Dear Grandma

Lelia Amick, wife and mother, on the
 farm in Nicholas County, West Virginia.

My grandmother, Lelia Clingman Humphries Amick, always said she had two birthdays.  The official birth record lists her date of birth as January 1, 1888, but she was really born on January 8, 1888.  Sunday will be the 124th anniversary of her birth in Pool, Nicholas County, West Virginia.  I asked her once what her middle name was, and she laughed when I thought "Clingman" sure was a funny name.  It turns out that her grandmother was Elizabeth Clingman Ott from Greenbrier County.

Irvin Amick and Lelia Clingman
Humphries around the time
of their marriage.

On December 27, 1905, Lelia, at the age of 17, married Irvin Amick.  They lived in Nicholas County, at first in the home of Lelia's parents, Will and Lucinda Humphries.  By 1920 they lived in their own home, next door to Irvin's parents, Samuel and Martha Amick.  My mother said that Grandma loved her cows, and that she had a favorite cow named Reddy. 

 In 1930 Irvin and Lelia lived in Greenbrier County where Irvin worked as a carpenter for the railroad in Rainelle.  At first they lived in Dwyer, but then moved to Rainelle, where they lived in an apartment in the old hospital building, then in the Scruggs house, and then in an apartment over Blair Jewelry Store.  Their son, Teddy Carl Amick, also worked as a carpenter for the railroad.  In July 1930, when Teddy was 21 years old, he was killed in a work accident.  Irvin and Lelia remained in Rainelle with their surviving children, Leathel Delores, Carrie May, Irma Belle, and Marylene Gathel.

After Teddy was killed, Irvin and Lelia bought a farm in 1932 in Waverly, Virginia, where they had a small store.   They were afraid that Irvin would lose his job with the railroad, but as it turned out, he continued to work there during the depression. 

Lelia (in flowered dress) sight-seeing
 in San Diego with her sister,
Sadie L. Humphries Dorsey.

Eventually the family returned to Rainelle where they bought a house.  Lelia worked as a cook at the King Coal Hotel and at the hospital.  From their home it was a short walk up town to the A & P grocery store, G. C. Murphy's Five & Ten, Flint's Hardware, and the Gulf service station where Granddad treated me to orange pop.  When Irvin retired from the railroad, they had lifetime passes to ride the train anywhere they wanted to go, so each year, my mom and dad drove them to Hinton. where they caught a train to Arizona.  There they spent time with Carrie before travelling on to San Diego, where Leathel lived.  Each spring they returned to their home in Rainelle. 

I remember Grandma's house.  Granddad had a perpetual game of solitaire going on the table, and Grandma had a perpetual dinner going in the kitchen:  pot roast, green beans, and fried apples, seasoned with her proverbs.  "It's a poor house that can't afford one lady."  "Might as well eat the devil as drink his broth."  I loved playing Chinese checkers and reading her Better Homes and Gardens magazines.  Grandma's house is where I learned to play Canasta. 

In 1968 I went to Berea, Kentucky, to go to college.  It was a different time, I can assure you.  As a terrified 18-year-old, living away from home for the very first time, I did something that most 18-year-olds today would never think of.  I wrote letters.  And I received letters.  Letters from my mom and dad, from friends at home, from friends who had joined the Navy, and from my grandmother, Lelia Clingman Humphries Amick. I saved her letters for some reason.  I didn't save letters from anyone

At a family reunion at Lizzie Bennett's house in
Nicholas County:  Lelia's nephew, Clyde
Arthur and his wife, Sadie Humphries Dorsey
(Lelia's sister), and Lelia Amick. 

else, but I've kept Grandma's letters in an old stationery box for 43 years.  The letters offer encouragement to me and ask dozens of questions about what it was like to be in college.  There was no generation gap. 

She wrote 11 letters to me from October 4, 1968, to April 22, 1969, from High Point, North Carolina, where she lived with her daughter and my aunt, Marylene Rountree.  Her health had deteriorated until she had to "give up housekeeping", which meant selling her home and disbursing all of her furniture and household items.  At that time my mother was in crisis herself dealing with the illness of my father, so Grandma went to live with her daughter in North Carolina. 

Oh, how she missed Rainelle.  Although she missed going to church, her first letter is full of news and questions.  It was also full of encouragement for me, telling me, "I know what it takes to get it.  You have got it."  Twelve days later she writes, "I was afraid you would forget you had a grandma.  I am so proud of you," and that they are changing East Rainelle so much, I wouldn't "know it" when I got back up there.  Her plans were to return to Rainelle, but on October 26 she wrote that she had asked her doctor about going to West Virginia, and he looked at her like "he thought I was crazy.  That is all he said.  That look was enough."  

She wrote to me on election day in November.  An intense democrat, she said that "this is the big day for one of the big men.  I hope it is the one who butters our bread."  She was "sorry that I can't help him out" at the ballot box.  That big man was Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon.  She didn't write about the election anymore. 

Later in November she told me the news she had heard from my mom.  "There is no place like home to me.  Wish I could go home."  She wrote about their Thanksgiving company, but that it "wasn't like being at home."  By February 4 her letters took a sad turn:  "Well, I have been here 1 year and it seems like it has been 2 years in a way, and again it don't seem so long.  Just to be isolated.  Just set here, nobody to see or call to talk to or anything to pass off time.  No friends to come in.  It is the worst place I was ever in not to have no neighbors.  Not like W. Va."  In her next letter she wrote, "I have been down here over a year, and it seems like a long time to be cooped up, but thank the Lord I am still here.  I would rather be back home.  There is still no place like home."  No, Grandma, there really isn't anyplace like home. 

In March she is making plans to go to West Virginia.  "I hope to go to W. Va. this summer some time if the good Lord be willing and just give me health & strength.  My head says feet stick with me and we will go places, but some times they say I can't go."  In April after I had apparently written about my trip home for Easter, she wrote, "Would love to been with you but seems like I won't get back up there any more, and I would love to go."  She continues that her daughter in California wanted her to come out there, and her daughter in Arizona would come to get her as soon as school was out on June 3.  She closes the letter by saying, "Well, I guess you are tired of this gab."  No, Grandma, I wasn't tired of it.  Her last letter closed with, "Love & may God bless and keep you."  He has, Grandma. 

She never made it home until she died October 4, 1969.  She lived with Carrie only a few months when she developed esophageal cancer. I love reading the old letters of encouragement and news and weather reports, the letters she pondered over and wrote with her mis-shapened hands.  Dear Grandma, I wish you a "Happy Birthday", love, Janet.

Riding the Turnpike in Sewell Valley

The James River and Kanawha Turnpike
crossing Little Sewell Mountain.

    If you do much investigation into the history of western Greenbrier County in West Virginia, you will read that U.S. Route 60 follows the historic James River and Kanawha Turnpike.  Well, that's true for the most part.    As U.S. Route 60 (now known as the Midland Trail) was constructed, it generally followed the path of the old turnpike road, swallowing up the historic road in contemporary highways accommodating faster and safer travel. In Greenbrier County, however, the James River and Kanawha Turnpike deviates from Route 60 at Meadow Bluff and runs across Little Sewell Mountain to Rainelle.  I had the good fortune to grow up in a house in old Sewell Valley right along the original turnpike.  We had no idea of its story. 
     Early in the history of the Commonwealth of Virginia, people recognized the need for a means to transport goods, people, and mail from the remote mountain region beyond the Blue Ridge to the Tidewater area.  This need led to the design and construction of a series of roads, including the James River and Kanawha Turnpike which ran from Richmond, Virginia, to the Kanawha River area, where Charleston is now located. 
        White men settled the Greenbrier Valley beginning in the mid-1700s, but little is recorded of the western end of the county other than that Stephen Sewell hunted there.  We occasionally dug up arrowheads in our garden, so Indians also hunted there.  Population in western Greenbrier was sparse until the arrival of the Raine brothers.  John Raine and his brother, T. W. Raine, appeared in 1903 when they purchased land on Meadow River from which they planned to supply timber for a new lumber mill.  Before the Raine brothers ever cut the first log from their newly purchased property, the community of farms along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike was known as Sewell Valley, named for Stephen Sewell. 
      The town of Rainelle was established on April 25, 1913, somewhat of a late development, considering that the James River and Kanawha Turnpike was completed through Sewell Valley in 1826.  The turnpike was the main highway and provided for the movement of passengers and mail between Lewisburg and the Kanawha Valley.    
      Stage coach service along the Turnpike began in 1827 with a stage line operated by the Caldwell-Surbaugh stage company, which ran from Lewisburg to Charleston.  J. T. Peters and H. B. Carden in The History of Fayette County, West Virginia list the “famous” stage stand owners, and among those listed are Harrison Hickman in Little Sewell Valley, Addison Frazier in Sewell Valley, and Thomas Henning at Meadow Bluff.  Stage coaches ran on the Turnpike until 1873 when railroads replaced them. 
      Twentieth century developments necessitated changes in highway construction to accommodate automobiles.  The road from Rainelle to Sam Black Church was by-passed when the Midland Trail diverged to Charmco and Rupert.  The turnpike became County Route 60/32, now paved, but mostly a one-lane road where good manners and driving safety dictate that you pull to the berm when you meet on-coming traffic.
     A tour book produced by the Midland Trail Association in 1916 describes the road as running from Meadow Bluff and over Little Sewell Mountain, the original course of the old Turnpike.  By 1926 when Percival Reniers and Ashton Reniers wrote The Midland Trail Tour in West Virginia, the Midland Trail had deviated to follow the present Route 60.  They write, “At Sam Black Church the Turnpike runs straight ahead over Little Sewell Mountain while the modern route bears right, down the easy grade of the Old Wilderness Road along Meadow River.” 
     The Midland Trail had begun its modern incarnation, while the direct route over Little Sewell Mountain was historically preserved in its rural, peaceful nature, used mostly by the residents of the mountain and valleys between Rainelle and Sam Black Church.  Today the area along the old turnpike route remains much the same as it did in its early days.
      In Rainelle the original turnpike, which is clearly marked with a street sign on Main Street, veers to the right in a fork of the road in what used to be called East Rainelle.  The old turnpike route runs over Little Sewell Mountain to Sam Black Church and reconnects with Route 60 near Interstate 64.  The road loops and bends past small farms and scenic mountain views where life includes everyday references to local history. 
      A few years ago I talked with Bobby Ayers, who at the time lived near Rainelle on the old turnpike.  Near Dennis, where a post office had been located, he had found a watering trough used during “old” days on the Turnpike, as stated on the homemade sign someone long ago posted over the trough.  Unless Bobby had told me about the trough, I would never have noticed it hiding under a clump of overgrown brush.
     There is a lot of history hiding in just 10 miles of turnpike.  The grave sites of the famous Greenbrier Ghost and her mother are located at Soule Chapel United Methodist Church, just off the Turnpike.   The Greenbrier Ghost appeared to her mother to tell how the Ghost's husband had murdered her.  The investigation of the untimely death of Zona Shue on Little Sewell Mountain convicted her husband of murder. 

Highway marker which tells the story
of the Greenbrier Ghost.

      A few miles from Soule Chapel is the Dietz Farm which was occupied by both Union and Confederate troops at different times.  The National Register Bulletin describes the Dietz farm house as being used as a hospital during the Civil War with graves of unidentified soldiers located nearby on the farm.  Soldiers from both sides followed the James River and Kanawha Turnpike through Sewell Valley as they repeatedly marched between Lewisburg and the Kanawha valley.  Some people are surprised when I tell them that my friends and I played "Civil War" when we were children.  We divided up into Union and Confederate forces and went for it.  I wish I had known then how many Union and Confederate soldiers had actually marched on the road just yards from our houses.  Unfortunately our local history was not taught in schools at the time, and we had no idea that where we lived was a major thoroughfare for troop movements.    
      After the turnpike improved travel through the mountains to Charleston in the early nineteenth century, more and more people moved to the area, built homes, and established farms along the road, creating a sense of community.  Post offices opened at Meadow Bluff, Little Sewell Mountain, Dennis, and Sewell Valley.
      By 1889 Sewell Valley possessed a school house and a new Baptist church.   According to the minutes of the first meeting to organize Sewell Valley Baptist Church, the gathering took place at the Sewell Valley Schoolhouse, located on the Osborne farm.  The original Sewell Valley Baptist Church was constructed in 1889 and was used until 1962, when a new church was built and the older one torn down.  The site of the old frame building is now the church cemetery.     

Bible school held at Sewell Valley Baptist Church
in the second building which was
erected in 1962.

     In a manuscript written in 1954, Herbert Harr notes that in 1910 there were not enough children to have a school in Rainelle, so the children attended a one-room school east of town called the Sewell Valley School.  This school was used at least until 1912, but in 1911 the Meadow Bluff District Board of Education provided a school for 30 students in a room over a store in East Rainelle.  Progress was moving away from Sewell Valley and toward the company town that was growing up around the Meadow River Lumber Company. 

The Osborne house as it appeared in the 1920s.  The
road is the Turnpike.  Picture from
K. C. Farren.

Land near the school and the church was part of the Osborne farm where a post office was located from 1909 until 1924.  The Osborne house was a landmark for decades and sat directly across from the intersection with the road that is now Airport Road.   The last of the Osborne family to live in the house was Freda Osborne Critchley, aunt of K.C. Farren, who told me, “I remember spending nights in the old house.  The beds had feather ticks, and every room, upstairs and downstairs, had a fireplace.”  K. C. has much of the furniture from the old house including a desk and a secretary that was used to sort mail when the house was a post office.  The family also had swords that were used during the Civil War.  I was enchanted with that house when I was a girl, and my dad, who knew Freda Osborne, took me by to visit one day, but my memories of the inside of the house are vague. I wanted to see those swords that my dad had told me about, but I don't think they were brought out on that day.  
     In 1947 the Osbornes sub-divided the farm into building lots, creating what is still known as the Osborne Addition, a residential suburb of Rainelle.  The road that had once provided a rocky trip on a stage coach from Lewisburg to Charleston and made mail delivery possible to remote farms, was now the “hard road” to the families in the comfortable bungalow-style homes situated off the turnpike on smaller dirt and red dog roads. K. C. said that documents from the creation of the subdivision show that the right of way for the old turnpike road is 60 feet, which could accommodate a much wider road than what exists now. 
     As homes continued to pop up in the Osborne Addition, Denzil and Audrey Simms opened a small store at the corner where Oak Street now connects with the turnpike.  In the 1960s Squire Haynes developed a grass landing strip on top of Little Sewell Mountain that accommodated small aircraft, and he eventually opened a restaurant at the airport that served meals to flyers from all parts of the United States.

The building along the Turnpike
where Denzil and Audrey
Simms had a store. 

     In the 1950s one of the lots near the Osborne house was used to build a skating rink.  The skating rink was open on Friday and Saturday, and the cost of skating was 75 cents.  Music was provided by a juke box, and K. C. and many other young people in Rainelle and the Osborne Addition spent as much time as possible hurtling around the rink, the girls with pom-poms on their skates.  The skating rink was a gathering place for teenagers, not only from Rainelle High School, but from many other Greenbrier County high schools as well.  When K. C. was about 10 years old, the mother of one of his friends took several children skating.  In the car the mom bragged about being a good skater, so the children insisted that she skate with them.  On the first trip around the rink the mom fell and broke both of her arms.  The skating rink was replaced with a bowling alley called Greenbrier Lanes which operated until the 1970s.   

The site of the Osborne house
as it appears today where Airport Road
intersects the turnpike.

       In the mid-1970s after Keith and Freda Osborne Critchley built a new home, the old Osborne house was torn down.  For several years the stone chimneys on each end of the house marked the location, until they, too, were torn down due to safety concerns.  The field where the house sat for so many years is now occupied by mobile homes.  
       Just as the old horse trough with its faded sign leaves only a trace of earlier travelers, the appearance of the James River and Kanawha Turnpike hints at the history evident along its route.  From horses and stagecoaches to Model T automobiles stirring up dust, the short stretch of road changes as each age dictates, yet it has stories to tell of life long ago if you know where to look. 

The home-made sign above the horse trough near
the old site of the Dennis post office along the Turnpike.

Don't Blame it on the Rain

 My daughter in Asheville, NC, is friends with a couple who at one time lived in a house far out in the woods.  When Katie was visiting, she and Ashley were sitting in the swing on the porch watching a heavy rain storm pass through.  During a lull in the conversation, Ashley said, "Rain, rain, rain.  Rainelle!"  Katie blinked twice and asked, "What did you say?"  As far as we know, there is only one Rainelle, an evaporating lumber mill town at the foot of Sewell Mountain in West Virginia.  It turned out that Ashley and Burton had been to the Appalachian String Band Music Festival at Clifftop, WV, and had travelled through Rainelle. 
Unlike Milli Vanilli, we can't "Blame it on the Rain".  We can, however, credit Thomas and John Raine for the town's unusual name.  Most sources attribute the name of the town simply to the Raine brothers, but recently tradition is growing that the name came from the daughter of Thomas Raine, Nell.  Thus, you see, "Rainelle".  However, I could find no documentation for this.  That doesn't mean it isn't true, but if it is, no one bothered to write it down.

The only public memorial to the history of Rainelle.

The only "monument" to the history of Rainelle is a marker along Route 60.  The town is certainly different than when I was growing up there, and I'm sure that it bears little resemblance to the original settlement that the Raines built around 1910.  Since the early 1970s major buildings have been torn down:  the sawmill, the Raine house on top of the hill, the railroad depot, the Pioneer Hotel.  Soon the high school will follow them. 

Thomas and John Raine were the sons of an English immigrant, Joseph Raine, and his wife, Ruth, who were living in Ohio as early as 1850.  Thomas was born in January, 1851, and John was born in Ironton, Ohio, on April 6, 1863. 

In Tumult on the Mountains, Roy Clarkson writes that John started his career as a choreboy in a lumber camp at the age of 13.  He worked in a grocery in Ironton until he was age 30, when he joined Thomas in a lumber business in Empire, Pennsylvania.  After exhausting their timber in Pennsylvania, they happened upon the virgin timber stands of West Virginia. 

The Clarkson book published photos of felled trees with diameters wider than the men were tall.  It's difficult to comprehend the size of the forests that existed in West Virginia before the loggers took them down.  We will never see forests like that again in West Virginia.

Otis Rice says in West Virginia: a History, that lumber companies from New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota bought most of the timber in West Virginia.  The going price was about two to five dollars an acre.  Rice explains that a yellow poplar tree that cost about 50 cents could yield 2,000 board feet of timber that sold for $80-$100 per thousand board feet.  Pretty good return on the investment. 

The Raine brothers eagerly explored the indigenous hardwood forests of West Virginia.  They first developed Evenwood in Randolph County in 1903.  The Raine-Andrews Lumber Company then discovered the forests of Sewell Valley along the Meadow River in 1906.  No rail access existed in the area, so the Raines built the Sewell Valley Railroad to transport timber to the mill.  The first board was sawed at Meadow River Lumber Company in 1910.  The mill was known as the world's largest hardwood lumber mill, a triple band saw mill capable of cutting an average of 110,000 board feet of lumber in 10 hours.  Clarkson says that eventually the mill's production increased to 30 million board feet of lumber a year which required the cutting of 3,000 acres of trees a year.

One of the eight-foot circular saws from the Meadow River Lumber Company is on display at the Cradle of Forestry Historic Site at Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, North Carolina. 

A postcard showing Rainelle and dated 1915, mailed from
Corliss, WV.  It is signed by Rebecca in Camp #7, Rainelle.

The town of Rainelle was incorporated on April 25, 1913.  It was a company town, with a company store and company housing for the employees of the mill.  In 1900 Thomas Raine lived in Pennsylvania; in 1910 he lived in Randloph County, WV, but by 1920 he had moved back to Pennsylvania.  I could find no indication that he ever lived in Rainelle for any significant period of time. 

John Raine and his wife, Elma, lived in Pennsylvania with two children in 1900.  By 1910 they had moved to Hillsboro in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.  None of their children were born in West Virginia but were all born in either Ohio or Pennsylvania.  In 1920 John and Elma Raine lived in Rainelle with their five children:  Burton (an inspector in the lumber yard), Richard, Margaret Helen, Max, and Edward.  Another son, John Raine, Jr., died April 13, 1919, at the hospital in Hinton from appendicitis. 

Thomas Raine died in 1933.  John's wife, Elma Davis Raine, died March 11, 1928.  Soon after Elma's death, John married Elizabeth Davis, because they lived in Rainelle in 1930.  Also in the household were Betty B. Davis (John's step-daughter) and Francis S. Davis (a step-son).  The live-in help included a cook, Fanny Lee, and a gardener, Jim Clay.  John Raine owned his home, worth $50,000.  He also had a radio and was the president of a lumber plant.  John Raine died August 28, 1940, in Montgomery, West Virginia, and is buried in Rainelle. 

And so ends the story.  A blue-collar kind of place for most of us, Rainelle, as we once knew it, full of families and stories to tell, is mostly gone.   The massive forests are gone, the mill is gone, and many of the people are gone.  Only shadows remain where once fortunes were made.

Have Your Prayin' Done Up

June 25 is the 100th anniversary of my father's birth.  His life was a short one, and many would say that it was a commonplace, prosaic life. Some may say that he was a poor man, full of struggles. But this is not just the story of his life; it's the story of how he once almost died and why he survived.

Austin David Ballengee was born in 1911 on what he called Sourwood Mountain near Hix in Summers County, West Virginia.  His father had been married to Bertha Cales and had a daughter, Grace Ballengee.  When Bertha died, Grace and Lonnie Ballengee lived with Lonnie's in-laws.  In 1910 Lonnie married Mary Catherine Burdette, and soon after, my father was born.  Catherine died in 1912 from dropsy, which is congestive heart failure in modern terms.  The baby boy's future was uncertain; he had diptheria after his mother died and almost died himself.  The Cales family went to get him, and from then on he lived with them and his sister, Grace. 

He shared many stories of his boyhood, how when the family went to Hinton on Saturday in a horse-pulled wagon, everyone got a banana.  The others ate their bananas right away, but he saved his banana until he got home. During the summer he was put to washing canning jars, because his hands were small, and they fit into the jars.  He hated watermelon because he once got sick from eating too much of it.  One Christmas his foster-dad told him that he'd seen reindeer tracks in the snow down by the gate, and my dad spent long hours in the snow looking for the tracks.  He had a card with a strand of his mother's hair sewn to spell her name, but the card was burned up in a house fire.

Grace died in childbirth after marrying Elmer Cales; Red was about 10 years old.  Perhaps it was this lonely little boy who developed the skill of talking to people because he never met a stranger.

Grace Ballengee Cales died in 1921, and in 1922, Lonnie married for the third time to Cordie Treadway Light.  For a time Red lived with Lonnie and his new wife, but he said that things didn't work out very well, blended families being complicated things, so at some point, Red moved on.  I don't know where he lived between that time and 1930. 
William and Hattie Lively lived near the Cales family in Summers County.  The Livelys had a large family, and Red was friends with their boys.  By 1930 the Livelys had moved to the Meadow Bluff area of Greenbrier County, and listed in their home on the 1930 census was Austin Ballengee, an 18-year-old lodger. He worked as a cook for a lumber camp, and he drove a truck for a while.  He told about running over some chickens while driving the truck; the chickens belonged to Thelma Egnor who was mad as a, well, as a wet hen about it.  He also played music at dances.  He could play guitar, mandolin, fiddle, all by ear; he couldn't read a note of music but played a pretty fair "Wildwood Flower". 

He started working on the Nicholas, Fayette, & Greenbrier division of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad in 1944 when he was 33 years old.  He lived in a boarding house on Second Street in Rainelle.  About this time on his days off he took a short walk after breakfast up to the Men's Quality Store on Main Street in East Rainelle to help the store clerk work the crossword puzzle in the newspaper.  In 1949 Red married that clerk, Irma Amick Tuck, in Richmond, Virginia.  They and Irma's three children from a previous marriage made their home in an apartment on Main Street in Rainelle.  In 1950 a fourth child was added to the family; that child was me. 

Red bought a parcel of land in the Osborne Addition and built a small house there.  The family moved into the house before it was finished because Red didn't like to borrow money, and he worked on the house as his cash supply allowed.

Both Red and Irma made a profession of faith in Christ at Sewell Valley Baptist Church, which was an important part of their lives; Red sang in the choir and taught Sunday School.  He made runs on the railroad and worked at Haynes Refrigeration during slow periods at the railroad.  After a lifetime of moving from pillar to post, Red's life was settled and family-oriented. 

In the mid-1960s Red had been called to work the evening shift in the railroad yard in Rainelle.  Long before his shift should have been over, he drove into the driveway followed by Hubert Buster in his car.  As Mr. Buster explained, Red had gotten sick at work; he'd even thrown up the lunch he'd eaten.  "When a man throws up," Mr. Buster explained, "you know he's sick."

My dad was in pain.  There were several family members at the house that evening, but for the life of me, I can't remember who was there.  As he lay on the couch struggling to breathe, my mom looked at me and said, "Anyone who knows how to pray, should pray."  She was afraid.  She called Dr. Todd from Quinwood, who said he would come.  When he arrived, he examined my dad and said he was having a gall bladder attack.  He gave him some medicine and went home. 

My dad's condition did not improve, and up in the late night, early morning, my mom called the ambulance to take him to the hospital.  At that time, when you called the ambulance, you called the funeral home.  They sent the vehicle which was also used to transport dead bodies.  No one had ever heard of an EMT, but the attendants loaded my dad into the ambulance and began the drive to the C&O Hospital in Clifton Forge, about 64 miles away today with the interstate, but at that time there was no interstate highway, so they were looking at a drive that would take at least one and a half hours, probably a little faster in an ambulance.  At that point, I estimate that it had been about 12 hours since my dad had first taken sick and driven himself home, with what one would obviously see was a heart attack.

According to my dad, the ambulance attendants wrapped him in warm blankets, but he said it felt like they had wrapped him in rubber sheets because he was so cold.  Then he began a journey that he could take only by himself.  He could see that he was at a river.  On the other side of the river were many people; they were happy, and they were waiting for him to cross that river.  At that point Jesus was with him.  Jesus began to prepare him to cross the river, putting him in what my dad described as a kind of bubble meant to protect my dad as he crossed the river.  It was then that Jesus noticed something large over to the side of them; this thing kept growing.  It was the prayers being offered up for my dad.  Jesus took my dad from the "bubble", and my dad survived because of the Christians who were praying for him. 

He lived for several years afterwards, but his health was poor.  He didn't say if or how the experience changed him, but I don't know how he could have been afraid of death after that.   When he testified about his "near death" experience, he told people that they should "have their prayin' done up," meaning that life is flimsy at best and in the blink of a gnat's eye your soul can depart your body before you ever have a chance to pray for forgiveness and help. 

Red Ballengee was not a perfect man.  I know some of the mistakes he made, and he, himself, said he sometimes took a drink when he was playing for dances.  He wasn't perfect, but he was a good father who kept his praying done up.