Norma Lugar: Writing by the rules, but from the heart
by SANDRA BROWN KELLY

Norma Vecellio Lugar loves roses and her grandchildren, and even wishes she could fall in love one more time in her life. She’s also so addicted to television she swears she could watch the Yellow Pages if that’s all that was on the screen.

But she doesn’t watch much TV. At 70, Lugar is still writing and editing stories and receiving awards for it. She has won more than 150 awards in her career.

“If I don’t win, then I don’t think it’s good enough,” she says.

Lugar has been part of The Roanoker magazine, owned by Leisure Publishing of Roanoke, for much of its 29 years. For more than a year, she also has been editor of its Pinnacle Living publication.

Last year, Lugar was chosen as Communicator of Achievement by the Virginia Press Women, which meant she represented the best of her profession, her service to her organization and to her community.

In addition to the Communicator honor, Lugar won a first place award from the National Federation of Press Women in “Special Articles, Social Issues,” for “Confessions of an OxyContin Addict,” a two-part series published in The Roanoker. She also won second place for a television commercial.

These awards were in addition to a first place, business and financial writing, and third place, features, in the VPA state competition.

It’s impossible to peg Lugar to any particular category of writing, as her awards demonstrate.

Her regular contributions to The Roanoker range from nostalgic pieces to heart-wrenching news features, such as drug addiction. In Pinnacle Living, she focuses on upscale homes and lifestyles in eight states.

Still, the stories she likes most are those that have the potential to change lives, she said.

“Confessions of an OxyContin Addict” was one; so was a 1996 feature in The Roanoker on domestic abuse, which also won top awards.

“These are the people stories that get to my soul. You don’t just walk out the door and, poof, it’s gone. I can still feel what it’s like to be in the battered women’s shelter.

“Richard (Richard Wells, president of Leisure Publishing) says I fall in love with my stories. I do fall in love with the people I interview.”

But Lugar says she also relies on good research and the basic rules of writing to propel her through a story. “I sit down and beat my head against the wall. I’ve had maybe two stories in my career that wrote themselves for me.”

She said the subject of her writing does not make any difference in the effort she puts into a story because she always tries to “do it like ‘SMA’ taught us.”

“SMA” was Sister Mary Agnes Brand, who ran the Seton Journal and taught journalism at the College of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Lugar graduated.

“SMA taught us to write everything as if you were going for a Pulitzer Prize,” Lugar said. “She was as competitive as hell.”

Lugar won her first writing award in 1956, from the Seton Journal for writing its showcase column, Journalulu. The Journalulu award sits on a table in her office. A clipping of a tribute written when Sister Mary Agnes died is stapled to a display board beside Lugar’s desk.

“It reminds me to always do my best,” she said.

First-generation born in America

Lugar grew up surrounded by stories. Her father, David Vecellio, emigrated to the U.S. after World War I from a small town in the Italian Alps and did stonework on the first Blue Ridge Parkway bridge in the 1930s. Her mother, Mary, came to the U.S. with her family from Innsbruck, Austria, when she was 13. Her parents met when her father’s construction company did a job with the company owned by her mother’s dad.

The family settled in the Roanoke Valley because it reminded David Vecellio of his hometown in Italy. The family lived first in Roanoke, but moved to Salem when Lugar was a teen-ager.

Lugar now lives in Salem, in the same area where she grew up and graduated from Andrew Lewis High and attended Roanoke College before transferring to Mount Saint Joseph. Except for college and a couple of brief stints on Ohio newspapers, Lugar has stayed close to home.

Her first job, as a staff writer with a Springfield, Ohio, newspaper, was typical for a female journalist in that period. Men could smoke in the newsroom, but women weren’t allowed to, and front page story assignments went to male reporters.

Before she left, though, Lugar got the first front page byline by a female on that paper, for an interview with then vice presidential candidate Estes Kefauver.

When she asked the editor for the assignment, he asked her why she thought she should get it. “I told him: ‘Kefauver’s a Southerner, and I’m a Southerner.’ “ The editor gave his approval.

After two years in Springfield, Lugar knew it was time to move to a larger publication. Logical next stops would have been Charlotte, Atlanta or Miami, but she wanted to come home. She was hired by The Roanoke Times for $70 a week. She had made $92 in Springfield, but she recalls then managing editor Norwood Middleton justifying the lower salary by saying he knew Lugar’s father wouldn’t charge her rent to live at home.

Later, Lugar left the Roanoke Times to work briefly on the Cincinnati paper in a job she quickly learned to hate. She returned home and taught English in Roanoke County for a year before rejoining the Times. She stayed at the Times until she married James Lugar and became pregnant and was required to quit. Pregnant women weren’t allowed to work on the newspaper at the time.

She had two sons, Jay and John, and stayed at home 10 years caring for them.

Jay and wife, Lisa, and children Caroline, 7, and Jack, 3 1/2, live in Richmond where he is marketing manager for Southern Expositions. John and wife Deanna live in the Roanoke Valley where he owns Virginia Varsity Transfer and Virginia Varsity Self-Storage.

After she and James Lugar were divorced, she went back to work, joining The Roanoker when it was in its fourth issue. She eventually left the magazine, ran her own public relations firm and worked at what is now National College of Business and Technology.

Lugar’s life has not always been a charmed one, she points out.

For 10 years once, she had writer’s block. She also has suffered periodically from panic attacks, which are now under control, but does not mind discussing.

“I’m now 70, and I think people are going to think what they think about me, but mainly it’s time for people to understand that panic attacks don’t mean people are crazy.”

Most frustrating to Lugar has been her relationship with religion. “Spiritual things have been a struggle for me,” she said. “I’m Catholic, but I went to an Episcopal church for a long time. Now, I’m back at Our Lady of Nazareth.”

She said she’s still not in a comfortable spot spiritually, however.

“I do know I have this God-given fascination with people. There are so many stories to tell, I’ll never be able to tell them all.”

Ten years ago, she returned to Leisure Publishing and The Roanoker where Wells and Editor-in-Chief Kurt Rheinheimer give her a great deal of freedom to choose her stories. When Leisure started Pinnacle Living a little more than a year ago, she became its editor. She also writes many of the features in the publication.

Leisure is her home, she says, and its staff is like her family.

“Around here, they call me a ‘diva.’ At first, that bothered me because I thought of a diva as someone who throws fit and makes extreme demands. They say that’s not what they mean.”

Perhaps the label has to do with always looking so well put together, how she can make a pair of khakis look like an elegant suit by adding the right sweater and jacket.

Or, it could be how her voice remains unthreatening, but deepens when she’s giving instructions.

In any case, Lugar is one diva who doesn’t mind digging in to get the job done, whether it’s a story or the garden she’s creating at home. The pergola has been built and some 50 roses are in place. A stone wall is next.

Come May, it will be six years since Lugar quit smoking, and she says she couldn’t have done it if she had not been a gardener. “I love getting my hand into the soil and growing something beautiful.”

She also wants to travel, something she has done little of in her life. Lugar is the only one of her siblings — Dora Richardson and David Vecellio, who live in the Roanoke Valley, and Connie Vecellio, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., and Sylvia, who is deceased — who has not been to Europe to visit their parents’ hometowns.

She also wants to go to the Chelsea Rose Show in England, and she wants to write a book

She does not want to retire.

“I’m just a slug if I’m not in an orderly life pattern.”