An emotional gathering from near and far celebrates the Front Royal Karate Club’s 50 years of discovery of one’s inner strength & potential

Friday, April 7, 2023, the Front Royal Karate Club at 7 Kidd Lane in Historic Downtown Front Royal saw the beginning of a weekend celebration of the legacy of a half century of the teaching and learning of mental and physical self-discipline characterized in the study of Okinawan Shorin-Ryu martial arts. Present with Sensei Art Drago and his wife Carol Corbin Drago were students from every decade of the dojo’s five. Sensei Drago recalled his first youth student, then 13-year-old Win Davis, whom Drago initially instructed on April 7, 1973, 50 years to the day earlier. Also acknowledged was Melanie Pomeroy, another student dating to 1973, who was the first female student at the dojo to achieve Black Belt ranking, which she accomplished in 1978.

Art and Carol Drago with framed copy of Town Proclamation approved by mayor and town council officially declaring April 7, 2023, as a day of celebration commemorating the FR Karate Club’s 50th anniversary. And it was a dojo family affair, as below Sensei Drago is flanked to left, by son Matthew, in from Los Angeles, and another younger-generation student keeping the Shorin-Ryu ‘martial arts family’ tradition going.

Past students traveled from around the nation, and even the world, to mark the occasion. Those included former student Will Nicklin, who with his wife Irena, arrived from Prague, capital of the Czech Republic; as well as Rodney Grimsley in from Irving, Texas; and Drago’s son Matthew, in from Los Angeles. And here is a nod to all those from near and far, who contributed to the creation and continuation of the Front Royal Karate Club legacy.

This reporter spoke with Sensei Drago, who preparing to turn 82 on May 3rd still actively instructs classes, about the emotions of the day and the coming 50th anniversary class as those students, past and present, filtered into the dojo in the hour-plus leading up to the 7:30 p.m. start of this landmark class.

“We’ll see who’s going to show up – and then the spontaneity of how we’re going to be able to do the whole thing,” Drago said with an eye towards how packed the training area might be. An opening head count, with one moment of comic relief, showed it was a manageable 41 students, which facilitated selected training routines or katas with students of various ages from the span of the dojo’s five decades. But we caught up with Sensei Drago early enough in the evening to allow him to reflect on achieving the half-century mark in business at his 7 Kidd Lane location just off East Main Street in the heart of Historic Downtown Front Royal.

Drago greets Will and Irena Nicklin, who grabbed the distance traveled record for the evening as they made the trip from their home in Prague, the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe. Below, Will trains with Sensei Drago as Irena films the 50th anniversary memories.

“My thing is that 50 years has gone by and I’d have to honestly say that it’s the community that really has made it work for me. I mean, your point about community — you have pictures on the wall 20, 30 years ago that you did articles on … So, there’s a tremendous amount of history, not only with who’s coming through the door, but yourself, you and me, because we’ve had a 30-year trek,” he pointed out of a professional history and consequent friendship between the New York City and Washington D.C. metro area transplants to the northern Shenandoah Valley. In fact, reviewing one of this reporter’s articles written on the dojo in 1990 for The Front Royal News on the black belt promotion of then 18-year-old Jamie Santmyers, I recalled Santmyers outlook on the additional martial arts discipline and perspective he was seeking with a switch to the Shorin-Ryu club on the way, it turned out, to a career in law enforcement. That discipline, it was noted in the 1990 article, was one based, not on winning competitions, but rather on mental and physical self-improvement coupled with an aggressive defensive stance that counters an opponent’s ability to maintain aggression.

We asked Sensei Drago if he had any notion that his bringing of the Okinawan-developed Shorin-Ryu martial arts mental, physical, and even spiritual, discipline to this small-town Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, community might become a local institution spanning five decades. It was a half century over which the Town Proclamation officially recognizing that achievement, described The Front Royal Karate Club as teaching “close to 50,000 juniors … and close to the same number of adults” over that half century.

“It was a six-month experiment,” Drago recalled of an idea coupled with a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time rental space. Phase one of that “experiment” was then-building-owner Ronnie Gilliam’s willingness to bring an existing storage space into a usable status for Drago’s “idea” of a Shorin-Ryu martial arts training club.

“Ronnie Gilliam, he put paneling up, put the lights up, put dressing rooms in the back, a window in the back, put a bathroom up, and he did the electric too. It was just a storehouse,” Drago explained of 7 Kidd Lane at the time he approached Gilliam about rental space. “There was one light bulb in the place. This place was a mess, it had junk piled up to the top of the ceiling. It had sinks and auto parts and toilets, kitchen supplies, air conditioners and wood …

“But underneath was two layers of tongue and groove floor. And that’s what you’re shooting for,” Drago noted of the support base for the dojo he envisioned coming to be in his landlord’s storage space. So, his prospective landlord’s cleaning out and sprucing up of the space to a usable condition set the Front Royal Karate Club in motion for that “six-month experiment”, circa 1973. Eventually, Drago noted, in 1992 when the club’s space was expanded the original floor would be replaced with a newer heavy-support base.

A visual tour of Kidd Ln. from its intersection with E. Main St. to the FR Karate Club dojo in the one-story section at 7 Kidd Ln., aka ‘Shorin-Ryu Drive, as illustrated in the final photo of sequence.

But returning to his perspective on the nature of this community’s people that has propelled the dojo forward through a half century, Drago revisited his relationship with his first landlord at the Kidd Lane space, the late Ronnie Gilliam. “The thing with Ronnie is that I had a lease with him for 18 years, it was only a handshake. That’s all it was, a handshake, which is a really amazing thing. I’ve had four landlords now — they’re all very special as to how things have worked out.

“I find myself more than ever now, realizing that it’s the community that really made it work for me. I mean, Front Royal is a very unique place. Being from New York, and having a handshake for a lease for 18 years, says something about the character of the town itself. And the people that have come through the door have cemented that,” Drago added of his student base over the years.

“So, we’re looking at 50 years. There’s an old Traveling Wilburys song that I really adhere to, it’s taking it to ‘The End of the Line’,” Drago pulled out an appropriate musical analogy of the late 1980’s, dare we call it “supergroup”, that encompassed three musical generations with members Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty. “Take it as far as you can,” Drago continued, “Because you’re still meeting people, you’re still training.” I asked Sensei Drago if ever in those earlier days did he envision the longevity of, not only The Front Royal Karate Club, but of himself as its Sensei and instructor pushing the age of 82?

Sensei Drago noted it was an emotional evening, not only for him, but many former classmates and friends who may not have seen each other for a decade, if not longer.

“That’s a joke — I was heading to other places, you know. But the town embraced me — it was successful. Why, if you have a bone in your mouth,” Drago smoothly segued from musical to a K-9 analogy, “why would you want to throw that bone away for a reflection when you know darn well that the one you’ve got is working? … If it’s working let’s see how long it’ll go. Well, here we are. People just kept coming,” he pointed out of the generational passing of the Budo Kai Karate Dojo torch from decade to decade over a half century.

Drago noted that in February 1973 he approached a Mr. Burke, described as a local officer, about potential realtors he might rent space for a karate school from, leading to his eventual relationship with Ronnie Gilliam and the above-described work enabling that April 7, 1973 opening. “Mr. Burke, I am teaching his grandson today, who’s 9 years old,” Drago said of one example of that generational torch passing.

On a more bittersweet note Sensei Drago nodded to the 131 portraits of black belt level students surrounding the dojo’s training space, observing that nine carried black mourning ribbons commemorating those students’ passing. “Over 50 years, you meet them in their 30’s, things happen. But I am coaching, right now, the child of a student who passed away, her name was Sharon Snapp — I’m teaching her great-grandson right now. He just started two weeks ago,” Drago said of another torch, this one in part memorial, being carried forward at the Front Royal Karate Club.

One of the club’s departed black belts, Sharon Snapp, fondly remembered on the dojo walls along with eight others who have passed from this plane of existence.

Drago recalled another past student who helped pass the dojo, among other, torches on in a quite literal way during her lifetime, Anne Holiday. “She was a special lady,” Drago recalled of Holiday, “In fact, she was the midwife to Matthew, my son’s, birth. And in reality she was midwife for over 4,000 people,” including he observed, several of the Hollywood Arquette family when they were here with the international, interfaith, spiritual networking group SUBUD, a branch of which settled in Warren County for a while last century, circa 1970s before this reporter arrived here, if I recall the story correctly.

After noting that he had already put in 4 or 5 hours training that day, Sensei Drago summarized his philosophy of personally continuing into the Front Royal Karate Club’s 51st year. “It’s just the commitment of enjoying the efforts of coaching and of training. You’ve got to keep it going as long as you can and you have to stay in tune — just like playing the piano,” or any musical instrument he said. “It’s a day-to-day thing …

Think we should wait any longer for stragglers traveling at distance, Sensei Drago may be wondering as the 50th anniversary class is poised to begin. As Drago began the class portion of the emotional evening, he may have thought ‘It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating our 40th year’ as memorialized on the wall to his left — but times stands still for no one and here we are 10 years later. Final shot of sequence is a panorama of those present as they get ready to get down to class business.

“That would be my comment, you keep maintaining as best you can. You don’t have to be fanatical, but it has to be consistent. Stretching’s important, an hour of meditation is important, I still fast 100 days a year — I’ve been doing that for 45 years. I mean, it’s not long, it’s like maybe 15, 16, 17 hours, miss a meal here or there. I haven’t eaten today except for a couple apples,” Sensei Drago told us around 6:30 p.m. as he prepared for the 50th Anniversary class he was about to lead.

So, the mental, physical, even spiritual discipline he teaches, applied to himself, has been crucial in his ability to continue in his role pushing into his 82nd year, we observed. “Absolutely, the constant element of pushing yourself forward and to keep your body toned, your cardio, your back, flexibility’s important. If you don’t have your joints working, nothing works,” he said of the need for continuous self-discipline’s impact into the physical sphere.

“But if you’re in a chair all the time, your body is going to be,” he paused looking for an appropriate adjective — “That’s the way it works,” he concluded of negative consequences of being frozen in counterproductive physical positions for too long. Uh oh, I think I better get up from this computer and start sparring, I found myself thinking two days later as I was transcribing the audio interview tape from Friday evening.

And that Friday, as the anniversary class time approached and more students filtered into the dojo, Sensei Drago left us to greet more and prepare for how the anniversary class would develop. See that development, and some additional greetings from the following day’s “50th Anniversary Buffet Style Celebration” at the Front Royal Moose Lodge #829 in these below photo sequences. If they illustrate anything, it appears to be that the relationship between Art Drago and this community is a Mutual Admiration Society.

‘Haven’t we done this before,’ some may have thought if time and space have separated them from Front Royal and the dojo. Below, Sensei Drago appears to be sneaking up on this student – but only for a celebratory hug for a successful completion of their kata. The ladies were involved as well, as Carol Corbin Drago takes the lead. – ‘You want to go?’ Art may be asking his wife once she was warmed up. And, indeed, she was up to the task of this challenging couple at the head of the dojo hierarchy.

Back in civies the following evening, Mr. Drago was again a busy man, greeting those attending the day-after ‘Buffet Style Celebration’ at the FR Moose #829 headquarters. And many came with a lot of ‘pot luck’ in their hands to help feed healthy appetites, especially for those worked out the previous evening by their host. And we may have spotted some next generation FR Karate Club members scurrying about, biding time till the dinner bell rang.

And a final flashback to the previous evening’s 50th Anniversary Class beginning with a dojo whiteboard notice that things won’t be slowing down the rest of the month. First two shots below, Sensei Drago may have his hands, and feet, full as he is double-teamed by this married couple called up. But he still had enough to go with a younger-generation student before Mrs. Drago took the floor with some of the female students. ‘Well, since you came all the way from Prague, you might as well get some action too,’ Drago may have said in calling up Will Nicklin for a workout.