* * Lois Badey loves fundraising

Gosh, it feels good when a talented, passionate person comes here to the NRV and loves it. Lois Badey, Senior Director of Development for the new Virginia Tech Moss Arts Center and the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, is another of our newcomers.

Badey, a certified fundraising executive, has a long background in philanthropy and benevolence. Her grandparents were missionaries, her father was a preacher and her mother was a professional singer. “That DNA has always been in me.

“All through my life,” she told me, “I have done volunteer work. I have always enjoyed raising money for small organizations.

“I realized that I could get paid for doing something that I really love to do. That is helping make a difference and facilitating change for people and really making people’s lives better. I have been in higher education for about 25 years.”

I asked her how she ended up at Virginia Tech. She told me that she was contacted by a professional job recruiter. Her first development job was at Randolph Macon College. After seven or eight years there, a job opened up at VCU and she stayed there for many years, but eventually needed a change. That’s when a recruiter called her to tell her about the job at Tech. That recruiter told her about an opportunity at a new center for the arts. It all sounded wonderful to her. But during the conversation, she couldn’t remember where the recruiter said the job was. She said, “So I asked her, ‘where is this exactly?’ The recruiter said, ‘it is at Virginia Tech.’ And I went, ‘in Blacksburg?’ And she said, ‘please don’t hang up.’

“I didn’t see that as a positive or a negative. I really didn’t know. I had never been to southwest Virginia. I knew nothing about Virginia Tech. This job for me was really a big leap, in many ways.”

The recruiter sent her a folder with an architectural rendering of the new Center for the Arts that was under construction at the time. She said, “I took a look at these materials and I immediately turned to my husband and said, Tom, ‘I know am going to get this job and I know I am going.’” Seeing my incredulity, she said, “Really.” She said this to me without a hint of arrogance, only confidence and belief in destiny.

“I came up for an interview. It was October 21, a beautiful fall day. Somebody really orchestrated that day properly.”

I said, “If you make your first trip to Blacksburg in October, you will find it hard to leave.

She said, “It IS hard to leave. I really understand the orange and maroon. It is real. It is on the leaves.”

Long story short, her interview went well and two months later she got the job. She soon formed a special relationship with Pat Buckley Moss who became the Center’s primary, named benefactor. “I so enjoy Pat’s family. They’re all wonderful. Nurturing. And they all love Virginia Tech. I look at her art and see so many different things. I see a beautiful linear quality, I see spiritual qualities, and I see whimsical qualities. A connection with nature.”

I recapped that Virginia Tech, once solely an agricultural and engineering college, had now made a bold statement about the arts. I said, “The Center has already given us a nudge in a new direction. Where do you see that going?”

“I see it going exponentially,” she beamed. “To infinity and beyond. It amazes me that many people still have not experienced a performance in the Moss Arts Center. There are people who understand the intrinsic value of the arts. It’s in their spirit. They may not play music or draw, but they love the arts. It’s innate, intuitive. Other people are afraid of getting connected, fearing they may learn something about themselves that makes them uncomfortable or changes their views or their life. There are people who don’t know they’d love the arts. Where we go in the future is making more people more comfortable. Imagine where we’ll be in 10 or 20 years!”

She said Southwest Virginians have always had art. “We just don’t call it art. The land here is a tradition. I knew nothing about this area when I came. I had a vague notion of Appalachia and what it was. It’s the people. It’s the beauty of the mountains. It’s the harshness of the winter and the magic of summer.

“The people here have no airs. Everybody is aware of their environment and the beauty of this place, and how it could be lost over one mistake.

“Drive down I-81 now in the springtime and see the red-buds highlighted against the lime-green shoots on the dogwood… you know you’re in Southwest Virginia. It is my favorite time of year. Spring is here. The mountains are forgiving in a way. I may never leave.”

* * Too many pictures, too little truth

I’m often complimented on my amazing wildlife photography, especially my bird shots. Here’s the thing, though, they’re not mine. They’re my dad’s. He’s the guy who spends his free, healthy time on the river, shooting the birds (so to speak).

Dad has told me that digital photography has totally revolutionized his efforts. In the old days of film cameras, he’d bring a couple of rolls of 36 exposures, take 72 photos, rush them to the developer (He’s never been the model of patience.) and hope he got some good ones. Now he takes a couple of memory cards and might take 600 to 800 photos and keep 6 or 8. When you go on these expeditions frequently, even those 6 or 8 begin to add up over time.

So complete has been the switch from film to digital that film is practically non-existent any more, relegated to the dust-bin of history. Thirty-five millimeter film is as rare as vinyl records and once-expensive film cameras are now found mostly in antique and thrift stores.

The technology that transitioned from film to digital hasn’t stopped. Now there are roughly 2 billion smart devices (phones, IPads, etc.) with camera capabilities. If every one of them took only three photos a day, the world would be accumulating 6 billion photos a day, over 2 trillion a year. My guess is that we’re taking lots more photos and looking at them lots less than ever before. In addition to that, the software tools for manipulating the individual pixels that now comprise a photo are cheap and ubiquitous; we can make any photo look like almost anything we want. Nothing we see in a photo today should ever be trusted as real.

All this brings forward the disquieting question of what a photo really is.

One of the most important and famous photographers of all time was Matthew Brady. Often referred to as the father of photojournalism, Brady (born May 18, 1822, died February 15, 1896) brought the horrors of the Civil War with his newly developed daguerreotype technique to vast audiences who had never before seen or envisioned such carnage. As a means of documenting the procession of the human experience, photography was unsurpassed in importance. That era is over. When was the last time you saw a photo that you long remembered? Did it have a believable realism to it, or was it the product of a Photoshop, Lightroom, or Google Nik technician’s hand? When you see a photo of an important event, do you have an expectation it is legitimate?

I recently saw a magnificent photo on-line that appeared to be taken of earth from space. It was titled “Earth in her cradle of clouds – via the Hubble Telescope,” and it had a fabulous, almost hand-like envelope of thick, high clouds around it. Problem is that it wasn’t really of earth and it wasn’t taken by the Hubble Telescope. It was a computer-developed 3D rendering. The magnificent images that WERE taken by the Hubble are likely to be disbelieved by all who see them. The more fabulous they look, the more likely we are to disbelieve them.

Think about the great, iconic photos of human history and how you might react to them now. Remember the lone protester in China, standing in front of the line of armored tanks? If you saw it today, would you believe it? Remember the four soldiers lifting the flagpole on Iwo Jima? Could it have been Photoshopped? Remember the naked, terrified 9-year old Vietnamese girl, running with other children down the street, fleeing a napalm attack on her village? It changed the US resolve in that war and hastened our withdrawal and eventual defeat, but only because there was no doubt in our eyes that it was real. Would it have had the same impact if its credibility had been as uncertain as the credibility of every photo we see today?

So what is a picture if it is no longer a true, visual representation of a moment in history? What if photography and art are now indistinguishable? If nothing we see henceforth can ever be believed as real, is it still valuable? And if so, for what? And if not, will we continue to take all those trillions of pictures?

As I type this essay, the television is on. I see commercials that are entirely, 100% computer generated, figments of the designer’s imagination. Could it be that within a decade, photography will become to all of us like an addict in a room filled with cocaine, far too much of a good thing to still be good? In the perfection of a technology still new in human evolutionary terms, we may have indeed killed it.

* * Pat Moss is happy to be here

My wife Jane recently invited me to join her at a local gallery. The event was for the adult and continuing education class that she had taken through VT, a class where she and her classmates painted still-life art. 

While there I met a small, white-haired woman who introduced herself to me as “Pat.” She was totally gracious and friendly, fondly resting her hand on my shoulder as we spoke. She’s relatively new to the community and since her arrival she’s showered us with love, devotion, and money. It turns out she’s one of America's most talented, famous, beloved and financially successful artists.

You know her as P. Buckley Moss.

She had no business or family ties here, having grown up in New York and spent much of her adult life in the Waynesboro, VA, area. So I got together with her and her daughter Becky the other day at the gallery to ask about her move to the New River Valley.

Pat told me she grew up on Staten Island, in sight of Ellis Island where her mother arrived from Sicily as a baby. “Mom arrived in 1904. I went to high school and college in New York City.”

In spite of her notoriety, Pat hardly sees herself as any different from the rest of us. Becky said, “Unlike Mom’s self-image, I see her as a celebrity. People want to touch and be part of celebrities.”

“I tell people I am not any more special than they are. It’s the truth,” Pat said.

Becky said, “We grew up with ‘You’re not any better than anybody else and they’re not better than you.’”

“I always wish I could give more,” Pat confessed.

Now mind you this is someone who gave Virginia Tech over $10 million to become the signature benefactor for the Moss Center for the Arts. She supports a wide range of causes, including her beloved P. Buckley Moss Foundation for Children’s Education that gives scholarships to educators.

“I had four periods of art in high school and I loved it! I was encouraged by my mother to pursue my arts.”

Becky said, “Mom is dyslexic. She has trouble reading.”

Pat continued, “I failed my way through grammar school and most of high school. I had teachers who were wonderfully understanding.” She went to Cooper Union in New York, a free college. Afterwards, she moved with her husband to Waynesboro, where she raised six children; Becky was her third.

“It was wonderful growing up in Waynesboro,” Becky said. “Everybody knew one of the Mosses.”

Along the way, Pat’s artwork became popular and she began to build a following and become commercially successful. “I love to work. I am 82 and I never want to retire.” She built a reputation for her warm, subtle styles, especially of rural scenes around Waynesboro and its Mennonite people. “They live their religion every day. They are helpful to each other and they support one another.”

While in Waynesboro, she started to show commercially. Her second husband was a marketing genius and soon shows started selling out and her fan base grew. What I really wanted to know is what brought her and her amazing generosity to Blacksburg. I mentioned how she was so open and accessible.

Pat asked rhetorically, “Have you ever been in a happier university or happier atmosphere than here? Have you met anybody who hates Virginia Tech? The values are good. People want to do the right thing. There are no snobs.”

Becky agreed, “The whole idea of the Ut Prosim (Tech’s motto, That I may serve), filters through the community. We have really felt that. People here are so welcoming and helpful. They want to see people succeed. That doesn’t happen everywhere.”

Pat said, “I moved here two years ago. It’s been great! Oh, my gosh, I love it! There are such caring people here.”

I asked, “How do you view the difference between ‘Pat’ and ‘P. Buckley Moss’?”

“I don’t know P. Buckley Moss,” she claimed. “I don’t know that I’d want to know her. She doesn’t exist. Part of ‘P. Buckley…’ was to be not identified as a woman. I was showing once in Boston. A man came to me and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re a woman. I’m so disappointed!’ He wanted to deal with me (on a painting). I said, ‘Especially for you, it’s twice the price.’ He hounded me the rest of the evening. I told him, ‘I don’t want anybody to know that you have a painting of mine in your house.’ I never relented.”

“I have never lived in a more nurturing environment,” Becky smiled. “When we moved into this gallery, we were moving big, heavy things in from the van. Several guys just walked up and asked if we needed help. It was wonderful.”

“We love it here,” they chimed.

“It really is a special place,” Becky said.

* * Blacksburg Partnership’s Diane Akers sees good things happening

The Blacksburg Partnership was created in 2003 to promote retail and commercial development and quality of life in the Town of Blacksburg. Its sole director since then is Diane Akers, a certified public accountant, turned assistant city manager, turned economic developer who loves the Blacksburg community.

“We are a non-profit, economic development organization,” she told me as we visited in a Blacksburg bakery, Our Daily Bread. “We are a public/private entity that came about as a result of the Town of Blacksburg developing a downtown master plan and an economic development strategy that recommended the creation of a non profit economic development organization to serve the town. Both reports recommended a group that could bring together the town, the business community, and Virginia Tech.

“We started with a formation group in the fall of 2002 and we talked about what the entity would look like. We developed a mission and a vision statement. We obtained non-profit status. We created a board of directors. We announced the formation in July 2003. I was once the only employee, until 2008, but now I am fortunate enough to have a staff of two, and we really make a great team.”

“Back in 2003, there were quite a few empty storefronts downtown. We talked about the need to create and maintain our place as a vibrant, university town. A lot of what we do focuses on quality of life. It’s what brings people to Blacksburg and makes them want to stay. In effect, quality of life is economic development. Our focus was on commercial and retail development, mainly retail, to fill in spaces.

“When the public sector and private sector can independently make progress, we encourage that. Our organization comes into play when a bridge is needed to bring these two groups together.”

They worked extensively on the interchange project at the area in the south part of town that was abandoned by VDOT when the new interchange was built to link to the bypass. They were able to secure the property as a gift from the state to the town, with the provision that it be used for public good. There were 34 acres of land given. It took ten years, but it was finally deeded to Blacksburg at favorable terms. They have developed one part of it, used by The Crossings. Most of the remaining property will be used for a new town park.

“We’ve also worked on assisting existing businesses and recruiting new businesses to the Town of Blacksburg. We focus our efforts primarily on initiatives along the commercial corridors: North Main, South Main, University City Boulevard, and Downtown. We’ve helped to launch merchants groups for the first three areas, and downtown has long had an established merchants group that serves as an example for the others in many ways. We want the merchants to get to know each other and work on common interests.

“We’ve built a quality of life website for Blacksburg that promotes living, working, and getting around. Stepintoblacksburg.org also features a community events calendar that allows the pubic to post upcoming events in Blacksburg and the surrounding area. We do a visitors guide and distribute 20,000 of them throughout the area and the state. We’re very arts focused. We worked with the Moss Arts Center when it was being developed to be a catalyst and a resource for Blacksburg being recognized as an arts community. We’re on the map in a way we weren’t 10 years ago. When you talk about economic drivers and quality of life, the arts fits right into that.

“We have a Blacksburg Partnership Collaborative for the Arts that serves as a resource for the arts community. A subcommittee of the Collaborative is working on a public art plan to guide our town’s vision for public art going forward. The Partnership is also the group who launched the Gobble de Art Hokie Bird statue project. It continues to be a highly visible public art project and a fund-raiser for the organization.

“We have a young professionals’ initiative. They plan events that are focused on social, community, and professional development.”

When I asked what had changed since she began, Akers said, “I think people are more collaborative now. We are working on projects together. We try to bring people together. One of our greatest regional collaborations right now is working on bringing passenger rail back to the area. Blacksburg will grow, but we need smart, well-planned growth. The town (council) is doing a great job with that. Blacksburg is a great town, cradled by a world class university, rich history, athletics, and the arts. What more could a community aspire to be? We’re very fortunate.”

* * Alan Fabian runs our local hospital

Ever wonder what it takes to run a hospital? I have. So I called on Alan Fabian, a newcomer to our community, who is CEO of Lewis Gale Hospital, Montgomery, whom I’ve gotten to know through his membership in my Rotary Club.

I expected it to be complex, but the more we spoke, the more complex it became. Fabian, 50, came into health care administration not through a medical education but one in computers and programming.

“We are one of four Lewis Gale hospitals,” he told me as we sat in his executive office in the ground floor of the 40-plus year old facility in south Blacksburg. “The main one is in Salem and the others are in Pulaski and Allegheny Counties. Lewis Gale has been around for over 100 years. Lewis Gale are all HCA (Hospital Corporation of America), which has 165 hospitals in 20 states. The goal with our name was to locally brand us. Our parent company is HCA Virginia which has 13 facilities. HCA is the largest hospital corporation in America.

“I grew up in Vermont and Massachusetts and got my degree in computer science. I worked around the country mostly for software companies. I worked for a hospital information systems company in Boston and a consulting company in Los Angeles that installed information systems in hospitals before I started with HCA in Dallas in 1995.”

He moved from the information technology side to the administrative side. He then worked in Louisiana but took a job here in 2013. He actively selected Blacksburg as a place he wanted to live and work. “I chose here. Having grown up (in an area) with four seasons, it’s easy to live in this area. I grew up in the mountains, the Green Mountains, doing lots of hiking, biking, and skiing. Coming here was perfect.” He had lived in large cities but felt that this was something he was more accustomed to.

The biggest challenge he had in running the hospital was keeping up with regulatory changes. “We may be half-way or three-quarters of the way through implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Regulating changes are ongoing.” For example, he said that across the country, hospitals are all required in their interventional catheterization labs to follow the same procedures and protocols. “When somebody has a heart attack, the gold standard is to catheterize and open the heart vessels within 90 minutes. The less oxygen the heart has, the more the muscle dies. These are mandated standards. and the data are put on the internet for everybody to see. We average 40-44 minutes. Our goal is the best health care the fastest.

“The challenges we have are that physicians provide care in the same manner. They feel their autonomy is being taken away from them. Historically, they did assessments and made decisions and provided treatment as they deemed appropriate. Now, diagnoses that fall under well-regulated categories are treated by mandate. We take away their ability to be doctors. It’s challenging to balance the regulation with the autonomy of the physician.”

I asked if physicians were unhappy. He chuckled and said, “Physicians don’t like change. They find things that work really well, and they stick with it and get repeatable outcomes. We’re changing the processes and that produces unrest.

“The unrest carries over to the patients, nurses, and everybody else. Patients are treated differently than in the past. Even the admission process is different. Sometimes what were overnight events are now out-patient. We have become change agents. We need to figure out how to implement the change in a consistent manner that meets everybody’s needs. That’s what we do every day.”

His customers have varying levels of coverage or none at all. The government forces the hospitals to provide coverage even for people who cannot pay. He said, “There is a base level of health care provided to anybody at any hospital across the country that will assure that any injured person can come in and be stabilized regardless of their ability to pay. Uncompensated care is higher in poorer, more rural areas where fewer people have a job that pays insurance. Uncompensated care has to be covered by patients who can pay. That’s how it evolved over decades.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that we can do whatever we want. There are firm guidelines from the government, plus the private payers (insurance companies) adopt them. The simple act of being admitted is regulated. Insurance is phenomenally complicated, years in the making. Medicare and Medicaid don’t pay us enough to cover the expense of providing the services. The reason so many services seem so high is that the ‘sticker price’ is almost never paid by insurance or the government. Everything is negotiated.”

I said, “Almost nobody can afford medical care on their own. Has the ACA improved this? What’s gotten better and what’s gotten worse?”

“Access to insurance is better,” he claimed. “It is still too expensive. There is a focus on wellness, education, diet, and lifestyle. It’s a challenge that we’re still not meeting successfully.

“But understand that hospitals are businesses. We have to turn a profit to keep the doors open, even when faced with the mandate to serve customers who can’t pay us.

“Rural hospitals are having a particularly difficult time. We’re seeing a reduction in compensation (from the government) and we serve more uninsured people. Hospitals are really important to communities. In rural areas, they are always one of the larger employers. They provide good-paying jobs. Nurses can make $20 to $35/hour, and they can often get as much overtime as they want. We have around 500 employees and we pay $45 million in salaries and benefits annually. Those dollars are spread into the community, so there’s a magnifier. Our statewide parent company is the 4^th largest private employer in the Commonwealth.

“Medicare covers the majority of my patients. As people get older, they require more care. Medicare and Medicaid account for 60-65% of our billing. The remainder is split between commercial or private insurance, self-insurance or the exchanges, uninsured, and those who pay us nothing. We have a largely single-payer system already. The government passes on regulations and mandates and little or nothing in the way of increases. Pharmaceuticals continue to get more expensive, and we invest in better technologies like MRIs and CAT-scanners. And employees want and deserve raises.”

I asked about his best days on the job. He said, “My best day here was recently when a patient’s son and daughter came in and told me what kind and caring people we had taking care of their mother. She died within 24 hours. They came back afterwards and said the same thing again. They were so thankful their mother could pass in an environment of compassion. This happens on a regular basis. These are my best days. That’s why I do this job. We do some really tough things in health care. All of that is overshadowed when a family member comes in to tell me how thankful they are that we were able to save a loved one’s life. With the skills and technologies we have now, we can save lives that would have been lost only 10 years ago.

“This job is not a stepping stone for me. I’m finding the place that I can be happy. I’m raising my family here and my daughter is graduating from high school and looking at Virginia Tech. We’re fortunate to have a great university in our back yard. I may retire here.”