The Face that Launched a Blog Conference
and my “blogging career!”
(editor’s note: I had planned to write this post, or one similar, on April 28th in order to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Commonwealth Conservative Caption Contest having a head-on collision with the Martinsville-Henry County Community Pride Jingle Contest. Since I failed to mail my raw meat sacrifice to Demzilla in time, I’ve decided to go ahead and publish this now as “MY Virginia Blog Carnival Submission.”)
I moved to Martinsville (from Manakin-Sabot) in August of 2004. Like most small towns in the South, excuse me, I forgot . . . it’s still a city, Martinsville is rich in Southern quirkiness. The people here, for the most part, are helpful and friendly to a fault. Sometimes it’s hard to complete tasks like painting a room or mowing the lawn because a neighbor will “drop by” with a bottle of wine or a pitcher of appletinis. The climate is splendid and it’s well-endowed with natural beauty as we lay cradled in the arms of Smith and Bull Mountains. Most importantly, I can’t think of a better place to rear children and that’s mostly why I’m here.
Martinsville is unique in that not too far in the distant past, it was an economic powerhouse with the textile mills and furniture factories employing thousands of people earning high wages. The city once boasted of having more millionaires (per capita) than any other. That changed when NAFTA created the “giant sucking sound” about which Ross Perot warned us, as jobs went elsewhere. While NAFTA benefited most of the country by providing lower prices, it took a heavy toll on Martinsville. DuPont, Tultex, Pillowtex and numerous other companies closed their doors and the ones that remained greatly reduced their workforce. The mass exodus of jobs was accompanied by the exodus of Martinsville’s middle class (I think I may be the only member of this group here) and created somewhat of a “haves” vs. “have nots” environment, albeit real or perceived, it’s here.
Economic development has been an oxymoron in Martinsville/Henry County for a number of years. I have spent countless hours on the internet reading, copying and pasting articles crucial to a better understanding of Martinsville’s past, present and potential future. The majority of the articles I saved were from Virginia Business and Bacon’s Rebellion and the best of these were written by Will Vehrs.
For anyone who has ever felt a special bond or connection with an author whom they’ve never met, I won’t need to explain it. For the rest of you, I still have hope. Will Vehrs was my Geopolitical Guru, my Southside Sage, my Economic Einstein, my State Budget Cutting Casanova, my Common Sense Compass . . . I hope you get my point, I’m starting to scare myself . . . AND he was always optimistic when it came to the future of our area. When it looked like the New College Institute wouldn’t become a reality, he wrote one of my favorite pieces: Let’s Have Traffic Jams in Southside. An excerpt:
Anyway, I am totally baffled as to why this university idea is not a total slam-dunk. We know that there will be unrelenting pressure to create more state university slots for our growing Virginia population. We should know that creating more slots at current universities in gridlocked areas like Charlottesville, Fairfax, Williamsburg, and Fredericksburg is problematic. There is land and private grant money available in Southside. Southside is a struggling area and a university would bring a welcome shot in the arm economically.
Will left Bacon’s Rebellion to co-blog with the recently made Honorable Chad Dotson (Congratulations on your new Judgeship, Chad) where the Friday Caption Contest was a mainstay. 
Those in the blogosphere recognized the caption contest as a “place” to unwind and be silly on Friday. On the week of April 28th, 2006, this picture (from the Martinsville Bulletin) of Mack Davidson and Cindy Price, the winners (in a field of two entries) of the Martinsville-Henry Co. Community Pride Jingle Contest, found its way into the caption contest. Tempting as it is to hold another caption contest with this photo, I won’t. Consideration for those who may be reading this while at work prevents me from doing so.
Will, whose job as a Business Services Manager with Virginia Department of Business Assistance, was having a slow Friday. A great deal of his time was operating a “Live Chat” on the Department’s Web site. He had to be online and ready for a chat whether someone was on the other end of the chat or not. To bide his time while waiting for the next chat to start, Will made a few okay, several, oops - lots of comments captioning the photo (my favorite: Cindy’s top was symbolic of the decline in Southside’s fabric industry.)
Those outside of the blogosphere apparently saw the contest as an economic development think tank where the most inspired and profound thoughts regarding the plans for progress in Martinsville were to be deposited. Will, portrayed as the ultimate power holder and decision maker, was frowning on Martinsville. He must certainly be to blame for the economic woes of late and must be held accountable. The Bulletin led the charge and the majority of public officials followed suit:
Del. Danny Marshall, R-Danville: “It’s just absurd. If he’s in economic development, he’s in the wrong job,” Marshall said. “The other thing that bothers me is, was this on our (taxpayers’) time?” However, the bottom line is, “the folks in Martinsville and Henry County don’t need this.”
Paula Burnette, Iriswood District, (my representative on the Board of Supervisors) said Vehrs’ posts “do not create positive attention toward our community … (a community) which he may be representing at some point. It’s hard to see how somebody could slam a community one week and the next (week) say it’s a good place to do business,” Burnette said.
Perhaps the harshest and cruelest recommendations came from (predictably) the area’s highest ranking state Democrats (this was before they became Democratics):
Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Collinsville, urged Gov. Tim Kaine “to call for Mr. Vehrs’ resignation, effective immediately” in a letter dated May 4. In his letter to Kaine, Armstrong said “given your strong commitment to the revitalization (of) Martinsville and Henry County and the efforts your administration is making to assist in that regard, I know you were shocked and displeased” at online comments.
“Shame on him,” said State Senator Roscoe Reynolds, D-Ridgeway, of caption entries posted on a blog by Will Vehrs. “If I were him, I would resign,” Reynolds said. “Or if I had the power to fire him, I’d fire him.”
The question for Ward Armstrong is: Do you prefer to be called HYPOCRITE or HYPOCRITIC? Considering Ward’s history of making tasteless, demeaning to women jokes while on the tax payers’ clock:
Freshman Del. Jeannemarie Devolites (R-Fairfax) was still miffed today about randy remarks that a Southside Democrat made about her Thursday as he parodied President Clinton. Del. Ward L. Armstrong (D-Henry) was doing a schtick on the House floor about that night’s legislative basketball game when he announced that Devolites was the team’s center.
“In fact, she’s coming over to my place later. We’re gonna go over the play book,” Armstrong said as Delegates roared with laughter.
At a postgame party, Armstrong told more Clinton jokes, this time comparing Devolites to Monica S. Lewinsky, again in her presence. Those present recalled Armstrong saying something to the effect that Devolites was “no Monica Lewinsky,” but that she had potential . . . .
Armstrong, 41, apologized during today’s House session, saying that “to the extent that some members may have been offended by my remarks, I wish to extend an apology . . . .I was merely trying to bring a little levity to the process.”
–The Washington Post, March 7, 1998.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board picked up on this hypocrisy as well and called for Del. Armstrong to resign:
Vehrs, who received a 10-day suspension without pay, has apologized more thoroughly and sincerely than Armstrong did. If Armstrong is right now that Vehrs should be fired for his postings to an online caption contest, then the Delegate, who is called upon to vote on women’s issues, should resign as well.
People sometimes say and do things they shouldn’t. If Armstrong is grandstanding, then he has made his point. To the extent that he might be genuinely offended by Vehr’s attempt to bring a little levity to a subject, then he should stop pouting and accept Vehrs’ apology like the grown-up he ostensibly is.
Thankfully, Governor Kaine did not follow the recommendations of those two bozos and Will was allowed to continue his career with the state. If someone was truly offended by the captions, they could’ve contacted Will. He would’ve removed them and that would’ve been the end of the story and I probably wouldn’t be blogging.
I didn’t intend to write such an in depth review of the jingle vs. caption contest debacle but I wanted to provide a backdrop of why I’m here. I first became aware of the controversy when Mary Rives, my best friend, called with what I truly thought was a fake tone of indignation in describing what the “Head of Economic Development for the State” had said about Martinsville. Using my own best fake tone of indignation, my response was something along the lines of, “How dare he laugh at Cindy Price, our cornerstone of decency and decorum in Martinsville?” I laughed and we ended the call.
The following morning, I read with disbelief Mary Rives’ letter to the editor of the Bulletin and realized that she wasn’t joking the day before. My first reaction was to resolve to never speak to Mary Rives again. Upon my next realization that she was my only friend and I loved her dearly, I called her (at 7:30 in the morning - this is significant to those of you who know me and my love of sleep) and said, “We need to talk.”
Our conversation was the beginning of my defense of Will which can best be summarized by, “You’ve got the wrong guy.” I didn’t understand why the community had its panties in a bunch over Will’s captions but Mary Rives explained that it was like a familial response to an outsider. Like a brother can call his sister a slut but pound the noggin’ of anyone else who dares to say the same.
My mantra continued to be, “You’ve got the wrong guy.” I said it loudly but realized I needed a venue and had none. Riding a horse through Martinsville and shouting my lungs out wasn’t an option, nor was printing thousands of fliers and stuffing them under wiper blades at shopping centers. Writing a letter to the editor was pointless since they had created this melodrama to begin with. All I could do was lay out my defense to one person at a time and hope that I could persuade them to see things as I saw them. This is what I do today, with my blog, but hopefully reaching more than one person at a time . . .
Meanwhile, Charles Roark, of local media Star 18, dialed information and received Will’s home phone number (all of this was aired publicly) and berated Will while under the guise of conducting an interview. Will, through all of this, continued to take the high road. He had graciously and generously apologized (too much, in my opinion) to a group of people that was increasingly proving that Martinsville was a joke. Hearing Will Vehrs defend his reputation to a low-life bottom feeder like Charles Roark was more than I could stand. Maybe I wasn’t the only person in the world whose favorite blogger was being demonized by their local media and whose new home was becoming known for it’s lack of a sense of humor in the blogosphere, but I sure felt like it. My newly adopted hometown, the majority of which had never heard of a blog, was calling for my favorite blogger’s head. Feeling like my husband must’ve felt upon hearing that Dale Earnhardt was dead, I started sobbing for this blogger whom I’d never met.
Waldo Jacquith’s blog, which I had read just enough to assume that Waldo was a woman (I think it was because we had the same taste in computers, cameras, music, movies and television shows and I thought “Waldo” was a super cool name for a woman) was a source of comfort for me as each day brought more ridiculous accusations and recommendations regarding Will. On Waldo’s Web site, I saw numerous political bloggers crossing party lines in their support of Will. Waldo himself said it best (emphasis mine, typos his):
Whatever harm may befall the region because of Will’s posts — and clearly none actually will — the current and future benefits of Will’s work on behalf of the region and within the Virginia blogosphere far outweigh that harm.
Just last month Will contacted me about giving a presentation to some state businesses about using blogs to promote themselves. I immediately agreed to do so. It never crossed my mind to ask for compensation or even further details. Why? It’s Will Vehrs. If he says that Virginia businesses could benefit from a few minutes of my time, I’m certainly going to do so. This is the sort of benefit that comes of Will’s extensive work as a Virginia political blogger. He has made connections, friends and allies across the state, all of which will serve him well in his work for the Virginia Department of Business Assistance and, by extension, will serve Virginia well.
If Martinsville officials are smart — and I hope they are — they’re know that they can turn these lemons into lemonade. I don’t doubt for a minute that, if they asked, Will would dedicate a significant amount of time to using his pulpit to promote Martinsville and Henry County. I would love to see him write a series of blog entries about the region, telling his readers about the area’s history, its culture, its businesses, and the economic opportunities available to the area. I’m sure that he could start a statewide blog discussion about Southside’s past, present and future. I’d be proud to take part in that discussion.
Will Vehrs erred in making jokes about Martinsville. Here’s hoping that Martinsville won’t err in their reaction. If any city in the state should know that “opportunity” is just another word for “problem,” it should be Martinsville. If they’re to have any chance any building a brighter future for themselves, now is their chance to demonstrate that they’ve learned that lesson.
Martinsville, of course, did continue to err in its reaction. Except for one Henry County Supervisor, Andy Parker, who seldom gets credit in our local media for being the lone voice of reason:
“I think people are making a bigger deal about it than necessary,” Parker said. However, “clearly, this guy has too much time on his hands.”
Parker also saw the humor in Vehrs’ comments. “While it might be in poor taste for some, some of it was pretty funny,” Parker said. “I certainly didn’t take offense.”
Mary Rives, in what can only be described as a grand example of open-mindedness and courage, took Waldo’s suggestion to turn these lemons into lemonade and contacted Will. She invited him to come to Martinsville during his suspension from his job. Will accepted and I finally had the opportunity to meet him. In person, Will was even more insightful and wittier than I expected. I was at a loss for words in this “presence of greatness” with whom Mary Rives and I dined at Chatmoss. I did manage to give him a copy of the Community & Economic Development Strategy for Martinsville/Henry Co. Now the guru had the play book, my job was done. Except we did mention the possibility of a blog conference being held in Martinsville . . .
Most of you know the rest of this story but I plan to continue it in “Why I Blog, Part Deux” which will have to come later. I suppose the “short answer” to Eileen’s question about why we blog comes from my very first post:
Sunday, June 18, 2006
After seeing the trouble Will Vehrs got into with his blog, I knew I had to have one. If for no other reason, I needed a place to defend people that had been wronged. I linked my defense of Will to my myspace.com page but it didn’t seem very dignified. So here I am….
I don’t intend for this to be entirely about Virginia politics, really….I hope for it to be more of an online journal. A way to hone my writing skills, let friends and acquaintances know what I’m up to, reminisce about “growing up” in Richlands, and of course, defend those who deserve it as well as offend those who deserve it.
When events are unjust and good people are being hurt by those wishing to further an agenda, we can no longer remain silent. This is why I blog.
