Appreciation: Roxane Gatling Gilmore

It was a balmy late summer afternoon during the busy presidential election year of 2000 and I sat on the steps leading to the little-used east door of the Virginia Capitol, affording me an unobstructed view of the Executive Mansion perhaps 100 yards away.

Right on schedule, the first lady of the commonwealth, Roxane Gatling Gilmore, got out of a black Cadillac driven by the Virginia State Police unit charged with protecting Gov. Jim Gilmore and his family. Under one arm were what appeared to be books — tools of her trade as a professor of classics that she insisted on continuing after Jim’s election in 1997.

I was watching because a Democratic operative had pitched a rumor to me a few days earlier that Roxane had decamped the governor’s residence. The tip smelled of barnyard droppings from the start and I wanted to state with firsthand certainty that it was exactly what its odor indicated.

Just to be sure, I had also queried a few sources on the inside and was told repeatedly and unequivocally that Mrs. Gilmore was very much living at the mansion and that, by all appearances, she and the governor were happy.

I wanted to run this insinuation to ground because I knew another side to them from moments outside their official role.

“What moments,” you ask?

High school football and our sons: the Gilmores’ and mine.

That busy year, the governor was in the inner circle of Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s presidential campaign against Vice President Al Gore. That fall was also the greatest football season that Mills E. Godwin High School in Henrico County has ever had.

The governor’s eldest son, Jay, was a senior on the Eagles’ 2000 team. My son, Rob, was a junior. It was a team better stocked on determination and coaching than next-level talent, but week after week, this team vanquished larger, faster football powers.

I had run into the governor and the first lady at a Saturday morning practice early in the preseason that coach Ron Axselle had organized especially for players’ parents in hopes they would get to know one another. Coach Ax added post-practice watermelon as an inducement. 

It felt awkward at first because the Gilmores were the state’s most powerful couple and I was a reporter tasked with keeping tabs on them. But this was outside official lines.

So we made a deal: this would be about our kids. I’d be “just Bob,” a proud Godwin dad and fan, and they’d be “just Jim and Roxane,” proud Godwin parents and fans. With that out of the way, we were able to relax and relish those fleeting Friday nights.

I figured I’d see them at maybe four or five games, thinking that they would be otherwise occupied with weighty matters of state or politics, especially for road games. I figured wrong. They attended every game right up to the nail-biter finale against Jim’s alma mater, J.R. Tucker High School.

They arrived late: he had been campaigning for Bush that day and got there before halftime. Early the next morning, he would be back at it and stay that way through the final weekend of the campaign and the election on Tuesday.

But when our sons and their teammates salvaged a last-minute victory over Tucker, the Gilmores joined in the euphoria because it marked the first time in Godwin’s history that it had ended a regular season unbeaten.

There is constant tension between journalists and those they cover about how close or distant such relationships should be. It’s not like a football field: no white hash marks and boundary lines. We can argue whether by giving the first family its space, I was too lenient.

Jim will tell you it never stopped me from reporting unflattering news about him if I had the facts to back it up. Those interactions outside our traditional roles never dulled my curiosity or skepticism — same as it would be with successive governors with whom I shared off-record moments. Such moments, I would argue, allow journalists to understand their subjects as real, three-dimensional people and are a guardrail against cynicism, a destructive default tendency to believe the worst.

Moments like those during their time in office and since allowed me to admire Roxane Gilmore as a first lady of great intellect, character and wit. I came to appreciate her as a mom who made time for her sons, Jay and Ashton, despite impossible demands her schedule sometimes imposed.

And I realized she loved her husband, was his staunchest supporter and his wisest advisor.