Justice fir all: It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Keep that in mind as you hold on to tradition from afar and watch Charlottesville’s Grand Illumination Holiday Concert remotely this December. Performers from around the region, including the Charlottesville High School choirs, Odyssey of Soul, and Rattlebag, take the Paramount stage during a TV broadcast co-hosted by NBC29’s Kasey Hott and Andrea Copeland-Whitsett. At the end of the night, officials will flip the light switch on our locally sourced tree with a crowdsourced name: Spruce Bader Ginsburg.
Friday12/4, airing on CW29 at 6pm and NBC29 at 7pm.
NBC29's Jennifer Von Reuter and Matt Talhelm will soon be working for Gray Television.
The local broadcast landscape underwent a major shift Monday when Gray Television announced it was buying legacy station NBC29 for $12 million—and unloading the stations it started here as the Newsplex 15 years ago.
Gray, the third largest broadcast group in the country, has had its eye on NBC29 “forever,” says Gray VP Kevin Latek.
And because of federal regulations, Gray is selling CBS19, ABC station WVAW, Fox WAHU and MeTV to Lockwood Broadcasting for $25 million, says Lockwood president Dave Hanna.
NBC29 was Charlottesville’s first TV station, founded by Harold Wright, who’s still general manager, Bob Stroh and attorney Lloyd Smith. It went on the air as WVIR in 1973, and was acquired by Florida-based Waterman Broadcasting in 1986.
Its founder, Bernard Waterman, passed away in 2017 and his widow, Edith Waterman, decided to sell the privately owned station. Gray president and CEO Hilton Howell went to UVA, and he told Mrs. Waterman, “Gray’s the right station to buy NBC29,” says Latek.
Gray started the Newsplex in 2004. “When you start a station, you have to be more scrappy,” says Latek. “We own a lot more stations like WVIR than start-up stations. It took 15 years to get up to speed.”
WVIR has the ninth-highest all-day ratings of NBC affiliates in the country, and once the sale closes, Gray will own nine of the top 10 NBC affiliates in the country, according to a Gray release.
Lockwood has acquired other stations Gray had to divest when it bought Raycon Media for $3.6 billion in 2018. “When we had to divest, we thought [Lockwood] would do better for our employees,” says Latek.
“We’ve always coveted Charlottesville as a market,” says Lockwood president Dave Hanna. The owner, James Lockwood, is also a UVA grad. “There are few opportunities you get to come into a market insulated from the economy” with a university, he says. He expects “the political season will be strong,” and Charlottesville is near Lockwood’s Richmond operations headquarters, he says.
“We started conversations with Gray six or seven years ago,” says Hanna. “We always told ‘em if the stations didn’t fit their model, we’d be interested.”
CBS19 will be Lockwood’s ninth station, and Hanna says viewers won’t see any changes, nor will employees see any layoffs. “None,” says Hanna. “It’s not our tendency to trim stations.”
NBC29 uses reporters and camera men to cover stories, while Gray reporters do their own camera work. Latek says there will be no layoffs “at this time.” But “there will be some changes.”
Because of its size, Gray has economies of scale that Waterman couldn’t afford, says Latek, and the station will see better technologies and graphics.
“What they’re doing right now is what we wanted,” he says.
The sale is expected to close in the second or third quarter of this year.
Attorney Lloyd Smith had wide-ranging interests from historical preservation to undergrounding utilities to the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
Submitted photo
Lloyd Smith, a founding partner of Tremblay and Smith law firm, Virginia Broadcasting Corporation, the parent company of what is now NBC29, and Guaranty Bank, as well as the North Downtown Residents Association and Park Lane Swim Club, died June 25 at age 85.
“He had a good life and died quietly with his family there,” says his son Garrett Smith.
Lloyd Smith served on myriad civic boards, including that of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, where he was instrumental in acquiring the former post office and federal courthouse for what is now the main library.
His purchase of a rundown Park Street manse, the Marshall-Rucker house, and restoration over 50 years resulted in its listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
When Lloyd and Ashlin Smith bought the house in 1960, there was no zoning, no architectural review board or preservation efforts, says Smith. Early members of the North Downtown Residents Association at times would buy an at-risk house to preserve it, he says.
Lloyd Smith served on pretty much every city zoning board—the planning commission, Board of Architectural Review and Board of Zoning Appeals. He also was a director of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and served as its president in 1982. And he was a member of the Monument Fund, which is suing the city for its decision to remove Confederate monuments from two downtown parks.
His obituary cites his “inexhaustible curiosity” on far-ranging topics. “He was interested in all kinds of things—architecture, undergrounding [utilities], the law or business,” says Garrett Smith.
Smith was a Marine who served in Korea before obtaining degrees from UVA. Submitted photo
He recalls learning attention to detail from his father, who “spent every weekend of my childhood” restoring the 1894 house. “It’s a process and we focused on details,” learning how to burn paint off wood or how to disassemble a window, says Smith. His father was thrifty and learned how to do the work himself. “That was his hobby.”
Harold Wright, general manager of NBC29, had obtained a license with fellow broadcaster Bob Stroh to start Charlottesville’s first television station, “but we didn’t have the business experience to do it,” says Wright. After teaming up with Lloyd Smith and Gerry Tremblay, “within six months they raised the money” and the station went on the air in 1973.
Smith had a deep interest in history—and in sailing. After he retired, he bought a house on the Chesapeake Bay where he sailed and did historic research. “He loved boating,” says Garrett Smith, recalling trips through Europe on canal boats traveling very slowly.
The Park Lane Swim Club was a neighborhood institution. Garrett Smith remembers the vintage pool empty during his childhood. When his thrifty father decided to restore it in 1980, he asked 10 neighbors to put in $1,000 for a 20-year lease for use of the pool. When the lease expired, the pool was incorporated as a nonprofit and now has a waiting list. The gatherings of the Friday Evening Philosophical Society there were “our Fridays after 5,” he says.
Lloyd Smith “was one of the most interesting men in Charlottesville,” says author Mariflo Stephens, who is a neighbor and member of the pool and philosophical society and Smith’s croquet club. “He was also one of the most generous men in Charlottesville. He could have kept the pool private.”
Garrett Smith says his father would most like to be remembered for the institutions that survive him, such as the bank, TV station, pool club and neighborhood association.
“That’s what he’d like as his legacy—these institutions that made the community better.”
A graveside service will be held at 10am Saturday, June 30, at Riverview Cemetery.
City Council candidates disclose campaign spending.
Show us the money
Getting on City Council can cost a lot more than what the part-time job pays, even after a raise in 2018 boosted the salary to $18,000 annually. So far, no one’s touched Mayor Mike Signer’s all-time high of $51K to get elected, but major cash has been raised this year in some cases. In others, not so much. Above are the City Council candidates’ numbers as of September 30, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Democracy dropouts
Click to enlarge.
Americans like to extol our exceptionalism for living in a free country, while conveniently skipping over the foundation of democracy: showing up at the polls and voting.
In that category, American citizens are lazy slobs.
Oh sure, we turn out in presidential election years, which nationally is a lackluster 50 percent. Locally, we do somewhat better, yet only mustering around 70 percent—barely a passing grade. And in a year where it’s merely local and House of Delegate races, which some argue are the most important, and fewer than one-third of the city and county’s 100,000-plus registered voters can be bothered to go to the polls.
Supposedly the 2016 election galvanized the country. Will that call for action be evident in the polls? We’ll find out November 7.
Officer-involved shooting
City police killed J.C. Hawkins Jr. October 13, after Hawkins allegedly sexually assaulted and robbed a 72-year-old woman in the 300 block of Riverside Avenue. Three officers found him on the Rivanna Trail, and say he pointed a handgun at them. Officers shot at Hawkins, he fell into the Rivanna River and “succumbed to his injuries,” police say. The officers are on administrative leave as Virginia State Police investigate.
Coach indicted
An Orange County grand jury indicted former volunteer softball coach Cathy S. Rothgeb, 57, of Stanley, on 34 counts related to sexual assault of children October 16. Rothgeb coached from the 1980s to early 2000s.
NBC29 boycott
Henry Graff’s interview with white nationalist Richard Spencer on the heels of “Charlottesville 3.0”—the October 7 tiki torch flash mob here—has irate viewers forming a Boycott NBC29 Facebook group with 122 members vowing to tell the TV station’s advertisers they don’t approve. Others simply changed the channel.
Gateway or gridlock?
Belmont Bridge photo by Jack Looney
City Council voted 4-1 October 16 to pass the conceptual design for the Belmont Bridge two-lane replacement project, with Bob Fenwick being the lone dissenter.
Borrowed & Blue shutdown
The Charlottesville-based tech startup that connected hundreds of couples to wedding vendors since 2011 abruptly announced October 16 that it would shut down all business operations, effective immediately.
Quote of the Week
Don Gathers. Photo by Eze Amos
“Someone set up a report card for city government. I believe this puts you on academic probation.” —Don Gathers at the October 16 City Council meeting
