WAKEFIELD In this small, neat town that straddles U.S. 460, Bill Galloway is known as the man who built an empire out of peanuts. Galloway, 76, who purchased and transformed the Virginia Diner into a well-known attraction, died Tuesday. Galloway was bigger than life, say those who knew him and worked with him.

They came by the hundreds Thursday - mayors and newspaper executives, a governor and one of his predecessors, college presidents and military students - to honor the local patriarch of journalism and philanthropy.

SOUTHERN SHORES, N.C.  Francis Rogallo was once a regular visitor to Jockey's Ridge, where he would drive up, unstrap his hang glider from his VW bus, and do some flying and hob nobbing with young hang gliders. He seldom volunteered that it was his invention of the flexible wing that made their soaring possible.

By Brown Carpenter, Correspondent KNOTTS ISLAND, N.C. Chris Behnke survived one of the deadliest battles of World War II. As a Marine veteran, he later related his experience to college students, giving them a firsthand account of what fighting was really like.

This mission statement, "The Duty of Landmark Newspapers," was written by Frank Batten Sr. in the mid-1970s. Batten became publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in 1954 and was chairman of Landmark Communications from 1967 to 1998. He died early Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009, at age 82. By FRANK BATTEN SR.

Since the mid-1990s, Frank Batten Sr., who died Sept. 10, 2009, at age 82, had donated more than $223 million to schools and other educational organizations. Here are some of them:

1999
Gives $60 million in 1999 to the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

2000
Gives $10 million to Virginia Wesleyan College.

2003

Friends and former colleagues remember Frank Batten Sr., retired chairman of Landmark Communications, who died Sept. 10, 2009, at age 82:
 
“He overreached. He overreached to do things he really didn’t have to do.”

-- E. Bradford Tazewell, lifelong friend
 

A timeline of events in the life of Frank Batten Sr., retired Landmark chairman:

Feb. 11, 1927
Born in Norfolk to Dorothy Martin Batten and Frank Batten.

March 1928
His father dies at age 32. Frank is 14 months old. The family moves into the home of Frank’s aunt Fay and her husband, Samuel L. Slover.

1941

By Earl Swift He was a son of privilege, the heir to a family fortune, a man whose life, in other hands, might have been measured in dollars and cents. Instead, Frank Batten forged a legacy not on what he made but what he created.

By Jasmine Washington VIRGINIA BEACH Amelia Miles lived 99 years, eleven months and five days through the changes of the world yet kept one constant in her life: art. Miles, an educator and artist who specialized in watercolors, died Aug. 9, less than a month shy of her 100th birthday on Sept. 4.