Whenever I’ve written about racism in Floyd County and Southwestern Virginia, some attempt to justify bigotry by saying "well, you have to remember that a lot of older folks around here grew up in a time when racism was a part of society and that’s what they learned to believe."

I grew up in racist times and it taught me to hate racism. I never understood the hate and fear that racism spawns and I was taught that when you get older you are expected to get wiser and learn that old mistakes like racism are wrong. As a recovering alcoholic, I know from experience that you can change your ways and seek redemption for sins of the past.

Down in Rock Hill, SC, 72-year-old Elwin Hope Wilson (above) grew up a racist, beat up blacks, supported the Ku Klux Klan and hated just about everything that wasn’t part of his white supremacist ways.

Now Wilson is facing his mortality and recognizes that his racist past was wrong. Associated Press Writer Helen O’Neill wrote a stirring, emotional story about Wilson, a sad old racist struggling to redeem himself and come to grips with his past:

Elwin Hope Wilson leans back in his recliner at his home in Rock Hill, SC, a sad, sickly man haunted by time.

Antique clocks, at least a hundred of them, fill his neat ranch home on Tillman Street. Grandfather clocks, mantel clocks, cuckoos and Westministers, all ticking, chiming and clanging in an hourly cacophony that measures the passing days.

Why clocks? his wife Judy has often asked during their 49 years together.

He shrugs and offers no answer.

Wilson doesn’t have answers for much of how he has lived his life — not for all the black people he beat up, not for all the venom he spewed, not for all the time wasted in hate.

Now 72 and ailing, his body swollen by diabetes, his eyes degenerating, Wilson is spending as many hours pondering his past as he is his mortality.

The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants to atone for the cross burnings on Hollis Lake Road. He wants to apologize for hanging a black doll in a noose at the end of his drive, for flinging cantaloupes at black men walking down Main Street, for hurling a jack handle at the black kid jiggling the soda machine in his father’s service station, for brutally beating a 21-year-old seminary student at the bus station in 1961.

In the final chapter of his life, Wilson is seeking forgiveness. The burly clock collector wants to be saved before he hears his last chime.

Read the rest here. It’s worth your time. (Photo from The Associated Press. Used with permission)

The Richmond Times-Dispatch canned 29 reporters, editors, photographers and graphic artists in its news division this week as part of the elimination of 90 jobs at the state’s largest newspaper.

Among those fired were long-time friend and former FCHS classmate Randy Hallman, the deputy sports editor, and Rex Bowman, the paper’s Roanoke-based Southwestern Virginia reporter. They’re the latest friends to hit the streets in the ongoing purge of talent from newspapers around the country in these grim economic times.

Randy had 37 years at the T-D and a national reputation for his coverage of NASCAR. But such things don’t matter when bean counters run the show..

The failing economy, however, was not the factor over at the The Roanoke Times, where the powers that be forced reporter Tim Thornton to resign without, according to published reports, telling him exactly why he was getting the ax.

The New River Valley Voice reported on Wednesday:

Trouble began brewing for Thornton a week ago when he was taken off the Radford University beat. Thornton said he was then told “to not come into work this week” and his status would be discussed on Monday, April 6. But it was then requested that Thornton come into the office for a meeting yesterday.

Thornton was told by New River Valley bureau chief Chris Winston and Roanoke Times Editor Carole Tarrant that they had conducted an investigation that had turned up information that had caused them to doubt his judgment and objectivity. Thornton said he asked what information that was and Tarrant responded, “This is not a discussion.”

Thornton is an award-winning reporter honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Virginia Press Association. The Times, sadly, has chosen to not inform its readers of its actions.

(Updated on April 5, 2009)

My comments this week about bad school bus drivers and my encounter with drivers who don’t use their lights in rain and fog brought a flood of email and phone calls from concerned parents and others who have encountered too much danger on the road.

It rained most of Thursday and I did a count of cars driving up Main Street towards the stop light at the Intersection of U.S. 221 and Virginia Route 8.  In a 15-minute period, I counted 49 cars traveling both directions in the rain. Of those 49, 13 had their lights on. The rest drove without lights in violation of the Virginia law that requires lights be turned on when using windshield wipers.

In that same period, two cars drove the wrong way on the one-way street between the County Courthouse and the Bank of Floyd and four went against the one-way arrows in the Village Green parking lot. Seventeen cars didn’t use a directional signal when turning and 19 stopped well beyond the lines painted on the street to keep traffic back a safe distance so large trucks can make the turn at the stop light.

I counted 27 drivers talking on their cell phones while driving. Two women applied lipstick and four men typed on their Blackberries.

Jeff Blakley, a newcomer to Floyd County, says he has noticed a significant number of drivers don’t use seatbelts.

He wonders: "What’s up with that?"

Good question.

After 23 years of living in the Washington, DC, area, where traffic is among the worst in the nation and four years back here, I believe Floyd County has too many bad drivers who don’t belong on the road. For a county our size, we have too many single-vehicle wrecks involving cars that run off the road because drivers misjudge turns or get distracted by trying to dial a cell phone or fiddle with the radio.  We have a high rate of head-on accidents caused by drivers who stray over the center line and a day spent in General District Court on Thursday shows too many local drivers drive too damn fast.

After a day of rain, sun bathed the landscape beneath blue skies Wednesday afternoon as I arrived home from the studio. Such a beautiful late afternoon should not be wasted so I pulled on a pair of riding boots, fired up the Harley and headed out for a ride.

Took Poor Farm Road over to Franklin Pike, turned left and headed for the Blue Ridge Parkway. Turned south as some steam rose off the drying road. Stopped briefly to let a half-dozen young does cross the road and proceeded on.

I topped a hill near Smart View and ran head-on into a wall of fog: Not light fog but thick soup, hanging over the road like a soaked blanket. Water beaded up on the bikes windshield and streaked the gas tank. I slowed from 45 to about 20 miles-per-hour and navigated carefully through the shroud of grey moisture.

Suddenly, a car, halfway across the yellow line, came out of the mist. As happens all-too-often in Floyd County, the driver ran without headlights. I veered to the side of the road as the errant vehicle passed within about 10 inches. The words that came out of my mouth were neither polite or printable here.

The fog cleared as I approached Shooting Creek Road and it looked clear up ahead so I stayed on the Parkway: A mistake. A mile later I was back in soup with visibility down to just a few feet. Two more cars without headlights passed but at least they were on the right side of the road.

I turned off on Virginia Rte. 8 at Tuggles Gap and leaded north towards Floyd, still in thick fog. It cleared, finally, near Canning Factory Road and it was sun and blue skies the rest of the way into town. During that brief ride, I encountered more than a dozen cars and pickup trucks and only two had their lights on.

As I headed out of Floyd on U.S. 221 I could see another fog bank closing in. By the time I got home the sun disappeared behind the encroaching grey mist. A thick shroud of dense fog still hangs over Chateau Thompson this morning.

Exactly 40 years ago, at 6:00 a.m., I wheeled my Ford Torino off Elm Avenue and onto I-581, leaving Roanoke and Southwestern Virginia for a new reporting job with a newspaper in Illinois.

I left behind a $105 a week job with The Roanoke Times for a $160 a week gig at The Alton Telegraph in a Mississippi River town just upstream from St. Louis.

The Times had been the second step in my fledgling career as a journalist. My four years there were exciting, educational and often controversial. The powers-that-be weren’t sad to see me leave. My four years at The Times were marked by clashes with editors and problems caused by my young, often out-of-control ego. I won some awards and that just inflated my young, immature head even more.

In Illinois, I would find freedom I didn’t have in Roanoke. Elmer Broz, the city editor at The Telegraph when I arrived, was a throwback to old-style Chicago journalism. He liked to raise hell. I fit right in.  He also brought my ego down to earth — more than once. I always deserved the reality check.

Leaving Roanoke and Floyd County behind became a turning point, a break from the safety and comfort of having family and childhood friends nearby. I arrived in Alton on a cold, rainy afternoon on April 2, 1969 and stayed for nearly 12 years, leaving on February 27, 1981 to head for Washington, DC. My first marriage ended in Alton and, after a few years of single life in the swinging 70s, I met and married Amy. We will celebrate 30 years together later this year.

Alton provided a stability my life lacked to that point. The dozen years there marked the longest I had — up to that point — lived in any one place in my life. I had spent my first five years in Florida — my birthplace — then three years in Floyd followed by five years in Farmville, four years back near Willis and then four years in Roanoke.

When Amy and I arrived in Washington in 1981 we had no idea we would stay for 23 years, living the entire time in the condo we first rented and then purchased in Arlington. Yet Washington became more of a base, a place to return to after many trips to places around the country and world. My work took me to many far-off places and my last passport had extra pages added to it.

Life on the road takes its toll and when it came time to make the decision to stop living out of a suitcase we considered a number of places to locate in what would be our final move.  Southwestern Virginia wasn’t even on the list.

But a return here to do a documentary on the Friday Nite Jamboree rekindled a love for the Blue Ridge Mountains. We bought land, eventually opened a studio in The Jacksonville Center and split our time between Arlington and Floyd counties before selling the condo in 2004 and buying a home.

Life, for me, came full circle. I write and shoot photos for The Floyd Press, the weekly that spawned my journalism career in 1963 when then-owner Pete Hallman took a chance on a 15-year-old kid who thought he had what it took to be a newspaperman. This web site is one of the featured blogs on the New River Valley home page of Roanoke.Com — the site for The Roanoke Times.

My suitcase sits unused in a closet. My passport lies in a drawer somewhere. I’m home…and I’m staying put.

However, I’m still raising hell. Some things don’t change.