Don Surber, Columnist
Charleston Daily Mail
dailymail.com
The first time you drive east down W.Va. 47 from Parkersburg, you think there cannot be a worse road in West Virginia.
It is winding, with oncoming cars crossing the centerline to avoid buckles in the asphalt along the edges of the road.
Then you hang a right at Smithville and quickly realize W.Va. 16 to Grantsville is worse.
- advertisement -Then you reach Five Forks and hang a left and . . . Well, actually the road to Nobe is not so bad.
So went my first visit to West Virginia. Has it been 28 years already?
The destination was an old farmhouse on a flat spot along the road. In the kitchen sat an old man and his wife, Pop and Granny, my fiancé's maternal grandparents.
I was 100 pounds lighter and so full of myself, I should have been in Hollywood. Young writers know everything.
The small room was filled with cigarette smoke and the "Dukes of Hazzard" beaming in all the way from Charleston. Channel 8 was CBS back then.
It was a Friday night, and they greeted us as they had greeted my wife's parents and uncle many a weekend past. Many were the departures and the returns as a son or daughter left for the big city or the military.
Every son served.
The first was Charlie. When in the course of my work, I met Chuck Yeager, I thought, he's Charlie. Instead of flying jets, Charlie built Chevrolets for a living. Other than that, the same eagle eyes and demeanor.
My grand in-laws weren't land-rich and cash-poor. Most of the farm was vertical.
No, they were family-rich, cash-poor. On the drive down from Cleveland, the future Mrs. Surber complained about driving down Route 21 every weekend to Calhoun County. And back again.
Now I realize just what those trips meant and I am jealous. I fall far short of that high standard as a parent.
Pop and Granny had something that America is losing: family. My in-laws tolerated three whiny kids in the back seat of a steaming car each weekend just for a few hours at home.
Home was not simply a three-bedroom ranch house in suburbia for my in-laws. It was also two little houses in Nobe where each had grown up.
Pop and Granny came by their riches by raising a pack of kids during the Depression.
When the war broke out, Pop went up to work in Cleveland. He didn't like it.
The one memento of his stay was a three-foot by one-foot photo of the East Ohio Gas fire on Oct. 20, 1944, which wiped out blocks of Cleveland.
I had a great-grandfather who died in it. He apparently was using the toilet when ka-boom. I shouldn't laugh, but I do.
Pop and Granny are long gone, but I often think about them. They have become symbols of the decency that I have encountered in my 24 years in West Virginia.
In the summer of 2004, their surviving children and many of their grandchildren held their first reunion. It came a week after the first Surber reunion at Mom's house. The home we grew up in on Hulda Avenue is long gone.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the number of million-dollar houses in California is rapidly rising. The reporter said they were now "a dime a dozen." Poetic license.
That's nice. Houses are nice investments. Far from harming the poor, rising housing prices increase equity and allow the working class to retire more comfortably by selling and moving to smaller quarters.
But homes are something money cannot buy. They are built one day at a time.
That photo of the East Ohio Gas fire now graces my wall, courtesy of my mother-in-law. When I see it I think of Cleveland, sure, and of another home I now have on a hill in Calhoun County, West Virginia.
Surber may be reached by e-mail at donsurber@dailymail.com
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