**After whose family Griffithsville was named. Griffithsville is where Duval High School was located

**After whose family Griffithsville was named. Griffithsville is where Duval High School was located.

It Won’t Be Apples They Smell

One student in my chemistry class can send this hydrogen sulfide smell all over the school with one small test-tube reaction. It’s the same gas that comes from “sulfur water”. Some say you will be able to smell the rotten eggs in Hamlin. Some say you already can on board meeting nights.

Hydrogen sulfide is more poisonous than cyanide gas. Lucky for us, humans call smell small amounts better than any detector made. But small amounts will gag a maggot. The amount of “rotten eggs” gas emitted will be five and one-half times stronger than the amount needed for the human nose to detect.

Every day, twenty-four hours a day, Apple Grove will smell like rotten eggs. But it will bring 600 non-union jobs. Why does West Virginia seem to get these choices between no jobs or hell on earth?

If we let them tear up our mountains with strip-mining they throw a few jobs our way. Dump out-of-state garbage in our hollers and get a few more jobs. Poison our air and water and we can work. Destroy our beautiful hardwood forests and we can stay off welfare. Guard criminals and you can earn a living. Moorefield sold out to the chicken people and now that sweet little town smells like several million dead chickens. Progress?

Do we have to commit suicide to survive? Is suicide survival?

But that is not all on Apple Grove. What a beautiful name for what is going to happen to it. Every year they will foul our air and rain with 66 million cubic feet of poisonous carbon monoxide, 6.5 million cubic feet of sulfur dioxide which turns to sulfuric acid in the clouds, 41 million cubic feet of nitrogen oxides which also come back as acid rain, 400,000 cubic feet of hydrochloric acid and over a million pounds of unnamed volatile organic compounds.

The state is about to give the pulp mill an air pollution permit that will dump around 13 million pounds of pollution into the air every year. That’s about 36,000 pounds of pollution every day! Every day! Besides the 600 scab jobs it will create a bunch more in the health care industry. Imagine the occupational diseases the workers are going to get along with their pay checks.

Where will the pulp mill get the stuff to mall all that mess? They are going to cut down all our trees for as far as you can see and replace the hardwoods with quick-growing evergreens and do away with the spring and fall color. There is a Weyerhauser plant going up in Flatwoods (site of my proposed one school for all of West Virginia) that will take care of gutting the forests in that area. There is another wood products operation going in near Fayetteville which will rob the beauty of that area. The middle of West Virginia is going to be destroyed unless strict timbering laws are passed. And like coal companies they will contract out the cutting so that local boys will get the jobs and the blame for destroying the woods. The companies know it is hard for us to want our neighbors to lose out on jobs, so they bank on us silently watching the destruction.

Hypocrites pray in public, says the Man from Galilee—it was suggested last week that there should be voluntary prayer time in school, that there should be a moment of silence every morning for voluntary prayer. What do you do if someone doesn’t want to be silent, but would like to sing rock and rolls songs during that time? Do we punish them for not being quiet while others pray? Should punishment and prayer be linked together? Do you have the right to pray and make everyone else be quiet while you do it? I think you do in church, but not in everybody’s school. Voluntary prayer is possible all day long, every day, and no one needs to show off like the hypocrites to do it.

I pray when I want to pray and when I think I need it. And I don’t need the prayer police telling me I have to pray every morning at 7:30. State religion would be a disaster! Imagine the local political bosses telling everybody when to pray or to pray at all. The so-called religious right-wing claims they want the government off our backs but they want the government to tell us when and where to pray.

Some good news for a change. The U. S. Congress passed a bill banning gifts from lobbyists to congressmen. This was done over the objections of the Republican leadership! Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell all wanted those free vacations from the friends of good government who try for the best Congress money can buy. Do you ever get the feeling that the national government is just a big version of Lincoln County? A group call Common Cause is still working to shut down the political action committees that pour tons of money into the campaigns of those politicians who are for sale. Are there other kinds? I am president of the Lincoln County Education Association Political Action Committee and I say get rid of them all. We can’t match the money the rich pour into the campaigns.

Ugly politicians—I used to see pictures of all those ugly, sour-looking men standing on Lenin’s tomb in Moscow and would then turn to the local paper and see the same guys shaking hands with Rockefeller in Hamlin. If it wasn’t for the language difference you could switch their guys for ours and no one would know the difference. I concluded that the Soviet Union was just a bunch of Lincoln Counties back to back.

Republicrats Are Locking Our Children Out Of College

Osbourne is also spending weekends in jail for cheating the federals out of $150,000 in mine reclamation fees. Another example of what the coal industry is doing to us. The Republicrats in Congress and our state legislature do their best to “take government off our backs” and let thieves like Osbourne do weekends in jail.

Imagine if some poor kid from Lincoln County held up a bank for what Osborne has stolen from us with paperwork!** Lloyd Jackson and his fellow Republicrats chose to punish the worker whose back doesn’t work right anymore because a mine roof dell on it. Medicare and Medicaid have been broken by outrageous hospital and doctor’s fees. Guess who it is the Republicrats have chosen to punish. Punish the victim is the battle cry of the big money politicians. And once again, are there very many politicians other than big money politicians?

An old high school friend, who is a doctor, once told me that he got himself through medical school by hard work and sacrifice. People on welfare could do what he did. “Anyone who wants to get ahead can do it because I did and I was as poor as you could get,” he said. I reminded him that the taxpayers of West Virginia built the schools that he attended, including the WVU Medical School. We built the roads he drove on, we provided the mail service and we provided the GI Bill of Rights that paid him to go to school. He didn’t do it alone, nor only by his hard work and grit. A combination of social services provided by the dreaded government and his extreme smarts made him a doctor. I am glad we made it possible for him to become a doctor and I hope we continue to make it possible for poor kids to become all they can be.

I have students right now who have the ability to be anything they want to be except for the damn money—that isn’t fair, no sir! People will tell you there is money for college education if you want it badly enough. There is some money if you have excellent grades, but there is almost no money for the B-average student**.

It is the old Jackie Robinson syndrome—he had to be the best player in baseball to get a chance at the white big leagues. There were all kinds of average players who never got a chance because they were Black. For a long time, most of the average players in any sport, college or pro, were white. The same applies to poor students, white and black. If you are in the top5-10 percent of your class you have a chance at some college money.

Rich kids don’t have to be near as qualified as poor kids to go to college. The Republicrats are trying to make it even harder for poor kid to go to college. And don’t forget the $100 million Super Tax Credit going to those “poor” coal operators.

Now to important stuff.

Marshall lost the national championship because of character. Two late hits out of bounds, one roughing the punter and a taunting penalty probably cost them a couple of touchdowns. It is a physically violent sport and without coaches with a firm grip on discipline, it gets spiritually violent.

While on the all-important subject of football—Marshall had four players from West Virginia on the starting offense and defense. Four players out of twenty-two from West Virginia. WVU’s football team is also overloaded with out-of-state players. Both bought the best professional players that were left over after the big money got through recruiting. Land we proudly call these foreign mercenaries, “our team.”

L. T. Anderson, who once wrote for the Charleston Gazette and now*** for the Daily Mail (My grandpa Charlie Barker used to call the Charleston Daily Mail a scab paper, but the Gazette has since joined them in union-busting) once proposed that WVU schedule football games with Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell and other Ivy League types. Every game those teams play is covered in the New York Times. WVU would probably go undefeated every year and get nation publicity in the Times. Anderson then suggested that WVU wisely turn down any bowl bids. Football fans like to win, they don’t care much who it is they beat.

I would like to amend Anderson’s suggestions and propose that only West Virginia high school graduates be allowed to play sports at WVU, Marshall and other state colleges. There would be no athletic scholarships, and all games would be with teams within a bus drive who adopted the same rules. In other words, we would de-criminalize college sports. Our kids would get to play for their home state schools.

Close to half of the students and almost all of the athletes at West Virginia University are from out of state. Out-of-state tuition doesn’t come near paying for the cost of education. We pay the taxes, a lot of their costs and they have all the fun! Let’s take our schools back. Make the out-of-state students pay the full cost of their education. It is crazy that a state as poor as West Virginia is subsidizing out-of-state students.

A friend of mine says that when I thought I was being called a communist I was really being called a columnist.

I hope you had a nice Christmas and do have a Happy New Year.

*Lloyd Jackson was a state senator representing Lincoln County

**Promise scholarships

***Now deceased

The Arabs Are Coming To Duval High School

The News from Sam’s Branch

The Lincoln Independent, January 17, 1996
This is a true story. It happened a long time ago at Duval High School. For three weeks representatives of an oil-rich Arab Sheik telephoned Duval High School to make arrangements for the Arab’s two sons to attend Duval. The Sheik was moving to West Virginia to get into the coal business. He didn’t want his teen-aged sons going to school in Charleston. He wanted them away from the drugs and violence of big city schools. One Wednesday near the end of school the principal announced to the teachers over the p.a. system that there would be an emergency faulty meeting immediately after school. So far the faculty didn’t know about the negotiations to enroll the Arab students at Duval.

The principal solemnly informed us at the beginning of the meeting that everything we heard during the meeting was to stay in that room. This was a serious matter and if not handled right could have international implications. We were brought up to date on the negotiations, the Arabs were coming tomorrow. The Sheik was a very important man, a wealthy man and we must handle this situation with kid gloves. The students must understand that there could be no making fun of these two distinguished, well connected Arab students. The principal beamed at the coaches as he informed them that one of the boys averaged 17 points a game in basketball and the other was a quarterback.

The place was buzzing the next day. Someone didn’t leave the news in that faculty meeting room. One girl turned around and went home and got all dressed up for the occasion, this could be a short-cut to riches. The sheriff met the new students at the Alum Creek bridge and gave them a light flashing police escort to Duval. The Sheik’s sons were driving an old blue VW bug.

At Duval a pep assembly was in progress when the Arabs arrived. They were introduced to the entire student body between cheers. The cheerleaders' eyes were sparkling at the tall handsome boys. One was blond haired and they were both light skinned. They explained that their mother was a white American.

After being shown around the school they were taken to Hamlin for a personal audience with the superintendent of schools. The superintendent welcomed them to Lincoln County and made it clear he was there to help them in any way he could.

The boys were brought back to Duval where the coaches took them out on the football field and into the gym to see what they had. State championships were flowing in all directions. The quarterback couldn’t throw and the basketball star dribbled like he had a hand full of thumbs. It was the altitude difference between West Virginia and Saudi Arabia that accounted for the poor performance. The Arabs should have left before the sports tryouts. They had blown their cover.

These Arabs were from the far-off exotic Arab land of South Charleston, they were very creative, red-blooded American boys, students at South Charleston High School. Their dad was American, too. They had pulled the whole thing off themselves. I was never sure if the Arabs were put in jail overnight because the authorities had no sense of humor or because they did. The boys should have gotten an Oscar. The whole thing was hushed up and never made the papers. It finally has. I wonder where those Arabs are now.

**My grandpa Charlie Barker said that rich people stole with a pen.