"It’s a steamy Friday afternoon in July, and the gates are opening on one of Southside Virginia’s biggest summertime bashes, the Cantaloupe Festival, near South Boston. Cars park on the grass outside of the Halifax County Fairgrounds, just 10 miles from the North Carolina border. The entrance road to the fairgrounds is decorated like a landing strip, with more than 100 white signs lining the road, each one emblazoned with the word “Goode.”

It’s a good time to be the incumbent, alright, as several people hand out fans, buttons, stickers and cups supporting Republican U.S. Congressman Virgil Goode at the front gate. Nobody seems confused by the full-court press of Goode love, nor wonders if perhaps they’ve stumbled upon a political revival rather than a party celebrating melon and Miller Lite.

That’s because, as the popular buttons read, this is “Virgil Goode Country,” and, in these parts, almost everybody knows “Virgil.”

But there is at least one nonbeliever at the festival. Al Weed, the Democratic challenger for Goode’s spot in the U.S. House of Representatives, makes an early appearance to talk to a few folks and sample the fresh melon. Though several people politely chat with Weed, who wears a big-lettered hat that reads “Vietnam Veteran,” and a small “Al Weed for Congress” sticker, the 62-year-old challenger doesn’t attract much attention.

At around 6 pm, the Cantaloupe Festival really starts to heat up, with hundreds of people arriving to sample the food and beer included in the $25 admission price. Weed has already left the party, heading down Highway 58 to attend a spaghetti dinner in Martinsville, 60 miles away.

While the grounds get more crowded, two clusters of partygoers form around a stand serving scoops of vanilla ice cream in half-cantaloupes—the challenge being to finish the sweet combination before the sweltering sun melts all the ice cream—and the keg booth, where beer drinkers can ask tap tenders to fill one of the blue Virgil Goode cups stacked on the table.

A few feet from a table of cantaloupe pieces stands a slender middle-aged man smiling between bites of sweet corn. Wearing a Goode sticker on a shirt remarkably free of sweat, the Congressman seems to be savoring the atmosphere.

Also enjoying the food is Virginia Lewis, 56, of Danville, who is seated at the picnic table where Weed had earlier chatted her up. Asked if Weed won her over during the discussion, she says it’s a good thing he left a campaign brochure with her when he left, because “I never realized that he was up for election.”

Lewis, herself an Army veteran, is impressed with Weed’s military record. She says another plus for Weed is his stated concern for Southside jobs. Unemployment is a sky-high 12.3 percent in Danville, and Lewis worries about her daughter’s job at the Dan River Inc. textile plant, which laid-off 300 people last month.

“I will vote for him,” Lewis says of Weed. However, she says that the nice man she just met might not make it to Washington, D.C. unless he starts advertising on television.

“I sure didn’t know who he was,” Lewis says.

Virgil has his mountain

Does Al Weed stand a chance? Ask anyone who knows anything about Virginia politics, and the near-universal answer is a variation on the assessment of Clyde Purdue, a Franklin County attorney whose offices adjoin Goode’s law offices in Rocky Mount. “Mista Weed’s chances,” Purdue says in a slow Vuh-ginia drawl, “are less than slim.”

There’s good reason to believe Goode—a former Democrat who became a Republican in 2002—has a lock on the Fifth District. His family name is widely known in the Southside, and at a time when many Americans can’t identify their elected officials, everyone in the Southside, it seems, knows Virgil.

But despite Goode’s clout, the race for the Fifth District presents an important question, one with a certain national significance. Can Weed—a Democrat, Yale grad and Vietnam vet—convince rural voters to oust a charming Republican who seems to share their personal beliefs?

Howard Dean’s political action committee, Democracy for America, likes Weed’s chances, and has selected him as one of its priority campaigns. Weed, a winemaker who lives in Lovingston, which is about 35 miles south of Charlottesville on U.S. 29, has considerable support among local progressives.

“There’s an outside chance that the Democrats could take Virginia at the presidential level,” says Bill Wood, director of UVA’s Sorensen Institute for Politics. “That could help Weed, but we’re talking long shots here.

“The Fifth is one of the most conservative districts in Virginia,” says Wood. “Virgil and his father are so well regarded, and Charlottesville is so out of step with the rest of the district.”

At first glance, the contrasting viewpoints alive in Virginia’s Fifth District seem irreconcilable. For starters, the Fifth, which is roughly the size of New Jersey, stretches 140 miles from the northern tip of Greene County to the North Carolina border and is about 150 miles wide at its southern base.

John Fisher, a columnist for the Danville Register Bee, says many Southsiders think of “those people up in Charlottesville” as “effete intellectual snobs, who won’t build a bypass.” When Charlottesville talks about the Southside—which is almost never—it’s usually as a boondocks.

“The fallacy of this district is that it represents people that have nothing in common with each other,” Fisher says. “What do I have in common with someone that lives 120 miles away?”

Unemployment levels are the most obvious difference. Martinsville, on the southwest edge of the Fifth, suffers the Commonwealth’s highest unemployment rate of 16.1 percent. Henry County and Danville are right behind Martinsville on the list, with most of the Southside experiencing at least twice the statewide unemployment level of 3.8 percent. Many Southside jobseekers were formerly employed by textile mills or in other manufacturing jobs that were sacked for cheaper labor outside the United States.

In Charlottesville, however, the unemployment rate is 3 percent, and the city’s largest employer, UVA, isn’t dashing off to Mexico anytime soon.

Yet Southsiders bristle when Upstaters stereotype them as out-of-work bumpkins. Besides, Charlottesville and the Southside have a few things in common—the presence of poverty, for one, and the soaring municipal costs associated with too many poor people. About 25 percent of Charlottesville residents live under the poverty line, more than double the poverty rate in Virginia. Many other communities in the Fifth District also have higher-than-average poverty rates, including Halifax, Henry and Mecklenburg counties.

Despite the shared problems, the political gap will be difficult to bridge. In 2002, then-Charlottesville City Councilor Meredith Richards challenged Goode; she won Charlottesville by a two-to-one margin, but she lost the election as Goode took home a whopping 63 percent of the votes in the Fifth District overall. In Franklin and Pittsylvania counties, Goode took nearly 75 percent of the vote.

“People see Virgil as their friend,” says Weed. “It’s hard to convince people to fire their friend.”

It’s a tough sell, but Weed has some enticing pitches. He likens Goode to a member of Bush’s “bank robbers,” raking in corporate contributions while ignoring the growing number of people lacking health care, a decent wage or any job at all.

Weed says he has a plan to help struggling Southsiders, and to sell it to them he’s racking up at least 1,000 miles a week, traveling in a volunteer’s Toyota Prius to the Southside’s summer festivals and Democratic shindigs. On many trips, he exits Interstate 81 near Roanoke, and drives south on Highway 220.

Just beyond the strip malls of suburban Roanoke, 220 rolls past kudzu-covered hillsides and myriad churches. The road is named the “Virgil H. Goode Highway,” after the Congressman’s father, a former Commonwealth’s Attorney in Franklin County; it passes the Virgil Goode Building in Rocky Mount, also named for Virgil the elder, where the front hall is decorated with a framed poem, which begins with this stanza:

VIRGIL HAD HIS MOUNTAIN
AND HE FAITHFULLY CLIMBED IT
HE HAD A LOVE FOR EVERYONE
AND HE ALWAYS SHOWED IT

“Well,” says Weed, “if I had $10 for everyone who says Virgil can’t be beat, I’d have enough money to beat him.”

Not much going on here

“As you can see, there’s not much going on here,” says a teenage waitress at Pino’s Pizza in downtown Lawrenceville. “What you see is what you get.”

The big moneymakers in Lawrenceville and surrounding Brunswick County, which are both mostly African-American, are two large prisons and a landfill that imports out-of-state trash. The county has two different youth sports leagues—one for whites and one for blacks—not by law, but by tradition.

In the basement of the Brunswick County office building, Al Weed and his 25-year-old “field director” Trevor Cox have set up about 30 folding chairs and a spread of fried chicken, meatballs and melon squares. It’s supposed to be a party to watch the third night of the Democratic National Convention; as Weed begins his stump speech, some of the black audience members cast sidelong glances at the television, catching a muted, fuzzy Al Sharpton wagging his finger.

Weed is wearing a blue shirt, sleeves rolled up, a navy blue tie with green and white stripes, khaki pants and loafers. There’s a cell phone in a holster clipped to his belt. The banner behind him reads “Soldier Farmer Statesman.”

“Virgil Goode is not a player in the Republican Party,” says Weed. “He’s like the kid who hangs out with bank robbers. They let him drive the car.”

He’s trying to explain how Goode, however harmless he may appear, has aided and abetted the Bush Administration’s heist—tax cuts for the rich, dismantled environmental safeguards, slashed budgets for schools and social services. “If y’all aren’t voting,” Weed says, “If y’all aren’t out there kicking butt, they’re going to dump it on you.”

The line gets a few approving murmurs, but the party’s no barnburner. It’s just another stop on the campaign slog for the would-be Congressman, the frustrating life of an unknown longshot.

Weed, however, knew what he was in for. After Vietnam and Yale, he worked with the World Bank and an international investment company before moving his family to Nelson County in 1973, with dreams of owning a farm and running for office.

“I wanted to build a place where I had roots,” says Weed, who grew up fathered by a hard-drinking ex-Marine in a New York City housing project for GIs. “I thought if I could win office, I would get some visibility and get appointed to a position where I could really make a difference.”

Weed’s had some tough opponents, though. In 1975 he lost a bid for Nelson’s Board of Supervisors. In 1995 he lost a State Senate primary to Emily Couric; when she died in 2000, her supporters tapped Creigh Deeds to run for her seat.

“I learned that the process doesn’t matter in politics as much as political junkies think it should,” says Weed. “People don’t pay attention to politics. They have lives. You say you’re running for Congress, and people just look at you blank.”

He’s getting a few of those looks tonight. “I kept thinking about how tired he looks,” Lillie Fournier says after the speech. The retired New York City police officer says she didn’t know anything about Weed, but attended the meeting to get out of the house. “He gave me the impression of the man you talk to over the fence,” Fournier says.

Weed figures he can win Brunswick, a Democratic stronghold, and he’s pleading for a high voter turnout to help compensate for the advantage Goode enjoys in other counties. Recent Brunswick transplant Anne Williams says black voters there feel energized by the Board of Supervisors elections last November. Voters elected three new black supervisors, giving African-Americans a 4-to-1 presence on the board.

“It’s the first time in history,” Williams says at the party, after Weed has finished his stump speech. “It gives people hope for change. They don’t want to vote for the good ol’ boys, the same old, same old.”

Weed’s only chance, it seems, is to rouse that spirit for change in Virgil’s backyard.

Anne Price, a Lawrenceville resident and retired teacher, says skepticism about Goode runs high in Brunswick County, which Richards actually carried in 2002. In other counties, Goode can deflect criticism with down-home politics—as Price says, Goode “knows how to wang his twang.”

Al Weed’s done his homework. He knows the issues in the Southside—jobs, tobacco, education—and he’s touting some good ideas. Weed supports the construction of a new research university to provide stable jobs, and more education spending to lure urban expatriate families searching for affordable homes, small town life and good schools.

Goode’s popularity in Southside Virginia, however, stems mostly from the twin pillars of the region’s beleaguered economy: tobacco’s decline and the outsourcing of textile and manufacturing jobs to Mexico and Asia. Goode is a wizard at tapping into resentment over both catastrophes.

Foreign competition is “where you’ll see Virgil Goode come in with guns smoking,” says Danville scribe Fisher. During the last weeks of the 2002 campaign against Richards, Goode ran TV ads in Danville featuring Goode standing beside a shuttered factory, shaking his fist at the sky and decrying the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Goode has proposed amending the U.S. Constitution to make English the country’s official language, and to eliminate the clause that grants citizenship to any child born in the United States.

Tapping into fear and hatred of Mexico has proved successful for Goode. Fisher, who is an independent and says he’s received Christmas cards from both the Democratic and the Republican Goode, says the anti-NAFTA TV ads were the final nail in the coffin for Richards’ campaign.

Goode has also been an outspoken proponent of a buyout for tobacco farmers, an extremely popular cause along Highway 58, which used to be called Tobacco Road.

“I think he represents the people, and he doesn’t mind stepping up for them,” says James T. Rickman III, while sipping a beer at the Cantaloupe Festival.

Rickman, who grew up on a Halifax County tobacco farm, cites a recent example in which Goode did indeed stand up to the big chief himself, President George W. Bush. This May, Bush announced his opposition to the tobacco buyout during a campaign swing. Goode fired back loudly, landing a prominent quote in The Washington Post in which he said: “I’ve heard from any number of good Republicans who said they’ll either stay home or vote Democrat in the fall if the White House doesn’t change its position.”

People also believe Goode has a grip on Capitol Hill’s purse strings. Can the Fifth District afford to lose Goode and his seat on the all-important House Appropriations Committee?

When federal funds come to the Southside, “people think he’s ridden in on this white steed and he’s given us this money,” says Rev. Cecil Bridgeforth of Shiloh Baptist Church in Danville.

Battling the legend

Franklin County resident Joe Stanley runs The Goode Report, a website that scrutinizes Goode’s efforts in Washington, D.C. The website takes Goode to task for alleged broken promises, his personal wealth (it’s between $1.2 million and $3.3 million, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch) and his campaign contributors, claiming, “Goode has opened his door to greedy corporate donors and well-heeled lobbyists.”

Stanley has strong words for Goode’s rants against NAFTA and illegal immigrants. “He’s fallen victim to the most hateful legislation,” says Stanley, drawing uncomfortable glances from patrons of the Dairy Queen near Rocky Mount. But even Stanley has a soft spot for Virgil.

“He knows me as Joey,” Stanley says, mentioning that Goode attended theatrical performances in which Stanley performed at the local Ferrum College. He and Goode both collect political buttons, and have even traded wares in the past.

“I don’t think Virgil is a bad person. I sort of feel sorry for him… He’s trying to keep his job,” Stanley says.

Trying to shed light on Goode’s personal popularity around Franklin County, Stanley says: “Ask people what Virgil’s actually done for them, and the first thing they say is, ‘Well, his daddy was a great man.’”

Virgil H. Goode, Sr. was a Commonwealth’s Attorney in Franklin County for decades, and a formidable politician.

The Sorensen Institute’s Bill Wood says he has a tape of the elder Goode giving an address at the Hampton Coliseum. “It’s one of the most incredible speeches I’ve ever heard,” says Wood.

Goode, Jr. ran for the House of Delegates in 1973, when he was a 27-year-old fresh out of UVA law school. His father took him across the Southside, introducing him to all the right people. When Goode moved into his office in Richmond, legend has it that the State had purchased new furniture, and Goode moved it out into the hallway as a common-man gesture of contempt for finery.

It’s all part of what people call “the Goode mystique.” It includes his law office in Rocky Mount, which looks like it might blow over in a stiff breeze. There’s the story about how Goode works from a desk made out of a tree stump, or how he buys each tire for his car at a different Southside dealership, or how he gives away pencils at church pancake breakfasts.

“It’s all part of what he does to create a myth around himself, the eccentric everyman,” says Laura Bland, who worked as a reporter for the Danville Register Bee for 13 years and is currently spokesperson for the State Democratic Party. “Every year someone from The Washington Post would come down to do a story about Virgil,” Bland says. “So he gives away pencils…big deal.”

Meredith Richards knows well how loyal the Southside is to Virgil, and how good he is at retaining that support.

“I remember someone saying he’d love to support me, but it sure would be hard to look Virgil in the face when he came over with the Christmas ham,” says Richards.

Despite the myth, there’s plenty of partisan bitterness over Goode’s switch from Democrat to Republican in 2002, after two years of working as an independent. The Southside has long been a stronghold for conservative Democrats, Strom Thurmond-type throwbacks with Republican leanings who nevertheless resent Goode’s leap to the GOP.

“People haven’t forgotten that. They won’t forget it,” says Page A. Matherly, a Franklin County supervisor who oversees Goode’s home district from an office in the Virgil H. Goode building. Matherly says he stopped backing Goode after the Congressman supported a right-to-work bill.

“I can’t support him, but I can’t say anything against him. I’d get assassinated,” says Matherly. “People think he’s Jesus Christ.”

The home stretch
Virgil Goode has eight times more campaign cash than does Al Weed, reporting $586,000 in late June while Weed had $70,000. And as columnist Fisher says, Southside Republicans are “well-financed, organized and motivated.”

In contrast, Fisher says, “I don’t see the Democrats here as a well-organized, cohesive unit. They have a track record of not producing.” And Weed can’t count on help from State Democrats, who seem to be pouring everything they have into John Kerry’s campaign. Money for Weed, says Dem spokesperson Bland, is “an issue that remains to be seen. We don’t just give away the store.”

Yet many Southside observers think this election poses some new twists.

Rev. Bridgeforth has been signing up voters as president of the Danville Voters League for a decade. Sitting in a pew in his small church, about a mile up Industrial Avenue from the Goodyear Tire plant, Bridgeforth says voters are angry about the war in Iraq and about a local economy that’s gone from bad to worse.

“There’s an unrest against government, period,” Bridgeforth says. If Weed can tap into the class rage boiling throughout the Southside, he could improve his chances against Goode.

Josh Guill, a 69-year-old Halifax resident who attended a Weed rally sporting a “Veterans for Kerry” button, says he used to vote Republican, and has voted for Goode, but he believes conservatives have abandoned the middle class.

“This county has been run for so many years by such a few people, and the majority have been shortchanged,” says Guill, citing the Halifax Board of Supervisors’ decision to help build a speedway instead of putting the money into more reliable economic development. “When you lose the middle class, you’ve lost most of the power in this country,” says Guill.

But without a massive grassroots effort and extensive TV advertising, many voters will have the same “who’s that?” reaction to Weed’s name on the ballot as they did to Charlottesville reporters’ questions about him.

In the 11 weeks until the Tuesday, November 2, election, Weed will continue to make tracks all around the Southside, shaking hands and kissing babies, sweating it out at the Southside’s summer festivals. Rev. Bridgeforth and other volunteers will be out there with him, chipping away at the Goode mystique.

“An upset’s gotta come sometime,” Bridgeforth says.

Hard times in Martinsville: Goode to the rescue

Job creation, and preservation, is a huge issue in the economically depressed Southside. Hardest hit in recent years has been the Martinsville area, where, since 1999, more than 9,000 workers have lost their jobs due to layoffs and plant closings, according to the Virginia Employment Commission. Major layoffs include:

• 1,000 by DuPont in 1999

• 800 by Pluma, a textile company, in 1999

• 1,000 by Tultex, a textile company, in 1999

• 1,000 by Basset Furniture, Hooker Furniture and American Furniture between 2000 and 2002

• 3,000 by V.F. Imagewear in 2002

• 350 by Active Wear in 2003 and 2004

Martinsville, a city of 15,000, has an unemployment rate of 16 percent, the highest rate in Virginia. Surrounding Henry County follows closely with an unemployment rate of 14 percent.

But rare good news came to the hard luck town last November, when both a textile company and defense contractor MZM announced that they would bring in a combined 300 new jobs. Rep. Virgil Goode was instrumental in arranging MZM’s plan to move to a vacated building in Martinsville, says Kim Adkins, president of the Martinsville-Henry County Chamber of Commerce.

“He’s been very engaged,” Adkins says of Goode’s work to “secure more money for this region.” She cites Goode’s help in landing Department of Labor grants and money for local Patrick Henry Community College.

Goode’s leverage with MZM, however, is mutual. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, MZM, a Washington, D.C.-based defense and intelligence firm, is Goode’s biggest campaign contributor, kicking in $48,551 during this election cycle.

In an interview with the Martinsville Bulletin, Goode said campaign funds weren’t involved in his efforts to bring MZM to Martinsville, claiming that he received the money before he knew the firm was interested in the move.

Farmer Soldier Statesman: Al Weed serves up his military history on the campaign trail

Like John Kerry, Al Weed is making the war in Iraq and his military service during the Vietnam War a major focus of his campaign.

“Look who’s fighting that war,” Weed said in a recent stump speech, referring to Iraq. “It’s not the children of the wealthy. It’s the children of ours.”

Few could pull off this argument with more authority than Weed. As a Green Beret who rose to Command Sergeant Major, the highest enlisted rank in the Army, Weed claims he’d be one of only 25 combat vets in Congress. And Weed’s son actually may go to Iraq as an Army surgeon, with a deployment looming before the end of the year.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever fought a war and cut taxes,” Weed says.

Weed went to Yale in 1960 on an ROTC scholarship, and later served as a medical sergeant in the Army’s Special Forces in Vietnam, finishing his year-long tour in July 1966. He stayed in the Army for 42 years, finally retiring in 2002.

Asked by Dan Smith of the Blue Ridge Business Journal why he stuck with the Army for so long, Weed said he likes to jump out of airplanes.

Rock out for Weed: Benefit concert promoter hopes voters get hip to Al

John Kerry has the Dave Matthews Band jamming across the Rust Belt to help drum up support for his campaign. Al Weed’s got local hip hoppers extraordinaire The Beetnix.

On Saturday, August 28, The Beetnix will play with Man Mountain Jr., Small Town Workers and the Songlines in a “voter awareness raiser” at the Satellite Ballroom, says Kris Keesling, the event’s organizer.

Keesling, 27, says she came up with the idea for a Weed bash after attending a local John Kerry event that “was like wall to wall white people.” Keesling hopes the event at the Ballroom (located underneath Michael’s Bistro in what was formerly known as the Plan 9 Outer Space) will bring a more diverse crowd who will leave with more motivation to vote for Weed.

The event will be sponsored by the Weed campaign, with the $7 ticket price going to recoup expenses. Though Weed will speak, Keesling says concertgoers need not fret about having to endure longwinded speechifying during the show.

“Mostly it’s going to be focused on the bands,” Keesling says, adding that she plans to “let the music speak for itself.” (John Borgmeyer and Paul Fain, C-Ville Weekly, August 17, 2004)