Sometimes on winter mornings, Barnie Day would wake up and find a freshly killed deer hanging in his barn in Patrick County.
He often had no idea who had left it, but that’s not what mattered. What mattered is that the hunters who hauled their kill to Day’s barn knew that he’d know what to do with it.
“They knew Barnie would know who didn’t have meat in his refrigerator, so Barnie would call around and see who needed venison,” says Jack Betts, Day’s friend and former neighbor.
Day died Monday at age 72. Those who follow Virginia politics might remember Day from his brief stint in the House of Delegates more than a quarter-century ago, during which he made such a name for himself as an orator that he was mentioned as a possible candidate for lieutenant governor. That didn’t happen — he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and retired after just two terms — but those who remember him only as “former Del. Barnie Day, D-Patrick County” are remembering only a small part of a remarkable man who was, at times, a journalist, a novelist, a business owner, a county administrator, a politician and, most of all, a community leader.
“He was the best of the best,” said former House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell of Roanoke County. That applies to more than just Day’s political career.
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Day was born in North Carolina in 1952. His father died when he was young, and “he had a rough road for a time,” says Betts, a former North Carolina journalist who was Day’s friend and neighbor in Patrick County. In high school, Day took a job in an aluminum factory in Roxboro, N.C., “loading tractor trailers from 3:30 to 11,” according to an article in the Carolina Alumni Review.
“That’s when the whole black-white thing began to resonate with me,” he told the magazine. According to that account, “An old Black man who had worked at the plant for 11 years was making $1.80 an hour. The plant started Day at $1.85. ‘It bothered me so much that I insisted they either cut me a nickel or raise his. They gave him a dime raise, and the foreman said, ‘You must be one of them stinkin’ Democrats.’”
If Day wasn’t one then, he became one later, but that’s getting ahead of things. Day managed to get into the University of North Carolina but had little money. He put off buying the books if he could. “He used to tell that he almost starved,” Betts said, were it not for his roommate, who had dropped off the football team but retained his scholarship — and free access to the dining room. The roommate let Day use his meal card. “I got through Carolina on a football scholarship,” Day later said. “It just was’t mine.”
Day wanted to be a novelist. He’d grown up in a family of storytellers. “His Uncle Dub had a dry wit and told stories in an understated, deadpan way that cracked you up,” the Carolina Alumni Review wrote. “His mom could replay parts of conversations with devastating accuracy, hopping nimbly from one side to the other. The young Day just listened, soaked it up like a sponge.”
Becoming a novelist right out of college wasn’t a way to make money, though, so Day went into journalism. He wasn’t in love with newspapers, “but I did want to see if I could make a living stringing words together.” He worked for a series of small newspapers in North Carolina, then moved to Kansas City to edit a chain of small newspapers. Then he decided it really was time to become a novelist. He and his wife, Debbie — a high school sweetheart — moved to Virginia, specifically to Indian Valley in Floyd County. Day had found a house they could rent for $300 a year, Betts says. There was a reason why. “It had one electric plug and one light — in the kitchen. Debbie said when she saw it she screamed.”
Unfortunately, not much novel writing got done. “He spent all his time helping old folks in the community — chopping wood, pulling weeds,” Betts says. Eventually, Day and his wife moved to a better place in Meadows of Dan, across the county line in Patrick County. It was “a gorgeous old frame house” where the basement “had once been a moonshine factory,” Betts says. Day ran a general store for a while, farmed asparagus and cattle, then somehow got hired as the county administrator.
That was the beginning of Day’s foray into politics. He was not your typical government official. Once, there were two firms competing for the right to operate a nursing home in Patrick County, a process that required state approval in the form of a Certificate of Public Need. Patrick County backed one firm, but not the other. Each side was allowed to present witnesses at a hearing in Richmond. Former Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Henry County, remembers things this way. The one side had “two lawyers from Hunton & Williams,” then a tony Richmond law firm. “Barnie rolls in with a blind priest,” who had been a resident of the other firm’s home somewhere else and extolled its service. “You can imagine which way that went,” Armstrong said. Day carried the day, so to speak.
Day later went into the elected side of government, as a county supervisor and, from 1998 to 2002, a member of the House of Delegates. Those were the days when rural Democrats were still common. Day proudly called himself a “conservative Democrat,” and that wasn’t considered a contradiction then. “He balanced the cultural conservatism his constituents expected, backing gun rights, for example, with a forward-thinking approach to education,” says Jeff Schapiro, the recently retired Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist (whose commentary can still be heard on the Roanoke-based Radio IQ). “He was not much on teaching for the test. SOL, to him, meant—,” well, I’ll let you guess what he thought that acronym stood for.
“Like many Southwest and Southside Democrats, he was his own man,” recalls state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville. “He wouldn’t pass a purity test for the Democrats today but he made a difference. … He was just sort of a breath of fresh air.”
U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, was in the House of Delegates then. Although he was on the other side politically, he remembers Day for his love of rural Virginia. “He cared deeply about the region,” Griffith says.
While Day had yet to write his promised novel, he quickly became known as a storyteller in legislative debates.
“He was the best storyteller on the floor of the House floor when I was there,” says Griffith. “He could weave a good tale.”
“He was a deadly speaker on the floor,” Cranwell says. “He could absolutely eviscerate — but he did it with good old down-home old-fashioned humor.”
Day often told stories through a fictional character he called “Cornbread,” although the one Armstrong remembers best involved “Aunt Maude.” As the story went, Aunt Maude was a terrible cook and everyone in the family knew it except her. One Sunday after dinner, while the women washed dishes, the men went out on the porch. One of the men tossed one of Aunt Maude’s biscuits out to the dog. The dog gobbled it down, then immediately started licking its nether regions. “See,” the man said, “he wants to get the taste out of his mouth.” That story then segued into Day’s explanation of why the bill in question wasn’t a very good bill.
For all of his humor, though, Day was considered a master of the legislative backroom, which was rare for someone so junior. “He was a difference maker with small groups of people,” Deeds recalls.
Sometimes Day’s sense of humor showed up in other ways. Schapiro says Day once saw him ordering a bagel at Chicken’s, then the State Capitol snack bar. A bagel? “Where I live, that’s a good huntin’ dog,” Day cracked. Armstrong remembers a famous story that made its way around the Capitol. Day had caught someone — probably best not to say who, but not a legislator — looking up “something he shouldn’t be looking at on a state computer,” Armstong says. Day forcibly escorted the fellow to the window, eight floors up. “These windows aren’t supposed to open,” Day told him, “but if I catch you doing that again, we’ll find a way.”
Day’s political trajectory was headed upward except for two things. One was redistricting. Republicans controlled the process then, and rural Virginia had to lose seats no matter who was in charge. Day was drawn into a district with Armstrong. Day had also been having trouble with his arm and went to see a doctor. The diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease. He was 43.
Day retired from politics, but not from life. He helped start a bank. He edited a book about Virginia politics called “Notes From the Sausage Factory” that included essays from all the living governors at the time. He asked me to contribute a chapter about former Gov. Doug Wilder, and I did. He also greatly improved the title I had suggested. He wrote political commentaries, which he compiled into a book called “The Mule Yule: Jesus Didn’t Ride in on an Elephant.” Former Gov. Gerald Baliles, whose roots were in Patrick County, wrote the foreword. Baliles called him “Virginia’s country doctor of political satire.” Schapiro called him “Virginia’s Mark Twain.”
In time, Day really did write his long-promised novel: “The Last Pahvant” about “An orphan with an astonishing gift is raised on a squatters’ camp on the Colorado River during the Great Depression.” It’s earned 4.33 out of a possible 5 stars on Goodreads.
For many in Patrick County, though, Day was not the novelist, not the former legislator, but the fellow who could get things done — at least until they moved five or so years ago to Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, for the sake of Day’s health. “Our community changed dramatically when Barnie and Debbie left,” Betts says. “They were such leaders in the community.”
Day was the guy you took your deer to if you wanted to make sure the meat was used. “In spring he’d call eight or nine people he knew who had tractors with garden tillers and go to some of the older people in the community and till them a new garden,” Betts says. Day organized fundraisers — often an oyster roast — to raise money for the fire department, the rescue squad, the food bank. He helped start a medical clinic. “When something needed done, he and Deb just did it,” Betts says. As the years went on, Parkinson’s robbed Day of much of his motor skills, “but he still had the leadership in him. Even though he couldn’t do things like he used to he’d get up on the tractor and plow a few rows just to show he could still do it.”
Betts, who wrote the piece on Day for the Carolina Alumni Review, once suggested the prospect of writing a newspaper story about Day’s community work. Day told him not to. “He was not ever looking for credit,” Betts says.
Now that Day is gone, though, these stories can be told. As a storyteller, he ought to appreciate that.
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