By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

 “This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be,” said Bob Dombrowski of the Trenton Arts Council.

Indeed. There were nine people in the room, not counting the local press and Bill Marshall. It was Jan. 20, and American Legion Post 106 on Highway 11 North was a scene of cheerful, high-tech pandemonium, laptops littering tables, wires crossing wires, men hanging off ladders. 

“How far away does this light need to be from the projector?” asked Dusty Muraszko, a Vietnam veteran and Legion Post member turned roadie for the day.

“I need a one-inch plug,” said Keith Bien of Skypilot, a local Internet service provider.

“Can you hear us now?” said Bill Bankson, a technology specialist with Dade County High School. He was talking to his sister, Lisa, in Armuchee, through an Internet video connection. “Wave your hand,” he told her.

Lisa waved. There was widespread relief. It had worked!

But getting Lisa to wave to the camera was not the purpose that had united all these brains, all this talent, this small tsunami of helpfulness, volunteerism and goodwill. Not to mention the local press and Bill Marshall. 

Rather, Lisa in Armuchee was standing in for U.S. Army National Guard Specialist Jeffrey Farmer in the Mideast as the tsunami of goodwill worked to engineer a live video feed from Trenton, to Ghazni, Afghanistan, so that Farmer could “virtually” attend – in fact, “virtually” preside at – the variety show being organized in his benefit for Feb. 5. 

Farmer and his unit, Delta Company 1-121 out of Milledgeville, were away on mission, so nobody was available to man the Afghanistan end of the operation. But the tsunami had a mission, too – today had been set aside to test the live feed – and the show had to go on. Thus Lisa in Armuchee instead of Farmer in Afghanistan. It was, anyway, the same principle, and Bien of Skypilot, there to wire the connection, said it ought to work. But he’d be back the day of, he added, in case. 

Jeffrey Farmer made local news in November when, as he served on active duty in Afghanistan, his Dade County home was broken into and his possessions stolen, down to the clothes he wore and the tools he used to support himself as an arborist.

Now Vietnam vet Bill Lockhart, Farmer’s American Legion Post buddy, is making another kind of news as, in a weird and wonderful partnership with the Trenton Arts Council, he spearheads “Farmer’s Aid,” a benefit meant to replace what Farmer lost, not to mention provide a gala night out for Dade County residents. 

The event will feature not only country-style bluegrass music but also beatnik-style poetry reading provided by the Arts Council, bringing together two sectors of the community that don’t often mingle. “We probably have a wide variety of different views, but how important is that?” said Dombrowski.

“Oh, politically, we won’t even talk,” said Lockhart. “It’s not about him and his cultural beliefs or me and my cultural beliefs. It’s about helping this soldier that is doing what he’s doing where we both can have cultural differences.”

The web connection that will, with any luck, unite Farmer with his supporters on Feb. 5 was the idea of the Arts Council’s Mary Petruska, who denies that she first uttered the term “live feed” without having a clue what she was talking about. “I understood what it meant,  I just had no idea how to do it,” she said.

That’s where the tech guys come in. Besides Bankson, Bien and Muraszko, techies Chris Greene, also of DCHS, and Seth Houts of the Bank of Dade were there to help. Chuck Peters of Cloudland Productions was manning the video camera, and Dombrowski and Ms. Petruska were the Event Nazis, organizing people and coercing them into posing for pictures for the local press. 

As for Bill Marshall, that’s just the Marshall Law for you:  When two or more are gathered in Dade to do good, at least one of them is going to be Bill.

Lockhart said that he’d tried via email to keep Farmer posted as to what was going on, but he didn’t think the specialist could grasp the extent of the preparations. “I mean, he knows that we’re going to try to help him with some of this stuff, but he doesn’t really realize how much effort is going into his cause,” he said.

In fact, without having been there the day of, it would be difficult for anyone to get a handle on it.  Suffice it to say that American Staging is lending a spotlight; Dade Commissioner and Trenton Better Home Manager Peter Cervelli said he could dig up a screen; and numerous area businesses, and Bill Marshall, are selling tickets. 

Not to mention the volunteers. “Everybody that’s working on this is just putting in incredible amounts of time and nobody’s getting paid,” said Ms. Petruska. “This is Dade County at its finest.”   

Ironically, the recipient of all this goodwill was an unknown commodity to all the volunteers except Lockhart. Or, as cameraman Chuck Peters put it: “So. Is this guy a nice guy? Or is he a jerk?”

The Dade County Sentinel, in keeping with its tradition of hard-hitting journalism, set out to answer that burning question, and this is what we came up with:

 “I  am 40 years old, a Leo,” Farmer told the Sentinel in an email interview. “I have never been married, and in between deployments let’s just say I am looking for a wife.”

Farmer has a mother on the Gulf Coast and a sister in Alabama. He joined the military just out of high school, then after discharge made his living working as a mechanic, hanging Sheetrock, and, most recently, running a tree service. 

Farmer rejoined the service after Sept. 11 changed the world. "I basically heard a call to arms," he wrote. "It said any prior service members that were in a combat field are needed. I was 35 at the time."

Farmer signed up for six years and is now serving his last one. “I am an infantry soldier and my specialty is weapons,” he wrote. “Our mission here is to train and mentor the Afghan police so that they can take over their own security and efficiently run their departments.”

Due to return home in March, Farmer is most concerned about the theft of his tools, which he needs to support himself, but that's not what he misses most. "I had an old 1911 pistol, 45 caliber, that my brother made for my father that was passed down to me after he died. It was the only thing I had left of both my brother and father," he wrote. "Very, very touchy subject."          

The pistol might be irreplaceable, but Bill Lockhart is determined to replace as much of the rest as humanly possible, and he urges Dade to pitch in. A bank account has been set up at the Bank of Dade. To contribute, make checks payable to Jeffrey Farmer and mail them to the Legion at P.O. Box 305, Trenton, Ga. 30752. 

Lockhart has also compiled a list of items that would make useful donations, and this is printed as a sidebar to this article.

Alternatively, you may contribute in a more fun way by simply buying a ticket to the benefit, which begins at 7 p.m. on Feb. 5, at the Legion Hall. Tickets are $10, and doors open at 6 p.m.

The above-mentioned beatnik poetry reading will be accompanied by improvisational jazz band the Undoctored Originals. The second act will be the Big Woods Band, a bluegrass group.

For more information, Bill Lockhart may be contacted at (423) 593-1572, or southernposeur@yahoo.com.

As for Farmer himself, he said it would take a war to keep him away, and he took our email interview as an opportunity to thank the community in advance for coming. "I can only say how much I appreciate their thoughts, prayers and support from all of those who got involved," he wrote. "Words really cannot define nor explain my true feelings. Any more and I’d be crying like a baby."