Maya 29-He's an ex-banker, ex-delegate to the Virginia General Assembly, ex-owner of a farm store, ex-editor of a small-town newspaper and an ex-Patrick County administrator. Source Roanoke Times
Barnie Day and his wife, Debbie, live along a dirt road in Patrick County, on a small oasis of shade surrounded by rolling cornfields.
He's an ex-banker, ex-delegate to the Virginia General Assembly, ex-owner of a farm store, ex-editor of a small-town newspaper and an ex-Patrick County administrator. He's got more X's by his name than your average adult-film starlet.
He's also a friend of mine. And let me tell you, for an ex-banker and ex-bureaucrat, he's a hell of a writer.
In 2005, Day and a cohort, Becky Dale, published "Notes from the Sausage Factory," a collection of political columns about Virginia.
Its 400 or so pages included the best stuff from just about every great editorialist in the commonwealth -- one of them is my colleague, Dwayne Yancey. I've used "Notes" as a reference on many occasions, and at other times for ideas. It could be a textbook for any college critical writing class.
A handful of those columns, published in this newspaper, were written by Day. His were the best ones in the book.
Day knows how to make readers angry, which is easy, and how to make them laugh, which is a lot more difficult, and how to make them mad while they're laughing, which is even harder. And if you ever read the column he wrote after the death of his mother, Nancy Jane, you couldn't help but weep.
