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““We have a job to finish,” Pee Wee wrote the morning after she got the
news. The heartwarming portrait of her father “C. Warren Falwell: Entrepreneur and Family Man” had just transformed into a tribute to her brother as well.
A few of the articles originally under consideration for this issue were temporarily set aside to make room for Ellen Schall Agnew’s “A Century of Contemporary Art: The Annual Exhibition at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.” Her story marks the one hundredth anniversary of what is “arguably the longest continuous (but for one year during World War I) original annual exhibition devoted to American art in the United States.”
The anniversary exhibition is on display through December 10, 2011. If you haven’t been to the Maier Museum at Randolph College lately, Agnew’s piece might just inspire you to attend. As the “catalyst” behind the establishment of the college’s internationally admired permanent collection, these exhibitions are not an add-on to the curriculum. Rather, the appreciation of art is deeply embedded in the col- lege’s mission; it is a critical step in the pursuit of a “more abundant life”—a pursuit that has benefited the entire Lynchburg community for a century.
Anniversaries and similar occasions aside, Lynch’s Ferry rarely experiences time pressure. The magazine is “a keeper.” The articles we publish will be just as informa- tive and enjoyable several years from now; there’s never any hurry. At least, that’s what I used to think.
“I verified this with my brothers,” Pee Wee Falwell would often say as we spent the summer going back and forth identifying photos and corroborating many of the anecdotes that appear in this issue. We had no way of knowing that one of those brothers, Calvin Falwell, would die in late August, less than two months short of his ninety-first birthday. “We have a job to finish,” Pee Wee wrote the morning after she got the news. The heartwarming portrait of her father “C. Warren Falwell: Entrepreneur and Family Man” had just transformed into a tribute to her brother as well. Her last sentence—“We did not want to let him down”—suddenly resounded in two directions.
Pee Wee Falwell was not the only Lynch’s Ferry author to experience a loss. Responding to our request to prepare her article for publication in the fall issue, Marjorie Huiner wrote back: “I made changes to reflect the fact that Phil Thur- mond died in March 2011.”
Huiner’s daily walk past 4402 Boonsboro Road had sparked an interest in the property and a friendship with Philip Thomas Thurmond. In fact, the first
draft of her essay about the house and its inhabitants was ready in time for Thurmond’s ninetieth birthday party in June 2010.
The author’s many rewarding conversations with the newly minted nonagenarian had often
strayed into fascinating places beyond the boundaries of her research.
“There was,” Huiner later lamented, “so much more
to his story.”
A editor
from the
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