Author Archives: Doug Cumming

This tradition of eulogies at Tate Annual Meetings has a certain shape. But no passing of those we love can really fit a pattern. The passing of my cousin Louellen Murray is especially hard and uncontainable. It comes way too … Continue reading →

Washington and Lee’s former SAE House, a lofty white plantation-style mansion on E. Washington Street in Lexington, Va., has stood nearly empty for seven years now. That’s because the chapter was suspended by the national fraternity and by the university … Continue reading →

“It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life.”     –Darnella Frazier, who at age 17 made the video of Officer Derek Chauvin choking … Continue reading →

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 →