Memories of a WV Mountain Kid

Excerpts from “Memories of a WV Mountain Kid”

By Keith Gibson

Looking Back

A few days ago I came to the realization that I have lived in seven decades, two centuries, and two millenniums. Wow !!…..Is that blessed, or what ?? The article I was reading when I discovered this startling news also said: “People born in the 1950s had the fastest cars, best music, soda fountains, happy days, and drive-in theaters.” Well, I know that to be the truth, because I can still remember the “muscle cars”, “great music,” “soda fountains,” a lot of “happy days,” and “drive-in theaters.” And speaking of drive-in theaters, I remember going to Monitor Drive-in Theater on “Buck Night” when it only cost a dollar for each car instead of charging each person a separate admission fee. I also remember two or three guys hiding in the trunk of the car.

Back in March 2000, when I was only a few days away from turning the big “5-0” I thought: “Where did time go??” “I’m not supposed to be this old!!” Nevertheless, I WAS that old and I thought it would be a good time to sit down and write about some of the things I experienced growing up in Lyburn, West Virginia. As a child I didn’t realize it, but life was tough back in 1950. The cost of living was a lot cheaper, but the average income was nowhere near what it is today. It’s true that a gallon of milk was .85 cents and you could buy a pound of coffee for .70 cents. Gasoline was .18 cents a gallon, and you could even buy a new car for $1,500. However, the average annual income in 1950 was only $3,200. Even with prices that low, can you imagine having to stretch $3,200 dollars over a year? And most of the jobs in Logan county back in those days were in the coal mines, working long hours. Not an easy job.

We lived in a house across the river from the old Lyburn mines company store, and one of the first things I remember was having a pedal car that I never could pedal and always ended up pushing it. And there was the peach tree in our yard that I would climb and think I was on top of the world (actually being 3 feet off the ground). One memory I will always cherish is walking with mom on the “back path” that was on “our” side of the river that went from Rum Creek to Rita, which is about 4 miles. Mom and I would walk up the road to visit my grandma Lillie Harless, which was about two or three hundred yards upriver. Back in those days honeysuckle vines grew on both sides of the path starting at the end of our very small yard and continued about two or three hundred feet, and you could smell the honeysuckle in the air, see the birds, the yellow, orange and black Monarch butterflies, and honey bees everywhere. With the love and security dad and mom had provided, I didn’t have a care in the world. It’s a cherished memory.

In the fall of 1955 we moved across the river beside the railroad tracks in a coal camp house at the lower end of Lyburn, and our new neighbor, Rev. Archie Conway and his family, were the nicest people you would ever want to meet. He had a printing press in one part of his house and would do small printing jobs for people in the area.

One day he gave me a small book he had made, and on the cover was printed “WHAT TO SAY TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SPEAK EVIL OF YOU.” When I saw the title I immediately thought “boy, this is just what I need!!” When I opened the book all the pages inside were blank. Such a good lesson.

Remembering Christmas in Lyburn, WV in the 1950s

I remember Christmas in the 1950s being totally different from Christmas now. It’s become so commercialized that it’s not the same anymore. It seems as if the “old-time” Christmas Spirit hardly exists. And because children get so much now, (and they get it all year long) the thrill of “hope and anticipation” is practically nonexistent. When I was a kid I would start getting excited right after Thanksgiving, because I knew it was getting close to Christmas. I didn’t get a lot of toys either, usually a cap buster, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat, or electric train. We got one toy, sometimes two, and any other gifts were clothes. But even though we only got one or two toys apiece, the air seemed like it was charged with the Christmas spirit. When we went to Logan during the Christmas season people had to park on the boulevard because it was too crowded in town. The first thing you would hear is the “Salvation Army” bell ringing in the season, and when you walked the streets in Logan, which were always decorated during the Christmas season, you usually had to walk “literally” IN the street because it was so crowded.

Another great memory was going up Laurel Branch, to cut down a Christmas tree and drag it home. They never looked as good as a store-bought tree, but we thought it was beautiful. Actually, many of them looked like the “Charley Brown” tree, but we didn’t care. After we got the bubble lights, ornaments, and a crapload of silver icicles on it we thought it was the most beautiful tree in the world.

When I was around six years old mom and dad would always tell me that I’d better be good because Santa was always watching, especially when it was getting close to Christmas. One evening in the late part of fall I was inside our old house playing when I heard dad say (rather loudly) to my brother Corky……….”Look.., up there just beyond that ridge!!” “Is that who I think it is?” Corky replied (also very loudly), “Man, that looks like Santa’s sleigh!!” “I think it is Santa’s sleigh!!” ……………… “Hey, Keith!!” When I heard that I went into a dead run out the front door, looking intently at the sky. Of course, I was too late, and dad said, “aww skeeter(a nickname he gave me), you just missed him. He just cleared the top of that hill right over there!” It seemed like my heart was beating out of my chest. I thought to myself, “I just missed him, but no doubt he’s out cruising around so I’d better play it cool and stay out of trouble.” When I look back and think about the hope and anticipation I had as a kid during Christmastime in the 1950’s I can’t help but smile.

Every year just before school started mom would order school clothes from Sears & Roebuck, and I remember seeing dad paddling across the river with a big box in the front of the boat, and getting so excited. Our school clothes had come in and he had stopped and picked them up on his way home from work. The clothes were for me and my older brother Corky, and we always got two or three pairs of overalls (blue jeans) and flannel shirts each, and socks and gloves. I also got a cap with ear flaps that had the fur above my eyes. We wouldn’t have been any more excited had it been a box full of toys. With the new clothes, I was ready to begin my second year of school, but this would be the last year I would ever be attending the old two-room schoolhouse at Lyburn. A brand new elementary school was being built at Earling, and my third year of formal schooling would begin there. You can’t imagine how BIG that new school looked to an eight-year-old kid who was used to walking to an old two-room schoolhouse where the first and second grade was taught in one room, and the third thru the sixth was taught in the other. And now I was actually riding a school bus.

I remember the first “sock hop” I ever went to was at Lyburn Grade School, and if I remember correctly I was around 10 or 11 years old. One of the songs they played was “Runaway” by Del Shannon. That song always brings back great memories.

In the spring of 1964, my dad (Hayden Gibson) and three or four of his friends set up a sawmill on Kelly mountain. He had made a deal with a couple of the local mines and was going to supply them with crib blocks, half headers, and cap wedges. After they got the sawmill set up and running they got together and built some shanties so they could stay there all week and cut trees and saw lumber. At the time I was in the ninth grade, attending Logan East Jr High and looking forward to summer vacation. When school finally let out dad came to me and asked me about going over to Kelly mountain and staying for a week. He said it would be sort of like camping out.  It wasn’t too bad at first, but then he talked me into bundling cap wedges. As I watched the wedge man cut some of the wedges I thought sure, no problem.

When the guy cut wedges out of a block of wood, the wedges would drop down to a conveyor belt that went out and dropped them into a neat little pile. Little did I know that this guy had done this for years and he could cut about two or three wedges every second. So here I was, on my knees grabbing the wedges and stacking twenty to a bundle with the narrow ends turned in, wrapping a piece of wire around it, turning the bundle up on its end and tightening them up with a hammer. It wasn’t long until they had to dig me out of the cap wedges. They all got a good laugh out of it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if dad didn’t put him up to it. After being there for a week I found out sawmill work is not easy.

A Rooster Named “Stubbs”

About halfway through the summer of that year, we had a visitor wander in out of the mountains. One morning we woke up to a rooster crowing, and when we went out to look we saw a big game rooster standing in front of our shanty. We immediately got some bread and started feeding him and it wasn’t long until he became part of the crew. This rooster was special. In fact, he wasn’t like any rooster I had ever seen before because he didn’t have any feet. We speculated that maybe his feet froze off due to frostbite or something, but it really didn’t matter, because now he was one of the guys, and we had to come up with a name for him so we called him “Stubbs,” and Stubbs had the run of the place. I don’t know for sure if Stubbs really knew he didn’t have any feet because he would walk around and scratch the ground with his two stubbs like it wasn’t a big deal.

After Stubbs had been there a few weeks some of the guys started wondering how long it had been since Stubbs had a girlfriend. After we discussed it among ourselves my brother Corky came up with the idea that since mom had some chickens maybe she would give us one of the hens so we could take it over to Stubbs so he could have some company. Mom agreed, so the following Monday morning, when we arrived for work we had a hen that mom had given us. We turned her loose and she shook her feathers real good and started walking around in front of the shanty. Now, I’ve seen some pretty chickens and I’ve seen some ugly chickens, and I can truthfully say that this hen was nothing to look at, but Stubbs thought she was beautiful, and it was love at first sight.

From that day on Stubbs strutted around like a king. And everywhere he went, his lady was always at his side. So every morning Stubbs would wake us up, and after we had a good breakfast of eggs and potatoes, and Stubbs and his lady had a good helping of bread we would go to work and Stubbs and his lady would go on about their business.

A few days after Stubbs had wandered into our camp and we began feeding him,  he actually let one or two of the guys get close enough to pat him on the head and even stroke his back. But now that he had his lady with him nothing like that was going to happen. He always kept his distance, watching over her and assuring her safety.

A year or two later dad finished up his work on Kelly mountain, dismantled the sawmill, and moved everything back to Lyburn. But just before we left, we noticed that Stubbs and his lady were nowhere to be found, and we never did see them again. Whether he had decided to move to another location somewhere in the hills or had met with an untimely fate, we can only guess. I really liked old “Stubbs,” and would rather like to think that he took his better half to a new part of the mountain to live out the rest of his days and raise a bunch of baby chickens.

More Memories of the mid 50’s

Sixty-four years ago when our family lived at the lower end of Lyburn, WV our next-door neighbors were The Reverend Archie Conway and his family. This was back in 1956 when I was only 6 years old, but I still remember the Conway family being some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet. Reverend Conway was very respected by everyone that knew him and was somewhat of a poet, In fact, he wrote and printed out his own poetry book titled “ECHOES FROM THE MOUNTAINS” containing 40 pages of poems he had written, with illustrations by my cousin, Lois Harless-Thompson, an exceptional sketch artist. The first inside page has sort of an introduction that says:
 
I have written poetry for forty years and more
About a lot of things and the people I adore;
About the faraway lands across the trackless sea,
Which always have, somehow, appealed to me.
 
I write of things as they appear in dreams,
Or as they fit into my little plans or schemes,
I have known celestial joy a hundred thousand times
To know that God has given the gift of writing rhymes,
 
I feel an inward blessing when I write a line or two,
So I hope this precious feeling will be conveyed to you,
And that your heart is lifted each time you take a look
At the simple little verses twixt the covers of this book.

                                                                – The Author
Transcribed by Keith Gibson

Counting the introduction, there are a total of thirty poems, which were written about everything from “THE MARCH OF DIMES.” to “FARMER BROWN’S TESTIMONY.” One, in particular, was about my older brother who built and flew model airplanes when he was a teenager and was titled “CORKY’S AIRPLANE,” but referred to in the poem as a “Hinky Dinkus.” Dad used to take Corky and his airplane to the ball field at Dabney, up Rum Creek, so he could have room to fly it and, Well……, Corky’s airplane had experienced a few crashes and he had cut the wings off and turned it into what he called a “Prop Rod”. One day we were at the ball field and Corky had driven a metal rod in the ground and looped the end of a string over it with the “Prop Rod” on the other end. He then started the engine and let the “Prop Rod” run around in a circle. Everything was going well until one of the local “Rum Creekers” decided he wanted to start jumping the string as it came around. The string was pretty long, and at first, he didn’t have any trouble, but as the “Prop Rod”  kept getting faster and faster the poor guy got to where he didn’t have enough time to jump out of the circle it was making. Needless to say, he lost the race with the “Prop  Rod” and the string wrapped around his ankles. He would have probably been cut up pretty bad by the propeller, but in those days kids wore heavy blue jeans, referred to as “overalls,” and they saved his ankles. He wasn’t hurt, but it scared the daylights out of him.

As far back as I can remember, mom and dad had always been members of Davies Branch Church at Buchanantown, and every  Wednesday and Sunday night we would go to church. When we lived in the previous house it was only a few hundred feet to the church house, but now that we lived on the other side of the river next to the railroad and state route 10 it was close to a mile.

One evening we were on our way to church, and had walked across the Lyburn swinging bridge and up the footpath that ran parallel with the river all the way to Davies Branch. It was getting dark and we had just walked past the house where we had previously lived when I felt something hit my ankle. It didn’t hurt bad, just sort of stung a little, but when dad checked my leg he found two small puncture wounds. Well. of course they decided that I had been snake bit and dad grabbed me up in his arms and rushed back home. I don’t know how fast a Nash Rambler would go in those days, but you can bet that dad had the “pedal to the metal,” headed for Logan General Hospital. The doctors examined my leg and decided that since it hadn’t started swelling that the snake was probably non-poisonous. After we stayed for a couple of hours to make sure, we went back home.

 

Copyrighted by Keith Gibson.