Brother-in-law Jeff Gaffney went on NBC29 to express the family’s bafflement.
SCREEN CAPTURE

A 9:30am weekday phone call to his mother and a drive to his vacation house at Wintergreen are about the only clues in the Wednesday disappearance of prominent developer and country club president Michael Comer.

What initially looked like a simple search for a hiker took a bizarre twist the following evening when officials indicated they no longer think that the missing Glenmore Country Club president and former Kessler Group project manager would be found at Wintergreen Resort where the 45-year-old Comer allegedly went missing July 1.

NBC29 reports that the search has ceased and broadcast a subsequent report in which brother-in-law Jeff Gaffney expresses the family pain and puzzlement that Comer’s car, keys, and cellphone were found at Wintergreen.

—originally posted July 3 at 5:57am under the headline, “Mystery deepens in club boss disappearance”

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Blogger and digital plagiarism watchdog Waldo Jaquith.
FILE PHOTO BY HOOK STAFF

Put a blog in Waldo Jaquith’s hands, even a literary magazine’s blog, and there’s no telling what can happen. Last week, the Virginia Quarterly Review employee called out Wired editor and best-selling author Chris Anderson on VQR’s blog for lifting whole passages from Wikipedia and other sources for Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” something many other reviewers, including New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, appeared not to have noticed.

The post came with a mea culpa from Anderson— he was told before-hand that his book was going to be challenged— who claimed that it was a mistake and that he  and his publisher had “forgotten” to cite the passages.

Jaquith’s post made an immediate impact, having generated 177 comments to date from people— including Anderson— arguing (more)

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Daily Progress readers recently received an uplifting, tear-jerking story of the UVA student who suffered what might have been a fatal, face-crushing injury while bicycling the Blue Ridge Parkway. Were it not for some doctors, including Martha Jefferson’s well-placed Mark Harris and UVA’s Stephen Park, there might have been a vastly different ending to this three-part story.

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Sacajawea descendant Summer Morning Baldwin performs a traditional Shoshone sign language prayer at Friday’s dedication.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Close to a hundred people gathered at the foot of the Lewis and Clark statue at the intersection of Ridge, Main, and McIntire Streets on Friday, June 19 in a ceremony dedicating a plaque to Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first American expedition to the Pacific coast.

Responding to concerns that Sacajawea’s representation, crouched beneath the two men in bronze, underplayed her importance to the expedition, the City commissioned the plaque, and invited two of Sacajawea’s descendents to author the text. The city also invited several of Sacajawea’s descendents from Idaho to the afternoon ceremony.

“When I saw this statue I was very sad, but you are leading the way, Charlottesville,” Rose Ann Abrahamson, Sacajawea’s great-great-great niece, told the crowd. “I believe this expedition had divine intervention, because we are all here together.”

Abrahamson’s mother, the great-granddaughter of a powerful Shoshone medicine woman, then performed a “smudging” ceremony on the plaque with burning sage, lit by a match from a Hook reporter.

“This is so people will respect it,” said Abrahamson, “and so it will (more)

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Last summer, the Hook examined the secret of UVA President John Casteen longevity, but today Casteen announced his retirement.
COVER PHOTO ART

UVA President John Casteen today announced his retirement from the university he’s headed since 1990. At a meeting of the Board of Visitors, Casteen announced his plans to step down on August 1, 2010.

“These years have been all but magical for my family and me,” Casteen said in an official release. “We have had the pleasure of living and working among students, staff members, faculty members, alumni, other backers of the University, and the women and men of a community that we see as America’s best. These have been years of working with legislators, board members, and others who care about the roles of universities in promoting and sustaining the common good, and of imagining with them how to cultivate a University capable of making Virginia’s and the Republic’s future worthy of their past.”

Rarely smiling and attired in an orange tie in the Dome Room of the Rotunda, Casteen received a standing ovation from the Board of Visitors and those gathered there for the announcement.

During his tenure, Casteen has increased the university’s endowment and its diversity, and he cites AccessUVA, the financial aid program that assures low-income students the means to attend the university without having to take out loans, as one of the accomplishments of which he’s most proud.

Presidents of the top 50 schools hold their jobs on average six years. Casteen, 65, has spent most of his adult life at the University of Virginia, starting with his enrollment there in 1961 as a 17-year old.

Casteen talks to the press after his announcement, and says he has no regrets about the amount of time he spent fundraising.
PHOTO BY CAMERON FELLER

“John Casteen will be remembered as the person who understood Jefferson’s vision of this place and catapulted it into the 21st century. He will leave an indelible mark and will be remembered as the father of our modern University,” said University Rector W. Heywood Fralin.

Fralin said that a “community-wide commemorative celebration” is being planned for Casteen to recognize his accomplishments. Fralin also said that Casteen will serve as a consultant for a year for the new president, and then return as a faculty member after a sabbatical leave once he steps down next August, when he becomes president emeritus. Fralin says the search for a new president will begin in late July.

Updated 5:05pm

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The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine tells the story of the controversy surrounding a bottle of wine  thought to be owned by Thomas Jefferson.
PUBLICITY PHOTO

In September 2007, an article in the New Yorker ["The Jefferson Bottles," by Patrick Radden Keefe] rocked the wine world.

It told the story of the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction, a 1787 Château Lafite supposedly found in a cellar wall in Paris that was believed to have been the property of Thomas Jefferson. As the article explains, Jefferson, a certified wine nut (spending the equivalent of $120,000 on wine during his presidency), was America’s Minister to France, and when he returned to America he continued to order French wine for himself and George Washington, requesting in one letter that the shipments be marked with their initials. The bottle in question had been engraved with the initials “Th.J.”

In December 1985, at Christie’s in London, Christopher Forbes, the son of Malcolm, paid $157,000 for the bottle. Following the hoopla, another tycoon, one Bill Koch, would spend $500,000 on four bottles of the discovered wine.

In 2005, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts presented an exhibition of Koch’s many collections, and so Koch asked the folks at Monticello to help find him out exactly where in France the wines came from.

After preparing a report, the article says, Monticello’s curator, Susan Stein, contacted Koch and told him, “We don’t believe those bottles ever belonged to Thomas Jefferson.”

However, Monticello’s researchers may have (more)

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Ummmm, pie.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Coconut cream. French apple. Peanut butter. Chocolate chess. To leaf through Mrs. Rowe’s Little Book of Southern Pies is to salivate. Sating such desires used to require a 30-minute or so jaunt over to Staunton to Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant and Bakery. The new book by Mollie Cox Bryan lets those so inclined create Mrs. Rowe’s confections at home.

Released June 1, the Little Book of Southern Pies has already made a New York Times list of cookbooks to watch, and on June 8, was reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

Bookworks in Staunton is holding a special event for the release of the book on Saturday, June 27 11am to 1 pm. 101 West Beverley Street , Staunton, Va. 540-887-0007.

Mrs. Rowe’s restaurants make about 60 pies a day, says Waynesboro resident Bryan, who wrote Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook in 2006. In the new book, published by Ten Speed Press, she assembles more than 50 pie recipes from the Pie Lady, the late Mildred Rowe. Detailed directions make pie-making look easy.

But for some of us, the crust is the most intimidating part of the pie process. “If crust is what’s stopping you from making pie,” advises Bryan, “use a frozen one.”

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Fran Cannon Slayton
PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

For a suburban-raised girl, Fran Cannon Slayton knows a lot about the romance of the railroads. She knows the difference between the sound of a steam engine and a diesel engine whistle. And she knows how the economics of a new technology killed a town like Rowlesburg, West Virginia, where her father grew up and where her grandfather was foreman for B&O in the 1940s.

Slayton never met her grandfather, but she heard all about him from the stories her father told her, stories that she channeled into a novel for young adults, When the Whistle Blows, that not only got published, but has garnered glowing reviews.

“An unassuming masterpiece,” says Kirkus. “Nostalgia done right,” according to the School Library Journal.

A former Charlottesville prosecutor, Slayton didn’t really set out to be a writer, even though a nagging idea for a book hit her about the time she started law school. “I didn’t want to admit I possibly wanted to be a novelist,” she says. “It’s like saying I wanted to be a super hero… so farfetched.” (more)

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Author Heather Hummel.
PHOTO BY DOUG ELLIS

Local author Heather Hummel just won first honorable mention at the New York Book Festival in the Romance Category for her book Though Hazel Eyes, a story about an English teacher working with troubled students, dealing with a painful past, and discovering a new romance with an “intriguing” man.

“I submitted Through Hazel Eyes to the New York Book Festival on a whim,” says Hummel, emailing from the event in New York, ” and was both surprised and honored to receive the Honorable Mention.”

Hummel characterizes her book as a “suspense romance novel” and says the classroom scenes were inspired from having taught high school English at CATEC on Rio Road.

“I also wanted to show the other side of a teacher’s life outside the classroom,” she says. ” The funny thing is that people often ask if it was autobiographical, and as life has it, many of the events in the book actually took place three or four years after I wrote it.”

Hummel reports that her agent is already shopping around her second novel, The Universe is My Sugar Daddy, to publishers. But she has other literary plans as well.

“My ultimate goal is to own and operate a writer’s retreat,” she says, “…probably in or around Charlottesville.”

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