Grandpa's Directions

By Scott Lothes

To get to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway station in Charleston, West Virginia, you just head south towards the river on Dickinson Street, cross the South Side Bridge and you can't miss it. Two story brick building, high arched windows, plopped down right between the tracks and MacCorkle Avenue. The way Middle Ridge rises from the riverbank, it's a wonder there's room for that much. But that's the easiest way to give directions in Charleston. The Mountain State's capital city fills a valley bounded by Tyler Mountain to the north and the easy-going Kanawha River to the south. The Elk joins the Kanawha there, and in the wide spot where their basins meet, somebody decided there was enough room to build a city.

It's not a very big city by New England or even Midwestern standards, even though it's the biggest in the state - 70,000 folks in a good year and that with houses built all the way up the south flank of Tyler Mountain. That didn't make getting around it any easier if you'd grown up in some holler where "goin' to town" meant a trek over the mountain to a weather-beaten assortment of a dozen shacks clustered along a one-lane dirt path that became brown soupy muck for two days after a hard rain. Unless you knew how to keep your bearings.

"It's easy to get around in Charleston," Grandpa told me, and he'd grown up in one of those hollers, way up the Elk in Braxton County where they're still looking for the alien who crashed his UFO in a fireball above Flatwoods in 1952. "You've got the river on one side, and the mountain on the other. As long as you know where they are, you'll never be lost."

The C&O station isn't very busy these days. It's only opened on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, when Amtrak's tri-weekly Cardinal pauses on its runs between New York and Chicago. Most people just drive right past it on MacCorkle's four lanes of concrete. A few might go to the restaurant next door for a bite to eat, and fewer still might actually go there to catch a train. Of course, if you'd been downtown in 1942, headed toward the river, found the South Side Bridge, crossed it and dropped down to track level, you'd have found things a little different.

In 1942, there were three express passenger trains every day in both directions, plus the countless locals and the troop trains. Young men left home on those trains, and some of them didn't come back. Young wives, robbed too soon of their youth waiting for husbands fighting overseas, waited the last few moments for the trains bringing their men home on leave. Families huddled close on the platform for the big send off or the welcome home party.

And that was just for The War. Gas rationing and the newness of the automobile and lack of good roads meant the train was the way most people traveled. There were businessmen from the Fast Flying Virginian wearing three-piece suits, heads in newspapers, pausing only briefly over the latest headline from Europe or the Pacific before flipping the pages to their stock prices and baseball scores. Traveling salesmen, suitcases in hand, peddling their wares out to Richmond or Cincinnati or every little station in between. Boys and girls dashing in and out of their mothers' grips until the local chuffed in bringing Grandma and hugs and presents.

If you'd been there on a certain late fall day in 1942, you'd have seen a group of a dozen or so boys, 15, 16, 17 years old. Too young for The War, too old and too restless and too longing for independence to stay home. If you'd stayed there and watched them for a while, you'd have probably seen one of those moments when it seemed as if the train was never going to come, and the restlessness overcame them, and they began first quarrelling and then pushing and shoving, as all boys with hot-running blood are bound to do when the world moves too slowly for their liking. And if you'd looked into the middle of that group, at the smallest, scrawniest boy who cussed the loudest and pushed the hardest, you'd have been looking at my grandfather. Walter Frame. Age 16 and going on 21. He'd been going on 21 ever since the day he realized what that number meant to every boy growing up in America.

"I wanted to be 21 so bad I could taste it!" he's told me. He gets the flicker of a long-ago gleam in his 82-year-old eyes when he tells me that, and I think there's some part of him that still wants to be 21. And he can still taste it.

There were only six weeks in Charleston between the day he rode down from Braxton County with his Uncle Bern and that day he waited on the station platform. Those six weeks Walter spent with NYA, earning $21/month as an apprentice auto mechanic working the hoot owl shift. Bern's wife, Ina Mollohan, got 20 of those dollars for room and board. Extra spending money came by taking a bus to Hurricane and driving new Chevrolets into the local dealership, for which owner Dusty Rhodes paid him a dollar per trip. Even with that supplement, it wasn't an easy living for a 16 year old. But it was an independent living, and Grandpa had never tasted easy life.

He had spent his boyhood summers working in hayfields alongside grown men since he'd been old enough to swing a scythe. The men were paid a dollar a day for their labors. Grandpa worked just as hard, just as long, and got 50 cents. Sitting through school was a test of endurance, especially when older sister Ruth was the teacher and wielded a stout yardstick. The whippings came daily for younger brother. If Ruth didn't know he was guilty of something, she whipped from assumption. High school offered little relief. Coming off the bench in a basketball game one Friday night, he took a pass in the lane and put a one-handed hook shot through the rim for two points. The coach promptly returned him to the bench. Only two-handed set shots were allowed at Gassaway High.

No wonder then, that the parts of his childhood he recalls most fondly are the late evenings and early mornings when he'd grab a lantern, a rifle, and an old hound dog, and set off into the hills running trap lines. Or take rod and reel down to Crooked Fork and cast for smallmouth, sunfish, and muskie.

His house was in Frametown. No kidding. He recalls with a grin the worst whipping he ever received as a boy by a teacher other than his sister.

"What's your name?" she asked on the first day of school.

"Walter Frame."

"There sure are a lot of Frames around here," the teacher mused.

"Yes, ma'am," Walter agreed with dead seriousness. "There are more Frames in these parts than white people."

It was seven miles from Frametown to the high school in Gassaway. Everyone walked the first mile, and then caught the school bus for the other six. He had just made that bus ride one bright autumn morning in 1942. Sitting in the boy's locker room before the first class, he wondered why. He had been 16 for nearly a year. He was no longer bound by law to be in school, and he knew it. What was he doing there? One of the Jarvis boys, a casual friend, sat nearby. Walter turned to him.

"Want to quit school?"

"Sounds good to me."

They walked outside into the crisp autumn sunshine, as if for the first time in their lives. After a trip to the drugstore they sat wondering what to do with themselves, wondering what to do with the day, wondering how to get home. It was hours before the afternoon school bus would depart, so they set off on foot, over the twisting road through the mountains under a canopy of changing leaves, hoping to thumb for a ride. No cars came. That afternoon, approaching the bus stop where they had started their last ride to school that morning, they heard a rumbling sound coming down the road behind them. They looked up to see the yellow school bus coast to a stop and drop off their former classmates.

A few days later, Walter was heading south down State Highway 4. The NYA, National Youth Administration, was a New Deal program signed into existence in 1935 by an executive order from President Roosevelt after much urging from wife Eleanor. The administration sought to help the huge numbers of unemployed young people brought about by the Depression in two ways. In exchange for labor, it gave educational grants to high school and college students. It also sought to provide economic relief and marketable job training to young people who were both unemployed and out of school via federal work projects.

After six weeks of on-the-job training in Charleston, the NYA announced several job openings at the Newport News Ship Building and Dry Dock Company in Newport News, Virginia. Walter jumped at the chance. With 50 cents and an address in his pockets, he waited with a dozen of his peers on the platform. They barely noticed when a gleaming Chesapeake & Ohio locomotive steamed into the station with the eastbound George Washington, which they boarded for the long journey to Newport News.

"Why did you do it?" I asked Grandpa so many years later.

"All through life, growing up, I had people telling me what to do. I just wanted to get out, get a job, and make money. I wanted to be my own boss worse than anybody you ever saw. I didn't want anybody to tell me what to do."

He spent six months in the shipyards, where plenty of people told him what to do as he worked as electrician's helper installing landing lights on the flightdecks of the Yorktown, the Hornet, and the Wasp. But he got $37/week for his efforts, and after two weeks in a Quonset hut paid for by the NYA, he moved into a boarding house where food and lodging cost $10/week. Not everyone was as practical.

"The NYA expected us to find our own meals, and some of us got pretty hungry."

At the end of six months, he returned home for a summer, and then joined the U.S. Navy at age 17, his father signing his enlistment papers for him. Plenty of people told him what to do there, too. After the war, he met my grandmother who has been telling him what to do ever since. But on that late fall day in 1942 on board the George Washington, he was as free as that boy running trap lines in the hollers of Braxton County. Racing through the fading leaves and dirty coal towns of the New River Gorge as his train sped east from Charleston, he played cards and talked and dreamed the dreams of youth, oblivious to those little towns flashing by through the windows.

He would remain oblivious while the mines closed and the towns died with them in the 1950s and 60s, and while the buildings crumbled and the new maple saplings poked up through the floorboards in the 1970s and 80s. And then I came to visit, and I would open a book of topographical maps and point to a dot that stood for one of those towns when Grandpa would ask, "What do you want to do today?"

He'd study the map, the tiny, squiggling lines of county roads that may or may not be paved, look at me, look at the map again, then look back at me. "Are you sure we can get there?"

"Easy," I'd tell him. "Just keep the mountain on one side, and the river on the other."

And so we went. (2006)