By Ronda Wertman
tribune correspondent
KEYSER — Good people led to good memories for Don Heare and others who grew up in South Keyser.
“I never thought of myself as an old person, but I guess I am,” said Heare as he shared his experiences with members of the Mineral County Genealogy Society.
Born in 1926, Heare shared that he was among several local residents born that year, including Reno Calemine, Elwood Hollingsworth and Fred Athey.
“Most people took us as brothers,” he said of Athey, whose mother was a sister to Heare’s mother.
Athey was born nine months after Heare and they grew up together in a double house. Heare noted that they were only separated one year in their 80 plus years.
Some of the best memories growing up surrounded Grandma Athey, who lived on Water Street between Ward Avenue and Virginia Street.
Heare said that, before his time, the stage coach stopped there.
Grandma Athey had a kitchen table that Heare described as “larger than any cafeteria table.”
“It always had food on it,” he said, noting that when it wasn’t meal time it was covered up with a sheet.
There was livestock in the back yard and room for horses. He said that Grandpa Athey had a wooden snow plow that he made and cleaned the streets with when it snowed.
“Grandma Athey’s was a place for us to remember,” said Heare, noting that next door was Charlie Weese’s store on Water Street.
Memorable points about the store include gas pumps that you pumped by hand, cars, penny candy, cigarettes a penny each, refrigerators, sewing machines and thread.
There was a stove in the middle of the store and daily checker games were held there.
“There were so many character people back then, good people,” said Heare.
In the late 1920s, Heare recalled that the firemen built a place for the kids to swim. They put a B&O boxcar door in New Creek and backed up the water for swimming. A boardwalk was built there and there was the traditional rope hung from a tree to swing into the water.
Back then a street was more than an address. “We’d have a ballgame in the street four to five times a week,” said Heare, noting that in the summertime the street was where the kids would get their shots as the County Health Nurse made her rounds.
“Most of the South End was just common ordinary people,” he said, noting that nearby Carskadon Mansion was “out of bounds.”
“I always remember it sitting up there like a tower,” he said, explaining that kids were expected to stay in their neighboring area and that the Mansion was a little too far.
“I really appreciate the work on the mansion up there,” he said of the Mineral County Historic Foundations restoration efforts.
Saturday was movie night for many as they took in shows at the Music Hall and Liberty Theatre.
“The movie was where you got your news other than the radio,” said Heare.
In order to have spending money, Heare caught fishing worms and sold them at 10 cents per dozen or three dozen for a quarter.
Sunday meant church and dressing up complete with shorts, tie and stockings up to the knees. Heare and Athey joined the kid’s choir before they could read, and to this day they remain active choir members.
Noting how nice kids look when the go to school today, Heare said in his day there were lots of hand-me-downs. He would walk three-fourths of a mile to school, back home for lunch, back to school and back home again.
“We were really lucky, people don’t know that you are poor until you tell them,” said Heare. “Race problems came along later. We just had a good time all together.”
In the early 40s Heare and many of his classmates would attend school then go to work at the Celanese. They earned 50 cents an hour making parachute material. At that time Celanese had 13,000 employees.
Heare and Athey bought cars together back then, going into partnership on three or four over the years. “We never had an argument over those automobiles,” he said.
Graduating in 1944, Heare went to war. There were over 90 in his graduating class, down from the 120 that began high school. Some students dropped out at age 16 to go to work and some were drafted before they could graduate.
To those who grew up in South Keyser, it was a defining part of their development. South Keyser was a town in itself boasting its own jail on Chestnut Street until the early 1900s when it merged with Keyser.
