Dear Wahooette Katie,
The announcement of your impending departure from CBS Evening News certainly has caused great anguish in Culpeper over the last two weeks. Already our local newspaper, the Culpeper Star-Exponent, has published two letters lamenting your leaving and postulating options for your future.
Allow me to suggest that it may be time to leave The Big Apple for the pleasures of living in small-townCulpeper, Va. I know you are familiar with the area; like I, you made many weekend trips home to what is now Nova, and U.S. 29 from Charlottesville ran right through the middle of town in those days.
I am pleased to report that things in this area really haven't changed a whole lot yet, and as Mr. Jeffersonopined in his "Notes on Virginia," Central Virginia is still a fine and pleasant place to live. While Fairfax and McLean have evaporated into the metroplex of Nova, Culpeper remains, as does Orange and Madison, towns with distinct character and quality of life.
Yes, we do have a goodly number of Virginia Tech Hokies in the area, but I have found them to be good, decent, honest and kind people — many are very close friends these days, and it has been easy to forgive them for the errors of their youthful decision-making that landed them in Blacksburg.
And, yes, we do have a small cadre of psuedo-intellectual elites who still pretend to know what's best for everyone else but themselves, but they are largely relegated to relatively isolated areas away from town and are easily ignored as they bicker among themselves to see who is more elite and more intellectual. Let not their presence influence your decision-making.
After all your years in NYC, it may be very difficult for you to consider leaving to retire or to continue your career in a small Virginia town. I know many of your journalistic colleagues from CBS and ABC have moved on to the Fox News Network — it's pretty obvious, even in Culpeper, that those decisions were ratings-driven — so I guess that option may be viable for you.
If so, I'd be pleased to write a letter of endorsement to Roger Ailes if you think it might help. You can contact me through the University of Virginia Alumni Association.
Sadly, even Culpeper will never be another Pine Valley, Pa., so if you run into Krystal, or Jackson, or Opal, or any of the Martins, please invite them to explore Virginia with you. (Please leave the village idiot Ryan Lavery there; as Pine Valley slides over the cliffs into the Atlantic Ocean, I know that Ryan and Greenlee will be left behind to rise heroically from the ashes to rebuild a brave new world.) We don't need them inCulpeper.
Gene Kidwell, Culpeper
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