As I write this in May, the Institute for Rural Journalism is meeting downstairs. It is an impressive group, from five states and the District of Columbia and including the deans of several journalism schools. The directors of the Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia state press associations are present, as is a past chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Their meeting represents a good use of our old house — as did the gathering here of Master Gardeners last weekend. The gardeners, under the leadership of Humanities Council board member Jennifer Soule, continued their planting of shrubs and perennials, meeting their community service requirement whilemaking a valuable contribution to our restoration. Later this week we host another garden club; then, folklorist Gerry Milnes will speak to as many people as we can pack into the parlor.

They say that people make a house a home. If so, we have gone a long way toward reestablishing the MacFarland-Hubbard House as the hospitable home itwas for the 160 years before we got here. The Humanities Council has occupied the house since June 2000, and in that time hundreds of people have shared the place with us. They include teachers, librarians, and historians, among others.

As we worked with Joe Jefferds, our board president at the time, fundraising chairman Thad Epps, preservationist Henry Battle, and others to save this historic property, we learned a valuable lesson: Houses, like people, must earn their keep. These gentlemen, in their wisdom as community leaders, understood that these old places will not be kept up for their age and charm alone. Their best guarantee of survival is that they continue as working properties.

Understanding this, it became clear that our challenge was to put this house back to work, both as our daily headquarters and as a place to pursue our programming mission. Sometimes it comes down to something as simple as hosting a meeting.

We look forward to extending this function by renovating our carriage house as a mini-conference center. This little building — actually a 1920s garage on the site of an earlier carriage house — stands at the back of our lot and was untouched during the renovation of the “big house.” Nonetheless, we roughed out plans to convert the old garage area into a big meeting room, with adjoining kitchenette and lavatory. The apartment upstairs will become a small suite of offices, to be used as an electronic publishing center when the West Virginia Encyclopedia goes online.

Now we are working with good people to move the project forward, and expect to have exciting news to announce soon. As always, our success depends ultimately upon your support as well. If you were among the donors to the orig-inal restoration, please consider extending your gift, either to help pay off the main house — about $150,000 remains — or in support of this valuable adjunct.
It will help to make this fine old house, which functioned as a bustling private residence for most of the 19th century and all of the 20th, into a first class home for the humanities in West Virginia.

Ken Sullivan

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MacFarland-Hubbard House Has Atmosphere

Dear Humanities Council:
Thank you so much for letting us have a meeting of the Contemporary Garden Club at the Hubbard House. It is a very inviting gathering place for groups such as ours. We all enjoyed talking with Jane Siers about the history of the house. I’ve had more feedback from the tour than from any other meeting we’ve ever had! Thanks again.
Susan Lane
Charleston

Program Made Possible by Grant

Dear Humanities Council:
Our grant project, “Bringing Writing to Life at Hurricane Town Elementary,” was a wonderful success, and we thank the West Virginia Humanities Council for all its help and support. Many of our students were exposed to people and opportunities they may never experience again.
Nancy Adkins
Hurricane

Fellowships Appreciated

Dear Humanities Council:
I want to thank the Humanities Council for supporting my research. As a teacher and a writer I find your support invaluable.

My plan is to submit my article, “Looking at the Mirror: Caecina and his Army in the Histories of Tacitus,” for publication by the end of the summer, and eventually to incorporate it into a book that deals with the personal and political relationships of leaders and armies in Tacitus’s Histories.
Caroline A. Perkins
Huntington

Dear Humanities Council:
It was truly an honor to be selected as a West Virginia Humanities Council fellow in support of my project, “Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890-1901.” I have enjoyed working with you.
James M. Beeby
Buckhannon

Dear Humanities Council:
I am pleased to report the publication of my monograph The marze¯ah in the Prophetic Literature: References and Allusions in Light of the Extra-Biblical Evidence. A West Virginia Humanities Council fellowship was instrumental in supporting my research for this project.
John L. McLaughlin
Wheeling

The Griffin Takes Off

Dear Humanities Council:
I can’t tell you how happy I was that Ken [Sullivan], Pam[LeRose], and Jane[Siers] were at the opening of The Griffin and the Minor Canon in Charleston and that you all kept us going throughout.
Thanks!
Mary Lucille DeBerry
Morgantown

Mary Lucille DeBerry was one of the producers of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s original animated production, The Griffin and the Minor Canon. The 30-minute video was produced in part by a grant from the Humanities Council.—ed.

Inwood Wins Again

Dear Humanities Council:
I want to thank you again for the grant that brought poet Devon McNamara to Musselman High last year. I may never know the total influence Devon caused with her ripple in the educational pool in Berkeley County. Students claim they haven’t stopped writing poetry yet.
My students entered the PARADE magazine poetry contest again, and as happened last year, one of the students from Devon’s workshop won! Alicia Perez placed second, winning a $200 prize.
Dottie McDonald
Inwood

Sweet n’ Sour Serenity
by Alicia Perez
I feel like a bird flying
Over seas
Or the juices of adrenaline
Rushing before a kiss

Sometimes my eyes drip
Petals, and I feel the
Frigid air of the mountains
Freeze the expressions on my face

I feel swept away with this
Bumpy camel ride
With the reflection of my jewels
Showing the way

Sometimes my blank face impacts
More than my smile
And my open mouth releases
Silence stronger than any spoken words

And sometimes I ride into
This ocean on a black stallion
Full speed ahead.

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Take time to vote for members to serve on the Council’s program committee. Your vote gives the public a voice in grants and program-making decisions. The Humanities Council program committee includes twelve Council board members and twelve citizen members representing the general public, schools, and higher education.
Deadline for voting: July 15, 2002.

Higher Education Candidates

Jay Malarcher attended Loyola University, where he majored in communications and Russian. He holds an M.A. from St. John’s College and a Ph.D. in theatre history, literature, and criticism from Louisiana State University. He is currently teaching theatre history and orientation and directs in the Division of Theatre and Dance at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

Barbara Rasmussen is an adjunct instructor in West Virginia and American history at Fairmont State College. She holds an M.S. in journalism and a Ph.D. in American and Appalachian history from West Virginia University. Barbara is an active member of the Morgantown Historic Landmarks Commission and the Planning Commission. She is a current member of the Council’s program committee.

Fran Simone is a professor and director of the Central West Virginia Writing Project at Marshall University Graduate College, a statewide affiliate of the National Writing Project located at the University of California at Berkeley. She holds an M.Ed. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from Duke University. Fran is currently drafting a memoir on journaling and mental health.

Public Candidates

Kenneth Bailey is the past dean of the College of Business, Humanities, and Sciences at the West Virginia University Institute of Technology. He holds an M.A. in history and geography from Marshall University and a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. He is the author of Mountaineers Are Free, A History of the West Virginia National Guard. Ken has participated in many humanities programs dealing with labor history and immigration.

Kay Goodwin is the cabinet secretary of the West Virginia Department of Education and the Arts. She is the past chairman of the University of West Virginia System Board of Trustees, a former chairman and lifetime member of the Governor’s Honors Schools Advisory Council, and received the WVU President’s Distinguished Service Award. Kay, a former college and university faculty member with an M.A. in speech and drama, is currently a member of the Council’s program committee.

Tim McClung is the managing director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the University of Charleston, which supports entrepreneurial initiatives in the state. He holds a B.A. in political science and English from West Virginia University. Tim is the vice chair of the New Economy Task Force -Vision Shared Implementation team and serves on the advisory board of both the West Virginia School Board Association and West Virginia Seamless Curriculum.

Gerald “Jerry” Sutphin is the owner of Visual Information, a company providing commercial art, graphic design, and audio/visual services. His area of expertise is the history of the western rivers and steamboats, and he served as the project consultant for the “Ohio River Odyssey,” a major Ohio River exhibition at The Huntington Museum of Art. Jerry holds a B.A. in art and journalism from Marshall University. He was the principal author of Sternwheelers on the Great Kanawha River and has produced a video history of the Delta Queen, Tested by Time to Become an American Legend, for the Delta Queen Steamboat Company.

Please email your vote to: lerose@wvhumanities.org

Higher Education Candidates (vote for 2)
Jay Malarcher
Barbara Rasmussen
Fran Simone

Public Candidates (vote for 2)
Ken Bailey
Kay Goodwin
Tim McClung
Gerald Sutphin

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Booknotes

Kennedy-Humphrey Primary

Spring and summer 2002 is the time for new books by West Virginia authors. Up Molasses Mountain (Wendy Lamb Books, 2002) by Julie Baker is a beautiful novel for young adult readers, but like the best of this genre is equally appealing to adults. The story is set in the 1950s in Clay, West Virginia. Weaving the voices of two narrators, it tells the story of an actual strike that occurred a half-century ago and its tragic effects on the lives of two fictitious teenagers. The ensuing divisiveness and the resulting personal tragedy sends 15-year-old Elizabeth seeking solace on the nearby mountainside where she finds Clarence, a misfit classmate, likewise using the mountain as a refuge. Of the mountain Elizabeth says, “I couldn’t imagine a life where I couldn’t come up on the hill to get away.” Baker takes her title from a poignant passage in which Elizabeth’s grandmother counsels her that “[o]vercoming heartache is like climbing a mountain of molasses. Sometimes you feel stuck there with the darkness tugging at your feet and pulling you down. But other times things are sweet and you can see your way to go on.” Julie Baker is a West Virginia native, now living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Up Molasses Mountain is her first novel.

Council member Maureen (Bunny) Crockett recommends another new book by a West Virginian, The Handywoman Stories (Swallow Press, 2002) by Lenore M. Coberly. Also set in West Virginia, the book comprises twenty interlocking stories depicting the inhabitants of a little town in Coberly’s fictional Galloway County. The stories take the characters from the pre-World War II era into the present. Kirkus Review calls the stories “deeply affecting in their simplicity” and asserts “[t]hat the homespun nature of these sharp-sighted little tales only enhances their warmth and wisdom.”

Venturing far outside the Mountain State for subject matter, executive director Ken Sullivan recently read Peter Carey’s novel, The True History of the Kelly Gang. The book, about the 19th century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. The Australian hinterlands appear not quite as lawless as the American west of the same era, but Ken says “Fans of American Westerns will enjoy this book. I went straight from Peter Carey to Larry McMurtry’s Boone’s Lick. The Australian upstart compares pretty well with our old master.”
Ken is reading William Kennedy’s Albany novels now. “I had read Ironweed years ago, and had an unread copy of Legs,” he says. “Having seen a half-dozen rave reviews of Kennedy’s new Roscoe, also about crime and corruption in upstate New York, I figured I’d go back and read the original trilogy in order. I’m about finished with Legs, and just bought Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game at a Charlottesville used bookstore. Critics are comparing Kennedy to Faulkner, and that’s a stretch — but this is darn good regional writing.”

Since the Humanities Council moved to the historic MacFarland-Hubbard House in May 2000, Council staff have worked to build a West Virginia reference library as they compile the new West Virginia Encylcopedia. Carolyn Welcker of Charleston is among recent donors of books to the library. Among the many books Ms. Welcker brought in during April and May were Hu Maxwell’s History of Randolph County, the West Virginia Writer’s Project publication West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, G. D. McNeill’s The Last Forest, Green Hills of Magic by Ruth Ann Musick, and Tale of the Elk by W.E.R. Byrne.

The West Virginia Humanities Council seeks historical works about the Mountain State, books by West Virginia authors, county histories, and biographical references. Gifts of books, cash, or other items of value are tax-deductible.

If you have books you would like to recommend to Booknotes or some you would like to donate to the Council’s library, contact Jane Siers by phone at (304) 346-8500 or via e-mail at siers@wvhumanities.org.

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The West Virginia Encyclopedia, to be published in June 2003, will cost more than a half-million dollars to produce. That is a big investment, but the West Virginia Humanities Council thinks the encyclopedia represents good value for the money.

The one-volume reference book will include the work of more than 500 writers in about 2,200 individual alphabetical topics. It will be fully indexed and cross-referenced. Special sections for writer biographies and a complete scientific names list for West Virginia flora and fauna are now being developed. Writing and research are nearly complete. This summer encyclopedia staff will continue fact-checking, revising, and copy-editing the big book. The new West Virginia Encyclopedia will tell West Virginia’s story from prehistory through the beginning of the 21st century.

The encyclopedia project has received solid financial support, with about $350,000 raised thus far. The largest amounts are from the State of West Virginia, the West Virginia Historical Education Foundation, Celebration 2000, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Several corporations and foundations have contributed to the project, which continues to seek public and private support.

The new West Virginia Encyclopedia will be an authoritative reference for the curious general reader, as well as scholars, journalists, and other professionals needing a reliable desktop reference.

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West Virginians have just come through the vigorous primary campaign of 2002. Voters of a certain age will recall the 1960 primary when John F. Kennedy campaigned actively in West Virginia.
Herb Little, who reported on the 1960 race, spent 39 years with The Associated Press covering state government and politics in Charleston.

The May 1960 West Virginia primary election stands as a landmark. It dispelled the widely held belief that being a Roman Catholic was a crippling handicap for a presidential candidate. In this overwhelmingly Protestant state, Catholic Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts soundly defeated Protestant Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, winning in 50 of the 55 counties.

In the month preceding the West Virginia voting, Kennedy had defeated Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary. Kennedy’s winning percentage there was a comfortable 56-44 but not enough to make Humphrey give up as a candidate. The religious issue had surfaced conspicuously in Wisconsin when an ad in weekly newspapers throughout the state urged Protestants to vote for Humphrey.

Apart from religion, all the advantages seemed to be on Kennedy’s side as their contest moved into West Virginia. He had plenty of money for advertising, staff salaries and other campaign expenses. He enjoyed a reputation as a World War II hero. Humphrey had not served in the war. Humphrey also had emerged from Wisconsin heavily in debt, forcing him to campaign as cheaply as possible in West Virginia. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., son of a president immensely popular in West Virginia, came to the state to campaign for Kennedy.

Despite Kennedy’s seeming advantages, a Lou Harris poll three days before the election showed Humphrey with a 45-42 edge. Kennedy devoted most of a TV appearance the Sunday evening before the election to trying to defuse the religious issue. Theodore H. White in The Making of the President 1960 called it “the finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any political candidate make.” Concluding the telecast, Kennedy said when a president swears on the Bible in his oath of office he is swearing to support separation of church and state. “And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him —and should impeach him — but he is committing a sin against God.”

After that Sunday evening telecast, Lou Harris conducted another poll. The result gave Kennedy a slight edge. His edge was anything but slight in the voting two days later. The statewide totals: Kennedy 236,510; Humphrey 152,187. Once the outcome was clear, Humphrey announced he was no longer a presidential candidate, and Kennedy said, “I think we have now buried the religious issue once and for all.”

Herb Little
Charleston

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Breadwinners and Community Builders:
Jewish Women in the Coalfields, 1890-1960

Deborah Weiner, Ph.D.

The Henry Rodgin Company in Bluefield, a jewelry store, was a larger version of the kinds of family businesses in which Jewish women worked in small coalfield towns. Mr. Rodgin opened the store in 1902 at the age of 18 and is seen on the left. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Goldenseal.

When Bessie Zaltzman died in 1949, she left most of her estate to her son Louis. This was not a trifling amount, because entirely through her own efforts she had amassed a small fortune worth $84,000. Starting out fifty years earlier with nothing but a shiftless husband, whom she divorced around 1905, she managed to acquire a cow and scraped together a living for herself and her three small children, selling butter and milk. Eventually she had a few cows, a small shop to sell her wares, and then some real estate. She became a landlady of small residential properties, overcoming crises that included floods, fires, and lawsuits. Not only was she a determined businesswoman — she was also determined to the end to maintain her commitment to Orthodox Judaism. Of her two surviving children, she left only a token amount to her son Abe, who had disaffiliated with the Jewish community. However, she did instruct Louis to make sure that Abe was never in economic distress, and established a Kaddish fund to make sure that her errant son would be properly mourned after his death. She also left money to Jewish charities and three synagogues: one in Jerusalem, and the others in Bluefield and Keystone, West Virginia, in the coalfields where she had spent her entire adult life after emigrating from Russia as a teenager.

Bessie Zaltzman was a woman of strong will, as her business enterprise and her frequent clashes with other members of Keystone’s Jewish community show. The outlines of her life represent a somewhat unusual, but by no means implausible, trajectory for an East European Jewish woman of her day. From the late 1890s well into the post-World War II era, women were central to the creation and maintenance of numerous small coalfield Jewish communities. Their economic contributions enabled their households to survive and prosper within a notoriously unstable local economy, while their concern with creating a Jewish environment for themselves and their families led them to become the driving force behind Jewish communal organization. Not only did their efforts enable Jewish communities to flourish deep in the mountains of Central Appalachia, their commitment to transmitting their heritage to their children under less-than-ideal condiions demonstrates how women in small-town America ensured the maintenance of Jewish continuity into future generations.

The Great Migration of Eastern European Jews to America coincided exactly with the development of the nation’s southern coalfields, which began in earnest in the early 1880s and reached a peak during World War I. In just a few years, the coal industry transformed a thinly-populated region of Appalachian mountain farm families to a rural-industrial society controlled by large companies, with a growing workforce and a pressing need for commercial services to support the new industrial activity. Newcomers from a variety of ethnic groups flocked to Central Appalachia, attracted by the opportunities of a booming economy. Most of them — African Americans from other parts of the South and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — went to work in the coal mines. But others, especially Jewish immigrants, sought to provide retail services to a growing population. In the coalfields, their success in constructing a niche within the small commercial sector of an overwhelmingly industrial economy enabled them to establish their own small yet vital communities. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, Jews from Eastern Europe founded congregations in nine small coalfield towns in southern West Virginia, southeastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia.

The survival of these coalfield Jewish communities depended on three requirements. First of all, like everyone else in the region, Jewish families had to provide for themselves within the confines of the coal economy. Second, they had to feel comfortable enough with their social environment to make the commitment to stay. And third, they couldn’t become so comfortable as to completely assimilate into the surrounding culture. As many historians of small-town Jewry have pointed out, this was especially difficult for Jews who lived far from the centers of American Jewry, as tiny minorities in the midst of an overwhelmingly Christian population. In all these dimensions, Jewish women played a crucial role in sustaining their families and communities.

Despite the opportunities of a growing economy, members of the region’s commercial sector faced daunting challenges. The boom-and-bust nature of the coal industry caused frequent periods of wage cuts and layoffs that shriveled the purchasing power of the local workforce. Strikes and other forms of labor conflict, endemic to the coalfields, also severely affected local merchants. National downturns such as the Great Depression hit the coalfields even harder than other places, because of the reliance on a single industry. Many local businesses faced the experience of losing everything and starting again from scratch, with bankruptcies not uncommon. Meanwhile, during the good times, payday Saturdays would find the stores crowded with shoppers and their owners would have to scramble to meet the demand.

Like other groups in the U.S. and in the coalfields, Jews devised strategies based on their old country traditions and experiences to overcome adverse economic conditions. One major strategy was a reliance on the family economy. Small Jewish businesses in America were true family businesses, with wives and children working along with husbands to help make ends meet. Daughters as well as sons helped in the store from an early age. In the coalfields, young women as well as men not only worked for their parents, but also took jobs as sales clerks at other stores in order to contribute to the household income. Jews who grew up in the region during the 1920s and 1930s recalled that at the very least, their mothers “helped out” in the family store during busy times. But “helping out,” though it was the accepted term to describe a wide range of women’s economic activity, greatly understates the contributions to the household economy made by many of these women.

Motivated by varying combinations of family need and personal fulfillment, coalfield Jewish women often took on significant responsibilities in the family business. Some wives acted as their husbands’ business partners in decision-making and division of labor, if not in a legal or financial sense. The division was often based on personality, with the more outgoing partner serving customers and the more reserved one handling behind-the-scenes tasks such as bookkeeping. If the family owned more than one store, the wife sometimes managed a store. One man related that after his father went bankrupt in the Depression, his mother went to work in the family’s next business venture out of necessity. Yet she remained active once conditions improved, which suggests that she was too important, or enjoyed it too much, to quit. One woman remarked that for her mother, the store “was her life.” She liked working and would spend most days at the store. Of course, this did not absolve her from domestic chores, and she could often be found cleaning the house at 2 a.m. Another woman recalled that her mother did just about everything in their small family dry goods store, from serving customers to altering clothing to traveling with her husband to New York on buying trips. In many ways this was a hardship for the family; as the daughter put it, “We were latchkey kids.” Yet she saw her mother as a role model of strength and ability, proudly calling her a “tremendous buyer.”

Many immigrant groups of the era had a history of married women helping to earn income for the family, mostly by working in the home or in a family business. For Jewish women, religious custom made it even more acceptable to play a major economic role. Since the cultural ideal for Jewish men in Eastern Europe was a life devoted to religious study, a woman who could operate a business to support the family while her husband pursued his scholarship earned respect and praise. Jews who grew up in the coalfields recounted many instances of grandmothers owning or operating small shops in Eastern Europe, New York, or Baltimore, and their daughters who came to the region simply built on their example.

Coalfield census records and business directories from 1900 to 1920 listed married Jewish women as owners of clothing stores, dry goods stores, and confectioneries. In later years they owned pharmacies, jewelry stores, and even an auto supply business. Some of these women had husbands who operated their own separate businesses, such as Blanche Sohn, who owned a confectionery and then a dry goods store while her husband Eli operated a saloon and then a clothing store from around 1904 to 1920. When the couple went into business together, she did the buying, according to a 1920 local newspaper item that informed readers, “Mrs. Eli Sohn is in the markets purchasing spring millinery. . . . Mr. Eli Sohn is painting the front of his store building in a very handsome style.”

A few women entrepreneurs, such as Bessie Zaltzman, had husbands who could not or would not support them. More common were widows who took over their late husband’s business or started one after his death, sometimes in partnership with grown sons. Mollie Gaskell, widowed in 1912 at age twenty-seven, became one of Williamson, West Virginia’s most respected merchants and a Jewish community leader as proprietor of the Williamson Bargain House (under the name “M. V. Gaskell”). Ethel Catzen Cohen inherited and managed her father’s extensive business interests in Northfork, West Virginia, where he had been the chief real estate developer.

Despite the respect local Jewish communities showed to most of these women, Bessie’s story reveals it was possible to overstep the boundaries of accepted female behavior. As early as 1902 she became embroiled in a number of legal battles against Jewish businessmen, which blazed in the local courts for years. Some years later, another Jewish man, whom she had sued over a sick cow she had purchased from him, advised her that she needed to get herself a husband. Her retort: “I don’t have to have no husband. I have got good children and I have got good property.”

Certainly the Jewish tradition of female entrepreneurship ran up against the modern middle class ideal that a woman’s place was in the home. After the immigrant generation passed away, it became less common for women to be heavily involved in the family business — or operate their own business — except out of necessity. More typical in the post-World War II era was a woman described by her son as “99 percent a homemaker,” a woman whose ambition “was to be a good hausfrau.” Nevertheless, in many Jewish coalfield families, single daughters continued to work as teachers, stenographers, nurses, and even manager of a local radio station, while a few married women remained active in the family business into the third generation, long after economic security had been achieved.

Interviews with Jews who grew up in the region, men and women now in their seventies and eighties, reveal a sense of pride in their mothers’ strength, capability, and resourcefulness as demonstrated to their children by their economic activities. As one man said approvingly, “My mother had a good business head on her.” Another remembered his mother as a “bright, feisty little woman” who pragmatically chose to work as a saleslady in another family’s dress shop as the best way to earn an income after her husband’s early death.

Ultimately economic conditions proved fatal to Jewish life in the coalfields. Starting in the mid 1950s, a drastic and sustained decline in the coalfield economy caused local businesses to suffer and led young people to make their lives elsewhere. Of nine coalfield congregations, most disappeared by the 1980s, though two are still hanging on today. But for the first half of the century, Jewish women’s communal, economic, and social activities helped carve out a place for Jewish communities in the coalfields.

Research for this article was funded by a West Virginia Humanities Council fellowship. Excerpted from American Jewish Archives, 2000. Reprinted with permission.

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Campaign memorabilia from Robert Byrd’s first race for the U.S. House of Representatives. From the MacFarland-Hubbard House collection, gift of Jim McGinnis. The West Virginia Humanities Council welcomes gifts of West Virginiana for display in the historic MacFarland-Hubbard House.

Thus far, five senators, an Associated Press reporter, the Senate parliamentarian emeritus, a former staffer, and a former professor have been interviewed. Additional interviews are planned with former United States presidents, Senate colleagues, historians, childhood friends, members of the press and family members. Byrd himself will also be interviewed. The website will include full transcripts of all those interviewed.

Condensing Byrd’s biography into an hour-long program will call for brutal decisions in the editing room. “It’s a little less painful knowing that all the great material that’s gathered for the project will be available on the Internet,” says producer Diana Sole.

West Virginia Public Television will broadcast the documentary statewide in the early 2003. Plans also include providing free copies of the documentary and study guide to all secondary schools and public libraries in the state.

The project is being funded by a mix of individual, corporate, government, and foundation underwriting. Initial sponsors of the project are: Verizon, American Electric Power, Dominion Resources, Office of the Governor, Dow Chemical, BB&T, Marshall University, and miscellaneous individual contributors. To date, more than $146,000 has been raised.

Film makers are interviewing many of Sen. Byrd’s colleagues. Here are some excerpts from The Soul of the Senate:

Senate Majority Leader Senator Thomas A. Daschle (D-SD): Senator Byrd’s life story could be summarized in one sentence. “Yes you can.” Because, I think that’s what it says. It says to people all over this country that you can become all that you want to be. If you’ve got the dedication and persistence and the character required. He has overcome so many obstacles. He has provided a road map, I think, to young people that would be one that I couldn’t recommend more highly. Senator Byrd is one who very thoughtfully considers options before coming to any conclusions. He is inclusive. He talks to others prior to the time that he makes his decision. But once having made that decision, he is defiantly determined to bring it about — to carry through, and will use whatever tools available to him to ensure success. I don’t know of anybody who is viewed as a more successful strategist or tactician than Senator Byrd.

Former Senator Bob Dole (R-KS): I would go to Senator Byrd when I was majority leader and ask him for parliamentary advice. ‘Now Bob, do you think I can do this?’ He was the minority leader, and he didn’t have to tell me, but he would. No man knows the rules better than Bob Byrd.

Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton(D-NY): Senator Byrd is one the most personally gracious, collegial, warm human beings I’ve met. Certainly, one of the very best colleagues that any of us can have in the Senate. He has an ingrained sense of decency and civility, but has a spine of steel. I know that from my previous life, as well as from my service in the Senate. He’s someone who is always learning. He is curious. He wants to know about new ideas. He’s not someone who stopped thinking and asking questions 25 years ago. He’s current. He’s concerned. And I think that is a real hallmark of his service. It has evolved. And he probably would be the first to tell you that he has never stopped learning. He always is trying to expand his understanding, to just drink in the wisdom of the past so that, he can apply it today and tomorrow. I admire that greatly about him.

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John Steinbeck 2002 Centennial Celebration — Call for Proposals

“Time is the only critic without ambition”
John Steinbeck

In the centenary year of Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck’s birth, the West Virginia Humanities Council is offering minigrant funding for exhibits, public programming, and book discussion groups promoting Steinbeck’s life and work. Throughout a career that spanned seminal moments of the twentieth century, the apotheosis of the common man was Steinbeck’s prevailing theme in works such as Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men. Libraries, museums, colleges, and schools are encouraged to apply for funding of up to $1,500.

For more information, contact
Pam LeRose at (304) 346-8500 or via email at
lerose@wvhumanities.org

Foreign Language Programming Initiative — Call For Proposals

West Virginia schools and colleges are invited to apply for grant funding to initiate new foreign language activities and programs for students and surrounding communities. Examples of eligible projects are student or teacher immersion days, lecture series, and Foreign Language Week activities. Both minigrants, up to $1,500, and major grants, up to $20,000, are available for these projects.

Deadlines for minigrants:
August 1, October 1, and December 1.
Deadlines for major grants: September 1 and February 1.

For more information, contact
Pam LeRose at (304) 346-8500
or via email at
lerose@wvhumanities.org

Archaeology Month — Call for Proposals

“Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize . . . the immense riches accumulated by the human race . . . By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.”
Claude Levi-Strauss, 1955,
Triestes Tropiques

Archaeology is the perfect marriage of history and science, interpreting past civilizations through scientific techniques. Minigrants of up to $1,500 are now being offered for archaeological programming in celebration of Archaeology Month in October 2002.

The deadline for these applications is August 1, 2002.

For more information, contact
Pam LeRose at (304) 346-8500
or via email at lerose@wvhumanities.org

Congratulations to the 2002 Fellowship Award Winners

Janet Snyder, Morgantown
art history, “Who did that? the Production of Limestone Sculpture in Twelfth-century France”
Sam F. Stack, Jr., Morgantown — history and philosophy of education, “The Arthurdale Community School (1934-1936)”

William Denman, Huntington
communication studies/history, “America’s ‘Great Debate’: The Struggle over Intervention in World War II”

Christopher Wilkinson, Morgantown
music history, “The Swing Era in Black West Virginia”

Mary Ferer, Morgantown
music history, “Music at the Renaissance Court of Charles V”

Ximena Gallardo-C. and C. Jason Smith, Glenville English, “Femme Futura: Projections of the Female in the ALIEN Series”

Katherine B. Aaslestad, Morgantown
history, “Local Patriots: Civic Heroes and National Commemoration in Nineteenth Century Hamburg”

Frank H. Gorman, Jr., Wheeling
religious studies, “Comments on Commentary: The Disciplinary Production of Commentaries on Leviticus”

John Lambertson, Morgantown
art history, “French Romantic Painting and Public Life: Tradition, Popular Culture, and Politics during the Bourbon Restoration”

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The West Virginia Humanities Council, in collaboration with RESA III and the National Council for History Education, will present award-winning writer and historian David McCullough at the Cultural Center in Charleston on July 17 at 8:00 p.m. Mr. McCullough will speak on John Adams: First Principles.

David McCullough has been called “a master of the art of narrative history” and “one of our most gifted living writers.” His work has been praised for its exceptional narrative sweep, its scholarship, and its insight into American life, as well as its literary distinction. His most recent book, John Adams, has been both a popular and critical triumph and received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for biography. McCullough also won the Pulitzer for his 1992 book, Truman. In addition to his two Pulitzers, he has won the National Book Award and the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize, each twice. He has received the National Humanities Medal, the St. Louis Literary Award, and the New York Public Library’s Literary Lion Award.

The July 17 program is free and open to the public, with a question and answer period and reception following the lecture.

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Major Grants
Major grants have a budget over $1,500. Applicants should allow ten weeks between the deadline and the start of the project. Maximum award: $20,000.
Deadlines: February 1 and September 1
Number of Copies: 24

Minigrants
Minigrants have a budget of $1,500 or less. Most proposals in this category are for smaller projects, single events, consultation needs, and planning for more complex projects. Applicants should allow six weeks between the deadline and the start of the project. Requests from schools for grants under $500 will be referred to the West Virginia Education Alliance.
Deadlines: February 1, April 1, June 1, August 1, October 1, and December 1
Number of Copies: 6

Media Grants
Media grants have a budget over $1,500 and support the planning, scripting, and production of projects intended to produce electronic or film materials, or a newspaper series. Maximum award: $20,000.
Deadline: September 1
Number of Copies: 24

Publication Grants
Publication grants have a budget over $1,500. This category is available only to nonprofit presses and recognized academic presses and supports only the production phase of a completed manuscript. Maximum award: $20,000.
Deadline: September 1
Number of Copies: 24

Fellowships
Fellowships of $2,500 are awarded once annually to college faculty and independent scholars to support research and writing projects within a humanities discipline.
Deadline: February 1
Number of copies: 6

Teacher Institutes Grants
This category is available to college and university professors and supports a two-week teacher seminar on a humanities topic suited to the teaching needs of elementary or secondary teachers. Maximum award: $20,000 .
Deadline: September 1

All grants categories have supplemental guidelines and applications; call the Humanities Council office for a copy. All West Virginia Humanities Council grant application forms are now available online and can be completed on our website.

Humanities Council staff are always available to help you with your proposal. Pam LeRose, grants administrator, can help you formulate your idea, review drafts, even suggest additional funding sources. She can be reached by phone at (304) 346-8500 or via e-mail at lerose@wvhumanties.org.

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The Fort Lee-Tackett Antique Club voted this
spring to learn more about early 19th century
furniture made by West Virginia craftsmen. As a part of their commitment to preserving the state’s heritage of cabinetry and furniture-making, the club has decided to locate and purchase an early West Virginia piece and donate it to the historic MacFarland-Hubbard House. The 1836 mansion, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is the third oldest house still standing in Charleston and the home of the West Virginia Humanities Council. Furniture from the 1830s and ‘40s, when the house was built and first became a home for the MacFarland family, is understandably scarce. “We are delighted that the members of the Fort Lee-Tackett club wish to donate to our wonderful old house,” said Council executive director Ken Sullivan. “And a piece from the earliest history of the house will be a wonderful addition to the downstairs historic rooms.”

The Fort Lee-Tackett Antique Club was formed over twenty years ago by a group of Charleston women who shared a common interest in antiques. The group meets eight times a year, with each meeting devoted to some aspect of antiques and collecting. “There are so many good West Virginia furniture makers that we club members know so little about,” said Faye Guilfoile. “We are committed to learning more about them in the coming year and to acquiring a good example for donation to the MacFarland-Hubbard House. We hope this will spur others in the area to give early pieces to the house.”

The club welcomes information on West Virginia craftsmen of that era, as well as any leads on available pieces with a West Virginia provenance. Anyone wishing to pass on information to the club should contact Jane Siers at the Humanities Council, (304) 346-8500 or via e-mail at siers@wvhumanities.org.

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