Doug Bell, R.I.P.

Doug and Arlene Bell in front of their Floyd County, Va. home, 2022.

My best friend from Blacksburg High School passed away on Friday after a brief but brutal  fight with cancer.  I met Doug Bell when my family moved to Blacksburg just before the start of my senior year in high school (Doug was also a senior). Doug and I were both discus throwers on the track team; he also threw the shot put and was always one of the best at state championships. The Blacksburg High School track team was one of four regional champions in Virginia in 1974.

We had more fun on the track team than the authorities approved. The trainer for the track team was a good dude who later found fulfillment as a U.S. Army Ranger. Shotput and discus were usually among the first events during a track team, and we had plenty of idle time afterwards. The trainer would summon us to join him in the back of a school and pull out a sock he kept stashed half full of marijuana. We would fire up a pipe or few joints and pass them around. Some of the coaches were puzzled why we would be laughing so heartily as we sat in the stands near the end of the track meet: “What’s so funny about guys running 8 laps for a two mile race?”

Doug and I had a friendly rivalry that extended to the weight room. Towards the end of the school year, we had a bench press duel and he edged me out by a couple inches. He managed to clinch 320 pounds but, after having no trouble with 310, I couldn’t quite lock up 320 .  We were both aghast to see the casual use of steroids by some guys on the Va. Tech weightlifting team – which won the NCAA championship a few years later.

Doug always spoke his mind. The local congressman, Bill Wampler, visited Blacksburg High School to afflict students with the usual bromides one morning early in 1974. In front of the school assembly, Doug asked the congressman if it was true that a recently elected senator from Virginia was “the dumbest guy in Congress,” as the media reported. Wampler hemmed and hawed and Doug was smiling from ear to ear.

‘That exchange captured Doug’s values and verve. Simply because a guy had an official title didn’t mean that Doug would curtsy to him like he was the King of England.

Doug was raised in a house next to the Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd County, Virginia. His great grandfather spent years fighting for the 54th Virginia regiment in the Civil War. He lost a leg from a wound but still sired 12 children afterwards, guaranteeing that Floyd County would never have a Bell shortage.  Doug was concerned that the National Park Service might target his family’s land for eminent domain seizure  – as it has many private turf near National Park land. Both of Doug’s parents died in auto accidents near their mountain home, tragedies that profoundly shaped Doug’s life. Doug and his two sisters moved to Blacksburg after his parents’ passing to live with an aunt and uncle.

Doug showed literary promise long before I did. In his first semester at William and Mary, his English professor was so impressed by an essay Doug wrote about his thoughts on roaming his family land with a rifle that he read the essay out loud to the class. That area – now like then – is knee-deep in bears. When I saw Doug in December in Floyd, I asked if he still had that essay but it may have been lost in the many moves in the subsequent half century. By the mid-late 1970s, we both began to be disillusioned with prevailing values that championed consumerism at any price.   I dropped out of Virginia Tech, he dropped out of William and Mary, and we would sometimes catch up in Blacksburg for a few puffs and hearty conversations that were more philosophical than what I encountered up north. Doug retired in 2015 after 26 years as a store manager for Lowe’s at 11 stores in Tennessee and Virginia.

Doug chose a great life partner in Arlene. Doug and Arlene bought his grandfather’s farm in 1987 and they turned those 95 acres into a glorious homestead.   Arlene worked with architectural interns from Va. Tech to choose a masterful design for the land and the house. They would have celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary this coming week. Doug had valiantly sought to stick around long enough to mark that milestone but Mother Nature trumped. Arlene was a great blessing to Doug as he faced health struggles over the last couple decades.

Doug was a tough guy from start to finish. Earlier this year, not that long after he had hernia surgery, he split four cords of firewood from a tree that fell in his driveway. I told him: “If there is a firewood chopping contest in Floyd County, you should definitely enter.”

Doug is featured in a book titled, Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail.  The A.T. initially went near Doug’s family property before it was moved 50 miles to the West.  Doug spent weeks helping author Mills Kelly piece together what had been lost by that shift out of Floyd County and beyond. Kelly had the perfect one-sentence summary of Doug: “Doug Bell is a man who belongs exactly where he is.”

Doug’s life story reminds me of a saying that was common in the United States in the late 1800s. According to Mark Twain, it was considered rude to ask a man where he was from. If he was from Virginia, he would tell you – and if he wasn’t, he would be ashamed to admit it.

But Virginia – and America – aren’t what they used to be. Doug Bell embodied old-fashioned virtues – self-reliance, toughness, tolerance, and living your life to a higher code. He favored maximum freedom in daily life but realized that rested on individuals being responsible for their own choices and their own fate. Unfortunately, those virtues have become much rarer in this century.

I send my best wishes and condolences to Arlene, to their son, Andrew, and to his surviving sister, Susie.

Doug and I in his Floyd County home, 2022

Doug and Arlene Bell, Floyd County Courthouse, December 2024

Doug and Arlene Bell, 2022