Planet Blacksburg had the opportunity to sit down with local news reporter Mike Gangloff of The Roanoke Times. Planet Blacksburg met up with the distinguished Virginia Tech alumni at the coffee kiosk in the New River Valley Mall and Gangloff provided insight into his life after Tech: the exciting field of print journalism.

Planet Blacksburg: You’ve written a lot, obviously over a long period of time, how long have you written for The Roanoke Times?

Gangloff: About 6 ½ years.

PB: Did you write for a paper before that?

Gangloff: For several papers. For The News Messenger, The Bland-County Messenger, The Richmond-Times Dispatch, The Magnet Magazine and some others.

PB: What is it that first drew you to the field of journalism?

Gangloff: Storytelling. Just to be paid to listen to people tell their stories and then to put them together and retell them, I thought was just the best possible way to get paid.

PB: Do you ever get tired of it? Just writing so many stories?

Gangloff: You can fall into a rut, definitely, but stories are all individual and are all different so you try to maintain a recognition of that and I keep it fairly interesting. In the past year, I’ve moved from writing to editing.

PB: So, are you still writing stories for the paper?

Gangloff: Only occasionally. Sometimes I write very short things. The last very long story I wrote wasn’t really that long. It was about a man who had been a postal worker around Blacksburg for many, many years.

PB: You’re a Virginia Tech alumni, correct?

Gangloff: Yes, I have a bachelor’s degree in Communications.

PB: Was that all of the higher education your pursued?

Gangloff: I got a master’s degree in Mass Communications at VCU.

PB: Where are you originally from?

Gangloff: Lexington, Ky.

PB: So did you just come here for school originally?

Gangloff: Yes.

PB: What is it that made you stay in Blacksburg? Because you came here and then left and then came back?

Gangloff: It’s just a really neat place. I love the New River Valley, the mix of people, the whole research university budding up against Appalachia, it’s just a very interesting combination. Plus it’s just a beautiful place.

PB: What is the most interesting story that you covered or one that you remember that really strikes you?

Gangloff: I always ask people that we’re considering hiring that question. [Laughs]. I don’t know, there’ve been many of them. On a different day, I’d probably give you a different answer, but today I’m thinking about an old man that lives in Ivanhoe, just down Wythe County. I actually lived pretty near him for a while. His name is Coolidge Winesett. I wrote several articles about his fiddle playing for a small paper down there and then years later wrote about how he fell through his outhouse floor and was trapped under his outhouse for three days before he was found. That was such an incident there was international coverage and that was carried around. Not my story but other people’s stories were just carried through wires to papers in Australia, Canada, Ireland and Scotland.

PB: He didn’t live with anybody else?

Gangloff: No, he was old, partly crippled, lived by himself.

PB: So his outhouse was like a shack outside his house?

Gangloff: Yeah, it was one of those plastic outhouses.

PB: So when he fell through the floor, where was he trapped?

Gangloff: The pit in the ground for the excrement.

PB: Ew.

Gangloff: So there he was, he wasn’t strong enough to pull himself out, he had nails digging into him. So he came out with a bunch of nasty infections and was in the hospital for months trying to recover.

PB: Wow.

Gangloff: Yeah, just the obvious fascination of the story. He had just a crazy attitude and a real sense of humor about it and said just hilarious things about the whole thing that made writing about him fun. He gave me one of the best quotes, which was... He was talking about his experiences in World War II in the Pacific and he said they were on some island for a while, some jungle island and he said, “I believe if them fellows had caught me, they would’ve tried to eat me!”

PB: [Laughs]. So, is print journalism your favorite type of communications? Did you ever try out anything else?

Gangloff: No, I’ve pretty much always been a print guy—newspapers, magazines, I like that much better than video things or now we do a lot of online things and they’re fun but not for me.

PB: Which type of news is your favorite—news, features, editorials, everything?

Gangloff: A little bit of everything. I’ve never really done a whole lot of editorial writing, I’ve written columns, which I guess lean in that direction. What I like to write is sort of a mix of the traditional news and features in that I really like to explore personality, explore motivation and character, why people do what they do. But I wanted to also have some urgency and immediacy to give the reader so I wanted to be tied to events or issues that typically would be described as news.

PB: Is this what you plan on doing the rest of your life or is there anything you’d like to do in the future, or are looking forward to?

Gangloff: Well, I think most people who write in whatever journalism or elsewhere, I think, imagine what it would be like to write novels so someday I may dust off my novel and attempt to pursue that. I play a lot of music, so I guess it’s remotely possible that someday someone would decide to pay me for doing that.

PB: Are you in a band? When I researched you, I found the band Pelt, but I didn’t know if it was you or not.

Gangloff: Yeah, I’m in a couple bands. Yes, I’ve been in Pelt for a while. For 12 years, I’ve played in the band.

PB: What do you play?

Gangloff: I’ve played a lot of instruments in the band. These days I usually play an Indian instrument called an esraj.

PB: What kind of an instrument is that?

Gangloff: It’s kind of, sort of like a bowed sitar.

PB: How did you learn to play that?

Gangloff: I actually taught myself. I managed to actually get a video of someone playing the instrument and just sort of learned from that—trial and error.

PB: So it’s fair to say music is one of your biggest hobbies outside of your job?

Gangloff: Yes.

PB: So you normally play that now, but what is “your instrument”?

Gangloff: Lately it’s been fiddle. For several months now, I’ve been wanted to play old-time fiddle, that’s just something I’ve wanted to do for years and years. My wife and children bought me one for Fathers Day this year and said, “Go ahead and play it,” so now I’m playing fiddle all the time.

PB: Do any of your bands perform around here? You have a CD right?

Gangloff: Yeah, I have a bunch of them actually. We’ve put out a bunch of records. We’ve been lucky enough to get a tour around Europe a few times. The last time Pelt played in Blacksburg was four or five years ago at a WUVT function.

PB: Are the other people in the band from around here, too?

Gangloff: One of them I met in Richmond and lived in Blacksburg for a while. Now the other two members of the band, actually there are three, one lives in Blacksburg, one lives in Philadelphia, and the other lives outside of Madison, Wis.

PB: So you don’t play together regularly?

Gangloff: No, it varies. Some years we play a lot. Like this year, we haven’t played at all and about next month we’re going on a tour out in the Northeast for a while, going to Europe next Spring.

PB: So when you go on tour what do you do with the paper?

Gangloff: That’s another great thing about my job for the paper is that they’ve been flexible enough to allow me to pursue this other interest. For one paper I actually filed some stories from the road one year—what it was like to tour on the road out to California, have the band playing every night, that sort of thing, so that was fine. I got to kind of combine music and journalism.

PB: Do you plan on working for the Roanoke Times for a while?

Gangloff: For the foreseeable future.

PB: Are your children around school here?

Gangloff: Yes, I have a first grader and a preschooler. Yeah, so we are here for the foreseeable future. There are always other places that sound interesting, it would be great to live on the West Coast, it would be great to live in Europe.

PB: Where have you been in Europe?

Gangloff: I’ve been to Italy and Greece on my honeymoon and I’ve been to Scotland and France and the Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark on tour.