Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

I’m from Clarksburg, and one of the best-known traditions there is the annual Italian Heritage Festival. I loved this festival when I was a kid, though I must say in recent years it seems to have lost some of its luster. Still, it’s a good place to run into old friends I wouldn’t see otherwise, so I try to make it down when I can.

While I was perusing the historical-photos archive at the WVU Libraries website, I came across this photo from the first-ever Italian Heritage Festival. (I don’t want to post it here, because I don’t have the rights for it, so you’ll have to click that link.)

Tell me — does the guy in the middle remind any of you of a famous West Virginian?

Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

My friend and coworker Laurel called me today to let me know she was going to be a little late in getting to the office. She had found a malnourished dog walking down the middle of the road, in traffic, and being the responsible animal lover she is, she picked it up and took it to the vet. It turns out the dog is well-known at the vet’s office, and they’ve been worried about it for years because of its irresponsible owner. Laurel can’t handle a third dog, but if the owner of the poor pooch doesn’t claim it in five days (knock on wood that he doesn’t), she already has a line on an awesome home for it. Well done, Laurel.

Which brings me to my rant: What the hell is wrong with people who don’t take care of their animals? Why even get a dog if you can’t be bothered to take care of its basic needs? Why? (I know the reasons; I just don’t understand them.)

When I was growing up, I knew some people who had two hunting beagles that they kept in a little pin in the back of their yard. (And by little, I mean 3′ X 6′. For two dogs. And the floor was made of two-by-fours with space in between them so some of the poop would drop out. It was a mixed blessing, because their feet would sometimes drop out too.) These were otherwise good people, but the dog thing was crazy.

I’m reminded of this kind of stuff every day, as I have to drive by this pathetic guy on my way home from work:

Fang

How bad would that suck? I did a post about this dog, who we call Fang, a year ago on Reversing the Numbness, and he’s still in this situation 24 hours a day. A lost cause on paws. Our kids often say “poor Fang” as we drive by.

To quote my friend Josh Williams: “Chaining a sentient being to a peg for its life is just not good juju.

tswhatI’msayin.

Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

What looks crappier than an old, empty pool on a really crappy day? Not much. Case in point:

The Stealey Pool

That’s the Stealey Pool, which was my summer haunt all the years of my youth. That place was awesome. Pretty much every kid in Stealey (including us Stealey boys) were members, and it was always one of the nicest places to swim in all of Clarksburg. Not only did spring mean the end of school, but it also meant the beginning of swim season and our daily trips up the biggest hill in the neighborhood to our beloved pool.

I was recently in Clarksburg for my Grandmother Stealey’s funeral, unfortunately, and my brothers and I spent a couple of hours driving around our old stomping grounds. It’s getting pretty run down in places, sadly, and I understand Clarksburg in general is going through some pretty tough times right now. Our trip up to good ol’ Stealey pool was an eye-opener. There it was, lonely, tired looking, its age showing in its peeling paint, its cracking concrete deck, it’s rusty fence. Add to that a gloomy day, a shallow pool of dirty grey water at the bottom of the deep end, and not another soul in sight, and the place just looked terrible. It looked dead, almost.

Even though the town is facing tough times right now, and I doubt the pool’s budget has an extreme makeover in the cards, I’m sure that the coming of spring will turn it into a completely different place. The surrounding hills will be lush with vegetation, the pool will be filled with clean, blue water, and the cracks in the deck will be hidden by slowly tanning feet of every shape and size.

I just love how spring makes dead things come back to life.

Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

I love music, as anyone who ever visits my Friday Music posts will know. (If you’re the same way, consider swinging by RtN and helping make a weekly play list. It’s an open invitation.) While I don’t make it out to see local live music like I used to, I still like thinking about some of the bands I was into in college in the early to mid-’90s. I love when I find traces of this music on the internet.

Here’s a video of the Joint Chiefs from 1995. These guys were hugely popular back in the day and just did a little three-show reunion tour in Morgantown, Charleston, and Huntington (I believe) a few weeks ago.

I was very stoked to find out that Steve Rubin, the guitar player from rock-hip-hoppers Circle 6, has posted all of Circle 6’s recordings online at Eight Track Mind. Go listen! With Steve on guitar and the incomparable Billy Resh on the mic, Circle 6 always put on an awesome show in a similar vein to Rage Against the Machine (but with a little more rap). At one point Steve and I had a big plan to get some guys together and do a show covering both albums of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but we never did get around to it.

Eric Lewis and I did play a lot of Pink Floyd, but it was his gigs with his band Once Hush that I remember the best. He was my roommate and the guys in the band were some of my best college friends, so I probably saw this group a hundred times. I never felt like they got the credit they deserved, because they were all fantastic musicians and they wrote really good pop songs. You can hear some of their stuff on the Once Hush MySpace page. Eric and singer/guitarist Greg Riordan are still making great music.

So many other bands, I can hardly remember them all. Rasta Rafiki. Jolly Gargoyle. The Karl Shuman Band. Lester James and the White Flames. The Recipe. The Groove Tubes. The Tide (featuring Eric Hopper). Todd Burge (who’s still the pride of West Virginia) and his bands 63 Eyes and Triple Shot. Brian Porterfield (also still going strong with his band The Love Me Knots). Sandra Black.

That’s just the beginning of the massive collection of quality bands that graced Morgantown in the early to mid-’90s. Dozens — probably hundreds — of bands have come and gone through this town since, and I missed out on most of them. I think I got to see The Argument once before they broke up, and the same goes for The Emergency, though I think they’re still together. I’ve seen one-man punk band J. Marinelli a couple of times, and Billy Matheney and the Frustrations as well. I’m sure there are excellent bands in this town I don’t even know about.

I’ll end with one more Youtube video of one Morgantown’s most world-renowned bands, Karma to Burn. They’re no longer together, but their legacy of instrumental rock lives on in fans across the globe.

Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

Last weekend was the first meeting of the Morgantown chapter of Grateful Dads, a group of fathers who get together with their kids and go on hikes, have picnics, etc. It was a small group, with only three dads and four kids, but you have to start somewhere, right? We had a really good time and will be meeting again in June. If anyone is interested in hiking with us in June, contact me at bryan@picturewestvirginia.com.

Our first get-together was at the Virgin Hemlock Trail, near Coopers Rock. It was probably as tough a trail as we’d want to tackle with small children. Thanks to some relatively minor human intervention, we were able to make the full loop. I love untouched wilderness as much as the next guy, but it’s cool that some trails have been made to be family-friendly, thanks to some tasteful, well-placed structures.

Annelies and Jude make the climb

No bridge, no cross for the wee ones

Chris and Alec make it across

Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

Morgantown rules. We have a vibrant music scene, a thriving arts community, a diverse population, and collegiate sports teams that are firmly planted on the national radar. Not only are we known by football and basketball fans, but Morgantown is also world-renowned in motocross circles, believe it or not. We have cool neighborhoods, museums, famous glass companies, cutting-edge medical facilities, growing industry that employs thousands of people, a happening downtown, dozens of local shops, bistros, coffee shops and bars, a great rails-to-trails systems, a new Wharf District with an amphitheater that features live music and family movies, mountain-bike trails, rivers to ride, rocks to climb, and so much more. Morgantown has really got it going on.

I’m not anti-growth or anything, but I do have to wonder just how far it’s going to go. Sure, we’ve got all that cool stuff I mentioned, but the strip malls are coming in full force, too (some of them in ridiculous places), and an overabundance of national chains are coming along with them. It’s simply remarkable how much construction is going on in this town. As the shopping centers grow, so do houses, condos and apartments. Hundreds and maybe thousands of new homes and units are underway. If you shoot a shotgun randomly in the air — please don’t — a pellet is bound to come down on something that looks like this:

Morgantown Row Houses

From that vantage point, if you turn 45 degrees to the right, you’ll see this:

Another Morgantown Apartment Building Complex

This is happening everywhere here, and it’s not just limited to condos and apartments. Housing developments are also spreading like wild fire, from starter homes to high-end McMansions. I live in a Cheat Lake neighborhood that was built in the ’80s, and builders keep surprising me by finding new places to put houses up in the development.

How is all of this going to end? What will happen to all of the older places where people used to live? Will we really get enough new residents to fill up all of these new buildings? How can we make sure our roads will handle all of this new traffic? Our arteries are already clogged — are we headed for a heart attack?

I don’t know. But if you’re one the many who are moving to Morgantown, know that you don’t have to move into a cookie-cutter subdivision with a nifty view of Interstate 79. There are other options, like this, the single coolest building in town:

The Good Council Friary

That’s right, the Good Council Friary is for sale, and if you have a cool $2.8 mil burning a hole in your pocket, it can be yours, all yours. How cool is this place? On a rainy day you can almost imagine yourself happening upon it after a long trudge through moors of Scotland. I wanted to get up close to shoot a photo of the hand-carved stone it’s constructed of, but I decided instead to heed the ‘No Trespassing’ signs. Though I have to think they would have forgiven me for trespassing against them.