Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290174
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROB EURE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
\ Jim Livesay, 45, an exercise trainer at the Innsbrook Fitness Center in Richmond's well-heeled western suburbs, may pose the ultimate challenge to Virginia's next governor.
"I see the gulf between the haves and the have-nots widening, widening, widening," said Livesay, a tall, muscular redhead who was a football standout at the University of Richmond.
"I see a generation of young people who have no feelings for other people because they have no feeling for themselves. I see a generation of urban youth so traumatized by their life situation that they cut themselves off from their feelings."
"The corporate people here [at the Fitness Center], they're just as alienated from themselves as the people in the city." Livesay says. He trains successful businessmen he's known since college. "They've got it made. But many are in terrible physical condition. They're afraid they're going to have heart attacks."
Livesay longs for a politician big enough to gather together the scattered lives of modern society. He's leaning toward Republican George Allen over Mary Sue Terry, who would be the state's fourth consecutive Democratic governor, but he fears these problems are beyond any one politician's reach.
"The election of George Allen would change the political power, but you've got permanent power and political power," he said. "Big banks, big corporate institutions are the permanent government. George would change the skin, but not the guts. Only money does that."
Tensions across Virginia - among levels of society, regions, sexes and races - make the business of politicians almost hopelessly complex.
In urban Virginia, killings with guns dominate more than headlines - they are neighborhood issues with voters. In the suburbs, prosperity leads to worries about transportation and taxation. In the rural mountains and valleys, voters look to protect their past and independence by supporting gun rights and traditional moral values.
Yet for all their diversity - old and young, rich and poor, black and white, urban and suburban and rural - Virginians often talk up and down different sides of the same problems. Basic issues such as the fear of crime and the need for good schools, decent jobs, and affordable health care are government problems no matter which side of Livesay's gulf you're standing on.
\ Mary Rainey, 43, knows that gulf from the side opposite Livesay's.
She left a factory job in New Jersey and moved back to Norfolk two years ago to reunite with her husband. On borrowed money, the high-school dropout enrolled in a trade school and in June finished a seven-month medical-assistant training course.
Ten job interviews later, she's still looking for work. Employers want "experience, experience, experience," she said as she monitored eight coin-operated washing machines loaded with her laundry. "How are you going to get experience, if nobody's going to hire you? It really discourages you."
The $4.25 an hour Rainey makes on the night cleaning crew at Norfolk's World Trade Center pays for phone and lights, but other bills are piling up since her husband, a handyman, has been idled waiting for a hernia operation. Rainey bought a $100-a-month health and life insurance policy on her sister's recommendation, but it turned out to offer little toward the medical bills. The family turned to welfare to pay for the operation.
"It was funny," Rainey said, "especially since I had gone to school for the medical field. If you're professional, have money and have insurance, everything's OK. But if you're poor, they treat you like nobody. That's the way it is out here."
She couldn't name the people running for governor this fall.
"I know we'll have a new governor. . . . I don't think politicians can change some of the things that are out here. But if I could get health benefits and better wages, I wouldn't think about moving [back to New Jersey] so much. I'd take a good look at someone who is interested in getting those things for people."
\ Herbert Codger isn't looking for much from politicians, but he knows how he'll vote.
Working behind the counter at Fisher Auto Parts in Churchville, Codger - 70, with white hair and moustache, reading glasses, tattooed arms, plaid shirt and knife holster - appears to live up to his name.
"As far as I'm concerned, we've got to get a Republican in. That's all there is to it," he said, stepping aside to spit tobacco juice into a trash can.
"I'm afraid so," agreed Forrest Campbell, a 45-year-old mechanic who had stopped by. "I can't figure: The state had plenty of money until the last governor got in office, then all of a sudden we were . . ."
" . . . broke," Codger said.
"Broke," Campbell said. "We even end up robbing our hunting and fishing fund. I've never heard of any state doing that."
Both men insisted they don't vote by party affiliation; Codger's views are shaped in part by listening to three hours of Rush Limbaugh on the radio every day.
They identify Terry with the recent series of Democratic governors, don't like the way the state has been run and won't vote for her. Plus, there is a litmus-test issue that she fails:
"Anyone for gun control, I'm against them," Codger said, "because I think they have total and complete disregard for the Constitution and my rights as a citizen. That probably would be the deciding factor, everything else being equal."
Crime doesn't seem much of a problem for Churchville, a hamlet on the banks of Whiskey Creek with four churches and five automotive shops, but it's important to Codger, and he doesn't see either candidate really addressing it.
"This crime issue is the biggest joke in the world," he said. "When they took prayer out of the schools 50 years ago, that's when this country started going to hell. We're starting on the second generation being raised with no morals, no standards. No wonder we have crime. They don't know how to live, how to treat each other."
\ Norfolk schoolteacher Jacqueline Moore, 46, surprised herself when she began thinking she needed a gun. She has 20 years of classroom experience with elementary and middle-school children.
But Moore's home has been burglarized three times in 18 months. She put in an alarm system, and a friend gave her the gun.
"It's registered and all," Moore said. "I have to admit, I'd been thinking maybe I should get one. And then the friend gave it to me.
"Just last night, I went for a walk. I know, it was really a dumb thing to do. But as I turned to go back down the street to my house, I realized someone was watching me. Two guys, and I could only see their silhouettes, yelled out, `Hey! You, girl! Let's party!' It scared me to death. I know I shouldn't have been out there, but I want to be able to walk in my neighborhood without fear."
Moore described herself as a "die-hard Democrat." She said she likely will vote for Terry, although "I resent that she sort of tried to undermine Wilder while he was in office."
She likes what she has seen of Terry through television commericals.
"The things she is talking about, we, as educators, have talked about among ourselves," said Moore of Terry's proposal to put youngsters who bring guns to school in boot camps. "We think it would be good, not just for those who bring guns, but for students with severe behavioral problems. It would give them the discipline they need and the sense of authority."
\ Fifteen years ago, Dale City in Prince William County wasn't much bigger than Churchville. That was before the mall.
Now most people know the town by the name Potomac Mills, a gargantuan collection of stores that has eclipsed such historic sites as Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello and Mount Vernon to become Virginia's most popular tourist stop.
It's the headache that accompanies getting to this shopper's mecca that frustrates Jack Lacy.
"I'd be happy if they would straighten out the roads," said Lacy, a burly man in a slightly crumpled white shirt - his tie and collar loosened - as he sat at a makeshift desk in his Smith Corona outlet. This from a transplant from Southern California.
Like most of the customers rushing through his store - many on their annual back-to-school shopping sprees - Lacy had little time to talk politics or anything else. He could not name the politicians running for governor. He had heard of Allen's father, the legendary football coach, but knew nothing of the son.
"I have had Richmond on my mind," he said, then admitted his interest was in visiting the city's NASCAR track, not the Capitol.
\ Penny Plemmons, Karen Shannon and Betty Harlow are young mothers whose lives revolve around their children. They share concerns about violence and education - but have vastly different perspectives.
Plemmons was coming out of the B&B Education Supply store outside Staunton with two of her three children. A 36-year-old homemaker from Craigsville, she teaches those two at home; the third goes to a private school.
The night before, Plemmons went to a seminar at Bridgewater College on outcome-based education, the school-reform program being developed by officials in Richmond. Four hundred people attended, she said, and Mike Farris, the home-school advocate and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, spoke.
"That's not going to be a good education program. That's just an experiment," Plemmons said. Already, she's mastered the jargon of the debate: "It's more affective than cognitive. Only 33 percent of the curriculum is academic. The rest is going to be attitude-shaping."
Married to a trout farmer and dressed in a plaid blouse, blue shorts and blue boat sneakers with no laces, Plemmons said she is a longtime Republican.
"In our area, I see more of the Republican Party talking about the issues. I haven't seen very much of Mary Sue Terry at all, except maybe a TV commercial."
Plemmons knows that Farris and Allen oppose outcome-based education and favor school choice, so she strongly supports them.
Another big issue, she said, is gun control, "especially here in this part of Virginia, where you have a lot of hunters." Plemmons wants to do something about crime in schools, but thinks one-gun-a-month limits and Terry's proposed waiting period for handgun purchases are not the answers.
"Why isn't the mother checking to see that her child is not bearing arms when they go to school? It's the breakdown of the family" leading to gun violence, she said. "I think Mike Farris and George Allen will do things to help the family, will strengthen the family."
\ Betty Harlow, 37, toweled off one of her three children, ages 2 to 11, by the pool at Avalon Swim Club in a western Henrico County neighborhood. Her husband is an orthopedic surgeon; she used to work as a nurse. Now she stays home.
Harlow said she doesn't have time to follow political issues. "Now, if you asked me some question about 2-year-olds . . ."
But she lamented that Richmond has become the "crime capital of the U.S." and said gun control ought to be part of the solution.
She wondered if she will allow her oldest child to attend events at the Richmond Coliseum when he gets his driver's license; a suburban boy was shot dead outside the downtown facility this year. Harlow said she may even give up taking the children downtown to the circus without her husband.
The family's biggest concern, however, is President Clinton's health-care reform program. Her two school-age children go to private school, but "we may not always, if the health-care system changes. . . . Possibly in the near future, we'll be more concerned about public schools," Harlow said.
Their lives have been little-touched by economic troubles, but they have given up thoughts of building a new home because real estate values are down from when theirs was purchased six years ago. The price tag is in the $500,000 range. "We could have gotten more for it a while ago," Harlow said.
Shannon's two children, ages 3 and 1, were busy helping her wash the Chevy Nova in the front yard of their home in Norfolk.
As she scrubbed with a big pink sponge, she occasionally swatted at the kids with a soapy hand, hollering for them to put down the hose or stop playing with the cooking pot filled with suds.
"If you want to ask me about politics, I don't know nothing," said the 23-year-old, who grew up in a nearby neighborhood and has been a housewife for most of her marriage. "We get the paper and all, but I don't read it. You have to wait for my husband to get home, if you want to talk about politics. He keeps up with it."
As soon as their daughter turns 4, Shannon said, her husband will apply for a transfer to West Virginia.
"I won't have my children going to schools around here. They're dangerous. Nine-year-olds shooting each other. That's what I'm concerned about - safer schools," Shannon said.
"Things have gotten worse - the drugs, guns, violence, all of it" - since she grew up in the neighborhood, Shannon said. "I won't sit outside at night. It's too dangerous."
Shannon registered to vote when she turned 18, but has never cast a ballot.
"Registering was something I always wanted to do," she said. "But I feel there's nobody out there worth voting for. If it had been, I would have voted, I guess.
"They might be able to change some things, if they try hard enough," Shannon said. "If they tried hard enough, they would have had a gun law passed a long time ago. If they tried hard enough, they would have gotten more than a handgun a month. A handgun a month is 12 a year. Who needs 12 guns a year? Who needs 12 guns at all?"
"If they tried hard enough," she said, "we'd have a lot safer streets and a lot better schools."
Staff writers Margaret Edds, Greg Schneider and Bonnie V. Winston contributed to this story.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB