I have settled on the title of my collection of essays about weird and wonderful sights in West Virginia: 'Please Don't Write on Hotdog.' Here's why.
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Ten Years After: Remembering the Faces from Upper Big Branch
It is has been ten years since the Upper Big Branch mine Disaster in West Virginia, which killed 29 miners, from their 20s to their 60s. Here is a video remembrance of their faces, as still-grieving families brace once more for Don Blankenship to rub salt in their wounds.
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SONGS OF COMFORT, SONGS OF HOME: “Till There Was You”
They were young idealists picking up trash across America. One of them could nail a tune from "The Music Man." (NOT "76 Trombones.") Enter a ponytailed, cigar-chomping Cincinnati jazz pianist in a Parmesan-wedge of a club in the hazardous part of town.
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SONGS of COMFORT, SONGS of HOME: A West Virginia Medley
I don't know whether spending the better part of a day crafting a music video from an old performance is the height of absurdity and uselessness as a tsunami of global suffering bears down upon the human race. But we could do worse, as we hunker down together, than to listen to this Clementines version of Hazel Dickens' great "West Virginia, My Home."
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10 Ways of Looking at West Virginia
With so many of us house-bound, my restless spirits may have been grunting about for some space and spaciousness. Here are 10 views from all around West Virginia for a little relief from cabin fever quarantine.
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The Dancer In the Hills
The back-to-the-land movement brought hosts of wannabe farmers and dreamers to West Virginia. It also brought a dancer who brought big dreams into the deep hills.
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The West Virginia Disaster that Changed Coal Mining Forever
A half-century later, one of the worst labor disasters in American history still reverberates in the courts and in the lives of families of the 78 lost miners from a conflagration for which no one has ever been held responsible.
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The Cloud Painter and the Berlin Musician
Robert Singleton had settled on painting clouds. Then, he stopped, hollowed out by too many deaths helping dying friends from his training with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. One day, a German musician stumbled on his site. And everything changed.
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SHORTSTORY: The Catholic Boy and the Five Dollar Bill
An extremely short story about an encounter with Abraham Lincoln and a pudgy Catholic boy on the streets of West Virginia's capital city. With a cameo appearance by Greek philosopher Diogenes.
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ELIZABETH and GEORGE: Part 1: A life on the streets
She called herself Elizabeth and she was a woman of the streets. But Elizabeth was also — or had been — named George. And she had a surprising former life. | PART 1
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ELIZABETH and GEORGE: Part 2: He was a musician on the go and then gone
George was an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who had connected with Ric Ocasek of The Cars. Then, George was gone like the wind. Ocasek turned to Rolling Stone to find out: "Where's Geo?"
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ELIZABETH and GEORGE: Part 3: A long-sought reunion, but with whom?
The long-sought reunion between the three sisters and their long-lost sibling was set to take place after a quarter-century apart. But who would they be meeting: Elizabeth? Or George?
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How the pawpaw was found, got lost and was found again
Pawpaws have been rediscovered and celebrated in a host of products from pawpaw beer to pawpaw popsicles. But how did the custardy fruit get forgotten since a pawpaw patch today might have been one cultivated ages ago by American Indians?
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How Mount Hope lived up to its name when desegregation came to town
The black kids went to one school in tiny Mount Hope. The white kids went to another. But when the court order came to desegregate, a funny thing happened in the hills of West Virginia. The white kids were sent to the black school instead of the other way around. Historic things ended up happening.
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You didn’t go one-on-one with the One-Armed Bandit
The life of a journalist is filled with mundane daily tasks. Get the calendar edited. Rewrite a press release. Track down a source who isn’t returning e-mails. Then, you get to talk to Gary Mays. The West Virginia native, had his left arm shot off at age 5. What happened next was the stuff of legend and lore, complicated by the racism that likely defused a pro sports career.
