Now this explains a lot of why I like your writing so much. I grew up in Martins Ferry, up the river by Wheeling WVA. Just a few miles south of the town that was the most polluted in the nation back in the ’70s – Stubenville, OH. The river was pretty nasty – couldn’t eat any of the fish and wouldn’t dare go swimming back when I was a kid.

But it does leave it’s mark on us. I also couldn’t live in the town I grew up in, too small for me and it’s not close enough to anyplace I could get work (I do theatre work.)

But it’s amazing how much cleaner everything is now. The steel mill only runs 8/5 not 24/7, but at least they still have some work. Most of the jobs seem to be gone, and have been gone since back in the 80′s.

Keep up the good work, I’ll keep reading.

I know my mother said that John L. Lewis was a regular at their house for dinner and once the Vice President of the United States came with him.

My grandfather was working in the coal mines from from sunup till sundown by the time he was 6 years old.

My father helped build the Cumberland State Park when he was in the CCCs. I haven’t been there in years, but I still remember it both for it’s harshness and it’s beauty.

I never thought about it that much, but now that you mention it I don’t really remember any white cars. Maybe they were white but looked tan/gray. LOL.

One thing about Portsmouth that most people probably don’t know is that it was the home of the Portsmouth Spartans, one of the nation’s first pro football teams. The team was sold in 1934 to a group of investors in Detroit, who renamed the team the Lions. The same Detroit Lions that had a 0-16 season last year.

Thanks for this post. Everyone comes from somewhere, and most of us don’t live there anymore.

It’s good to remember where we came from and the people who still live there. I was born in a town I never grew up in, yet it is a part of my psyche, because my grandparents were there for most of my life.

I never lived on a farm, but I was able to gather eggs and ride horses and slop (feed) hogs and milk cows when I was growing up. I only did those things a few times, all when I was a child visiting my grandmother. I’ve also walked behind a plow pulled by a mule, walked barefoot in a ‘garden’ bigger than my any yard I’ve had in the sububurbs or city. I’m a (small) city girl, for sure, but I always imagined myself a country girl.

I grew up ‘in town’, but I’ve always identified more with time spent with my grandmothers or helping with the farm animals. I feel like my experiences as a child gave me a completely different perspective than other children I knew growing up in the suburbs.

I realize what I just wrote doesn’t exactly relate to what you wrote. But, you just reminded me of things that felt like ‘us’ to me when I was growing up, even though I never really was part of the ‘us’ having a garden tilled with a mule and a plow or cows and chickens that supplied the milk I drank and eggs I ate.

Thanks again for sharing this story. :)

You grandfather sounds like he was quite a brave man. Was he a part of the mine wars in the 1920′s?

I don’t see anything to equal it today.

Do you remember how nobody in their right mind would buy a white car when the steel mill was operating? The soot from the mill covered every house and car in town. Even though it’s much more economically depressed today than it was when the mill was operating, the houses and cars today, ironically enough, are much cleaner than they used to be.

Thanks for writing. I’ve known people without indoor plumbing. I’ve also known people who heated with firewood. It’s more common than many people think, although it’s more a rural phenomenon than a city/town one.
Although there was an elderly lady across the street from us whose house was heated with a wood-burning furnace in the basement. She spent all summer dragging a child’s red wagon around collecting scrap wood.

I remember asking my great-great grandmother what a “hick” was. She told me that it was someone who had never bothered to learn anything about other people outside their own little world. She also reminded me that hicks can be found everywhere, even in some mighty fancy places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. I’ve never forgotten that.