Billy Coffindaffer, the farmer, war veteran, college professor, college administrator, community activist and family man who always came back to West Virginia, died last week in his adopted hometown of Morgantown.
He was 96 years old, and, amazingly, probably spent a good 40 or better of those years working for the benefit of both the University City and the Mountain State, his colleague, Patty Showers Ryan, said.
“Billy was into everything and he did everything,” said Ryan, who is the executive director of Your Community Foundation.
The foundation is the altruistic endeavor that Coffindaffer was instrumental in forming at a time in his life when most of his peers of the same age were settling into that comfortable recliner in front of the TV.
“He could visualize something,” Ryan said, “then go out and get it done.”
“Settling in,” meanwhile, was what his colleagues and friends did, whenever he’d warm to a civic subject.
They had the thought they might want to get comfortable, because they definitely knew they were going to be there a while.
Not that he prattled on, mind you.
It’s just that one idea and one concept … naturally begat four more ideas and four more concepts.
And four more after that, until a late afternoon sun began glancing in — and your cellphone began chirping with calls from people from work or home, wondering where the heck you’ve been all this time.
For Coffindaffer, it added up to a list of contributions that included his lead roles and teamwork support on the forming of the Wharf District in Morgantown, the docks and riverfront parks at Star City and even the establishment of the WVU-Parkersburg campus in Wood County.
And, much more.
“All you have to do is look out the window,” Ryan said.
Coffindaffer’s window to the world, as with other young men of his generation, opened with World War II.
He was born in 1927 in Kinchloe, an unincorporated community in Harrison County.
Through eighth grade, he did his lessons in a one-room schoolhouse before moving on to Unidis High School in West Milford — where that spirit of involvement percolated up pretty quickly.
He was senior class president, quarterback of the football team and point guard on the basketball team. World War II was grinding and he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1945 while still in his senior year.
For service and country
Coffindaffer was initially stationed in China and was steaming to Japan for an invasion when the bombs dropped on Hirsoshima and Nagasaki.
The ink was barely dry on his discharge papers when he joined the U.S. Naval Reserves.
When the Korean War broke out he again found himself in uniform.
Coffindaffer was a young man on an academic mission after World War II.
The G.I. Bill brought him to Morgantown and WVU, where he earned a degree in agriculture education in 1950.
It brought him back to the state’s flagship university after Korea for graduate school.
He was awarded a master’s in agronomy in 1955, a degree that extended its roots to the University of Wisconsin, where, with his Ph.D. in higher education administration from there in 1961, he became Dr. Coffindaffer.
Along the way there was marriage to Norma and the arrival of Ernie and Donna, and an opportunity to come back home, in the way of lots of ex-pat West Virginians.
His doctorate paved the way to an administrative post at a community college in Parkersburg that, with his professional and academic nudging, would later become a branch campus of the state’s flagship university.
Coffindaffer also did a stint as president of the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and also had the plate-spinning distinction of serving as president of Concord College and Bluefield State College — at the same time.
He worked in state government and with 4-H and the Extension Service at WVU and across West Virginia.
“Countless West Virginia University students have benefitted from the opportunities Bill Coffindaffer provided for hands-on learning through endowed internships and more,” said Jorge Atiles, WVU dean of Extension and Engagement and director of the university’s Extension service.
“He understood the value of community, and he worked throughout his life to strengthen the bonds between local communities and WVU Extension that we’re building on today.”
When Coffindaffer retired in 1989 from the University of Maryland as an assistant dean of agriculture, he and Norma again became West Virginia residents and Morgantown residents — with no more packed boxes or moving vans in the picture.
Just in time, as Ron Justice chuckled Tuesday, for Vision 2000.
What retirement?
Justice, who made his career as a dean at WVU, was just getting into public life in the 1990s when the above plan was gridded out.
Vision 2000’s talking points were this: to enhance infrastructure while doing away with urban blight.
That included major makeovers of South University Avenue, which later became Don Knotts Boulevard — and that strip of dilapidated warehouses on the banks of the Monongahela River that eventually gave rise to the Wharf District.
“I’m getting ready to turn 62,” Justice said.
“Billy was about that age when we started working on Vision 2000.”
Justice, who would go on to serve as mayor, said he liked that Coffindaffer could be enthused without being overbearing.
He liked that his friend never let ego intrude on the greater good.
“Billy had this gentle way with people,” Justice said. “It didn’t have to be ‘his’ idea. He just wanted something that worked.”
Work, it did, the former mayor said.
“When you look at the Wharf and the rail-trails and everything with riverfront development, that’s Billy.”
Another Billy concurs.
“He knew that he might not live to see some of these things come to fruition,” said Billy Atkins, a Morgantown attorney and Your Community Foundation board member, “but that’s why it’s called ‘vision.’”
Star City Mayor Sharon Doyle, who was then new to city hall doings, saw that 15 years ago when Coffindaffer consulted on what would become her town’s landmark riverfront park and marina.
“He always had everything mapped out whenever he’d present to council,” she said. “He was always thinking three years or five years along.”
‘Thanks, Billy’
The project now is the official saying goodbye to Billy.
Friends may call from 3-7 p.m. Thursday at Suncrest United Methodist Church on Van Voorhis Road, where services will begin at 11:30 a.m. Friday.
“Billy was such a friend and mentor to me,” Justice said. “We lost a good one.”
In many ways, Ryan said, Coffindaffer got to preside over one final meeting of Your Community Foundation.
That was when the current board of directors met Monday for a regularly scheduled session.
The talk, the executive director said, naturally turned to that tireless guy who could get people jumping and excited about an idea — without ever raising his voice.
Coffindaffer’s philosophy was just as easy as it wasn’t — in terms of the homework and grunt work involved.
“If you don’t think bigger than what you’ve got today,” he was fond of saying, “you’re never going to get anywhere.”
Board members boiled that down even more Monday, Ryan said.
“It was a chance for everyone to sit around that table and say, ‘Thanks, Billy.’”
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