Features from the Archives of "The Friday Read"

April 11, 2020
Getting Away
From the archives of The Friday Read

For those of you who feel the walls closing in, we offer a journey to four distinctly Virginia locales. Walk the sidewalks of Lexington with our last truly independent newspaper editor, explore a nuclear-proof shelter in Culpeper, retrace George Washington's steps through the Great Dismal Swamp and honor the memory of a 'moving landmark' in Albemarle County. We'll get back to the news in due time. Meanwhile, safe travels!


** Ink-STAINED WRETCH
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** For 25 years, a newsman as 'independent as a hog on ice' (2017) ([link removed])
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By LAURENCE HAMMACK, The Roanoke Times (Metered Paywall - 18 articles a month)

Doug Harwood ambled along a downtown sidewalk, an unfiltered Camel cigarette dangling below his drooping moustache and a stack of his news magazines tucked under one arm, hot off the press. On this blustery afternoon in early March, Harwood delivered the latest edition of The Rockbridge Advocate, which once a month provides an unvarnished version of events in Lexington and Rockbridge County. As Harwood made his way down Main Street, he was met by a father and son. “Look out, Dad. Let’s go the other way,” Tom Chaffee said in jest. It was a reference to how some people — the ones with news of public interest that they’d rather keep private — are wary of crossing paths with Harwood and his pull-no-punches paper.


** VIRGINIA's NEVER-ENDING History
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** Former nuclear-proof bunker in Culpeper now safe guards treasures of Hollywood (2018) ([link removed])
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By GABE LAMONICA, The Washington Times

The machine gunners who once operated it around the clock are gone and so is the gun turret, but this former nuclear-bomb-proof bunker is still protecting a hoard of riches underneath the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The stacks of billions of dollars in cash that were stored here during the Cold War have been replaced by vaults stuffed with film from the golden age of Hollywood. Today, it’s officially known as the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center — where the Library of Congress stores about 98.5 percent of the nation’s film-recorded treasures.


** 250 years after George Washington drained it, feds soak a swamp (2017) ([link removed])
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By BEN FINLEY, The Associated Press

This is a story about a future president who tried to drain a swamp, and government workers who are making it wet again. By returning the habitat to its natural state, they just might keep the Great Dismal Swamp from heating up the planet. It was a young George Washington, working as a surveyor 254 years ago, who saw profits in the wetlands straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. The seemingly impenetrable swamp had been dismissed as a deadly morass where explorers vanished and runaway slaves escaped. Today, scientists have discovered that the swamp’s peat soil is a vital piece of the climate change puzzle, able to either contain or release a greenhouse gas that causes global warming.


** APPRECIATION
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** Charlottesville mourns a moving landmark, ‘Running Man’ (2015) ([link removed])
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By SUSAN SVRLUGA, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)

Over 30 years of teaching in Virginia, Billy Catron sent a lot of kids off to the University of Virginia. He always told them to watch for his brother-in-law, Philip Weber. Every student, without exception, came back and said: I saw him! I see Running Man all the time! Weber was hard to miss. First there were the simple odds: He ran so much, and so often, and for so long, since the 1980s. On a summer day, the 55-year-old U-Va. alum might run a half-marathon in the morning before it got too hot, then another one in the evening as things cooled off. On a winter day, he might knock out a quick-paced 20 miles, then get up the next day and do it again. And again.



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