My backwoods childhood in the early 1940s was riddled with love of family, community, curiosity and quiet vs. big booms and doomsday warnings, spaced with weekly messages by fire and brimstone preachers about hell and end times, so much so that I would awaken late night and stare over the hills, wondering if this would be the night. Fortunately, the Rev. Glendon McKee showed up with his blessed messages about the love of Jesus Christ.

Calhoun County had 1,700 men and women march off to World War II, near the highest numbers per capita in USA, with the farm chores and raising children left to women.

My earliest four-year-old (1943) recollections from World War II was the departing of Uncle George McCoy from Grantsville to fight in the fray, a solemn and rainy day to watch him board the Greyhound Bus headed toward the battlefields of Europe, tearful eyes following his departure.

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Also memories of sitting on the porch of the John Ira McCoy homestead in Hur and listening to the battery radio voices of H. V. Kalterbourn and Edward R. Murrow giving nightly reports with tears flowing down the face of his new bride, Eleanor.

Then visiting my uncle Ray Roach and his wife Thelma McCoy in Parkersburg, during the war, our evening peace being disrupted by Civil Defense air raid sirens to turn off the lights and hunker in basement until the all clear.

Perhaps my clearest memory was the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Listening to the radio with my mom of Hur Hill, she always told a story about me rushing outside if I could see the bomb cloud.

After starting school in Grantsville, the nation moved on to the Cold War, continued threats of nuclear annihilation with children being trained to "duck and cover" under their desks and Civilian Defense placements of barrels of food in county buildings, just in case.

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