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On the other side of the room stood a plain wooden podium, a massive ribbon-adorned wreath of roses, and a large framed photo of Patsy, faded to the point of near invisability. It was in fact the very same photo that had stood on an easel in the exact same spot a half-century earlier. David, who had recently fulfilled a long-held dream and been ordained as a minister, walked up to the podium right on time in a purple clerical scarf.
“Ours is a sacred purpose today,” he opened, in a voice indistinguishable from his docent’s tone. “Patsy dreamed, she achieved, she overcame.” We had gathered to celebrate “a life not forgotten, a voice that cannot be silenced.”
I leafed through the program and read one of the two poems David had written for the occasion, “Our Shenandoah Angel”: “As you journeyed through life with your head held high, / No one could stop you, no matter how they tried.”
The first speaker was current Winchester mayor Elizabeth Minor, a longtime local public servant who had handily won her second term only a few months earlier. In 2010, she designated September 4 as Patsy Cline Day, one of the only official recognitions the singer has ever received from Winchester. Mayor Minor walked slowly to the podium, clutched its sides, looked up at the audience with a distant stare, and began crying immediately.
“To me, anyone that isn’t a fan of Patsy Cline is totally un-American,” she laughed after pulling herself together. “She is one of Winchester’s very own . . . Everywhere you go, everyone knows Patsy Cline, and everyone knows where she’s from. She is such a strong part of Winchester’s history.”
Tracie Dillon, a one-time Celebrating Patsy Cline board member who was born years after the plane crash, tearfully opened her speech with a quote from Harriet Tubman. She called Patsy “my lifelong idol” and said, “She rose above the things that weighed her down, and she proudly proclaimed where she was from, despite being shunned by those who didn’t have the same belief in her dream.” She then trembled her way through the lyrics of “Always,” recorded only a month before Patsy’s death: “Days may not be fair, always / That’s when I’ll be there, always.”
Julie, Patsy’s daughter, then rose and approached the spotlight once again. “I didn’t prepare a big speech,” she said, apparently honestly. She had none of the others’ stage-readiness or resolve, though I’d never seen such a mixture of grief, joy, and grace in a person’s eyes before.
“I guess you could say we’re speechless. But I did want to say thank you, from us. We’re very fortunate that she is remembered always. It’s a privilege that few people get to experience when they’ve lost someone in their lives. They don’t always have them in front of them with recordings or photographs, or people’s memories. Or occasions fifty years later, where people gather to pay tribute. But that is a blessing that we were given. As a child of four, I sometimes don’t have a whole lot to contribute to the conversation. But having lived around the family, and being here in Winchester, with all her friends, the people who knew her, worked with her, and watched her grow, it has been a learning experience, a history lesson. My dad would’ve loved to have been here today. He still comes to Winchester and still loves to come, but he’s gotten it down to just an occasional thing now. But he did want to send his best, and say thank you.”
Jim also spoke that day, after walking slowly from his seat in the front row. He too opened with an unnecessary caveat that he didn’t write a speech. “That day fifty years ago, that was the saddest day of my life.” Overwhelmed, he simply listed memories, seriatim, with little commentary. He spoke about meeting Patsy for the first time, the WINC performance, the shows that followed. He mentioned his memorial parties for her, his respect for her talent. Heavy-heartedness fit him as unnaturally as his suit and tie. This was not a man made for tearful church services, but he muddled his way through, ending as he started: “That day was just so sad.” Then he slowly returned to his seat next to Bertha.
Two doors by the podium swung open and we walked single file into the blinding funerary sun. The grave was right by the parking lot.
It was a modest thing, just a 3-foot metal marker on a marble base, flush with the ground at the outset of the cemetery. It was marked “DICK,” and a large bouquet of roses, sent by Charlie, was sitting on the place where he was headed. The ground was still soft from a snowstorm earlier in the week, but the sun was out and a powerful wind tossed the men’s ties and jackets as we stood in a circle around the plot, squinting and readjusting our feet.
One more emotional speaker read a final prayer. This was Jim Mogavoy, whose father drove Patsy’s car in two Apple Blossom Parades in the late 1950s. He was born the same year as Patsy but stood tall and oaklike in his tartan jacket. “Her memory, fifty years later, is still alive for us,” Mogavoy read from a piece of wind-shaken paper.
As the group began to break up, some attendees took pictures of the grave. Others approached Julie, who signed programs and stood for photos while the wind scrambled her black hair. But most people congregated in small groups for prolonged hugs. The wind kept toppling the graveside flowers, and David and the other docents sprinted over to stand them back up. At the perimeter, the blonde Channel 3 anchor stood in front of the camera recording her segment intro. Before long she had the microphone in front of JudySue, who spoke with a hushed, grateful nod: “Everything I’d hoped,” she said. “Just . . . so perfect.”
I stood in the blasting wind watching everyone come to terms with this difficult walk through the past, when out of the distance on the far side of the cemetery emerged a roving figure in a pink T-shirt. She came crookedly toward us as another woman in earth tones jogged to keep up with her. At close range she looked older than her manic walk implied, and unwell—rabid, possessed, overdetermined.
“What’s all this?” she asked loudly. David approached, in shepherd-the-people mode, and explained our purpose for the day. The woman’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open.
“I . . . I can’t believe . . . Are you hearing him?” she asked her friend, who seemed equally shocked. She turned back to David. “I didn’t even know Patsy Cline was from here. I didn’t know . . .” She stopped to get her breath. “I love her. I live for her. A few days ago I told her,” pointing to the friend, “I told her we had to get in the van and drive somewhere. I needed a break from everything. We just hit the road. I’m from Florida. We just ended up here.”
No one knew what to make of her, and after trying without success to bring her into our mournful circle, even David left her to be. The news team knew a story when they saw one, however, and soon this woman was in front of the Channel 3 camera, breathlessly baring her desperate soul for the local audience that, in person, kept their safe distance, protecting the solemnity of their communal memory.
3
Resistance
Seventy-odd years earlier, back when Jim McCoy was just beginning to envision a world beyond rain, soil, and sun, the Valley land around Shenandoah Memorial Park contained some of the most active agricultural farms on earth. This was the peak of Virginia apple growing, the industry that literally brought light to the Shenandoah. At their height, Valley growers supplied two-thirds of the entire national apple supply, and the magnitude of picking, planting, and storing all that fruit required the region’s first large-scale electrical grid. For that innovation, and for the scope and scale of Valley produce operations altogether, the locals owed a single man, Harry Flood Byrd. There can be no understanding of the Winchester region’s particular character or twentieth-century evolution without Byrd. No one else had such an outsized effect on the upper Valley’s physical and political state, or arguably the psychology of its residents. Byrd essentially created the world that allowed Jim McCoy to dream of a modern life, and he embodied the culture that pushed those dreams to the margins.
Born in 1887, Byrd knew all about the southern propensity for somber remembrance that Patsy’s mourners exhibited around her grave site. He grew up in the era when Virginians, like their compatriots throughout the
battered Confederacy, elevated communal mourning to an entire way of being. “The well-born Virginian of our era was tutored to revere himself as being the dispossessed heir to an all-perfect and all-admirable estate in the Old South,” wrote the Richmond native James Branch Cabell, a popular author who was less than a decade older than Byrd. “We were taught that we had been robbed; that our rights had been taken away from us at Appomattox.” Annual Confederate Memorial Day celebrations echoed throughout late-nineteenth-century Dixie, and reverence for Virginian Robert E. Lee approached deification, particularly in his home state. By his own admission, Byrd rarely read anything but Civil War histories throughout his life, and he surely would have known well Thomas Buchanan Read’s popular postwar poem “Sheridan’s Ride,” commemorating the Union general’s 1864 burning of the Valley—a poem that starts, “Up from the South at break of day/ Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay.”
But despite his immersion in the cult of southern victimization, Byrd never evinced much passion for collective culture or experience. Byrd was born into one of Virginia’s First Families, who trace their lines back to the colony’s earliest blue-blooded English dynasties. Byrd’s most famous ancestor was William Byrd II, the so-called Pepys of the Old Dominion, who was born in England in 1674 but lived most of his adult life in America as a legendary bon vivant, author, diarist, explorer-surveyor, and statesmen. William II served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and founded Richmond, naming it for an area of London that he knew from his years as a barrister. A long line of legally minded Byrds followed in his wake, though after the suicide of his son, William III, the family fell on lean times that lasted through the nineteenth century.
Harry’s father, Richard Evelyn Byrd, came to Winchester for a fresh start on his own legal practice, and his sons rescued the family name. Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr. became a pioneering Antarctic explorer and the first man to fly across the southernmost continent. Harry, the older brother, barely left the Valley except for business, and looked, even in his earliest photos, like he was born with a starched collar and double Windsor knot. With his father, who favored him, Harry took regular trips to the family cabin near Appomattox, dubbed “the Byrd’s Nest.” There he developed a lifelong love for long forest walks, and a yen for solitude and meditative quiet. The young Harry surely needed those relaxing spells; his father was such a hapless and unreliable alcoholic that he once left a trial during recess and returned to court so drunk that he began arguing for the other side. Harry clearly took the behavior as a warning, and was a teetotaler all his life. He also exhibited a shocking work ethic from childhood, a hearty reserve of what Henry Adams called “the Virginian habit of command.” Even relative to the brush-clearing Spotswood gang or Jim McCoy’s ceaseless roaming pursuit of a country music career, no one ever attacked the Valley with such terrific force of will.
At age fifteen, Harry Byrd dropped out of high school and took over the Winchester Star, his father’s failing newspaper. Guided by his stated editorial philosophy that “the Business Department is the life blood of the paper,” he made it solvent within five years, then bought out his sole competitor. Byrd quickly ran with the highest class of corporate Virginia men, who drafted him to become a state senator.
By this time, Byrd had already begun growing apples on his land in Berryville, JudySue’s hometown. This kind of amateur farming was so common in the region that it might as well have been a native folk tradition, as the McCoys’ cider press attested. But apples themselves were originally a product of the British Empire. Pre-colonial Virginia was naturally rich with cherry, mulberry, gooseberry, and huckleberry, but apples arrived on the earliest English ships. They were abundant at Jamestown, where John Smith noted their use for “most excellent and comfortable drinks.” By 1686, one Sir William Fitzhugh had 2,500 acres of apple trees in Westmoreland County, near the mouth of the Potomac, and many other men had smaller orchards for private use as well. William Byrd II even praised the state’s “industrious” apple planters in his famous History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, published in 1728. From the moment that Englishmen first saw the Valley from the Swift Run Gap, apples spread through the Shenandoah as quickly as the people. Before they became the quintessentially American fruit, apples were a living symbol of possibility, proof that British life and tastes could be imposed upon the New World.
Byrd didn’t especially need the money, so his own initial growing efforts might be called a labor of love. But Harry Flood Byrd never did anything for sentimental reasons. He treated his trees like a hobby empire, a lower-stakes version of the political and media fiefdom he was growing with the Star and in the state house. He looked at the Shenandoah Valley of his youth—a quiet, comfortable place that was better known commercially for wheat—and saw a potential factory. Byrd bought his first apple land in 1906. In 1912, he expanded by purchasing his neighbor, Rosemont Orchard. In 1918, he bought nearby Green Orchard, then the next year, Kelly Orchard. His expansion was equaled only by his innovation. He brought heaters into his fields to protect the trees against spring freezes. He was the first planter in the area to use tractors. He pioneered the use of corrugated pads to keep his fruit unbruised. He volunteered his trees for some of the earliest large-scale pesticide and fertilizer tests.
As a businessman, Byrd was a visionary. As a politician, he was a great businessman. Winchester Cold Storage Company, which he built in 1917, wasn’t the first such facility in Virginia, but it soon became the largest in the world. Despite his career-defining aversion to government debt, the project was financed with borrowed money; in 1920, Byrd owed over $150,000 to creditors, even as he became the stubborn face of “pay as you go” government budgeting. But he achieved the kind of success and influence that make mere hypocrisy irrelevant. World War I started just days after he opened the storage facility, for example, and threatened to doom it right at the start. So Byrd contacted a congressman friend to volunteer the facility as a place to store food for the war effort. Even as the fight in Europe waged on, Harry Byrd kept the trains coming into Winchester.
In the state senate, Byrd was a ceaseless advocate of limited government except when big government benefited him. He increased the power of the Crop Pest Commission, raising the standards of inspections beyond what smaller, competing operations could afford. He passed laws requiring cedar trees to be kept away from orchards to prevent infection from a type of mold called cedar rust, then had his neighbors’ trees destroyed during the night if they didn’t comply. He improved Winchester’s surrounding highways, brush-cut non-apple trees from roadsides, and pushed for an extension of electric lines to supply the cold storage plant with better power. But he resisted any regulation of cold storage plants, as well as any size limits on trucks.
Despite his ruthlessness, Byrd was esteemed, and even relatable for local folks. His expressionless workaholism endeared him to a state that has produced more presidents than world-famous artists. He never lost his capacity for piddlin’. Like an upper-crust cousin to Jim McCoy, he tended to the minutest details of his business operations: poisoning mice, pruning trees for better sunlight, sales. “Ranging across his fields on foot, horseback, and motorcycle,” writes one biographer, “he involved himself in every phase of the operation from purchasing land to planting trees—whose quality he was very particular about—to harvesting and selling the fruit.” He was elected president of the Frederick County Fruit Growers association in 1920, and held an annual apple-growers picnic at Rosemont Orchard that attracted 1,500 guests at its apex.
In 1924, Byrd helped conceive the first Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, with a goal “to bring visitors from far and wide to Winchester and Frederick County that they might see the grandeur of our land at the time of its greatest beauty—apple blossom time.” It started as a one-day, one-time event, but the chamber of commerce knew a gold-laying goose when they saw it. With a few wartime exceptions, the festival has come annually ever since, and now stretches over a week and a half in l
ate April, as my tipsy brunette friend had informed me in the Half Note Lounge. And it all started when Harry Byrd—the man who built more roads and power lines and cut down more trees throughout the Valley than anyone in history—sold the idea on “the grandeur of our land.”
His rise became inexorable, self-fulfilling. In 1926, Byrd became governor, the youngest since Jefferson, and his youthfulness was a major part of his appeal: “The vigor with which he moved generated a wave of optimism and acclaim,” according to one historian. He was additionally the bringer of a new technological dawn, the first head of Virginia to use a microphone and speakers at his inauguration and the first to broadcast the ceremony on the radio. His speech nevertheless announced that “the prosperity of Virginia depends primarily upon agriculture.”
By 1933, Byrd’s orchards were producing half a million bushels from 150,000 trees. The Winchester Cold Storage Company held 1.5 million bushels at any given time, and Byrd began selling overseas, to England especially. Byrd’s net worth at this time was $1 million. Apples may have epitomized early Shenandoah Englishness, but Byrd, by using them as an instrument of personal fortune and political domination, ushered in the region’s era of unfettered American business. He took a symbol of his people’s settlement and turned it into a monopoly.
In March of that year, the undisputed “Apple King of America” was appointed to the United States Senate after his predecessor was drafted into the Roosevelt administration. The median income in the South during the Depression was half that in the North, which led President Roosevelt to famously declare the South “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” His stimulus plans included massive efforts to modernize the region, usually through the Works Progress and Public Works administrations. In almost all cases, Byrd, an arch-Dixiecrat, opposed these measures in alliance with his fellow Virginian newspaperman-senator Carter Glass, from Lynchburg. But even as the two bemoaned federal overreach and overspending with their every breath, between 1935 and 1943, Virginia, like the South generally, gained huge amounts of new roads and electric lines, and significantly lowered its infant mortality rate, among other public health improvements. As the Depression and recovery wore on, Byrd had his apple pie and ate it too: the New Deal strengthened his constituents and his home infrastructure, while his virulent opposition to it made him a folk hero in a state that honored noble self-sufficiency above all. As his own agricultural fortunes soared, he voted against numerous farm bills and worked hard to undermine the Civil Works Administration, a short-lived manual-labor employment program. He borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time to improve his own business while lecturing the peons about the impossibility of free lunch. When an Alexandria school principal asked to pick postharvest apples in order to feed students, Byrd told him to go to the shops in Winchester and buy them through the proper channels like everyone else.