Now and Then

Excerpts from Now and Then Articles

Here are some excerpts from articles in Now & Then. If you would like to read the rest of the articles, you can order the back issues of:

From: Mark Givens, The Last Full-Time Farmer in Clover Hollow by Fred Carlisle (Appalachian Lives)

“I had it made until he died. I haven't had it made since.” This is Mark Givens speaking, talking about his father, Daniel, who died on August 13, 1982. He was 60 years old. His son was 30.

At the time, Mark Givens was a salesman selling fertilizer in Southwest Virginia for the Boca Raton, Fla.-based specialty chemical company W.R. Grace & Co. “I loved every minute of it,” he remembers. “I was saving money. I enjoyed the job. I loved dealing with the people.” He felt free and independent—he followed his own travel schedule. He felt responsible and successful.

Everything was going well: the job, living in Southwest Virginia’s Clover Hollow, and a new marriage. Mark and Melodie had been married for three weeks and were about to move into a new mobile home just above his family’s house.

Then Daniel died.

From: Our Bars by Kelley Rae (Appalachian Lives)

Bars are a family thing.

I was about five when my family bought the bar on Route 28, a long road that winds through the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. Everything we did, everywhere we went was situated along this road that traveled from Maryland and into West Virginia, weaving into and out of the places of my past.

Both sets of my grandparents lived along Route 28. Some of my schools were on Route 28. Our church was on Route 28—and so were our bars.

Our very own family-owned bar was about midway between Boonie’s and the Woodland Inn. Boonie’s was named after the owner—a wealthy man, about 60, with a peg leg that never curtailed his ability to chase the ladies.

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From: The Grit Behind the Miracle: A Community Builds a Hospital by Alice E. Sink (The Power of Illness & the Promise of Health)

In the summer of 1944, an epidemic of infantile paralysis spread through the nation like a prairie fire. Within 24 hours, a total of 27 cases was reported in North Carolina alone. Most of those afflicted in the state were children from the Catawba River Valley, an area that begins in Lenoir, N.C., and stretches approximately 75 miles southeast to Belmont, near Charlotte. Isolation wards in Charlotte Memorial Hospital and Gastonia’s Orthopedic Hospital filled quickly. Youngsters had no place to go for expert medical attention.

On June 21, three physicians met in Hickory, NC, to make plans for providing necessary medical care to the growing number of afflicted polio victims: H.C. Whims, health officer for both Catawba and Lincoln counties; C.H. Crabtree, North Carolina’s representative of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis; and A. Gaither Hahn, who was at that time chairman of the Catawba County Chapter of the Foundation. They planned their strategy, deciding to use the Catawba County Fresh Air Camp, a summer experience for underprivileged children, located three miles outside the city limits on Lake Hickory.

From: Beyond Control, Caring for a Body with Diabetes by Jeff Powers-Beck (The Power of Illness & the Promise of Health)

I've lived with Type 1 diabetes, more or less successfully, for thirty-two years now, ever since I was diagnosed at the age of four. I still remember the morning my mother took me to the doctor’s office. My dizzy spells and bouts of thirst had worried her more than a little. That morning, I had a big bowl of Captain Krunch for breakfast, and my blood sugar must have reached stratospheric levels.

In those days, they called it “juvenile diabetes.” All injections were given in glass syringes, which my mother sterilized dutifully every morning and evening. I can still hear the tinkling of the glass syringe against the sides of the glass double boiler. Tink-a-tink-a-tink-tink: time for your morning shot.

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From: Hanging in the Balance: The Fate of the Cherokee Language in the 21st Century by Barbara R. Duncan and James “Bo” Taylor (Appalachian Accents)

Siyo! (Hello!)

Will the Cherokee children of the 21st century greet each other this way? Will they speak the language of their ancestors? The Cherokee language as changed, adapted, and survived for thousands of years. “It is a gift from the Creator,” says the Rev. Robert Bushyhead, Cherokee elder. “And it is what makes us Cherokee.”

Less than 200 years ago—before the Trail of Tears in 1838 when the federal government forcibly removed most of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma—nearly every Cherokee person could both read and write the Cherokee language because of the syllabary form of writing invented by Sequoyah. He was the only person in recorded human history to invent a writing system without first being literate himself, an incredible accomplishment. The Cherokee people rapidly became literate and published Bibles, hymnbooks, and a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. They also created a written constitution.

But today fewer than 10 percent of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, living on part of their ancestral homelands in Western North Carolina, still speak and write their language.

From: A Clear Connection by Anya E. Liftig (Appalachian Accents)

The day began as usual—dodging piles of rotting trash, stepping around puddles of unknown substances and weaving in and out of teeming masses of strangers on Third Avenue. I pulled my digital cell phone, the newest “must-have” New York accessory, out of my bag. As I dialed the number, I imagined myself being magically transported from the chaos of the city, along the invisible wires, through satellites and switches, and deep into the Appalachian mountains to arrive by my Mamaw’s side when she picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” Despite the fact that I still found myself immersed in the grit of the city, the connection was complete. I was with her on the porch of the old family home at the head of the holler, fresh from digging potatoes and killing a few chiggers. The dog scratched at a midsummer flea, and one cousin or another was working on the old truck.

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From: The Lucy-Desi Museum: Paying Tribute to the Inventors of the Sitcom by Paul Heimel (Museums and Archives)

“I’ve spent half of my life learning about Lucille Ball,” says 31-year old Ric Wyman, an Elderon, Wis., native whose affinity for the late comedienne led him to take over as director of the Lucy-Desi Museum in Jamestown, N.Y., in February 1999. “There’s just something captivating about her.”

The people of Jamestown feel the same way about their hometown hero. Jamestown, a quaint city of 35,000, is located on Chautauqua Lake’s southern shore in southwestern New York. Maybe the people of Jamestown are so taken with Ball because she is the best known connection between a small Appalachian New York community and the larger world. Perhaps Ball’s fame legitimizes Jamestown in the eyes of the local citizenry.

From: Living the Past at Oak Hill School by Amy D. Clark (Museums and Archives)

On a blustery October day, a group of fourth-graders from three East Tennessee schools have gathered to practice the three R’s of education: reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, as their great-grandparents might have done nearly a hundred years before them. The boys are dressed in overalls, fur caps, and flannel shirts; the girls are wearing bonnets, prairie dresses, and petticoats, looking as if they might have stepped out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. “I just finished On the Banks of Plum Creek,” one of them whispers, the tops of her black granny-boots peeking out from the ruffle of her skirt.

Kathy Mays, a retired teacher and curator of the museum, serves as the schoolmarm. She is dressed in period attire: a gray, high-necked dress with a broach nestled at the throat and skirts that sweep the floor. Her hair is woven into a tight bun. She rings a brass bell as the children walk single file to the school, where they are seated, shortest in the front and tallest in the back, with girls on one side and boys on the other.

From: Building Virtual Archives by Lori Riverstone (Museums and Archives)

When I was a young girl, I often traveled with my Great-Aunt Margaret from our East Tennessee home to North Carolina and Kentucky in search of the elusive missing link in her genealogical records. We wound through the mountains to visit city halls and libraries, historical societies and cemeteries, family reunions and people’s homes. Once there, Margaret would dig through mounds of paperwork and photographs while I played and prowled nearby.

I suppose that these early experiences formed my romantic impression of the way of the researcher: long road trips, dusty and moldy books, legal pads, and chewed-up, eraserless pencils. Certainly my experience working in the university of Tennessee's special collections department has only contributed to this impression. But I have discovered that things are rapidly changing for investigators, regardless of whether they’re scholars, writers, or genealogists like Great-aunt Margaret who are doggedly trying to track down family history.

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From: Going Thirsty? Appalachia Faces Water Supply Problems by David Lewis Feldman (Appalachian Rivers, Lakes & Streams)

Appalachia is probably one of the last places that comes to mind when people think about water shortages, disputes over water rights, or restricting water used for washing cars, irrigating crops, or watering lawns. After all, depending upon where you live in Appalachia, precipitation—rain, sleet, snow, and ice—averages anywhere from 36 to 70 inches annually. However, people living in Guntersville, Ala., or in Dalton, Ga., in Crossville and Pikeville, Tenn., or in Owingsville, Ky., know all about political conflicts over water. Those conflicts are fueled by fears that there may not be enough to support future growth. These and other communities throughout Southern Appalachia have begun to experience serious water supply disputes, only made worse by a series of droughts plaguing the area since the mid-1980s.

From: Learning Happens by Jo Ann Simmons (Appalachian Rivers, Lakes & Streams)

In the past, education in rural schools has done little to engage students in science and math. Traditional textbook-driven science tends to present scientific concepts as an abstract set of disconnected facts; scientific laboratories are often sterile places where students carry out formulaic experiments. Seeing no connection between classroom learning and their daily lives, many students lack motivation and, as a result, are not prepared to be scientifically literate citizens.

An innovative program introduced in rural West Virginia and Alabama schools is doing its best to address this problem.

From: Lessons from Ganderbill Holler by Inez Fugate Liftig (Appalachian Rivers, Lakes & Streams)

All the branches of the Ganderbill mean something to my family and me. Here’s the place where Susie the lamb fell over the cliff. There’s where the ram fell into a whirlpool. This is the stream that is fed at Big Spring Point, near Wolf Pen Holler, where my ancestors tried to capture the wolves that were eating their livestock, and here is Deep Holler, whose mountainsides are so steep, it was nearly impossible to scale them. Then there’s Little Brook that has the best wild plums in the world, the same stream in which my grandfather—Old Man Gran— washed his face for the 104 years of his extraordinary life. The old-timers credited his longevity to his cold, early morning splashes in the water that fed Ganderbill.

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From: Balancing Act: An Interview with Silas House by Jane Harris Woodside (Always a Love Story: Fiction from the Appalachian Mountains)

Being an Appalachian writer feels most days like walking a tightrope, says 29-year-old Silas House, whose first novel, Clay’s Quilt, has readers of fiction throughout the region and the nation sitting up and taking notice. “To portray the region honestly without perpetuating stereotypes—it’s incredibly hard,” notes House.

“I thought about it, especially when I was revising. I sure didn’t want to perpetuate anything negative, but I also couldn’t leave anything out just for the sake of being politically correct. It wouldn’t have been honest.”

From: The Mighty and Enduring Pen of John O'Hara by Christine M. Goldbeck (Always a Love Story: Fiction from the Appalachian Mountains)

John O’Hara’s fictional town of Gibbsville is a thinly disguised portrait of Pottsville, the seat of Schuylkill County in Appalachian Pennsylvania’s anthracite region.

It is a town that has changed a great deal since the early part of the 20th century when O’Hara, a home-grown writer whose books won him international acclaim, exposed the eccentricities and flaws of the hard coal region’s rich and poor, the famous and the infamous in his novels and short stories.

From: How to Write West Virginian by Kevin Stewart (Always a Love Story: Fiction from the Appalachian Mountains)

Because of your wife’s job, move to an aristocratic coastal city in a state farther south than West Virginia. Become an adjunct instructor for very little money at the local community college. Split up with wife. The day before spring semester starts, learn that your classes didn’t “make.”

Fall back on your undergraduate degree, which is marketable: Work as a drafter for a hack home designer and hate it.

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From: Planting a New Industry in the North Carolina Mountains by Jane Harris Woodside (Striking a Balance: Conserving & Developing Appalachia’s Natural Resources)

Why not, Suggs and others asked, develop a natural products industry, based mainly on native botanicals? Such an industry could potentially do everything from cultivating ginseng and bloodroot to producing, distributing, and marketing its own lines of herbal teas, tinctures, or tablets to one day supplying drug companies with active compounds for prescription drugs…

As Suggs points out, “Herbals are about a $4 billion a year industry in the U.S. and if you look at Europe, it's about double that. Even if Western North Carolina counties figure out a way to capture only, say, 1 percent of that, it's a pretty sizable market.”

From: Mountaintop Removal: Necessity or Nightmare? by Rudy Abramson (Striking a Balance: Conserving & Developing Appalachia’s Natural Resources)

About sunrise, Willard and Evelyn Kelly hear the bulldozer engines start up on the mountain above their house, followed by the clattering of steel treads in a cacophony that will continue until dusk. Less than a mile from their door, yet another of Logan County’s ridges is being scalped. “Sometimes,” says Willard, “it sounds like they’re coming right at you.”

From: Hollow Journey by Jack Owens (Striking a Balance: Conserving & Developing Appalachia’s Natural Resources)

I stood at the top of #6 Hollow in Jenkinjones, West Virginia, where McDowell County ends and Virginia begins just over the mountain. I hadn’t been back to the bottom of West Virginia in three decades. I was too busy being an FBI agent and raising six children, too occupied to feel the pull of my roots.

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From: Pride and Sorrow: Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Aftermath of September 11 by Janet Frank Atkinson (Beyond Our Borders: Appalachia and the World)

Outsiders are easily spotted in the rural town of Shanksville, Pa. Let’s start with Ida’s Country Store. Ida’s is one of the only places in Shanksville where residents can pick up a gallon of milk without driving 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store. You see, the door to Ida’s opens in. Outsiders try to pull the door open. That’s a huge indication that “You’re not from around here, are you?”

More outsiders have come to this Somerset County town since the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 at 10:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, than had found their way to the community during the past several years put together. And outsiders will continue to come to this community …

From: Fear by Anwar F. Accawi (Beyond Our Borders: Appalachia and the World)

The phone rings, shattering the early morning silence like a boy’s stick does icicles. I jump out of bed and run barefoot to the family room where our only phone hangs on the wall. On the way, I bump into hard things, furniture my wife had rearranged just before we went to bed. When I pick up the receiver, I am not awake yet, but that does not keep me from doing what I have to do. Years of practice have taught me to do things while semiconscious. I have let the cat out, changed diapers, and given babies their formulas without being fully awake. My hands know what to do. The left one picks up the receiver and brings it up to my ear.

From: Raised to Leave by Lee Smith (Beyond Our Borders: Appalachia and the World)

I was born in a rugged ring of mountains in Southwest Virginia—mountains so high, so straight up and down that the sun didn’t even hit our yard until about eleven o’clock.

My uncle Bob—they lived across the road—used to predict the weather by sticking his head out the window and hollering back inside “Sun on the mountaintop, girls!” to my cousins. The only flat land in the county lay in a narrow band along the river. Though we all “ate out of the garden,” real farming was impossible in this “hard rock ground.” The only thing it produced was coal.

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From: Ray Hicks and the Doctors by Joseph Sobol (First Person Appalachia)

When I arrived at the Medical Center in Johnson City, Tenn., one evening in the spring of 2001, Ray Hicks, the patriarch of American traditional storytellers, was in one of those tiny cubicles in the innards of the emergency room on a narrow, rolling bed a foot too short for him. A cultural standoff was in progress.

He’d been there since just after noon. The hospital staff seemed to be hoping that he’d get tired and go home—after making an appointment to come back and see a specialist like a good citizen of the nation of Modern Medicine. Ray’s family knew that he was not now, nor had he ever been, a citizen of that nation, and that if they took him back home to North Carolina, they’d never get him back down. So each camp was trying to wait the other out.

From: Funny, There Should Be That Quality, Sometimes … by Barclay Franklin (First Person Appalachia)

There is a quality, sometimes, about the air, a quality that may be best described by what it isn’t. It isn’t like the air of summer, heavy and oppressive, smothering you beneath the weight of a humidity just short of visible. It has no invigorating quality like the sharp air of an autumn day. It brings no alacrity of spirit, no bounding blue-sky happiness. … It is, near as I remember, the air of spring in the Appalachians of my childhood—warm, still, sensuous, soft.

From: Notes from the Pugh Family Reunion by John O’Brien (First Person Appalachia)

Beck puts my astonishing deviled eggs on one of the picnic tables inside the shelter. They do seem insubstantial there among the fried chicken, pork tenderloin, spicy ham, half a dozen casseroles, three different kinds of potato salad, four other plates of deviled eggs, three varieties of rolls, salt-rising bread, two large bowls of wondrous green beans, fruit salad, three varieties of cole slaw, and half a dozen dishes I can’t name but intend to sample. The dessert table—my God—each cake and pie like a picture from a gourmet magazine.

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From: The Hand That Wrote The Dollmaker by Silas House (Paying Tribute)

Let us now praise a not-famous-enough woman.

Although most readers of Appalachian literature consider Harriette Arnow to be one of the matriarchs of 20th-century literature, her name is not spoken in the same sentences with writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Porter, or Eudora Welty.

It should be.

From: Appalachian Steward Ed Bingham by Tal Stanley (Paying Tribute)

Teacher, neighbor, mentor, friend. Ed Bingham daily wove the callings of his life into a seamless garment that he offered to all of us.

I knew Ed when I was his student. Later when I returned to Southwest Virginia’s Emory & Henry College as a member of the faculty, he was my neighbor. Through it all, he was a friend. Only later, after he was dead and I had begun to understand what I had lost, did I recognize him as my mentor.

From: Stitches in Time by Nancy Jane Earnest (Paying Tribute)

She received letters during World War II from a son in North Africa addressed simply to “Granny, Elizabethton, Tennessee.” They arrived as addressed without question. What common homemaker could have garnered that kind of respect and notoriety from an entire town?

That uncommon matriarch was my maternal grandmother, Mary Jackson Perry. As a late-arriving grandchild, I had no concept of the scope of her life or the depth of her quiet conviction that she could make the world a better place. To me, she was just Granny—my model, my stability, my champion, and my friend. She taught me to tie my shoe and drink tea properly, but best of all, she taught me that the most important thing I could be in life was myself and that with determination and a strong sense of my own strength, I could easily find my place in the world. The lessons came from an expert.

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From: Country Cool by Danny Fulks (Raised Up in the Mountains)

They came down from little West Virginia towns like Madison, Red Jacket, Lenore, Crum, and West Hamlin. Girls—late of lands where slivers of coal left on the banks of runs flickered in the sun—packed hair dryers, low-rise jeans, and music by J.Lo, Alison Krauss, and Limp Bizkit; hit the crooked two-lanes; and left out for Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. Some had tatoos—half-covered by jeans or tops—ears and eyebrows and an occasional tongue pierced. Others styled-out with short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, cell phones on their ears, and, close up, smelled as sweet as a fresh dryer sheet from momma's laundry room. After twelve years under lock-down in schools where principals in polyester sport coats kept them under surveillance, they were ready to let go. Country cool.

From: Going Underground by Christine Goldbeck (Raised Up in the Mountains)

A century ago and more, most young men risked their lives in Appalachian Pennsylvania anthracite mines because it was their job. Mining was about the only way to turn a buck back then in the hard coal region. Today, the Underground Miners based in Luzerne County spend their own money to descend into the dark, damp, and largely aboandoned underground caverns because they like to do it.

From: Father Joseph by Anwar Accawi (Raised Up in the Mountains)

Father Joseph was a short, skinny priest in his late fifties or early seventies. There was no telling how old he was because his wrinkles had wrinkles. He wore his black cassock like a teepee, and he moved about freely within its folds without distrubing it at all on the outside. His feet were not visible beneath his long garment, so when he walked around, he appeared to be floating on air, much like a Hovercraft.

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From: At the Edge of the Past: Jenny Wiley’s Story and Its Relevance Today by Edwina Pendarvis (A Tribute to Twenty Years)

One of the major stories to come out of the ongoing war against Iraq was the rescue of Jessica Lynch, a young Appalachian soldier who had been captured by the Iraqis during our invasion. Her story almost immediately took on the porportions of a myth. In the midst of a controversial war, here was something on which almost everyone in the United States could agree.

From: ESL, PM, Class Code 9318 by Dana S. Wildsmith (A Tribute to Twenty Years)

I'd never own up to having favorite students, but if I were to, Meng Thorng would be a contender. A courtly, well-educated man in his 50s, a school headmaster in his native Cambodia, he now handles the indignity of being set back to beginning-student status with a graciousness that always puts me in mind of Savannah or Charleston or the late Queen Mother. Tonight he has written for us his starkest truth, and he reads it as truth, plain and bare.

From: Creases by Jim Minick (A Tribute to Twenty Years)

I am ten and riding with Grandpa on his Honda, my small body hugging his. He pulls over and tells me that he wants me to find our way home. We have just gone through the village of Mifflin, but I am too young and too far from home to know which way to go. He is firm, despite my protests, because he wants me to learn. He points to the mountains, tells me to use them.

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From: The War: 40 Years After by Diana Nelson Jones (The Media and Appalachia)

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson leapt over a gulley full of water into Tommy Fletcher’s yard along Route 3 in Inez, Ky. Photos show an entourage in the foreground of Fletcher’s shack, were Johnson declared, “I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.”

From: Bringing the News Back Home by IRJCI Staff (The Media and Appalachia)

When Rudy Abramson retired from the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times in 1983, he kept traveling in Appalachia, a region where he had done environmental and other reporting. With deadlines facing him less frequently, he had time to reflect. And what he concluded was that the sense of community in the region was fading. He attributed that partly to the fact that fewer local news outlets were defining the public agenda for their communities or playing a strong role in their civic infrastructure.

From: Shop Talk from Rosy’s Diner by Fred Sauceman (The Media and Appalachia)

“I'm pretty much on my own, and what I do is, I'll wake up about 6 in the morning and NPR news is on my clock radio, and I’ll start mulling over what’s going on in the world. I’ll get up and have my coffee and read the morning paper and start thinking about what I would say if I were in the diner reading this stuff. And so when I get dowtown usually I'll start doodling out ideas on topics and I’ll do three or four different subjects and gags on those subjects, and then about 2 o’clock I’ll go to the editorial page editor and show him the four doodles that I’ve come up with and he’ll say let’s run this one.”

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