Patrick begins this 2011 recording with thoughts of how to tell his life story and finishes with the way his mom encountered her husband’s mistress. A maroon 1946 Ford is also mentioned.

Patrick: I start telling what… let’s see…. If grandchildren were interested… I’d start telling from the first thing I can remember, and then if there are questions along the way, answer them. Otherwise I’m sort of like…. Well, I could do that. I keep thinking I was going to write it down. I start it off, then I get… mmmmmm….

JP: It’s easy to…. And the same is true about conversation. You wander unto uncharted territory sometimes but…

Patrick: You know I’ve thought of several ways of…. One, of all the houses I’ve ever lived in. That’s one way to go. All the neighbors I can remember, that’s another way to go. All the cars I have owned, that’s another way to do it. Yea.

JP: I’ve always measured time by who I was with at the time.

Patrick: Yeah?

JP: And what rallies I have competed in, or what races I went to, but that only goes back to 1988.

Patrick: Yep! Red Star, West Virginia is where my mother and father were living when I was born. It’s a town about the size of my house.

JP: Room for four!

Patrick: Mom sent me an article in a newspaper two years before she died. It’s about that house, which is now considered a haunted house, on the side of a hill, with a red star. It’s very near where my grandfather was… ah….. He worked for the railroad. In his job he had a long ball peen hammer. You walk up on one side of the train and tap every wheel. If it goes “clunk” it’s a dead wheel. If it’s “ping” you keep going.

Patrick: The name of that little town always slips me, but we went there, Stephanie and I went there, right there on the river. There was a church in that little town that my grandfather set up. When I went there years ago there was still a mural, a painted mural, that my father had done of the town when he was a young man. [Years later] We tried to get in when Jack and Sue and I went there, and that mural is not there anymore. It was a painted and drawn on paper, I think. Might not have lasted.

Patrick: I remember when I was there, I guess it was in the sixties, Where the hell was I? Red Star… my father had walk ten miles to work, carrying a tool kit. He said it was ten miles but I looked it up the other day. It doesn’t look like ten miles. I think it’s more like three!

JP: Maybe it felt like ten.

Patrick: Especially in the middle of the winter. He was making forms for the… you know the cement highways during the WPA works projects.

Patrick: So, I was born in the Oak Hill Hospital actually, although they lived in Red Star.

JP: Were Jack and Sue also born in that same hospital?

Patrick: Don’t know…. probably. Dr. Puckett.

JP: And the family left West Virginia when you were sixteen to follow his, his affair?

Patrick: Well, everybody was leaving… for work, because after the war the coal mines were losing… and the building industry was dying.

Patrick: Building… for a company, the Oak Hill Lumber Company, he was the foreman. And no more work. It still got the same population right now as it was when we left, about 400.

Patrick: So, we left… First one of his brothers went down as a plumber to Winter Park, Florida. And then another brother went down, he was an electrician. And then my father went down…

JP: Carpenter

Patrick: As a carpenter. They all got into that industry. And Grandfather had been going for years to Kissimmee, because he had a free pass from the railroad.

JP: I thought that you had told me or maybe it was Little Grandmother who told me that, that he had, you know, he had a woman on the side….

Patrick: He took a woman down with him before he took us down.

JP: Okay.

Patrick: But on the lake, she lived on the Lake Viola. I went there with mom who went in the house and slapped her face and got out. She came running off that porch, crying, and zoomed off in a ’46 Ford, maroon.

JP: Oh wow!

Patrick: I never saw the woman, but mom said “No, not even pretty. She looked ugly.” Of course, that’s not what people go by.

JP: That’s right.

Patrick: It’s what’s inside and what happens between you.

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Recorded 16 Nov 2011 on Mallorca in Spain. 111116-163816-growing-up-in-wva.mp3 transcribed by Chantal.