Thursday, January 29, 1925
Mostly about West Virginia: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, and the wall up with our English dread! The New York Times has been blackguarding us again. A penny a linear in the New York Times Book Review, dated January 18, intimates that West Virginia is in the blackness of darkness. He calls us Virginia’s lost province, and mourns the fact there is such a difference in spirit and condition! No accounting for tastes. That is the proudest thing that we are of.
He says that West Virginia is one of the great battlefields of industrialism. True, we do get up a little earlier than some of our neighbors and quit a little later.
We believe, like the little schoolgirl, that the most wonderful thing that man ever made was a living for his family.
He says that we carry guns and wear big hats. True enough. We are still able to bear arms and while the foundations of the north have probably not made the subject of craniology among the mountaineers one of the subjects of research, still it would not shake those foundations to know that it takes a little larger hat for the intelligent mountaineers than it does for the soft-boned cotton spinners of the north. Another count in the indictment is that our recent past has been bad. Such is life and luck. It runs bad for a while and then gets worse. The butt end of his blessing reads: “Bad as has been the recent past, there seems some prospect at least a civilization less crude will be evolved.”
“Rot!” says Mrs. Mountain-State. “No man kin tell me to my face I ain’t no lady and get away with it. I will just give him a smack in the snout!”
No man can argue on the question of his own gentility.
So just consider that our shoulders have been shrugged and let it go at that.
Our withers have not been wrung.
WEATHER
Four or five inches of dry snow fell at Marlinton Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday morning, the government thermometer registered 18 below zero. This is the lowest temperature in a number of years.
THE ECLIPSE
Saturday morning business was mostly suspended in the town of Marlinton from eight to ten o’clock during the eclipse of the sun. Smoked glasses and over exposed photographic films and plates were in demand. About nine-tenths of the sun was covered. The light of the sun was diminished, and frost flew in the morning air.
Rev. Fred Gray, of Cass, gives us the dates of the eight total eclipses of the sun visible to the United States in the past 100 years. November 30, 1834; August 7, 1869; July 24, 1878; January 21, 1880; January 1889; May 28, 1900; June 8, 1918; September 10, 1923. On March 7, 1970, will be the next total eclipse visible in the United States, visible in Florida. In 1999, there will be another one.
TARIFFS
The New England textile industry has been depressed for a long time. That unfortunate fact ought not to be made a matter of partisan recrimination. The thing might have taken place under any tariff, low or high. On that point businessmen are better judges than politicians. But one truth has certainly been established by events at Fall River. It is that the theory of a protective tariff as a form of modern magic and miracle working has had the stuffing knocked out of it. The grave prattle in which Republicans, from President Coolidge down, have indulged on that subject, ought to be heard no more. The high tariff as the sole cause of high wages and the only source of American prosperity has become so futile that sober minded men engaged in the great commerce of the world put it out of their calculations. It will go hard, but Fall River will put it out of that last refuge of unverified assertion and general humbug – a campaign speech. – New York Times.
ARM SHOT OFF
Guilford Scott, aged about 20 years, accidentally shot his arm off with a shot gun. He and a young man about his own age were hunting rabbits on the Scott farm had started the dogs, and young Scott took a stand by a horse sled. He set the gun on the sled and rested his right arm on the muzzle of the gun. The gun slipped and the hammer struck the sled. A charge of number six shot went through this right forearm. A lot of shot hit him in the face, and a number of teeth were broken out. Dr. Norman R. Price was called; and the young man was brought to the Marlinton Hospital where his arm was amputated just below the elbow. He is getting along as well as could be expected.
Guilford Scott is the son of Summers Scott, who lives on a farm near Fairview. He is a grandson of the late Beverly Waugh.
DIED
Daniel A. McNeill at Buckeye January 22, 1925. His age was 76 years. On Saturday afternoon, his body was buried in the McNeill graveyard, the services being conducted in the Methodist Protestant church. Mr. McNeill was a good and prominent citizen of Pocahontas county. He was an extensive landowner and merchant. He was the third son of the late Jonathan McNeill and Angelina Adkison McNeill. He was married to Miss Nannie Cloonan…