A longtime friend emailed last night with some concerns about the “With apologies to Thomas Wolfe” article I wrote for DCDarkside in 1997.
“You presented a dark image of life in Floyd County when your family moved here after leaving Prince Edward County. You wrote that you worked hard to leave early and vowed never to return. Yet you did return in 2004 when you and your wife moved here and bought a home. Why?”
She made a good point. I wrote the article in 1997 and used my problems I faced in Floyd County both from my time there from age 5 to 8, when we moved from Florida back to her birthplace after my father died in an industrial accident in Tampa and then a move Farmville in Prince Edward County after their racist school board and supervisors closed the public school to avoid a federal order to integrate and opened an all-white private school.
Before the closure of public schools, Farmville had been a happy time for our combined family after my mother remarried when I was eight years old. I had a bicycle and a newspaper route in town, spent many Saturday afternoons at the local theater where matinees were dirt cheap and they had movie serials about Superman, Zorro and Flash Gordon.
But the school closures and the racist all-white school bothered us. I became a photographer who contributed photos to The Farmville Herald and found where the KuKlux Klan met and took photos from a hidden place in the woods of their burning cross and wrote an essay about their hateful rhetoric.
After my mother’s marriage to Truman Bolt, who was divorced with a son and two daughters, she had two children by him and we were a family of two parents, five kids, all with a surname of “Bolt” and one named “Thompson.” A family friend said we were a family of six Bolts and a “nut” named Thompson.
Truman had offered to formally adopt me, but I said “no” because my mother had told me that my father was “irreplaceable,” but my eight-year-old mind could not understand how she could replace him and I never gave Truman a chance to be my father. That was my fault and a mistake I tried to correct with him when we talked shortly his death in 1985.
He and my mother sold their sawmill business in Prince Edward County and decided to move his family home in did not have little league or newspaper delivery routes that a teenager could use with a bicycle. Also, the home then had wood stoves in the living room and bedrooms, one cold water pipe and an outhouse.
My young mind decided that I needed to get out of the county fast. Fortunately, Pete Hallman of The Floyd Press, looked over my clips and photos, knew about the photo the Klan, and offered me a full-time job as a reporter and photographer. His wife, Ruth, was my English teacher at the then new Floyd County High School and also taught journalism and was advisor of the school paper, where I had photos, stories and some columns during my three years there.
What was should have been four years there became three because I used summer school and gave up study halls for classes and skipped my junior year and gradudated a year early (1965). Pete had arranged for me to become a correspondent for The Roanoke Times while in high school and they gave me a fulltime position as a reporter and photographer at age 17.
I was attending the University of Virginia’s Roanoke campus with plans to transfer to Charlottesville for my last two years with a major in Political Theory (which was what Virginia called political science then). My agreement with The Roanoke Times was that I would have a college degree in five years.
I finished the first two years at the Virginia Roanoke Campus and it merged with Roanoke Technical Institute and it became Roanoke Community College. As the time, I had the option to moving to Charlottesville and taking a leave from the Times for two year, but I had been given a column and had won two Virginia Press Association awards and was having a lot of fun.
I tried to hide the fact that I was not taking a classes anywhere towards a degree. When the Times found out, they told me I had two weeks to find a new job elsewhere. I found a new reporting and photography position immediately at The Alton Evening Telegraph on the Illinois side of the St. Lous Metro area and, with a new wife, moved there in 1969.
The Roanoke Times had every right to fire me. I had agreed to obtain a college degree within five years and failed to do so and tried to hide the fact. It taught me a valuable lesson.
The Telegraph became home for 12 years. I was, ironically, assigned to cover Southern Illinois University, which had opened a new campus in nearby Edwardsville and I covered activities there and the SIU Board meetings in Edwardsville and Carbondale, further south in Illinois, and the state board of higher education, which met in Chicago monthly, requiring flights from St. Louis and an overnight stay in the Windy City.
I also the pleasures of covering the summer concerts at The Mississippi River Festival on the Edwardsville Campus, photographing and reviewing popular music acts like Credence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, The Band, The Who and many others for the 10 year run.
My first wife, Jan, and I bought a vintage row house built in 1815, and were featured in a St. Lous Magazine story about restoring it. Unfortunately, our marriage was in trouble and we divorced. She got the house and I moved into an apartment created in a vintage sanitarium.
I was a single man who enjoyed the company of several ladies until I met Amy, a professional actress who had been the resident heroine on The Goldenrod Showboat on the Mississippi River in St. Louis. She was brought in by Alton Little Theater as their pro actress for a charily melodrama in 1977 and I was asked to play the villain. We married in 1979 and moved into a three-story townhouse with a back deck overlooking downtown Alton and the river.
We were happy in Alton, the townhouse and our lives, but an offer from Rep. Paul Findley of Illinois gave me a chance to work for Congress and I thought a couple of years there could give me a chance to learn more about how it worked by being in the system.
I had been to Washington on assignments and was there during the 1776 Bicentennial. A trip there with Amy first gave us some doubts about leaving Alton but finally accepted the offer and loaded a rented Ryder Truck, packed it with our belongings and drove two days to Arlington, where we had rented a condo from a lady who had moved to Jacksonville, Florida.
A planned two years became seven, becoming communications director for New Mexico Congressman Manual Lujan, then chief of staff for a freshman House member, at the request of the National Republican Congressional Committee, then back with Lujan as his special assistant to the ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee.
Traveled a lot with Lujan, to the Paris Air Show, visits to Israel and the Middle East, the South Pole and other places. The committee handle NASA and the Space Shuttle Program and I had to work with another staff member when the Columbia shuttle exploded after takeoff on a mission.
After Manuel told me that he was retiring as a Congressman in 1989, I accepted and offer to become Vice President of Political Programs for The National Association of Realtors, overseeing their political action committee (RPAC), then the nation’s largest, and an independent expenditures program that spent millions on candidates without their knowledge.
Amy took acting and directing jobs in plays and worked on a New York Rockefeller Center tributed to Lee Strasberg, with Al Pacino and others. She later became a buyer for The Hecht Company, part of the May department store chain.
We had purchased the condo from out landlord owner and paid it off in 15 years. Arlington had become home, one with museums, theaters and restaurants galore. We could order Chinese delivery at 2 in the morning. I had left the political world in 1994 and returned to journalism, working as a contract photojournalism for wire services like AFP (The French agency with an active operation in Washington), the Washington Post, New York Times, National Geographic and others.
I shot photos in Israel, Syria, Iran, Honduras, Afghanistan and other hot spots. But the major one was only a few blocks from out home when a hijacked commercial airliner slammed into the side of the Pentagon as part of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I shot photos from a rise alongside Columbia Pike as a runner from the wire service picked up the used Compact Flash Cards from my two cameras, along with used batteries and she delivered new batteries and cards. I didn’t get home until the wee hours of the morning.
The attacks sent me to Afghanistan to cover the search for Osama bin Laden. I returned home in 2003 with an offer to go back out as an embed with a military unit dispatched to Iraq in 2004, but Amy asked me, for the first time in our marriage, to reject the assignment.
“I have a bad feeling on this one,” she said. “I don’t think you will come back alive.”
I had long learned to listen to her “bad feelings.” I said “no” to the assignment. It was time to slow down.
Washington had also become an armed camp with missile launchers on the National Mall and military assault vehicles around the Pentagon.
My mother, who still lived on the family farm, was in failing health, so we decided to leave Washington and move to Floyd County to be close to her.
Yes, this was the Floyd County that I could not leave soon enough in 1965. Amy and I had talked about retiring to New Mexico, a state we loved and had visited often. We decided we would be in Floyd while mother was still alive and would consider relocating to New Mexico after she died.
We were with mom a lot. She lived alone at home with my oldest step brother and a half brother keeping an eye on her when I wasn’t around. We closed on a house in December, 2004. I was a Floyd County resident again.
The return brought renewal of friendships from my high school days. Wanda Combs, editor of The Floyd Press, asked me to take photos of high school athletic events. Then she asked me to cover meetings of the Board of Supervisors and sessions on the Circuit Court.
Amy helped out at Angels of the Attic and took care of homeless cats for the Animal Human Society. We made a lot of new friends.
Mom’s health continued to decline. A fall at home broke her hip and could not live alone any longer. We offered to have her live with us but she declined. We had to move her into an assisted-living facility. I would spend time with her there daily.
At one point, she said she wanted to be with both of her husbands, my father who died in 1948 and Truman, who died in 1985. When I asked how she wanted me to handle it, she said “I guess you will need to cremate me.”
In August of 2012, she had trouble recognizing me during my visit. I returned home but the facility called and said I needed to be back there that night. I sat with her during the night. Her breathing was ragged and she died shortly after 5 a.m.
As she wished, we scattered half of her ashes over the grave of Truman in Buffalo Mountain Church Cemetery. As noted in her obituary in The Floyd Press and Roanoke Times, she and my dad met at the Norfolk Navy Yard where he was an Electrician’s Mate serving on the U.S.S. Missouri when it sailed towards Tokyo to attack the capital of Japan in an effort to end World War II, but atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an unconditional surrender and he stood on the deck of the ship in the Tokyo harbor to witness the surrender.
Dad returned to Norfolk, proposed and married my mother both rode Harley Davidson motorcycles and had planned to ride them from Virginia down to Florida so she could meet his folks. But a stop to let him meet her parents (my grandparents) came with a surprise about the marriage and she had to soothe things out and told him to ride onto Tampa. She would come down in a few days.
“Take the train,” he said. “Don’t try to ride alone.”
She called three days later and told him to pick her up at the train station in Tampa in four days.
Then she took off on her Harley and rode down, on her own, from Meadows of Dan to Tampa.
“I had everything I needed,” she told me when I was five years old. “I had two tire repair kits, four patches, extra oil, spark plugs and two sets of points and a carburetor rebuild kit. I needed to use all of them.”
The last set of repairs came at a diner in Georgia, just across highway 301 from the motel where she had spent the night. She rebuilt the carburetor in a booth.
When my future dad rode up on his motorcycle, he found my future mother sitting on the curb by her bike, waiting.
“It was our first and only real fight,” she told me years later. “He got over it.”
With a map she kept with the route marked, I took her ashes down to Tampa to be with my dad at the cemetery in North Tampa. Then I drove north, up I-75 to Atlanta, where I spent the night just East of there at a motel near I-85 before heading East the next morning to Charlotte, then north on I-77 to U.S. 221 at Hillsville and East to Floyd to home.
When I asked Amy if, with my mother gone, should we consider relocating to New Mexico.
“No way,” she said. “This is our home. We aren’t going anywhere else.”
Yes, it sure is. Amy and I, as partners, have lived in three homes we liked: Alton, Illinois; Arlington, VA (and Washington,DC) and Floyd, VA.