ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607080157
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Strip
HE'S ROANOKE COUNTY'S most famous professional citizen. Now he's considering a run for the Board of Supervisors. But are Don Terp's causes more popular than he is?
Sometimes, Don Terp is a man with a mission.
In 1990, he put his business on hold so he could devote nearly a year and a half to defeating the proposed consolidation of Roanoke and Roanoke County. This year, he found a new cause in the campaign to wipe out Roanoke County's school bond referendum. From 5 a.m. to midnight, his days were consumed by news conferences, debates, strategy sessions and hours of research on county finances.
Those who have faced Terp in combat view him with a mixture of outrage and grudging respect.
"It's obvious that if Don Terp believes in something, he's going to carry the flag, and he's going to run it until the job's complete," said Jim Hopkins, one of the leaders of the pro-consolidation movement.
Sometimes, Terp is a man who must be king.
He has volunteered to lead the Roanoke County Republican Committee, the local Virginians for Perot group and the steering committee for Roanoke County's vision process. Each time, the reception he received was less than enthusiastic. Each time, Terp quit.
Other members of those groups viewed his departure with a mixture of relief and vexation.
"If he can't get his way, he picks up his marbles in a marble game and goes home," said Ronkeith Adkins, a Republican and a participant in the vision committee.
Terp is not an easy man to distill down to a single word or phrase. It's simpler to back into a description by compiling a list of those characteristics he does not possess.
He is not modest. He is not dumb. He is not shy. He is not a follower.
Terp would add one more to the top of that list: "I am not controversial."
He said he has walked away from organizations only when the hated c-word has been used against him.
"I don't know what they mean by the word controversy," he said. "I really don't think I'm controversial."
It's no surprise that the word controversial has been appended to the name Don Terp. After all, his name first became a Roanoke Valley household word because of the most controversial issue in recent history - consolidation.
Hopkins recalls his first encounter with Terp at a consolidation debate:
"Here's this guy with red suspenders, and you don't know what to expect," Hopkins said. "He was very loud, and he was very emotional. Extremely emotional. I thought, 'Gosh, who's this guy who's screaming and getting all upset?' I was all filled with enthusiasm and shocked that anybody would be opposed. I guess I saw him as an extremely negative person."
By the end of the campaign, Hopkins had come to realize that Terp was a formidable opponent. On the morning of the referendum, Hopkins received a call from the county registrar's office notifying him that pro-consolidation posters did not list the organization that paid the printing costs, as required by law. He spent the rest of the morning scrambling around, marking pen in hand, adding the information to each poster.
Who caught the mistake? Terp, of course.
"You get mad, but he saw that flaw," Hopkins said with a chuckle. "He caught it."
Terp said he became leader of Citizens Against Merger, a core group of 15 anti-consolidation activists, by default. Five people showed up for the group's first meeting in December 1989.
"Everybody stared at each other and said 'Who's going to be the spokesperson?' and I said, 'Not me.' And a couple of other persons said, 'Not me.' And I said, 'Well, somebody's got to do it.'''
Lela Spitz, another CAM member who was there from the start, describes Terp as a "take-charge person," and that's exactly what he did. He ran the campaign like a war, complete with espionage plans.
He organized letter-writing campaigns to maintain a constant presence on the editorial page of the Roanoke Times & World-News.
"I wrote most of the letters, even though somebody else signed them," he said.
After becoming suspicious of two CAM members, he scheduled two series of meetings rather than purging the suspected "ringers." Some of the meetings were decoys designed to feed the two only what Terp wanted them to know. The other meetings, where the real business of the campaign took place, were held in secret.
His distrust of mergers goes back to his experiences with Hewlett-Packard, the computer giant that purchased an electronics company he worked for in New Jersey. Ironically, it was probably one of the luckiest breaks of his career.
Terp was raised in Westfield, N.J., a bedroom community to New York City. His father, a building contractor, died in a construction accident when Terp was 14. His mother went to work, telling her eldest son, "I'll give you a roof. I'll give you food. The rest is up to you."
Although he ended up in the electronics industry, Terp admits math was never one of his strong points. Good grades in art and music - he played the clarinet and the sousaphone in his high school band - helped get him through school.
After graduating, he worked at Western Electric until World War II. He celebrated his 21st birthday in North Africa and was later transferred to India, working his way up from a radio operator and gunner on a B-25 bomber to communications chief.
After the war, he opened a camera shop, then sold life insurance and finally became a purchasing agent for Booten Radio Corp.
When Hewlett-Packard purchased the company, Terp said, he was surprised at the expense of merging two companies that had separate finance, inventory and personnel systems. Still, he stayed with Hewlett-Packard for 20 years and has fond memories of company picnics and financial stability.
Just as he reaped the benefits of working for Hewlett-Packard, Terp said during the consolidation campaign that he could see the advantage of cooperation between the county and city governments. He vowed to work for that cooperation, but such pro-consolidation activists as Hopkins say Terp failed to pursue that goal with the verve he displayed before the referendum.
"I was so exhausted from consolidation, I just wanted to get out of the whole thing," Terp said.
Similar criticisms emerged after the failure of the county's school bond referendum, when Terp declined to participate in a blue-ribbon committee charged with finding solutions to the county's school needs.
Terp hasn't always refused invitations to work with local governments. Last year, he agreed to participate in the county's vision committee, the first step in a planning process that will culminate in a new comprehensive plan. At the first meeting, Terp volunteered to serve as spokesman.
"We had this unusual woman, who came from Roanoke city, who said she thought I shouldn't be spokesman because she thought I was too controversial," Terp recalled. "What right did she have to go around telling Roanoke County how to run its business?''
Barbara Duerk, the former City Council candidate who made the comment, said the immediate reaction to her comment was muted.
"It was like I had dropped a bomb, and nobody responded for a while," she recalled.
Terp went home that night and wrote his resignation letter, which he faxed to Duerk and other members of the committee.
"I couldn't see a point in trying to continue," he said. "I was totally negated."
It was not the first time Terp left an organization in a huff. Roanoke County Republican Chairman Hugh Key, a former member of Citizens Against Merger, said Terp left the party a year after he joined in 1989 because George Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes.
Terp admitted he has problems with some of the party's national planks.
"I don't think this right-wing thing is the way go to," he said. "They made it very clear abortion was an issue. That's not my cup of tea. I don't think that's anything for government to get involved with."
But he said he left the county organization for different reasons.
"I never really felt I was part of the Republican Party in Roanoke," he said. "There was a group that was pushing me, and they wanted me to get much more involved in the Republican Party. Then you had this country club group from Southwest County, and that's the Republican Party in Roanoke County. It's a country club group. If you don't live there and you didn't go to the right college, you're sort of persona non grata."
When he and his wife, Carole, attended a meeting of the Republican Women's Club in 1990, they were horrified to learn the main speaker's topic was breast cancer awareness.
"Don was incensed that we had that kind of speaker at that kind of meeting," recalled Molly Kelly, vice chairwoman of the local party at the time. "He felt we should be talking about politics. He kept telling us that we needed to run the party like they do in New Jersey."
Republican politics are a bit different in New Jersey, particularly in Morris County where Terp lived. He was a grass-roots Republican activist in New Jersey, working for the likes of Malcolm Forbes when he ran for governor. But when Terp left New Jersey for Virginia's lower tax rates, he also found a whole new breed of Republicans, and they weren't to his liking.
"The biggest problem we have in Virginia, particularly in Roanoke, is people don't like confrontation," he said. "One of the interesting things about New Jersey is if you defeat somebody, you shake hands and go about your business. Down here, you have an enemy for life."
Terp said he can count his enemies on one hand. At least two of those fingers are reserved for Republicans. Kelly and former GOP chairman Al Thomason both raised objections in 1990 when Terp submitted his name to become chairman.
Thomason said Terp paid his dues to the party for one year, but has never been active in party functions. That was one count against him with the executive committee, many of whom have been members for 25 years.
And there was another issue.
"He's a very, very controversial person, and I'm choosing my words very carefully," Thomason said. "He doesn't get into anything unless there's a fight in it. Like consolidation. He jumped on that like a duck on a June bug."
There was that word again.
Terp looked to the newly formed local chapter of Virginians for Perot for political solace in 1992. He and Carole lasted a month.
"Nobody would support us," he said. "They decided we were just too prominent. They wanted us in the group, but they didn't want us to head it up."
Terp sees the Perot group as disorganized, and says he will sometimes leave an organization because "I don't necessarily like being a part of failure."
Beverly Fitzpatrick Jr., who admits he doesn't agree with Terp on many issues, nevertheless defends him.
Fitzpatrick, director of the New Century Council, said he observed Terp's ability to be a team player when Terp and Carole joined the regional organization and headed up a subcommittee on communication. Although Terp wanted to focus on the Internet, the group decided that too few Roanoke Valley residents were on line and put priority on other projects.
"He didn't take offense at that and walk out the door," Fitzpatrick said. "He hung right in there."
Although he's best known for defeating issues such as consolidation and the bond referendum, Terp is quick to point out projects with a more positive tilt.
A resident of Bonsack, he helped form the Bonsack Area Residents' Coalition. The network of civic groups was instrumental in widening Alternate U.S. 220 to four lanes between Daleville and Bonsack.
Perhaps his most successful organization is the Southwest Virginia Internet Society, which has grown to 170 members in the two years since the Terps founded it.
Bernie Cosell - a Giles County resident who was one of the original architects of the Internet and is now an honorary member of the society - said Terp acted as "chief marketer and hand-holder" when the Roanoke Valley first got access to on-line services. Acting as an independent contractor for The Roanoke Times, he held
seminars across the region on Infinet, the first Internet provider in the region. But opening up the Internet was more than a job to Terp, and he offered individual assistance to all of his new recruits.
"He got people onto the Net, and he tried to keep them happy," Cosell said. "People got into the habit of calling Don and Carole at all hours of the night."
He credits Terp for his part in attracting multiple providers offering access to the Internet.
"Part of that is the Valley looks like a bunch of Internet crazies, and part of that is Don was the chief drum thumper," he said.
No matter what your politics are, if you are interested in computers, you can have an amiable chat with Terp. Former state Sen. Brandon Bell, for example, is a consolidation proponent and a Republican, but he's also a former Hewlett-Packard employee.
Terp "knows I was in computers," Bell said, "and when he sees me, that's all he wants to talk about."
The Terps almost left Roanoke County because of computers. They were so entranced by Blacksburg's electronic village experiment that they put their house on the market and made plans to move there.
The couple never got an offer on the house, and now they've given up on the idea and moved on to other projects.
The latest project was announced just weeks after the defeat of the county's school bond referendum, when Terp held a press conference and announced he might run for Hollins District supervisor against Chairman Bob Johnson next year.
Terp, 73, said he'll step down if he can find "a guy in his 30s'' to take his place, but he insisted he will not allow Johnson to run unopposed.
Terp admitted he gets along better with officials in Roanoke city and Botetourt County than with his own elected leaders. He has little nice to say about the men now serving on the Board of Supervisors, some of whom he would be sitting next to if he runs and wins.
Here's his take on longtime board members Johnson, Harry Nickens and Lee Eddy:
"To be honest with you, I haven't seen much come out of those three guys."
And this about newcomers Fuzzy Minnix and Spike Harrison:
"I think they still need to find the bathroom. Neither one knows where it is yet."
And, finally, the paid county staff:
"What you have is a multimillion-dollar corporation being run by people who couldn't run a corner grocery store."
Terp is already devising a platform, even though the next election is more than a year away. He said he'll call for spending between $10 million and $40 million in new money on education over the next 10 years without raising taxes. The school budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 is $79.9 million.
How will Terp do it? He mentions eliminating cellular telephones and cutting back on county-owned vehicles, but admits that won't begin to approach $10 million.
"You just have to start looking for places to pare back," he said. "There's big blocks of money that can be worked on, but I don't want to comment on them."
In May, he spent three hours with Brent Robertson, the county budget director, going over financial records. Diane Hyatt, the finance director, joined them for the last two hours. County Administrator Elmer Hodge sat in on the final hour and offered to pay Terp a consulting fee to review the county's finances and make suggestions for improvements. Terp declined, then criticized the three staff members during a public meeting for wasting a total of six man-hours, saying they should instead simplify their financial reports.
Johnson snapped at him and suggested that the county staff might not be willing to meet with Terp in the future.
Former supervisors question whether Terp would be effective as a candidate or supervisor. But Terp isn't listening to the naysayers. Concerned Citizens for Good Government, the organization he formed to fight the bond referendum, is still active; he believes it will become the basis for his political support. He's evasive about the group's membership, simply saying, "We have everybody who voted 'no' against our bond issue."
A "no" vote on the bond referendum doesn't necessarily translate into a "yes" vote for Terp. Some people might say it's not Terp's style to run if he thinks he's going to lose. Others would simply say it's not his style to lose, period. It's all the same to Don Terp.
"Usually, when I get into it, it's not a lost cause," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 282 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. Community activist and Internetby CNBenthusiast Don Terp most recently made a name for himself with his
opposition to Roanoke County's school bond referendum. color. KEYWORDS: PROFILE