Thursday, December 4, 1925
Here is my alibi. I was off on a jamboree at the University during the week of weeks. “And what was you doing that day?” asked the lawyer of the cowboy witness. “Oh, nothing much, just taking a few drinks, eating a few sardines, smoking a few cigars and romancing around.”
I had promised not to leave the reservation out the Morgantown Post, a newspaper of these United States, gave a big infare and sent me an invitation and I was fain to go for that paper has been born again, and having got through the second summer so fatal to babies, widowers and newspaper, it called in a couple hundred West Virginia writers, and I gathered up my little bag of chestnuts and went down to the settlements to peddle them out. Come to the banquet hall tonight, for bobbed hair beauty will be there! We gathered round the festal board in the new million-dollar hotel. Let him who saith that there is no culture in West Virginia, wash his own neck!
It was the occasion of the annual game with the friendly enemy, Washington & Jefferson, of Washington, Pennsylvania. Every year they come to Morgantown to joust with our boys for the supremacy. Of the 24 games that have been played by these teams, W & J has won 17 and West Virginia has won seven. But in the last four games, West Virginia has won three, so we are eating a little farther back on the hog these days.
I was one of a big bunch of writers who were presented with tickets for the game. It is played in a big stadium which makes the Coliseum look small. “While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; when falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; and when Rome falls – the world.”
When the tickets were distributed, a student handed me an odd one, and I found that I was cut off from the rest of the deadheads, and I wondered why I was not allowed to go in with the elect, but, of course, I was thankful to get one. After wandering around from door to door and flashing my pass, I was finally led to the front seat and found myself facing the center of the field on the ground floor.
“The best seat in the house,” a neighbor remarked. Section 22, row A, seat 24, had meant nothing in my young life up to that time. Hereafter it will never be forgotten. I was where I could see the whites of their eyes.
The first quarter ended with the score 0 – 0. But I was not downhearted. While I had been in a sort of a trance during the heat of the fight, I am from the woods and can read sign. The battlefield has a pretty fair turf on it, but there had been a frost and that left it in a condition that soon changed to mud. At the end of the first quarter while no score had been made, the ground around the Pennsylvanians’ goal had been cut to pieces, while around the West Virginians’ goal the grass still grew. That showed how they fought…
I was somewhat like the reporter who was sent to cover the big fire. He wired in that all was confusion and that he could not write anything. I am not able to give you any of the niceties of the game. They were there, no doubt. I feel sure that a young West Virginian would murmur, “excuse me,” as he stepped upon a visitor’s face, and the visitor would naturally reply in the spirit of the game, “thank you to hell, sir.”…
SLATY FORK
There was a large crowd at the Thanksgiving service. It consisted largely of young people. Train the child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
We have had some very cold weather for the time of year. Real winter at times.
We would have more money to build and maintain roads if better judgment was used in surveying out the new State Roads. For instance, our road leaves the pike and goes down to the mouth of Slaty Fork. Evidently a fair grade and a shorter distance could be had by following the general route of the pike. And then going up the Big Spring Fork, instead of going around the foot of the hill by L. D. Sharp’s farm for at least a mile, they cross at the lower end of the Sharp farm and run through three meadows and a calf lot. The survey is right through the middle of the bottomland. Mr. Sharp says he will have to have thirteen gates to get anything out of the land they will leave him. He estimates his damage at four or five thousand dollars. If they will go on the other side of the creek and along the foot of the hill, keeping on the side of the meadows, he will ask no damage for right-of-way.
BIRTH
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Meadows, a son.
