Wess Harris was working his table at the Mountainlair on Sunday afternoon when somebody walked up and shook his hand before wrapping him a bear hug.
“So, how have you been, man?” Harris asked.
“Hey, I’m all right for the most part,” came the reply. “I’m still not talking to them, though.”
The man nodded in the direction of the various family members who had accompanied him to the ‘Lair.
And, while they looked on with a collective, bemused grin, Harris and his “ ‘Cross the Pond” pal shared a hearty laugh.
A war and a week
Harris is an author and labor historian who has written extensively about West Virginia’s coal mining wars of the 1920s.
That’s when miners literally bled and literally died for the right to organize a union.
He was on campus this weekend to share some of that scholarship for Mountaineer Week, WVU’s annual celebration of all things Appalachian.
This is the 72nd edition of the week, which was founded in 1947 by a law student named Arch Moore, who would go on to serve three contentious terms as West Virginia governor.
Just two years before, Moore lay critically wounded in a German field, shot and left for dead in the waning days of World War II.
Young men who were just out of uniform, and old before their time, joined Moore on the Morgantown campus in pursuit of a degree on the G.I. Bill.
Moore want to shake the war clouds, so he conceived of a sunny celebration of his native Mountain State and the Appalachian region.
An observance was planned. And it caught on.
Mountaineer Week 2019 continues through Saturday, with all the food, artisans and musicians that make it famous.
The famous (or, infamous) PRT Cram, meanwhile, highlights today’s events. It will be from 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. in front of the Mountainlair.
Visit https://mountaineerweek.wvu.edu/ for the complete schedule of activities.
‘Just talk’
Harris, meanwhile, said he was surprised and moved by the impromptu reunion with his former student who still wasn’t talking.
None of them were then.
Talking, that is.
That’s why he brought the tape recorder to class.
It was 1977, and Harris was a newly minted educator.
He was teaching a public-speaking class at the old West Virginia Career College in Morgantown, and his students were all guys who had fought in Vietnam.
They had Charlie and the Grim Reaper breathing down their necks in-country, but in Harris’ class they were just like everyone else.
They were terrified at the prospect of standing up in front of a packed room and “making a speech.”
Harris noticed they were at their most engaged — serious, funny and achingly frank — when they were chatting among themselves in the back row.
So, he hit on the idea of the tape recorder.
Just talk, he said.
Pass the microphone around, he said.
Shyness was vanquished after the first tale of a kid from the boonies in the war zone.
The result was an oral history that amazed Harris. Not all of the tales were grim.
Some of them were spit-your-beer funny, in that “you had to be there,” way.
Harris paid someone to transcribe the tapes and everybody pitched in for the paper and staples.
“ ‘Cross the Pond: Dedicated to Our Fellow Appalachians Who Failed to Return to the Mountains,” was now a document.
Blowing smoke at the faculty party
It was done right before Mountaineer Week 1977, so Harris pitched the book to the event’s organizers.
When “ ‘Cross the Pond” caught the eye of a group of English professors, one of them hosted a party for the book and its contributors.
Like the grunts they once were, the story-tellers didn’t mind a party.
But stow the accolades, they said. They didn’t even use their names in the book.
Fine with Harris, who liked the idea of the Everyman-warrior account.
After all, Haris said: As a cultural rule, West Virginians do all the toiling in obscurity anyway — while everyone else benefits.
The professors at the party didn’t know what the chroniclers had planned, though.
One of the profs had fired up a charcoal grill, and the hamburgers and hot dogs had to make room for the cassette tapes.
It got everyone’s attention when the oral histories ignited.
They didn’t just want to be faceless in the book. They didn’t want their very voices traced back to anything, either.
And the way you accomplished that, in those ancient, pre-Twitter days, was by torching the tapes.
Which is why he and his former student, 42 years removed from that Mountaineer Week, couldn’t help but laugh Sunday.
Here’s how Harris recounted it:
“His family said, ‘Dad still won’t tell us which story is his.’ I said, ‘I know.’”
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