The 2009 New River Valley Triathlon benefits the Mental Health Association of the New River Valley, Inc. Here's a history (.pdf) of the Mental Health Association.
One of the founders of the organization was Al Payne.
From Bob Giles:
You have to be somebody really special when you have a building on a modern university named after you and you have not contributed dollops of dollars to the alumni fund.
Al Payne’s building was completed about 10 years ago on the Virginia Tech Campus. They named it not for an engineer, agriculturist, inventor, or internationally famous person but for the long-term ecumenical campus pastor.
I knew Al Payne a little. I visited him at his home for a long delayed conversation...just because. Our plans for later such pleasant meetings were canceled when he died ten days later.
Al Payne knew of my concern for the environment and his concerns had grown. I led one of his seminars on religion and as thanks he sent a postage stamp of Hopkins, the great teacher, in a hand-made wooden frame. I cherished it for the thanks, creativity, personal dimension, and possible meaning.
He was involved in religious affairs throughout campus and community life for many years, a high-wire, difficult-to-fund act performed over competing demands and expressed needs from diverse religions, churches, skeptics, and atheists and those professors teaching history, philosophy and religious studies. He was the person who was called upon to pray at the beginning of all major campus events. His prayers were masterful art works, like his polished stamp frame. Non-denominational, brief, occasionally humorous, crafted poems, they called for the best of human-kind. His prayers merited collection and were published.
The prayers were the outer manifestation of the man with a charming, engaged wife, active in his church, active on campus, engaged in lunch conversations with thoughtful people, advising on hundreds of committees, a prime mover in early local mental health program development.
In the evening, his named building casts a shadow on a student dining hall where some pray. He would like that, but he would be so modest as not to even be able to see the effects of the light of his smile and life vigor on the University and surrounding town and county.
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