Stone Blue Airlines’ Flying Circus FPV Festival started four years ago in Wise. The Southwest Virginia town is four hours away by car from Stone Blue’s Lynchburg headquarters, but that didn’t deter Stone Blue’s owner, Jeremiah Guelzo.
He says a group of people in Wise were interested in his aircraft, and the location was perfect for the event. “When you’ve got somebody that’s interested and wants you to be there, I want to go down there,” he says.
The next festival will be May 18-21 in Covington, which sees big potential for Guelzo’s small aircraft.
Despite its name, Stone Blue isn’t an airline. The company builds and sells all sorts of drones and other remote-controlled aircraft.
Most of these aircraft differ from other remote-control planes in one very important way. They have onboard video systems and transmitters.
Pilots on the ground wear goggles showing them what the plane-mounted cameras see just as if they were on board.
“This is remote-control aircraft with a video system,” Guelzo says. “That’s all it is.”
But that makes all the difference. These aircraft don’t have to always be visible to the pilots, so they can race in an old iron mine illuminated with colorful LEDs, as they did at the Flying Circus last year in Covington, or in an old school building, as they plan to do this year.
“It’s the NASCAR of the future, is what they say,” Marla Akridge says. “After I’ve seen it and watched it on TV and experienced it, I think they’re right.”
Akridge is executive director of the Alleghany Highlands Economic Development Corp. She got involved with drones when Steve Bennett, a member of the Alleghany County Board of Supervisors, bought one from Guelzo.
Last spring, 120 pilots came to the Flying Circus in Covington, traveling from as far away as Florida, California and Canada.
The event was “kind of dipping our toes into the water,” Akridge says. The biggest economic impact from the event was pilots staying at motels and eating at local restaurants. This year, Akridge anticipates a lot of spectators.
The Flying Circus isn’t the end of Covington’s plans for drones. Akridge says the goal is for the area to attract people interested in learning how to fly drones — not just for pleasure, but also for photography, forest management and other uses.
During last year’s event, Akridge worried that some people might object to the traffic or the sound of drones buzzing overhead. While retrieving festival signs, she saw an older man walking toward her and braced for a complaint.
“He was so excited,” Akridge remembers. “He said, ‘When are they coming back?’”
The Lincoln Memorial University College of Veterinary Medicine is the newest vet school in Tennessee — and in Virginia. In fact, it’s the newest in the country.
While some of the school’s facilities are on the main LMU campus in Harrogate, Tenn., students get their hands-on training 12 miles away in Ewing, Va., at the DeBusk Veterinary Teaching Center. The campuses sit on either side of the Cumberland Gap.
“Pete DeBusk is the chairman of the board of trustees,” says John Dascanio, the vet school’s executive associate dean. “He’s a benefactor of the university and a great friend of the university.”
A Virginia native, DeBusk is the owner and chairman of DeRoyal Industries in Knoxville, Tenn. He has an Angus farm near Ewing, a Lee County community, and donated part of his property to the fledgling school. “That facility became sort of an ideal solution to where we could keep our animals,” Dascanio says.
LMU, a private university offering bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, was chartered in 1897. The vet school welcomed its first class of 87 students in 2014. It has just over 300 students in three classes now.
Those students spend about half their day on the Harrogate campus and the other half at the DeBusk center in Ewing. During their final year, they’ll also spend time with vets and at veterinary hospitals that have partnered with the school to give students real-world experience.
Before they enter that final year, Dascanio says, students deal with a variety of animals, ranging from household pets to beef cattle. While the majority of students will probably work in small-animal practices, they need to be prepared, Dascanio says, for the occasional goat or pot-bellied pig.
“We also want to open students’ eyes to all the possibilities out there,” Dascanio says. Students who grow up in suburbia may think of vets as small-animal doctors because that’s what they’ve seen. Introducing students to cows and horses may open up a new world, but most still end up in small-animal practices.
“I think a lot of people choose large-animal [practices] because it’s a lifestyle choice more than anything else,” Dascanio says. “They enjoy being around farm animals. They enjoy being around farmers. They want to contribute back to agriculture. That’s sort of a different goal in life.”
An economic impact study conducted before the first class entered the vet school defined its primary impact area as 14 counties in Tennessee, 10 in Kentucky and three in Virginia. In its first year of operation, the school was predicted to have a $16.6 million economic impact. That impact was projected to grow as the school grows.
“There aren’t many colleges in the country who can claim that kind of history,” says Hollins President Nancy Gray. “We have several of them in Virginia, but it’s unusual by national standards.”
The women’s college just outside of Roanoke approaches the milestone with no debt, a dozen-year string of balanced budgets, a large and growing endowment, and an apparently healthy relationship with young women seeking an education. The 234-member freshman class that joined the Hollins sisterhood last fall was the university’s largest in 17 years.
The next freshman class will be greeted by a new president. Gray, who will have been Hollins’ president for 12½ years when this semester ends, says this is “a natural stopping point” and “a great time to hand Hollins off in a strong position to my successor, Pareena Lawrence.”
Hollins’ board of trustees conducted a three-month search and in November chose Lawrence to be the university’s 12th president. She is provost and chief academic officer at Augustana College, a 156-year-old, 2,500-student liberal arts school in Rock Island, Ill. In a letter to the Hollins community announcing Lawrence’s selection, search committee member Alex Trower says, “Pareena embodies all that is a Hollins woman: smart, articulate, warm, energetic, caring, engaged and completely aligned with our mission.”
Judy Lambeth, who chairs the board of trustees and led the search committee, says, “We were looking for someone who is clearly committed to women’s education. That is what Hollins is all about. That is our mission. We still believe in that wholeheartedly.”
‘Prepared for anything’
Offering a liberal arts education to an all-female student body in small classes may seem out of step in this era of coeducation and high-tech training at ever-larger universities. But out of step doesn’t mean out of date.
“We believe so strongly in that core mission of liberal arts education and education for women,” Gray says. “But we also believe that an institution, in order to thrive, has to be in the world as it is today, because we function in a world that is constantly changing … And so, several years ago now, we recognized the need to diversify our student body and have done that successfully from a host of perspectives — racial, ethnic, socio-economic.”
Part of being in the world as it is today, Gray says, is preparing for the world as it will be.
“I mean, the reality is, technology is changing so fast, we can’t possibly prepare students with technical skills for the job market that are going to persist because they’re going to be out of date by the time they graduate or a few years later,” she says.
“However, if we can prepare them to think, to solve problems, prepare them with quantitative skills, prepare them to communicate effectively orally and in writing, prepare them to work effectively in teams, they’re going to be prepared for anything that happens in the job market, no matter how it changes … And employers are telling us that,” she says. “The liberal arts are maybe more relevant today than they’ve ever been, not less.”
That can be a hard sell for parents looking at a sticker price in the current academic year of more than $49,000 in tuition, fees, room and board at a school where English and studio art are among the most popular majors. “We try to connect the dots for them,” Gray says.
Alumnae network
No matter what a Hollins’ woman majors in, she has a chance to study abroad, participate in the university’s Batten Leadership Institute Program and become involved in undergraduate research. For parents worried about their daughters’ employability, the most encouraging aspect of a
Hollins education may be the network of its graduates willing to share their knowledge and experience with students.
Lisa Birnbach, author of “The Preppy Handbook,” recognized the importance of the Hollins’ alumnae network in a Vanity Fair article about women’s colleges thriving “in this era of post-feminism, gender fluidity and skyrocketing tuitions.” Of Hollins, Birnbach wrote, “The secret sauce is the intensely involved alumnae, who return to campus whenever they’re invited as mentors, and who provide internship opportunities to the students.”
During the most recent January term, Gray says, Hollins had 30 or more students in New York City; 30 or more in Washington, D.C.; about 50 in Roanoke and others scattered in other cities — all working with and learning from Hollins alumnae. The alumnae also offered programs on résumé writing, interviewing and other skills valuable for anyone looking for her first job after college.
“They’re sharing their experience with students and giving them feedback,” Gray says. “Our hope is these internships will turn into jobs.”
In addition to offering internships, alumnae return to campus every fall for the university’s Career Connections Conference. Classes are canceled so students can attend alumnae-led workshops ranging from what it takes to own and run a business to how to find an apartment in a strange city. When they’re not on campus or hosting students’ internships, many alumnae serve as career mentors and connect with students through Skype sessions.
Though some of these programs and emphases are relatively new, Hollins graduates have been finding success for some time. The first woman assigned to cover the White House for a television network, the founder of Emily’s List, the youngest woman to win the Man Booker Prize and the author of “Goodnight Moon” were all Hollins women. The university has produced four Pulitzer Prize winners and one U.S. poet laureate. Yet, perhaps because it has only 639 undergraduates, Hollins has remained, according to Birnbach’s Vanity Fair article, “a cozy place where everything is for the delectation of the undergraduate women who attend it.”
Lambeth, the board of trustees chair, agrees. “It’s tailored to you,” she says. “You come in, and you’re able to make that education fit your priorities. It’s just a unique place.
“I came in like a tangled-up puppet, like so many teenagers are,” she adds. “It didn’t take long before I realized that Hollins is helping me have these capabilities, maybe I should put them to use.”
Fewer single-sex schools
Perhaps the most surprising thing about a Hollins education is that it’s still available.
In 1857, Hollins founder Charles Cocke declared his school recognized “the principle that in the present state of society in our country young women require the same thorough and rigid training as that afforded to young men.” That was a fairly radical idea for its time.
During the next century or so, a growing number of people accepted Cocke’s position. Some of them even thought women should be allowed to get that education at the same schools as men.
As more colleges and universities became co-ed, single-sex schools became scarce. In 1970, Virginia was home to 11 women’s colleges. Now it has three. Sweet Briar College nearly closed in 2015, before being rescued from financial problems by a determined group of alumnae. Mary Baldwin University, also celebrating its 175th anniversary this year, plans to admit men to a residential program for the first time this fall, though it will be separate from the women’s college.
Raising money, retiring debt
Hollins has had its own financial troubles and confronted the specter of admitting men, but it has come to a very different place than either of its Virginia sisters.
In 2000, when debt was high, the endowment was shrinking and the campus needed repairs, Hollins solicited ideas from the university community and suggested that every possible solution would be weighed. Most of that community thought any solution but coeducation should be considered.
Gray became Hollins president in January 2005, stepping into an ongoing fundraising campaign aimed at retiring its debt and increasing the endowment. The publicly announced goal was $125 million. The campaign raised $161 million by 2010. The endowment had grown to $171 million by 2015.
Gray credits alumnae, faculty, trustees and “extraordinarily visionary donors,” people willing to give substantial amounts of money without getting a program or a building named after them in exchange.
Since retiring its debt in 2007, the university has been committed to staying out of debt, paying for renovations and other capital projects through fundraising rather than loans.
More than half the buildings on campus — including the theater, the student center, the humanities building, the dance studio and historic houses — have been renovated or updated since Gray took office. The university has added the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center and Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, drilled geothermal wells and is renovating the science building.
Being debt free relieves pressure, Gray says, but she and her leadership team agreed early on that a large endowment was critical.
“Those large endowments allow you to provide a measure of academic excellence for your students that exceeds what they can pay in tuition and fees,” Gray says. An ample endowment also allows “the institution to respond to great opportunities as they arise and to get through tough patches as they arise — both of which are inevitable in the life of any institution.”
To celebrate the university’s 175th anniversary, Hollins is appealing to key donors with a quiet fundraising campaign that had raised $44.5 million by August. In November, Elizabeth Hall McDonnell and her husband, James S. McDonnell III, pledged $20 million to Hollins’ endowment. It’s the largest gift in the university’s history. Gray says Hollins has received two $1 million commitments since then, and another donor has offered $5 million if the university can raise another $10 million before Gray leaves campus on June 30.
Graduate programs
Hollins has leveraged its academic strengths to create more income, too. “We believe strongly that our core mission is undergraduate liberal-arts education for women,” Gray says. “We also, though, have built out now an array of 10 co-ed graduate programs that build on our undergraduate strengths.”
Hollins’ first graduate program, in creative writing, was created in 1960 and may be the college’s biggest claim to fame. Most of the programs added since are related to writing — including playwriting, screenwriting and children’s literature. Hollins also offers graduate degrees in teaching, dance and liberal studies. Some offer summer residences on campus.
“In the summer, we become a residential co-ed graduate campus,” Gray says. That allows Hollins to get more use out of its on-campus facilities and to bring in visiting faculty. “That’s been an important part of our income, in addition to the undergraduate tuition and fees,” Gray says.
What’s made the programs work financially, Lambeth says, is they work academically. Instead of adding executive MBA or nursing programs, Hollins went with its strengths.
“We’re small, and I’m not sure we have the luxury of a big innovation funnel — of looking at, ‘Hey, here’s what’s making money in the market. Let’s go do it,’” Lambeth says. “In a weird way, sometimes having to act within your resources makes you really pay attention to what you’re doing. You can squander a lot of money if you have a lot of money.”
Lambeth sounds confident about Hollins’ future, although she acknowledges there will be challenges.
“I think running a university is an incredibly complex task,” Lambeth says. “People in the world underestimate the incredible complexity of an academic institution. I’ve been in Fortune 500 companies, and I can tell you a university is every bit as complex as that universe is.”
Gray has proved she can handle that complex job, Lambeth says, adding she believes the incoming president has that ability, too. “We’ve selected a leader capable of running a complex system at a complex time,” Lambeth says.
Like every Eagle Scout, John Tickle had to organize, supervise and complete a public service project. The habit stuck. It continues with his family’s Bristol-based company, Strongwell Corp.
“They’re super-involved in the community,” says Lennie Gail Mitcham, executive director of the Southwest Virginia Alliance for Manufacturing.
The company is so involved, Mitcham says, the narrative introducing Strongwell as the alliance’s “Manufacturer of the Year” was extra long.
“They’re very big on corporate citizenship,” Mitcham says, ticking off a long list of organizations, causes and services the company and its employees serve. Boys and Girls Clubs, the Boy Scouts and the Birthplace of Country Music are among the groups that have benefited from Strongwell’s involvement.
The company also promotes advanced manufacturing as a potential career for young people in Southwest Virginia through tours, internships and the support of groups such as YMCA Tech Girls.
“Innovation, corporate citizenship and advocacy,” Mitcham says, “They definitely hit the mark on all those things.”
Strongwell’s four plants produce tens of thousands of feet of structural fiberglass parts every hour, according to the company’s website, using a process called pultrusion. Pultrusion involves pulling liquid resin and reinforcing fibers through heated metal dies. Depending on the ingredients and dies used, the end product can range from studs and nuts to components for wastewater treatment facilities to other components that can be assembled into complete buildings.
Strongwell traces its roots to a Bristol factory that started building furniture in 1924. During World War II, Strongwell’s corporate ancestor switched from building radio cabinets to making parts for weapons.
In 1956, the company produced its first pultrusion plastic products, ladder rails. They are still an important part of the company’s product line.
That group now includes a variety of products, including power poles, bridge components and building panels that can withstand a shot from a .357 magnum or a projectile hurled by a 250 mph hurricane.
“After the Great Recession, we became a very diversified company,” says Tekai Shu, Strongwell’s social media and business development manager.
Since its inception, the company has gone through a number of ownership changes, moving from private to public and back to private.
It added plants and production processes until Tickle and his family gained ownership of Strongwell — Tickle worked at the company nearly 30 years before his family took full ownership — and focused its efforts on pultrusion.
Strongwell also focuses on promoting advanced manufacturing in a region known for coal mines, furniture plants and textile mills.
“There hasn’t been a real great focus on manufacturing within our region,” Shu says.
To change that, Shu says, Strongwell hosts 20 to 24 tours each year for middle school pupils up to MBA candidates, showing them the operations and job opportunities of advanced manufacturing.
With more than 650,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity, more than 10,000 square feet of lab space and a wide range of products to create and market, Strongwell needs workers on and off the factory floor following a variety of career paths. The company is blazing new paths in other ways, too. In a field stereotypically dominated by men and in a region stereotypically portrayed as overwhelmingly white, more than 60 percent of Strongwell’s workers are women and more than 20 percent are minorities.
QualiChem began business in 1989 as a blender of industrial cleaning and water treatment products, with eight employees serving customers in Virginia and the Carolinas.
Today, the company employs 77 people — 52 at its Salem headquarters. The company’s offices in Europe and China market its water treatment chemicals and metalworking fluids to customers — including Boeing and Pratt & Whitney — around the globe.
In October, the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce named QualiChem its Small Business of the Year. Companies in the running for the award are required to have a record of increased sales, employee growth, staying power, innovation and contributions to the community. QualiChem appears to have all the bases covered.
The privately-held company says its revenue grew more than 60 percent during the past five years.
“We have sustained a steady year-on-year rate of growth over the past 15 years, and we expect the steep growth curve to continue for the foreseeable future,” QualiChem President Glenn Frank said in a statement. “Our growth is driven by our management team’s focus on new product development, customer service and support for our distribution partners.
“We make a substantial investment in R&D to keep on the cutting edge of technology in our core businesses and have a program of continuous improvement in quality, delivery times and product consistency.”
The company also made a sizable investment three years ago, expanding its Salem headquarters, laboratory and manufacturing center by 70 percent and adding a 45-seat training and conference center.
In addition to developing its markets and working to stay at the forefront of its industry, QualiChem works with high school and university students interested in chemistry or manufacturing, offering internships to some and full-time employment to others.
Joyce Waugh, president of the Roanoke Regional Chamber, says QualiChem stood out among the winners in 11 small-business categories. QualiChem won the manufacturing category to earn its shot at the overall Small Business of the Year award.
“The Small Business Awards selection committee was impressed by QualiChem’s story of finding their niche markets and going from a small operation with mostly local sales to one of the fastest-growing cutting and grinding fluids manufacturers in the world,” Waugh says.
“They had a good history of growth as well as revenue,” she says, but that’s not enough. “You’re looking at sustainability. It’s the ones that have been around and weathered the recession and the things that come and go that really make the difference.”
Today’s college students may be more savvy than their predecessors, according to Jonathan Lee, a 1995 Roanoke College graduate and the college’s director of alumni and family relations.
Technology has made information readily available to current students, Lee says, and they are better at using that technology and taking advantage of other resources. They’re also more willing to ask for help. But today’s college students share at least one trait with virtually every college graduate who came before them. “I don’t think they realize how little they know,” Lee says.
That has become one more thing that the liberal arts college will try to teach its students. “We sort of came to realize students need as much guidance as possible to succeed in the real world,” Lee says.
Lee and his colleagues also realized Roanoke College’s alumni offered a ready-made network of people who could provide that guidance, so Lee — along with Director of Career Services Toni McLawhorn and Career Advisor Kelly Dalaski — developed a way to connect students with that network. The 175-year-old college’s Maroon Mentors program targets sophomores but also pairs juniors and seniors with alumni who’ve spent some time in the business world and are willing to share what they’ve learned.
Insight on a career Steve Devlin, a 1998 Roanoke College graduate, was hesitant when Lee suggested he become a mentor, but he relented. “I guess, as we talked about it more, it kind of hit me that these kids are coming out of school without a good idea of what the world is like,” Devlin says.
He also thought about how great it would have been if someone had done this for him, how much time he would have saved in developing his career. Ultimately, Devlin became a mentor to Luke McCollester, a sophomore from Rochester, Mass., who came to the college as an athletic training major.
McCollester says his first biology class convinced him he’s not a science person but he has always liked math. Now he wants to get an MBA, become a CPA and go into wealth management. “Maybe open my own business,” McCollester says. “I’ve always been interested in being an entrepreneur.”
McCollester’s time with Devlin has given him some insight into what that business is like. Devlin and five other people — one of whom is also a Roanoke College graduate — founded Market Square Advisors more than three years ago. The wealth management company contracts with Freedom First Credit Union as well as serving its own clients.
Roanoke College suggests that mentors meet with students at least two or three times a semester. Lee says ideally that would include an introduction session, a mock interview, job shadowing and possibly an internship.
With Devlin and McCollester, the process began with a meeting at Mac & Bob’s (a restaurant owned by a Roanoke College graduate). “We just went and grabbed a long lunch, and we just chatted,” Devlin says. “We just kind of went with the flow. “
“We kind of hit it off really well,” McCollester says. Devlin didn’t want to do things halfway, McCollester says. They discussed ways McCollester could use the skills he developed during a marketing and web design internship last summer to work on a project for Market Square Advisors.
McCollester says he shadowed Devlin, watching how he dealt with clients with very different concerns. The company deals in wealth management, McCollester says, but Devlin showed him, “You’re in the people-helping business.”
Since that first meeting, McCollester says, he and Devlin have communicated almost weekly, and McCollester expects that will continue. “I definitely think Steve and I will keep this relationship going,” McCollester says.
Helping two women Ellie Hammer, a 2010 graduate, has kept up her relationship with 2012 graduate Sara Sloman for more than four years. That connection predates the Maroon Mentor program. Sloman was an intern at the Merrill Lynch office where Hammer works. “It was a very rewarding experience,” Hammer says.
She helped Sloman with job shadowing years ago. Since then Hammer has assisted Sloman with interviews and other career challenges. Hammer was especially keen to help because she knew how difficult it could be for a woman to break into her business.
When she joined Merrill Lynch, she was the only female financial adviser in her office. Hammer’s childhood — she describes herself as a tomboy and a daddy’s girl with three brothers — prepared her for working with men. “A few of them, I think they’ll tell you I made them be my mentor,” she says. “I kind of bullied them into it.”
In addition to Sloman, Hammer is also mentoring Cassidy Drew, a sophomore from Atlanta. “I really like that I’m able to talk to somebody who’s in the business world,” Drew says, “just because there’s so much difference between the classroom and the real business world.”
She met with Hammer a couple of times last semester, including a mock job interview. Hammer says she wanted to go through that exercise before they got to know each other too well to make it more like a real interview.
Drew says the mock interview was very useful. She learned something about how she acts in that situation. “I fidget a lot,” she says. “It’s usually those little things you don’t notice until someone points them out.”
Drew’s parents have a consulting company that finds art for businesses to place in board rooms, reception areas and hotel rooms. Her parents work with several Fortune 500 companies, Drew says.
She likes the variety in that work. “Every project is something new and different,” Drew says, “and I really like that. “
Drew says she’s leaning toward a career in marketing, perhaps on “the creative side.” (She’s taking a graphic design class.) She likes having a mentor who works in finance because it’s “good to get different perspectives.”
Drew’s not sure about the immediate future of her mentorship because she is applying for a Rotary scholarship, which could mean she’ll spend a semester as an exchange student at the University of Oslo. She’s not completely sure about that marketing career, either. “I still have plenty of time to figure it out,” Drew says.
The mentorship will be even more valuable in her junior and senior years, Drew says, because she’ll have someone to help connect her with people in the working world and somebody to bounce ideas off.
Plenty of volunteers
Lee says the ultimate goal is for every student at Roanoke College to have a chance to have a Maroon Mentor to help them make those connections and discuss those ideas. The mentorship program was limited to business majors when it began two years ago. This academic year, the program was opened to all majors. Last semester, 42 of the college’s roughly 450 sophomores were in the program.
There’s been no problem finding potential mentors, Lee says. Whenever he travels for Roanoke College, graduates offer to mentor students. It sounds like a cliché, Lee admits, but he insists it’s true, “People here really care a lot about each other.”
And those mentors rarely have problems connecting with the students, Lee says. “I think part of it is we are a small school,” he says, “so there are a lot of commonalities, even if there are 10 or 15 years between them.”
Coaches and professors tend to stay at Roanoke College, Lee says, so mentors and students may have had the same classes taught by the same people.
Lee says studies and anecdotal evidence shows many companies are looking for employees who can think on their feet, exercise critical thinking and adjust to changing circumstances. In short, most employers prefer liberal arts graduates.
“They realize,” Lee says, “that a person with a liberal arts degree can take projects and run with them and be flexible.”
Even so, Lee says, the education available to students through Maroon Mentors can develop and amplify one very important lesson some students can’t absorb in a classroom. Mentors who’ve been in the working world know, and may be able to convince students that it’s okay for them to take a chance. It’s okay to fail. Rather than derailing a career, those experiences can be opportunities to learn and grow. “If you have someone mentoring you and guiding you, you feel a little more empowered,” Lee says.
Students and newly minted graduates are sometimes so focused and driven they aren’t prepared for the inevitable stumbles waiting in their career path.
“I think in today’s world there’s so much pressure on students.” Lee says. “What are you going to do? What’s that first job’s salary going to be?” Mentors can let them know, “Things will work out. Keep working hard. Keep moving.”
Students can learn other important lessons from their mentors, too. Lee says one reason the program begins with sophomores is so students can get a close look at what their chosen field is really like. If they’ve picked the wrong path, it’s better for students to learn that early in their academic career rather than the second semester of their senior year.
Students and mentors both can profit from these relationships, but Devlin says the potential benefits extend far beyond that. “I think it’s important if you care about what’s up and coming in the workforce,” he says. “The better we can prepare kids for the job market, the better off our society will be.”
The sun is coming up now, just about a minute later than it did yesterday. And about this time yesterday, Alison Parker and Adam Ward were sending a live shot of an interview with Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, back to the control room at WDBJ in Roanoke, where Ward’s fiancée was monitoring the feed.
Gardner was talking about tourism and the 50th anniversary of Smith Mountain Lake’s creation. As Parker smiled and Gardner talked, gunshots exploded just off camera. Parker screamed and ran. Ward fell, the last bit of video he shot catching the gunman in the edge of the frame. Viewers saw it live with their morning coffee.
As much of the world knows by now, Vester Lee Flanagan II, who went by the name Bryce Williams when he reported for WDBJ, waited for the on-air interview to begin, then shot and killed his former co-workers. He shot Gardner, too, though she apparently wasn’t intended to be a victim.
As much of the world knows by now, Flanagan filmed the shooting and posted it on Facebook. He sent what’s been reported as a 23-page fax to ABC News, praising mass murders and claiming he was acting in revenge for the killing of nine people in a Charleston, S.C., church and for insults he felt he’d suffered. All kinds of media reported Flanagan’s claim that the accumulation had turned him into a human powder keg. Yesterday, that keg exploded, killing Parker and Ward, wounding Gardner and, eventually, killing Flanagan himself.
The shooting and the chase that ended with Flanagan’s capture and then his death took over the news cycle. People who watched the abomination live – and others who followed the events throughout the day – spread news and rumors and sympathy through social media. They shared – and then argued about the sharing of – the killer’s video. They posted tributes and photos and calls for prayers. In the real world, people came to the station with food and flowers and a desire to somehow comfort the suffering and express their own grief.
Matthew Teague, writing in The Guardian, described it well. “When Flanagan shot through the barrier that separates news and consumers, it ruptured in both directions,” he wrote. “The killings turned regular people into broadcasters, but it also made broadcasters into regular people.”
If they hadn’t before, people realized Parker and Ward were more than journalists, more than television personalities. They were two young people with plans and dreams and families. Ward was engaged to that producer who saw his death as it happened. Parker was in love with an anchor at the station. He appeared on national newscasts beside her father, who pledged to make his daughter’s legacy his drive to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people.
Throughout the day and night and into this morning, Parker and Ward’s colleagues reported the story of a former co-worker killing two co-workers and friends. For people who’ve never been part of a small newsroom – particularly a small newsroom full of young journalists, young people, full of zeal and ambition – it may be difficult to understand the closeness of that kind of group.
So it’s difficult to explain how impressive Parker and Ward’s colleagues have been though all this. They’re clearly suffering and grieving, but they’re also doing their jobs well and professionally. That’s a powerful tribute not only to the people who’ve worked at WDBJ during this tragedy, but also to Parker and Ward and to the careers and the lives they’ll never have.
The first debate between Sen. Mark Warner and Republican challenger Ed Gillespie was nearly over before either man came close to making news. When Warner turned a discussion of same-sex marriage into remarks about women’s reproductive rights, Gillespie said he thinks women should be able to buy contraceptives “at the drug store and the grocery store” without a prescription. When the candidates came down from the stage, Gillespie said that really was something new from his campaign.
“I’ve never really said it before. I’ve never been asked before, but that is my view,” he told reporters. “I think that makes a lot of sense when the medical society responsible for determining whether it should be or should not be a prescription drug recommends that it be made available over the counter. I think that would make life a lot easier for a lot of adult women.”
Over the counter medications are not covered by health insurance.
The debate was at the Virginia Bar Association’s 124th Summer Meeting, held this weekend at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It was the first VBA summer meeting at The Greenbrier since 2005, but moderator Judy Woodruff suggested it might start a trend of holding political debates in neighboring states.
The bar association has a tradition of inviting statewide candidates to debate at its annual meeting. Woodruff, co-anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour, moderated last summer’s gubernatorial debate between Ken Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe. So far, this year’s senate race has generated much less interest than that contest, which McAuliffe eventually won by less than three percentage points. A recent Roanoke College poll shows Warner with a 25 point lead over Gillespie. Real Clear Politics, an organization that averages recent polling to try to give a clearer picture of political races, puts Warner 19 points ahead. Gillespie has never been closer than 14 points – and that was in a Rasmussen poll taken in January.
Warner, Virginia’s governor from 2002 to 2006, holds a significant fundraising advantage over Gillespie. Warner has raised nearly $14 million and has nearly $9 million on hand. Gillespie has raised just over $4 million and has just over $3 million on hand.
Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate in the race, was his party’s candidate for governor last year. As it did last year, the bar association left Sarvis out of the debate because the association believes he has virtually no chance of winning. He collected less than 7 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial election.
Gillespie’s revelation of his opinion on contraceptives was a rare moment in a debate that consisted mostly of each candidate trying to tie the other to unpopular people and policies. Gillespie constantly yoked Warner to President Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act and what Gillespie sees as diminishing American influence around the world because what he characterized as “errors of omission” in foreign policy. The bipartisan Gov. Warner wouldn’t recognize the partisan Sen. Warner, Gillespie repeated. Warner tied Gillespie to Enron’s scandals, to the Bush administration’s deficit increases and Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Warner painted the election as a contest between his moderate, problem solving self and Gillespie the “partisan warrior” and lobbyist. Gillespie claimed his lobbying experience will make him a more effective senator.
“I’ve advised people on how you get things done with bipartisan support in Washington D.C. and was very effective at doing that,” he said.
“It’s not about being a lobbyist,” Warner said. “It’s also about who you lobby for – Enron, largest corporate fraud in modern American history. That’s not the kind of solution I believe to partisan gridlock and the problems we’ve got in Washington – and this election will be about that.”
The Hill, which covers nothing but Congress, has put numbers to the common perception that the current Congress has accomplished very little. The 113th Congress has passed 126 laws so far, according to The Hill’s count, but only 99 laws The Hill considers “substantive and not related to ceremonial recognitions.” The previous Congress had passed 144 laws at the same point, 105 of them substantive. Substantive laws, in this count “have some tangible impact on policy, even if it is as minor as a land transfer.”
Repeatedly, Gillespie attacked Warner for his vote supporting the Affordable Care Act, saying the law needs to be replaced. When asked by reporters what he would replace it with, Gillespie’s list overlapped with changes Warner said on the stage that he wants, including bringing more competition to the market by letting companies sell policies across state lines. Gillespie said a recent federal appeals court panel decision that holds federal ACA subsidies unconstitutional in states that, like Virginia, have not set up exchanges, puts Virginians’ health coverage at risk. Warner pointed out that another appeals court disagreed and used it as another opportunity to tie Gillespie to a dysfunctional Washington culture.
“I support the Virginia court,” Warner said. “My opponent supports the DC court.”
While much of the debate was an exercise in spin, the candidates did come down clearly on some issues. Warner said he is for marriage equality. Gillespie said, “I do not believe in government sanction of same sex marriage.”
Warner supports the Import Export Bank. Gillespie does not.
Gillespie would not say whether he wants the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion overturned, even when Warner asked him directly, implying his opinion is irrelevant.
“There’s not going to be a vote to overturn Roe versus Wade,” Gillespie said. “That’s a Supreme Court decision. I’m running for the U.S. Senate.”
Political debates are often about zingers and blunders.
Terry McAuliffe’s attempt at the first turned out to be the second.
During Saturday’s Virginia Bar Association Gubernatorial Debate, McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate, said that an investigation into Republican candidate Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s dealings with Star Scientific and company owner Jonnie Williams showed the attorney general should have been prosecuted, if Virginia’s rules about disclosure were stronger. The report by Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael N. Herring, which was requested by the attorney general, doesn’t say that.
After the debate, McAuliffe tried to walk back his statement.
“The way I interpreted it is he could have been prosecuted if we had stronger disclosure laws in Virginia,” McAuliffe told reporters after the debate. “He could have been prosecuted … That’s our analysis of the report.”
In fact, the report says the laws Cuccinelli may have come closest to violating – prohibitions on officials receiving gifts when the timing or frequency could raise suspicion– do “not carry criminal penalties.”
Cuccinelli received many expensive gifts from Williams, not all of them recorded on his disclosure reports, but that’s not grounds for prosecution, according to the report.
Herring, a Democrat, concluded “one cannot help but question” whether repeated omissions of gifts from disclosure forms are “coincidence or a pattern reflecting intent to conceal.” But Herring decided disclosure of other gifts and benefits Cuccinelli received from Williams suggest he wasn’t trying to conceal his relationship with Williams. Herring also decided that Cuccinelli’s owning and trading in Star Scientific stock while the company was engaged in a court case with the commonwealth wasn’t grounds for prosecution, either.
Parsing McAuliffe’s blunder and his muddled attempt to clarify it captivated the press corps, but the candidates did talk about and around other issues, many of them tied to the economy.
When moderator Judy Woodruff, co-host of the PBS NewsHour, asked which programs they would cut and which taxes they would raise if they were governor, each candidate gave evasive answers. Cuccinelli said he would appoint a commission to examine tax breaks and loopholes and tie government spending to population and inflation, something he called “a massive undertaking.” McAuliffe said he would go after the same set of loopholes, but he expects Virginia to get substantial savings from the expansion of Medicare that will allow money going to health care to be redirected to transportation and education. Cucinnelli called that “pure flim-fammery.”
Both candidates took a stand on divisive social issues. McAuliffe said he would sign a bill recognizing gay marriage if one reached his desk. Cuccinelli said the same about a bill declaring that life begins at conception.
McAuliffe returned repeatedly to Cuccinelli’s socially conservative record, relating it to the economy. To be successful, McAuliffe said, Virginia has to be welcoming. Alluding to Cuccinelli’s challenge of then University of Virginia professor Michael Mann’s climate change research, the attorney general’s history of opposing abortion and what Cuccinelli called “the personal challenge of homosexuality,” McAuliffe said it’s difficult to get the best scientists to come to Virginia when state government is challenging their work and it’s difficult to get women and gays to want to work in Virginia when their rights are being attacked. Cuccinelli said the notion that his positions chase businesses out of Virginia would be laughable if the matter weren’t so serious. “This isn’t debating,” Cucccinelli said. “This is demonization.” McAuliffee is the one driving jobs from Virginia, Cuccinelli charged, by sending Green Tech, an electric car company of which McAuliffe was chairman, to Mississippi instead of bringing the company and the jobs it was supposed to create to Virginia.
Asked whether increased taxes and decreased entitlement benefits should be part of a federal deal that would replace the sequester, Cuccinelli said everything needs to be considered. McAuliffe talked about the importance of diversifying Virginia’s economy.
When Woodruff asked the candidates about immigration reform, Cuccinelli said there should be a compromise, but he would not take a position on whether it should include a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. McAuliffe endorsed compromise, a path to citizenship and said he would be proud to sign a Virginia version of the Dream Act, which would give benefits to people who came to the United States illegally as children.
McAuliffe characterized the election as “a choice between rigid ideology and mainstream compromise.” Cuccinelli, citing his years of public service, said Virginians have a right to ask that their governor has made some commitment to Virginia before running for governor.
Perhaps the only thing Cuccinelli and McAuliffe agreed on during the debate is that Virginia’s next governor should focus on jobs, the economy and transportation. They don’t agree about what to do once they’ve focused.
The debate came at the end of a week that saw three polls provide different snapshots of the race. Public Policy Polling (PPP) and a Quinnipiac University poll showed McAuliffe with a four-point lead. A Roanoke College poll showed Cuccinelli with a five-point lead. All three polls showed Cuccinelli with a similar percentage of Virginia voters on his side — 39, 37 and 34 percent – but the Roanoke College poll found significantly fewer McAuliffe supporters. Quinnipiac gave McAuliffe 43 percent of the respondents, PPP showed him with 41 percent. Only 29 percent of the respondents to the Roanoke College poll supported McAuliffe.
The Virginia Bar Association, which held the debate as part of the organization’s 123rd summer meeting, has hosted gubernatorial debates since 1985.
Photos by Mark Rhodes
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“There aren’t many colleges in the country who can claim that kind of history,” says Hollins President Nancy Gray. “We have several of them in Virginia, but it’s unusual by national standards.”
Alumnae network
Raising money, retiring debt
Steve Devlin, a 1998 Roanoke College graduate, was hesitant when Lee suggested he become a mentor, but he relented. “I guess, as we talked about it more, it kind of hit me that these kids are coming out of school without a good idea of what the world is like,” Devlin says.
Ellie Hammer, a 2010 graduate, has kept up her relationship with 2012 graduate Sara Sloman for more than four years. That connection predates the Maroon Mentor program. Sloman was an intern at the Merrill Lynch office where Hammer works. “It was a very rewarding experience,” Hammer says.