J. TODD FOSTER: Vote For The Region's Most Dysfunctional Town

The area towns of Damascus, St. Paul and Bluff City remind me of three of my relatives: my late grandmother, my late great-uncle and my still-living uncle.
When all three were alive and together in the same room, they were always vying – albeit unwittingly – for the title of most dysfunctional.
All three of my kin were insufferable alone; together, they were combustible.

I ALWAYS knew it was Christmas Eve not because of the glistening evergreen tree, gift-wrapped presents and eggnog, but because that’s when the guns came out. And the fights over money.
You’ve never seen fights over money until you’ve seen a poor or – at best – a struggling Southern family battle over money they don’t have.
“I’ll spend $10,000 to make sure you don’t get a dime more than me,” my great-uncle (let’s call him St. Paul) would bellow to my grandmother (Damascus). These were an aging brother and sister fighting over their parents’ modest estate – while their parents (my great-grandparents) were still alive and within earshot.
By now, some of you readers who have pegged me as an Ivy League-Yankee-elitist-liberal are scratching your heads. Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m a Middle Tennessee native who was the first on his daddy’s side of the family to graduate from college. The closest I’ve been to the Ivy League is a thick tangle of the green climbing vine.
AS MY teen years slid into adulthood, I started practicing journalism fairly close to home. Then my circle widened. By my mid-30s, I was as far away from my family as I could be and still be in the continental United States. (I couldn’t get my wife to move to Alaska.)
Uncle St. Paul and Grandmother Damascus died in the early 1990s and I haven’t seen my uncle (my mother’s brother) in years. Let’s call him Uncle Bluff City. For the most part, he was a bluffer.
When he got mad at the Christmas Eve dinner, held annually at my great-grandparents’ home, he would pull out a gun and stick it to Uncle St. Paul’s temple.
Uncle Bluff City never pulled the trigger, although years later he would buy up a bunch of rental property and one day shoot one of his tenants in the face.

TALK ABOUT your late-payment penalty. (The tenant lived, got a nice settlement and declined to press charges. Otherwise, Uncle Bluff City would be in prison now.)
Anyway, with Uncle St. Paul and Grandmother Damascus departed from this earth and my Uncle Bluff City ostracized by the normal members of my family, it was safe to return close to home last year.
I’m now four hours away from my roots – but within striking distance of my beloved mother, who turned out far more normal than she ever had the right to.
I can’t really explain why two little Southwest Virginia towns (Damascus and St. Paul) and the hamlet of Bluff City, Tenn., remind me of three relatives. Maybe because all three towns create a disproportionate share of news. My three relatives created a disproportionate share of controversy and angst.

THE BLUFF City controversy – a recall election – is strange enough, but then there’s the case of Alderman Melvin Carrier, who was elected last year and is not even the subject of the recall election.
Carrier made news a few weeks ago when his fellow aldermen enacted an ordinance aimed at … Carrier, whose trash-filled lawn was the subject of neighborhood complaints. Herald Courier reporter Mac McLean wrote about the episode in a story published May 11. Two days earlier, McLean and photographer Earl Neikirk visited Carrier’s barber shop on Main Street.
Carrier wanted to know why his business was being photographed and instead offered up what he said was a better story. He sent out a friend from the barber shop to tell the journalists about being harassed by police and about how he had invented a car that got superior gas mileage and would put Detroit out of business, as if the Motor City isn’t already. Carrier’s friend explained that his brain was too big for his head and caused him to be bipolar.
We went with the Carrier story instead, and apparently the alderman didn’t like it much. After a May 20 budget workshop, he asked McLean if he was the “guy who put his name in the paper” and warned him never to do it again. Then Carrier physically bumped McLean.

McLEAN REPORTED the incident to me, and I fired off a letter to Carrier on May 21.
“Dear Alderman Carrier,” I wrote. “Reporter Mac McLean today informed me of an incident with you yesterday in which you warned him never to publish your name again and then bumped him. You lost any claim to privacy when you won public office. Furthermore, public disputes don’t even shield private citizens from publication. Should another incident of this sort happen again, I can assure you your name will be all over the Opinion page of this newspaper, and a possible call made to local law enforcement.”
I never heard back from Carrier. But McLean did. On June 3 at another meeting of the Bluff City Board of Aldermen, Carrier spotted the reporter and publicly declared “there’s that dumb ass right now.” He walked by McLean, and within earshot of other city officials, vowed to the reporter that he would “piss in your gut.”
I have no idea what Carrier meant by that threat to the reporter; it’s no Southern colloquialism I’ve ever heard of, but it’s safe to say it’s unbecoming of an alderman.

SO, AS promised, Carrier gets his name in this column – 14 times, by my count.
As a journalist, I hope Damascus, St. Paul and Bluff City remain the gifts that keep on giving. If I were a citizen, though, I’d be thankful they’re not in the same geographic room at the same time.
Insufferable can easily become combustible.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier. He may be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.