It was entirely not like Bob Young to be a no-show at the News-Press’ weekly info sharing lunches on Mondays in the Little City. So a number of regulars began to be concerned starting a couple months past. But there were assurances from Bob via text messages and some on his staff that everything was OK. He just needed time to rebound from surgery, we were told. He clearly did not want any information about his true medical condition to become known.
But Bob passed away this Monday night, Nov. 18. He was 82 although up until recently, he both looked and acted decades younger. He exhibited boundless energy as chair of the F.C. Economic Development Authority and as a 24/7 on-call patron of the best outcomes for the Little City. His bigger-than-life presence was an indispensable part of the City’s remarkable growth over the last two decades. His affinity for the Art Nouveau architectural and artistic style reflected his inner self, as did the accouterments in his dream personal home that he built on a Poplar Drive corner lot. There is a giant Mucha poster in there and a lot of shiny German WMF steel antique pieces. There was added a deeply humanizing element, a young English Springer Spaniel named Brandywine, Brandy for short, whose magnetic personality charmed all at Young’s office where he took her every day only blocks from his home.
We don’t often see people of Bob Young’s intellectual and cultural magnitude in normal walks of life. He beat his head against the wall trying to get things done in his first area home in McLean before learning of an urge for growth just up the road in little Falls Church, where he showed up in 1999. While Falls Church had also had a reputation of downright hostility to commercial growth, we at the News-Press had begun a decade earlier challenging that sentiment on grounds that growth was required to pay for the good schools everybody wanted.
In Falls Church, Bob Young was not everyone’s cup of tea, but then innovators and city builders seldom are because they stand for new ideas and change for the better. He generated an aura of impatience that offended some, but we at this newspaper loved his brash can-do approach and endless flood of new initiatives and ideas. The City has become a mecca for good development, schools, cuisine and general quality of life with a tax rate that is heading in the opposite direction of every other jurisdiction around. Please read the story cobbled together about all he’s done here. No real point in repeating it all in this space, so take that story as an extension of this commentary.
Among other things, like another Renaissance Man before him, W&OD Trail pioneer Walter Mess, Young was among the few who expressed a true appreciation for the benefit of the News-Press to this community.
