My Childhood - West Virginia

The Move

As I alluded to in an earlier post (end of 2nd paragraph), my family moved from the Washington DC suburbs to West Virginia. We moved at the end of 1977, but my father had bought a cabin on an acre of property on a mountain in 1974. As I am prone to remember, we bought the property on August 17, 1974 and moved on December 23, 1977, which was a tough time to move. When we bought the property, the whole family traveled to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. My father had found out about the new subdivision on the mountain from an ad in the Washington Star. They had also found a similar plan in nearby Shenandoah County, VA. My mother had called and gotten all of the information on both of those subdivisions and we went to one three weeks earlier in Virginia and then we went to the one in West Virginia, Glenwood Forest. We took a tour with a guy named Stan Patty. He had bought a lot a year or two earlier. He was a genial man, balding with black hair, a bushy mustache and black-rimmed glasses. He took us in his vehicle on roads crossing the 400+ acres of the forest that comprised the subdivision. He took us to the creek at the bottom of the plan, Back Creek. Back Creek was more like a small river because it was about 60-80 feet wide. We stood on a bluff overlooking the creek bend and it was beautiful. We were impressed by this.

Picking the Property

When we went back to the offices and we were more alone as a family, my mother and father spoke. They both agreed that the West Virginia subdivision was more of what they wanted. Back Creek ended up being the amenity that sealed the deal. We went to the Glenwood Forest offices, which were in a small cabin right beside Route 45, and my Mom and Dad went to negotiate. They started out in the main room of the cabin where they were looking at a big map on the wall representing all of the Glenwood Forest lots. There was a color code for the lots where unsold lots were in green and sold lots were marked in red. There was a lot of discussion of what lot we wanted and Dad settled on one more near the creek on a road called Sassafras Lane (my parents live at this same place even today 43 years later).

Joe Lack and the Hotdogs

While we were settling on a property, we met the owner of the community, Joe Lack. Joe Lack was a former car salesman from Richmond, VA I believe. He was of medium height, thin, dark and had dark hair and mustache like Stan. He looked like a car salesman - like he was fast talking, shifty and could make a deal happen. Joe Lack would later go on to become a revered man in the community because of his vision in creating several communities in Berkeley County, WV. Joe's life was cut short from cancer in 1982. One of the streets in Glenwood Forest West was renamed Joe Lack Memorial Lane.

Mom and Dad went to an office with Joe to settle on the property and any construction. While this was going on, Stan said we could have hotdogs and cokes that were on a serving table. The hotdogs were going on one of those oven spit small appliances. My sister Noelle was 4 and my brother Tim was 13. Noelle maybe ate half a hotdog and drank a bit of coke. My brother Tim ate maybe 3 or 4 hotdogs. I was a strange child. I decided I was hungry and Mr. Stan was so nice that he said eat as many as you want. Any time anyone said eat as many as you want, I still to this day take them up on it. I ate maybe 8 hotdogs and drank probably 5 cokes. Mr. Stan said it was ok, then it was ok. He shouldn't have said it if he didn't mean it.

The Cabin

Dad had signed a deal where Glenwood Forest would build a cabin shell on the 1 acre property for $8,000. Work started in September and the shell was completed sometime in Oct 1974. Our family traveled up to the cabin and Dad assessed the building project. Of course it was not up to his standards. He and I drove to Winchester, VA to Lowes and purchased some 2x4s and nails. Dad got back to the cabin and proceeded to add studs to the walls and deck supports. He put more nails in the deck railings, all the while complaining about how shoddy the work was. But nothing anyone did would ever be up to Dad's standards.

We came up to the cabin on several weekends in late 1974. We brought supplies in the back of the truck like blankets, food, matches, lanterns and coolers. We brought up a table and some cots on one of the first trips. The cabin did not have any electricity at that point. Dad was an electrician, so he was going to wire and finish the cabin himself. That cabin was cold. I mean cold! We would arrive around 6:30-7 pm on Friday night and would start a fire in the fireplace. It would take until Saturday morning for the cabin to get semi-warm. I may be exaggerating, but I was always cold that first 24 hours.

My Mom would make hot chocolate and she would cook breakfast. We would have sandwiches for lunch. You notice how I am thinking of food - always a theme with me. We would play games of I Spy, cards, board games etc. During the day we would explorer the forest and play on the acre. This wasn't my cup of tea most of the time. It was good exercise and it was seeing nature. I would bring some books to read of course - mainly Hardy Boys books. Our family got to be closer because of this wilderness bonding experiment.

Over the next few years, Dad worked hard to improve the cabin and the acre lot. I helped him sometimes by carrying things, going to get things, holding flashlights, etc. "Go get me the Romex connector," Dad would say. I would go in the pile of electrical devices and look. "What does it look like?" I would ask. "The Romex connector boy, don't you know what a Romex connector is?" He said that like I was born knowing what a Romex connector was. I just googled Romex connector and now I remember seeing those in his collection. Well, you learn something new everyday.

Moving To West Virginia

Towards the end of 1976, my Mom and Dad began to talk about moving to West Virginia. I was fine living in suburban Maryland. We lived 4 miles from the capital of the United States - pretty much the capital of the world as I thought. Washington DC was a happening place. We had the White House, the Smithsonian, the Capitol Building and Embassies about a 20-30 minute drive away. We went to nearby Landover Mall. My brother would go to the newly founded Washington Capitals hockey games at the Capital Centre in Landover. I was in the Prince George's County Central choir. Prince George's County, MD had 3 county choirs. There were something like 238 elementary schools in this one county. The population of PG County at the time was something like 800,000 people. They were just starting to build the Metro system that would provide inexpensive transportation all over the DC area. But the Beaches were going to move to the wilderness. I was hoping it was all talk and that it would stay talk. But the talk continued and in the fall of 1977 the talk was looking like a reality when a For Sale sign went up in our yard.

The Move

We moved in December of 1977. It was a bit stressful because of Christmas of course. We moved some of the smaller stuff for a couple of months. I am not sure how the bigger stuff got moved. Most likely, we rented a U-Haul truck and my brother and Dad moved the bigger items. I remember being in my mother's friend's house in Upper Marlboro, MD the day before the move. I still didn't want the move to happen. I was in the middle of my 6th grade year. The next year I would go to Junior High so why couldn't we just finish out the year first? I had already said goodbye to my best friend Doug and to my classmates in school. I had to make new friends and to find things to do in a forest. One of the school counselors asked how I felt about the move. I had told her that our dog would be happy. Lucky could run free in the forest and he would be loving that. Lucky was our brown-spotted Dalmatian that we had gotten at the start of 1977 (he was born November 11, 1976). She looked at me and told me that she was sad for me.

We got to West Virginia and our cabin was cram full of furniture and stuff. A local firm had started building an addition to the cabin in November. Mom termed it that we were building a house onto our cabin. The addition was two stories and was bigger than the cabin. The entire top floor of the addition was Mom and Dad's master bedroom suite. The main floor was going to be the living room and dining room. There was also a basement for laundry and a big woodstove. When we arrived to live there, there were plastic covers over what used to be a window and now was an archway. The addition smelled woodsy and new. I would do into the addition to look at it. There were no steps in place at the time. Mom said it was dangerous and to be careful. Mom also gave us kids a talk on how tough things were going to be because Dad did not have a job and it might take him a few months to find one. She told us we were going to be eating food like hot dogs and soups and our cereal was going to be the Malt-O-Meal cereal. Malt-O-Meal came in a bag. There was Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice. After a few weeks of eating puffed rice, I requested that Mom buy Puffed Wheat because I told her puffed rice was a waste. I could eat a whole bag of puffed rice and not even feel like I ate anything. Mom wasn't happy with my request (probably because puffed rice was $0.39 a bag and puffed wheat was $0.49), but she noted it and I didn't see much puffed rice after that.

Mom took Noelle and I to school to register. The school was a 5-room schoolhouse in Back Creek Valley. Now, we had been to the local church in the next town over the mountain a bunch of times. We had met a nice family, the McKinney's, and they kind of took us under their wing in the months leading to the move and the months after the move. Dottie and Rich had 4 kids and one of them, Brian, was my age. Brian had freckles and looked a bit like Opey Taylor to me. My brother Tim ended up marrying Dottie's sister Brenda about 2 years later. Brian had an upbeat disposition all the time and looked at life with the jar half full. He had introduced me to some of the local boys the summer before when they came over to his house. The boys looked rough and tumble. Remember, I was that scrawny nerd boy that you could beat up. Brock Parsons had come over to Brian's house and he looked like he could take you to the woodshed. They were all talking about hunting and fishing - stuff I hadn't done and probably never wanted to do. Brian's family had an outhouse and a mobile home. This was a different place than Forestville, MD. I knew nobody in Back Creek would understand what made this nerd dude tick. When I checked into school, I met the rest of the 6th graders. As I thought, the boys were all hunters and farmers. They were very tough. They all knew each other. A few were like Brian and we very cordial to me. Some told me that they didn't want any outsiders. One of the boys said, "You took our hunting land," with a scowl on his face. This would be a tough half a year of adjusting.

When I came to the school, I was immediately the spelling representative for the school and I automatically made the Math Olympic team. It just made sense. I am somewhat of an amateur comedian and I have a routine where I tell about this time. All of the kids that spring played softball at recess. I wasn't much of a softball player. So I stayed at the basketball court and shot baskets. I was shooting baskets one day when this kid came back to towards the school. "You want to play softball with us?" he asked. I told him I didn't like to play softball. I shot some more baskets. "Hey, let me ask you a question," he said, "Do ya hunt?" I dribbled the ball and answer, "No." After a long pause and some more shots by me he said, "Hey, let me ask you another question, do ya fish?" The word fish came out as "feesh." I answered again, "No." There was a much longer pause and he asked, "You queer?" I answered again, "No," and shot some more baskets. It had been said. I then knew what they all thought. A + B had to equal C to them. Another time, the same kid sees me reading a book during free time. "Why you readin' them books," he asked. "They teach me about the world and take me to far off places," I answered. "You know them books is for the girls," he replies. These are true stories which I tell as sort of a joke. That's the kind of world I had moved into.

As I look back on it, it is all good now. I had 400 acres of woods to play on, a creek to swim in and a place to run the roads on which prepared me for high school track and cross country. It was a tough transition but I came to appreciate the corner of the world where I was living. Junior high and high school was actually the same school (7th-12th), and it offered a lot more opportunities to learn and grow. There were more kids like me from the valley to the east where the school was.

Genealogy Angle to the story

Most of the last names in "The Valley", as we called Back Creek Valley, were very English/Scottish. Names like Coates, Faircloth, Butts, McKinney, Dunham. There was one name that stood out - Minghini. I would puzzle at that name every time I thought about it. I had decided that the name was Welsh, because Welsh people are close to English, but they had weird names for last names and had village names that were almsot unpronounceable. Englbert Humperdinck was Welsh so Minghini was probably Welsh.

Well, I thought about this again about a year ago. But now I had some tools to once and for all figure out where this strange name Minghini came from. I found some people in ancestry.com from Berkeley County, WV that were Minghinis born around 1925 and followed the trail back. What I found was a wonderful story that many people may not know. The trail led back to an Italian man named Giuseppe Minghini who was a valet to a British General Charles Lee. Minghini was brought to Lee's estate (built in 1773) in what is now northern Berkeley County to run his estate. General Lee died in 1782 and after a time Minghini was not needed at the estate. He established his own household and took on a local wife. Today there are still several Minghini families in the county. These people are something like 1/32 or 1/64 Italian, which is a rarity in the county. I wanted to find someone to tell them my find (and probably freak them out like I do). With my research techniques, I found a Minghini that I knew of (my high school principal's daughter-in-law) and I gave her a message telling her about my find. She was happy to hear from me and said she was in fact the older sister of a girl I went to the 5-room school house with. She also ran into my Mom from time to time at the local gym in town. Small world in West Virginia - and in general.