Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 31, 1994 TAG: 9410310083
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ The big names, you know already:
Bern Ewert, who pursued the vision across three decades and set the project in motion. Rupert Cutler, who carried it the rest of the way to opening day.
If you are one of the 17,000 or so visitors who have trooped through the woods at Virginia's Explore Park this inaugural season, you may know the faces, too - of the costumed "interpreters" who bring the park to life by re-enacting the pioneer experience on the Appalachian frontier.
Then there's Richard Burrow, the park engineer. If the name isn't familiar, don't feel left out.
"He wasn't the kind of person willing to grab the microphone," says Beth Shively, a former secretary at Explore. "He didn't have that front-man thing. If you were a businessperson or a government official, you'd know Richard, but not the average paper-reader."
And yet, says Trixie Averill, who chairs the state board that runs Explore, "Richard has had more of an effect than Bern Ewert because Richard gave us something tangible. Bern gave us the vision. But if the Roanoke Valley has anyone to thank, it's Richard, for giving us a beautiful tourist destination."
It's a theme echoed by many who have been associated with the project over the years. Says former Explore consultant Mike Gleason: "The project would not be where it is today without him."
Burrow devoted a decade to the park. "The best years of his life," park director Cutler says.
Then, three months after the opening, Cutler laid him off.
"I can't believe they let him go," Shively marvels. "Richard loved the Explore project to the core. I thought he'd just slump over at his desk someday; he'd just be there 'til the end."
So did he.
But as he sits amid the boxed-up contents of his Explore office, Burrow betrays no bitterness. Hurt, maybe. Shocked, sure. Uneasy about having to look for another job at age 47, definitely.
A guide to resume writing sits prominently on his desk.
"I haven't been in the open job market for 25 years, when I left college," he says.
The circumstances of his departure from Explore aren't quite as straightforward as they've been made out to be.
True, the park, in its rush to open, ran up a $220,000 debt. But the park's governing body voted this month to sell off surplus property - mostly houses Explore never really wanted but had to buy to get the rest of the land in which it was interested - to erase that shortfall.
Instead, park director Cutler says, the problem was the "trajectory" the park's finances were on. When Explore was drawing plans and erecting buildings, it needed a full-time engineer. Now that the park is open, it needs 11 part-time or full-time "interpreters."
But it can't afford both. Burrow's $72,000-a-year salary was the second biggest on the payroll, next only to Cutler's $90,000.
"It became a pretty inescapable conclusion," Cutler says, "but not one that anyone enjoyed making."
In some ways, Cutler has taken the decision worse than Burrow. He told Burrow and six other workers on Sept. 30 they would be laid off. Not long afterward, Cutler was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers. Six of them.
"One for each employee I laid off," he says, miscounting the number, if not the cause.
Breaking the news to Burrow was the worst of all, Cutler says.
"He was my first and best friend in Roanoke," Cutler says. "He's got the keys to my house. He even helped me pick out my house."
Burrow says he didn't have "an inkling" what was in store when Cutler called him into his office that Friday afternoon at 2 o'clock.
"I thought he was going to tell me what actions he was going to take" to deal with Explore's budget shortfall. "I had no idea it was going to be me," he says.
Even the Explore board's chairwoman was astonished.
"We just said, `Balance the budget,''' Averill says. "Never did it cross my mind that Richard was going to be the one."
If Burrow leaks any emotion about the turn of events, it's mostly disappointment that he won't be around to do what engineers do best: He sees himself as the quintessential i-dotter and t-crosser.
"My forte is getting the job done and complete," he says. "And I'm not talking 90 percent. I'm talking 100 percent. A lot of people can get it to 80 percent or 90 percent."
The problem is, while Explore's first round of construction may be done, the park that Burrow envisions hardly has begun.
"I believe, in 10 to 20 years, Explore Park will be something this community is proud of and that hundreds of thousands of visitors per year are staying in Roanoke to see. I totally believe that. I'm glad I was able to get it started."
It's just, darn it, "I like to pull things together and I like to finish them."
Quitting not in plan
Low-key and patient almost to a fault, Burrow is not the kind of guy about whom people tell a lot of stories. Instead, they fall back on generalities - "a steadying influence," "a stable force," "the glue that held the place together."
Even the one story Gleason recalls is a tale not of Burrow's great heroics, but of simple perseverance.
It was in the late 1980s, in the project's early days. A team of Explore consultants from Washington was due in Roanoke to appear on a television show. A snowstorm had closed the Roanoke airport, so the planners were rerouted onto an Amtrak train; Burrow volunteered to pick them up in Lynchburg.
The train became mired in a snowdrift en route.
"We sat on the tracks for hours and hours," Gleason recalls. The consultants figured if their ride had gotten to Lynchburg at all, he'd long since have gone home to wait for a call when they finally arrived.
But Burrow ended up sleeping in the station.
"When we got there, there he was with his four-wheel drive," Gleason says. "It was almost daybreak. That is just so typical of Richard Burrow. If he says he'll do something, you know he'll do it."
One of the curiosities about Explore has been how such an even-tempered guy as Burrow could get along with such a moody and mercurial executive as Ewert, Explore's project director from 1985 until 1991.
To Burrow, it's no mystery at all.
"I was probably one of the few people in Roanoke who could work with Bern," he says. "Bern had great vision. But he did not know how to make that vision take form, and he did his visions orally. He talked about things. I learned to take what he was talking about and turn it into an outline of doable activities and, if you did all the activities, the vision would take form.
"That's what made us a good team. He had the majority of the vision; I had the majority of the to-do list. I like that. That's what I do."
Did it ever bother Burrow that Ewert, and later Cutler, were the ones who received most of the credit for Explore? Not at all, Burrow insists.
"It's not my goal to be a high-profile person. It's my goal to work on things I think are important and do the work."
One reason it's so difficult for co-workers to recall anecdotes about Burrow is that he intentionally has submerged his own personality in the work of others - if not Ewert's visions, then the labors of the other Explore planners he's supervised, managed, cajoled, coordinated.
"I enjoy being part of a team," Burrow says. "I don't believe in boasting about what I'm doing because in very few cases can people say 'I' did that. It was truly teamwork."
That trait, he says, was instilled in him in the early 1960s by Eddie Joyce, the legendary football coach at Andrew Lewis High School in Salem.
Burrow's dad was a state trooper; his mom, a bank teller. Burrow was born in Richmond, and bounced around from Southwest Virginia to Southside to Hampton Roads as his father was transferred.
In 1961, the family moved once more, from Wytheville to the Roanoke Valley. His parents narrowed their house-hunting choices to two, then asked young Richard: "Do you want to go to Cave Spring High School or Andrew Lewis High School?"
Ever the practical sort, Burrow picked Andrew Lewis. Why? Why else?
"I was a football player," although not an exceptionally talented one, he adds.
Joyce taught Burrow not only about teamwork, but also about perseverance in the face of adversity - a lesson Burrow says he's calling upon anew these days.
On the fourth play of the first game of the 1963 season, the junior defensive back spotted the Patrick Henry fullback taking the hand-off and breaking for daylight around the end.
"I tackled him," Burrow says, "but he got up and I didn't."
The concussion he suffered wasn't the worst of it: He also fractured a vertebra in his neck.
"Coach Joyce could have said, 'I think you should go do something else.' Instead, he kept me involved with the team. I kept charts on offensive plays and he consulted with me at halftime as to what was working. He wanted me to feel part of the team and encouraged me to play."
The next year, Burrow was back on the field.
"My senior year, we won the state championship. We were the last ones [in Salem] to do that and we were not that good. We won because we played together."
Burrow followed an older brother to Virginia Tech to study engineering. By the 1970s, Burrow wound up working for Roanoke's city government, first as traffic engineer, later as city engineer, eventually as chief project engineer.
Those were the Ewert years, and Burrow found himself working with the young and aggressive city manager on the landmark Design '79 downtown revitalization program - the rebirth of the City Market, the creation of Center in the Square, the makeover of Elmwood Park.
Those were the big-picture items, but Burrow typically prefers to dwell on the more mundane matters - such as the city's 1979 bond issue.
"I was determined as city engineer to build those projects within three years. I wanted them built in a time frame so that people could remember voting for them and then could walk downtown and say, `By God, I remember voting for these trees and benches and it looks pretty darn good. I did the right thing in voting for it.'''
One day, Ewert walked into Burrow's office.
"He looked as if he was thinking," Burrow remembers. "He sat down and started talking about his image of a project. It incorporated the zoo and a train and lodging. It was a real muddled picture he presented, with all the various possibilities in it. I actually remembered laughing. I didn't do a belly-laugh, but I chuckled. 'Bern, do you realize what you're saying? Do you realize how big a concept that would be for this valley?' He was very serious."
And soon Burrow was, too.
In pursuit of a vision
In 1984, Burrow was detailed to work with Mill Mountain Zoo on a proposed expansion.
Before long, it had evolved way past a simple expansion - into something called Explore. Ewert stunned just about everybody when he quit as city manager in 1985 to run the foundation that had been created to bring Explore to life. By the next year, Burrow had joined him.
Doug Cruickshanks, the banker who headed the River Foundation, still marvels that both men were willing to give up secure jobs to pursue a chimera.
"There was nothing more than a vision and a vision that was not widely shared. That is a mark of some courage, perhaps a measure of risk-taking."
Burrow did get a pay raise out of the deal. But the job was guaranteed for only two years, so Cruickshanks thinks Burrow was motivated by something larger.
"I think there was some altruism there, a sense that 'this is something good for society and I want to be a piece of it.'''
Indeed, Burrow had become a true believer, convinced that the Roanoke Valley's economic salvation lay in tourism.
It's a good thing, because Burrow soon found the leap from the large-scale operations of city government to the start-up venture of Explore involved more than a leap of faith.
"I'd worked at the city for 10 years," Burrow says. "I had a nice office there."
Suddenly, he found himself working on a surplus drafting table in a cubbyhole office in Salem. There wasn't even room for his files; he carried them around in his station wagon.
"It was rather a shocking change," he says.
Ewert may have given the fledgling project credibility in one way, but Burrow provided Explore credibility in another, says Gleason, the McLean consultant who helped Explore in some of its early lobbying and fund raising.
"Sooner or later, you come up against a state or federal official who was concerned about some aspect of the project. Richard was the guy who could talk to them and talk their language. Bern and I could talk a pretty good talk, but when they started asking you detailed, mechanical questions, that was not Bern's bag and it's not my bag,'' Gleason says.
``When they'd say, 'I'm not sure you can make that curve in the road, or you can't build something that close to the river,' Richard could say, `Yes, you can and here's how' and resolve the problem in a matter of minutes. If you don't have a guy like that, things can get stalled. Sometimes, it's just a test to see if we knew what we were talking about. You can't put a price on that.''
The title "engineer" conjures up an image of Burrow hunched over his drawing table. Burrow did plenty of that, but his role was hardly confined to slide rules and blueprints.
He drew up budgets; he kept track of Explore's far-flung team of consultants. He was also a favorite speaker as Explore boosters made the rounds of civic groups.
"Richard was often the point person, the 'stand-up-and-talk' person," says Joyce Waugh, Explore's former public relations person who now works in Roanoke County's economic-development office. "That was intentional. He listened well."
He did something else well, too.
"What was really good about Richard," says Shively, the former secretary, ``was if you didn't understand something, he'd explain everything thoroughly.''
Explore often needed to do a lot of that.
Most importantly, says Roanoke architect Timm Jamieson, who worked on Explore's master plan, "Richard has the fortitude to worry about the details."
As Explore moved closer to construction, there were even more of those.
"He was cutting trails with a machete. He was running a Bobcat. He was stacking pieces to the church. He was worrying about the buffalo getting out of the gates. That sounds like menial stuff," Jamieson says.
But it's those kinds of details, Burrow is fond of saying, that add up to the big vision - or can make one unravel.
Burrow spent nearly a week walking in the woods, trying to figure out exactly where to locate Explore's big barn. He devoted days to deciding which trees would stay and which would have to go.
"Everything in the park, from the roads to the trails to the buildings, are developed where I wanted and look the way I wanted them to look," Burrow is proud of saying.
And now he's gone. Today is his last day; it's also the day the park closes for the season.
For now, Explore has no construction in the works; Cutler says when Explore has the money to reassemble more buildings, he'd like to be able to hire Burrow part time to oversee the work.
Burrow says he'd like to come back to do that; but he'll still need another full-time job. Right now, he's looking. For a while, Burrow will offer himself as a planning and engineering consultant.
Burrow says the biggest challenge is not just finding a job: It's finding a job he thinks will be important.
"The struggle for me is Explore Park hasn't been just a job where you go in at 8 and leave at 5. It's been a way of life for me."
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