheuk describes as “a more moderate Baptist church.”
Sojourners is known for its “universal message of love” toward the poor, people of color, gays and the “differently abled,” says Miller, and she suspects the church draws more “people who live on the margins.”
In 2006, the same year Virginia passed its constitutional amendment mandating that marriage was between a man and a woman, Sojourners decided its pastor would “officiate no weddings until it could officiate all weddings,” says Miller. The belief was that the law was unjust, and the congregants didn’t want their pastor acting as “an agent of the state,” she says.
Since the Supremes radically reversed that amendment, Miller says she’s performed five same-sex couple weddings, three of them in the church sanctuary.
“I think in a world that’s increasingly black and white, increasingly polarized, Sojourners recognizes that life and love are messy,” explains Miller. “We see gray areas all around us. In the midst of the messiness of life, we try to live out God’s love by providing compassion and hope to those who need it.”
Churches are not the only religious institutions grappling—or not—with the issue of same-sex marriage. In July, Eastern Mennonite University announced it was adding “sexual orientation” to its nondiscrimination policy and changed its hiring policy, which will allow those in a same-sex marriage the same benefits as heterosexual couples.
The reaction to the change in hiring policy, says university spokesperson Andrea Wenger, was mixed, with “those who are celebrating and those who are disappointed.”
Wenger says the decision was the result of years of conversation about the issue, and the Supreme Court ruling was not the driving factor. “Last year we had two faculty members leave,” she says, “one because we were talking about it, and one because it was not happening fast enough.”
What has not changed is the school’s celibacy policy set forth in its Community Lifestyle Commitment that everyone, including single faculty and students, is expected to sign. That, says Wenger, “is very actively criticized.”
Local private schools with religious ties vary in the hiring of gay faculty. At Tandem Friends School, which is rooted in Quaker beliefs, homosexuals teach there and they and their spouses receive benefits. Ditto for St. Anne’s-Belfield, which has historical ties with the Episcopal church, but has not been religiously affiliated since 1985, according to spokesperson Beth Stefanik.
Covenant School provides a “traditional, Christian liberal arts and sciences education,” according to its website. Headmaster George Sanker did not respond to four phone calls. Four of five board of directors members contacted also did not return calls. A message left for board President Craig Colberg at the school was also not returned.
And there hasn’t been any change at the Charlottesville Catholic School, says Catholic Diocese of Richmond Director of Communications Diana Snider. “When we hire teachers, we emphasize that we’re a Catholic school,” she says. “As part of employment, they’re expected to uphold the teachings of the church.” Thus, the hiring of gay faculty “probably wouldn’t happen,” Snider says.
“The church promotes marriage between one man and one woman. A Catholic wouldn’t be able to be married to someone of the same sex in the Catholic Church.”
Struggles and successes
Albemarle High School seniors Charlotte Campbell and Mac Callan are officers in the Queer & Ally club, which provides support for LGBTQ+ students. Photo: Martyn Kyle
A new generation of gay teens
*Writer’s note: Seniors Mac Callan and Charlotte Campbell are officers in the Queer & Ally club—formerly known as the Gay-Straight Alliance—at Albemarle High School. Callan, the president, is female to male transgender, and prefers using masculine pronouns to describe himself. Campbell, a pansexual, is a vice president of the club and is most comfortable with using the pronouns “they” and “them,” but for the clarity of this article will be identified using feminine pronouns.
Being a teenager in a time when same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states and transgender role models like Caitlyn Jenner have their own reality television shows is something only today’s youth have witnessed. Though national acceptance makes being LGBTQ+ easier, some say it sure doesn’t make it easy.
Albemarle High School senior Mac Callan is inspired by the trend of transgender women like Jenner and Janet Mock advocating for their own rights. He says he wants to join them in inspiring the trans community—but doesn’t always feel comfortable in his own skin.
“I’m more ashamed of myself,” he says, having grown up with internal transphobia, which he is actively working to combat. An avid viewer of Mock’s MSNBC web show, Callan saw her speak at UVA last year. “Seeing another trans person being respected by an entire crowd of people was incredible for me.”
Although senior Charlotte Campbell agrees that being gay in today’s world is easier, she still feels shame for being different.
“Growing up, I was under the impression that being gay was a bad thing,” says Campbell. “Like hetero is the norm and if you’re homo, something’s wrong with you. I’m happy with myself from time to time, but if I really think about it, deep down, I’m still kind of ashamed.”
Campbell, who struggled with identity in middle school, found a family of similar souls within the Queer & Ally club at AHS, which provides a safe place for LGBTQ+ students. The club also organizes different school events, like the Day of Silence, in which people who support the LGBTQ+ community don’t speak for a day.
Allies are increasing. Like Q&A, Charlottesville High School has a similar club called PRISM, and a local organization called ROSMY provides services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. Lyndele von Schill, whose daughter is a lesbian, helped found the local chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She estimates that about 266 students enrolled in city schools and 888 students enrolled in county schools identify as LGBTQ+. To get this number, she multiplied the total number of students in each school district by 6.5 percent, which is the number of LGBTQ+-identifying youth in America, as stated by a Gallup poll.
Campbell says she was most proud to be gay on the day the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage constitutional, but least proud that same day, when a Facebook user said something was wrong with her—she must have been abused in her past and that God didn’t make her that way.
“Once I was shot down, it just kind of killed me,” Campbell says. “Even though gay marriage is legalized, there’s still going to be homophobia.”
Gay glossary
Gender: Psychological identification
Gender queer: Identifies with both genders, not necessarily gay or straight
Non-binary: Identifies as neither man nor woman
Pansexual: Attracted to the soul of a person, not the genitalia, regardless of gender
Sex: Physical identification (anatomically male or female)
Transgender: Someone who is biologically born one gender but identifies with the other
Transsexual: A transgender who has undergone a medical procedure to transform from one gender to the other
Old school
Sixty-eight-year-old Linda McNeil remembers questioning her sexual orientation when she was 12 years old. Photo: Martyn Kyle
What it means to be a gay senior citizen
While millennials are rooted in a culture that at least acknowledges the idea that it’s okay for two people born of the same sex to love each other intimately, this can’t be said of older generations. Born in 1947, 68-year-old Linda McNeil remembers first questioning her sexual orientation and gender identity when she was about 12 years old, at a time when, she says, “we didn’t even have words for this.”
McNeil identifies as gender queer and pansexual.
As a queer senior citizen, McNeil is proud of the progress her country has made, and says she feels a part of many different groups, including the larger LGBTQ+ community and the Charlottesville Unitarian Universalist Church. As one of the key church members who made hanging the rainbow banner, which reads “We support same-sex marriages,” outside the church possible, McNeil calls this accomplishment one of her “proudest moments,” saying it’s a “huge deal, even in supposedly blue Charlottesville.”
Because she identifies differently than the majority of people her age, she says she still feels, at times, reluctant to identify herself fully in conversations with certain people, for fear of their discrimination toward her.
“I still feel that in the pit of my stomach sometimes,” she says, remembering the fear of coming out to her boss during her career as a teacher and the amount of bravery it required. “I could’ve faced serious consequences—bodily harm, slashed tires, defacing of my home.”
McNeil feels that employment and housing are two areas in which the LGBTQ+ community is heavily discriminated against.
According to Doris Gelbman, a lesbian and an elder care attorney in Charlottesville, many LGBTQ+ senior citizens have similar fears, particularly when it comes to choosing a nursing home. Some local homes are affiliated with religious organizations, which Gelbman says can be difficult for gay people.
“They may not be very comfortable with a church organization because they’ve been condemned in a church,” she says.
Having been raised a Baptist Christian, Susan Scofield says it took her nearly 20 years to come out because she was convinced being gay was a sin. Photo: Martyn Kyle
Gen Silent, a documentary about the oldest generation of the LGBTQ+ community, will be screened at the Senior Center on September 20, and Gelbman will conduct a Q&A after the film.
Describing the film, she says, “The first wave of activists that worked for gay rights took a lot of risks coming out of the closet. Now that they are much older and retiring and entering nursing care, they are having to go back into the closet in order to be comfortable or in order to be treated at all.” Though the film features seniors living in Boston and New York, she says this worry rings true locally as well.
Some LGBTQ+ seniors were raised with traditional Christian backgrounds, too, making the relationship between their faith, preconceived notions of homosexuality and their own sexual orientation difficult.
Susan Scofield, a 53-year-old lesbian, says it took her almost 20 years to come out because she had been raised a Baptist Christian and was convinced that being gay was a sin. She met her first girlfriend while attending a conservative “Bible college” in Tennessee and says she wrestled with her thoughts and feelings for a long time.
“Of course the sex won,” she jokes.
Scofield feels discriminated against in more ways than one, because she is lesbian and also confined to a wheelchair. She says she’s faced discrimination in job interviews, for her lack of accessibility to public places and because of her sexual orientation. However, she says she’s still celebrating the Supreme Court’s June ruling for marriage equality, calling it “a vindication for all the injustices of being treated as a second-class citizen.”
She says she felt a surge of pride when she learned Oliver Sacks, a brilliant neurologist who wrote about the brain and who died in August, was gay, too.
“Come out of the closet, folks,” she says. “There is strength in numbers.”
The waiting game
Darren Pace and Aaron Eichorst waited until May to make their marriage—which they committed to 22 years ago—legal in the eyes of the state. Photo: Rachel Zahumensky Willson
Aaron Eichorst and Darren Pace adjust to a new reality
Aaron Eichorst, 43, and Darren Pace, 44, committed themselves to each other 22 years ago. But marriage became a waiting game for the couple, who weren’t sure when to start considering getting married outside of Virginia, in a state that recognized gay marriage. Fortunately, Virginia legalized marriage before the couple abandoned their hopes of marrying in-state, and the pair was married May 23.
For Eichorst, the chances of a Virginia marriage looked slim, and he was shocked when the ruling passed last October.
“It was just euphoric,” Eichorst says, “It was wonderful.”
Thinking back on the couple’s life together, Eichorst reflects on the sense of belonging and community that was missing from their life together. It was this feeling of acknowledgment and acceptance that made the legalization so important to him.
“After living as this sort of second status for such a long time, to feel included in [the community] is the most significant thing that I felt,” Eichorst says. “…that feeling of belonging and that I’m secure in the same way that other people’s relationships would be.”
This sense of security surpasses just the community level. As Eichorst notes, it also has visible benefits on the couple’s life together outside of the home. Recalling a recent trip to Europe, Eichorst describes the process of going through customs and how unmarried couples must by default go through customs separately.
“We’ve been living in this second tier for such a long time that sometimes I forget,” Eichorst says. “And I just forgot that I didn’t have to go in a separate line from my husband anymore.”
As the couple looks toward the future, Charlottesville remains in the cards for them. Both Pace, a systems coordinator for State Farm, and Eichorst, coordinator of fine and performing arts for Charlottesville City Schools, feel firmly invested in their careers and personal lives in Charlottesville.
Overall, the couple’s plan is “just to contribute to Charlottesville and Charlottesville’s cultural side…” Eichorst says. “Growing old here.”
Just-married life
The wait is over for André Hakes and Catherine Gillespie
For years André Hakes and Catherine Gillespie had a Valentine’s Day tradition: They’d go to the Charlottesville clerk’s office and ask for a marriage license. And they’d be denied.
As soon as they heard that gay marriage had been legalized in Virginia, they set out to tie the knot October 6, 2014, waiting for the moment that the Charlottesville Circuit Court would start issuing licenses. After years of asking the court to grant them a marriage license, the couple was one of the first same-sex couples to be married in Virginia. For Hakes and Gillespie, both 44, it had been a wait of 19 years.
Gillespie and Hakes will celebrate 20 years together this fall. As Gillespie remembers the couple’s early life, she recalls Hakes saying, “Well, I don’t know if I want to get married. I just want to wake up one day and realize that we already are.”
Gillespie feels the same way and says that once they were officially hitched it went by quickly: “There we were on the court steps getting married and then it was over. … We finished the laundry we had started, and it was back to married life because that’s what we already had.”
What the couple didn’t have was the paperwork and the ring to prove it. Although Hakes and Gillespie knew they wanted to be married for a long time, both felt strongly that it be done in Virginia. Hakes especially, being a Virginia attorney, wanted it to be done in-state. “Charlottesville is my home and it’s my place,” she says. “I didn’t want to go somewhere else and get married and then cross the border and have it not count.”
“We thought they were going to have to wheel us down the aisle by the time gay marriage was legalized,” Gillespie adds, laughing.
Not only was the couple surprised by the legalization, but Gillespie notes how comforting the symbolism of the ring was after going without one for so many years.
“It says, ‘You’re not married,’ and that wasn’t true of me,” she says. “I had been in a committed, loving relationship for 19 years, and I had no outward symbol that that was my status.”
Asked about plans for the future, Gillespie jokes, “I’ll probably do some laundry this afternoon,” but later states that their plans are just like everyone else’s: “Pay off our mortgage, send our kid to college, retire successfully—everybody’s plans.”
Both agree that moving is not in the picture.
“I love that our son is here in Charlottesville,” Hakes says. “This is all he knows. He’s a local and I love that.”
Journey to healing
For Brian McCrory and Benjamin King, now the real fun can start
For Brian McCrory, 35, and Benjamin King, 37, the right to legally marry lifted a giant weight. Although McCrory says they have been married in the eyes of family and friends since October 12, 2013, it wasn’t until a year later that the state recognized their marriage.
The two have known each other for 13 years and have been a part of each other’s lives since young adulthood. Although they didn’t start dating until TK years later, they knew each other well, and McCrory says that once they knew they wanted to get married they didn’t hesitate.
“I think we married faster than most people would have,” he admits. “I mean, we got married within six months of knowing we wanted to.”
Despite considering themselves married since 2013, the legalization of McCrory and King’s marriage last October was an incredibly healing experience for the couple. McCrory, thinking back on his childhood, discusses his strong religious upbringing and both the joy and pain his religion brought to him. More than anything, McCrory recalls feeling relieved when he heard gay marriage was legal.
“I remember I was at work when I found out,” he says, “and I just cried. I cried and cried. It was a huge hurdle that had been looming over me and my life and it was more meaningful than I ever anticipated it to be. … [I felt] so much more like a real person.”
Although McCrory admits that he still finds it difficult when unknowing coworkers ask him questions about his wife or girlfriend, he is optimistic about a bright future with King. The couple hopes to live a life colored by their shared experiences in foreign countries and cultures.
As McCrory puts it, their plan is “to see more of the world, experience other cultures and sort of find our place in it.”
Girl power
One year later, gay marriages skew feminine
On October 6, 2014, gay marriage was legalized in Virginia when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. Same-sex couples could legally marry here, and marriages of Virginia couples outside the state were recognized. Nearly a year later, Albemarle County and the city of Charlottesville have recorded approximately 130 same-sex marriages. Combined, city and county have recorded 88 female same-sex marriages since the ruling and fewer than half that number of male same-sex marriages, a trend that is reflected nationally. Here’s how the numbers shake out.
11
The average number of same-sex marriages in Albemarle County and Charlottesville per month since October 2014.
55
The number of same-sex marriages in Albemarle County since October 2014. Of those, 36 were between two women and 19 were between two men.
75
The number of same-sex marriages in Charlottesville since October 2014. Of those, 52 were female couples and 23 were male.
134,160
The number of married female same-sex couples in the United States, which accounts for 53 percent of the total number of same-sex couples (according to the 2013 American Community Survey released by the United States census).
On the books
Equality under the law in Virginia
For years, Virginia, a state that enshrined heterosexual marriage-only into its constitution, had a brain drain of often highly trained professional gay couples who emigrated to places where they would not be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled states can’t prohibit same-sex marriages, everything is hunky-dory and everyone has equal protection under the law in Virginia, right?
Not exactly.
“We currently have laws against discrimination in Virginia,” says attorney Doris Gelbman. “It just doesn’t cover gay people.”
She lists employment and housing as areas with no protection. “What it means is my employer can fire me because I’m gay or they perceive I’m gay and I have no recourse. I can be evicted from my apartment and it’s legal.”
Around 13 or 14 states, including Maryland, have added sexual orientation to their anti-discrimination laws, she says. Not so in Virginia.
“We don’t have a nondiscrimination clause in employment,” says House Minority Leader David Toscano.
He foresees a couple of things that should happen in the upcoming General Assembly. In light of the Supreme Court decision, Virginia’s Code Commission is going through the books to clean up language like “husband and wife,” he says.
What the Code Commission can’t clean up: the constitutional amendment. To do that, the legislature must vote twice with an intervening election and then it would go on the ballot, explains Toscano.
Toscano, a Democrat, predicts some controversial moves in the January legislative session. “I think the conservative wing is going to push a number of issues not directly attacking marriage, like the so-called religious freedom laws, to write them into code and attempt to frustrate the Supreme Court decision.”
He mentions Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who has cited her religious beliefs as reason to not issue marriage licenses to gay couples. “First, the Supreme Court is clear: The clerk is an instrument of government and has to abide by the rule of law. That’s pretty clear. It gets a little hazier with private businesses.”
Adds Toscano, “I don’t support using religion as a way to discriminate against people.”
What about the other three delegates, who are all Republicans, representing Albemarle County in the General Assembly?
Delegate Matt Fariss, Rustberg resident and co-owner of the Lynchburg Livestock Market, did not return multiple phone calls. On his website, he says that he’s “first and foremost a Christian family man” and will fight “liberal policies” that will put the rights and freedoms he’s been blessed with in jeopardy. So we’d guess he’s not a same-sex marriage supporter.
Delegate Rob Bell says he has no plans to carry any legislation to amend prohibitions against gays currently on the books. Asked if the Supreme Court decision was a mistake, Bell points out, “I supported the constitutional amendment.”
He says he anticipates some religious freedom bills.
Delegate Steve Landes says he’s waiting for the courts to resolve issues like religious freedom before racing to change the laws in Virginia. “There’s a debate among religious denominations about whether they have to marry same-sex couples,” he says. “The courts have to definitively decide what can occur based on religious beliefs. We generally don’t make changes until all things have played out in court.”
Some conservatives have reconsidered their opposition to same-sex marriage in recent years. Landes says, “I have my own individual beliefs as for what the Bible says and what my religion says.
“We take an oath to abide by the state’s constitution and the federal constitution, and those are in conflict,” he continues. “The courts have set up a conundrum with how they look at the First Amendment and the 14th. In the end, Virginia has to try to comply with what the courts determine.”
–Samantha Baars, Laura Ingles, Lisa Provence and Cara Salpini
Warren Haynes Band breaks ground on the first night at the new Lockn’ festival in 2013. Haynes has been a fixture on the schedule for the last three years. Photo: Jay Blakesberg
Back in September 1977 Jay Blakesberg caught his first Grateful Dead show in Englishtown, New Jersey. He quickly became a die-hard fan, and as a hobbyist shutterbug started bringing a camera to shows as he followed the band around the country.
Martese Johnson 's lawsuit claims he was "permanently disfigured" during his encounter with ABC agents. Photo: Jackson Smith
March 17—St. Patrick’s Day—was a pretty typical day for third-year Martese Johnson at the University of Virginia. A Tuesday, it was one of the heaviest academic days for the media studies and Italian major, and he was in class until mid-afternoon. That evening, “I hung out with friends on the Lawn for a time,” he says, “and people said, let’s go out and have fun and party.”
Then everything changed.
Johnson, 20, was arrested by three Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents early March 18 outside Trinity Irish Pub and charged with obstruction of justice and public intoxication or swearing after he gave owner Kevin Badke, who was checking IDs at the door, his valid driver’s license.
Johnson wouldn’t have gotten in that night anyway because Trinity was allowing only 21-year-olds and over in after 10pm, but when he gave Badke the wrong ZIP code on his driver’s license, that raised enough doubt for Badke that he didn’t bother to check the birthdate, he told the Cavalier Daily. Both men describe the exchange as “cordial,” but Johnson drew the attention of nearby ABC agents when he was turned away from the bar.
The world awoke to a photo of a bleeding black man on the ground surrounded by police. In a year of black men being killed by police, it was—sadly—not a new image. Johnson joined the list of other hashtags: #michaelbrown, #ericgarner, #freddiegray.
“The thing that stands out the most,” said Johnson in August, “I was the first hashtag that’s still alive today.”
This doesn’t happen to (white) UVA students
The photo that went viral: Martese Johnson’s encounter with the ABC on the Corner. Photo: Bryan Beaubrun
Mr. Jefferson’s U was not South Side Chicago-born Johnson’s first choice. He yearned to be a University of Southern California Trojan, but he cast wide his college application net.
“In high school, I was very indecisive and ambitious and so I applied to 26 colleges,” he says. “I narrowed it down to three.”
His first visit to UVA was a summer Darden business program. “I hated it,” says Johnson. “It was my first introduction to southern preppy culture.” He committed to USC at 17, but was too young to legally agree.
UVA was a last-minute decision, he says, after making an eastern college tour and reaching out to his RA here. He discovered that UVA is a different place in the fall than in the summer. “Students were here and I saw how tight the community was,” he says. “There was a larger family vibe and I really appreciated that.”
Nonetheless, during his first year in Charlottesville he experienced the isolation and discomfort a lot of students experience, particularly black students. He learned that music chosen for homecoming, for instance, was something more likely to appeal to white culture, like Taylor Swift or country music, than to what black students may be listening to.
First-years can’t go to bars and the four black fraternities don’t have houses. “Everybody goes to fraternity parties,” Johnson says. “If a black student tries to go to a white fraternity, they’re typically turned away.” That happened to Johnson several times.
“I’ve been called nigger and physically threatened by members of white fraternities,” he says. “That’s very common.”
“These are the factors that push us to the outskirts. And we come together in the outskirts.” A lot of black students choose to live more than a mile away from the Lawn in the Faulkner dorm complex on North Grounds, “which is really far out,” says Johnson. “It’s the culture that promotes that behavior.”
His experience at UVA has been “drastically different” from most African-American students’, he says. “Ninety percent of them remain part of the black community and never explore other facets of the university and organizations that are influential in the university,” he says. “If there are no black students on Student Council, no black voices will ever be heard on Student Council.”
Johnson himself nearly stayed on the outskirts, getting involved in black organizations such as his fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, and the Black Student Alliance.
“It was my love for the black community that sort of propelled me into the white community and the larger community at UVA,” he says. “Minority students and athletes are disproportionately reported for honor violations. At that time, no one black was on the Honor Committee. I realized there was no black voice.”
In the video of his arrest, Johnson is heard saying, “I go to UVA. I go to UVA, you fucking racists.”
He explains why. “Since I got here, UVA, in my mind, has been my safe haven where I could grow as an individual, academically and personally,” he says. “Also I realized I’m part of a larger society. UVA is not a larger society and when I step off Grounds, I’m a random black kid who’s near a bar.” And being on the Honor Committee at UVA was no protection.
“He was shocked and hurt,” says third-year Aryn Frazier, who met Johnson through several black organizations, including the Black Student Alliance. “He was not shocked in that he didn’t know police brutality happened. He was shocked and hurt in a community where he’d made it one of his main goals to bridge gaps and experience the university to its fullest that he would become subject to police brutality.”
“How could this happen?”
Students took to the street March 18, shocked and angry over Martese Johnson’s arrest. Photo: Will Kerner
Frazier, political action chair for the BSA, had gotten up at 5am March 18 to catch up on school work and the first thing she did was check her phone. “Seeing that picture was jarring,” she says. “I immediately called my mother because she knows lawyers.”
She went to her first class, and skipped the rest to figure out what was going to happen next. “Martese was my friend and that happened to him, whom I know personally,” she says.
Frazier helped organize the demonstration that night attended by hundreds, including students, faculty and community members, both black and white. Johnson was present, the 10 stitches visible on his forehead.
When he first saw the bloody picture of himself that went viral, Johnson was appalled. “In the moment, I didn’t realize I was hurt with the adrenaline pumping,” he says. He was taken to the hospital and when he reached the jail, he says his wounds were still bleeding. “You’ll be fine,” he says police told him.
Dean of African-American Affairs Maurice Apprey referred Johnson to his lawyer, UVA law school grad Daniel Watkins, now with Williams Mullen in Richmond.
Watkins had his own brush with the law while at UVA when an ex-girlfriend accused him of stalking and assault in 2011, charges that were later dismissed. “After I got arrested, my goal was to go into the public defender’s office,” says Watkins. He says he’s defended more than 60 criminal cases in the past three years.
“I told [Johnson] about my case, that I had been wrongly accused and also faced public ridicule,” says Watkins. “What I regret to this day is that I never talked about my side of the story.”
Watkins says he had two priorities for Johnson: to not get convicted and to protect his reputation.
UVA President Teresa Sullivan asked Governor Terry McAuliffe for an independent Virginia State Police investigation. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman asked state police for a criminal investigation of the arrest. Rector George Martin said investigation wasn’t enough and the state needed to do something to make sure this didn’t happen again. And supporters packed the courtroom for Johnson’s first court hearing March 26.
“I was outraged,” says Dean Apprey, “because it’s a long stretch from checking an ID with the wrong ZIP code to an intracranial injury that requires 10 stitches. What is law enforcement doing to teach de-escalation between an arresting agent and a suspect or student?”
With the groundswell of support, Johnson was taken aback with remarks he found on anonymous sites such as Yik Yak, which included, “He probably wouldn’t have been seen as resisting arrest if he’d shut his smart ass mouth. Drinking underage and talking shit to ABC. Real smart.” Or, “Please go protest where people are not TRYING TO DO THEIR FUCKING HOMEWORK.” Frazier, too, noticed the “very mean-spirited comments” about Johnson. “I think he was glad to see a large part of the community rally around him,” she says.
On June 12, charges against Johnson were dropped—and the prosecutor decided to not bring charges against ABC agents Jared Miller, John Cielakie and Thomas Custer, whom the ABC refused to identify to the media but who are named in a defense motion.
The agents had “articulable” suspicion to detain Johnson after he was turned away from Trinity, said Chapman, who determined the bloody arrest was more from a clumsy fall than police brutality. And the whole incident took place in fewer than 30 seconds.
“Oftentimes interactions with police can quickly go sour and just as often, it isn’t precipitated by criminal conduct on the part of the arrestee,” says Watkins. “You can be a student at a No. 1 public university and walking across the street and find yourself bloodied on the ground.”
Although the ABC agents have been cleared criminally and administratively, Johnson questions the need for a Prohibition-era agency to go after young people. In 2013, UVA student Elizabeth Daly, 20, and her friends were terrorized by ABC agents who mistook her sparkling water for beer in a Harris Teeter parking lot. Daly was charged with three felonies when she fled an agent banging on her window with a flashlight and one with a drawn gun, and spent the night in jail. Her $10 million lawsuit against the agency was settled for $212,500.
Johnson has not said whether he will sue the ABC.
And yes, he believes race was a factor. “There was no reason for me to be treated like that,” he says. “I’ve seen this happen with white students. They’re never physically harmed.”
ABC Special Agent Miller, who grabbed Johnson’s arm, according to a defense motion, claimed that his eyes were glassy and he could smell “the strong odor of alcoholic beverage coming off him,” the state police investigation says.
Johnson disagrees with the agent’s assessment. “I was not drunk that night,” he says.
To Johnson, the more important question is “not whether I was drinking, but why did these officers feel like treating me that way?”
He says he was “disheartened” that the state police investigations found no wrongdoing and said no policy was broken. “That’s what upsets me the most,” he says. “A policy that allows any person to be harmed to that extent.”
Now, not later
Johnson spent the summer as an intern for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington. “This is my first summer being thrown into the real world,” he says.
Often he was recognized, and although he’s always been comfortable interacting with people, walking down the street in D.C. and having to stop and have a conversation “can be stressful,” he says. “I never wanted this public figure image, but now I’m hoping to use it to better society.
“I’ve always been passionate about issues of all kinds of social justice, criminal justice and the plight of minorities in our country,” he continues. “I always knew I would address those issues some way. I didn’t know how. When everything happened to me, it threw me into the moment and it made me understand now is the time to create change.”
Johnson says he’s committed to creating cultural change in the communities in which he lives—such as putting a multicultural center on the Corner, which is not always seen as welcoming to minorities and where Charlottesville residents who don’t go to UVA usually aren’t found, Johnson says—and to larger policy changes. “It’s motivated me to create change in the moment instead of waiting for me to have some sort of official position,” he says.
His experience also has made him more empathetic and understanding of people going through a variety of situations. “I’ve seen personally how quick people judge who you are, your character and your intentions before having any insight into what has gone on,” he says. “By being subjected to that, I have a stronger awareness of how complex every situation can be. Humans are complex in themselves, and I think we forget that and try to make situations black and white when they’re not.”
For example, when people ask him if the three officers who arrested him should be punished, he says it’s not that simple. “Perhaps we should punish their parents,” he says. “Perhaps we should punish the community they came from. Punishing those three officers won’t solve the larger societal issues.”
Has UVA changed as a result of #Martese Johnson? Yes and no, he answers. In the no column, he lists the Cav Daily’s now-removed-from-its-website April Fools’ issue with the headline, “ABC agents tackle Native American students outside Bodo’s Bagels.” Johnson calls it “racist satire,” and notes the CD didn’t satirize the Rolling Stone’s now-discredited gang rape story. And he lists anonymous student comments made “on a daily basis” on Yik Yak.
In the yes column, he says minority communities at the university are coming together to prioritize issues. “We want a multicultural center on the Corner,” he says. “Con-
versations on race are happening. It shows this problem has become a big priority.”
Over the summer he made a number of speeches, including one in New Orleans the week before he returned to Charlottesville, and he headed to Chicago for the 60th anniversary of Emmett Till’s death on August 28.
It wasn’t much of a break from dealing with his St. Patrick’s Day trauma, but Johnson seems okay with that. “Me having a break is a smaller priority than using the platform I’ve been given to promote the change I think is so important,” he says.
The scars on his forehead have healed, but they’re still visible. “I’m afraid to cut my hair,” he jokes.
Despite all that’s happened, Johnson says he has no regrets that he chose the University of Virginia, which “has helped me grow personally in ways that I would have never foreseen back when I was choosing colleges to attend.”
And, he says, “I have never been in a community so uplifting and supportive.”
One thing that stands out is his experience as a trending hashtag. “The fact that I became a hashtag and still have the opportunity to breathe…” he says. “The prevalence of those is still too many and they keep happening.”
Johnson always has been interested in politics and always has figured one day he’d run for office—like another guy from his hometown, Barack Obama. He doesn’t discount a run for POTUS. “I’m still thinking about it,” he says.
There is one major problem: He’s about 14 years too young. He laughs. “Maybe in my late 30s or early 40s.”
Daedalus Bookshop owner Sandy McAdams, photographed in the late '70s at C&O, was one of the Downtown Mall's founding fathers. Photo: Courtesy of Subject
Ann Gordon recognized that it was pretty sketchy downtown after hours. Her children later came to call it “wino safari-land.” She walked there with them sometimes during the 1970s. “There were strange derelict people,” she recalls, “and a men-only bar at The Brass Rail. There was a flop house, men living in single rooms renting week to week, and a very bizarre set of shops that were just old school. It wasn’t changing. You could feel that it could stay that way forever. Or it could just be gone the next day.”
One of the things that killed the old ideal of a traditional Main Street was that after hours it tended to become safari-land. When the office buildings emptied out for the day, what need was there for the department stores and appliance stores and clothing stores to stay open? Businesses started moving where the people were, or where they could get to more easily. Out in Barracks Road Shopping Center there was ample space for broad, paved lots for cars. As a result, like downtowns almost everywhere, Main Street was becoming more than a little seedy.
But seediness can be a seed-bed. By the early 1970s the city had seen the writing on the wall. It decided to roll the dice and develop a desperation plan to revitalize downtown by closing a portion of Main Street to traffic and creating a pedestrian mall.
Just as those plans were developing, almost as if an alarm clock had rung, a wave of young entrepreneurs was finding opportunity in low real estate values and fringe properties to open businesses downtown. They were not typical business owners. Some of them were hippies, activists and protest veterans. One was a Greenwich Village bohemian who had moved to Canada to dodge the draft. A few were disaffected young lawyers leaning toward a life less ordinary by indulging their interests in the arts, music, food and drink.
They were the Not Ready for Chamber of Commerce Players. They were about to bring something new and something radical downtown, something that would chart a path toward what it would become. And Ann Gordon was one of them.
Tumbleweeds
The construction of the pedestrian mall in 1976 caused disruption for Main Street, but its ultimate success rested on the strategy of stimulating small businesses and cultural offerings. Photo: Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society
When I first came to Charlottesville in 1981 there were tumbleweeds rolling down the mall. Or at least it seemed that way, and not only to me. The experience of walking downtown in search of nightlife was like a desert march from one oasis to another. There were pools of light and life and noise at Vinegar Hill Theater, at Fellini’s, at Miller’s, and way down on the east end of a long desolate expanse, at the C&O. If you were there before 8, when Williams Corner Bookstore closed, you might link up with a small crowd as a poetry or fiction reading was breaking up. But otherwise, nothing. Turn up your collar and hustle through the dark and hope you make it to the next watering hole.
Six years earlier, not a single one of those oases had yet opened, and it wasn’t at all clear where a downtown night life, even a rudimentary one, might come from. A 1968 study of the Central Business District had confirmed that what was happening to Main Streets all over the country was happening here as well. Declining business revenues and declining property assessments spelled doom for traditional shopping districts.
Things were not yet dire downtown in 1968, but more businesses were leaving for Route 29 all the time, with few new businesses coming in. And there was only one way for that to end.
The folks sitting on Charlottesville’s City Council decided to answer the challenge with an ambitious, and contentious, plan to revitalize downtown—building a municipal parking garage, turning Main Street into a pedestrian mall, and developing a master plan that emphasized small-scale retail and restaurants mixed with residential and office space.
There were voices who argued that downtown should just be allowed to fail—that when it all crashed, developers would move in to pick over the bones and re-build and re-develop on a larger scale without tax dollars being wasted. Mitch Van Yahres, who as a young council member thought long and hard before finally casting one of the deciding votes in favor of the mall in 1974, told a story years later that encapsulates the resistance. When he came on council in 1968, he “asked for a study of downtown housing and transit. The previous city manager laughed. Who would want to live downtown?”
That was a question that needed answering if the mall was to succeed. The Democratic city council was unanimously for the revitalization plan. And a new cadre of city employees, Cole Hendrix the new city manager, and Satyendra Huja, the new planning director, had the vision, and the political support, to see the vision through.
But that vision needed to be something that would change people’s hearts and minds about what downtown was, and what it could become. As Huja put it in a magazine interview in 1977: “People tend to go where things are going on, and we want this to be such a place. Very diverse, urban. Its success depends on community attitudes, as well as numbers of shoppers.” But how do you change community attitudes? And once you create a place that people might want to live and to play, what’s the driver, what’s the engine that’s actually going to get them to start coming?
Artists and anarchists
Michael Williams returned to Charlottesville to help his family open and run their downtown bookstore. “It was a tremendous opportunity,” he says. “I met some of the best people I will ever meet, being part of this downtown community.” Photo: Amy Jackson
One of the first indications of changing attitudes actually happened before a single brick was laid on the mall. The first lurch of the train as the engine kicked in came when Ann Gordon and her husband Chief bought the former Jarman motorcycle showroom on Market Street and converted it for use as an art house cinema.
“One day in 1973,” she says, “Chief found this building for sale for $30,000, and said ‘Let’s buy it.’ I was basically a UVA graduate student who had never finished her masters, and Chief wanted to act. He was dedicated to bringing the arts to Charlottesville. We knew almost nothing about what we were doing, except that we thought we had good taste in movies.”
They started with the idea of creating an arts complex. The 200-seat cinema, to be named Vinegar Hill Theatre, would reside in the Market Street frontage. The back of the building, the vintage part fronting on Old Preston (Vibethink is located there now), had been a working garage and office and was in much rougher shape. They decided to limit themselves to opening the cinema first, and sell remaining part of the building. That was when they met the anarchists.
John Conover and Virginia Daugherty had drifted into town in 1971 at the end of a year of driving the country and living out of an old converted bread truck. The truck had been fitted out with a bed and an ice box by a sailor in Norfolk, where the couple had met. “We wanted to see America,” Conover says. “We went from hippie farm to hippie farm. We just wanted to be free. Of course we thought the world was going to come unglued. That was spring of 1970. The war was at its peak. Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King was dead. Bobby Kennedy was dead. People had been to the moon. Some people didn’t believe they had been to the moon. Something was going to happen. Good or bad. There was going to be an apocalypse.”
Waiting for the apocalypse in a bread truck got a little stale, however, and they decided to settle in Charlottesville where John had done his undergraduate work, and where they knew a few people. Their activist sensibilities had been sharpened by the tumult of the ’60s, and they dove right into the local political scene. They volunteered and canvassed for the local Democratic Party. And they started hanging with the revolutionaries manquées of the Black Flag Press.
Black Flag was a collective that had started when UVA student activists went looking for a place to print up protest material and found that local print houses would have none of it. They managed to raise enough money to buy some printing equipment and set it up above the Studio Art Shop on West Main Street. The group took their name from the emblem of the anarchist movement, and they set out to stir up a radical economic upheaval in Charlottesville. By the time Daugherty and Conover joined up, however, they were also taking on some commercial print jobs.
“Nobody else could do that work, and we got into it fairly cheaply and ended up doing a lot of university work,” says Conover. “Then it started to be economically viable. Then we fell in with Chief and Ann Gordon, and we realized it was a business and not a terrorist operation or an idealist operation.”
By the time of that realization, most of the original anarchists had melted away. Daugherty and Conover bought the back half of the old automotive building from the Gordons for $18,000, moved the operation downtown, and renamed it Papercraft Printing.
Vinegar Hill Theater opened in 1976, just as the pedestrian mall was about to be completed. You could see the films of Billy Wilder, Howard Hawkes, Bergman, Huston, the French and Italian New Wave, Altman. It brought a dollop of urban sophistication to the newly-opened mall, a bright red cosmopolitan cherry on top of what was still the plain vanilla of an old Virginia Main Street. “Charlottesville itself didn’t have that sparkle, that edge that said ‘Let’s have new, let’s have different’,” says Ann.
But the Gordons were dedicated to supplying new and different. A few years later, they bought the old flop house just up the street and opened Fellini’s restaurant. By that time, their marriage was dissolving. After the split, Ann reverted to her maiden name, Porotti, and continued to run the theater. Chief presided over the restaurant in his white dinner jacket. A scene was starting to develop in downtown Charlottesville, but would take a while to mature.
“I think sometimes we were buoyed by our own narcissism,” Porotti says. “We wanted to start a movie theater like The Circle in D.C., or the New Yorker in New York, or The Brattle in Boston. I guess we thought that people would come because they had come in other places. By the early ’80s it was good days for us, but not so much for downtown. I used to ask my employees when they came in, ‘How’s it going out there?’ They’d say, ‘Tumbleweeds’.”
Paris, 1914
Ann Porotti, co-founder with her then-husband Chief Gordon of Vinegar Hill Theater, in 2003. The art house cinema was the first explosion of cosmopolitan culture in downtown Charlottesville. Photo: Jim Hall
In 1974, as Gordon and Porotti were moving their theater toward launch, and Black Flag Press was starting the transition to legitimate business, Sandy McAdams arrived in Charlottesville with 20,000 books in a railroad car. He had been through town briefly some years before, though he had no real connection to or feeling for it. But when he started looking for a permanent home for the book collection he had been amassing and selling out of a barn in the Hamptons, a friend of a friend showed him a photograph of a building for sale at the corner of Market Street and Fourth Street, NE in Charlottesville. He took one look and said: “That’s it.”
There’s a great Yiddish word that describes people like him. Edward “Sandy” McAdams is a macher. It means “someone who gets things done, makes things happen.” But it can also carry a suggestion of being overbearing, a bit too much. I’ll leave it to those who know McAdams to decide whether that shoe fit him back in the ’70s. For certain he was a big, bristly personality in a heavily bearded, well-knit, if undersized, package.
In the early ’60s he attended Vanderbilt, where he ran for a student senate office with, he reports, no political platform whatsoever. “That’s my wild expectations,” he says. “I thought I can do this. I ran for it. Did nothing, except I visited every single room and talked to people. A day or two before the vote, my friends and I broke into the administration building and hung a huge sign on the clock tower saying ‘It’s Time to Vote for Ed.’ I won by the largest plurality in the history of the school.” But by the end of the year, Vanderbilt had kicked him out of school. Why? “It’s hard to say,” he says with a sly grin.
McAdams finished his undergrad degree at NYU, and he went on to finish all of a masters degree but the language requirement. He lived in the mid-’60s Greenwich Village of Dylan and Ginsberg, worked as a building super, and was introduced to the book trade by befriending some booksellers over on Fourth Street. He worked for a summer on Cape Cod unloading fish off the trawlers, an experience he wrote about for a State Department publication touting life in the United States-type slices of Americana. After NYU, he taught school for a few years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to stay out of the way of the draft. He and his first wife were tempted back to the States when his in-laws offered them a farm in the Hamptons, Long Island but that came to an end when his wife left for the West Coast with some guy on a motorcycle, and McAdams started looking for a place to move his bookstore.
McAdams opened Daedelus Books in 1975. With his personality as a magnet, it quickly became a hub for some of the edgier more interesting people in town, many of whom were looking to make things happen. One of those was Philip Stafford. Stafford was born in Georgia but had done most of his growing up in Richmond. He attended UVA as an undergrad, but after a couple of years of the drinking and road trip social life, he tired of the frat-centric scene and wanted to get away. He went to Ann Arbor for law school partly because he’d heard that the student progressivism was more well-established there. He had some eye-opening experiences, one of which had to do with the new politics of food.
The new politics of food that developed in the 1960s led Philip Stafford to co-found the C&O—and to a lifelong interest and career in food and wine. Photo: Amy Jackson
Younger generations may hate it, but it’s just a bald, inescapable fact that baby boomers started everything first. The foodie movement got its earliest start in the late ’60s as back to the land and political activism combined to take on factory farming and convenience foods. In Ann Arbor, Philip Stafford caught the bug. “The book that made a tremendous impression on me was Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe,” he says. “It was published in 1971 and I read it shortly after that. It contributed to my early interest in food, which in turn led to a career in food and wine. This was primarily a book with a political argument, but it was also a cookbook. Lappe argued that meat production wasted environmental resources that led to food scarcity. Her tone of suppressed rage caught the mood of the times, and in the second part of the book she provided dozens of vegetarian recipes. I removed meat from my diet, and started to learn how to cook.”
In 1974, Stafford returned to Charlottesville, interested in trying out small town life. He worked as a lawyer doing legal research for a time, but pretty soon he started talking about his desire to open a restaurant. His counter-cultural leanings had already brought him into contact with McAdams: “I was walking around, and I walked past Daedalus. I had been looking for this Aldous Huxley book for a long time. And I walked into this room—I can picture this pretty well to this day—this sort of eccentric looking guy walked up to me with a beard down to his waist, and sort of put his face up to me and said ‘What do you want?’ I said ‘I’m looking for this book The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley,’ and he said “It’s right over your shoulder.’ And he just reached over and handed it to me.”
Sometime after, a friend mentioned that she had heard that McAdams had some interest in a restaurant as well. So he went back to Daedelus and re-introduced himself. Within a few weeks, they had bought a building and were setting about to bring haute cuisine to the Downtown Mall.
The building was a little shell down by the old railroad station on Water Street. It had housed a greasy spoon for a while, and had formerly served as a bunk house for railroad workers. But it had potential. They found wood from a barn in Crozet to build what became the bar downstairs. Bricks and more wood came from the porch of a house being torn down on West Main. They cannibalized vintage beadboard from the old bunkhouse to create an austere, minimalist space that became the fine dining restaurant upstairs. Stafford was to be the food and wine guy. “What I brought was hard work,” says McAdams. “Sandy had the vision,” says Stafford. “I think instantly when he saw that C&O building and the way it looked he understood that would be a place. If we could do the right thing inside the building, plenty of people would in fact come and find us from anywhere.”
Indispensable training came from Claudine and Walker Cowen. The Cowens were gastrophiles, she a chef from Brittany, he the editor of the University Press of Virginia. “They took us by the hand and helped us into the world of fine dining,” Stafford says. “Walker gave life lessons, and Claudine held small classes in her home for the first chefs at the C&O.”
When they opened the C&O Restaurant in 1976, they had arrived at a formula that coupled ongoing training from the Cowens with exacting standards of quality and service. Jason Bell, who became a waiter and later a maître d’ upstairs at the C&O, remembers that “we all got this incredible Ranger boot camp training in food. You can’t play at this. You absolutely had to be able to understand an entire menu and deliver it every single night. You had to pronounce the French correctly, and understand the cooking principles involved.”
The experience, according to Bell, could be life changing. “Every man goes through at least one experience where they find out what it means to work hard and to be serious and to be ethical about what you were delivering,” says Bell. “That’s what the C&O was to me.”
Lightning struck when New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne came through town to meet the writer Peter Taylor, and Taylor took him down to the C&O. Surprised by the quality that he found there, Claiborne gave the restaurant a glowing column in the Times. And more national recognition followed.
A lawyer by training and a scruffy bohemian had put the Downtown Mall on the nationwide culinary map. But as just as important perhaps as the culinary success upstairs was the bar culture that developed downstairs. “It was a pretty glossy crew down there,” says Bell. “Everyone was really, really smart. It was a Paris, 1914 kind of thing.”
Small ball
In 1970, before they settled in Charlottesville, became stalwarts in the local political scene and started Papercraft Printing, Virginia Daugherty and John Conover traveled America for a year in a converted bread truck. Photo: Courtesy of Subject
I used to make this snide joke when I first moved downtown in the late ’80s. Downtown shops, I would say, consisted of little boutiques run by the spouses of UVA professors with too much time on their hands and with money to burn. Not much of a joke, I know. Just a condescending piece of graduate student snark. I mention it with shame. Not my finest moment as a human being.
I don’t excuse it, but there’s a hint of something true in it. The truth is in that word boutique. There were starting to be a lot of them around—little antique shops, craft and art galleries, specialty shops with a narrow thematic or market focus. The scale was small, the vision was personal and the owner was often the person who greeted you when you walked through the door.
It turns out that was planned for and was the key to the mall’s ultimate success. Bill Lucy, a retired professor of urban planning at UVA, and a downtown resident himself, did a study a few years ago entitled Charlottesville’s Downtown Revitalization. Lucy talks about the approach taken by the city as playing “small ball,” a phrase that refers to the strategy in baseball of winning by focusing on small achievements. As Lucy puts it, you “activate the existing fabric with small investors and small entrepreneurs.” Instead of city block demolition, you get vintage buildings being rehabbed. Instead of chain superstores, you get bohemian creative types and mom and pop doing their thing.
Mom and pop are, quite literally, the folks who brought Williams Corner Bookstore into being. Michael Williams came here with his family in the ’60s, and went to Lane High School just as the school system was first resisting, then badly botching, efforts to fully integrate. Williams describes the demonstrations as he and 400 fellow students staged walkouts and demanded better treatment for their classmates as “one of the most empowering experiences of my life.”
In 1976, Williams’ parents decided to quit their library jobs and follow their dream to open a bookstore. They bought a building on Main Street that they had always been fond of, and Michael helped his family run the business. Besides becoming the best bookstore in town for paperbacks, fiction and poetry, the store’s reading series, which Williams inaugurated when a series at The Prism Coffeehouse closed down, became a signature literary offering downtown. For 20 years, until it closed in 1996 because of competition from the big chain Barnes & Noble, there existed an open conduit between the creative writing program at UVA and Williams Corner. Jason Bell, before he worked at the C&O, was a wunderkind poet, packing the house for readings at the store. Ann Beattie, Rita Mae Brown and a host of writers of national reputation gave readings there when they were in town. And students like Bell, as well as UVA faculty, had a generous local platform to bring exposure to their work. Like Anne Porotti and Chief Gordon, like McAdams and Stafford, the Williams family had “activated the existing fabric” to create a business that seriously upped the cultural texture of downtown life.
By 1981, at the old Miller’s Drug Store building two blocks away, Steve Tharp was busy doing the same thing. He had already started a restaurant on the UVA Corner, but that wasn’t the dream. “I had always fantasized about creating a jazz club kind of scene,” he says. “You know, everyone wants to be Humphrey Bogart in the corner with a dinner jacket. I had a thought that that might work here.” John D’earth, and members of his group Cosmology, became regular performers at the club, and momentum built that established Miller’s as the live music mecca downtown.
Steve Tharp opened Miller’s in 1981, preserving much of the look and feel of the original early 20th century drugstore. With acts ranging from rockabilly to blues to jazz, Miller’s pioneered the music scene on the downtown mall. Photo: Amy Jackson
With music, film, literary events and a few vibrant bars and restaurants, there was now the strong beginning of a scene to draw people to downtown. There is a direct line from Vinegar Hill Theatre to the Virginia Film Festival. There is a direct line from Daedalus Books and the readings at Williams Corner to Charlottesville’s vibrant used book culture and the Festival of the Book. There is a direct line from Papercraft to the Virginia Arts of the Book. There is a direct line from jazz at Miller’s to concerts at the Pavilion. And there is a direct line from the C&O to the explosion of fine dining that has taken place downtown since.
It would be way overstating it to claim that these pioneers saved the Downtown Mall. Every one of the people I interviewed for this piece mentioned numerous other individuals, businesses, organizations and strategic decisions that went into creating the mall’s success. From other early restaurants like the Hardware Store and Court Square Tavern, to imaginative developers who fostered creativity like Gabe Silverman and the Kuttners, to civic events and organizations like McGuffey Arts Center, Live Arts, First Night and Fridays after Five. And it would be wrong to suggest that they changed everything, because there are important remainders of old Main Street still operating and contributing tradition and depth to the fabric of the mall—like Timberlake’s Drug Store, Tuel Jewelers, The Young Men’s Shop and New Dominion Bookshop.
But what they did was definitive. They pioneered downtown as an intellectual and artistic center—as the anti-university, as a place for fringe, disaffected creatives to live, work and play, and thrive. It was their bohemian sensibilities, combined with the vision of Charlottesville planners, and the transitional, underdeveloped nooks of real estate on the mall that combined to make that new version of downtown Charlottesville possible.
At the start of a new academic year, it’s inevitable that some students mourn their summer vacations and others feel happy to have something to do. Either way, going back to school can be a stressful time for both students and parents. Who’s picking Jacob up from football practice? And how much did Jessica’s scientific calculator cost!? In this year’s Back to School issue, you’ll find tips and tricks for managing both you and your child’s busy schedule, new technology you can expect to see in the classroom this year (hint: laptops!) and which teacher is bound to have all the kids clamoring for a seat in her classroom. Plus, we’ll show you just how much school supplies are weighing on your bank account and how those items and costs differ across city, county and private schools. There’s a lot to consider as you say goodbye to summer and hello to another busy school year, but we’re rooting for you.
Laugh and learn
Jennifer Horne, a teacher at Charlottesville High School, discovered her passion for teaching long before she had the degree to prove it. Photo: Jackson Smith
A model teacher recognized
Entering her eighth year of teaching at Charlottesville High School, Jennifer Horne proves that you’ll never work a day in your life if you love what you do. To CHS administration, faculty and students, the ninth grade teacher has earned her role model status with improv classes, by sponsoring the hip-hop and freestyle club and introducing a program that has been adopted by teachers nationally.
Before beginning her teaching career at CHS, Horne studied theater as an undergrad at James Madison University. After graduation, she moved to Atlanta for 10 years, where she owned a local theater troupe and, during the latter half of her time, taught improv classes for at-risk kids, who impressed her with their thoughtful and funny improvisations. Horne says she had no idea that this would help her discover exactly what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
“I found that I like teaching even more than I like performing,” Horne says, and consequently, she went to graduate school at UVA and earned a master’s degree in secondary education. Now teaching English, public speaking and improv at CHS, Horne says she’s studying her class rosters and is excited to meet her new students.
She hasn’t forgotten theater, though. Along with teaching improv to ninth graders, who, she says, have wonderful senses of humor and who “want to be so big, but they’re still kid enough that they dig it,” she continues to practice improv with the Bent Theater Company, which she started in Charlottesville.
Horne’s claim to fame is the incorporation of “unleveled” classes at CHS, which contain a mix of students of all success levels, where the class can be completed for academic or honors credit. If students are reaching for the honors credit, though, they are required to do additional coursework during the year.
“I have shaken a lot of hands and kissed a lot of babies,” Horne says about getting the unleveled model adopted at CHS. The main challenge was reassuring parents that unleveledclasses would be challenging for their children,but overall, she says they’ve been “amazingly successful.”
Horne and her colleague, Nicole Carter, gave a presentation on unleveled classes at the National Convention for Teachers of English and now, she says teachers from all over the country e-mail her for lesson plans.
As for another great teaching victory, Horne and many other teachers and administrators are excited that standardized testing could be on its way out. “Multiple choice stops kids from questioning and instead asks kids to answer,” she laughs. “It’s weird.”
New gadgets
Laptops issued to city and county students
At the start of the 2015-2016 academic year, a slew of new technologies are trickling into city and county schools. This year, one common gadget is being handed out across the board.
A pilot last year at Walker Upper Elementary School has encouraged city school officials to assign Chromebooks, which are basically just budget laptops, to all students in grades three to 12, according to Beth Cheuk, community relations liaison for Charlottesville City Schools.
“Obviously, each school will have its own policies about whether students bring the devices home,” she says, “since a third-grader is different than a high-schooler.”
In the county, all middle and high school students will be issued Lenova laptops, says Albemarle schools spokesperson Phil Giaramita.
“Students will be able to use the laptops in their homes to conduct research and collaborate with their peers on projects,” Giaramita says. As a part of a pilot program, some fourth and fifth graders will have access to these laptops, as well.
City schools are further exploring Canvas, a web-based learning management system where teachers can post all of their class content in one place, and students can use an electronic calendar that shows every class’ assignments and due dates. A virtual drop box on the site allows students to turn in their homework online. Parents can create an account, too, to keep an eye on their child’s progress. In the county, teachers continue to use a similar online program called Blackboard.
In both regions, teachers use smart boards, or interactive white boards with Internet capabilities, in their classrooms across the division, though Giaramita says county schools are seeing less value in these boards now that most students are issued their own laptop.
And at Charlottesville High School, a three-year renovation of school-wide science labs is coming to an end with the upgrade of nine lab rooms with high-tech work stations and the incorporation of what Cheuk calls an “age-old tool:” sunlight. She says the formerly windowless rooms will now be day-lighted. Just last year,CHS debuted the Sigma Lab, which Cheuk describes as a suite of labs and work rooms that support engineering, science and the integration of new technologies across a variety of disciplines.
Albemarle County High School has undergone renovations, too, as some lockers have been replaced by laptop charging stations, which include benches for sitting and outlets for charging computers on each side.
Also in the county, bus drivers’ iPods are being replaced with tablets, which will be used to track time and manage students. In the future, the tablets will be used to make transportation more efficient, according to Giaramita.
In what could be the most beneficial advancement for families, county schools are continuing with the installation of fiber optic cables that will improve broadband services among school facilities and eventually bring high-speed Internet availability to more students’ homes.
While some parents may encourage these cool new gadgets, others would prefer going back to a time of loose leaf paper and graphite pencils. But at city and county schools, there’s no escaping the digital age.
Pencils and flash drives and glue, oh my!
How much do back-to-school supplies actually cost?
There’s nothing quite like back-to-school shopping. New shoes, freshly sharpened pencils, planners that will totally get used this year (no really, for real this time), glue sticks that haven’t hardened yet. But as kids transition from elementary to middle school, and from middle to high school, those supplies lists start getting a little longer and a little more expensive. Curious as to how back-to-school costs compare for families at city, county and private schools, we took a look at the lists for sixth graders at Walker Upper Elementary, Henley Middle and St. Anne’s-Belfield schools.
Overall, the lists for incoming sixth grade students look pretty similar. You’ve got your standard three-ring binders, notebook paper, pencils, erasers, highlighters. But across the board, teachers expect their students to invest in USB flash drives and earbuds, both of which start around $10 on Amazon. And some schools are particular about specific brands, like Crayola colored pencils and Mead five-star three-subject notebooks.
Teachers in public schools also ask families to invest in items for the classroom: Walker requests hand sanitizer, two boxes of tissues, disinfectant wipes and a box of plastic baggies from each student, and Henley asks for a box of tissues per student. The STAB list is divided into three categories: items to be provided by the school, items for parents to purchase and items students should have at home. STAB provides three-ring binders, notebook paper, pencils, pencil pouches and dividers, and expects parents to invest in Expo markers, glue sticks and a scientific calculator.
According to standard costs at stores like Walmart and Target, here’s how much sixth graders are expected to spend at three different schools.
The cost of going to sixth grade*
It used to be that all you needed supplies-wise to start a new school year was a notebook and a few pencils. As you can see from the lists below, times have changed. Oh, and don’t forget the fancy L.L. Bean backpack with your kid’s initials embroidered on the outside pocket ($29.96-$139) and a new lunchbox because last year’s still smells like peanut butter.
Henley
Composition books: $12
3-ring binder: $3
Notebook paper: $4
Dividers: $3
Pencil pouch: $3
Colored pencils: $5
Pencil sharpener: $2
Glue and glue sticks: $6
24 No.2 pencils: $6
Pencil cap erasers: $3
Highlighter: $2
Scissors: $3
Tape: $2
Earbuds: $10
USB drive: $10
Pens: $4
Tissues: $2
Total: $80
Walker
Binder: $3
Paper: $4
Dividers: $3
Pencils: $8
Erasers: $3
Colored pencils: $5
Highlighters: $2
Earbuds: $10
Flash drive: $10
Hand sanitizer: $2
Tissues: $2
Disinfectant wipes: $2
Plastic baggies: $3
Expo markers: $3
3-subject spiral notebook: $8
Pocket folders: $6
Total: $74
St. Anne’s-Belfield
Composition notebooks: $5
Glue sticks: $3
Expo markers: $3
French dictionary: $8
Flash drive: $10
Scientific calculator: $15
Notebook paper: $4
Graph paper: $4
Index cards: $2
Scissors: $3
Ruler: $1
Dictionary: $5
Total: $63
*Rounded costs according to walmart.com.
Back to reality
The school-year evening hustle
As the parent of one elementary and one middle schooler, I have officially transitioned from eagerly anticipating the start of school each fall to dreading the crush of schedule complications that the change in season brings. Summer is so comparatively relaxed with its less structured days and less urgent bedtimes—and, of course, its lack of homework, a reliable source of school-year drama in our house. Especially on days when I work from home, I feel I am stockpiling strength from 7:30am to 2:30pm to brace me for the onslaught of driving, bickering, dinner prep, nagging and multitasking that comprise 2:30 to 8:30(-ish).
It’s easy to feel isolated in the swirl of your own family’s chaos, so I reached out to three local moms with a short questionnaire about the rhythm and routines of their school-year evenings.
In reading their responses I felt reassured that I was not alone in finding afternoons and evenings challenging, and I even picked up a couple of tips and strategies for easing the pain.
Mom is the one in school
Kathyrn Murray is the one who has to worry about getting her homework done and have time for husband Jack, while tending to Latham and John, who aren’t in school yet. Photo: Amy Jackson
Kathryn Murray is the hardworking parent of 2-year-old Latham and 3-month-old John. Her husband Jack works full-time, and Kathryn is pursuing a degree in nursing, so she’s the only person in their family who currently has homework. And although Latham has taken art and tumbling through Charlottesville Parks & Recreation, his extracurricular activities are still light.
But evenings with two kids aged 2 and under present plenty of other challenges. As Kathryn puts it, the evening rush to eat dinner, clean, spend time with Jack when he gets home and also try to get Latham to bed at a reasonable hour “is the most hectic time of the day.”
She has some tricks up her sleeve, however, including having an afternoon outing or walking to the park, which helps a lot during the after-nap time frame when Jack gets home. She also includes Latham in dinner preparation, which “helps to keep him calm and occupied,” she says. A couple of times a week the family switches up cooking with takeout or dinner with Jack’s family. Latham is in bed between 8 and 8:30pm, while baby John heads to bed around 10pm with his parents.
Elementary extracurriculars
Nichole Rustin-Paschal and her husband Marlin try to keep up with 8-year-old Akil’s two to three extracurricular activities a week. Photo: Amy Jackson
Writer and lawyer Nichole Rustin-Paschal and her husband Marlin have an 8-year-old son named Akil who attends Venable Elementary. Akil is a busy guy, participating in two to three extracurriculars a week, including clubs at school, tae kwon do, soccer or swimming and, coming soon, piano.
Nichole shoulders after-school activity transportation and overseeing homework time, which happens at the dining room table or (and this made me smile in recognition) sometimes Akil will sit on the floor. She also makes dinner three to four times a week, while Marlin takes the lead one or two nights, and they head out for dinner or grab takeout for the remainder. Nichole says that not relying on all the excellent takeout or eating out for dinner is one of the family’s challenges. Akil winds down after dinner with bathtime and reading, and heads to bed around 8:30 or 9pm at the latest.
Nichole shares this excellent advice for evening parenting strategies: “The best thing for me to lower stress is to give Akil a clear plan about what’s on tap for the day and talk through with him what that means in terms of when he’ll have his snack and break, and what time we have to leave for places. If Akil understands the plan and is on board, then typically, we have a better afternoon and evening. I also have to recognize when he’s tired and provide space for him to relax.”
The creative life
Two-year-old Lucien is the only one in Megan and Heath Hillary’s household without extracurricular activities, while 15-year-old Inigo participates in theater, government and architecture. Photo: Amy Jackson
Visual artist Megan Hillary and her husband Heath straddle the age divide with 15-year-old son Inigo, who attends Charlottesville High School, and 2-year-old son Lucien. Although Lucien doesn’t yet participate in after-school activities, Inigo more than fills his time with theater from three sources: Live Arts, CHS or Gorilla Theater Productions. And because he’s interested in pursuing architecture, he takes part in the after-school Architecture, Construction and Engineering program. There’s Youth Council, the teen arm of City Council and, most recently, he’s involved at the Ix Art Park.
Megan and Heath split the transportation needs, “depending on who’s nearby and available,” she says. The family generally cooks at home, and everyone participates in dinner prep except for Lucien. “We all have dishes we’ve perfected, and there are family favorites we request regularly,” says Megan. “Sometimes two of us pair up, most often it’s one of us solo.” Bedtimes are enforced, and age appropriate.
And while Megan acknowledges the difficulty of finding time for it all because “we’re all in the arts and we always have something going on,” she also recognizes the importance of creative outlets. “To manage stress overall, we strive to ensure we’re all pursuing something we thrive on, however small. Something that feeds our souls, away from the periodically high-anxiety demands of work and school.” Words to live by.
Kathyrn Murray is the one who has to worry about getting her homework done and have time for husband Jack, while tending to Latham and John, who aren’t in school yet.
Nichole Rustin-Paschal and her husband Marlin try to keep up with 8-year-old Akil’s two to three extracurricular activities a week.
Crown jewels
LeiLei Secor is paying her hefty UVA out-of-state tuition with proceeds from her jewelry business. Photo: Martyn Kyle
UVA second year juggles school work with her own jewelry business
Time management is tough for a lot of college kids. You’re away from home for the first time, and suddenly you don’t have teachers and parents breathing down your neck, reminding you to turn in your homework and setting curfews. Adjusting to a free-form college existence is challenging enough, what with trying to balance your newfound freedom and social life with that whole going-to-class thing. Now imagine making that transition while also running your own business.
LeiLei Secor, a UVA second year from upstate New York, did just that. Secor was only 16 when she sold her first piece of handmade jewelry on Etsy in the summer of 2012, and since then she’s made sales nearly every day. Oh, and she’s raked in upwards of $100,000. Ironically enough, the first piece she listed on Etsy hardly generated any attention.
“I listed my first bracelet and that didn’t sell,” Secor says. “None of my bracelets sold the first week. So I taught myself how to make wire jewelry, and I sold my first piece of wire jewelry the week after I had started.”
Secor says this was a crucial first lesson in adaptability when it comes to running a business. If something doesn’t work out the way you planned, try a different route. The macrame and beaded bracelets she’d enjoyed making since 10th grade didn’t seem to make an impression on the market, so she switched gears and learned to make delicate pieces of jewelry out of wire. Her bestselling items are simple wire rings, which feature shapes like hearts and music notes or the word “love” in cursive. Knuckle rings, which sit between the fingernail and middle knuckle, have become popular, too.
“There’s definitely more to it than just making it and selling it online,” Secor says. “You have to consider what the trends are, and how to market it so it’ll stand out amongst all the other listings.”
Unsurprisingly for a 19-year-old entrepreneur who’s been running her own business since high school, Secor plans to apply to the McIntire School of Commerce. If that doesn’t work out, her backup plan is studying economics and foreign affairs, but business is what makes sense to her.
“I’ve always been interested in the whole idea of start-ups, running your own business and being creative with it,” Secor says. “I really like the creativity behind it, and I think there’s an endless amount of opportunity in business. It’s something you can make to reflect your own personality, really take it and run with it if you’re passionate about it.”
As for how she manages it all, Secor says she genuinely loves the five or six hours a week she spends sitting down to create pieces with her own two hands that other people will wear and enjoy. It gets tough around the holidays, she says, what with the influx of orders coming in around the same time as finals, and she doesn’t expect it to get any easier in the coming years.
“I think I’ve learned a lot from the last year in terms of time management,” she says. “Hopefully as it becomes more difficult I’ll be able to adapt more easily.”
For more information about Secor and her jewelry, check out designedbylei.com.
–Samantha Baars, Laura Ingles and Miller Murray Susen
