Growing up poor in rural West Virginia, it required a creative imagination to keep myself busy in the summers, and over the years some things changed. One of my earliest memories though was catching bugs, salamanders, and frogs in the yard surrounding my great-grandmother's house in my hometown of Hendricks, and also commandeering the swinging bridge beside the house where I would often either scare the crap out of local women who wanted to cross it or I would cook up schemes to make a quarter or two in order to buy a soda or some candy up at Sonny Hedrick's store just down the street from the house. Of course, on occasion, I would wander out too far and that would get me in some trouble - you see, I was not allowed near the river behind the house, as of course I couldn't swim and I was much too young to deal with things like the occasional copperhead snake that would occasionally be lurking in the bushes. Probably more frightening though was the old couple who lived in a ramshackle old house just at the other side of the field, Jake and Corey Phillips. The Phillipses were an eccentric old couple, and would even pull a shotgun on local kids that got too close - rumor had it that old Jake had shine stashed in the springs nearby, and he didn't want them to be found. Whether that was substantiated or not remained to be seen, but it made for good local legend and would explain why those two were so cranky! If I got too close to the creek, it would be guaranteed that I would suffer the consequences of that decision - Mom at the time worked at the Kinney Shoe Factory in Parsons, and Granny babysat me most of those days. One time, as a matter of fact, I decided to venture down to the river, and in short order here came Granny with a large spatula, and she herded my little butt back to the house with it quickly! That incident lives on in family legend as my famous "Skillet Spoon Encounter," and it has become the object of much laughter even to this day.
All of that happened around the year 1976. Approximately one year earlier was the setting of my famous "Pentecostal Peeper"story that took place in a little church outside Falling Waters, WV, called Little Falls Chapel. When my step-grandmother Goldie became terminally ill with cancer, she underwent a major religious conversion and devoutly followed her faith by attending that little church. However, being I loved to catch critters down near Hoke Run close to their house outside Martinsburg, I often ended up taking some of my little friends to church with me, and that caused excitement. But, you can read that story elsewhere, as it has already been told. But, here is the little church, both inside and out, as it appears today:
Little Falls Chapel, interior - that was the center aisle I ran down to show "Preacher Jake" the huge toad I caught.
The exterior of the church.
Catching frogs and toads was only one of many activities I had during the summer months, as I grew older I was allowed to patrol the creeks myself without supervision, and then my focus shifted to crawfish, "miller thumbs" (a small creek sculpin), and other creatures I would find. Most of that happened when I was around ten years old and we moved to Kirby, WV, and through the center of town flowed Grassy Lick Run. We at the time lived in a mobile home just about a couple of hundred yards from the creek, and I would spend hours on end down there messing around in the creek, being careful to avoid neighborhood bullies and nosy neighbors. I began to also take an interest in reading more in the summers at that time, and that fueled my imagination more (I will be talking about that in-depth shortly too), to the point I decided to build my own "island" in the middle of the deep hole just below the town bridge in the creek - in reality, all the deeper it got was to my ankles, so it became easy to heft big rocks and pieces of sod to my "island" to fix it up. I also had gotten the family passion for fishing a year earlier when I spent the spring of 1979 with my dad and step-mother in Brunswick, GA, and in the deep holes of Grassy Lick Run there were two types of large fish that were fun to catch but of no nutritional value - one was creek chubs, which were large minnows that grew to about 9 inches, and the other were 1-2 foot mudsuckers. The mudsuckers were really fun to catch, as you often had to snag them with a hook as they would not bite, but the challenge of catching them became a sort of personal accomplishment. Although regrettably I haven't fished in years, I still love to fish, and look forward to doing some more fishing later on.
Another thing that I found fun to do in the summers was picking berries and other fruits that came in season. As a young kid, I came to know well when the various edible berries ripened, as my great-grandmother would go every July at least once to pick huckleberries, blackberries, and a luscious red raspberry we called "mountain raspberries." When she picked all the berries, she would spend at least a week canning them, turning the harvest into jars and jars of jams, jellies, and also delicious pies, dumplings, and cobblers. Granny's favorite places to pick blackberries and raspberries was over in what was called Shaver's Fork, which was accessed by a dirt road on the east bank of the Shavers Fork River just south of my hometown of Parsons. Back in there, she was able to go to a couple of abandoned farms which were owned by relatives and pick all the berries she wanted. Later, it would be a trip to Stony River just northeast of Thomas where a large plateau sat just above the dam there, and the place was abundant with huckleberries. I always liked the huckleberries the best, as they had a good flavor to them - elsewhere in the country they called these "wild blueberries," which technically they were, but we always called them huckleberries. Another berry in close proximity which was similar was a reddish berry with a cherry-like flavor called a serviceberry. Often, we would just pick them together, and they somehow ended up all mixed in the same bucket. Seeking out a delicious delicacy like that had its risks, in particular venomous snakes such as rattlers and copperheads, but it was worth it to have those delicious berries. As I got older and we moved to Kirby, I was able to find a small huckleberry plain just outside of town, and often frequented that as well as picking the ton of tiny wild strawberries that grew in the big field behind Grassy Lick School. Those berries often ended up in a small pie I had a local woman named Goldie bake for me. There is a certain satisfaction one gets in harvesting wild food like that, and throughout the year during the summers there was always something to pick or dig up, and I got to master all of them.
Once I hit fifth grade and my own pursuits became more varied, I also spent a lot of time, especially at night, reading books. I grew to love and identify with so many of the characters in the books I was exposed to, especially thanks in part to a large stack of old Cricket and Readers Digest magazines that we got from Aleida, a classmate of mine, as well as some of the local people. But, I also had a lot of other reading material, and it was pretty diverse - Robert Newton Peck's Soup books, as well as Louisa Shotwell's Roosevelt Grady and William Armstrong's Sounder. I also still found a great deal of pleasure in reading the Olive Beaupre Miller My Book House set that Mom had originally gotten me as a gift when I was born, and through that I was exposed to so many other things, notably William Makepeace Thackaray's classic short story The Rose and the Ring, which still amuses me to this day. Reading books like that (including the World Book Encyclopedia set and the large gourmet cookbook I "inherited" from my late step-grandmother when she passed away in 1979) helped me to rise above the poverty that we lived in then, and in addition to having a certain identification with many of the characters (ironically, this is why I cannot be prejudiced today, because in reading books like Roosevelt Grady, Sounder, and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, all of which had as central characters Depression-era poor Black children, I saw myself), it also fueled my hunger for knowledge and I would "experiment" with doing things those books said by going outside and sort of reenacting some of the stuff, of course adding my own twist. I did have many neighborhood kids as friends then too, and we would build forts and other stuff together too, and they must have thought I was out of my mind with some of the stuff I would come up with! However, I am thankful for that experience, as it broadened me in so many ways.
As I grew older, however, I found my interests expanding quite dramatically, as all of a sudden at around the age of 12 I began to develop an interest in music. It was on one of those lazy summer Sunday nights, and Mom was messing around with the radio, flipping through the dial, when I heard this great sound coming through - the song I can remember vividly, as it was a 1949 recording by Benny Goodman's orchestra of a song called Moonlight on the Ganges, and as I listened more to this, I became hooked, and that began a 35-year love of a music called big band. I didn't know what it was all about then, but I knew I liked it. In a short time, I found out that the station Mom tuned into was WBT-AM, at 1110 on the dial, out of Charlotte, NC. On Sunday nights back then, WBT had a music show that went from 10 at night till 1 AM that was hosted by late radio personality Henry Boggen, and as I have already told the specifics of that story, I won't indulge that here. Needless to say, over the next couple of years afterward, I would sit at our kitchen table in our mobile home in Kirby, WV, with that radio on, and in the summers when I was allowed to stay up later I would sit and drink sugar-sweetened coffee while listening to that show on Sundays, and that also began to fuel my imagination. As I loved to draw, I began drawing pictures of orchestras and such, and that music was adding a new dimension to my already-active imagination. And, so that would be all the way into my high school years. I still listen to that music today, and collect it - with almost 1000 LP records and over 1200 CD recordings, I would say that in 30 years I have a good handle on the music now, and it is solely entrenched as a part of my own identity. When I hear a song like Keely Smith's rendition of Lullaby of the Leaves, or Sinatra's very iconic recording of Summer Wind, it hearkens back to those balmy nights of sitting at our kitchen table with the windows open and the radio playing, often with only the light over the stove on. On occasion, Mom and I would play Yahtzee or dominoes too when she had trouble sleeping, and all of that just evokes so much.
As I entered my teenage years, many changes took place as we moved out of Kirby in the summer of 1985 and in the next few summers my whole summer routine would change. I still loved my music, still read a lot of good books (at this time I became passionate about Armenians and Assyrians, and was introduced to William Saroyan's writings), but I also began to diversify my tastes a little. In my sophomore year of high school, I got into Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and later Shostakovich, and Russian composers became something I liked to listen to. Also, after my conversion in 1986, I also became more involved in church work, and I spent a lot of summers doing things such as teaching Vacation Bible School, attending denominational conventions, and other such things. I also had learned to play the saxophone, and in high school I was active in the marching band and that had me out and about as well during a lot of weekends in the summer months. A more active social life meant a little less of my earlier childhood activities, as my interests were changing - I didn't catch as many crawfish or frogs in the creeks anymore, but I did still gather plants. When Mom took care of a nonagenarian lady on Salt Lick Road between the towns of Terra Alta and Rowlesburg, we were out in the country, and there were a lot of woods around. So, I would explore the woods above the house, often taking our old dog Jill with me, and while in the woods I harvested stuff such as ramps, wild garlic, fiddleheads, and berries. It was around this time too I began to dabble more in cooking as well as short forays into minor agriculture, and I kept a little vegetable patch above the house as well as using the wild foraging items I found in recipes. Listening to Stravinsky or Mario Lanza while experimenting with a homemade pizza recipe or making bagels (I was becoming more aware of my Jewish roots, and found a Jewish cookbook in the local library, so I experimented in the kitchen a lot!), as well as making a sort of stew concoction I liked to cook was comforting to me, and it made me feel creative and productive. I also was able to spend more time with my dad's family in Brunswick, GA, and loved fishing for gar and dropping blue crab traps in the river with my cousin Michael off my aunt and uncle's houseboat near Blythe Island, as well as messing around Saint Simon's and Jekyll Islands. That was also my first opportunities to earn a little cash too, as I worked with the construction business my dad had in Brunswick to pick up a little extra cash in the summer, and that felt good as well. Once I graduated high school and went off to college though, a lot of that faded away, especially as the responsibilities of married life, keeping up with school work, and later jobs took up much of my time. And, for most of my adult life, living in a more urban environment didn't help either, as a began to gain weight and just succumb to Corporate America's demands rather than indulging some childhood passions I once had. The fading away of much of that also caused a part of me to sort of die as well, and in the past few years I really started to realize it more as I get older.
However, I do have good news. Over the years, I have began to do a little bit of rediscovering who and what I am, and doing a personal journal for over 20 years has helped a lot. Additionally, recently the opportunity has presented itself to move back home after over 26 years in Florida and the "urban jungle," and I see much possibility for recovering some of what I have lost. Of course, not all is lost in Florida though - being able to grow my own tomato and basil plants, as well as having the joys of seeing the sandhill cranes and their families as well as feeding bread to the large flocks of white ibis that visit our yard every so often have put me in touch with some of that early passion, and I think that the more I recover some aspects of my youth, the more healthier it will make me physically and spiritually too. One part of being a West Virginian by heritage is mastering the ability to "make do," and oftentimes the worst wildernesses to survive in are not the ones with creeks and woods, but rather the ones with asphalt, concrete, and pollution - that has been a big struggle for me. It also has helped in recent years to see shows now in TV such as Swamp People and Duck Dynasty, as they also serve as a reminder of who I am and where I come from. However, at this stage in my life I see myself more of an Ike Godsey than I do a John-Boy Walton, but Ike's character had a lot that was admirable as well. So, whether it be the rural creeks and woods of my home state of West Virginia, or even the occasional "Florida Cracker" towns that grab my attention here, they all resonate with something deep inside me that reminds me of carefree yet busy summers of my youth. And, as I write this now in the Florida heat of mid-June, that fact becomes more real. If you grew up the way I did, my advice to you is to remember those good things, even if you did possibly grow up poor economically and in a rural or small-town environment. Never think of that as a curse, but as a blessing, for you will begin to find it has impacted you in more ways than you imagine. Thank you for allowing me to ramble and share, and enjoy these summers and make the most of them while you can.
Many of the art pieces I have included in my article are endearing prints created by a talented artist by the name of Mark Keathley. I recently became acquainted with his work, and his paintings have in large part inspired this article too. I hope you can appreciate this remarkable artist as much as I have come to appreciate him.
