Photos of mine, printed ABOVE the fold…
August 28, 2006, 7:51 AM
How often can you say that your photos end up on the front page of the local newspaper? And above the fold, no less. If you look at the August 28, 2006 edition of The News Virginian, you will see two photos anchoring an article about the Skyline Parkway Motel, which, you may recall, had been abandoned for some time, and then was torched in 2004. Both of them are tagged with “Photo courtesy of BEN SCHUMIN”. Here are the photos that the newspaper ran:
The “before” photo was to the left of the text, and the “after” photo was to the right.
They also interviewed me for this article, and it discusses my love of Wikipedia, and my interest in vintage structures that inspired the original Afton Mountain photo set. That photo set, in fact, is mentioned in there as when I had previously photographed the complex.
That area has definitely changed since I photographed it. The “Howard Johnson’s” sign in front of the restaurant of the same name is now gone, leaving an empty sign in its place, the gas station is now branded as “WOCO”, and of course the Skyline Parkway Motel was torched.
One thing I said in the article is that I believed the proposed multi-million dollar renovation to that little cluster of buildings (which I first mentioned here, was not going to happen any time soon, considering that the Skyline Parkway Motel was supposed to have been demolished more than a year ago.
So yeah, I got to be the one to basically tell Phil Dulaney, the owner of all those different buildings up there, in the newspaper, that he was completely full of (you know what), though in a far nicer way than that. Hey, someone had to say it. Might as well be me.
So all in all, I’m just totally tickled about the whole thing.
Web site: "Landmark now a lesson in arson" in Monday's edition of The News Virginian
Song: Tom Lehrer singing My Home Town
Quote: Excerpt from the article, quoting me: "I highly doubt we will see anything happen anytime soon," he said. "Although I think it would be just the thing for the mountain, to have something nice there. Certainly that [the current site] is not something to say, 'Welcome to Augusta County' with."
Categories: Afton Mountain, Skyline Parkway Motel, Virginia local news, Wikipedia