Hatton Balderson:  Where fearlessness and talent meet.

by Janine Latus
photography by Keith Lanpher

Hatton Balderson has a canvas bag so old its handles are reinforced with duct tape. In its myriad pockets are screwdrivers and awls, fishing line and piano wire, pencils and pliers and an ice pick older than Hatton himself.
The back of his Isuzu Trooper is stacked with man-sized sheets of cardboard and two sleeping bags, not for himself or his beloved French bulldogs but for swaddling his customers’ art as he moves it from their homes or offices to his framing studio and back.

“I’ve moved millions of dollars of art in the back of this thing,” Hatton says.

Hatton is a painter, a framer, a musician and an installer of art. His hands move as easily over the strings of an upright bass as they do over a mat cutter, instinctive to the point of not thinking. He has sold his own paintings – blends of acrylic and watercolor that evoke Van Gogh and Matisse – stood and delivered as a professional musician, framed thousands of pieces of art and installed even more.

When South University opened its Virginia Beach campus in 2010, it was Hatton the school hired to hang 300 pieces of art in three days, each “security hung” as it would be in a McDonald’s or a motel so no one could take it off the wall and walk away. Banks have hired him to move and hang entire collections. Art owners call him to frame and hang their precious and priceless. Indeed, when the Chrysler Museum of Art ran its Our Community Collects show last fall, the framing on several of the masterpieces was his.

Even Senator Mark Warner uses him, not just to hang his annually rotating collection of Virginia art in both his Norfolk and D.C. offices but also to help choose what’s included.

“Hatton has been a member of our team since the first year of our effort to showcase Virginia art on Capitol Hill,” the senator wrote in an email. “He has great taste and an amazing ability to combine different mediums from different artists to form one cohesive show.”

Hatton got into it three years ago, when Susan Hirschbiel, at the time a commissioner on the Virginia Commission for the Arts and a longtime friend and supporter of Warner, asked Hatton to join her in selecting art for the senator. Together they travel the state looking for cutting-edge artists, a smorgasbord of sculpture and glass and canvas, creating a slide show of options to send to Warner’s staff. Once the senator has made his choices, Hatton and Susan navigate a van full of art through the security labyrinth of bomb-sniffing German shepherds and gun-wielding guards under the Russell Senate Office Building, Warner’s eager young tie-wearing aides as escorts. Once through the tunnels and halls to the office, it is Hatton who stands back and evaluates the art and the space, then launches into measuring and math-ing and positioning everything just so.

“It’s always a challenge,” Susan says, “because it’s not a gallery or a home, it’s a public space.”
Hatton, though, has absolute faith in his abilities.

“When I get going I shift from being human to being an installation machine,” he says. “I love what I do, I’m passionate about it, I get a fearlessness and confidence from all of the years of doing it, and I’m an obnoxious perfectionist, a gift from my dad’s side that’s both a blessing and a curse.”

For hours he works, not stopping for lunch, the pieces of his mobile arsenal arranged like surgical tools in the holes and slots in the tray of his paint-stained stepladder.

Hatton started in the business as a 24-year-old college kid, filling in at the old Decker Studios as a favor to his mom, Shelby Balderson, the galleries’ manager. Then the framer quit and Hatton picked that job up, too. Gone were his plans for law school; he had found his passion.

When Decker closed in 1990, the dynamic duo of mother and son built a sunny studio behind the family’s home and went into business under the name Shelby’s Picture Framing. In truth it was Hatton doing the framing and Shelby going in with her artist’s eye and directing what needed to be put where. Hatton was just the hired muscle, the one who schlepped and carried and hammered in hangers.

Twenty-five years after their partnership started, it’s all Hatton.

“He’s learned everything I can teach him,” Shelby says, in her native accent of “to-mah-toe” and “ah-boot.” “I’m trying to retire.”

Still, she is “Virginia Beach Central,” as Hatton calls her, with a network of connections throughout the Hampton Roads arts community. For years she was a pre-judge for the Boardwalk Art Show and she and Hatton would raid the shrink-wrap bins and buy Virginia originals.

The Baldersons’ only advertising is word-of-mouth, one satisfied customer sending their name along to the next. Bob and Janet Chen­man, owners of L. Chenman Inc., a scrap metal company, hired Hatton in 2009 when they bought their spacious, blank-walled home half a block from the beach.

“It was a tabula rasa house,” Hatton says. “There was not a stick hanging.”

Together the Chenmans and the Baldersons considered the art and the walls.

“I always have an idea where I want things and then I let him have his say,” says Bob, a longtime champion surfer who has a collection of custom surfboards that needed to be hung, plus 5-foot-by-5-foot nudes and colorful acrylics and oils of surfers. For Janet, Hatton framed an oil painting that had belonged to her grandmother, the new frame encasing the old to maintain the historic authenticity of the piece. He painted and sanded and touched up another frame so it would match ones Bob had brought back from Hawaii.

“We’re very pleased with what he’s done,” Bob says.

Hatton cuts mat with the ease with which most people butter bread. His studio has racks of mat boards in colors with names like Raphael and Monet’s Cloud. His glass cutter is 30 years old, the diamond blade lubricated with lighter fluid, its missing springs replaced by rubber bands. A beam is decorated with photos sent by clients of bulldogs in costume, and one of himself at about 3 years old, the year the family moved into the Oceanfront home they are now leaving.
Razorblades litter counter tops; linked foam mats like you’d see in a child’s playroom cushion the floor. A work table is covered with plans and paintbrushes, straight-edge clamps and a giant roll of Kraft paper. Classical music plays quietly.
Clients rarely see this space, though. Instead Hatton goes to them with his measuring tape and cases full of frame samples. There are some clients he’s known so long that he just picks up the art and brings it to the studio for the deliberation process. Others need more client input.

“The first frame I pick might be the perfect thing, and other times I’ll spend a few days thinking about what I want to put on to set it off.”

Sometimes what has to happen first is an un-framing.

“We have art come in here that people spent a lot of money to get framed and it’s so bad it just makes your teeth itch,” Shelby says. “It’s something plain and clean that needs a plain and clean frame and it’s got something floop-do-doo all over it that’s just awful. A frame can kill a piece or enhance it, and it should enhance it. Always.”

So should its placement, and Hatton takes pride in having inherited his mother’s artistic eye.

“I’ve had customers when they’re writing a check for me say, ‘You’re cheaper than a chiropractor and infinitely cheaper than a divorce lawyer,’ ” Hatton says. “I’ve had them say, ‘You saved my marriage.’ ”

Or as Senator Warner writes, “We couldn’t do this without him.”

embedded by Embedded Video

vimeo Direkt

by Lon Wagner
photography by Marcus Holman

I don’t want to go.
I don’t want to go.
I don’t want to go.

To yoga. Yeah, I’m stressing about yoga.

I have to do a story, and deadline is coming up, and you can’t really do a story about yoga if you haven’t done yoga.
But it’s raining. Saturday morning. 7 a.m. A great day to sleep in. The early bird kids aren’t even up yet, but I can’t sleep, because I’m stressing about yoga.

I am not, as the yogis might say, “being where I am.”

I don’t want to go. I’m thinking that might be a good mantra – is it yoga in which they have a mantra that they chant over and over again, or is that something else? If it’s yoga, I’d like mine to be “Idon’twannago.”

I’ve never yoga’d before. My wife has, and says I’ll probably like it, and occasionally has said that I “need it,” which I take to be some sort of comment that I tend to STRESS TOO MUCH.

The magazine folks don’t even know my wife, but for whatever reason decided I would be a good human foil to cast against yoga. Specifically, a version called “hot yoga,” in which – according to a quick Google dive – participants not only do yoga but do yoga while sweating their meditations off in a 100-degree room. The idea is that the heat enhances your flexibility. And I’ll need lots of enhancement.

So, for some reason (a check), I agreed to be the George Plimpton of yoga. Plimpton was a famous writer who reported a football story in 1963 by going to pre-season training camp with the Detroit Lions as a backup quarterback, then writing a book, Paper Lion.

Plimpton tried a lot of other stuff, too … hockey, bridge, high-wire act in a circus … so if he were still doing that stuff in 2012, he’d probably be doing hot yoga. Hot yoga’s become very popular.

All of this races through my brain as I lie in bed listening to the rain and practicing my “Idon’twannago” mantra. Dang, I can’t sleep. I might as well go yoga.

When I got the story assignment, one of the first things I did was call up Chris Yax. The Yax family is to hot yoga in Hampton Roads what the Manning family is to quarterbacking in the NFL. Of seven Yax siblings, five are involved with Hot House Yoga.

Chris is a nice, calm guy, and after a tour of the Norfolk Hot House building and an hourlong talk with him, I felt more calm, too, about doing yoga.

“However flexible you are, however strong you are, however much your mind strays,” he advised, “just let yourself be where you are.”
Since it’s my impression that doing yoga is kind of a womanly thing, I made sure to let Chris know how manly I am by asking about the heating system: What kind of heating system do you need to keep a room at 100 degrees?

It seems a 250,000-BTU Reznor furnace does the trick. It seems that there’s a fine science to hot yoga, and Chris said they keep the room at about 40 percent humidity – and about every 12 minutes, the oxygen in the room is replenished.

Chris also gave me a few tactical pointers for my first class: No heavy foods two hours beforehand. If you drink coffee, don’t drink it beforehand (which means I’ll be performing yoga for the first time ever as a giant grouch). Make sure to drink plenty of water, and we require that everyone bring water, because they’ll need it.

Finally, for guys, shirts are optional, but he recommends “lined shorts.”

“Sometimes, we have some large men doing the classes, and with the 100-degree heat and the sweat…”

Oh, Lord. … Idon’twannago, Idon’twannago.

Over at Hot House Yoga, I walk in the rain across the parking lot and in the front door. It’s 8:10 on Saturday morning, and the place is bustling. The 7 a.m. class has let out, and people are flowing out from that and in for the 8:30.
I tell the woman at the front desk what I’m doing – story, magazine, never done this before. She tells me where the mats are, and the mat covers. Hot House provides them, because, again, due to the sweat, if you didn’t have one of the nice soft covers on your mat, it’d stick to you like Saran Wrap.

I don’t really feel like talking to anybody, so I grab a mat and duck into the locker room. Maybe I could just hide out in here and pretend I did a class. There’s nice soaps, pleasant music, high-quality tile showers. …
I briefly engage another guy to ask if I should go with the long black sweatpants (my preference) or LINED shorts?

“You may want the shorts…it’s HOT in there.”

And … bare feet?

He nods.

I keep on the optional T-shirt, because I’m not one of those comfortable-walking-around-the-yard-shirtless guys.

Into the room. The light is dim. Bending my inflexible limbs into unnatural poses immediately leaves my mind when I’m enveloped in the hot air. It’s hard to breathe. I’m not sure I can be in here for the next hour and 15 minutes.

Five other people are in here already. I stake out a spot in what appears to be the back. I lie down perfectly flat, close my eyes and pretend to be leaving my worries behind, but really, start thinking how long I have to catch a nap.

Only minutes pass before I feel sweat forming on my head. Not perspiration. Not glistening.
People keep coming and coming into the room – women, men, all shapes and sizes. A guy walks just past me and – dude, really, that close? – unrolls and places his mat like 2 feet away. I change my mantra to Ihopehehaslinedshorts,
Ihopehehaslinedshorts.

Nice music starts playing, not overly New Age, just the musical equivalent of a trickling stream, and our instructor begins.

“Hi everyone. My name is Jill, and I’ll be guiding you through your practice today. Stand up and come to the front of your mats.”

Jill says we’re going to start with “Mountain Pose.” I don’t know any yoga positions, and I know only a few yoga position names, so I’m going to have to imitate a person in whichever direction we are being asked to face.

“Bend the knees a little … shins move forward … engage the front of your thighs to straighten the legs … careful not to lock your knees. … Pull the lower belly in and up … pull the ribs back and down.”

I’m not sure what she means by this, but I am pretty sure Governor Bob McDonnell just signed legislation outlawing this very thing.

This is the tough thing about yoga, hot or not, and it’s probably not fair to restrict it to yoga, but you can’t just go out and start doing it. It would take a while to really get competent enough at it. To equate it to a sport I’m more familiar with: If you were playing basketball with someone who had never played or watched it before and you told him to go “run a pick and roll,” that probably wouldn’t work out.

Jill keeps going. Yoga moves a lot more quickly than I ever imagined. I imagined a lot of lying down on the mat, and we haven’t even gotten to do that yet.

“Create an upside-down V with the body … hands shoulder-width apart … index fingers pointing forward … separate the fingers wide … core strong … long spine … feet hip-width apart … heels behind second and third toes. … Long breath in … long breath out.”

I keep trying to mimic what others are doing, looking around while trying not to look like I am looking around. There are some people, quite a few actually, who swoop and reposition themselves from one movement to the next in such a graceful manner.

Mr. Ihopehehaslinedshorts isn’t one of them, but he’s way better than I am.
I have no access to a clock, but at what seems like 20 minutes in, my eye itches and I put my index finger into the corner near the top of my nose. It is so full of sweat that it makes the sound of someone trying to pull a foot out of mud.

I wonder if there will ever be an official drink water break, but I stop and take a
few sips.

Jill pushes on: “Step your right foot forward 2 feet … lift and extend your left leg … point your toes … square off your hips and your shoulders … strong core. Stay here … or … hinge at the hips … body down and leg up … keep your arms with your ears … gaze forward underneath your hands. … To deepen … bring your body level to the floor … left hip rolling down … hold for 4 … 3 … 2 … extend … and release.”

I absolutely can’t do some of these, but I am trying.

I can see that if these instructions become second nature, if you improve your flexibility, get your breathing right, this could really help a person, I’m thinking.

I am often the human embodiment of stress: looking calm on the outside, worried about everything on the inside.

I remember what Chris Yax told me: “If you think it, you are experiencing it.
If you’re stressed in the mind, your body listens to it.”

I did have one point of mental release during the class. It was about halfway through, and sweat poured off my head and down into my face. But the heat no longer mattered. Some automated physical adjustment had occurred. I felt pretty good.

There was even one point when I swore I felt a cool ripple of air.
Jill: “The body is soft … the mind is clear … the breath is your focus. … As you feel the breath … notice the stilling of the mind … embrace the moment. … If thoughts come in … the mind moves … just notice … come back to the breath … back to the moment … into stillness. Thank you for sharing. … Namasté. ”

Namasté?

Wait, I know that word. They say that at the end. I’m done! I did yoga!

I was feeling pretty good, until I mentioned it to my 9-year-old daughter about a week later.

“YOU? You did yoga? I would pay however much money I have to have seen that,” she says.

Well, I did do it.

“I’d pay however much money I have, PLUS 10 dollars if I could have taken pictures,” she says.

The magazine’s going to take pictures of me trying to do it. You can see those.

“I bet they’re going to sell a lot of those magazines – and I’m going to be one of  the buyers,” she says.

Be where you are, I tell myself. Just be where you are.

Hotelier Walter Banks, on growing up with – and beyond – the Cavalier.

by Roberta Vowell
photography by Eric Lusher

Walter Banks’ childhood was the stuff kids’ dreams are made of.
His father was general manager of Virginia Beach’s grand Cavalier Hotel and Beach Club for most of the years between 1929 until 1959, and from toddler to teen, little Walter had the run of the place.

The lush gardens were his playground; he roamed at will with his boxer pup, Bub. “There was a fig tree, great for climbing,” Banks, now 68, says from his Florida home. “Those trees, they are special to a child.”

There were ponies to ride. Ponies! On the beach! And in the winter, the family would gather around the fireplace in the hotel’s very English-pub restaurant, The Hunt Room. Dad would order a whiskey sour, mom sipped an old-fashioned, and Walter would munch potato chips washed down with a Roy Rogers – a most excellent childhood mocktail of soda, grenadine syrup and as many maraschino cherries as could be begged from the bartender.

Funny thing, though. Just the other day, Walter Banks was sitting beside the Atlantic Ocean, at his own luxurious resort, the Lago Mar, in Fort Lauderdale, and he spied his granddaughter hop up on a stool at the outside Promenade Bar. “She was batting her eyelashes, pretty as you please, trying to get more cherries in her soda,” he says. “I think her mother, Debbie, did it, too, when she was a little thing.”

In the late 1950s, the Banks family moved to Fort Lauderdale to make the Lago Mar their own. Walter Banks built a career, and a life, there. But
decades later, Virginia Beach remains a home as well. He owns a house here, on quiet Bay Island. He and his wife, Debbie, fly up in their private jet about once a month. Those visits, and his life in the luxury hospitality business, help keep memories and traditions alive.

Traditions. There’s his son, Lee Banks. He took the family business a step
further, building two lush resorts in Costa Rica, complete with an eco-park of native animals and an active volcano. The youngest Banks hotelier has problems his father and grandfather never dreamed of.

“I called my son the other day,” his father says. “I was complaining about something at Lago Mar, an air conditioner not working. He called me a couple days later and said, ‘Your problems are insignificant. I had two jaguars get out of their enclosure, and we’re searching the property for them.’ I said, ‘You’re right, I’ve never had a problem with jaguars here at Lago Mar. In fact, the only jaguars we have are out in the parking lot.’ ”

Continuing the family tradition, Lee Banks’ three daughters spend summers at the Costa Rica resorts, Waterfall Gardens and The Springs. “Can you imagine?” his father says. “They’ve got an aviary with butterflies, and hummingbirds you can feed by hand, and toucans to play with. Will Smith was just there. They filmed the last Bachelor there.

“They’re going to have an even better life than me. I’m feeling downright
deprived.”

Banks says all this with a laugh. He remembers his childhood at the Cavalier as magical.

His father, Sidney Banks, had begun working as a young man in hotels in Roanoke, the biggest nearby city east of his native Bland County. He came to the Cavalier as general manager at age 31, right after the stock market crash of ’29. He left the Cavalier for a few years, moving his family across the Chesapeake Bay to manage the imposing Chamberlin Hotel in Hampton.

But most of those years were spent at the Cavalier, with the Banks family – Sidney, mother Florence and young Walter – living in a tiny white clapboard house christened The Maryland Cottage. Tennis courts spread outside the family home, but Walter’s game was golf. He spent long, lazy days at the Cavalier Golf and Yacht Club. By age 15, he was an ace, honing his game to a four under par (the kind of handicap that stops cocktail chatter in the clubhouse). His chief competitor was an orthopedic surgeon who also set both Walter’s arms after the kid fractured them in separate incidents.

Those were the days before liability lawyers popped up in every TV commercial, and so the pool was crowned by the challenge of childhood, both terrifying and exhilarating – the high diving board. “You never see those anymore,” Banks laments.

It wasn’t all Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, though. “I snuck around,” Banks says, “but I always got caught. I had hundreds of babysitters – there were 400 people working at the Cavalier, including the beach club and yacht club, and they were always watching me.”

He had friends from school, but most of his playmates were the children
of guests. Many of the families returned year after year, and the children forged strong bonds.

But when Walter was 16, his life took a different turn. The war ended, the economy rebounded and Americans began crisscrossing the country in search of the good life. Sidney Banks found it in Florida, a state ballooning with the tourist industry. In 1959, he purchased a 110-room oceanfront hotel in Fort Lauderdale called the Lago Mar. The place was dated. The family began demolishing and rebuilding it.

“Fort Lauderdale was not much different than Virginia Beach at that time,” Walter Banks says now. “It was small and compact and a lot less people.’’
He ran the beach concessions as a teen. He entered the University of Miami intending to become an attorney.

Man plans, God laughs. Hurricane Cleo brewed up in the Caribbean in late August 1964, slashed through Haiti and Cuba, and then crushed the Florida coast. In all, Cleo caused $198 million in damage and killed 217 people.
The Lago Mar took a huge hit. Much of what the Banks family had lovingly built and restored was in shambles.

“My senior year of college, I spent all day working here, then going to classes at night,” Banks says, “helping my parents put this place back together.’’

He finished his undergraduate degree, but more important, he had a huge change of heart.

“I always took the hotel business for granted, growing up the way I did,” Banks says. “But when it looked like we had a chance to lose the property, I realized how much I loved this property, how much I loved the staff, how much I loved our visitors. … I saw how much it meant to my parents to keep the hotel, how deeply they care.

“Once you’re about to lose something, you realize how much it means to you.”

He ditched plans for law school and took courses at the respected hotel management program at Cornell University. He left in 1965, and married Debbie two weeks later. Back at the Lago Mar, Sidney Banks, then 67, made an announcement.

“He said, ‘You’re going to give me a graduating present. You’re taking over the business.’ ”

It wasn’t quite that smooth, though.

“I had a great title,” Banks says with a laugh, “but it didn’t mean much, because everything was up to my dad.”

Banks eventually took on more authority and dove into a remodeling program in the ’80s and ’90s. The family added 164 suites and 40 rooms and a spa, and even planned a saltwater lagoon where visitors would swim with tropical fish. The proposed lagoon ended up as another swimming pool. “Do you know how hard it is to have fish like that? They get sick! Illnesses you’ve never heard of. They have to have special food. Everything needs to be cleaned. We realized we weren’t in the fish business.”

The result of the Banks family’s hard work is a resort rated four diamonds by AAA. Lago Mar boasts a 500-foot private beach, two swimming pools – one with a tiny island where singers perform – four tennis courts, a putting green and a giant outdoor chess board with life-size playing pieces. “Everybody loves the chess board,” Banks says.
Banks also gave back to his adopted home. He was on the board of the Federal Reserve branch of Miami, chairman of the Holy Cross Hospital board, and a volunteer and fundraiser for the private Pine Crest School, his children’s alma mater.

For Walter Banks, the best thing about Lago Mar is that he was able to offer his own children, Debbie and Lee, an updated version of his own childhood. “They always had the run of the place. One of the best things is that we have so many international visitors, they made friends from everywhere. Debbie also traveled, and I think by now you could put her in any major city and she’d know someone to call.”

The younger Debbie, 45, stayed on at the hotel. She has four children and is in charge of children’s programs and holiday programs, special events and international travel. Lee, 44, and his family live in Florida during the school year. Everyone lives within three miles of the Lago Mar.

“My grandchildren, they get to meet people from all over the world,” Banks says, “and those are the people, year after year, they come back. Debbie’s kids are just like she was, making friends with all nationalities.”

Today Walter Banks and his wife continue their frequent visits here to see her brother and Walter’s old stomping grounds. “My children, my grandchildren, they have a wonderful place at Lago Mar,” he says. “Same experience. But mine was better. The Cavalier was special.’’