MONONGAH – Everyone smiled and waved at Kip Price as he checked in at the desk Tuesday afternoon, but no one paid him any mind after that.
That’s because they all knew where he was going.
Room 14, down the hall and to your left.
“Just calling on Mr. Asa,” he said.
“I have something for him.”
That’s 99-year-old Asa Davison, who just might be the most storied resident of St. Barbara’s Memorial Nursing Home – a convalescent facility that sits on a rise overlooking a once-bustling coal town in northwestern Marion County.
If you’re into college football, you know the locale for the past gridiron exploits of Alabama coach Nick Saban, who quarterbacked Monongah High’s team all the way to the state title in 1968, his senior year.
If you’re a student of West Virginia coal mining history, which doesn’t always have a happy ending, you’ll automatically mark Monongah as the place where as many as 500 people – many of them Italian immigrants and some said to be children, working underage and off the books – died in a horrific mine explosion in 1907.
If you’re Kip Price, the region’s champion of the Greatest Generation, Monongah, and St. Barbara’s, is the place where Davison and his wife, Delores (they’re looking forward to their 73rd anniversary in October) now reside.
There they are: Room 14, down the hall and to your left.
Davison was deemed worthy enough by his country to fight on the front lines in World War II – if there were such a thing as a “front line” in the bloody, stealth and tenacious island-hopping campaigns of the South Pacific.
His same country, though, pronounced him not good enough, due to the color of skin, to walk through the front door once he made it back.
“I can’t imagine what any soldier who was in combat in World War II went through,” Price said.
“Then when you think about the Black soldiers … well, they had another war waiting on them back home.”
Thank you for your service
Price knows that the soldiers of World War II have all but faded away, as the old general once said.
So, he started his own campaign a few years ago, to start honoring them, white and Black, while they could still return the salute.
He and Davison, in particular, would call on elementary schools, churches and historical societies to tell the story.
Price set up poster board displays, with photographs and factoids detailing America’s world wars, and, for the Black soldiers who served, its race wars, too.
There were newspaper features and appearances on local TV.
Sometimes, Price will present the warriors, now in twilight, with a plaque — like the one he gave to Mr. Asa on Tuesday.
“We need to be doing this,” he said. “Look at what they did for us. We owe them.”
Davison will give a small chuckle and shake his head at the overture.
Then, in a soft voice, he’ll say he never felt entitled and that whatever he owned materially, he got by the strength of his hands and back.
‘We had to pull the shades down’
Work, he did, in Fairmont, the county seat of Marion, around 20 miles from Monongah, by way of the twists and turns of U.S. 250.
After Pearl Harbor, Fairmont was jumping on the home front.
The mines were filling coal cars 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And the little factories stacked together like Legos in Fairmont’s famed “Belt Line” district behind 12th Street were pulsing, with patriotism and purpose.
People were bringing home good paychecks.
Unless, they were people of Davison’s pigment.
That’s why he didn’t fight it when he got his letter in 1943 to report to the induction center.
He was technically still in high school when he stood at attention and took the oath.
On the passenger train enroute to Alabama for basic training, the sergeant barked a telling order once they hit the Deep South.
“We had to pull the shades down, so they wouldn’t see the Black people on the train.”
Flat on his back – but still alive
In New Guinea, in the dusk of a day full of relentless shelling, Davison, hunkered down in a 4-by-4 foxhole he dug himself, suddenly – literally – got fighting mad.
He shouldered his rifle, and, using the prevailing racial slur of the time, said, “I’m gonna get a Jap.”
Davison didn’t get far.
An airy, but firm, fist to his chest knocked him flat.
His breathing was hurried and raspy, but that was from the excitement. No gurgling, no blood.
Mr. Asa took a small Bible to war with him. It had his name engraved on metal plate. The Bible was in his front pocket, and he noticed later the plate was scuffed and bent in, where it hadn’t been before.
Was a bullet or shrapnel deflected, divinely?
“I never did figure it out. My chest and neck hurt for days. But I was still here. That’s all I knew.”
All he knew back in West Virginia was that he was a changed man. He knew he was going to let a lot of things bounce off, that maybe he hadn’t before.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take up for himself, though.
Once, he dug in against a white supervisor who tried to fire him without just cause.
He worked his way into a civil service job, before leaving to start his own demolition company.
In a small, wood frame house on Fairmont’s leafy Maple Avenue, he and Delores raised three sons and took in a little girl from next door who was coming up rough.
Stop and smell the roses (really)
The wartime hatred he once felt for the soldiers in the other uniform – the ones who were shooting at him as he was shooting back – faded, in time.
Stateside, Mr. Asa was proud to eventually be in an economic circumstance where he could help people, Black or white, who needed it.
St. Barbara’s, he allowed, isn’t his well-kept house on Maple Avenue.
However, he’s also quick to say, it’s definitely not bad, either.
The staff there loves the sweet old couple in Room 14.
And a certain soldier appreciates the good fight Price is waging to keep memories alive.
“You know God is good,” Davison said.
“I’m truly blessed. I know a lot of good people and Kip’s right up there on top. I like what he’s doing. Why would you give roses to somebody who isn’t around to smell ‘em anymore?”
