MORGANTOWN — Look back over the past 10 years. Twenty or 30, even, if you’ve lived here a while.
If you attended just one public meeting related to Morgantown or Monongalia County during that span, there’s a good chance you saw him there.
Oftentimes, he’d be first at the podium when the public comment portion of the proceedings were announced.
And, in a distinct, measured baritone — it somehow managed to sound as old as the very Appalachian mountains — Paul E. Nesselroad would venture an opinion.
Or, a rebuke or reprimand.
It was easy: As a farmer, he worked the land. As an academic and citizen-advocate, he knew the lay of it, too.
Nesselroad’s voice was silenced last week when he died in Morgantown at the age of 94. A memorial service will be noon Friday at Suncrest United Methodist Church.
Ed Hawkins, the Monongalia County commissioner, who, like Nesselroad, came up in a farm family, says he expects a lot of people will show up.
Which, he said, is what Nesselroad spent his professional life doing for the people of Monongalia County.
“Paul Nesselroad was a gentleman, and he showed up,” Hawkins said Tuesday.
“There no truer statement of public service than that,” Hawkins continued. “Paul showed up.”
Making hay — for the first day of school
Nesselroad and Hawkins both go back to 4-H with their youth, and they stayed with the mission.
If it had to do with land use, Nesselroad was at the meeting.
If it had to do with zoning issues, Nesselroad was at the meeting.
If it had to do with the advancement of young people, Nesselroad was at the meeting — even it was in the middle of a hayfield.
That was right after World War II, when Nesselroad, with his U.S. Army uniform freshly creased and back on the hanger, was helping out on the family farm in Jackson County with his father.
Nesselroad recounted the events of the above when he sat down with Norman Julian, a now-retired columnist with The Dominion Post, in 1996.
When a gas explosion tore through nearby Gilmer High School — it was in the summer and no one was in the building at the time of the blast — the local school board wanted to shut the whole thing down altogether.
Two GHS advocates scrambled. Find us an agriculture teacher, the school board had said, and we’ll keep the school open. It was August and close to the start of school year.
It was also hay season.
They knew where a certain father and son would be.
They also knew Nesselroad had been studying agriculture education at WVU when he enlisted in the military and was planning on resuming his studies.
When they asked, Nesselroad didn’t even blink. Schools are the backbone of the community, he said. Especially small, farming communities in Jackson County. So, he said yes.
What happened next?
“We went back to baling,” he told the columnist. Nothing to it.
Reaping the harvest
Other teaching positions in high school and college classrooms followed. Nesselroad is credited with reviving 4-H and agricultural education programs across West Virginia.
He was a longtime professor at WVU, retiring as chairman of the university’s Department of Agricultural Economics.
That was where he planted the first seeds for the usage of computers in agricultural economics classrooms.
On top of that, there were all those causes, commitments and public meetings.
“Paul was a man of his word,” Hawkins said.
Last July 3, Nesselroad and his wife, Joanna Strosnider Nesselroad, celebrated 70 years of marriage. She survives, along with their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Public service, he told Julian in that column in The Dominion Post, was as easy as loaning your rototiller, so your neighbor could put a garden in his backyard, too.
“We need people who actively do for others, who make things better than they were when you started out yourself,” he said.
