Author Archives: Doug Cumming

This ran as an op-ed in The Roanoke Times on Jan. 18, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On Dec. 22, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. composed a two-page, single-spaced typed letter to my father, the Newsweek bureau chief in Atlanta … Continue reading →

Avis Waring, who served in Occupied Japan and wrote economic reports for the CIA, died Monday (Jan. 11) of complications from Covid-19 at the Borden Center, Lexington, Va. The illness had been diagnosed on her 100th birthday two weeks earlier. … Continue reading →

LEXINGTON – The Monday nights when The Community Table hands out drive-thru takeout meals have grown cold and dark. Long gone are the twice-a-week meals served in a gesture of dignity and solidarity to all who came, ragged or spruce, … Continue reading →

Daddy was not a religious man. But if the Kingdom of God is within, as Jesus says in Luke, it was there, within his mind and heart, that this Kingdom radiated. I think of it as a spectrum of energies, … Continue reading →

I found among my father’s effects a thin, musty hardcover volume called The History of Western Culture, a collection of Life Magazine articles that ran between March 3, 1947, and Nov. 22, 1948. Each one is far grander than a … Continue reading →

I wrote this for RARA, to appear in Lexington’s weekly News-Gazette on Nov. 18. It went up on the paper’s website Nov. 13. No family table in our community need be without a turkey and trimmings this Thanksgiving. The Rockbridge … Continue reading →

[This is the obituary I wrote for our father yesterday, a day the family gathered on Anne Preston’s front porch in Decatur to absorb the fact that he had passed away that morning. The Hospice staffer reached me around 6:30 … Continue reading →

Election Day was a long one for me, up at 4 a.m. in the cold moonlight to be a poll worker, rotating tasks that led to my 7:15 p.m. emptying of 746 machine-read paper ballots from the big black box … Continue reading →

White privilege. White fragility. White rage. White guilt. White supremacy. All of these contain a truth too deep for understanding outside a state of grace. When I read these words from “experts” who use their scientific or academic authority to … Continue reading →