Friday night lights
The high school football season is in full swing and that fat old guy with cameras that you see prowling the sidelines is probably me and this shot from Floyd County’s homecoming, I feel, says fall and football. Oh yeah. Floyd won the game over Galax, 48-0.
Eureka!
The rain came down in buckets Thursday — a real old-fashioned Southwestern Virginia gully-washer.
I didn’t see the approaching clouds. Had my head glued to a video monitor editing a documentary but a building-rocking rumble of thunder sent me to the window of the studio to see sheets of water falling from the skies.
This was the first hard rain since regrading my driveway with the new DR PowerGrader. How, I wondered, would the surface hold up under the pounding rainfall?
Lies, damn lies and politicians
My cell phone started ringing before I stopped for my morning coffee in downtown Floyd Tuesday. When I got to the studio, several voice mails awaited. Even more would be waiting at home. Amy said the phone started ringing early. She looked at the caller ID on the first call and saw it was The New York Times and went back to sleep.
Scary
The Floyd County High School student approached me while I was photographing a football game on Friday.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you the one who wrote the story in the paper about Mr. Farmer?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you have to make such a big deal over it?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, it’s not like it was rape or anything like that.”
Dan Farmer, a Floyd Elementary School teacher and a girls softball coach at the high school, resigned from both jobs after being charged with contributing to the sexual delinqency of a minor: Having consensual sex with a 15-year-old student at the high school
Road trip
Three a.m. Dark. Pitch black. I notice a fresh batch of leaves on the driveway illuminated by the headlights as I head the Liberty down the driveway and make the right turn onto Sandy Flats road.
Time for the annual trip to Washington. A four-and-a-half hour drive, if all goes well, from the peace and serenity of the mountains to the madness of the National Capital Region.
 Steve Jarding (right) and I do our road show at The Washington Center for Politics and Journalism (Photo by Terry Michael) |
Each year at this time I make the trek to DC for an appearance at The Washington Center for Politics and Journalism. Terry Michael, who runs the program, is an old friend as is Steve Jarding, an “adjunct lecturer in public policy” for the Kennedy School at Harvard who also ran Mark Warner’s successful campaign for governor a few years back. Steve and I have been doing this road show for the center to talk about political campaign management to a group of interns for Washington-based media and news organizations with bureaus in the city.
No traffic as I turn onto U.S. 221 north and head towards Roanoke. The Liberty’s headlights reveal a deer grazing on the side of the road as I cross into Roanoke County but the road itself remains traffic free all the way down Bent Mountain.
Traffic picks up as I near Roanoke. Even at 3:30 a.m. some people head for work in the city. A few cars as I turn off Brambleton Avenue and short-cut along Colonial Avenue to U.S. 220 and Interstate 581 at Wonju Street.
A little truck traffic on Interstate 81 as I head north. The Travel America truckstop in Troutville normally has gas for less than the going rate so I fill up there and pick up a 32-ounce of “Coffee Extreme,” a brew for truckers that claims double the caffeine of ordinary coffee.
Busy
Another busy week with very little time to post. I’ll try to catch up this weekend.
Some good press
The Crooked Road, and Floyd, are featured in Friday’s Washington Post Weekend Magazine. Included, of course, is a look at the Friday Night Jamboree, the County Store, County Sales and The Pickin’ Porch.
The print edition also featues a mention of Oddfellas Cantina.
Happiness is a smooth driveway
Our freshly-graded and newly packed driveway awaits the test of rain forecast for Tuesday. Our fingers are crossed.
The wild young days
Had business in Northwest Roanoke Saturday and finished up with some time to kill so I decided to venture across Williamson Road to see if I could find an apartment complex where I lived in the 60s.
Vista View opened in 1967 as one of Roanoke’s first, singles-only apartment complexes. Located just off the intersection of Williamson and Hershberger Roads, the two rows of apartments with a swimming pool and club house in the middle featured large balconies, bright colors and an "anything goes" attitude.
When it opened, most of the original residents came from the Roanoke-based flight crews of Piedmont Airlines – young, reasonably affluent singles who partied hard. I moved into apartment 201, overlooking the club house and pool.
At 19, I was the youngest resident in the complex but that didn’t seem to matter to the twenty-somethings who played poker all night in the club house or skinny-dipped in the pool at 3 in the morning.
They welcomed me into their nonstop life of parties, poker and debauchery. It was a young, carefree time where sexually-active young women took the pill and AIDs didn’t punish promiscuity.
But like the swinging sixties, the fun didn’t last. Residents of nearby houses complained constantly about the noise from all-night partying and the perceived trauma of their children sneaking peeks at naked, nubile young women frolicking in the pool in the wee hours.
Management cracked down: No swimming after hours, no all-night poker games in the club house, no nude sunbathing on the balconies. As leases expired, the fun-loving pilots and stewardesses of Piedmont moved on and so did I, renting another apartment in South Roanoke Apartment Village, another complex that catered to singles just off Franklin Road on the other side of town.
But life there wasn’t the same. Nobody skinny-dipped in the pool, the young women wore bathing suits when they sunbathed and if there was a poker game, I never found it.
After a few months, I left and settled into a house in Second Street SW – my last home before leaving Roanoke in 1969. Thinking about Vista View brought a smile as I crossed Williamson Road and turned left off Hershberger.
I wasn’t sure I could find the apartment complex after 40 years or even if it still existed. It did – sort of. The apartments are still there but one row of apartments are boarded up. Looks like a fire destroyed the unit I once called home.
The property is run down and a Confederate flag flies from the balcony from one of the remaining, occupied apartments. Airlines no longer base flight crews in Roanoke. USAir swallowed up Piedmont years ago and most pilots and flight attendants now are older, married and less inclined to party.
I got back into the Jeep and headed back across Williamson Road to I-581 and home, leaving another relic from the past behind. Ah, but the memories remain.
Mission accomplished
I had planned to wait until Saturday or Sunday to attack the driveway with the new DR Power Grader but I arrived home Friday afternoon with four hours to kill before having to cover a football game and decided to hook up the lawn tractor and give it a try.
Ninety-minutes later, my formerly rut-filled, undulating, washed out off-road trail was restored to a smooth, usuable driveway that any car could drive on.