OUR WEEKLY READER
THE FXBG ADVANCE, SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 2026
Goodbye to All That: My Swedish Death Cleaning
By Janet Marshall Watkins, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
The first time I helped clean out the home of a dead person I was 22 and working my first real job, as a reporter covering local news and celebrity DUIs in Aspen. Tom, the charming, wise-cracking 33-year-old who sat next to me in our office, had just died in a car wreck on a windy mountain road—a thing I learned in a 6 a.m. wake-up call from an editor I didn’t particularly like.
I made my way to the newsroom and joined my colleagues in a morose morning meeting. We knew we needed to write a story about Tom’s fatal wreck—he was a well-known reporter in our little city, and his family was kind of famous. We also decided somebody should go to his place and tidy up before his sister got to town.
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Mary Washington Healthcare Says Half of 2026 Residency Program Graduates Are Staying in the Area to Practice; Officials Won’t Release Names or Locations
By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
Two and a half years ago, when Mary Washington Healthcare withdrew its financial support for the Moss Free Clinic and forced it to shut down, then-MWHC Healthcare President and CEO Mike McDermott announced that the hospital corporation’s new medical training residency programs would fill the void.
“With no plans to provide further support for the Moss Clinic, McDermott said MWHC is focused on investing in its $10 million, three-year internal medicine residency program, which started last year to recruit and train new doctors,” Pie & Chai Magazine reported in a 2024 article. “He said the hospital corporation expects 70 percent to stay and practice in the area after their residency. He said once the residency clinic is fully staffed—in the third year of operation—physicians there will be able to address many of the medical needs of the indigent clients now served by Moss.”
McDermott’s 70 percent figure was off the mark.
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Cell Block
By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice.
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Accokeek Creek the Latest Site of Sewer Line Break and Raw Sewages Spill
By Jesse Adams, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
On the afternoon of June 7, I took my 8-year-old-daughter to the Stafford Civil War Park to enjoy nature on on a short stroll through the woods. As we neared Accokeek Creek, she complained about a foul odor. I smelled it too. The water didn’t appear abnormally colored so I labeled it as potentially just being the breakdown of organic material and/or sediment from runoff following our first significant rain in quite some time and didn’t think anything more of it.
Fast forward to July 21, when I had a stressful couple of days interviewing for a new job, and I went back to the Stafford Civil War Park by myself to clear my head. When I approached Accokeek Creek this time I smelled a much stronger foul odor, and saw that the water was a very cloudy gray. My stomach immediately sank and I knew something wasn’t right.
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Residents Voice Strong Concerns about Cell Tower Location in City Next to Neighborhood and School
By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
Residents of the Idlewild subdivision in Fredericksburg were surprised to learn at an online community forum Monday night that the company proposing construction of a 150-foot wireless telecommunications tower had been in meetings with city officials for much of the past 18 months.
They also learned that the builder, Milestone Towers, met with members of City Council “four or five” months ago during which they discussed an offer of $25,000 and an undisclosed annual “revenue share arrangement” for use of city property as a cell-tower location next door to Walker-Grant Middle School and 250 feet from the Idlewild property line.
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