“Take Me Home Country Roads” was an anthem to my dad, as it is for many who leave West Virginia only to return. There is no other place like it, and there are no other people like the good people of West Virginia and the surrounding areas of Kentucky and Ohio. The troubles of the region are well known and are many, but the people rise above not only their own tragedies but also the constant barrage of ridicule and misunderstanding of their culture. Through it all, they are constant and they would give the shirt off their backs to aid even their harshest critics. West Virginians are proud. They have been overlooked, misunderstood, taken advantage of, and made the butt of jokes yet they hold their heads high and continue to be good neighbors to each other and to the rest of the world.

My dad was a young Elvis look-alike when he met my mom in Chicago in 1968. He wandered into a local tavern where my mom was enjoying a drink or seven with her brother on Labor Day weekend. She says that her brother dared her to ask my dad to join them in a game of shuffle board, and she did. She also said that she was “three sheets to the wind” (her words, not mine). That was the first day of the next 49 years they would spend together. They married in Chicago, but my dad grew homesick for the West Virginia hills and so my mom agreed, after my brother and I were born, to accompany him home.

Dad was a proud West Virginian. He was very particular about things and how he liked them. He cared about what people thought. He kept his feelings to himself unless he’d had a couple of beers. And he could sing. He’d always get me to sing with him to the old bluegrass gospel music coming from the kitchen radio every Sunday morning. He’d say to me, “Some day we’ll make a record and be famous.” I think he always had big dreams but never really knew how to go about achieving them. One of his favorite phrases began, “If a man had money…” Because of this, he could also be sullen and down often and he struggled from time to time. To me, he and his side of the family embodied West Virginia. Country folks and country cooking, family, and being proud and private people were what I saw in them.

Dad’s proudest moments came when he became a grandfather, first to my daughter and then later to my niece. My dad was never a fighter, but cross his girls and that may be the only time you’d see him puff up. I think being a grandfather was a way for him to find real happiness in his heart, and to somehow redeem himself. He joked with his granddaughters, he took them for walks in the yard to look for butterflies, he sang made up songs to them. Cancer got the best of him in 2018 at eighty years of age. No matter what anyone else ever thought about him, there are two girls in the world who will always fondly remember their Poppy.