Thanks for the compliments, guys!  Firstly, I believe that I discovered
the "bandwidth sink" that I discussed on "Roadgeek" (and got good
feedback on) a couple weeks ago, an article that got a lot of attention
on the "Snope's Urban Legends Pages", and I unlinked several of the .jpg
images and the total website bandwidth dropped back to normal.  I'm glad
that I solved that in time for this article, which should increase
website usage.

Secondly, Earl Swift is a fairly prominent writer, and he works for the
_Virginian-Pilot_, and his articles typically are later published in at
least a half dozen other newspapers.  We spent about 4 hours together on
the interview and he is an interesting person, and he gave me some
valuable pointers on how I might go into free-lance writing for a
living.

I'll promote his articles and books, here are several that he wrote
recently --

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=88750&ran=93871
"19th century mountain tunnel may soon return to fame"
By EARL SWIFT, _The Virginian-Pilot_, July 6, 2005
Synopsis: Claudius Crozet’s celebrated Blue Ridge Tunnel, a stone arch
railroad tunnel four-fifths of a mile long under Afton Mountain in
Virginia, once the longest such structure in the world.  Abandoned since
1944, it is now the centerpiece of a planned hiking and biking trail.

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=83757&ran=185992
"Claimed only by the flood"
By EARL SWIFT, _The Virginian-Pilot_ - March 19, 2005
Synopsis:  Four children from the same family were lost in the floods in
Nelson County VA in 1969 resulting from the remnants of Hurricane
Camille, and nobody ever stepped forward to claim them, theories abound,
it is believed that they were on a trip traveling through the state, but
the children remain unidentified.

http://www.bookfinder.us/review1/0618168206.html
_Where They Lay: Searching for America's Lost Soldiers_
AUTHOR: Earl Swift
Synopsis: "Swift focuses on the search for an army helicopter crew that
went down in Laos in 1971.  He interweaves accounts of a generation's
worth of site sifting, involving everything from the most basic shovel
work to satellite relaying of computer data, with the whole history of
the remains-recovery project.  He adds short biographies of the four
lost airmen-Jack Barker, John Dugan, Billy Dillender and John Chubb-and
the details of forensic and archeological techniques used over the last
generation".

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/swift.html
_Journey on the James: Three Weeks through the Heart of Virginia_
by Earl Swift
Synopsis: "In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling the entire
length of the James.  He hadn't been in a canoe since his days as a Boy
Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater, not to mention
man-made obstacles, to challenge even experienced paddlers.  But
reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot of freeze-dried
food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself -- he hoped not
literally -- in the river and its history.  What Swift survived to bring
us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in a fourteen-foot
plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life of Virginia".

--
Scott M. Kozel    Highway and Transportation History Websites
Virginia/Maryland/Washington, D.C. http://www.roadstothefuture.com
Philadelphia and Delaware Valley   http://www.pennways.com