Thursday February 2, 2023
GREAT LIVES: Dr. Gladys West | GUEST COMMENTARY: Pie and Chai for the soul | GUEST COMMENTARY: The Renwick Courthouse
GREAT LIVES: Dr. Gladys West
The Great Lives series returns to Dodd Auditorium tonight at 7:30 p.m. on the Fredericksburg campus of the University of Mary Washington. The auditorium opens at 6:30 p.m., and you’re encouraged to arrive early to secure parking.
The movie “Hidden Figures” opened Americans’ eyes to the role Black women played in the development of the space program. Karen Sherry, senior curator at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, will introduce Fredericksburg residents to another hidden figure tonight - Dr. Gladys West.
To appreciate the extent of her impact on modern live, you need only look at your phone which uses GPS technology to help people find their way to just about any spot on the globe. Dr. West is responsible for making GPS a reality.
She was also involved with satellite mapping of the ocean.
“What’s remarkable,” says Sherry, “is that she had all the accomplishments despite growing up a poor, rural, black girl during age of Jim Crow.”
This lecture is a way “sharing her remarkable life, and hopefully inspire people with this story.”
Unlike most lectures, which are led by a single speaker, this one will feature four speakers. Sherry, and:
Dr. Carolyn West Oglesby – Daughter of Gladys – Will give a personal perspective on her mother’s life.
Alan Dean – Worked at Dahlgreen with Gladys’ husband and will situate her career within life at Dahlgreen, as well as technical insights.
Marvin Jackson – Cowrote Dr. West’s recent autobiography, It Began with A Dream.
Don’t miss this special evening at UMW.
GUEST COLUMN: Pie & Chai - A tasty, down-home treat for the soul
by Steve Watkins
Editor’s Note: If you didn’t know, Fredericksburg and its surrounding environs is a great literary town that arguably deserves a place alongside such places as Oxford, Mississippi, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Now there’s a magazine that showcases all this talent.
My wife, Janet Watkins, and I started Pie & Chai Magazine in November 2022. Our intention is to publish 12 times a year, with a new issue the first of every month. We just came out with our fourth issue, and we have a couple of more already in the can, ready to publish in March and April. I’m the editor, so if you have a comment or idea, send it to me at pieandchaimagazine@gmail.com . Here’s a slightly revised version of what Janet wrote for the first issue under the headline “Why Pie & Chai”:
We’re launching Pie & Chai Magazine for a simple reason: to provide good, mostly local writers with a place to tell good stories, the kind worth sharing. In these stories—under the broad categories of Deep Dives, Being Human, Prescriptions, LOL, Etcetera, and 22401(ish)—we hope to move, enlighten, and amuse you, and draw you in to a creative community. Think The Atlantic Monthly, only here.
We aren’t here to make money. We won’t sell subscriptions, we won’t run ads, we won’t pirate your data, and our contributors won’t get paid. Everything here will exist because someone cared enough to create it. For free.
We’re old-school print journalists, so we believe in facts (not alternative ones) and the power of stories to comfort and afflict. We’ll serve up deep reporting, thoughtful analysis, personal essays and poignant humor. You won’t find press releases here, or fiction. No poetry, either, except as it may offer itself up in some of the prose. What you will find is humanity in all its glorious messiness.
In our dreams, Pie & Chai has been a physical place for dishing up warm desserts and bringing people together. But we don’t own a building, and we’d rather write than cook. So, this is our virtual effort to expand minds, forge connections, and sweeten lives.
If you’re interested in where the name came from--the original Pie & Chai—you can read about it HERE.
If you'd like to check out Pie & Chai, go to pieandchaimagazine.com. We don't do subscriptions, don't want anybody's data, but you can join our Facebook group if you'd like, for a reminder at the first of every month that we've posted a full slate of new stories on our website. All the articles we've run in the past are available in the online archive.
Janet is a former journalist and now director of a nonprofit organization that advocates for children and teens. Steve is a retired college professor, retired yoga teacher, active Tree Steward with Tree Fredericksburg, author of 13 books, and winner of the national Golden Kite Award for young adult fiction. They live in Fredericksburg.
GUEST COMMENTARY: Beautiful Renwick
Article and painting by Wendy Atwell-Vasey
The Renwick Courthouse is my favorite building in Fredericksburg. I have loved it since I moved here 30 years ago.
I love its elegant modesty, built in the 19th century for an emerging, important city, still surrounded by gorgeous land and farming communities. It is both grand, like the high idealism brought to the Neo-Gothic cathedrals and government buildings in the capitals of Europe, and warm, like the country houses and churches in Sweden or the Cotswold Cottages in England. Our building has flying buttresses, a rare detail in Virginia, and a charming cupola with a bell from the famous Revere foundry. It has tall, arched windows, and steep roofs. Inside, ceilings soar, even as the scissored timbered ceiling beams feel warm and sheltering.
Some brilliant Fredericksburgers hired James Renwick, who became one of the most prominent American architects in the world, to design our courthouse in 1852. It was early in his career, but already Renwick was becoming famed for integrating Gothic and Roman architecture, among other styles in his buildings. He designed the Smithsonian Building and Trinity Episcopal Church in Washington, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and influenced Gothic revival university architecture all over the country. Think Princeton, Duke, Yale, and Notre Dame.
We were so fortunate to have him work here, in Fredericksburg. Of course, we have stellar examples of Early American architecture here, especially Federal and Georgian styles, and we are even proud to think of ourselves as the most historic small city in America.
But as historian John Hennessy has written, “the Renwick Courthouse is perhaps the most important, impressive piece of architecture in Fredericksburg,” and “one of the finest Gothic courthouses in the mid-Atlantic states.”
Being in that courtroom to serve on juries until recently has been a privilege for our citizens. Throughout its more than 150 years, the court stage and pews and wooden jury box seats hosted dramatic scenes of slave trials, secession decisions, speeches of famous officials and the everyday interpretation of justice that make a city work.
I hope we can find the funds to preserve what this building is, and not let it become a shell of what it was. If we consider uses for it that are characteristic of its history, we might avoid stripping it to create a blank slate for development of only the purposes of generic hotels, apartments, and shops. It is important to obtain Historic heritage tax credits and foundation donations.
But we might think of specific uses that might inspire investment or sponsorship. Film and broadcast companies might find a renovated Renwick attractive for historic movies and courtroom dramas. Schools could lease it to hold mock trials and field trips on civic lessons. Colleges could rent the space to teach architecture. Its rehabilitated walls could be leased as space for art shows and galleries. Its stage is ideal for lease as a playhouse.
Our Sister City Programs, and many others, which are envied, but often itinerant, could hold events there and have space for meetings. I hope we will find the energy as a city to avoid the false dichotomy between commercial generic use versus cultural use. This vision requires that we prioritize the sponsored care of the gem that we have.