Bill Lynch, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

West Virginia native Dave Evans enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was only 17. A year later, his unit was ambushed in Vietnam. Most of the men were killed. Evans survived but lost both legs.

He returned to the United States, where he was fitted with prosthetics.

Evans went to school, joined the national anti-war effort and became a peace activist. He later divided his time between West Virginia and a long list of war-torn countries, where he traveled to help fit prosthetic limbs to civilian survivors, many of them children.

Evans died in 2020 at the age of 68. Filmmakers Alison Gilkey and Eric Neudel gathered footage of Evans and interviewed the activist and others about the personal devastation of war to make the film, “The Wake Up Call.”

Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Gilkey and Neudel about the film.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: First off, tell me about this film that you’ve made.

Neudel: We had this idea to do a film about war. It started out in Laos when we were there on a trip for the state department as part of the American Film Showcase. They were showing a film that we had made. That film was traveling around the world. We went up to northern Laos to the border with Vietnam and China, in this area called the Plain of Jars. It’s actually a bigger area than that. What we discovered there was that it was highly bombed. There were lots of unexploded bombs there. We filmed. We had our equipment. We filmed a lot of the kids and people.

Anyhow, we got great material, beautiful material about these people have been damaged by this American bombing. That area is the most bombed area on the planet. A million tons of ordinance was dropped in Laos. It was a neutral country, but it was a good dumping zone.

Gilkey: Well, and that’s kind of the point of how awful this bombing was, because it was the American warplanes that couldn’t land at the airbase with ordinance. So, they just indiscriminately dumped whatever munitions they had left over the mountains of Northern Laos.

Neudel: And in the farmlands, too. So a lot of the people who were injured were farmers and their children.

Gilkey: Well, we got back home with it. Hours and hours and hours of footage. And we were super excited to explore this idea further. And as we were going through the footage, of course, the light bulb went on, oh my goodness, we’re essentially looking at a foreign language film here.

We couldn’t afford a translator. We had many, many hours of footage. So we then started thinking about, ‘okay, this is a really important subject area, but how are we going to tell something about war? And who can we find to be the main character?’

Well, turns out that decades ago, Eric had worked with this man, Dave Evans, who is the main character in the film, shooting Dave, as he was working in prosthetics clinics. Nothing came of that project.

But we were able to contact Dave at his home in Antigua, Guatemala, and he graciously agreed to allow us to come and stay with him for a couple of weeks.

Lynch: Can you tell me a little about Dave — his personality and what he was like?

Neudel: Well, he was an amazing character, irascible, sometimes really difficult, sometimes a super great buddy. It was wonderful to go out to a restaurant with him or a bar and talk with him. He had this vast amount of experience in the world. And his story was amazing.

You got the feeling with him that he was a person possessed. He himself needed repair. And I think the way he thought he could repair himself was repairing other people. So, he was really passionate about that, and really obsessed with doing his best.

Gilkey: He saw himself in the amputees that he was trying to assist.

Lynch: Dave passed away in 2020. Did that have any effect on the making of the documentary? Did it change any directions or thoughts that were planned?

Gilkey: No. In fact, the film was finished — its structure — everything was in place. By the time Dave passed, we were going through the process of hiring a composer and doing the post-production work.

Neudel: When he died on July 3, Allison called me and said, “You know, I have some really, really bad news for you, and I know you’re going to be really upset.”

And when she told me that, the first thought I had is, “He never got to see this. He never had…”

This film had finally, totally gelled and was resonating.

I was so anxious. We were both so anxious for him to see it that it kind of, like, broke my heart that he didn’t. He didn’t. This is his legacy, I think.

Gilkey: It’s part of it.

Neudel: I mean, he’s got a lot of people. He trained a lot of people he’s helped. So that’s, of course, a bigger legacy than what we did. But in terms of expressing his spirit. I think this is a good vehicle for getting across who he is and was, and what he meant. You know, I was… when he died… it was painful.

Lynch: What do you hope people will take away from the film?

Gilkey: I hope it makes people think. As Dave himself says in the film, I wish people would just think, think a little. These young kids that we send off to war… I mean, the film is not anti-military, but it is anti-war because we send these young kids off and they are kids. Dave was only 17. He wasn’t even old enough to sign his own enlistment papers, you have to ask his mum to do it.

What do we think is going to happen to these tender young hearts and minds, when they see, inevitably, what they’re going to see in war? We bring them home. They’re not the same people.

So, think, just listen to the wisdom in the film. This wisdom comes from people who have lived that experience.

Neudel: The other side for me, the second part for me is that Dave, as I said earlier, he was repairing himself by repairing other people. In my mind, I think one of the lessons is that if you really want to do something, if you want to be happy, if you want to repair yourself, do something for other people. Try to focus on helping other people and it will yield a kind of redemption for you.

It may not be as in Dave’s case. Vietnam always haunted him, but it filled him, and it made him a better person. He was not someone who just gave like five bucks to a cause and that’s it. You’re done.

He went actively, existentially into that world, and he made it better for real human beings in very tangible ways.

Lynch: Eric… Allison… thank you very much.

Neudel and Gilkey: Thanks so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.

“The Wake Up Call” will be shown at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 23 at the Culture Center Theater at the Capitol Complex in Charleston. A pre-screening reception begins at 6 p.m. For more information, including ticket prices, visit festivallcharleston.com.

On a busy holiday afternoon at the Capitol Market, Kanawha County native Kevin Struthers was trying not to sound too excited about his job, but sometimes it’s near impossible for him not to gush.

“I’m the Kennedy Center’s Director of Programming Jazz, Chamber and Classical New Music,” he said, laughed and added, “It’s kind of an unwieldy title.”

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the United States National Cultural Center. Located in the nation’s capital, it’s a sprawling building that houses theaters and concert halls that have hosted some of the most respected and revered artists in the world.

The 55-year-old oversees a chunk of what is seen and heard on those stages and is responsible for the artistic programming and day-to-day direction of jazz, chamber, and classical music programming at the Kennedy Center.

Struthers has been around the famous and notable for decades. He’s been there backstage, but also listened to superstars in their respective musical fields rehearsing from his office and been at his desk when some of these same performers have ducked their heads in through the door to say hello, but he can still get impressed.

The director sighed and marveled at his own career, which seemed, if not impossible, at least unlikely for a saxophone player from South Charleston High School.

“It has been amazing,” he said. “I have been so lucky, so privileged.”

Struthers was born in Charleston and went to school in South Charleston. His father, George, now deceased, was a dentist for 37 years in Kanawha City.

“My mom, Nancy, still lives in Charleston,” he said. “So, does my mother-in-law, Susan Harpold.”

Struthers said he was one of the local music and theater kids. He was in the band, sang in show choir and took roles with the Charleston Light Opera Guild.

“I did all the artsy stuff,” he said.

One of his strengths, though, was leadership. He was organized, focused and responsible — which often led to him being tapped for those kinds of roles behind the scenes of performances.

In 1986, after he went to Washington and Lee University in Virginia to study musicology, he fell into the same kind of pattern.

Management and administration suited him.

“A lot of people in administration are frustrated artists,” Struthers said. “To be an artist, you really have to have that drive.”

He had a lot of drive, but he wasn’t so sure he had enough talent as either a singer or a saxophone player to be really successful.

“But the arts were such an important part of my life,” he said. “I always wanted to be part of that.”

Friends told him he could maybe find a career in arts management — either overseeing a theater or maybe a few performers. He started looking for a program.

While studying at Washington and Lee, he met his future wife, Courtney Harpold, a pre-med student, who also happened to be from Charleston.

They got to know each other while singing in a school choir.

“We’d never met,” Struthers said. “I went to South Charleston, and she went to ‘The Hill,’ George Washington.”

Harpold lived two doors down from his grandparents. Struthers said they knew many of the same people, even had some of the same friends. There was some crossover between schools and church.

“We were at the same events at the same time,” he said. “We just didn’t know each other.”

A romance blossomed.

In 1989, Struthers earned his music degree, with an emphasis on musicology, while Harpold went on to WVU Medical School.

They continued to date, while Harpold worked toward her medical degree. Meanwhile, Struthers took a job with the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and then Tourism.

“That was really fun,” he said. “I was one of the public relations officials. I got to travel all over the state and host travel writers from across the country.”

The job allowed him to mountain bike, ski and go rafting.

“It was a great job for a 24-year-old,” he said, adding, “But not a lot of money.”

In Charleston, he stayed active in the arts, sang and was in the light opera guild’s production of “Oklahoma!” which starred a teenage Jennifer Garner.

“She was something then and look at her now,” Struthers said.

In 1993, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in arts management at American University in Washington, D.C., just as Harpold was finishing her studies at the West Virginia University School of Medicine.

She graduated with honors and then was placed at Georgetown University Hospital for her medical residency.

“She’s just brilliant,” Struthers said. “We got married and moved to Washington.”

While studying, he interned at National Public Radio, where he worked in development.

“Which is what they call fundraising,” he said.

One of his American University professors was also the vice president of development at NPR. After Struthers completed his degree in 1995, he said the professor helped him get a job as the assistant to the vice president of development at the Kennedy Center.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” he said. “I learned everything as I went.”

After a year and a half of working in the back office, Struthers said he became aware that he hadn’t stepped foot inside a theater in years.

“This was not why I got into the business,” he said.

So, when a line producer job opened up at the Kennedy Center, he applied for it and was made line producer for “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center.”

“A line producer job is a lot of rigmarole,” he said. “It’s contracts and travel arrangements and housing and hospitality — a lot of details.”

But it was still very cool.

The job opened up new worlds of music to Struthers, who didn’t know an awful lot about jazz.

“I’d had some exposure to jazz at Washington and Lee,” he said. “I’d played some.”

But spending time around Dr. Billy Taylor, an acclaimed jazz composer and pianist, who was considered a living legend, was entirely different.

“So, here I am in this job, meeting all these amazing artists and I don’t know who any of these people are,” he said. “I didn’t really understand what I was being exposed to, but I was learning.”

From a line producer, Struthers eventually became the director of jazz programming at the Kennedy Center, working with Taylor until his death in 2010 at the age of 89. He continued as the director of jazz programming with the center’s current artistic director for jazz, Jason Moran, who succeeded Taylor in 2011.

“The artistic director has the vision and the ideas,” Struthers said. “My role is to take these thoughts and view them through the lens of our institutional mission and then look at hall availability, the budget, what’s playing in the market and create a season.”

It’s a weighty responsibility for all of them, he said.

“The Kennedy Center’s mission is to present the best in performing arts in the world,” Struthers said. “We are the national performing arts center.”

While on staff, Struthers has met or been in the room with some of the most prominent artists in the world as well as a few of the most powerful people in the country. Washington’s elite comes to the Kennedy Center.

“You really know who you’re going to see there,” he said.

The pandemic changed things at the Kennedy Center. Struthers was asked to take on the role of director of programming for classical new music and chamber music, as well as jazz.

“It began a whole new chapter for me,” he said.

Like many other organizations, Kennedy Center employees shifted to remote work during the pandemic. This changed everything for Struthers and not necessarily for the worse.

Struthers and his family have lived in Shepherdstown since the late 1990s.

He said, “For the first six or seven years, I took the train into Washington, but as Courtney and I had kids and they got older and my job evolved, making the train became impossible.”

For over 15 years, he drove 75 miles each way to work, but remaining in West Virginia was important to Struthers and his wife.

“I was what the government calls ‘an extreme commuter,’ but the pandemic changed all of that,” he said. “I could work from home. That much has been such a gift.”

It turned out that he could do a lot of his work from home and because everyone was meeting more online, he was able to make contact with some people more easily than before.

These days, Struthers splits his time between his office in Washington and his office at home.

“We’re working on trying to find the right balance,” he said. “But I clearly don’t need to be there all the time, still.”

The pandemic brought something else to the Kennedy Center: “Mountain Stage.”

Struthers’ bosses said that while the Kennedy Center was doing a lot of programming, they weren’t focusing that much on folk, country, or world music.

“Mountain Stage was the perfect vehicle to elevate that kind of work,” he said. “Mountain Stage has an eclectic mix of music — and it’s in West Virginia.”

Struthers said his superiors were aware that he was from West Virginia.

“They were like, ‘Oh really, Kevin,’” he laughed.

Stuthers said he told them, “I know, I know, but they’re the best.”

“Mountain Stage” made its debut at the Kennedy Center Oct. 24. Hosted by Kathy Mattea, the show included performances by Asleep at the Wheel and West Virginia’s own Tim O’Brien.

Behind the scenes, before the show, Struthers said he ran into “Mountain Stage” piano player Bob Thompson.

Struthers remembered the first time he watched him play, over 40 years ago. Thompson had been hired to play music at area schools.

He saw him perform at South Charleston Junior High.

“What a great piano player,” Struthers said. “Never would I have imagined our lives would intersect like that.”

The director had no idea what was ahead for him. The pandemic makes looking too far into the future difficult, but he knows he has an amazing life and an incredible job for someone who loves the arts.

“There’s nothing like being in a room with live music,” he said. “You can’t quite replicate the sound of a live orchestra. There’s just something incomparable to listening to a record and being 30 feet away when Aretha Franklin is singing.”

Author: Bill Lynch

'The Wake Up Call' Documentary Explores A West Virginian's Fight After War

W.Va. Native Works With Legends At Kennedy Center