Author Archives: Doug Cumming

“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 →

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 →