Staunton, VA boyhood home of Bill VandeWater and gourmet goat dinners

• Although Bill was born in Newton, Iowa, he moved to Staunton, VA when he was 10. He therefore considers himself a Virginia gentleman, a loyal member of the ACC conference, and still likes to go around saying annoying things like "save your Dixie cups, the South shall rise again."
• So, it was with great anticipation that on our way to visit Colonial Williamsburg at the beginning of Oct. 2010, we planned to spend the night in his old home town. We arrived around 6 p.m., checked into a "been there since he was a kid" Howard Johnson's (are there still HoJo's?) and took off to see his old house, church, and Staunton's community park before it got dark.
• I have the feeling that Staunton has been a town of between 20-25,000 all its life (about 1757), but I'm probably wrong on that. But a nice, small town with some interesting buildings. Bill's father worked as an engineer/director at American Safety Razor while they lived there. There's an extremely interesting article about Staunton in Wikipedia. It seems that it was much more than just the place where Nina Wilson went during the summer following her senior year of high school to visit a friend and in the process met Bill VandeWater, a friend of her friend's boyfriend. Imagine that!
• It was home to a resort-style lunatic asylum which later became a regular asylum which later became a men's correctional facility which is now being turned into condos. Oooooow, no thanks. Bad karma. It was the first city to practice a city manager form of government. Home to President Woodrow Wilson. Home to Staunton Military Academy; home to an expensive girls' college called Mary Baldwin; and some 200 buildings designed by architect Thomas Jasper Collins (1844-1925) whose firm is still in business today. Not to mention all that important Civil War stuff. It even has an Amtrak station which is more than I can say for Nashville!

• It didn't take Bill long to find the old house on Oriole St. It looked exactly like it had some 45 yrs. ago with the exception of some new concrete/stone to build a retaining wall, replacing the former railroad ties. Oh yes, and the "End the War" homemade/hand-lettered sign in the front yard.
• Next, we headed to the 215-acre Gypsy Hill Park where Bill played little league baseball and went swimming and had lots of boy/teenage adventures. If you don't have a park like this (golf course, swimming pool, ball fields, tennis courts, basketball, bike path, dog walking, picnic tables, etc.) in your home town, you have missed out and should start whining to your city council. Bill had a sparkle in his eyes when he talked about the fun he had there. If I've heard the story about how their senior class took a lighthouse from the senior prom decor and put it out on the little island in the middle of Gypsy Hill lake, I've heard it a dozen times. One of those glory-days memories that never gets old like we do.
• We then headed to the Main Drag where we had been told there would be restaurants and were told by a man exiting one that we should eat there, it had been "really good." So, relying on the kindness of strangers, we did. It turned out that it was one of these new-fangled restaurants that deal in green grocer food or in regular English, food from local growers. So, Bill had a local goat and I had local (I'm guessing not) tilefish. Both our dishes had lots of gourmet roots and veggies that as a child you would definitely have foregone dessert not to have had to eat them. And I like veggies! I don't recall seeing salads on the menu nor was bread served, making it a rather expensive, strange little meal. The tilefish was very salty. I don't know if it comes this way or the cook was a little wayward with his seasoning that night. Anyway, we didn't stand on the sidewalk afterward and encourage people to go in for a delicious repast.