Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 19, 1993 TAG: 9309230070
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
There was the quirky radio show he hosted - a four-hour program that managed to get away with introducing a Rolling Stones tune right after a Gregorian chant, followed by a recording of the 1958 Miss America playing the Hammond organ. And make it all sound strangely beautiful.
There was Harwood's hippie exterior - the curly mess of hair, the scraggly mustache, the brown suede work boots worn from heel to toe.
And there were very definitely parties. Lots of parties.
Used to be, "people didn't take Doug very seriously," Lexington Realtor Otis Mead recalls. "He was too far out of the mainstream."
It's been 23 years now, and Harwood hasn't changed a bit.
What's interesting is that the rest of the community has gradually come around to embrace him - to understand and appreciate the institution he's become.
His radio show is more than 20 years old now - "almost old enough to drink," Harwood says.
So is his career in alternative journalism. The dee-jay/journalist writes stories for his news magazine, The Rockbridge Advocate, that have the whole county buzzing.
Even his trademark 20-year-old boots - the perfect prop for his role as the war-weary drummer in the Lime Kiln Theatre play "Stonewall Country" - have become a standard part of the scenery here.
"He's ubiquitous and he's everywhere," says Brian Shaw, W&L's communications director and a contributing writer to the Advocate.
Indeed, Harwood is so omnipresent that he's not far removed from the cast of town characters he loves to chronicle in his 20-month-old news monthly.
"That's our newspaper editor," people will say, pointing to the wiry, graying 40-year-old slinking along Lexington's cobblestones, an unfiltered Camel in one hand and The New York Times in the other.
There he is again, this time lunching at The Southern Inn with Lexington Mayor Buddy Derrick and his wife, Martha Lou, who often pick up the tab.
Saturday nights he's on the radio, with people staying home in droves to listen to his eclectic show, called "The Anti-Headache Machine."
The first of the month, Harwood even plays paper boy, hawking the Advocate on every street corner - and garnering story tips, offers of iced tea and more free lunches.
"One of the reasons Doug's been such a successful figure is he's not a part of [the newsmakers'] group - and yet he manages to be around them a lot, and they enjoy his humor and camaraderie," says Don Baker, former head of Lime Kiln and a longtime Harwood friend.
Even Harwood's competitor, Matt Paxton IV of the News-Gazette, says no one has a better handle on what goes on in the community than Harwood.
"He had and has a real following," says Paxton, whose family has owned the Lexington weekly for four generations.
"And speaking of the devil, he's walking past my front window right now as we speak . . . "
\ Harwood was raised in Springfield, Mass., the youngest son of upper-middle-class parents and a member of the Christian Science Church - the same church WDBJ-TV anchorman Keith Humphry and U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte grew up in.
To illustrate how far removed he is from those roots, Harwood likes to tell the story of an ornate chandelier his parents gave to the church. Everyone in the church thought the gift was hideously out of place there, but they accepted it graciously.
Not long after his parents moved to Florida, Harwood went back to his hometown and into a bar - and was delighted to find the same chandelier hanging up there instead of in the church.
It's those same kinds of anachronisms that make Harwood such an oddity.
This son of a lumber-company owner lives in an old country farmhouse he calls "Tick Haven" - a place so messy that the wife of Harwood's buddy Shaw refuses to sit down there. "It's pretty `rasty,' " Shaw says.
"Rasty is a combination of nasty and rowdy. It's one of Doug's favorite words . . . When you see his appearance, you'll see that personal things mean very little to him."
First off, there's his car, a beat-up, dusty, brown Buick. Harwood doesn't know what year it is.
Then there's the look - the faded Levis, the wrinkled shirt and the famous suede boots. Baker tried to persuade him to donate the boots to the "Stonewall Country" prop collection, but Harwood wouldn't budge. And they definitely don't stop the bachelor from attending some of Lexington's swankiest shindigs.
Ask Harwood about his cocktail-party meanderings and he gets a little defensive at the suggestion of anomaly: "I haven't forgotten my roots, despite all this downward mobility," he deadpans.
W.T. "Pete" Robey III, Buena Vista's city attorney, recalls reading a newspaper blurb recently reporting that $3,000 worth of property had been stolen from Harwood's farmhouse. "And I knew with that figure, they certainly didn't get his car or his clothes," Robey says.
These same quirks carry over into Harwood's Saturday-night radio show, which he's been hosting on the W&L station, WLUR-FM, since he was a sophomore - for no pay. Some of his favorite song combinations include:
Three Spanish nuns singing a tune from the 1300s, followed by the Rolling Stones tune, "Live With Me," which begins with the line, "I got nasty habits."
Spanish Medieval organ music, followed by Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer."
A thundering Bach organ piece, followed by a Native American chant - or the Beatles' "I've Got a Feeling."
A Medieval fanfare Harwood calls "Music for Henry VIII to eat rare roast beef by," followed by Dave VanRonk's song, "Romping Through the Swamp," which ends with a bomb going off; followed by a Solomon Islands lullabye; followed by the Neil Young song, "The Will to Love," which opens with bottle caps getting popped. (That's a favorite May Day show combo.)
"I once read in Scientific American a story that said what makes bird songs so interesting is their combination of predictability with a surprise thrown in every now and then," Harwood says. "I think about that when I'm putting a show together."
Harwood titled his all-time favorite show four years ago "Mud and Mold." He'd been having flulike symptoms for weeks and, because of his Christian Science background, it didn't occur to him to see a doctor.
"It had been a muddy summer, and I figured the mold had something to do with what was ailing me," he recalls.
"It was a pretty great show. The transmitter kept screwing up, like it was doing sympathetic vibrations for me."
That particular show was heavy on the gospel tunes: "I was getting religion on my deathbed," Harwood says, laughing. A few days later, a friend rushed him to a Roanoke hospital, where he nearly died.
"They thought it was Legionnaire's disease, but it would've cost too much money to find out for sure. At any rate, now I get to march in all their parades."
\ Harwood's recent Labor Day weekend show featured a money theme. The lead song was an early '60s folk recording of Carl Sandburg singing "Showers of Dollars," followed by the Talking Heads' "Girlfriend is Better," which contains the line: "Who took the money away?"
"Whenever there's a controversy in town, you can hear it in the music he chooses," Baker explains. "Sometimes there's a subtle editorial. Sometimes it's not so subtle."
This particular show fell into the not-so-subtle category. In his inimitable style, Harwood was commenting on the recent story that Lexington lawyer Tommy Spencer gave a loan to county Supervisor Bobby Berkstresser as well as free legal advice to Supervisor Ben Nicely - at the time the supervisors were voting on a quarry-expansion rezoning that Spencer vehemently opposed. Harwood was the first to uncover the news, which is the September cover story of the Advocate.
Spencer, whom one Lexingtonian describes as being "like liver - you either love him or you hate him," says he's glad the story came out. He also says he hopes the story will bring about investigations into county government procedures, which he calls "the good-ole boy way of doing business."
Spencer's biggest complaint is the county's system of attorney representation, which for years has been handled by the local firm Natkin and Heslep rather than by an independent county attorney. Spencer and the firm have been on opposite sides of court cases for years.
Where Harwood fits into this, perhaps, is that lawyer David Natkin signed on early to the Advocate, buying five shares of stock when Harwood and his partner, publisher Kitty Sachs, began hawking the $500 shares to start the magazine early last year. Harwood concedes that Natkin is the Advocate's largest shareholder, but bristles at the notion that his journalistic integrity can be bought.
"Buying a share doesn't even buy a subscription - let alone my soul," he says. "Nobody has ever tried to bribe me. If they did, I'd take the money and then write whatever I damn well wanted."
For the record, he adds, Bobby Berkstresser is a shareholder, too, and it didn't keep him from being targeted in the story.
A common criticism of small-town journalists is they're too well-connected to their sources to be objective. "Some people say that's true of Doug," concedes Shaw, the W&L staffer and a Lexington city councilman.
"But I personally have never known him to be afraid to take on anybody," he adds. His July cover story about the effects of the Reeves Brothers' toxic-waste dumping sites raised eyebrows.
As did his August cover story on the trial featuring Buena Vista's Martin brothers (headline: "Melvin beat Wylie with a bat. Wylie stabbed Victor with a knife. What next?")
Robey, the Buena Vista lawyer, says Harwood's success stems from the fact that he knows more about Rockbridge County, past and present, than most of its natives.
"For a Northern boy, he sure does know a lot about being country," Robey says. "He also has a keen understanding of government - how it's supposed to work and how it's not supposed to work.
"He's a watchdog and he's fair. He's not creating trouble - but he does look for it."
To keep the magazine from becoming too serious, it also features the kind of offbeat things that define Harwood.
"The News," a regular feature of the month's blips and blurbs, spotlights everything from "Oliver North signed the guest book at the Southern Inn with the comment, `Great food, Semper Fi,' " to "The mail was late being put up at the Lexington Post Office one day when employees were required to watch a film on ethics. Go figure."
One scan of an issue's news blurbs, and you get the feeling that Doug Harwood does know everything that goes on in Rockbridge County - a claim he flatly denies. "I think I scare people sometimes," he says.
"But the fact is, I don't know even a quarter of what goes on here . . . One of the amazing things about the community - and why I say I don't know it very well - is it's incredibly factionalized."
He is proud of some of the stories he wrote for the Rockbridge Weekly, the paper he and Sachs left to launch the Advocate. Moonlighting as a bartender at the White Column Inn, Harwood once overheard a drunk construction worker blabbing about some blatant code violations concerning a building he was working on. Harwood wrote the story; the violations got fixed.
"I dethroned a knight once, which I was really proud of," he says. The News-Gazette ran a story a few years ago about an area resident who claimed to have been knighted by the queen of England for his work in arms-control negotiations.
"He said the queen sent out for a special sword for him," Harwood recalls. "I called the British embassy, the Navy, the White House, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the Norwegian embassy - he claimed to have been a member of the Order of St. Olaf.
"Finally, at the embassy a man named Thor checked the records back to 1847 and said he'd never heard of him."
\ Harwood is a successful beat reporter because he's a trusted journalist; people count on him never to reveal his sources - until they die.
"It's a strange feeling, having been around here long enough that some of my sources are actually dropping dead," he says.
When Harwood first came to Lexington, "it was a hick town with saloons, pool halls, beer joints and bums. Buena Vista had a livelier retail community," he says.
Now it's chock full of newcomer money, fancy retail shops, espresso bars and high-stakes real-estate deals. Harwood laments the loss of the beer joints and pool halls. He wants the area to grow, "but in a way that preserves what makes it special."
"Doug loves the town, and he takes a very jaundiced view of change," Don Baker says. "He's a strange mix of very liberal-radical views and very conservative views, and that's hard for some people to line up. At the same time, he kind of cultivates this mysterious image."
In their one-room office on historic Washington Avenue, Harwood and Sachs run themselves ragged trying to chronicle all the area's changes, quirks and controversies. They have a typical, bantering best-friends relationship.
"I label. Kitty licks and sticks," he says, referring to their mailing routine.
"We've tried every licker there is and haven't come up with one superior to the human tongue," she adds.
One of publisher Sachs' biggest challenges is trying to keep Harwood quiet when he's sitting on a big scoop. Because of monthly deadlines, he's not supposed to reveal the nature of a story-in-progress for fear that the competition might find out. "I love to blab," he says.
With a circulation of 3,000, the Advocate is growing slowly but steadily. Harwood's proud that it's always come out on time - even though some months they've had to do some last-minute scrounging to come up with the $1,000 monthly printing fee.
"Sometimes Doug looks bent over and tired and dragging in the mornings," says Spencer, the lawyer. "He's starting to show his age and the weight of being the underdog."
Harwood can't afford health insurance, and friends report that his home phone is sometimes disconnected because he can't pay the bill.
Lucky for the Advocate, Harwood doesn't appear to be motivated by money. "I love to pick up The Wall Street Journal and read that GM needs $3.8 billion, or it's going belly-up," he says. "It's a constant faith booster; it makes that 30 bucks I need seem not so bad."
And lucky for the Advocate, Harwood's image as the scraggly, struggling, starving reporter seems to enhance its stature more than hurt it. Realtor Otis Mead paints a perfect picture of the character:
"He's the kind of guy that when everybody else is so serious about being on the QEII, he would be paddling along very nonchalantly - backwards - in an innertube."
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