Thanks Arthur Godfrey!

Dear Blue Ridge Leader,

I read the interesting article by Tim Jon in the April edition of the Blue Ridge Leader about the Union Cemetery. It caught my eye, because I wonder if he knows that Arthur Godfrey, famed radio and TV celebrity, is buried in the cemetery?

How do I know this? Well, before we moved to Loudoun in 1982, I worked in the LA film and TV industry. I mostly worked on TV series and commercials, and my very last job before moving the next day was to do an ad for supplemental insurance with Arthur Godfrey as spokesman. 

It was about January 31, 1982 or so.

He was in pretty bad shape then, riddled by emphysema from years of smoking. All he had to do was to cut a few 30 second ads where he just had to get up from a chair and move to a pay phone, and drop a dime into the phone. But his emphysema was so bad, that he could hardly make it ten feet. 

He had his own oxygen tank nearby. In 1982, he was only 79, but looked and moved like he was much older. He died about a year later on March 13, 1983. He was 79, just a few months shy of 80.

On the set, there was a lot of dead time between takes designed to give him a chance to rest and catch his breath, literally. He scolded the crew and chastised them not to smoke, or else they would wind up like him. 

I had time to talk to him, and I told him that “he” was the last job I was doing in LA and we were moving to Virginia the very next day. His eyes lit up and he asked me where we were moving to? I answered and said, “Reston,” for a short time, because we knew it was a planned community and we chose an apartment for six months. 

We knew that we would not be next to an all-night bowling alley or disco. It was 1982 after all, and we had no real way to pick an apartment online, but I did have a small apartment guidebook that I picked up somewhere. From it, we chose an apartment near Wiehle Avenue.

He told me to check Leesburg out when we started looking for a more permanent house. So, after we settled into our DC jobs and started to look for a house—we took the advice from our new co-workers to avoid anything north or south of DC on or near 95. Also to stay away from the eastern suburbs for the same reason, traffic would eat us up.

So, one sunny April morning we headed to Leesburg where Ryan Homes was building a new subdivision called Carrvale. It may have been one of the first big subdivisions in Leesburg at the time. 

We went out to see the new homes and signed on the dotted line. We fell in love with Leesburg on first sight. We were taking Arthur Godfrey’s suggestion and were going to move that June. Thanks Arthur.

We lived there until 1993, but when our commute into DC on Route 7 just got worse and worse, longer and longer, we knew we had to make a change. 

When we moved to Leesburg in 1982, we drove the Dulles Toll Road and headed north on a nearly empty Route 28 and hung a left on Route 7—all the way to Leesburg in the dark during winter and no traffic lights or even lights at all. 

I think it was about 15 miles from Route 7 to Leesburg. The first lights we saw were from the FAA ATC. Total darkness. Our biggest fear was the deer that congregated near the Xerox Conference Center entrance.

As signal lights got more plentiful and the Marcus Bles property started to get developed, we made the move to Lovettsville, so we could take the MARC train into DC. We hated to leave Leesburg, but with every new traffic signal on Route 7, our commute became longer.

A few years ago, I was thinking about Arthur Godfrey after someone asked me, “How we come to Leesburg?” As I related the story, I wondered what happened to Arthur? 

Now, with the internet and Wikipedia, it was an easy find. Arthur Godfrey is buried in the Union Cemetery in Leesburg. 

Next chance I had, I went to the cemetery and asked the cemetery staff where he was buried, and they pointed to where he was buried. I was shocked. I never heard this story even in the local papers.

I took a few pictures. It was sort of completing a circle. Had I not worked on the insurance commercial on my last day in California, and had it not been with Arthur Godfrey, we would never have found Leesburg. Fate? Karma? Who knows.

Some years ago, I heard a story about Arthur Godfrey and his connection to the Leesburg airport. According to local accounts, after finishing his television show in New York, he would fly from Teterboro Airport to his Beacon Hill Farm near Leesburg.

As Stanley Caulkins once recalled, Godfrey reportedly found the runways at the old airport too short for his DC-3 in marginal weather and offered to help extend them—though this story has not been definitively corroborated.

What is documented is his significant role in the airport’s early history. In 1950, he purchased the Leesburg Airpark and donated it to the Town of Leesburg on the condition that it remain a public airport for 20 years. He regularly flew between Leesburg and New York, calling the airfield the “Old Cow Pasture” on his national radio program.

As the Town grew, leaders determined a larger airport was needed. In the early 1960s, Leesburg secured federal funding for a new site, and Godfrey released the Town from the restriction on his donated property, allowing it to be sold to help fund construction.

When the new airport opened on October 10, 1964, it was named Godfrey Field in his honor. It later expanded alongside regional growth following the opening of Dulles International Airport in 1962, and in 2000 was renamed Leesburg Executive Airport at Godfrey Field.

Please pass to Tim Jon. He may get a kick out of the Union Cemetery link to his wonderful story.

George Santulli

Lovettsville