Gone but not forgotten
By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
Robert E. Simon Jr., a New York real estate developer who founded Reston, Va., in the early 1960s as America’s first planned alternative to the postwar suburban sprawl of commuter towns with cookie-cutter houses on look-alike streets, died on Monday at his home in Reston. He was 101....At a time when millions were fleeing crowded cities for what some sociologists called a colorless life in suburbia, Mr. Simon envisioned a Northern Virginia community that blended the serenity of an Italian hill town, the urban attractions of San Francisco’s Embarcadero and the social equality of a utopia in Finland.
By ALISON GRAHAM, The Roanoke Times (Metered Paywall - 18 articles a month)
Officers kicked down the door of his Rocky Mount home. They dragged him outside, stuffed him into a police car and drove him to jail. Over and over again. Henry Lee Law remembers talking to his dad, Amos, with heavy metal bars between them. ...Jail time was an unfortunate downside to his father’s illegal moonshine business. “It’s a dangerous job,” Henry Law said, “but if you can get by with it, you get a big roll of money that you can’t make out here on regular jobs. And when you got away with it, that was a rush. That was a good feeling.”
.
By EARL SWIFT, Outside Magazine
It is a quiet, restorative place, this clearing high on a Pennsylvania ridge. Ferns and wildflowers carpet its floor. Sassafras and tulip trees, tall oak and hickory stand tight at its sides, their leaves hissing in breezes that sweep from the valley below. Cloistered from civilization by a steep 900-foot climb over loose and jutting rock, the glade goes unseen by most everyone but a straggle of hikers on the Appalachian Trail, the 2,180-mile footpath carved into the roofs of 14 eastern states.
