I was born in West Virginia and spent my first 18 years living in its capital, Charleston.  In 1966 I left the state to go to college and didn’t return for more than a few months at a time until, at age 41, I brought my family back to West Virginia so that I could attend medical school.  It was then that I began to understand what growing up in Appalachia meant and how my experience differed from a great many Appalachians. In fact, I don’t believe that I really understood the concept of Appalachia as anything other than a geographic area until I was able to view it from the perspective of more than 20 years of living in various parts of the United States and in three different countries.

Charleston in the 1950s and 60s was a prosperous place and I had a comfortable middle class home life.  I had a vague awareness that there was poverty in the state, but it didn’t intrude on my life and I didn’t go looking for it.  It wasn’t just me, most of my friends shared this willful ignorance as we went on blissfully with lives untouched by depravation or despair.  In those years, the social activism that would arise among young people in the late 1960s was not yet born.  We were, as The Saturday Evening Post described, living in an oasis of luxury surrounded by poverty.  Though none of us would have described our lives as luxurious, I have come to realize that everything is relative.

It’s not as though we stayed in Charleston. We spent a lot of time camping, hunting and fishing. We drove all over the state but somehow never managed to really see it. At most we may have thought “What in the world do the people who live here do for fun?”  For most of us, West Virginia was a place to leave just as soon as we could and never look back.

My first year in college was at the University of Kentucky so I was still in the Appalachian environment. It wasn’t until 1967 when I enlisted in the Navy then I spent much time out of Appalachia and got to know people from all over the country. But I couldn’t help feeling vaguely defensive about being from West Virginia. I always felt that I was being thought of as the big dumb hillbilly. Nobody was seeing me; they were only seeing a stereotype. I’m sure that I was far more sensitive to this then any actual occurrence. I also know that there are many people who have suffered a whole lot more discrimination than what I imagined for myself.  No matter how misguided or self-centered my concerns were, I was left with the feeling of being not quite good enough or not quite being at the same level as other people. It wasn’t a feeling of intellectual or physical inferiority, it was more of a feeling of social inadequacy.

My late teens and early 20s were a time of mixed emotions. I had periods where I felt there was no point in bothering to try because I just wasn’t good enough mixed with periods where I intended to show those SOBs that I was better than they were. It wasn’t until I met my wife of now almost 50 years that I realized that if she loved me I must be a worthwhile person and I really didn’t require any other validation.

This is enough brooding remembrances for one setting. I’ll be back in the future more the reflections on growing up in Appalachia. But the next post is going to be more grumpy opinions.