* * Keepers of the Tradition portrait Makes finals list in prestigious art competition

When portrait artist Leslie Roberts Gregg invites you to collaborate on a project, you jump at the chance. At least I do!

In April, Leslie and I released Keepers of the Tradition, a compilation of a dozen fine art portraits with accompanying full-color, hardbound book. Leslie was just informed by The Artist's Magazine that one of the portraits had made the prestigious finals list out of over 7,500 entries.

Here’s how it all came about.

You may remember from a couple of years ago that I ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates, 7^th District. Leslie is an old friend, preternaturally empathic, and after my loss, she was worried about my inevitable let-down. She called and explained that her father, Ray Sr., had competed for and lost a State Senate race a generation earlier, and she knew the toll.

Originally thinking about a project for me, the idea of a collaboration took shape, “There have been a number of patriarchs and matriarchs that I wanted to paint, but sadly they passed away before I got the chance.” Would I like to work with her on chronicling some of the area’s people who were keeping alive traditions of their grandfathers and grandmothers? The idea appealed to me.

During the course of a twenty-minute conversation, a title emerged: Keepers of the Tradition. We committed to each other to begin right away. Fifteen months later, we were done, ready for the grand unveiling.

It was an astonishing, fabulous event! Ten of the twelve people pictured were in attendance, and none had seen their portrait beforehand. As Leslie and her subjects pulled off drapes one by one in the packed room, they witnessed her work for the first time. There were more than a few moist eyes in the audience.

Leslie and I have been doing presentations, shows, and events since then, and both of us are still floating above the clouds. I can never remember doing anything that made so many people so happy!

Leslie recalled about the inception, “The original phone call was just to check on you. The idea of actually collaborating occurred to me after thinking about a project for you. I thought, ‘What if I took a break from my commission treadmill for awhile and work on some of the things I wanted?’ I had always wanted to paint some of the special individuals in our area. Having you to tell their stories was a perfect match. My commissions have been one after another since 1992.”

Our first subject was restorative forester Jason Rutledge of Check, Virginia. Jason selectively cuts timber from large tracts of land and drags them out with draft-horses that he raises. He’s a brilliant, grizzled, eccentric, photogenic man who was generous with his time and receptive to our project. A few weeks later, well after I’d finished the write-up, Leslie invited me to see the finished portrait. It was stunning!

And so we went, working with twelve carefully selected subjects, including a woodworker, a millstone preservationist, a country preacher, an herbalist, a quilter, a farmer, a violin maker, and more. Leslie spent fifty, sixty, even seventy hours on each one, and she never let me see them until they were done. Each one was miraculously better than the one before. We carefully kept them all under wraps, so to speak, until the last one was completed and professionally framed, and the book was printed.

The portrait of Kerry Underwood, a moonshiner from Floyd, was the award winner. Leslie commented, “He has a roughness about him. He has chiseled features and a strong face. Moonshiners are rebels, a trait handed down in the profession. They’re pugnacious, strong, and independent people. He had a confident arrogance I wanted to portray.

 “From the beginning when I started thinking about this, I knew I wanted to paint them on my terms, not influenced by others, even you. I think the artistic freedom allowed me to paint in such a way that was more appealing to the judges (of the competition). It let me be more creative, passionate, and edgy. I think the judges look for that.”

“I’m extremely proud that one of the Keepers portraits was chosen,” Leslie beamed. “The show continues to grow and evolve. Venues are requesting it for display. Our Keepers continue to participate in presentations. They are adding even more by their presence. They help the portraits come alive with their passion. I love that evolution of this project. Our original concept was to produce a compilation of portraits and a book. What we got was a compilation of portraits, a book, and a group of individuals vested in its success and in each other. They’ve formed friendships and bonds that I never saw coming. It’s been extraordinarily rewarding!”

* * Rebuilding public trust

Flint, Michigan’s recent municipal water supply contamination resulted in a Virginia Tech Civil Engineering professor becoming a hero. But that’s hardly a happy ending. Professor Marc Edwards has no hesitancy in decrying the state of our national infrastructure and decries the death of academic freedom to call out anybody and everybody who isn’t doing their job. Sadly, he may be in the minority.

Back in 2003, he correctly identified that there was lead, a virulent neurotoxin, in the municipal water of Washington, DC. Last year he said the same thing about the water in Flint and he was correct again.

To the people of Flint, the 51-year old academic is a folk hero, confirming their worst fears while local authorities and the professors at their own University of Michigan stayed on the sidelines. So enamored were the residents of Flint towards him and his students that they spray-painted on a local landmark this succinct message: “You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!”

As proud as I am for Edwards and his merry band of Hokies who put into practice the best of Tech’s motto Ut Prosim, (That I Might Serve), it’s still a tragedy. In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Dr. Edwards said in effect that universities, municipalities, and state and federal governments have long been employing CYA (cover your posterior) approaches to dire problems. And he’d like to see it fixed.

 He complained that the metrics of academic achievement were fame, funding, and quantities of research papers published, rather than public good. Funding in particular is problematic, as universities are now increasingly forced to find funding wherever they can. Formerly, state universities got significant funding directly from their respective states. As that funding has diminished, they have been forced to go elsewhere, and elsewhere is typically corporations, many of which are loathe to fund research that may look too closely at their practices. Graduate students who work to uncover unsavory industry practices may find employment doors closed to them after graduation.

Our next problem is our failure to address the needs of an aging national infrastructure of roads, sewers, pipelines, bridges, and water systems. Consider that in the 1960s, our nation built a space program that sent a man to the moon, engaged in a significant foreign war, and constructed the bulk of the Interstate Highway System at the same time, all the while seeing impressive economic growth. We did this by extraordinary levels of taxation on our wealthiest individuals. Today, we’re still mired in the Reagan-era thinking of trickle-down economics, convinced against all evidence to the contrary that if we channel more money to the top of the wealth food chain, it will trickle down to the rest of us. It is astounding that this roundly discredited theory persists.

And our next problem is general disdain for the regulatory agencies that protect our air, water, ground, and food. Again, part of the Reagan legacy was one of the most potent political statements of the modern era, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This has had two horrible effects. The first is that the regulatory agencies have been chronically underfunded and unable to truly protect us from serious threats. Witness our own congressman who repeatedly hammers the EPA, desperate to cut their funding by at least 15% when they’re underfunded already. The second is that there are too many people today staffing government positions who bought into the Reagan poison and don’t believe in the mission or worthiness of their agencies.

In the Flint situation, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the federal EPA weren’t doing their jobs. But what professor would risk his or her position by taking them on? A professor can destroy his funding network by publicizing a single critical finding.

When the public can no longer trust our corporations, when we can no longer trust our governmental institutions, and we can no longer rely on our scientific and academic communities to call them out, we can expect one disaster after another. That’s where we are now.

Lest we think about these problems as being exotic and distant, we must remind ourselves that the nearby Radford Army Ammunition Plant is routinely, almost daily, open-burning toxic materials, dispersing them into the air not 2 miles from the Belview Elementary School, poisoning those children and their own employees to an extent we don’t even know.

Edwards teaches a course in heroism at Tech. When asked about it, he said, “You’re born heroic. I go into these animal studies, and heroism is actually in our nature. ... It’s not fun. These are gut-wrenching things. But the main thing is, ‘Do not let our educational institutions make you into something that you will be ashamed of.’” Indeed.

* * Adam Ernest wants better voting

Blacksburg’s Adam Ernest isn’t happy about the way we vote: not who we vote for but how. If it were up to him, Voting Day would become a thing of the past, as would electronic voting machines and their attendants. He’s developing a better solution.

“The first election I voted in was Bush against Gore in 2000. We know what a fiasco that was! I thought at the time it was ridiculous. It made a real impression on me. Here we are 16 years later and we still haven’t fixed it.”

He founded a new company called Follow My Vote, which is developing an open-source verifiable online voting system.

Adam was a military brat. His dad was in the Air Force and they moved all over the place, eventually to Germany where he finished high school on the base. He was always the kind of guy who wondered how things worked. He applied to Tech’s Engineering program, but was later accepted into Pamplin College of Business, where he graduated with a degree in Marketing Management. “I have always been fascinated with people. Psychology. Sociology. Understanding the way people think. I am an empathic person. I can put myself in people’s shoes.”

His instantaneous love for Virginia Tech will bring tears to the eyes of every Hokie. He said, “The moment I stepped on the Drill Field, I turned myself completely around, and as I did a wave of emotion came over me. I said to myself, ‘you are right where you are supposed to be. You are home.’ It was really cool. I felt something big would happen here.”

He graduated in 2004 and moved to Miami for the better part of a decade, where he built a name for himself within the field of Internet Marketing. He became successful at a company called MediaWhiz. But his heart was back in Blacksburg. He quit his day job and moved back in January 2014.

I asked him what is wrong with the way we vote. “We have reached a point in the evolution of technology where developing a verifiable voting system is now possible.”

The goal of a Democracy is to have a government that represents the will of the people.

“Not a lot of people vote,” he continued. “Only 36% of registered voters typically show up at a mid-term election. The Millennial generation that I’m at the upper end of only vote at around 10%. These are young people that grew up with technology. They are comfortable leveraging technology to make their lives easier and more efficient. They are savvy, but distracted and busy. They aren’t motivated to spend hours waiting in line to vote, as people have done in past, when more quick and easy systems could be developed. In any event, those combinations don’t lend themselves to how we vote today.

“Lots of Millennials think the system is rigged. When voters think their vote doesn’t count, it reinforces their decision not to vote. I believe it is my duty to vote. Many people do. But others haven’t grown up with that ethic.”

Adam envisions a system whereby people can vote over the course of several days, even weeks, from the comfort of their home or wherever they access the Internet. More people will participate. “I have my (political) beliefs, but we are a nonpartisan company. We’re simply looking to provide a better system. It will be the first truly honest, end-to-end verifiable voting system in the history of the world.”

The cynic in me, honed by recent experiences, says there are far more reasons why people aren’t voting than the time and inconvenience of the process. There are heavily gerrymandered districts, where legislators are picking their voters rather than the other way around. Massive amounts of money are being poured into campaigns. Voters are being suppressed. The list goes on and on. From my perspective, one of the reasons we don’t have better voting systems is that the people we’d call on to make the changes are the people who benefit from the status quo.

Adam recognizes this, but is committed to at least providing a better voting system. He has found that getting approval in governmental elections will be difficult and time-consuming, but has had interest from corporations doing proxy voting and from other nations, including – get this: Bulgaria.

“I envision a day when every election is done on-line. If online voting were to become a reality, it could fundamentally affect the way people vote and whom they vote for, and doing so could hurt the re-election chances of the people who got elected by the current systems. I understand that there are many people in power now who won’t want this to happen. The problem my company has is bigger than building a system and proving it will work.

“We honor the will of the people. For our system to be adopted, it will be because the people insist upon it. It is of the people, by the people, and for the people. That’s what this is all about, true and honest representation.”

* * Feeling mortal

I guess at some point in every adult’s life, we’ve all thought about our mortality. This was heavy on my mind the other evening as I visited with one of my nonagenarian friends who lives at a local retirement home nearby.

To protect his privacy I won’t mention his name.

He was one of my professors at Virginia Tech when I earned my degree in the 1970s. He is a slight man, grandfatherly, sagacious, and soft-spoken, quick to expound others’ virtues, with a John Nash-like beautiful mind. He literally wrote the textbook that we used for several quarters – we were on the quarter system in those days rather than semesters – in one of the college’s most demanding courses. He’s told me that he’d ask his students on the first day of the quarter to please sit in the same seat for the first three sessions, after which they could sit anywhere they wanted, as by that time he would have memorized every name. He was widely admired by all of the thousands of students he taught. I call on him when I can, fully knowing that he won’t be with us much longer.

He has a whole bevy of doctors attending to his various infirmities these days. He told me he’d recently acquired a cane to assist with his stumbling around his building and he’d gotten lessons in how to use it. He has diabetes and he’s managed it well for decades, but as his body has gone through physiological changes, the implementation of his medications has required commensurate modifications, often difficult to properly assess. Getting old, as the expression goes, ain’t for sissies.

Most gut-wrenching for him is his loss of memory. He had become horrified at the realization that he was often now unable to remember names of his doctors, his stock-brokers, and many other professionals on whom he’d relied on for decades. Now mind you, here’s a guy with an astonishing, world-class intellect, a power of recall the rest of us merely dream of. I tried to assuage his feelings of creeping inadequacy, doing my best to convince him that first of all, memory loss is a common problem with aging, and second, it’s the way the rest of us work habitually. (Why did I just walk into the kitchen???)

The world will be a poorer place when he passes. The rest of us go on until our last day comes. We all have an expiration date. We all know this; we all have an understanding and awareness of that irrefutable fact.

My life has been blessed in that regard. Unlike my wife, whose father died when she was a teen, few people in my close personal sphere have died young. My parents are only a few years younger than that aforementioned friend, and while they have their aches and pains are generally in good health and are self-sufficient and living in the house where I grew up. But they both understand that they are giving their actuarial tables a run for their money.

Furthermore, my younger brother is battling a life-threatening disease. His treatment is costly, intrusive, painful, disruptive, and uncertain in the best case. We don’t much talk about the worst case, but we know it’s there.

We should all be blessed with long, healthy lives…but we’re not.

I was thrown into introspection on my short drive home that evening, wondering about the place mortality takes in others’ lives. My own mortality is not an omnipresent ogre, weighing on my psyche. I’m not making everyday decisions in the notion that I might die today, although the possibility is always there. (Note: I ride a motorcycle 250-300 days per year, including this morning (It was 19F on my way to my office.).) I suspect that people who have greater awareness are those who lost a close family member when they were young. How about you?

In her book, Wild, author Cheryl Strayed wrote, “The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.” Life is a precarious, precious thing.

When the phone rings, do you expect it to be the police telling you your spouse has died in a traffic accident? When you get mail from the US Government, do you expect to open an envelope and learn your son has died in the war? When you get a check-up, do you expect the worst?

If you’re so moved, shoot me an email at bikemike@nrvunwired.net and let me know what part your own mortality plays in your life.

* * Ray Smoot can’t wait for the next passenger train

The last time anybody stepped on a passenger train around here was almost fifty years ago, and Blacksburg’s Ray Smoot isn’t happy about it. Growing up in Lynchburg, he became infatuated as a child by trains, often riding to Virginia Tech where he went to college in the mid-1960s.

Ray is now a semi-retired administrator at Virginia Tech and Chairman of Union Bank. He has a ready laugh, ruddy cheeks, and a mop of salt-white hair atop his head. In his retirement years, he’s stepped forward to head up a committee working to bring passenger trains back to the New River Valley, taking a planned extension from Lynchburg to Roanoke and extending it further into Montgomery County, likely to Christiansburg.

 “If there is one thing that I would say I know something about, with all due immodesty, is railroads,” he claimed.

I met him in the Blacksburg office suite of the Virginia Tech Foundation, an organization that manages Tech’s assets and real estate holdings, including the Hotel Roanoke and the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center. “Ever since I was old enough to remember, I was watching, reading, and traveling railroads. Lynchburg was on the route of the Powhatan Arrow. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was a great place. The Southern Railroad had routes through Lynchburg to the north and south. They had 18 passenger trains every day. The Norfolk and Western had another 6 per day on their east-west line. And the C&O, now the CSX, also went through from the east to the northwest up the James River from Richmond.

“So yes, I’ve always been interested in trains, and getting passenger rail back to the New River Valley is a logical extension of that.

“I’m not sure why I found it so intriguing,” he continued. “I have a talent that surely has no value, but I have maps in my head. I can fly over anywhere in the Eastern United States and I’ll know where we are from spending so much time studying maps.

“Railroads are part of that. They are a steel connectivity, an indelible line on the map that links places. They are the first real permanent physical manifestations of a connection between places that our nation has had. My interest in railroads has never waned.

“When I was in college (in the mid-1960s), there were 12 passenger trains every day between Lynchburg and Christiansburg. Flash forward to today. Tech has four times the number of students it had then. RU (Radford University) has grown similarly. Our region in the New River and Roanoke River Valleys has one of the highest ratios of college students to overall population in the country. We have 50,000 to 60,000 college students in an area of 350,000 to 400,000 overall. A high percentage of Tech and Radford students come from the megalopolis that stretches from Washington to Boston. Whenever school has a break, a substantial number of them go home on Interstate 81, and it becomes a parking lot.

“When Amtrak extended service to Lynchburg in about 2009, the ridership quickly exceeded all projections and estimates. Big time. That got me to thinking about my area. Why not get that service here to the New River Valley? Roanoke picked up on it and now they have a bus that goes from downtown to the station in Lynchburg, and by next year, they’ll have a train into Roanoke.

“Nobody seems to be against this. Most political issues have opposition; this one it seems like everybody is on board.

“Several of us started talking to the local mayors, supervisors, and state delegates. Everybody was excited about it. We were reluctant to set a date, but decided that to best make it ‘real,’ it needed a completion date. So we set a vision date, 2020. We’re working to try to make it happen by then.”

I asked Ray if he felt we made a mistake in this country allowing our rail network to atrophy. He exclaimed, “Oh, absolutely! One reason that happened is the failure to engage public funding for rail as it was being engaged for air service. In other words, the airlines were never building their own airports, yet the rail companies were expected to build their own stations. Why is it rational to subsidize airports and highways with public funding but not rail infrastructure?

“I hope we’ll continue to see Amtrak grow. As that happens, we’ll see some private trains implemented.

“How has the economic case for the railroad, the corridor of the Powhatan Arrow, changed? When I grew up in Lynchburg, it was a vibrant community with industries in shoes, textiles, and foundries. How will (our local communities) stay successful? I think passenger trains will again become a part of the mix. I hope so.”