The best thing about my job, bar none, is the excuse it gives me to get on the phone or get out of the newsroom and talk with some fascinating people.
Recently, one such person I had the good fortune to meet was John Copley of Stafford County. He was at Historic Kenmore, a block over from The Free Lance-Star, fiddling with its imposing metal gates so that they would look and work just right.
If you’ve lately walked or driven by the place, which features what’s been called ”one of the 1oo most beautiful rooms in America,” you’ve seen Copley’s handiwork. The gates, which had been absent from the entrance for many, many years, are back in their rightful spot–and looking quite grand.
That’s his doing as a volunteer for The George Washington Foundation, steward of Kenmore and Ferry Farm, and the subject of an article in today’s Town & County section in the newspaper.
Copley is one of the folks who appreciate such places, as became clear in our first minutes of conversation when I followed up that chance meeting at Kenmore with a phone call to him at home.
It came out that in his volunteering for Ferry Farm, George Washington’s boyhood home in southern Stafford, Copley had helped to background research on the people who owned what became the Washington farm–going all the way back to the days of land grants from the British king.
He said he loved “putting some meat onto the bones of the people who owned the property.”
It also emerged that if, come spring, you stroll by Ken Fortune’s fine home on Hanover Street, between Prince Edward and Princess Anne streets, and look closely, you’ll see another bit of Copley’s inventiveness.
Notice how the reproduction Civil War cannon out front of the house floats in the flower bed?
That’s Copley’s doing.
He made a saddle for the tail of the artillery piece and some adjustable supports so that the cannon wouldn’t have to be raised up on pilings. This way, the conversation piece nestles more naturally into Mr. Fortune’s front yard.
Tinkering with stuff and solving unorthodox puzzles are what Copley relishes.
In his decades at the Dahlgren naval research facility, before retirement, that was a way of life for this West Virginia-born mechanical engineer, I learned during the interview.
“I like to get down in the dirt and make it happen, to find a way to figure things out,” he told me. “I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of that.”
Thanks to that inquisitive nature, and John Copley’s spirit of volunteerism, our community is much the better place.
