* * Clay Quesenberry’s life of pain

I wrote this a couple of years ago about my long-time friend and co-worker, Clay Quesenberry.

“My doctors all say the same thing, that I must be the toughest man alive,” Clay admitted sardonically as he sat in his wheelchair, musing about his life. “I’ve had 21 surgeries in the last 20 years.”

Clay and I have known each other for thirty years since he joined Christiansburg Printing, which my parents owned at the time. Then when my wife and I inherited the company 20 years ago, he worked for me.

He told me that with his new prosthetic leg, he’s learning how to walk again.

“I am 53 years old. I began having problems in the spring of 1991. I was on my usual spring outing, hunting for morel mushrooms. I began to notice that my legs didn't want to do what they used to do. They seemed to want to drag behind me and my hips hurt.

“Gradually things began to worsen and I saw a doctor about it. He tried to take a pulse measurement on my feet, but he could not find any pulse whatsoever. I saw a specialist at the Radford Hospital and he determined that my abdominal aorta had clogged. This was unusual for someone as young as me. It is the biggest artery in the body and it is in the abdominal area just south of the heart. My clot was right where the artery splits into two branches, towards each leg. I spent seven days in the hospital after surgery to replace this artery with a synthetic unit. Several months I felt much better but nine months went by and I began to feel the same symptoms again. One night, I woke up and both legs were completely numb and I couldn’t walk. I was rushed into the emergency room again. In this surgery, my doctor removed 300 separate clots.

“I have a hyper-coagulative blood disorder. It is hereditary and my mother died from it at age 49. They didn’t know what it was or how to treat it. I have had the worst case that many of my doctors have ever seen in terms of the virulence of the disease and the speed with which the clots form. Smoking cigarettes of course makes things worse and I was smoking at the time.

“To make a long story short, as I said, I have had 21 surgeries. One day, I measured 17 linear feet of scars over much of my body. In the last surgery, they amputated my left leg just below the knee because my foot had been destroyed by so much time with intermittent blood flow. I went to Roanoke Memorial Hospital for surgery. They tried to save the foot, but it was too far gone. I was doing reasonably well in recovery until I got a MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus) infection, which delayed the process of healing. I couldn’t get my prosthesis for 22 weeks. I am now in physical therapy learning to use my new leg.

“I have always been a strong-willed person. If there is something that happens that can’t be undone, and it is how it is, you either deal with it or you don’t. You either have to live or die, and I have chosen to live. I have tried to be as happy and positive as I can. If I had chosen to give up, I would have been dead twenty years ago,” he shrugged his head philosophically. He is a casual, informal man of great intelligence, with a magnetic personality that people like.

“Beyond the pain, it is a bitch monetarily. I have insurance, but each surgery can cost $25,000 or more, sometimes much more. If my co-pay is 20%, over 20 surgeries, that adds up to a pile of money. I am likely to remain in debt indefinitely because of it.”

I asked if he had his life to live over again, what he would have done differently. “I would never have started smoking and if I did, I would have quit sooner. Until I got sick, I thought I had a cool life. I had a great family and a good job. I got to do whatever I wanted to do. I was always happy. I had a great, albeit poor, childhood, with lots of friends.

“All my recent surgeries were to save my left leg and in the last one, they took it. So I hopefully won’t continue to have problems. I’ll be on blood thinners for the rest of my life.

“They say I’m the toughest man alive. But you either tough it out or you die. Other than twenty years of constant pain, I’ve had a good life. I’m not done yet!”

Clay Quesenberry died in July at age 56. I have submitted it for publication with the approval of his widow, Linda A. Quesenberry.

* * When Bud talks, everybody listens

“Bud” was in town the other evening, Roanoke actually. Bud is the nickname of James I. Robertson, Jr., the famed and beloved Civil War historian who for almost 45 years taught tens of thousands of Virginia Tech students about the War. He retired a few years ago as Alumni Distinguished Professor of History and moved with his second wife, Betty, to the Northern Neck.

I took his class, yes, 40 years ago! He was quite the rock-star even in those days, regaling 300 or more students in a large auditorium three times each week for two quarters (Yes, Tech was on the quarter rather than the semester system back then.) with tales of triumph and mostly tragedy.

I got to know him on a more personal level years later when he helped me as I wrote my first book, The Spine of the Virginias, about that odd sibling relationship between Virginia and West Virginia. I knew West Virginia was carved from Virginia during the War, but I didn’t know the details. When we discussed it, he admitted he didn’t know the details either, but his friend Stuart McGehee, a professor of history in Bluefield, was an expert. While scratching out contact information for me, I asked Bud to accompany me to call on Stuart. On our way to and from Bluefield, our acquaintance blossomed.

Stuart welcomed us with open arms, and I realized later he was the essential interview for my book. Always the contrarian, he developed an alternative story of West Virginia’s formation than had been proffered by historians before him, a story of underhanded and ruthless dealings by a band of railroad lawyers working for the B&O (Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad to petition Congress to establish a new state.

But I digress.

Bud was the featured speaker at a fund-raising event for the Center in the Square at the Hotel Roanoke. Leslie Roberts Gregg, my artist friend who collaborated with me recently on my latest book, is also friends with Bud after having painted his portrait. So the two of us, accompanied by our spouses, attended the event. With Bud as a headliner, it was the largest event the Center had ever hosted.

If you’ve never attended a Bud Robertson speech, you owe it to yourself. You’re likely familiar with his voice, as he recorded dozens of Civil War stories that aired for years on WVTF, the NPR station in Roanoke. He has a distinctive voice, with a mild “r”-weak speech impediment and a Southside Virginia drawl. When Bud talks, everybody listens.

Bud’s Civil War has always been less about battle lines, maneuvers, military tactics, and weaponry and more about everyday lives of soldiers, women and children back home, slaves, and even animals. He brings the War to a personal, intimate level, making the horror much more real.

He discussed how the legends, tales, and mythology of the War have evolved over time. Acknowledging that the nation was formed in the 1770s and 1780s, he claimed it was re-formed into the federal system we are familiar with today by the War. So many innovations we take for granted today were birthed in the Civil War. For example, the clothing factories of the North, at the onset of the war, made a single size of uniform, fitting just about nobody. The quartermaster ordered that uniforms be made in four sizes, labeled “small,” “medium,” “large,” and “extra-large,” and so it is today. Mail delivery was the only personal communication in those days, and often news from the front back to wives and sweethearts back home was bad. Too many women were seen weeping hysterically on post office steps, after opening mail with the worst possible news. So the Post Office instituted home delivery.

Dr. Robertson warned that that for our democracy to survive, compromise was essential. He decried the current state of polarization in government, strong in his conviction that the death of compromise would mean the death of the republic.

He spoke effusively about Robert E. Lee, explaining the General’s decision to defend the Confederacy rather than joining the Union effort. Lee descended from a Virginia First Family, and his state was 250 years old when the War began, whereas the United States was only 75. Lee’s first allegiance was to Virginia. Bud decried those who would besmirch Lee’s legacy, as immediately after surrender, Lee worked tirelessly to bind the nation back together.

Bud’s greatest admonition was about the current state of historic incompetency in today’s youth. “History is our best teacher,” for what is to come in the future, he claimed. A country that forgets its past compromises its future, and our youth are painfully ignorant.

My degree was in Engineering and Bud’s class was an elective. But I remember it as if it was yesterday. Conversely, ask me what I remember about Thermodynamics.

* * "Don't get above your raisin'"

The first time I heard the expression, I thought the woman who said it to me was talking about a dried fruit, not her progeny. “Don’t get above your raisin’, is something my folks told me often, especially my mother,” she said. I was in the depths of coalfield Appalachia, in the town of Hurley. Hurley is in Buchanan County, near the top of Virginia’s little triangle, where you go west to get to Kentucky and east to go to West Virginia. I was mystified by the expression, so I asked her about it.

“Hollow folks don’t often want their children to have too much more than they did,” she admitted.

I’m on an active Facebook group called “Appalachian Americans,” that has over 33,000 members. So I asked them about it, whether they’d heard it before and whether they felt good or bad about it. Here’s a sampling of what I got back:

“I don't see it as negative. Yes you should strive to better yourself no matter how good your upbringing may be, but just don't forget where you came from.”

“‘Stay humble, child. You ain't no special case.’ – that's what I heard. If I got way too big for my britches, my name became Little Fool.”

“I don't have kids. I did question humility as a young person. With gray hair has come a greater appreciation for what my grandparents and mama taught me. Humility, or remaining grounded, has become a mellowed yet useful tool in being the adult that I wish to be. I don't ever want to forget where I came from. I never did. But, I didn't always appreciate the humble heart.”

“I was never told that but have heard it. My take on it was 'don't be ashamed of where you came from'... Not don't do better. I have heard it said of people who moved away and came back home acting like they were better than everyone that had stayed. And heard it said to teenagers who in their infinite wisdom were thinking they were better and knew more than their parents.”

Many used the expression, “Don’t forget where you came from,” which they saw as equivalent, or at least related.

This was puzzling to me on many fronts. My conclusions:

“Don’t forget where you came from,” too, is a colloquial expression. Nobody really forgets where they come from. Some of us come from supportive, healthy, nurturing environments. Some of us come from abusive, destructive environments. Those in that latter group are probably the least likely to forget.

The inner meaning, perhaps, is to retain a sense of humility regardless of your station in life. Through much of our nation’s history, each generation has done better--materially and educationally than the one before. Yet retaining humbleness has been a time-honored value in these mountains. Conceit is a definite no-no. Does it come from religious underpinnings? Is it traceable to the Scots-Irish roots of many of the earliest settlers? 

Nevertheless, human advancement is part of human nature, it seems. If we’d never got above our raisin’, wouldn’t we still be living in caves?

I was always encouraged by my parents to be educated and successful. They both had college degrees; mom had two! We were expected to go to college. We raised our daughter that way as well. When I asked her about this and whether she’d ever been told not to get above her raisin’, she said, “Nope, that would be silly.”

Then I asked Courtney Chang, my “Taiwanese daughter,” who stayed with us on a Rotary International exchange a few years ago. She’s about 35 now, and like most Taiwanese is accomplished and driven. She said, “My parents encouraged us to study more and someday we can be standing on the top of the world (economic pyramid).” But her parents also told her to remember her roots. Taiwan, as a small island country, is at the mercy of larger economic powers, yet it is still one of the most advanced, technologically sophisticated nations in the world. They will teach their children to excel whether Americans do or not.

One Facebook comment has stuck with me. “I grew up in an abusive and loveless household, have just about no pride in my heritage, and had to remake my personality in order to become a half-way decent person. There's a lot of people who grew up in situations like mine, and it’s a big burden for them to constantly be reminded to be “proud of their heritage or how they were brought up.” People should be proud of their heritage if their heritage is something to be proud of. Otherwise, they need to move to other parts of the country or world, meet new kinds of people, and create their own better heritage.”

Shouldn’t we all want our children to achieve?

* * Tommy Loflin lauds community banks

Those of us in the bifocal set remember longingly the shops, stores, and banks on Main Street that formed the economic backbone of our small towns. Chances are, the drug store, the furniture store, the record store, the car dealership, and even the bank were owned by the parents of our classmates. Even in the chain stores, the clerk who waited on you typically was somebody you know who worked there seemingly forever. This memory sparked a conversation with banker Tommy Loflin, who recently helped me secure a loan to enhance my business.

“I’m from Rustburg,” Tommy said. “It is a tiny town, without a single traffic light, only a caution light. It’s south of Lynchburg, where we shopped. Downtown Lynchburg was thriving.”

Tommy came here to go to Tech and is now the Market President at NewRiver Bank, a new bank that formed after First National Bank, a local bank with a long history in Christiansburg, was merged into a larger bank. Several members of the Bank’s board were unhappy with the merger, unhappy enough to form their own bank, which was eventually folded into Roanoke-based HomeTown Bank.

“Banking has gotten more complicated from a regulatory standpoint. In the old days, whenever that was, when you knew customers well, you knew their financials and you knew their character you could make a decision quickly. That applies to some degree today, but there are more required analytics. When you make a loan on real estate, you still need to get an appraisal and title work. But customers can still call me on my cell phone at home on a Saturday, tell me what they need the money for, and if, because of our personal relationship, I know that it’s a good deal, we can come to terms.

“We started in 2008 as a result of First National selling out. HomeTown Bank started in 2005, so they were a young bank when our bank organized to join them.”

Tommy explained that some of the people affiliated with FNB who were unhappy about the proposed sell-out, from customers to employees to members of the board of directors. Several directors fought an unsuccessful proxy fight to prevent the sell-out. Once it happened, they decided to form a new bank that would stay local.

According to Tommy, these directors felt that, “FNB was such a great contributor, such an asset to the community, at least in their eyes, and their fear was that in the sell-out the local control would be lost. The local directors’ input would be watered down. It wouldn’t be Montgomery County people running the bank. I was against it, too. I left FNB as soon as the sell-out happened. I don’t think there was any positive financial gain from these folks fighting the sell-out or starting something new. I really think their hearts were in the right place fighting the fight.”

Since then, what was FNB is now part of a much larger, regional bank.

“My definition of a community bank is one where the powers that be, primarily the directors, are entrenched in the community and care about the community and make decisions because their kids go to school there, they run their businesses there, and they pay their taxes there. The loans are mostly kept in the community. The paychecks and profits are spent in the community.

“We concentrate on our neck of the woods, meaning the New River Valley. A local person may have a core business here but need money for a facility elsewhere, and in that case we’d help them. But most of our customers are within 30 miles.”

Tommy said he was not only a proponent of local banks, but of all local businesses. “It’s healthier for small, rural communities to have local what-evers: drug stores, farmers, everything.

“My suggestion to folks is that even if they only have a checking account and a savings account and perhaps a car loan, get to know our branch manager. Let them get to know you. When something comes up or if there’s a problem with your account, there will be a face with that phone call. It’s more personalized. Personal service is what allows community banks to survive and thrive. We have an automated system for after-hours calls, but during regular hours, everybody is responsible for taking calls. I put in lots of hours and sometimes take home work. My kids are grown, I have the time, and it’s fun for me. I’m doing this for reasons beyond money. It will take years and years for this bank to have the reach and influence that FNB had in this community. But we’re working on it; it’s the right thing to do.”

* * Katrina Milburn has fought drug addiction

Katrina Milburn has been fighting demons for almost fifteen years. “I don’t feel like I’m a typical addict, but I am an addict nonetheless,” she admitted.

“I was diagnosed ADD (attention deficit disorder) my senior year in high school. I was captain of my volleyball team, I played soccer, and I made straight ‘A’s. My family is upstanding.

“My mother is German and my parents went to Germany every year to visit family. After (the attack on) 9/11, I began having nightmares that they would die in an airplane crash. I had bad anxiety. I worked at a beauty salon as a hair stylist. Another girl offered me methadone. It made me happy.”

(Methadone is not to be confused with methamphetamine or “meth”. Methadone is a legal, prescription only drug used to counter depression. Meth is illegal, an extremely addictive stimulant drug that is used to create an immediate, intense euphoria.)

“On the methadone, I didn’t cry any more. I took one every other day. Other than my supplier, nobody knew it was taking it, not even my parents or my boyfriend. When my parents got home safely, I stopped. But on a hike to the Cascades, I felt like I was dragging a bag of bricks. I had lost all my physical energy. My body was in withdrawal.”

Katrina is a slim, attractive woman, now in her early thirties. She has wavy blonde hair and expressive blue-grey eyes. She speaks in a rapid-fire staccato.

“I was spending around $100 per day on methadone. I had never done drugs before. I’d smoked some marijuana and drank some alcohol, but I didn’t consider myself an addictive person.

“My parents were always insensitive to me and my problems. Whenever I would mention a problem to mom, she’d just say, ‘get over it.’ All my life.”

She described the withdrawal as worse than the drug. “I couldn’t get out of bed. It is the worst experience anybody could have, worse I’m told than heroin withdrawal. It’s uncomfortable. Miserable. I kept calling in sick. I told my parents and my boyfriend. I tried to get treatment. I kept getting rejected. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t.”

She finally obtained Suboxone, a medication approved for the treatment of opiate dependency, from the New River Community Services. Eventually she got cleaned up. She’s been drug-free for 10 years.

“During my addiction, I was making immature decisions. I was impulsive. I got into trouble with the law for writing bad checks. Once I was imprisoned for six weeks. I didn’t have health insurance and I have lupus, so I needed to see doctors. I wrote bad checks.

“I had a dog that I dearly loved, a shar-pei, that I took everywhere with me. It bit a couple of people and the authorities ordered me to put him down. After one of my hospital stays, he was taken in by the dog warden. He was beaten up, he had a broken leg, scrapes on his face, and black eyes. I didn’t feel like I had any friends or any support. I became suicidal. My boyfriend left me. My parents were never emotionally supportive. One day I had a rope around my neck, and when I called my mom she hung up on me. I almost killed myself that day, wondering how long it would take someone to find me if I did.”

Her road to recovery began with the New River Valley Community Service's Bridge program, designed to divert people with mental illness away from the criminal justice system and jail and into treatment. “I had written ten or more bad checks. I always intended to pay what I owed. But it was a vicious cycle. I was sick and I couldn’t work, so I couldn’t pay.”

Nowadays, she does some cosmetology work, but her heart lies in helping others with mental health. She has publicized her availability to young people struggling with depression and mental illness on a crisis hotline. She typically takes several calls each day. They tell her she’s their only hope.

“People everywhere are suffering from mental health,” she claimed. “It isn’t always acknowledged. I’ve heard that one in three at one time suffers. It may not be you, but it may be your son or daughter, your brother or sister, or the guy in the car beside you. It is anything from grief to anxiety, from sleep disorders or PTSD. These are not minor problems. They’re hard to overcome. The people suffering should reach out. Those who don’t have it are close to someone who does. It affects society in general. Jails are filled with people with mental illness. If they could be properly treated, it would save millions of dollars.

“I had lost hope. It’s the worst feeling in the world. I’m trying to prevent everybody from experiencing that like I did. I’m an empathic person. I feel their pain over the phone. Being alive today was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.