The Reece family has been Running Man folk for, well, a long time. Charlie and Kim arrived here in the summer of 1987 with four-week-old daughter Carolyn. Our second daughter, Katie, joined us in 1990. The girls tracked through Mt. Vernon Elementary, Tabb Middle, and Tabb High, then Penn State and UGA, then each through grad school. They were both married here and now live with their families (including our five grandkids) outside of Richmond.

We lived on Patuxent Turn for 15 years, then, when Kim got tenure at W&M (more on that later) we took the opportunity to design and build our dream home on Moyock Run with Running Man builder Darrell Hunter, moving there/here in 2002.

Both Carolyn and Katie did the full-bore soccer thing, and both enjoyed four years of choral music at Tabb High with then Running Man resident Gordon Parr. Thanks to social media they’ve maintained strong bonds with Running Man friends that they grew up with.

So, as the expression goes, we’ve seen a thing or two, and we’ve no plans to move anytime soon.

Charlie (aka Charles if you are giving him money) was reared in Oklahoma City. Kim (aka Professor Kimberly if you are similarly formal) grew up outside Cleveland, Ohio. We came to the Peninsula so that Charlie could help design and build the CEBAF accelerator at Jefferson Lab in Newport News. Charlie was part of a physics R&D group at Cornell University that relocated here with specialized experience required for CEBAF.

Charlie attended Baylor University and received a BS in physics, Phi Beta Kappa, then moved to University of Rochester, NY, for graduate school, receiving a PhD there in 1983 working with superconducting radio frequency resonators seeking extreme sensitivity for testing general relativity. (Don’t worry, there’s only a little bit more of this stuff later.)

Kim (conveniently, it turned out for Charlie) went to the University of Rochester for her undergraduate degree in microbiology. She first met Charlie her freshman year because she needed a ride to church, and Charlie was the guy with a car. Yes. It was all acknowledged and above board when Charlie served as TA for Kim’s required physics class – by then we were actually already engaged to be married. (You’ll have to ask if you want more details.) We were married between Kim’s junior and senior years at UofR. She got her BS and started grad school there, then Charlie finished his PhD work and got a job at Cornell. So… Kim moved her graduate work to Cornell in molecular and cellular biology (earning a PhD on early DNA sequencing of particular genes in rice).

Four years later, the move to Virginia is coming and so is Carolyn, so Kim wrapped up her lab work (and an infant) and we moved to Running Man in 1987.

For 36 years Charlie had a succession of job responsibilities at Jefferson Lab. Setting up unique facilities, production engineering, operational optimization, trouble-shooting, advising PhD student research, creating the first online safety information manual perhaps in the world (“what’s to this web stuff anyway” he heard), and managing a technology R&D group for his last decade and a half at JLab. He made technical contributions to several next-generation research particle accelerators in the US, Europe, and Asia. Charlie turned in his badge and keys May 2023, retiring from JLab, but not slowing down. He transitioned to the Extension Master Gardner program, joined the Virginia Choral Society, increased his photography and scuba diving hobbies, and has ample time for other volunteer work and the grandkids.

Kim completed writing her PhD dissertation after we moved the Virginia. We suffered the proverbial two-body problem of professional scientists. Her degree was in plant molecular biology – but nobody does that anywhere near this part of Virginia. Since our anchor looked solid at JLab, Kim retooled herself into a marine molecular biologist and became indispensable at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, the graduate school of marine science for The College of William and Mary. Professor Kimberly is an internationally recognized expert on diseases of shellfish and harmful algal blooms, using DNA sequencing and analysis techniques to track pathogens.

Charlie comes by digging-in-the-dirt genes legitimately. He has long enjoyed gardening and is happy to now have more time with which to tend his ten-tree fruit orchard, vegetable garden, now mature landscape (professionally designed and installed by former Running Man resident Helen Jenele), and recent additions emphasizing native perennial species to support the local ecosystem – think pollinators and birds, rabbits, not so much. He enjoys serving the Virginia Cooperative Extension educational mission via its Master Gardener program, assisting York and Poquoson residents with solid horticulture information.

Kim delights, when she has the time, in cooking and baking for just the two of us, as well as for family and friends. An annual summer event lately has been “Grandma Camp”, when the grandkids get a week of programmed activity at grandma’s house.

Kim and Charlie both sing in our church choir, and both are Elders in the Presbyterian Church (USA). We are charter members of the KirkWood church located across the street from the Tabb Library and the Y, known to many as the Pumpkin Patch place. That welcoming and serving community has been our home since 1987. We’ve served there in every role imaginable. Charlie has recently set up the KirkWood Native Tree Trail in the woods on site as a Master Gardener Tree Stewards project. Feel free to take a walk there and meet 34 different species of your woody native neighbors and learn their important roles in the local ecology via QR codes on tree labels.

How do we celebrate holidays? We eat. For any and every event we gather with local and remote family and share yummy recipes gathered over the years, as well as new creations. An example -- a nephew of ours now living in NYC has joined us every Thanksgiving for the past decade. His tradition, now duty, is to fashion a very beautiful and delicious sour cherry pie using a recipe composed by his great-grandmother. Superb. The sour cherries are saved from our on-site cherry tree.

We are also a theme park family. We’ve had season passes for Busch Gardens every year since 1988, as have Kim’s parents who have regularly made the trek from western PA to join us for the rides and shows.

Years ago we purchased a large Christmas tree. Our tradition is to decorate it primarily with accumulated milestone memory ornaments from the lives of members of our family. We delighted several years ago when our oldest granddaughter, fresh from watching the Pixar movie Inside Out, looked in wonder and declared it our “memory tree” full of core memories.

We were attracted to Running Man because of the effort to retain native trees. It has been a comfortable place to raise and from which to launch a family. In our 37 years here we’ve seen many neighbors come and go. We’ve enjoyed landmark events in the clubhouse, neighborly care during and after hurricane Isabel and lightning and ice storm-induce power outages, Halloween parades back in the day, contributing to planning the powerline exercise trail, and the “distancing” comradery when we all took walks during the Covid shutdown. We appreciate that in Running Man we give each other space to live our diverse lives, while knowing that a friendly hand is available every which way you look or reach.