Is there something in the nonprofit water that has directors of local cultural institutions dropping like cherry blossoms to pursue the ubiquitous “other opportunities”?

Long-time Second Street Gallery executive director Leah Stoddard becomes the latest to mysteriously disappear, turning in a resignation May 5— without the usual two weeks or more notice that typically accompanies cordial departures. By May 6, she was no longer listed on the gallery website.

“I have resigned,” Stoddard confirms from home May 7. As for the lack of notice, “I can’t really talk about it,” she says.

Stoddard joins the Paramount Theater’s former director Edward Rucker, who tendered his resignation May 2 “to pursue other opportunities” after a 10-month tenure and University of Virginia Art Museum director Jill Hartz, who was shown the door in December and then landed a job heading the University of Oregon’s much larger museum. (Not to mention cultural icon Mac McDonald.)

“She wanted to pursue other options and spend more time with her family,” offers acting director/membership and outreach coordinator Catherine Barber, who notes that (more)

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Less than a year ago, after a national search that produced 71 candidates, the Paramount Theater heralded new executive director Edward I. Rucker (pictured left with CNET founder Halsey Minor at the groundbreaking of the Landmark Hotel in March), a Charlottesville resident, as a man of “vision, enthusiasm, and experience.” The best person for the job, Paramount chair Gary Taylor said at a July 19, 2007 press conference introducing Rucker, was “right here.”

Well, Rucker’s not there anymore. He resigned May 2, Taylor confirms, less than 10 months after his arrival. His departure, after two weeks’ notice, creates a powerful sense of deja vu. Less than two years ago, in September 2006, the Paramount’s original executive director, Chad Hershner, who oversaw the 1931 theater’s nearly $16 million renovation and 2004 reopening, also suddenly resigned. Hershner, who resurfaced as vice president of advancement at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, did not immediately return the Hook’s call.

Like Hershner’s, Rucker’s resignation “was definitely unexpected,” (more)

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Forty-one years after she made American legal history by winning her Supreme Court case against the Commonwealth of Virginia and ending the Commonwealth’s ban on interracial marriage, Mildred Loving passed away Friday at her home in Caroline County. She was 68 years old.

As the Hook relates in this week’s cover story on the statewide legal crackdown on lust and love, Loving just wanted love. An African-American woman born Mildred Jeter, in 1958 she wanted to marry her lifelong friend Richard Perry Loving, who happened to be white. Because of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that banned interracial marriage, the two had to steal away to the District of Columbia to tie the knot. Weeks later, Caroline County police arrested the newlyweds on charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” a charge to which they agreed to plead guilty, understanding that they could avoid jail time if they moved out of the state.

With the help of the ACLU, the couple launched a legal challenge to the statute that prevented them from living in their hometown. Nine years later, a unanimous Supreme Court struck Virginia’s “anti-miscegenation” law from the books as well as those of 16 other states. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “There is (more)

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Jill Hartz, the ousted UVA University Art Museum director who was unceremoniously dumped in December from the job she’d held for 11 years, has been hired as executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

“It’s an opportunity to direct a museum at the next level,” says Hartz. “It’s a step up in terms of what the museum has to offer– 23,000 square feet versus 6,000.” The Schnitzer boasts a bigger budget and staff, as well as a café, museum shop, and dedicated meeting room.

The Oregon museum has broad Asian and contemporary collections. “In the Asian art area, in particular, they want to bring their collection into the present with contemporary acquisitions and exhibitions,” says Hartz. “They want someone to move the museum forward. This is perfect for me. I like the challenge of strengthening the program and building a national reputation.”

Hartz came to UVA in 1994 as a trail-along spouse when her husband, Richard Herskowitz, was named program director of the Virginia Film Festival. They moved from Ithaca, New York, (more)

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“It was wild,” says internationally renowned juggler Mark Nizer, who has wrapped his three performances in the strife- and famine-torn nation of Zimbabwe, where he was a featured performer in the Harare International Festival of the Arts, held in the capital city.

Nizer, who has been known to juggle whirling chainsaws and electric steak knives along with ping pong and bowling balls, has performed at New York’s Lincoln Center and at D.C.’s Kennedy Center. But little could prepare him for the country whose dictator, Robert Mugabe, unsatisfied with the March 29 election that just put him out of power, found a way, as Nizer was leaving, to get a runoff election.

“The people there are so gentle and sweet,” says Nizer. “I think that’s one of the reasons Mugabe and (more)

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Paul Summers still remembers the Valentine’s Day in 1954 when he met Jill Faulkner at Fort Bragg. He was a young infantry officer back from Korea, and she was a bridesmaid at a wedding. By June that year he’d asked her to marry him, and on August 21 they tied the knot.

“That was against the wishes of both sets of parents,” says Summers, and one of those parents was Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner. “They thought it would be doomed to failure.”

Fifty-three years of marriage later, Summers mourns the loss of his bride, who died April 21 at their White Hall home, Knole Farm, at age 74 following a severe stroke in November 2006.

The couple moved to Charlottesville when Paul attended law school. They had three children– Paul III, Cathy, and Bok– and moved to the country in the ’60s.

She was happiest when hunting, recalls her husband. At Farmington Hunt Club, Jill Summers was master of foxhounds, the longest-serving active female master in North America.

“Jill was anything but a feminist,” says Paul Summers. “She was appalled at the word. She was proud to be an attractive woman. She was a lady.” (more)

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The only child of William Faulkner, Jill Faulkner Summers, has died at the age of 74, 17 months after suffering a debilitating stroke. An avid fox hunter, Summers was, until the time of her illness, the Master of Foxhounds for the Farmington Hunt, a role she described in a 2005 story in the Hook. Married to a professional money manager, Paul Summers, Summers was the mother of three children, daughter Cathy as well as Bok and Paul Jr., who for many years operated the former Blue Ridge Brewing Company, Charlottesville’s first restaurant/brew pub, on West Main Street. The Daily Progress has an obituary.

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Four days after publicist to the stars and chicken farmer Tommy Lightfoot Garrett pled guilty to a reduced charge in Buckingham County Courthouse, some questions about his accomplishments remain. For instance, did he actually grace the cover of Senior Magazine, the Arizona edition, as at least one website claims?

Garrett’s other professional achievements are easier to document. There’s no doubt, for instance, that he appeared on the HGTV reality show Living With Ed– in fact, a rerun of the episode featuring Garrett aired just this morning, and clips of the show are available on YouTube. Several of Garrett’s self-published books are for sale on Amazon.com, including his most recent, Cosmic’s Adventure: A Science Fiction Novel, released in paperback on March 31. In a product description, taken from (more)

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After more than a year of courtroom delays, the forgery case against publicist-to-the-stars and chicken farmer Tommy Lightfoot Garrett came to an end on Friday, April 18 in Buckingham County Court with more of a whimper than a bang.

Garrett, who had been facing 15 felony counts of forging and uttering, pled guilty to just one reduced charge— entering the property of another with the intention of damaging it, a class-one misdemeanor. He was given a 12-month suspended jail sentence, two years unsupervised probation, and was ordered to pay his victim, David Kimbell, $3,500 restitution.

The plea deal, announced in court on Friday, kept court-watchers from hearing what promised to be riveting testimony detailing the allegations behind the charges— that over the course of at least 18 months in 2004 and 2005, Garrett (pictured left last year in February outside the Buckingham Courthouse) forged checks he’d stolen from Kimbell, whom he’d befriended several months before Kimbell’s grandmother died in November 2002.

Kimbell (pictured right in the blue shirt with funeral home owner Charles Colbert) says both he and Garrett attended St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Buckingham County and that early in the friendship he was impressed by Garrett’s Hollywood connections (among the 70 clients (more)

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Twenty-five years ago, newlywed Selden Tilman was devastated. He’d been married barely six months when he lost the white-gold ring his bride had given him.

“It was loose then,” recalls Tilman, who worked at Ken Johnson’s Cafeteria in the island at Barracks Road beside what is now Ben & Jerry’s. “I was washing stuff. When I got home, I realized it wasn’t on my finger. I cried.”

Tilman was crying again today, only this time tears of joy.

Janet Harper, center in photo, now general manager of Barracks Road Shopping Center, was a regular at the family-style cafeteria (which fed such notables as Jack and Anastasia Manahan), and Harper had gotten to know Tilman.

So when Ben & Jerry’s manager Doug Barrese, left, strolled into her office this morning with a bucket of rusty tableware— and a man’s wedding band— Harper thought she knew the rightful owner.

“It had left the building,” says Barrese, explaining that (more)

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Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson admits he was disappointed he didn’t get the nod for the U.S. Supreme Court when his name was bandied about as a nominee in 2005 and he was interviewed by President George Bush. “For a little while, I really felt very sorry for myself,” Wilkinson told the audience at the UVA Law School March 28, and in fact, he enjoyed a brief wallow in self pity.

Then one day, “I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Jay, you make a hell of a poor victim,’” said the federal judge on the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Wilkinson, a UVA law grad/prof and Charlottesville resident, gave the Henry J. Abraham Distinguished Lectureship on “A View from the Bench” as part of the 14th Virginia Festival of the Book.

Wilkinson, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, said abortion or any other single issue should not be a litmus test for a federal judge. “I honestly don’t think we’re a partisan group,” he observed, while noting the skepticism that came from the Bush v. Gore decision, in which conservative justices ruled for Bush. “We just rule case by case.”

He said he’s never witnessed a judge swapping a ruling on one case in exchange for a vote on another. “There’s none of that horse trading one would see in the political process,” he said.

Although he’s a well-respected jurist, Wilkinson said, “My kids though it very boring that I wasn’t a firefighter.”

He acknowledged that being a judge is a “monastic” life, exemplified by his uniform. “Maryland has red robes,” he said. “They’re beautiful. Those of us with black robes envy them.” (more)

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Charlotesville radio veteran Dick Mountjoy passed away this afternoon at age 61, after a two-year struggle with cancer.

“He died very peacefully, and he died knowing people cared for him,” says his longtime WINA co-host, Jane Foy.

For four decades, Mountjoy had been an institution on the central Virginia airwaves: first spinning Top 40 hits on local AM station WELK in June 1965 as a 19-year-old UVA first year. Soon he climbed the radio ranks to become the station’s programming director, and even became one of Charlottesville’s first television personalities, reading the news when NBC29 first began broadcasting. When WELK disappeared in the wave of new FM music stations, Mountjoy made the transition to morning talk on WINA-AM, where he remained until 2006.

That’s when he began to experience a sore throat that wouldn’t go away. After several alleged missed diagnoses, doctors eventually found a large (more)

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