Let’s Tell the Stories of Who Moved Here, Not Those Who Left
My “day job” as many of you know is as writer and editor of It’s WINDSday, which ostensibly focuses on wind and renewable energy, workforce development, and environmental protection but also small businesses, the latter through the stories of the courageous, creative and capable people who started them.
Take Lori Verity, an Air Force “brat” who after college at Ohio State came to Norfolk to study cooking at the since departed Johnson & Wales. Out of market jobs followed at prestigious hotels, but Lori (4th from right in the picture above) yearned to return to Hampton Roads. With a partner, she scrimped and saved and started on a shoestring Yummy Goodness, now a booming catering concern with TowneBank as its top client. “Lots of people tell me that once you’ve lived here, you always want to come back.” She sure did and is now raising a son here, perhaps another entrepreneur.
Or Kip Poole, native of Portsmouth and grad of Virginia Tech’s hospitality program who would take a culinary program at a Title I high school in Delaware from 40 to 200 kids before coming home to Hampton Roads. He would eventually become chief chef for VB Schools, then in 2024 take a leap of faith, opening Yorkie’s Deli that he has turned into a classroom of sorts. “With the help of friends and students, we have a vegetable garden out back, growing crops we cook in the restaurant. We then compost the scraps and use the soil to grow more. Nothing goes in the landfill. I hire teenagers to show them the life cycle of food.”
Then there’s Juan “Rafa” Famania, whose Puerto Rican mother urged him to join his sister in eastern Virginia where he would soon learn a valuable trade, welding on aluminum ships. Thanks to his encouraging young wife Natalia, he launched his own firm, JRF Ship Repair in Portsmouth, and is living in a nice house in Smithfield with a bevy of Navy contracts keeping his workforce happy.
Tiziana Garner left Tallwood High in VB and then earned a bachelor’s at ODU before joining the Coast Guard for a decade to see more of the nation. But the scent of the sea and our maritime industry lured her back. Now she’s ensconced in Dominion Energy’s Command center in Norfolk, monitoring the comings and goings of ships and people around the utility’s offshore wind project. And she’s in ODU’s new maritime and supply chain program, a second masters and a career in her chosen field within her grasp, “I love it here, never leaving.”
I am not pollyannish about what brings people to the Tidewater or drives them off. It can be work or love or the desire to be away from or near family. It happens in every community and to many of those we educate at Tallwood, Maury, Kecoughtan, Lakeland or Norfolk State. The 757 isn’t for everyone. Our economists and demographers study “out- migration” but frankly, it’s up to each one of us to show others what we have to offer by making full use of our amenities and talking up our virtues. Yes, we don’t get Taylor Swift, but many other acts of distinction make it to the region. We are not DC, or NY or Denver, but truth be told, some of their bedraggled denizens look longingly at our water and attractions and wonder if life is better at the end of I-64.
Bosnian refugee Marco Friegelj found his home here. Smart and undaunted, he started a technology solutions firm, then bought a building near the Downtown Tunnel where he now shares space with over 200 other startups, and he has similar hubs in Newport News and Hampton. They’re called Incu-Hubs. Marco’s not yet Nusbaum, Harvey Lindsay or Drucker & Falk, but watch out.
The future of a region is in its talent, not necessarily its nameplates. I’m interested, both for It’s WINDSday and Forward Thinking, in sharing the stories of our next generations of Coastal Virginia movers and someday shakers.