Emily Paine Carter

Recent columns

• Recording holds clues from 6 decades ago
• Rubbed shoulders with any big names?
• Roanoke Valley contains many big hearts
• Column archive

Thanks to all you readers who kindly shared your Brushes-with-Greatness/Fame. We recognize that you -- as proper, genteel Virginians -- are not name-droppers, but gracious folks "pressed" (bad journalistic pun) to help fill this column.

Make that "columns," plural! Yes, y'all have indeed been out yonder, gathering anecdotes like so many squirrels with acorn-stuffed cheeks, bringing choice morsels back home. Your tales remind me that the front porches of the South are rightfully famous locales for swapping stories.

This week, we'll deal primarily with political figures:

• About 1958 Pat Hutchinson literally bumped into a famous figure -- or vice versa -- while touring the White House with her New Jersey high school classmates.

As Secret Service agents were moving visitors along, closer to the wall, one guard inadvertently pushed then-Vice President Richard Nixon into her. She speculated that the guards may have been edgy since Nixon's preceding, unpleasant (i.e., targeted with rocks) South American tour.

• Doug Sutton's fellow Andrew Lewis High School Class of 1967 ("the best") mates thought he was so clever to have invited President Lyndon Johnson to our graduation ceremonies.

Doug even received a formal note of regret that LBJ had other commitments -- goodness knows what -- and would be unable to attend.

• My [Salem Presbyterian] church youth group leader Elaine Durham -- whose father-in-law had served in Congress with Barry Goldwater -- introduced me to Sen. Goldwater after he delivered a speech at Virginia Tech.

• A few years and much politics later I recognized then-on-the-lam, 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman at Harvard Square. Pointing at him, I reacted like a graceless elementary school kid spying a teacher at the grocery store and wondering why she's here, away from her habitat: "Hey! Is it you?" I called across the downtown Cambridge street. Abbie grinned, nodded, winked and walked on.

• Rob Miles met Sen. John Warner during Desert Storm, when Warner visited Rob's military base in Saudi Arabia. Or was that Kuwait or Iraq, Rob mused? Anyway, the locale was somewhere sandy and hot.

And, speaking of hot places, Rob said he used to have a credit card with a "famous" number as its security code: 666, the Book of Revelation's supposed "mark of the beast." ("Supposed," because Rob explained that 666 apparently was a typo, or whatever one would call a scribe's goof back in pre-keyboard times.)

"I got a number of comments about it," he chuckled. "Once as I was trying to place a telephone order, the operator didn't believe me. She apparently thought I was kidding, trying to be ironic with the humanist organization."

• And, contrasting with our deepening political muck, is this shining nugget, then-Lt. Gov. Don Beyer's 1991 letter to my skeptical son. Beyer -- whom I had met briefly at a party in Salem -- wrote of having discovered a wealth of "positive role models" while in office -- of all places.

He reflected on politics attracting "true believers" from both parties: "people who believe the system works. ... There will always be people with the wrong motivations, and others whom the system has defeated. But, as a famous philosopher from New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen, has argued, the real challenge of adulthood is to maintain your idealism after you have lost your innocence."

Now, that's the stuff of greatness.