May??? It's May Again?

Gosh, I looked at my blog and realized it's been over a month since I've written anything. Just when I think things are going to slow down a bit, I find my calendar filled. Guess who fills it up by saying "yes" to too many things? Oh, well, staying busy keeps me happy and sober and useful. I'm looking forward to a vacation, though. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to take one in July, which is not that far away.

I took the picture at the top one evening after work when Morris and I went for a walk through historic Monroe Ward in the downtown area. The picture shows the back of an old store on Broad Street. This area is typical of most cities; a former residential neighborhood turned commercial, followed by a decline as suburbs sprang up around the city. Now, though, people are moving back into the downtown neighborhoods. New apartment and condominium dwellers are revitalizing empty buildings, and events like weekly evening art walks & street festivals bring in people from surrounding areas.

I've been going to brunch, too. I got this plate of goodness at Northside Grill. Richmond is a restaurant town, and there's no shortage of great choices when it comes to dining away from home.

I took a segway tour, and it was a blast! I want to do it again. I went with several of my friends, and no one got hurt. Segways are very easy to navigate, so keep your eyes open for the chance to ride one wherever you live.
Segway of Richmond offers a choice of tours, and they provided friendly instruction.

The weather has been pleasant overall, so I've been exploring the city and going out with friends when I'm away from the office. I usually have my camera charged up and ready for any photo opportunities. The picture below shows the view from Gamble's Hill looking across the James River.

I've been to a couple of cook-outs, and there's nothing like your first hot dog or hamburger off a charcoal grill to convince you that summer is on its way. We were at a picnic in the country, and nearly choked on our food when the seat of Robespierre's camp chair suddenly gave out.

I try to be a good citizen these days. My face hasn't appeared on any "Wanted" posters around town lately.

A cook-out I attended at a friend's house last week featured a delicious Hummingbird Cake. My mom used to make these. Looks good, doesn't it? We also watched an old movie called I'll Cry Tomorrow, starring Susan Hayward, chewing the scenery and trying to dance. The 1955 movie was based on the autobiography of Lillian Roth and her alcoholic downfall. I love old movies.

Last Sunday a friend invited me to the Picasso exhibition (fabulous) at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. No cameras allowed inside, of course, but I took a couple of pictures of the new addition to the museum.

Those are a few of the things I've been doing lately. My life has been full and rich, both at work and play, and I would not be able to say that if I were still drinking. When I was newly sober I met a guy named Jimmy who was trying to get back into recovery. We hung out together quite a bit, but after a year without drinking, Jimmy drifted away from recovery. I was sorry to hear that Jimmy died a couple of weeks ago at the age of fifty-four. I'm sad about that, but there's some anger, too. Jimmy loved life, and he had the tools he needed to live happily but he put them down and the insanity returned.

The other day as I walked out of the museum, there were three goblets of white wine on an outdoor table. The day was bright, crisp, and sunny. The wine was the color of straw, and looked lovely in the tall glasses. A petulant voice in my head said "Why can't you have a glass of wine?"

Instantly, the response came "Because I'm an alcoholic," and I was glad that the answer carried no bitterness or regret. There was a time when I first got sober that these two voices would have held a debate in my head. As I walked across the green lawn at the museum, I chuckled. Remember the old Looney Tunes cartoons that featured an angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other? Just for today, the angel has the stronger voice.

Out Like A Lion

It occurred to me this morning that it is the last day of March, and I'd better get cracking if I want to post a few pictures of springtime in Richmond. Spring made a lovely debut in town this year, but has been shoved aside by a petulantly departing Winter. Rather than exiting gracefully with a promise to return when invited, Winter has made a last stand, shaking her fist defiantly. There was a dusting of snow on my deck this past Sunday when I woke up. Nevertheless, Spring is here, and I have a few photos to prove it.

Cherry blossoms in the Malvern Gardens neighborhood

A stunning saucer magnolia tree blooms in Byrd Park

A Queen Anne home in Barton Heights welcomes Spring

Early celebrants enjoy the afternoon at Boat Lake in Byrd Park

I spent one Sunday in mid-March with Brenda & her daughter Emily. After a delicious brunch in Carytown, we went by an open house at a home for sale in Byrd Park. I recommend this as a cheap form of entertainment. We dropped by the 1918 Mediterranean-style house built for the Lathrop family. It's a small place - only 6,750 square feet of living space in the main house. The additional 432 square feet in the separate garage apartment may tip the scales for you if you need more room.

Come on in and look around!

Look at it this way, even if you knew someone who lived in this house, you couldn't go visit and rummage through every nook & cranny of their home. Nor would you want to. With a realtor's open house, you have their tacit approval to open doors & cabinets. Open houses are a nosy person's dream come true.

The main staircase in the reception hall

Dining Room

Living Room

Yes, We Have No Burnett's

The moment one learns English, complications set in. — Felipe Alfau

Somehow, certainly not by careful design, much of my worklife has been spent communicating with others by telephone. In my younger days, I was an employee of the good old Bell System, back when people could choose between telephones with buttons or dials. When I began working there, no one had a cell phone & nearly every household had landline service. Subscribers in rural areas could still get party lines.

When it was time for the Christmas holidays (Remember those? We were able to say "Merry Christmas" back then without offending anyone), I would volunteer to work the skeleton crew so that most of my co-workers could leave early on Christmas Eve. We didn't get many calls on that day anyway, and I'd get to leave early on New Year's Eve as a trade-off. I recall one Christmas Eve when I got a call late in the afternoon from an elderly woman.

She was in a nursing home and was being moved to another room. She needed to get her phone service moved as quickly as possible, because they were moving her that very day. When I told her we could not move her phone until the following week, she immediately started wailing. She sounded so frail.

"Oh, Lord! You got to move it today, else I won't be able to talk to my family on Christmas!"

I felt quite bad for her, but the technicians were booked solid, and only emergency orders had a hope of being worked the following week. I was already expediting her order because of the circumstances.

She continued to whine and moan, and I did feel sorry for her. I had questions, though, and said "I'm so sorry the nursing home is moving you to a different room with no warning. That's very unusual."

"Mmmm, well, yes. I suppose so."

"Why are they doing that?"

"It's this lady I'm in this room with. It's all her fault! She keep worrying me & worrying me. And when I hit her, they move ME!"

There's always more than meets the eye. Here she was acting pitiful, and she'd just been caught beating up her roommate. I told her her service would be moved at the end of the following week, and wished her a Merry Christmas.


Wilton, circa 1750-1753
The photographs on this post are of Wilton, a plantation house owned by the prominent Randolph family. Yes, Morris & I were out exploring again. It was a chilly day with drizzling rain, so the pictures look a little gloomy. I decided to be adventurous and play around with some button called picnik. Usually, I limit photo manipulation to cropping and adjusting the contrast, but I experimented with some of the more mundane picnik features this time. I didn't want my pictures to look too freaky.

Front view of Wilton
It took a lot of money and many slaves to support the lavish lifestyle of the landed gentry in Old Virginia. By the time a few generations had passed, the economic climate had changed. The last of the Randolph family to live there was Robert, who died in 1859. Here's what a northern visitor in 1833 had to say about the house:
"...spacious wainscoted rooms, high ceilings, broad staircases and fine hall give you a very magnificent idea of the grandeur of the former proprietor who so long ago had an establishment that wants for nothing but a fitting up, to vie with modern elegance. But such ruin! - Broken down fences, a falling piazza, defaced paint, banisters tied up with ropes etc. etc. - the general aspect of the house is that of forlorn ruin."

Center Hall at Wilton
The illicit photo of the interior was snapped when our guide, Tom, dashed off to the bathroom before we began our tour. Honestly, what is it with us Americans? You can go to Europe and practically lick the walls of 12th Century structures, but over here we act like something 100 years old will turn to dust if it's looked at cross-eyed. Photography, with or without flash, was not allowed inside the house.

One of the most striking qualities of Wilton is that the entire interior is elegantly paneled - even the closets. The early Randolphs were very wealthy indeed, and the house reflects their importance in colonial society. But consider this: hot, humid summers + no window screens + mosquitos. Sure, the place looks great now that it's renovated, but in its heyday on a summer night it would have been filled with a bunch of hot itchy sweaty malarial rich people. I'll happily accept reduced circumstances with window screens & air-conditioning.

Rear view of Wilton
Zooming back to current times, I once again find myself in a job that requires a good amount of telephone conversation. The wonderful thing about answering the AA hotline is that you never know what to expect. It is quite common for callers to pay no attention to what we say when we answer the phone, and we do get a lot of wrong numbers since ours is one digit different than a local television station's phone number. I fielded calls all day when the nation's TV stations went digital two summers ago. I finally started telling callers that unless their television was causing them to get drunk, I could not help them.

The previous office manager told me a story that still makes me grin. It goes something like this. She answered the phone one day with the usual "Alcoholics Anonymous, how can I help you?"
"Uh, yeah, my wife handed me this number and told me to call it. Who did you say this is?"
"Alcoholics Anonymous."
"F%CKING BITCH!!!" (shouted to someone in background as the call was disconnected)

The Chesterfield Apartments
Richmond's first AA meeting was held here in June, 1943
A few weeks ago I got a call from a blurry-sounding woman asking a question. After a bit of confusion, I understood that she was asking about a brand of liquor, Burnett's, and whether we stocked it. I told her I couldn't help her.

"This isn't the ABC store??? Who is this?"

"This is Alcoholics Anonymous."

"Huh? Who?"

"This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We're who you call if you want to stop drinking."

"OH MY GOD!!!" she screamed, and slammed the phone down.

Two Richmonders Against the Odds

Good grief! Planet Bill's first post of 2011, and we're treated to a cemetery shot? Am I in a dark mood? No, not at all; I've just been roaming Richmond with my camera, and Morris & I found ourselves sticking our noses in a couple of places that were new to us. Let's take a look.

The picture at the top was taken in Holy Cross Cemetery, located at the southwestern edge of Chestnut Hill. This district was one of Richmond's original streetcar neighborhoods, and contains many examples of Queen Anne, American Foursquare, Greek Revival, Bungalow, and Colonial Revival homes. The sky was gray, and the wind was cold & brisk on the day that Morris & I rode through the graveyard. We came across a curious plot with multiple iron crosses with no names, simply the abbreviation for Rest In Peace.

Cemeteries have never terrified me. Even as a child, when I found some of them pleasantly creepy, they were assurances of the order of life. I remember visiting the graves of relatives, some known and others gone prior to my birth, and hearing remembrances of these people from my grandmother. Like the books I loved to read, there was a beginning and end, but the stories between the similar covers were colorful, fascinating, and unique. Death is part of the natural order of life. Ashes to ashes, and all that. What is important is what we write on our pages.

After a Saturday breakfast at a place called Yesterday's (appropriately named, since we were fueling up for a day of local history), we drove toward downtown. At the edge of the city limits, we took a detour up a rutted road in search of Woodland Cemetery. It was a forlorn place, barely kept, and made meaner by winter's harsh light. Groundskeeping seemed limited to common areas, for many gravesites were wild with dead weeds & brambles. The cemetery was bordered by untamed thickets on two sides, and industrial buildings on another. The two pictures, above & below, give an idea of the unwelcoming atmosphere.

What better place to bury a local hero! Yessiree, here's where you will find Arthur Ashe, champion of Wimbledon, the Australian Open, and the US Open. After a lifetime of battling racial discrimination, he rests in a place for Richmond's deceased black citizens - desolate Woodland Cemetery.

Arthur Ashe grew up in Richmond. His athletic grace was matched by his intelligence. He had to fight to play tennis, growing up in a time when he was not allowed on most courts. Ashe was a fighter on & off the tennis courts, breaking into a traditionally "white only" sport, and then becoming an AIDS activist. Ashe contracted HIV through an unscreened blood transfusion in 1983. Although he wished to keep this information private, when he learned that USA Today was nosing around his business, he pre-empted their news coup by calling a press conference to make his own disclosure of his disease. He established the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, and became a champion of humanitarian causes.

Arthur Ashe attended Maggie Walker High School in Richmond, a school for black students during segregation named for another determined underdog, where teachers urged their pupils to excellence. Our destination, although Morris & I got sidetracked by cemeteries, was the Maggie Walker House in the Jackson Ward District. I highly recommend the tour of Maggie Walker's home, which is now a National Park Service property.

Maggie Walker was the first female president of an American bank, an accomplishment all the more noteworthy because she was African-American during a time of unabashed racial discrimination. Her mother was a former slave who took in laundry to support the family after Maggie's father was murdered. Maggie attended the Armstrong School, and became a teacher there after graduating. At that time, only single women were allowed to teach, so she left her job upon her marriage. She rose to a prominent position in the Independent Order of St. Luke, a benevolent organization that assisted African-Americans with health care & burial services. She chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and became its first president in 1903. Keep in mind that this was even before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in elections. Her bank gave many black citizens an opportunity to have a savings account and buy a house.

The picture above shows one of the double parlors in Maggie Walker House. When touring most historic homes, the tour guide (when pressed) will say something like "These pieces are reproductions. We've furnished the house the way we sorta kinda figure it might have looked originally." Not so with Maggie's house. The house passed directly from the Walker family to the National Park Service in 1979, and still contains most of the original furnishings, including the pictures on the walls. Recently, the Walker descendents donated fifty additional original items to the house. You really get the feeling that you are walking through Maggie's home, and that her boisterous grandchildren may run through the room at any moment.

Another wonderful aspect of the tour is that you get to see nearly the entire house. Parlors, dining rooms, and bedrooms are part of touring most historic homes, but I always want to see how people really lived. What were the back rooms like? Above you see the kitchen, and below is the laundry room. Can you imagine cooking a meal for a large family plus guests in a kitchen with no countertops? Today we have Viking ranges, granite counters, motorized gizmos, and most Americans haven't got a clue about cooking from scratch. If the box doesn't say add water & stir it's time to make restaurant reservations.

A small bedroom for a granddaughter has her collection of dolls on the bed.

Now, I can pretty much assure you that you're not going to take a tour of a gilded-age mansion and hear a tour guide say "Mrs. Vanderbilt repaired to this chamber when she needed to take a slash." Next we see Maggie Walker's bathroom, complete with clean-but-stained toilet, bidet & bedpan. There are no pretenses here; the tour guide will even point out the upstairs window where Maggie's son shot & killed his father, mistaking him for a midnight intruder.

In the next photo we see why there was a bedpan in Maggie's bathroom. She spent her later life as an invalid. She had diabetes, and her cause of death in 1934 was listed as "diabetes gangrene." Her two sons and their families lived with her, and there were up to ten people living in the 28-room house at one point. Upstairs, Maggie had her own little oasis: a large bedroom, her own spacious bathroom, and a kitchenette that had been fashioned from an upper enclosed side porch. The kitchenette had a wall of windows that faced east, and I imagine that she enjoyed this cheerful, sunny room in the mornings.

She also enclosed a porch off her bedroom at the front of the house, which you can see in the first photo of the Maggie Walker House. Here, she liked to sit in her wheelchair to watch the traffic go by, looking down at the Jackson Ward neighborhood that she helped make the "Harlem of the South" and the "Black Wall Street of America."

Alcoholism took its toll on her family. It is said that her husband and both of her sons were alcoholics, and that her husband came home drunk and was trying to sneak into the house via an upper rear porch when his son fatally shot him. There had been a series of neighborhood robberies, but the family had to endure a murder trial before the son was aquitted. He never recovered emotionally from the tragedy, sank deeper into the drink, and died a few years later.

Ending your tour today, we have a few more photographs. These were taken in the very old section known as Union Hill, a district which dates back to around 1805. Thanks for dropping by, and I hope your year has started out smoothly.

Cadillac Walk

There are only a few days until Christmas, and I know you're pressed for time. So, for those of you who took a moment to stop by Planet Bill, I've arranged a special Yuletide treat for you. You are invited to take a stroll along Monument Avenue to see the Christmas decorations on the mansions. I've done all the legwork for you, so you can just sit back, relax, and enjoy the sights.

Sunday night Robespierre, Ember, Morris & I met at Robin Inn for dinner before we took a walking tour of Richmond's famous street of early 20th century mansions. It was really cold, so we fortified ourselves with Italian food. Our walk was long, considering the temperature; we went down the north side of the avenue from the 2400 block to Stuart Circle where the street begins, which is at the 1600 block. We returned up the south side of the avenue, and my ears were numb long before we got back to our cars. We had to watch our step, too, because patches of ice & snow still lingered.

Monument Avenue is a noted example of the City Beautiful movement, and it truly did look beautiful on Sunday night. A couple of tour buses glided by, but there weren't many others out on foot. There are two good reasons for taking a pedestrian tour. First & most important is that you miss most of the splendid architectural details unless you are walking. Secondly, an evening stroll allows you to peer inside these homes from the sidewalks to catch glimpses of the graciously proportioned rooms with their high ceilings and rich furnishings. These blocks suffered a decline with the mid-century flight to the suburbs. Many of the houses became multi-use buildings, with professional offices on the lower floors while the upper storeys were chopped into apartments. The nadir was probably in the 1960's, before the banner of historic preservation was raised. Now, most of these houses are once again single-family homes.

Sit back and enjoy your tour from the warmth of your home.



Ah, you've found the Christmas Cadillac!

Robespierre, Ember & Morris pose in front of Santa's big white Sedan de Ville.

Every year this car is stuffed full of toys & presents, and Santa sits behind the wheel.










RAWR!









I wish each of you an exceptionally nice Christmas this year!