Doug Thompson could (still) use your thoughts and prayers UPDATED
Doug Thompson | Photo by Dan
Doug Thompson hit a cow while riding his Harley Super Glide (which he rode a lot) on U.S. 221 in Roanoke County night the night of Nov. 10. He was on his way home from a Floyd County High football game. Details of the accident are here.
On Friday (Nov. 17) he was in critical serious but stable As of Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 27), Doug was listed in good condition at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, and he needs all the thoughts and prayers he can get.
Various news accounts have described Thompson, 64, as the blogger behind Blue Ridge Muse and a former reporter for The Roanoke Times. All that’s true but there’s a lot more to him than that.
Doug worked at the paper for awhile back in the late 1960s and/or early 1970s, and then he landed a job as a reporter in Illinois. Eventually he found himself working on Capitol Hill, first as a congressman’s press secretary and later as a chief of staff. Here’s his bio.
But he ended up as a lobbyist, working for the National Association of Realtors. He also founded Capitol Hill Blue, which bills itself as the oldest political site on the Internet. That went online in 1994, in the infancy of the World Wide Web, and it’s still around. He’s still listed as their editor and publisher.
To make a long story short, Doug burned out up in Washington, D.C. and in 2004 he and his wife returned to Floyd, where he’d moved to at age 14. There, he established a photography business, and Blue Ridge Muse, and he covered sports and other stuff for the weekly newspaper up there, and he managed Capitol Hill Blue from there, too.
He has a great sense of humor and he’s a controversial figure in Floyd County — which he knew better about than just about anybody. When I was a metro editor, if there was a newbie reporter who was working on a story up there, I’d tell him or her, “The first thing you need to do is call up Doug and offer to buy him lunch. Because he’ll regale you with facts and history and point you to good sources” for whatever story they were working on.
Here’s one of those stories. Doug’s not mentioned in it, but he played a key behind-the-scenes role, and he wrote a little bit about that here.
A couple of years ago I went up to Floyd where Doug and I had lunch at Oddfellas Cantina. He seemed delighted to learn The Roanoke Times would pay for it, and he proceeded to order a large steak, the most expensive item on the menu. Ha!
Let’s hope he recovers soon.
November 27, 2012 - 5:00 AM
Frank mixed me up with all of his talk...
Here’s wishing him a speedy recovery.
On the good news front, Zack Foutz, the Cave Spring athlete who contracted meningitis from the contaminated steroid injection seems to be on the way to recovery. Good wishes and prayers for him also.
I’m hoping he recovers to write another “Someone was watching over me…” piece, which is what he titled one after a close encounter with a deer last year. This time it should be about the irony of writing about preparing to put his bike in the shop for a 100,000-mile tuneup and titling the piece “How many miles to go before I sleep?” (He followed it up Friday with another item — about his new iPhone as a viable photojournalism tool.)
Doug has a pretty full autobio on http://dougthompson.com at
http://www.dougthompson.com/about-blue-ridge-muse
closing with, “Despite his work in new media, Thompson remains a newspaperman at heart and lives by the creed that it is the role of a newspaperman to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’”
He wrote an amazing story about his mother and her history with motorcycles. She passed away in August: A life well lived
Doug has been a serial journalist/blogger, writing and shooting stills and video for the Floyd Press, his BlueRidgeMuse.com blog, CapitolHillBlue.com and more than one motorcycle-related site.
For Veterans Day, you might point to this piece of his:
http://www.roanokevalleyhog.com/node/17
Thanks Bob Stepno for the links – Mr Thompson seems to be we quite a wonderful storyteller. His story about his Mom was quite moving and easy to relate to for those of us with aging parents.
I hope his recovery is swift and complete.
Our prayers are certainly with Doug. We are so happy about the good news about Zack Foutz . The Foutz family are such wonderful people. We have been friends with them a long time. Our church has been praying for Zack.
Prayers and good thoughts, Doug–Here’s hoping you’ll be back on BRM and Capitol Hill Blue in no time!
Doug was a Kingbreaker in an age where the media considers themselves Kingmakers. I remember Doug from the Clinton years when he laid the roadbed for sites like the Huffington Post.
People on FreeRepublic are remembering him fondly tonight. We fought with him and later against him but we always respected him.
So is there any news on this man?
He’s in my prayers.