UVA History Professor William Hitchcock visits the Miller Center to discuss and sign copies of his new book The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe. The book landed on the Financial Times bestseller list, won the 2009 George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe and The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945–Present.

Monday, January 31, 2011 at 11am.

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CBS News Legal Analyst Jack Ford visits the Miller Center tol discuss recent history’s most intriguing cases. Ford has covered the trials of O.J. Simpson, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and Michael Jackson. One of the original on-air faces at Court TV, Ford returned in 2004 after a period of time at NBC. In 2010, he taught a New York University undergraduate course on famous trials of this past century.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11am. Directions.

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The Office of African-American Affairs at the University of Virginia hosts Amiri Baraka, poet, playwright, and activist, for a reading and discussion of his work.

Born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism.

He has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

January 27 from 7pm to 9pm at the Culbreth Theater. Directions. Info: 434-243-2080

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The Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society hosts local columnist Phil James, who’ll be signing copies of his recently released book, Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Stories from Western Albemarle, on Friday, February 4 from 5:30pm-7:00pm at the Society’s McIntire Building location on Second Street. The collection of columns by the popular Crozette Gazette author focuses on tales of Western Albemarle’s past, including architecture and town planning, local commerce, ecological history, and famous occurrences and tragedies from the area’s past. Refreshments will be served.

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Michael Duffy, Time magazine’s assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief, comes to the Miller Center to discuss the making of John F. Kennedy’s candidacy and campaign. In 1995, Duffy won the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. He co-wrote 13 cover stories with his Time colleague Nancy Gibbs in 1996. Duffy won the 1998 Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting as a member of a team covering the campaign-finance scandals. He is the co-author of Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush and The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House. When: Friday, January 28 at 1am.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Isabel Wilkerson, the author most recently of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which documents the migration of black Americans across America, comes to the Miller Center on Monday, January 17 at 11am. Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her coverage of the historic Midwestern floods and for her profile of a boy growing up on Chicago’s South Side. The award made Wilkerson the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first black American to win for individual reporting.

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The Blue Ridge Chapter of the Virginia Writers Club hosts guest speaker Sarah Collins Honenberger at the Boar’s Head Inn on Wednesday, January 26 at 7pm. Honenbeger will pay homage to the classics and perseverance with the link between her latest novel Catcher, Caught and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in a celebration of the anniversary of Salinger’s January 28, 2010 death. More details at [email protected] or 540-718-2032.

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The C&O has always been the home of the second chance,” says owner Dave Simpson, who has run the Water Street restaurant for 30 years.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

For 30 years now, Dave Simpson has been holding down the fort at the C&O restaurant, which put Charlottesville on the fine dining map when original owners Sandy McAdams and Philip Stafford opened the place in 1976.

Back then you could count the number of fine-dining restaurants in town on two hands. Today, you need a calculator.

Remarkably, the cozy place in the funky building on Water Street is still setting the standard in Charlottesville cuisine. As for Simpson, he’s manged to maintain the restaurant’s good reputation for three decades now with a combination of hard work and some fine people skills. One of the few missteps he’s made was straying away from the C&O and partnering with wayward accountant Jim Baldi (who is still wanted on felony embezzlement charges) on the Bel Rio fiasco, a restaurant whose noise and financial problems made Simpson feel put in a “bad guy” role. He parted ways with Baldi and issued a public apology to the people in Belmont “who found this enterprise a nuisance while I was involved.”

Back where he belongs now, Simpson, who grew up in Charlottesville in the 1950s, the son of a City cop, recently took time out to reflect on the last 30 years.

“Growing up as a cop’s son then was a little like growing up on the Andy Griffith Show,” says Simpson. “My mom worked at Sperry, and my brother Mike and I graduated from Lane High school.”

In 1968, Simpson’s mom took him to lunch at the local Shoney’s for his 13th birthday, and at one point asked (more)

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A rendering of UVA’s new Ruth Caplin Theatre.
Willam Rawn Associates

Last month, UVA held a ceremonial ground-breaking at the future site of the Ruth Caplin Theatre, a three hundred-seat, 20,500 square-foot “thrust stage” theater that will rise beside the Culbreth Theater on Culbreth Road— courtesy of Ruth Caplin, 89, and husband, Mortimer Caplin, 94, who donated $4 million for the $13.5 million addition to the Drama Building and whose lives have been as drama-filled as the plays and films they hope to nurture.

UVA alum and former law school prof Mortimer Caplin is a legend in legal circles, a still-practicing tax lawyer who served as IRS Commissioner during the Kennedy Administration and briefly into the Johnson White House, during which time he made the cover of Time magazine. As a law prof at UVA, he taught future U.S. Senators Ted and Robert Kennedy. And he’s a lover of the arts, it seems.

Indeed, back in his UVA student days in the 1930s Caplin was president of the Virginia Players, and appeared in a number of UVA productions, including the title role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

“The theater will clearly advance artistic values cherished by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson— music, dance, architecture, painting,” said Caplin in remarks prepared for the October 21 event, which he attended with his wife. “It’s our hope that it will enrich the studies of all University students, making the arts not only a part of their course work, but a part of their lives.”

So what’s a thrust theater? It has a stage that opens and extends into the audience, which allows theater-goers to watch the performance from three sides, allowing for more intimacy. In addition to theater productions, the facility will be used (more)

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CBS News Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford visits the Miller Center to discuss the Fall term of the U.S. Supreme Court. Crawford contributes regularly to the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, The Early Show, and Face The Nation, as well as CBS Radio News and CBSNews.com. Crawford served as a regular contributor to CBS News from 2005 to 2006.

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Attorney Frank Buck served as Charlottesville mayor from 1980-’88.
FILE PHOTO

Update:

The case has been continued to December 13 at 9:05am as Buck’s deep ties to the legal community have led Charlottesville District Court Judge Bob Downer to consider recusing himself. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman says he has requested that a special prosecutor be appointed in the case.

–Updated Friday, November 19 at 1:56pm

Original story:

Lots of people have imagined throttling someone. Attorney and former Charlottesville mayor Frank Buck may have acted on the impulse.

Buck was arrested on Thursday, November 11, and charged with misdemeanor assault for his role in a day-earlier incident that his legal client and alleged victim, Milton Leo John, calls “outrageous.”

According to John, a 53-year-old airline pilot, the judge and bailiffs had stepped out of the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court on a recess when his attorney, Buck, began to discuss a week-earlier hearing. The topic was an old domestic abuse charge that, John says, was dismissed shortly after it was lodged and which should have already been expunged. John says he was calmly expressing his frustration over Buck’s alleged failure to press his case and presented a letter he’d sent Buck showing that he’d made the expungement request several years earlier.

John, who stands 5′7″ and weighs 160 pounds, says he began reading from the letter when his 6-foot-tall, 230-pound attorney suddenly and unexpectedly went berzerk. (more)

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Emmett Boaz worked as a gunsmith, and was a competitive pistol shooter for about 10 years.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Ask people how they want to die, and the two most common answers will be in their sleep or doing something they love. Renaissance man and longtime disc jockey Emmett Boaz, 63, has gone the second way— at the soundboard of radio station WTJU. He had a heart attack shortly after beginning his 6:30am show on Saturday, November 6.

Although best known for his traditional music show, “Leftover Biscuits,” which he hosted since 1996, the endeavor just skimmed the surface of Boaz’s range of knowledge and skills. In 2003, the Hook ran an issue in which Boaz was quoted in almost every story, with Boazian observations on topics as diverse as development, music, and colonics.

Born in 1947, the Covesville-raised Boaz grew up on his family’s apple orchard, and he received a degree in English literature from Marshall University in West Virginia.

He was drafted and served in the Army in Vietnam during that war. Later, he put his James Madison University master’s degree into a teaching career, but, as he told the Hook in 2003, “If I’d stayed teaching junior high, I’d have killed somebody.”

Boaz— who seemed to love Elizabethan drama and guns with equal passion— was also well-known for the 15 years he spent as the manager of the 7-Eleven store at Woodbrook Drive, where he described his duties mostly as “throwing drunks out of the place.”

What struck many of his colleagues at WTJU was the depth of his knowledge of traditional music, which encompasses old time, early country, bluegrass, and roots-era music.

“It was his voice that drew me in,” says Leftover Biscuits co-host Peter Jones. “Emmett had a deep, Southern accent that would bring you in. He told stories from his childhood, and memories associated with a song.

“He downplayed his knowledge,” continues Jones. “He even played up his Southern corn pone.”

“Don’t let my father’s accent fool you,” says Emmett Boaz IV, who’s here from Fairbanks, Alaska. “He didn’t need (more)

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Jay Varner will present selections from his new memoir Nothing Left to Burn on Thursday, November 18 at 5:30 pm at New Dominion Bookshop. Note: This event was originally scheduled for the evening of October 29 but, due to the President’s visit to Charlottesville, was postponed until November 18.

Nothing Left to Burn is a memoir that looks into the life of a family that has spent years harboring secrets, both dark and volatile. It tells the story of a son’s relationship with his father, the fire chief and a local hero, and his grandfather, a serial arsonist.

When Jay Varner, fresh out of college, returns home to work for the local newspaper, he knows that he will have to deal with the memories of a childhood haunted by a grandfather who was both menacing and comical and by a father who died too young and who never managed to be the father Jay so desperately needed him to be. In digging into the past, he uncovers layers of secrets, lies, and half-truths. It is only when he finally has the truth in hand that he comes to an understanding of the forces that drove his father, and of the fires that for all his efforts his father could never extinguish.

Jay Varner is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he earned his MFA in creative nonfiction. He currently lives in Charlottesville. This is his first book.

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Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment and The Effect of Living Backwards and co-editor of The Believer, visits the UVA Creative Writing department as its first 2010 “mini” Rea Visiting Writer. Julavits will give a talk on craft at 6pm, Wednesday, November 10 in the Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge. She’ll then give a fiction reading at 8pm, Thursday, November 11 at the UVA Bookstore.

According to associate director of the writing program Jeb Livingood, The Dungannon Foundation generously gave UVA a larger donation this year, allowing the program to have both full Rea Writers, who meet with students in private conferences, and the “mini” Rea writers, like Heidi Julavits, who visit for a shorter time but still give a talk and reading.

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