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Charlies On The Radio:

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Charlies On The Radio:

Regular price
$46.22
Unit price
per

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Charlies On The Radio:

Regular price
$46.22
Unit price
per
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 Charlies on the Radio: A Charleston, West Virginia Memoir Jeffrey Simmons is the oldest living member of his family who can still carry Charleston, West Virginia forward. This book is what he did about that. It starts with two people: a grandfather who lived through the Great Depression on Woodward Drive — a home builder wiped out when the banks closed, a family that farmed to survive, three siblings gone before Jeff ever knew their names — and a grandmother who sat by the radio every single night to listen to the Charleston Charlies play baseball, then took him to Watt Powell Park in person, to the Civic Center for the Harlem Globetrotters, to a city she made sure he grew up inside of rather than just near. Between those two people is the actual inheritance this book is trying to pass down. Everything else is the ground they stood on. That ground turns out to be stranger and richer than most local histories let on. A two-thousand-year-old burial mound that survived only because a racetrack got built around it instead of a factory. Booker T. Washington walking out of the same salt furnaces that built this valley, on his way to becoming the most powerful Black man in America. A Klan rally at the Capitol steps and a school board fight that firebombed classrooms fifty-two years after a tent revival drew twenty thousand people downtown. A homeless man everyone called Aqualung who helped solve a real murder. A plane full of marijuana crashing on a hillside above the airport, financed in part by a filmmaker who later won an Oscar. A governor destroyed for proposing a coal tax three days into office, and another who went to federal prison after telling reporters the Lord voted for him. Thirty-three chapters move from the 1700s to the present, tracing one family and one city that keeps rebuilding on the exact same ground it keeps losing — a mall on a glass factory, a brewpub in an old pool hall, a governor's grandchildren still shaping the same statehouse he was carried out of in disgrace. Charlies on the Radio is a plainly told, thoroughly researched, and deeply personal account of a place most histories overlook — written by someone determined to get it down before there's nobody left who remembers.

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