EDUCATOR PEPPER RECALLS HUMBLE BEGINNINGS - Annual Creston Community Homecoming

(08/16/2005)

By Bob Weaver The Creston community has spent several years fund raising and restoring their vintage school, now having annual homecomings Old timers in the Creston area will remember Eddie Pepper (pictured left) who attended the now restored Creston school during grades five through seven, leaving the area in 1943 to live in Maryland and then joining the US Navy during WWII. Sunday was homecoming day at the school, attended by a number of former students. "The military helped me get an education," Pepper said, having been at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. From these humble beginnings, Roy Edwin Pepper who now lives in Frostburg MD, has made his mark in the world as an educator. He has been a teacher in several places, an instructor in every grade from 7th to WVU and George Washington University graduate schools. "While teaching in the DC area, I got acquainted with astronauts Col. John Glenn and Alan Sheppard, who were younger men at the time with children, they were active in PTA," he said. "I remember my teacher at Creston, Joe Collins," said Pepper, who lived a few houses up the Fork from the school which was built in the 1920s. Pepper then began to rattle off the naming of all 55 counties in West Virginia. "How many people would learn that now?" he asked. Trying out their old school desks (front, left to right) Jimmie Tucker, Nellie Wix Feick (rear, left to right) Wanda Grim Juant, Dora Jean Tucker Webb Wirt County Commissioner Robert Lowe and long-time newspaper columnist, oil and gas man and retired state road supervisor Alvin Engelke Rodney Lynch (pictured left), whose well-known dad Seward Lynch, passed away not long ago, has returned to his community to help with the school project and other community affairs.

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