Harry Kollatz Jr. at the Richmond magazine Parham Road office, 1996 (Photo courtesy Harry Kollatz Jr.)
In recent weeks, on several occasions well-meaning people have asked me, “How’re you enjoying retirement?”
This query came as news, as they say, to me.
Put another way; I joined Richmond magazine 30 years ago this month. The Flashback column premiered in August 1993. Put the two together, and you get 59 years.
Which is two less than my actual age. So, barring a sudden windfall, such as an eager streaming service’s purchase of the rights to my 2019 novel “Carlisle Montgomery,” I must continue with something approximating a professional life.
Otherwise, as for how I started out in these pages, the primary culprit can be named: Donnie “Dirt Woman” Corker.
One summer afternoon in 1990, when going through the checkout line of the Ukrop’s on West Grace Street, my attention was drawn to the cover of Richmond Surroundings magazine.
What captivated me wasn’t the declaration of the “Best & Worst” issue, nor the beaming newscaster Cheryl Miller, but a skybox headline, “The Outrageous Dirt Woman.” The sprawling feature by editor Frances Helms profiled Corker, one of the greatest disturbances to the city’s vaunted hidebound ways as a gay and cross-dressing icon.
Three black-and-white photos ran across the text columns, similar in layout to those old Playboy magazine interviews. Corker lived out, loud and proud. Not to prove anything, but because Corker knew no other way.
In this moment, after some years of wandering in the outskirts of journalism, I thought, “Perhaps this is the place for me.”
I came up through Virginia Commonwealth University after six years, a change of major and a genuine inability to get through self-guided bonehead algebra. My college career ended in 1986 with an English major, minors in history and philosophy, what was termed a “concentration” in journalism, and almost a minor in art history.
During college, I was a copy clerk at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. My duties included pulling photographs from the Associated Press machine (including some gruesome images of battle zones, massacres and disasters that still haunt me) and running to the downtown Trailways station to pick up film from distant bureaus like Farmville.
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Finding my way: overnighting at Short Pump Town Center with Lady Wonder from Build-A-Bear, May 2004 (Photo by Todd Wright)
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Photo courtesy Harry Kollatz Jr.
Another journalism berth, best described as an unpaid postgraduate internship, was at the late and little remembered Richmond Review (1988-90). The monthly, feaures-oriented paper was supported primarily through the credit cards of its owner, James Armstrong. It also allowed for the cutting of my eyeteeth on feature writing, with Michael Neal providing an astute editorial eye. I garnered a bouquet of clips with articles long and short.
The Petersburg Progress-Index hired me around 1991 to contribute five features a week for a specialty insert called “Petersburg: Close-Up.” Wearing a fedora and carrying a camera, I received nicknames that varied between Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent. Dina Cappillo Niblock edited me there, and I began a career habit of writing, well, too much.
Then came that defining moment at the Ukrop’s checkout line.
It took me a couple of years, but eventually Helms relented to my letter and phone campaign and gave me a chance as a freelancer. My first piece, “River Road Confidential,” intended as an investigation of scandal and rumor along Richmond’s wealthiest road, turned into an 8,000-word dissertation on history and architecture. The feature ran, severely truncated but well-illustrated. They brought me in as the full-time staff writer in December 1992.
“Flashback” went from the magazine’s front to back and back to front again, expanded, shortened, and even endured the brief “bullet-point” experiment.
This column began as an indulgence for my interest in the city and region’s history. Helms, who agreed to my suggestion, wanted the pieces to focus on physical locations like buildings. As time went on, the scope expanded to encompass people and events. Then came the struggle of squeezing the results into a column format, to which a series of long-suffering editors can attest. “Flashback” went from the magazine’s front to back and back to front again, expanded, shortened, and even endured the brief “bullet-point” experiment. Today, we’re at about 300 Flashbacks and counting.
Susan Winiecki, now the magazine’s associate publisher emeritus, succeeded Helms. Winiecki had come to Richmond magazine in 1996 from the hard news pages of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Under her direction, I plunged into harder-edged stories, some dealing with murder, attempted murder, unsolved murders, incest or missing children.
I come from “the softer side of Sears,” and these pieces caused me incredible anxiety. My preferences are for occasions where a hot jazz combo accompanies the conversation. I indeed wrote about those subjects, too, along with all the murdering or the near-murdering. When your business card says “staff writer,” and you are the primary one, then writing is what you do, or you find something else. I never did.
But it wasn’t all murders and violence.
What began as one of my attempts at humor in a staff meeting turned into June 2007’s “24 Hours With the General.” For this, I sat on the steps of the Robert E. Lee Monument to gather the thoughts of anybody who happened by. A rescheduling caused by rain placed me there on … Confederate Heritage Day. This entailed a surreal pop-up parade.
Colored pencil portrait by Thomas Harte Hobson, October 1993, during my first full year as the first staff writer for Richmond magazine (Image courtesy Harry Kollatz Jr.)
Prior to the start, as a massive Stars and Bars strained at its rope, a bespectacled African American man circled the statue in his pickup truck and through the window shouted, “I’m free! I’m free! Thank God!” His tone implied more amusement than annoyance.
Bagpipes played “Dixie,” and motorcycles roared around the monument. The flags were eye-poppingly bright and big. Faux generals in gray rode on horseback. Though participants made an effort toward authenticity in their period dress, one artillery unit hauled its cannon with an SUV.
Then they were gone with the wind.
That afternoon, A.J. Johnson, a Black man, strode across the grass medallion on his way home. Johnson came from what he considered the West End, around Meadow Street south of Cary. He’d passed by Gen. Lee all his life but admitted to knowing little about him except for frequent controversy.
“Guess it depends on which side you’re on, doesn’t it?” he mused. “I don’t know if he was a racist. I’ve been told he was an asshole. And I’ve been told he was a decent person. I don’t want to be entirely down on the cat. But I’ll say this much: It’s a hell of a statue. I mean, this is forever, man; this is for infinity.”
What A.J. Johnson, and that fellow in the pickup truck, might’ve made of the events of 2020, when not only Lee but all the booted-and-bearded men went away, are views I’d like to hear.
A significant personal accomplishment for my tenure was the 20-year run of the Theresa Pollak Prizes for Excellence in the Arts.
My spouse, the artist Amie Oliver, suggested naming the award for Pollak, an artist and the founder of arts education both at VCU and the University of Richmond. She had hired most of the contemporary artists who helped earn a national reputation for VCU’s School of the Arts.
During the Pollaks’ run, I interviewed dozens of makers and creators from across a range of disciplines, ages and backgrounds. We put on events where we handed out the awards and gifted a print of a Pollak work to the recipients.
The categories expanded, divided, shrunk and turned biannual. The receptions became an anticipated event. We had one celebrity sign-in when singer and actor Mandy Moore attended. She knew one of the musicians in the ceremony and complimented my hosting. I have no selfie because we didn’t have them then.
For the final Pollaks in 2017, I bestowed a Lifetime Achievement Award upon Vince Gilligan, also a Lloyd C. Bird graduate but a few years behind me, who created “Breaking Bad” and wrote for “The X-Files.” I managed not to stammer too much around him, and he even hammed it up with us for the camera. Off and on, for a decade, I stood on West Broad Street under the Lee’s Chicken sign giving fake weather forecasts. What began as impromptu humor gained some recognition as a quirky Richmond thing. The office’s move in 2021 from the Book Bindery building and away from the sign ended the series. The reports exist in half-life on YouTube.
Through the years I’ve read as well and looked as good on the printed page due to an escadrille of editors including Chad Anderson, Kate Andrews, Scott Bass, Craig Belcher, Jack Cooksey, Carla Davis, Tina Eshleman, Tharon Giddens, Tina Griego, Jessica Haddad, Court Squires and Susan Winiecki. The galore of designers and artists making this column look good has included Sarah Barton, Doug Dobey, Scott Fields, Isaac Harrell, V. Lee Hawkins, Steve Hedberg, Heather Palmateer, Jay Paul, Arnel Reynon, Jason Smith, Mollee Sullivan and Justin Vaughan.
Most of them long ago followed other paths, but through the years, this publication’s owners, Rich and Elisa Malkman, have been constants, navigating the magazine through all weathers.
There is, in the end, something to be said for continuity.
