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[specpapa]

"Bjorn the Last Unicorn" EP 2 FULL | Show From Pencilish Animation

[specpapa]

Hillbilly Transplant

My journey from the mountains to the beach.

                                                         For my Father

      As pelican shadows flashed across my lawn in Cocoa Beach Florida and I started to write this, I was reminded of my Father sitting at the card table in our home in West Virginia and the sound of his manual Royal typewriter that he used to create his weekly newspaper column.

      He was self-educated, and job taught. He, my Mother, and our family, settled on our farm, at Smithtown, West Virginia. He wanted to be close to the West Virginia University. That was so all his children had a chance to attend. I was a year old.

       One column caused his readers to write thousands of letters to appeal to the state of West Virginia to prevent the strip mining of the land at the headwaters of nearby White Day Creek. Within six months of his death, the mining started, and the creek no longer supports any life except brown algae on the rocks. As a boy, I fished that creek, for rainbow trout that the state stocked before trout season and swam in the clear water. No one does that now.

     He wrote of common things that he encountered as an agent for the Conservation Service in the Department of Agriculture, and the lives of the people he met. He was forced to give up writing when the state took our home by eminent domain. He had twenty-eight newspapers printing his column when that happened

      He never wrote again because he took a job with the city of Morgantown, West Virginia in the engineering department and worked there until he retired. He finished his days suffering from Parkinson’s and never left the homestead because of the embarrassment caused by the trembling of his hands and arms. My Mother survived him by twenty years in the house he built on the opposite end of the property from where the original house stood.

      He wrote in careful prose that was easy for his readers to understand. I hope to do the same. I have moved, since I started this book, to south Florida near Palm Beach.