* * One man’s exit from NASCAR

John Holst has always been interested in cars and traffic flow. And earlier in his life, was a big car racing fan, especially stock cars, especially NASCAR. Now, the thrill is gone. Noticing that attendance at races was diminishing, I asked him why he thought that was.

“I grew up in Virginia Beach,” he told me, “And lived there before coming to Virginia Tech and moving to the New River Valley. My dad, sister, and I attended races almost every Saturday night for years, especially Langley Speedway in Hampton. It was something we loved to do. It’s a 3/8 mile oval track, paved.

“There were different classes of cars. Pure stock. Mini Stock. Grand stock. Limited stock and late model stock.”

They differed by the year of car and the variation from what was sold by dealerships. Some were custom built.

“For us it was a family passion. Dad is from Michigan and has always been interested in cars. The in-person aspect is far different from watching on TV. The sense of speed is greater. You can meet the drivers and the crews. The smells. The sounds. The feeling of the vibration; it’s incredible.”

He explained that depending on the class of race and the particular race course – and all are different – you could have 20 to 45 cars racing at one time. Races could last 100 to 200 laps or more.

“We would get there around 2 in the afternoon and would stay through the evening, returning home near midnight. We got to know racers and their families. Dad became a spotter for one racer, telling him what incidents were ahead of him. I was his scorer. For some races, I was on the pit crew, changing tires and getting the drivers back on the track.

“The allure for me was the whole experience, being at the track, around the action. Nothing sounds or smells like a race car!”

So what happened, I asked him.

“There’s not been enough action. That’s contributed to the decline of NASCAR. Short tracks offer a better value for watching. There are short straight-aways, and there’s lots of bumping around. The speeds are slower, around 70 mph to 110 mph, so drivers in crashes aren’t hurt as bad. At bigger tracks, cars now exceed 200 mph.”

Holst said his declining interest preceded the overall drop in track attendance. “One of the things that drew me in was the history of the sport. Moonshiners souped-up their cars and challenged each other to see who was faster. That intrigued me. As the sport grew, it threw those hard-core roots aside, looking to become more corporate friendly, more family friendly, more marketable to regions beyond the southeast. It turned people away from the sport. It had southern roots, and when it strayed from the south, they cut off the roots. There were other types of racing in the northeast and mid-west, but the south was known for stock cars.

“The tracks became more cookie-cutter, more like each other, a “D” shape. There was good action and they could pack a lot of people around it. The formula worked and it was replicated throughout. The focus was towards tracks near big cities. It was a money-driven decision. But it seemed like every week you were seeing the same race again and again. There was no variety any more.

“They also made tweaks to the cars that diminished the brand individuality. They became standardized. Things became too homogenous. The new breed of drivers are more polished, with less aggressiveness and character.

“Finally, cost is a big factor. Ticket prices got to $50 per seat, twenty years ago. Trying to do this for a family became prohibitive. Track owners made great profits.

“More recently, I’ve considered the environmental aspects. I’m not as conservative now as I was. It’s really wasteful for 40 cars to be burning essentially jet fuel at 3 mpg for hours. A car may go through a dozen sets of tires over a weekend, and that’s each car. It’s resource intensive. This is more of an issue for me now. For current fans, this may not even be on their radar. For former fans, it has been on their back burner. I haven’t been to a big race for 20 years. (Racing) is like: go fast, turn left, and repeat. I can’t imagine what might bring me back.

“NASCAR has promoted a southern heritage. There are lots of Confederate flags. I’m not sure I ever saw a black driver or black fans. It hasn’t reached out to minorities.

“After coming to Tech, I realized I was far more liberal than I thought. That coincided with my waning interest in NASCAR. Now with a warming climate and sea level rise, noticeable in Tidewater where I’m from, car racing seems irresponsible.”

* * Jim Lucas is the region’s newest cemeterian

What do you like to do on your weekends? Many weekends, Jim Lucas and his wife Gail are at their cemetery, conducting burials.

The Lucases opened Memorial Gardens of the New River Valley in Blacksburg, one of the few private cemeteries, 19 years ago. “It’s not common to open a cemetery at all,” he told me. “We’re members of the International Cemetery, Cremation, and Funeral Association. We were at an annual meeting, sharing a meal with other members. A man beside us heard our story and said, ‘Nobody opens a new cemetery. Nobody.’ He was from New Jersey, where there had not been a new cemetery opened in 50 years.”

Jim said most cemetery owners had become so through family legacies. Other cemeteries were municipally owned, like Blacksburg’s Westview Cemetery, or at churches.

“A hundred years ago, it was common for business leaders, for example the local banker, the funeral home director, the druggist, or others to get together and start a cemetery. (Nowadays) there are lots of regulations. Anybody starting a new private cemetery needs to put $50,000 into a perpetual care trust fund. It’s a lot of money and you have to put it up front.”

I teased Jim about this idea, as he’d only given me reasons why NOT to do it. So why had he and Gail done it?

“We bought some land at the north end of town intending to build a residential subdivision. I knew Blacksburg needed another cemetery, or expand their existing one. We decided to do it. The mayor and town manager were receptive. They helped to re-zone the land and we moved forward.”

It’s a beautiful site, overlooking Brush Mountain where North Main Street merges onto the US 460 bypass. My family buried my father there a year and a half ago.

“We knew one was needed,” He continued. “We wanted to give back to the community. We had no idea how psychologically rewarding it would be.”

Jim is from Newport in Giles County and is the third generation in his family to attend Virginia Tech. He became a developer and real estate appraiser, founding Lucas Real Estate Appraisal Services. He developed the Colony Park commercial office complex where he now has his offices. Yet these businesses never affected him personally like owning a cemetery.

“I never envisioned this being so fulfilling. I laugh with the families. I cry with them. I’ve been involved with burial of family members, friends and people I know. There are many stories of people thanking us for what we’ve done. It’s part of the job. I personally attend most of the burials.

“There’s a difference between a municipal and a privately owned cemetery. At the municipal cemetery, the managers’ job is to fill out the paperwork and dig the grave. We feel a bigger obligation. Cindy (Turner), our family services counselor, is a wonderfully loving, caring person.

“Every burial is sad. They all hurt. Digging the grave. Putting the vault in the ground. Covering it with dirt. It’s very emotional. We’ve buried my dad, my mother in law, my uncle, my cousins, and even your dad, in our cemetery.

“The hardest are the young folks. Children. Babies. Murder victims. Car accident victims. We buried the Tech policeman who was murdered (in 2011), the teenager who was kidnapped and murdered (in 2016), one of the professors killed on April 16 (2007) and many young people who have been killed in accidents, or just died young. All of them are tough.”

The cemetery has sections for first responders and veterans, a University Garden, Methodist and Baptist sections, as well as Jewish and Catholic cemeteries within the larger cemetery, and other sections such as upright granite monument and family estate areas. Almost 50% of their interments are cremated, an unusually large number, which Jim attributes to Blacksburg being a transient community and the popularity of cremation in other cultures and other areas of the country.

“I have learned a lot about memorialization and closure. It’s important to people to have closure. People need permanent memorialization; a permanent spot for the deceased’s remains with proper memorialization.

“Either Cindy or I attend every burial. We feel like we should be there. It’s different for us. It’s in here. (He patted his chest over his heart.)

“I was once talking with a local businessman who I’d dealt with on many occasions for my appraisal business. I was talking about the satisfaction I’ve felt with the cemetery business, and I could see he didn’t understand. I said to him, ‘I’ve been appraising real estate for you for 35 years. I’ve done a good job. You’ve never hugged me and thanked me for doing a good job.’ This happens routinely now at my cemetery.

“Traditionally, I’ve not been a hugger. It happens all the time now. This is just different.”

* * David English’s life of service

David English has devoted much of his life to service. Four years ago at age 30, he became the youngest chief the Blacksburg Volunteer Rescue Squad had ever had.

“It takes dedication,” he told me. “I’ve been doing this with Blacksburg Rescue for about 16 years. I started volunteering when I was 15 back in New Jersey before I moved to Blacksburg. I went to Virginia Tech, which actually was a popular destination for many people from Jersey, and got a degree in computer science and mathematics. I fell in love with the area and have stuck around ever since. Virginia as a whole is nice, but there’s something particularly special about this area that sucks people in.” 

“There are a lot of people I’ve gotten to know through the Rescue Squad and as students that have been drawn to the area. The hardest thing is to ensure they have jobs that are what they want to do.

“Professionally, I’m the training coordinator for the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, and I’ve been there for about ten years.”

David’s rescue business has taken him to some of the nation’s most horrific events. He was on the scene at the World Trade Center’s collapse in New York and at the shooting at Tech on April 16, 2007.

“My dad was a volunteer EMT (emergency medical technician) back home in New Jersey. A lot of new members to our squad have family histories in rescue. Before I was old enough to start running calls or doing emergency work, I would hang out with dad at the station. It becomes part of your family. When you’re old enough, you move up to the next level.”

“As soon as I got in the door, it was fun, with lots of people having similar interests and motivations. It’s a combination of helping others and helping yourself.”

I asked him about those difficult, horrible moments.

“Whatever the call, whether minor or major, I didn’t cause it. It’s already a problem. I’m there to make the situation a little bit better. There are internal benefits to helping people and making their lives better and being part of something. Over the years, I’ve saved some lives. Many calls are minor and just need a ride to the hospital or some comfort. Others are critical, and in those you do what you can to save a life.”

“When we interview a new recruit, we try to determine their motivation. We ask why they are interested in joining us. Most answer that they want to help others. That’s important, but we want them to be realistic. There is no paycheck and recruit who is only in it for others may not realize that it takes a toll on him or her. Younger applicants need some experience for their future career in medical school or a physician assistant program. We recognize that, but we may not want the person who is only in it to achieve something else. We’re looking for people we think will become passionate about it and vested in it. There are lots of intrinsic rewards in what we do.

“It takes lots of time and money to train a recruit. We want to weed them out early if they’re not a good fit. When a recruit spends time riding with a crew, both will get a better feel for the fit.

“I’m a volunteer like everyone on the squad. I’m managing 171 active members plus 43 inactive life members. Plus, I have a full time job and am working on my master’s degree in public administration.

“We do more than emergency medical services. We do water rescue, search and rescue, and other types of assistance. We serve Blacksburg and surrounding areas, and have mutual assistance agreements with neighboring squads to help each other when needed.”

The squad, founded in 1950, gets monetary assistance from the town and county, but is not part of the town. They are a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit and get other funding from donations. They’re governed by a board of directors, on which David sits.

“The area is growing rapidly. We have a plethora of skilled people to run calls. We’re fortunate for the community we’re in. We’re community and service focused. Tech’s motto is Ut Prosim, Latin for ‘That I May Serve,’ and that plays a part. We have good equipment, good support, and good people. Squads in areas of diminishing population worry about keeping good equipment and keeping the lights on.

“A big part of my job is seeing where we are and where we need to be, while pushing change to make us better. Many squads have an aversion to change; we embrace it. We are not a ‘good ole boy’ network. We embrace what diversity we have in our community. If you want to serve, we want you.”

* * On blackface and redface

Sometimes events of the day will stir memories long thought lost. When I was a child, my dad belonged to the Christiansburg Kiwanis Club. Each year, they did a variety show as a fund-raising event, the Kiwanis Minstrel (later re-named the Kiwanis Follies). My dad had to be the world’s worst actor, with zero musical talent to go with it, but he still donned blackface and got on stage in the old CHS auditorium and fumbled through many one-liners and dialogue jokes, intended to lampoon African Americans, and likely politicians of the day, as being buffoonish, dim-witted, and lazy. Maybe the actors’ ineptitude was part of the attraction, given that the cast included many of the town’s prominent citizens.

It says something about the era and 1960s Christiansburg that people attended and even evidently enjoyed these shows, eagerly anticipating them.

I remember asking dad as one upcoming season approached, and he informed me that they’d been discontinued, permanently. Why? “Some black people find them offensive,” he said, to the best of my ability to quote him now over 50 years later. Good enough to satisfy my teenage curiosity.

This comes back to me now as our state governor, Ralph Northam, and our Attorney General, Mark Herring, are finding themselves in trouble for being found to be, or admitting to be, participants in similar events, where they covered their faces in black shoe polish. I’m guessing most Virginians are doing some soul searching now, exploring our feelings about what even then was a disrespectful act, but in the bright light of the present is clearly much more so.

For my dad’s part, I’m sure his participation was an innocuous act of performing his club duties, as he, and my mom, were the least racist people I ever knew. Both thought all people were the same, created equal. I think part of that was that being Jewish, both felt the sting of all oppressed minorities, whether they were still oppressed or not. Henry Ford was a rabid anti-Semite, and my parents refused to ever buy a car made by his company, or anything made in Germany.

Sometimes I think I’m more sensitive to racism than my black friends. I asked my closest about this situation and she said, “Racism is preventing someone’s advancement because of race. Dressing up in blackface is disrespectful and might indicate racist tendencies. Is (Northam’s) track record on inclusiveness good? If so, this is a non-issue.”

Having better good sense than me, my dad never took a stab at politics. But I could envision that had he done so, someone could have easily found one of the old photos of him in blackface and excoriated him over it.

Coincidental to the current situation, my wife and I saw the movie The Green Book, where a black man and a white man traveled through the deep South together, the latter providing chauffeur service to the former. The name is from a publication that blacks used when they traveled which was their guide to restaurants and hotels that would accept them. In one scene, the black man is scheduled to perform for a gathered audience at an elegant all-white club and he is refused food service himself. It’s hard not to be angry that situations like that persisted a century after emancipation.

I think we run a risk when we judge people now by seemingly innocuous actions – but clearly weren’t – during another era. How will people decades in the future look back on our behavior now? Will we be scorned because we drove gasoline powered cars and did little to stop global climate change? Because we ate red meat? Because we destroyed mountains to gain access to the coal below or laced the countryside with gas pipelines? Because we attended barbaric events like football games?

Speaking of football games, we all know that fans can be rabid. It’s not uncommon for fans of the Kansas City Chiefs, the Washington Redskins, or the Florida State Seminoles to wear feather headdresses, wave fake tomahawks, and yes, paint their faces in redface. Why do we consider blackface less acceptable, more worthy of scorn and derision, than redface, which is surely equally insulting? Certainly most of us would conclude that they’re equally inappropriate. Physician, anthropologist and professor Paul Farmer said, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

I suspect that neither Northam nor Herring will resign over this, and doubt that either will be removed, given that doing stupid sh*t in college is not illegal. Hopefully the silver lining is that we’ll all be a bit more attuned to the sting of racism and committed to ending it in any way we can.

* * Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring

The irony wasn’t lost on anyone in writer and Radford University professor Rick Van Noy’s audience that the evening of his scheduled talk about his new book on climate change was the coldest of the year. Van Noy spoke to a packed room at the Radford Public Library about his travels to the coastal southeast to tell stories about how both urban and sparsely populated areas were dealing with encroaching seas.

Rick admitted to me as we spoke about it later that he’s not a scientist; he’s a story-teller. The book has no charts or graphs, and little technical data. Rick’s goal was to highlight that rising seas, a predictable result of a warming planet, are already happening and people are already being forced to confront it.

“The questions I usually get,” he said, “are, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ and I ask, ‘Do you want me to give you a three-point plan?’ The fact is, the solutions and answers will be many, based upon the place and situation.”

I asked how he decided to commit himself to the project.

He said, “I’m an English professor. I’m interested in the environment and natural systems. I spend a lot of time outside. Anybody with an outdoors hobby notices changes in the environment. If you’re a fisherman, a hunter, a bird-watcher – whatever – you notice changes to the landscape and habitat. I was also frustrated by not seeing the needle move. I was reading information about climate change and I didn’t see policies or human activities changing.

“One galvanizing moment for me was on a family trip to Glacier Bay in Alaska, where we watched a huge chunk of ice calve off a glacier. I thought I’d tell stories from national parks in Alaska and Montana and elsewhere where changes were happening. It would be too hard to pull off. But I realized there were places in my own region that are experiencing similar things. I went to the Everglades and to the coastal islands. How could I get people interested? How could I help people understand how it may affect them directly?”

So Rick went to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where old cemeteries are being inundated. He went to Norfolk, where city streets are seeing recurring flooding. He went to Tybee Island in Georgia where the causeway linking to the mainland is being swamped. He went to the Everglades and the Keys.

Several other ironies occurred to us as we spoke:

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“Most of us live moment by moment,” he said. “It’s hard to think of the big picture. We’re the only species that will foul its own nest. So maybe that’s where stories come in. We need to think about long-term effects of unimpeded progress, consuming more resources, and endless growth. We may need to change the storytelling, change our foundational myths. The stories can be more powerful than the statistics.

“I was encouraged that I could have conversations (with affected people). I thought there would be more fear, more resistance. People didn’t want to think they lived in climate change refugee communities because they feared it would be bad for tourism or industry. But they would talk about it. We are an ingenious, adaptable, creative, malleable species. We’re sentimental to places we don’t want to leave.”

We talked about the analogy of the earth as a living thing. Glaciers grow and shrink. Mountains rise and are eroded away. Barrier islands are dynamic systems, constantly moving with storms and tides. Most changes are not in human time frames, but they happen nonetheless. Humans will survive climate change, but we can avoid the worst impacts by acknowledging the science and planning accordingly. We have done things in this country to improve the environment, like banning CFCs that were killing the ozone layer and passing the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. With the right political will, we can improve our chances of avoiding the worst.

“We are capable of doing the right thing,” he said. “In the decades to come, our coastlines in particular will look very different. Some places we may have to let go, to abandon. We may need to re-define what we mean by ‘progress.’

“My goal is to raise awareness. Climate change and sea level rise are facts. We need to have conversations about how to minimize the damage. I hope the stories affect people in ways the numbers can’t.”