Phil's FIGHT Fredericksburg potter battles life-threatening disease (2024)

Story by EDIE GROSS Photos by SUZANNE CARR ROSSI

PHIL AND TRISTA CHAPMAN struggled to get their heads around what the doctors were saying.

The muscle weakness Phil had felt for the last few months, the exhaustion he'd battled, had nothing to do with Lyme disease, a spinal injury or exposure to metals.

After months of testing, poking and prodding, the professionals had come up with another diagnosis: ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a fatal condition also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

"I said, 'What do I do?'" recalled Chapman, who received the news Aug. 1 at VCU Medical Center in Richmond.

The doctors seemed surprised by the question.

"They said, 'Make yourself comfortable,'" he said.

Comfortable?

Chapman, a professional potter for 30 years, works 12- to 15-hour days hoisting his creations in and out of an 1,800-degree kiln.

He once set himself ablaze trying to fire the perfect clay pot for his brother.

And when his Sophia Street studio in Fredericksburg was gutted by fire 10 years ago, he rebuilt much of the place by hand.

He wasn't about to make himself comfortable.

"I said, 'See ya,'" said Chapman, 53. "I'm not just going to sit around and wait for it."

And sit he hasn't.

Not long after his diagnosis, he enrolled in a study at the University of Virginia, where doctors were launching trials of a drug designed to halt the effects of ALS.

He started practicing yoga and meditation to raise his energy levels, and he switched to a diet free of caffeine, sugar and alcohol but heavy on fruits, vegetables, soy and whole grains.

In addition to the pramipexole pills provided by the University of Virginia, Phil's daily regimen includes a dozen different supplements--iron, stinging nettle, glucosamine, chondroitin--designed to arm his body against the disease that could paralyze him.

"I'm trying traditional medicine, alternative medicine, whatever," he said. "I have to try."

He is backed by an army of supportive friends and family, who plan to honor him next month with a 30-year retrospective of his work.

The Jan. 7 event at Walker Home in downtown Fredericksburg will showcase Chapman's pottery over the three decades since he arrived in Fredericksburg as the city's first professional potter.

It will also serve as a fundraiser for Chapman, whose health has forced him to cut back on his work.

He and wife Trista are both self-employed potters--many know them for their efforts on behalf of the Empty Bowl fundraiser for the Rappahannock Council on Domestic Violence--and the cut in income coupled with health-care costs could be difficult to absorb.

"Phil's a fighter. He is not somebody who's just going to stand by. He needs financial resources to fight the fight," said Earl Pence, a longtime friend and one of the event's organizers. "If there's any chance he can beat this thing, we don't want him to lose that chance because of a lack of financial resources."

A potter for Fredericksburg Chapman, a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., was barely 23 when he started throwing clay in Fredericksburg in early 1976.

During his last semester at Virginia Commonwealth University the previous fall, he'd overheard a conversation between a faculty member and a student about two men in Fredericksburg who wanted to open a pottery studio and were looking for a potter.

The student the professor approached didn't want the job.

Chapman, who earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts, did.

The men--George Poudrier of Fairview Beach and Johnny Miller Jr. of Falmouth--envisioned their Fredericksburg Pottery Shop as a stop on the city's historic tour.

Poudrier, whose wife was an art teacher and amateur potter, thought it'd be a nice touch to have an artist decked out in Colonial garb throwing clay in the shop's picture window at Sophia and Hanover streets, Chapman recalled.

"I managed to talk [Poudrier] out of the Colonial garb," said Chapman, who, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, fashioned many a soup tureen in front of that picture window.

At the time, Fredericksburg boasted a handful of weavers, woodworkers, painters and a coppersmith. But by all accounts, Chapman was the town's first full-time potter.

"You could call him a pioneer, I suppose," said Dan Finnegan, who became the potter in the window at the Fredericksburg Pottery Shop a few months after Chapman left the business in March 1979.

Years later, the two would operate studios just blocks from each other in downtown Fredericksburg.

"His craftsmanship is without parallel," Finnegan said. "He's an incredible, fanatical maker, and I mean that in the best sense. I always knew if I was working at 11 o'clock at night and I walked down to his studio, he'd still be up.

"As far as setting a standard, the quality of his work is without question," he said.

In 1979, Chapman had high hopes for making it on his own.

With a pile of free bricks he and a buddy had carted away from an old boiler plant in Lorton, Chapman built a kiln on a friend's property in Spotsylvania County.

He used an old dog kennel on the land as his studio, and by October, he'd managed to create enough pottery to take to a show.

He cleared $500 that weekend.

Chapman was growing his own food next to the converted dog kennel, and the house he rented on Sophia Street cost him $90 a month.

Between art shows and the occasional odd job painting houses, he was eking out a living.

"One winter," he said, "I ate nothing but potatoes."

Any extra money he had, he spent on insulated fire bricks for the new kiln he wanted to build, one that would reach the high temperatures he needed faster.

In 1981, he made a bargain with himself.

"I said if I don't make $14,000 this year, I quit," he said. "I made $16,000, and I thought 'man, this is great.'"

He never looked back.

A year later, he moved his workshop to the building next door to his home, and Sophia Street Studios was born.

For several years, Chapman continued making what he calls "functional pottery"--mugs, bowls and the like. But he also delved into raku, a Japanese style of pottery that would become his hallmark.

Under that process, Chapman fires his pieces at about 1,880 degrees. Rather than wait for the kiln to cool, he removes the pottery while it's still aglow and smothers it in sawdust.

The sudden change in temperature shocks the glaze on each piece, creating the signature crackle effect.

On July 11, 1995, Chapman fired several batches of jars and vases, pulling them hot from the kiln and dunking them into the sawdust before placing them on a rack for cooling.

Around noon, he and several other artists stepped into his back- yard next door for lunch.

When Chapman walked back into the studio an hour later, the place was on fire.

The blaze, possibly caused by a stray spark igniting the sawdust, gutted Sophia Street Studios. Chapman briefly considered selling what was left and starting again elsewhere.

To make matters worse, his parents had both been hospitalized with serious back problems. Fellow artist Trista Depp--who would later become Chapman's wife--lost her mother to liver cancer only days after the fire.

And a month later, Chapman's brother suffered a brain aneurysm.

"We went through hell that year," Chapman recalled.

In the end, the couple opted to stay, rebuilding the studio with help from friends and other local artists.

In two months, that studio and the Chapmans' home next door will be paid off.

The plan had been for the couple to spend less time traveling to art shows, where they do most of their business.

With the mortgages behind them, they could focus more on their Sophia Street gallery and spend more time in Fredericksburg practicing their art.

But those plans didn't include doing battle with a life-threatening illness.

A process of elimination It's hard for Chapman to pinpoint exactly when the symptoms first started.

It wasn't uncommon for the muscles in his hands to twitch or cramp, but after all, he worked long days in his studio.

His right leg bothered him some. But he'd spent a good deal of time on his hands and knees, remodeling the workshop after the fire, and that leg had never really been the same.

He had some pain in his right shoulder. But he'd hurt it years ago while skiing, so that was also easily explained.

In November 2004, his wife, Trista, was running the SunTrust Richmond Marathon. Chapman would drive ahead of her at key spots, pull off the road and jump out to hand her a water bottle.

"I was running along with her and my foot was just dragging, and I couldn't figure out why my foot was dragging," he said.

A few months later, while the couple prepared to travel to Florida for an art show, he mentioned to Trista how exhausted he was.

"I just said to her 'I don't have the energy anymore,'" he said. "'I don't know why, but I just don't.'"

A friend in Richmond urged him to see a doctor.

After a series of MRIs and EEGs and visits with orthopedic surgeons and neurologists, doctors ruled out a myriad of ailments: pinched nerves, degenerative disc disease, exposure to chemicals and heavy metals.

There is no one test that identifies ALS. Rather, it's diagnosed through a process of elimination.

Chapman, doctors said, had come to the end of that process.

Some 5,600 people a year are diagnosed with ALS, according to the ALS Association, a national nonprofit organization devoted to fighting the disease.

ALS attacks the nerve cells in the body's brain and spinal cord, ultimately destroying a person's voluntary muscle movement.

While the patient's mind remains sharp, the disease robs the body of its ability to move, speak, swallow and even breathe on its own.

The average ALS patient lives two to five years from the time of diagnosis. But one of the disease's most famous public faces, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, has lived for more than 40 years since his diagnosis.

Doctors told Chapman he would need braces to help him walk and ultimately a wheelchair.

He might want to think about buying a hospital bed, they said. And perhaps a lung machine to help him breathe.

Those first few days following the diagnosis were difficult, said Trista, Phil's wife of nearly eight years.

"There were just two days of complete depression, just staring across the room at each other and not knowing what to say. Utter devastation," she said. "And then we were like, 'No, I don't think so. That might be what other people do, but not what Phil does.'

"Initially, he gets crushed," she said, "but then he gets fierce."

In September, Chapman joined a drug trial at U.Va., where researchers are testing to see if pram- ipexole (pronounced pram-ee-PEX-all) can protect the nerves in ALS patients from degenerating.

"We are not at a stage where we can realistically think about a cure for this disease," said Dr. Lawrence H. Phillips II, vice chairman of the school's Neurology Department and head of the study. "We're looking for drugs that can slow the rate of progression."

Only one drug has been approved by the Federal Drug Administration to treat ALS. In studies, patients who took riluzole lived an average of three months longer than those who didn't, said Phillips.

Some three dozen clinical trials looking into treatments for ALS are under way in this country right now. Plenty more are being conducted in Europe, said Phillips.

"The thing that's most encouraging is there's a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of energy and a lot of money going into developing and testing drugs for this disease," said Phillips, who just returned from an ALS symposium in Dublin, Ireland.

"We keep hoping somebody's going to hit a home run."

The pramipexole study includes 20 participants at U.Va. and 20 more at other sites, Phillips said. He would not comment specifically on Chapman's case, but the goal of this trial and others, he said, is to improve the patients' odds.

"The expectation we have is we're going to make small increments and, hopefully, one of these days change ALS from an always-fatal disease to a chronic illness that people can live with but on medication," he said.

Phil's fight Over Thanksgiving weekend, the Chapmans traveled to Raleigh, N.C., for the annual Carolina Designer Craftsmen Fair.

Phil Chapman earned the Craftsmen's Choice Award, given to the exhibitor with the highest quality of work.

"That was a nice way to end my last raku show," said Chapman, who is giving up the style he has specialized in for the last 20 years.

The work is just too draining.

"I like the fire and the smoke and the excitement. It is a lot of fun," he said of raku. "It was a lot of fun at the time. Now it's too much."

Instead, Chapman will introduce some new techniques to wife Trista's line of whimsical earthenware, experimenting with the clay's chemistry to improve its durability.

He still has plenty to learn, he said.

"Anybody who thinks they are a master of clay is full of it. It's a humbling experience," he said. "They call it 'practicing medicine.' This is just 'practicing clay.' It'll always be a challenge."

A consummate do-it-yourselfer, Chapman said it's been difficult to accept his limitations, that he can't do everything himself anymore.

Since the beginning, he and Trista have talked openly about Phil's disease and the challenges it presents for them.

"The thing about life is everybody's in it for the first time and we're all just trying to get through," Chapman said. "If you just share all this stuff and get it out in the open, progress might be made."

Still, much like after the fire destroyed his studio, he said he's astounded by the outpouring of aid.

Friends say the moment they heard about Chapman's illness, they wanted to pitch in.

"It was just a big rallying cry of 'What can we do?'" said pal Nancy Greer, who has helped organize the Jan. 7 event.

Local artists have donated works for a silent auction. Restaurants and shops have offered up free food and wine for the affair.

"What you're really seeing is the Fredericksburg community being good at what they're good at," said Pence. "Everybody has stepped up to do this, which is very rewarding to see."

Assistance has come from out of town as well. The Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen--both Phil and Trista are members--has held three separate fundraisers to help the couple, said furniture-maker Karri Benedict of Waynesboro, Pa.

Benedict and her husband, potter Rod Meyer, have known the Chapmans for at least a decade.

"I can remember seeing him with these awesome pots but just such a humble person," Benedict said of Phil. "Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He's an everyone-who-knows-him-likes-him kind of guy."

That's why so many people have stepped up to help out, said Pence.

Both Trista and Phil have participated in their share of benefits on behalf of other people. Most notably, the couple helped start the Empty Bowl fundraiser in 2000, an event on behalf of the Rappahannock Council on Domestic Violence.

Hundreds attend the yearly soup dinner, which supports the council's efforts to help battered women. Attendees fill bowls donated by local potters with homemade soup and then take those bowls home at the end of the evening.

The Jan. 7 fundraiser at Walker Home is a chance for the community to give back, said Pence.

The event is not about mourning Chapman's illness, he said. It's about helping him defeat it.

"This is about Phil fighting the fight," he said.

EDIE GROSS is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star. Contact her at 540/374-5428, or egross@freelancestar .com. SUZANNE CARR ROSSI is a staff photographer with The Free Lance-Star.