Dear Editor,
Thank you for publishing Homer McNeil’s photo and Thomas (son of Tip Kincaid) Kincaid’s article. Brought to mind another little story about the kindness of Homer McNeil in Durbin.
Homer was a good friend to my father, Gene Lawton, who owned a garage beside the barbershop/doctor’s office. We lived above the garage. Homer plowed a garden on his hillside in front of his cabin. My mother planted vegetables, and they shared the bounty. Mother would walk up to the garden with three little girls trailing behind.
I’m sure she would carry the youngest, Sarah, back home. Mother canned the extra, of course – no wasting food.
Recollections from 1940s in Durbin,
Becky Lawton Benton
St. Inigoes, Maryland
Dear Editor,
Several years ago, I inherited my grandfather’s farm in Pocahontas County, and I visit the gravesite in Marlinton when I come down to spend several days at the farm. The granite headstone has been leaning for several years, and I have been trying to get it corrected by the monument company that installed it.
They have been contacted several times and keep giving the same excuse. The next time they are down there they will fix it. It doesn’t take years to fix this problem. However, this is not the only headstone leaning, and I have to assume this is the same monument company in Elkins.
The cemetery is maintained by Marlinton, but the repairs to monuments are the responsibility of the monument company that did the placement.
The question is why does the town of Marlinton allow this company to continue installations if they neglect the maintenance?
Pocahontas is a beautiful county and this type of neglect should never be allowed.
Joe Collins
Marlinton
Dear Editor,
President Biden continues to ignore Supreme Court rulings as he racks up over $130 billion in debt forgiving student loans in a brazen effort to buy votes. He does not have the constitutional authority to do this, only congress can allocate these funds.
The ultimate irony is that many who chose not to attend college or paid their own tuition are footing the bill.
I worked a full-time job as well as being in ARMY ROTC and the National Guard to pay for my degree. Now I am footing the bill for individuals who majored in subjects that have no income potential, spent their time partying at spring break or making six figure incomes.
No one forced these individuals to take out these loans. They need to pay them off. Tuition has increased since I attended college way above the rate of inflation. Google the salaries of a number of university heads and you find that many are pulling in million-dollar salaries with a number of these institutions sitting on muti-billion-dollar endowments.
The exorbitant cost of higher education is a problem that can be fixed by cutting overhead and out of control salaries. Throwing money, we are borrowing, at the problem just makes the situation worse, feeds inflation and the ever growing national debt.
If we as a nation continue to spend money like drunken sailors, it will not end well. Some projections predict that if this continues the price to pay off these loans will exceed $400 billion and does not fix the core problem.
Joe Kaffl
Hillsboro
Open Letter
to past Green Bank Elementary students;
In March of 1975, JoAnn Fromhart had a spelling bee and she asked me to spell Gigantic.
I said, “gig-an-tic is gigantic.”
After the spelling bee was over, she said she would always remember that.
Yours,
Farrell G. Kelly
