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My son Douglas is driving now. He is 16.
His slim black wallet opens to display the badge of freedom and wheels — his permanent Virginia driver’s license.
I remember sitting with him in the Fauquier County Circuit Court in early May the day he received it.
It was a formal session of the court and along with Doug in his slacks and itchy dress shirt were other teen-agers, appropriately attired, with one or both parents. All the seats in the courtroom balcony were filled.
Judge Dudley Payne and Commonwealth’s Attorney JonVargo
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down to its present number of 180) under his direction.
Vargo is a quiet, observant, optimistic educator, a shy, selfeffacing man of middle years. His enthusiasms reveal themselves, almost in spite of himself, when he talks about his students and the school.
“I will miss the students mostly. They are good kids out here. And I will miss the wonderful faculty who work here,” he said. “They are highly dedicated.”
He is most proud, he says, of bringing an awareness of a larger world into the minds of the students. He organized a Model United Nations, taking students two years in a row to Dublin, Ireland, to participate in a simulated U.N., attended by other students from around the world.
In the classrooms, he began mini course offerings, not for credit, that have included Russian Film, French, Swedish and Japanese Literature, African History, and a History of the Middle East. He expanded course offerings that now include Economics, Music Appreciation, and Psychology as well as the addition of more Advanced Placement courses.
And he took a further step by recruiting international students to attend Wakefield, starting with four but now pointing to 15 students from as far away as Turkey and Japan and Taiwan. For these students, he set up a boarding facility in the Old Trinity Manor, which was the former home of the school’s founder, Dr. Lynn and his wife, Pamela.
Vargo, as an outgrowth of his own international background, specializing in languages and linguistics with degrees from Georgetown University and New York University, has tried to “expand Wakefield students’ views of attending colleges outside of Virginia — not that Virginia doesn’t have wonderful universities and colleges,” he said. “It does. But I push the students to look further afield than that.”
During his own undergraduate years and those spent earning a Master’s degree, he lived and traveled abroad, using the languages he has mastered, Spanish, Portuguese and French. “Travel changes your perspective and how you see the world,” he said.
Partly because of this kind of perspective, the school, he says, “continues to draw very
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