Earl Goodall, my neighbor, friend, and an amiable human being, passed on at age 93 on July 5, 2024. Earl was the subject of my 2021 16-minute documentary, "When Earl Went to War", about his Korean War service, while also portraying the man's sweet, down-home character. Here's a look back at the kind of guy who never gets lifted up into the spotlight. But he has stories and adventures worth telling.
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A RECORD RUN: After a legendary half-century, Budget Tapes & Records to close shop
Budget Tapes & Record will close Sunday, March 3, 2024, in Kanawha City, W.Va., after a half-century in operation. Here are two personal takes on the role this long-running establishment played in the life and times of West Virginia as an alternative, hippified haven for generations of folks.
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FIRST/PERSON: Traveling West Virginia’s backroads in the Byrdmobile
"I once worked for a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan — and I’m proud of it. Not because he was a Klan member more than three-quarters of a century ago, but because of what he became afterward ..."
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When Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sent to Moundsville Prison for making a speech
The story of how Socialist firebrand Eugene Debs once landed in the state penitentiary in Moundsville WV illustrates "how easy it is for Americans to vilify their own citizens and, when seized by fear or fashion, step on each other’s rights," says John W. Miller in this reprint from the Moundsville Blog.
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RE/PRINT: ‘Almost Heaven ’Til We Get There’: Black Miners and Blair Mountain
"I’m a sixth-generation West Virginian. My children are seventh-generation. My generational claim to Appalachia is subversive. It talks back to cavalier anti-Black stories of poor white redneck hillbillies and to the white people who claim an entire region as their own."
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BACK/THEN: On the Bad Streets of Ann Magnuson’s Charleston Upbringing
West Virginia native Ann Magnuson is an American actress and performance artist who was also once a girl growing up on the streets of Charleston, WV. Here's a short recollection of the the city's "bad" street from her girlhood.
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POEM: “Haymaking”
We cut, rake, and bale / till the sun goes down and the dew settles on the fields, / then start again next morning once the dew burns off ...
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BOOK REVIEW: The True Story of West Virginia’s (Bourgeois) Revolution and Birth
The birth of West Virginia was more complex than the usual telling that it was born as a result of the Civil War. Industrial and labor forces were in play well before the war that would lead to a breakaway state carved out of western Virginia—with key support from Abe Lincoln, write the authors of the new book "Seceding from Secession."
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POEM | “Nous Celeron” by Douglas John Imbrogno
'Don’t you, Nous Céleron, wish to lay down your arms? Enter the Ohio’s cool darkness, or the Chinodahichetha! Sounding out each syllable as a Wyandotte might utter them ...
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Prehistoric W.Va. was not an uninhabited hunting ground
You don't have to live long in West Virginia before you hear that the land used to be a "hunting ground" for Native Americans. The actual history is more vibrant and complex, as the region was more likely "an Interaction Zone" or melting pot of native ethnicities, languages, and technology.
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DON WEST | Part 2: “May It Be So”
Long before it became fashionable, Don West fought the passive hillbilly stereotype by pointing to mountain labor’s traditions of struggle and solidarity.
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DON WEST | Part 1: Not An Easy Path
Don West was not a warm and fuzzy person or "a creator of comfort. He was a ceator of action." It could be uncomfortable, but the labor activist and poet left a legacy to be explored in a WVPB documentary that debuts Sunday, June 7, 2020
