For an editor, attached files from writers are like holiday gifts. Some are exactly what you asked for, a few need to be returned and others are things you never knew you wanted.
Dave McCormack’s work — that gift with the crinkled wrapping paper and bad tape job — always was the latter.
Dave had the guts to peek into D’Angelo’s front door window after his many calls went unanswered and he saw footprints in the pollen on D’Angelo’s porch.
He wore sunglasses with the mother-son duo who made all the deviled eggs at Sally Bell’s because he was told the color of the yolks starts burning your eyes.
He wrote an ode to the French fry that compared fries around town to former girlfriends.
He angered a local restaurateur when he gave his account of being a judge for a reality TV food competition.
“When you see skeptical faces after you pitch an idea to a crowd, you know you’re onto ‘something really big.’ ”
Dave always seemed to know what was next and could searingly describe places and people, portraying one subject as “a laid-back guy with a head of hair that looks like it was styled by field mice.” You could say the same about Dave’s eyebrows. We were so lucky to have him as a columnist and writer for almost 10 years.
In our June issue, another talented writer, former Richmond magazine senior editor Kate Andrews, profiles Dave and his leap of faith — his purchase of a huge, decrepit warehouse in Petersburg in 2003 and his journey into development. As Dave said in his TedxRVA talk in 2017, when you see skeptical faces after you pitch an idea to a crowd, you know you’re onto “something really big.”
It’s in that spirit that I’m writing, of my own volition, my last letter as this magazine’s editorial director. This space will become that of longtime co-worker Jessica Ronky Haddad as I move into the role of associate publisher, solely working with our marketing team, our custom publication team and nonprofit partners.
Storytelling always will be part of me, and it’s been a privilege to have shared this space with you — to share our staff’s work, to share when we’ve fallen short, to question plans and to celebrate the region’s successes, too.
I’m happy to be writing this last letter just before the Boulevard will be renamed Arthur Ashe Boulevard on June 22. I want to think that our December 2018 issue devoted to Ashe had a little something to do with pushing that forward, but even if it didn’t, the stories finally shared there are what live on.
