(This will begin a series of articles about growing up in Lewisburg, West Virginia, perhaps the greatest town and in the best time to grow up that a young man could ever ask for.)
I heard the dreaded news in February1955. My father was an FBI agent and had been transferred from Beckley, WV to Lewisburg, a small West Virginia town of about 2,000.
Why in the world would Mr. Hoover put an agent in Lewisburg, I wondered? It turns out that my Dad moved to Lewisburg to monitor the construction of the underground bomb shelter for the United States Congress at the nearby Greenbrier Hotel, and we never had a clue. It was well kept and guarded secret for over 40 years.
But for an 11-year old, no matter what the reason, moving anywhere was a catastrophe. My best friend Freddie Arnold and I were like Siamese Twins. We played ball together, we slept over at each other’s house, we dreamed together, we laughed together, we went to movies and events. We did everything together.
And I was moving where?
Beckley was a decent sized town, maybe 20,000 people. We had a dozen Little League teams in Beckley. Lewisburg had two. A hick town, I thought. Lewisburg did have a small girl’s school, Greenbrier College for Women and Greenbrier Military School, but that was it as far as I could tell and neither interested me at the time. I was crushed.
Daddy came over early and secured a place to live – a five-bedroom house on Court Street, so at least I wouldn’t have to share a room with my three siblings. The lot was large enough for a good-sized whiffle ball field and there was a basketball goal on the garage. Those were all good things, but who would there be to play with?
Freddie and I said our goodbyes and promised to write, but boys don’t really write stuff, so we would quickly lose contact. And now I was in this dumpy little town called Lewisburg.
On a chilly March morning, I would enroll in Mrs. Loomis’ sixth grade class. Walking to my desk, the kids all eyeballed me up and down. A Beckley kid, they thought. Probably stuck up.
Mrs. Loomis introduced me, and then they had a math quiz. Though I hadn’t studied the material, I took the test anyway and got a 100. Math is math, no matter the town.
At lunchtime, I noticed that all the guys had brought their baseball gloves and were playing catch. That was a good thing, but I didn’t have my mitt with me, so I just watched. There was kid named Bill Shaver who could really bring the heat. He was as fast as the Beckley pitchers, maybe faster. The other kids were about like me: Clumsy and slow.
After school, walking home, I was joined by a kid in 5th grade, a neighbor named Brad Stuart. Brad lived about 5 houses up the street and we hit it off immediately. On the way home, and I remember this as clear as if it was yesterday, Brad showed me a place on Court Street that had a large drainage grate over what appeared to be a deep hole.
“Drop a rock through the grate,” Brad suggested. I did and could tell it was a deep hole.
“That’s a cavern down there,” Brad said. “Lewisburg has lots of caves and caverns.”
A few days later I would find out more about the caves near Lewisburg. Joe Hayes, a fellow classmate, lived a block or two over and had invited me to go caving with him that weekend.
Caving? What could I say? That I would rather get a molar pulled with no Novocain than go down a cave? Nope. I said, sure, let’s go.
Joe met me at my house with a bunch of rope and two flashlights. We hiked about a mile down Old Fort Springs Road, then into a pasture field where we found the cave. Joe squeezed his way down the dark hole and I followed, thinking I would rather be in a graveyard at midnight on Halloween than in this stinking cave, but I kept my cool. I suppose I passed the smell test as Joe and I would become good friends, often sharing hunting stories in Sunday School Class instead of listening to Mr. Yarid teach from the New Testament.
Joe, Brad, baseball mitts? Maybe this Lewisburg place wouldn’t be so bad after all.