My late father, Bernard “Bill” Hall, was born to parents in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. His father was a coal miner and separated from the family. His mother died when he was young. He was raised by his grandparents on a hard scrabble mountain farm, where he delighted in joking about cows with shorter legs on one side, enabling them to stand on the slopes of their mountain pastures.
One thing he would not have delighted in would have been a recent book with “Hillbilly” in the title. On more than one occasion he insisted with raised voice that “I’m not a hillbilly. I’m a mountaineer.” And he remained a proud West Virginia mountaineer until his death at age 87.
He left his beloved mountain farm after graduation from high school and enlisted in the U. S. Army. While stationed in Michigan, he met my mother, fell in love, and was married during WWII. He was soon after shipped over to India and was a Master Sargent in charge of an Army Air Corps communication unit. At the conclusion of the war he returned to Michigan, my mother, and me, and remained a “Michigander” for the rest of his life.
But in his heart and soul, he always belonged to Appalachia and those West Virginia mountains. In his “growing up years” he worked on the farm, where his grandparents eked out a meager living. And as a youth he learned at an early age how to manage a team of horses. They plowed and worked the farm in the growing season, and did logging on the mountain slopes in the winter. He was too young to be felling trees and cutting with the crosscut saws, but he could skid out logs with his horses.
About 75 years later he laid near death on a hospital bed, fading in and out of consciousness. But in a few moments of waking, he looked up toward the ceiling of the stark room, raised his arm strongly, and commanded “Whoa, Bill, easy now!” I knew instantly that he was back with his team of horses, including his favorite named “Bill.” They were once again plowing, or skidding logs, or just raring to gallop off into those mountain slopes.
In the end, his home was Appalachia, and he was a proud mountaineer.
