The Augusta Free Press marked its six-year anniversary on July 2.
On July 3, the publishing company announced its flagship print publication, The New Dominion Magazine, will shift to a monthly schedule beginning in January.
“Response to the magazine this year has been wonderful – even in tough economic times,” said publisher Crystal Graham. “With a rebound of the economy expected in 2009, it only makes sense to make the shift to a monthly publication.” Read more »
Here’s what is coming in our Summer 2008 edition of The New Dominion magazine - set to hit newsstands in July!
A religous Revolution
Shane Lam felt the calling. He had to come back home, even though it would risk opening up some old wounds that had taken years to heal. But if that was all that he had to risk, the reward - the spiritual rebirth of his old stomping grounds - was well worth it.
2025 Vision
What does the Greater Augusta area look like in 2025? We asked a group of people who will have a lot to say about that to share their perspectives. And there is no shortage of opinions, you can rest assured.
Vineyards in the Valley
The wine industry east of the Blue Ridge has been thriving for years. Now the industry is taking root in the Shenandoah Valley. Join us for tours of new vineyards in Augusta County and Rockingham County and learn more about what locals are saying is the Next Big Thing in Valley agriculture.
Around the Valley in a baseball daze
Jerry Carter had this wild idea. There are 11 baseball parks in the Valley League. What if he made it a point to go to a game in each, and invite fans to go along for the ride? AFP editor Chris Graham caught up with Carter at two of his stops and caught Valley League fever himself.
The L Word It’s tough losing an election. The AFP’s Chris Graham shares his thoughts about his unsuccessful run for Waynesboro City Council, and asks Creigh Deeds, Bruce Elder and Tracy Pyles how they dealt with the sting of losing themselves.
Who am I? AFP contributor Elizabeth Geris takes us inside the world of geneaology to answer the age-old question.
Book ‘Em promotes literacy, crime prevention: AFP contributor Faryal Zubair catches up with Book ‘Em founder Mark Kearney to discuss plans for this year’s Waynesboro book festival.
50K and counting at the Wildlife Center Wildlife Center founder Ed Clark talks about how far veterinary medicine has come since the center opened in 1982, and about common loons.
History by fabric An inside look at the upcoming Quilts: Past, Present and Future exhibition.
It was hard enough getting Kitty Lough to go into an independent-living facility, harder still to get her to accept the change in her lifestyle.
She never would have guessed back then that she’d miss it as much as she does now.
“She’s finally gotten over the stage of saying, I just don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t understand why this all had to happen,” said her son, David, talking about his mother’s forced departure from a retirement community in Waynesboro, in January. Read more »
Listen to a special edition of “The Augusta Free Press Show.”
Andy Carle from George Mason University, Karen Roberto from Virginia Tech and Richard Lindsay from the University of Virginia join New Dominion editor Chris Graham in a series of discussions about our readiness to deal with the coming Senior Boom.
“We were just tired of the separate-but-equal thing. Because it certainly wasn’t separate-but-equal,” said Rita Wilson, who is retiring from Staunton City Council on June 30 after 16-plus years on the job, and who a generation ago made her first foray into public life by rather casually visiting the principal at Bessie Weller Elementary School to talk to him about enrolling her eldest daughters.
“I went to Bessie Weller like I didn’t know anything, and I went in, and all the white mothers were standing around, and the lady said, May I help you? And I said, I came to enroll my girls in school. And they said, Where do you live? And I said, On Jackson Street. And she said, Your children should go to T.C. Edmonds on Johnson Street. And I said, I think you’re mistaken, because my next-door neighbors go to this school, and if my next-door neighbors go here, my girls should go here, too,” Wilson said. Read more »
“Mary Baldwin College Bookstore, this is Elizabeth.”
It was all I could do to answer the nearby phone at this 166-year-old private school’s only campus bookstore, while apologizing to the 23-deep line of extremely patient young women that started at my cash register – young women whose arms were struggling to contain their own individual towers of burdensome, outrageously expensive textbooks.
On the other end of the phone was yet another student enrolled in the college’s statewide, updated version of the correspondence-style of higher education known as the Adult Degree Program. Read more »
Yeah, I know, invoking “Field of Dreams” in a piece examining the economic aspects of a proposed $20 million baseball stadium is beyond cheesy.
But I do it to try to make you consider something that you might not otherwise. Namely, that the whole idea rests on the notion that a Downtown Waynesboro baseball stadium could draw 4,000 fans a night, 70 nights a year, when nobody involved in the behind-the-scenes on the project has the slightest inkling as to whether even a single person will ever turn the turnstiles. Read more »
Listen to a special edition of “The SportsDominion Show.”
New Dominion Magazine editor Chris Graham talks in this podcast with Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist about minor-league baseball stadium financing.
Your first instinct during a recession is to cut back on extras like eating out, going to the theater, going on vacation.
Or is it?
“The recent press has amplified a growing anxiety that is out there about home finances. But for the most part, Americans tend to see their leisure time and vacations almost as a birthright. So it may change a little bit, but it won’t be something that they would give up quickly,” said Mark Shore, the director and CEO of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau. Read more »
Listen to a special edition of “The Augusta Free Press Show.”
Michael Harvey, the executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Partnership for Economic Development, joins New Dominion editor Chris Graham to talk about the local economy and its ability to withstand shock from macroeconomic trends.
When you’re a TV weatherman, a trip to the local burger place can be a challenge not unlike the 10K races that Eric Pritchett runs when he’s not standing in front of a television screen telling us what Mother Nature has in store for us tomorrow.
“What’s it going to do on Monday?” one of the employees at Wright’s Dairy Rite asked Pritchett as we stood in line together awaiting a food order, inquiring about the talk that had been circulating in weather circles about a possible upcoming winter storm.
Another asked Pritchett a little later how another NBC29 weather anchor was doing. The owner of the store came over a few minutes afterward and threw in a question about the morning news show - Pritchett does the 5, 6, 10 and 11 o’clock news, but he answered the question anyway. Read more »
It’s 20 years for Bob Corso at WHSV-TV3 in Harrisonburg. That wasn’t the plan when Corso came back East.
“I never really thought about how long I’d be here, but I didn’t have a plan like OK, I’m going to be in Harrisonburg two years, then I’m going to go to, you know, a midsize market and then go a major market, something like that,” Corso said. Read more »
When you’re a news reporter - print, radio, TV - it comes with the job that sometimes you have to rush to the scene of a car accident or fire or some other such catastrophe to tell folks what is going on.
And it doesn’t make it any easier that it’s your job - and that you’ve had to do it before; even if you’re a veteran reporter like Ken Slack, the Augusta County bureau chief for NBC29, and you’ve had to do this many, many times.
“You don’t want to be there. You feel like a vulture most of the time,” Slack told me - and I can echo the sentiments. Read more »
The subject isn’t evolution, and the barristers aren’t William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. But the upcoming trial of a Staunton adult-video store owner on obscenity charges has some of that Scopes Monkey Trial flavor to it.
Doesn’t it?
I mean, on the one side, you have the fundamentalists who have been breathing fire about the invasion of porn into their sleepy hamlet since the day the local newspaper first broke the story back in the summer. And on the other side are the secularists who have themselves been breathing fire over the application of what they see as an outdated law by an overzealous to say the least prosecutor who is trying to enforce his morals on the population with the taxpayers footing the bill for his values crusade. Read more »
He has represented Larry Flynt - which says most of what you need to know about the legal background of Paul Cambria.
Let’s just say that he’s done this - defending someone standing accused on obscenity charges dealing with the production or sale of pornography - before.
Which could explain why Staunton Commonwealth’s attorney Ray Robertson tried to have the Buffalo, N.Y.,-based Cambria removed from the obscenity case against After Hours Video owner Rick Krial last fall. Read more »
Is there a disagreement among the principals behind the Citizens Task Force Against Pornography on the direction of the community effort?
I don’t think so. But there does seem to be at the least a difference of opinion as to what the task force’s goals should be.
“Our number-one goal was to get the ordinances on the books. That was our number-one focus. Our number-two focus was just to be a watchdog over the business that we had here in Staunton,” task force head Andrea Oakes told me. Read more »
It was the big to-do back in 1968 when it was released in America.
“Filmed entirely in Sweden,” a snapshot on movietime.com relates, “‘Inga’ brims with a European sensuality and eroticism that shocked American audiences upon its release in 1968.”
That about sums it up right there, doesn’t it?
“When I got word that a local theatre was about to show the 1968 XXX-rated movie, ‘Inga,’ I wrote a letter of warning, telling them that pornographic exhibitions would not be tolerated,” Staunton Commonwealth’s attorney Ray Robertson wrote in his book, More Tales from the Trenches, released in November, “and that while I could not promise a conviction, I surely could promise a prosecution. They would be showing it at their own peril!” Read more »
Item by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Sad news in city government today - former city councilman Lem Irvin has died.
Irvin, 77, of 1845 North Talbott Place, died Wednesday evening, according to an obituary on the News Leader website.
Irvin served multiple terms on city council, most recently from 1998 to 2002.
Analysis by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
A majority of Americans support opening public lands up to oil exploration-related drilling, but a bigger majority thinks the drilling will be more of a benefit to oil companies than to average consumers.
These were the rather mixed findings of a poll released today by the Washington, D.C.,-based research firm Belden Russonello [...]
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The latest housing-market news is in. I’ll be an optimist and called it a mixed bag, even as Fred Morgan, a Realtor with 1st Choice-GMAC in Staunton and a member of the Greater Augusta Association of Realtors, admits to being a bit shocked when he first saw the latest sales data.
“The [...]
Compiled by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
LOSER: Me, for not being able to spell
It’s Cindy Corell, one -r, it was pointed out to me today. Got it.
(The name seems to scream out for a second -r. Seriously, Cindy, you might want to consider …)
So let’s diagram the matter of the Paint the Valley Blue slam in the [...]
Fear and Loathing in Waynesboro column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
We’re slowly, patiently rebuilding our AFP archives, though honestly it wouldn’t be slow and patience-testing if there weren’t so many goldmines contained therein.
Case in point - I’m scanning the files on an old hard drive for stories about local government in 2005 the other night, and [...]
Listen to “The Augusta Free Press Show.”
AFP editor Chris Graham joins “Online with Jim Bresnahan” on 1450AM in Lexington to talk about the local Paint the Valley Blue effort to get the vote out for Democratic Party candidates Barack Obama, Mark Warner and Sam Rasoul.
Chris and Jim also discuss the 2009 Virginia governor’s race in [...]
Item by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Holly Allen & Friends will play the Friday-night gig at Stone Soup Books and Cafe in Downtown Waynesboro this week.
Allen will be joined by Deep Blue Jones lead singer Jeremy Fretwell and R.W. and Sherri Smith.
The show starts at 6 p.m.
There is no cover charge.
Reservations are encouraged. Call 540.943.0084.
[...]
Item by Crystal Graham
freepress@ntelos.net
Puppies and dogs of all ages and sizes will get to march in their very own parade on Saturday, July 26, as part of a Puppy Parade to benefit the SPCA.
Successful Women’s Alliance Network, or SWAN, will be putting on the parade as part of their outreach efforts to the benefit [...]
Story by Laura Lehman Amstutz
For the second year in a row, Eastern Mennonite Seminary has admitted more students from other denominations than those who are Mennonite.
This year, EMS has admitted 22 new degree-seeking students and eight non-degree seeking students at the Harrisonburg campus. Three more degree-seeking students and one more non-degree seeking student will enter [...]
In the Scheme of Things column by Nan Russell
Sitting across from a German couple and a Chinese mother and child, we were waiting at the Guilin airport for our delayed flight to Shanghai. In this last week of our travel-study tour, my husband and I were savoring this mini-break by reading.
Tuning out languages I couldn’t [...]
Dinner Diva column by Leanne Ely
Last Wednesday on my radio show, a listener was asking me questions about nutrition. I answered them as best I could, and her reply was incredible. She said, “Perhaps laying out our food for the next day is just as important as laying out our clothes.” Not an exact quote, [...]
Local News
- NV:Increment financing approved for road to county development
- DNR: Former state senator says iron is hot for rail
- RTD: Charlottesville named one of country’s 10 healthiest cities
State News
- WP: Gilmore filed false information on disclosure forms to hide ties to controversial contractor
-Daily Press: Mayor promises action on Internet abuse
National News
- Politico: GOP losing [...]
The Best Seat in the House column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
No, I wasn’t the guy who gave Virginia a first-place vote. So you can quelch that rumor right here and now.
Not that I think the Cavs are going to finish fifth in the Coastal Division of the ACC in 2008, either. In fact, I’m probably [...]
Item by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Waynesboro righthander Jake Cowan was honored as one of the Valley League’s players of the week after throwing a complete-game three-hitter in a 5-2 win over Covington last week.
Cowan struck out 11 and walked four en route to the win. The UVa. product also picked up the win over Vienna in [...]
Item by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
DuPont Community Credit Union celebrated the grand opening of a new office in Waynesboro and the groundbreaking at a site that will host a new office in Woodstock.
The new Waynesboro office is adjacent to the long-time office for the East Side of Waynesboro at 200 E. Broad St. The 7,300-square-foot facility [...]
