Duncan Slade, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Merging Home, Heart And Opportunity In The Mountains

Editor’s note: This story is the last in our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.

Over this summer, Abie Reed will graduate culinary school, do a stint as a bread and pastry chef at a diner, plan a wedding, get married, and as if all that isn’t enough, build a house with her fiance — a tiny house.

They’re planning to move into the tiny home at the end of the summer, and settle in while she takes a gap year to find mentors in the food industry.

“It gives us an opportunity to create a home and have our first house together and everything,” she said. “But if I can’t necessarily find anything that I genuinely would like to be a part of, nothing would stop us from picking up and leaving.”

Her fiance works in Hurricane, West Virginia and has family in the area. They’re building the tiny home there and Reed said they will stay in West Virginia for at least the next five years.

“But after that, honestly, wherever life takes us, we’re really open to going anywhere,” Reed said. “Especially because my sister is in England right now with her husband and then my parents live in South America. And so the world is open to wherever we want to go. We just have to make that decision.”

The food industry is just one of many industries that might require young West Virginians to move away. And whether youth want to become engineers, software developers, stockbrokers, actors, musicians, or chefs — they look around at the state and see limited opportunities to advance that career, whatever it may be.

This was the situation West Virginia native James Rogers found himself in over a decade ago.

“When I first started my career, I wanted to be a chef,” He said. “And the best way to learn how to be a chef is to travel.”

Rogers spent 14 years working in restaurants, mainly in Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

“I didn’t expect to move back,” he said. “And I’m not saying that I would never have moved back, nor would I have never chosen to move back. I didn’t expect to because I’ve always liked high intensity, high paced jobs.”

After an injury in 2015, he did return. Last spring, he graduated from Pierpont Community and Technical College with a business management degree and planned to go back into the restaurant world.

That was right before the pandemic.

“The service industry really took a big hit,” he said.

Rogers reevaluated and is now going to school for accounting. He said he’d like to remain in West Virginia but will go wherever he can find a job.

“I’ve reached a point in my lifetime, where I would prefer not moving a whole lot,” he said. “I’ve moved 10 times since I graduated high school.”

After spending much of the last two decades living in busy metropolitan cities, he said West Virginia is convenient.

“I believe in West Virginia, we are provided with quick access, because we have a load of traffic on the roads,” he said. “We have a less dense population. So it’s less stressful to go satisfy all your day-off routines…Whereas in a city it may take the entire day.”

He’s also got a large family in the state and the cost of living is pretty low.

Sam Clagg just graduated from the culinary arts program at Pierpont. He’s got a job lined up at a restaurant in Charleston, near where he grew up in Putnam County.

He said he’s always been a family man and would never want to move far away from them.

“My family dynamic is where we always communicate, we never stop talking to each other,” Clagg said. “I think that if I leave that I’ll be leaving a part of myself.”

He plans to stay in the state, not just because his family is here or because he thinks it’s a good place to be a chef but also because he sees potential.

“You see big cities and stuff where they have these restaurants here dedicated for 50 years and stuff, but you don’t see that here,” he said. “You see closed down restaurants, you don’t see a community. They’re trying to get together, but they just need some glue. And I feel like I’m that glue.”

Like many young chefs, he hopes to open up his own restaurant someday.

Clagg tells people who are leaving West Virginia to give it time and wait for the right job. He said some jobs do require leaving but he believes one can build a comfortable life in the state.

“I don’t think I’m ready to live in a big city like Miami, Florida, or New York City, or California,” He said. “I don’t think I was ever born to go there. I think if I stay in West Virginia, I will be working towards my strengths.”

The dozen or so young West Virginians we spoke with for our “Plugging the Brain Drain” series have a lot in common.

They recognize the state has issues, and want to see it get better. They have family here but don’t feel like they’re necessarily bound to stay. They think it would be great to find a good-paying job in West Virginia. But if there’s a job offer in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles they’re probably going to take it.

Their future plans aren’t set in stone, much like Reed and her fiance’s tiny home.

“We can literally just attach it to a truck,” she said. “And leave at any given moment.”

A tiny home that Abie Reed and her fiance are modeling their own after.

Lack Of LGBTQ Protections Has Some Young West Virginians Ready To Leave

Casey Johnson lives in Pittsburgh’s North Shore, a couple of blocks from one of the most colorful buildings in the nation, Randyland, a utopian-esque public art installation with walls, chairs, and trinkets in every possible shade and hue.

When apartment shopping in the Steel City, Johnson, who is pansexual, gender non-binary and uses non-gendered pronouns, searched to find a neighborhood that was the “most accepting.” North Shore, they said, fits the bill.

But if Johnson were ever to move back home to West Virginia, where they grew up, they know that acceptance isn’t certain and often a matter of where someone chooses to live.

Johnson was raised inside the city limits of Martinsburg, one of just over a dozen cities in the state to protect LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in housing and employment.

Their mother now lives outside city limits in Berkeley County, where no protections exist.

“If I were to move in next door to my mother, I can be evicted from an apartment because I’m queer,” said Johnson. “I could be fired from a job because I’m queer. And I’m not protected at the state level.”

Johnson wants to see lawmakers create statewide protections for LGBTQ West Virginians. A bill to do so has been introduced in the statehouse for the last two decades.

The most recent proposal — known as the Fairness Act — died in committee this year without a single vote. At the same time, state Republican lawmakers joined a half dozen other states and passed a transgender athletes ban.

“It hurts to come from a place where we preach how much we love people and how much we care about people, and then we don’t see that in practice,” Johnson said.

This story is part of our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.

After graduating from West Virginia University last year, Johnson moved to Pittsburgh for an entry-level software development job and said they don’t see themselves moving back home with the current lack of protections.

“The thought of living somewhere that I could raise kids who one day would turn out to be queer, and the place wouldn’t accept them, you know, they wouldn’t be able to get health care, they will be turned away from even like schools and things like that, that alone is enough reason to move away from a place for me,” Johnson said.

Advocates started this year’s legislative session with the hope that this would be the year the Fairness Act passed.

During a 2020 gubernatorial debate, Republican Gov. Jim Justice said he supported the legislation. That moment was heralded in October by former Republican Senate President Mitch Carmichael as “a significant turning point in the political landscape of West Virginia as it relates to the LBGT community.”

When the state legislature convened in February, there was a noticeable lack of decisive change on the issue.

The Fairness Act didn’t make it onto the legislative calendar in the Republican-controlled statehouse.

However, the GOP lawmakers joined over 20 other states in considering a ban on transgender girls competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

This proposal passed and became law.

“I’m going to sign it proudly because I really believe that that is the right thing to do,” Justice said just days before signing the ban into law.

This dichotomy of priorities rankled Democrats in the statehouse and sparked protests and outrage among some young West Virginians, a group more progressively-minded on social issues.

“I’m sure to have transgender students,” said David Laub, a WVU graduate student who is studying to be an English teacher. “And it’s really frustrating to me, that I would have to sit by and just watch them not be able to do the things that they care about potentially in school — one of them being sports.”

He’s also a former high school athlete and said he doesn’t see the need to legislate whether or not transgender girls can play sports.

Laub acknowledged that he and his friends are all pretty liberal and among the minority in West Virginia, a state with Republican supermajorities in both the chambers of the legislature.

Political disagreements are a part of life but Laub said some of the legislation proposed this past year by Republican lawmakers went beyond politics.

“When it comes to matters of not being able to discuss systemic racism, and not being able to discuss sexism in the classroom, because they’re divisive concepts, or not being allowed to strike to get a fair wage, or transgender students in my classes not being able to just play sports,” said Laub. “That’s an eye-opener that is so far removed from my personal everyday reality.”

He went to WVU on a full-ride scholarship and said he owes everything in his professional life to the school and by extension the people of West Virginia.

Still, when he thinks about where he wants to live, it comes back to acceptance. David has close friends who are LGBTQ.

“I don’t want to put them in a situation where they feel kind of threatened just for existing or unable to exist in an authentic way without fear of like employment discrimination or other kinds of discrimination,” Laub said.

Almost every Republican — and a few Democrats — in the statehouse voted for the transgender sports ban. However, support is not unanimous.

“I think that anytime lawmakers do something that is a hindrance for young people or hindrance for minorities, it really does turn people away,” said Del. Joshua Higginbotham, R-Putnam, the lead sponsor of the Fairness Act this year and the only Republican delegate to vote against the transgender sports ban.

Joshua Higginbotham, R-Putnam, speaks in the statehouse earlier this year.

In the state Senate, several GOP members voted against the measure. Those who spoke said they agreed with the idea but feared the NCAA’s threat to move revenue-producing regional and national championships to other states without transgender sports bans.

“I don’t think that my colleagues were motivated out of bigotry,” said Higginbotham. “I don’t think they were motivated out of hatred. I think it was a lack of understanding. Most people, especially in the Republican Party, have not met an LGBT person. And I find that to be very disappointing.”

A 2017 national study from The Williams Institute found that West Virginia has the highest percentage of transgender teens with 1.04 percent. The national average is .73 percent.

Higginbotham was first elected to the statehouse in 2016 at the age of 19 and is now just 24. He said many of the people he went to high school with are in college, in jail, or have left the state.

“When I talk to a lot of the people who have left, they remind me that it’s the culture,” Higginbotham said.

He said state lawmakers should do “everything we can” to deregulate and pass tax reforms that will attract businesses.

”But ultimately, if we don’t change the image of our state, if we don’t change the stereotypes…people aren’t going to want to move here,” Higginbotham said. “And more young people will try to leave.”

When Generation Z and millennials become the largest voting bloc, Higginbotham said he expects a cultural shift in West Virginia and the nation.

A study last year from the Center for American Progress found that the 2024 election will likely be the first where these two younger generations outnumber the Baby Boomers.

He points to a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released earlier this year that found — for the first time — half of Republicans support gay marriage.

“Ten years ago, that would have been an impossibility,” Higginbotham said. “And I think that as we replace some of the Baby Boomers, some of the greatest generation, we’re gonna see these cultural changes.”

Morgantown Creates Civilian Police Review Board

Morgantown City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to create a civilian police review board, the culmination of a year-long process sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

In the wake of Floyd’s murder and nationwide protests, Morgantown city officials and community members started to talk about how their city could benefit from a police board with civilian members. The city formed a special committee and it began meeting weekly to hash out the proposal’s details.

“I cannot thank the folks who showed up to the committee enough,” said Deputy Mayor Rachel Fetty during Tuesday’s meeting. “We received the contributions and the careful recommendations and thoughts of really every segment of the population that I can think of, from folks within the department, folks who are married to members of the Morgantown police department, folks who have experienced being policed as persons of color or as members of LGBTQ+ groups, or as human beings.”

The board is the second of its kind in the state, but the first to be created by a city. Bluefield has a similar police review board, formed in the wake of a consent decree by the Department of Justice.

The Morgantown ordinance approved by the council looks markedly different from earlier plans that would’ve given the power to investigate citizen complaints of police misconduct.

The power to investigate was removed from the plan following threats of legal action from West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and the Mon-Preston Fraternal Order of Police (FOP).

Wheeling-based attorney Teresa Toriseva, who represents the FOP, told the Dominion Post Tuesday that she will file a lawsuit challenging the legality of the board. Under the ordinance, the police chief will carry out any police conduct investigations and then send the findings and disciplinary actions to the review board.

The review board will be able to accept the police chief’s actions or suggest their own recommendation, a level of oversight Toriseva says is in violation of state code. The FOP’s view on the board’s legality is not universally held.

“What is at issue here is the question of who runs the Morgantown police department, the chief or the FOP and Ms. Toriseva,” said Bob Cohen, a retired attorney and member of the Morgantown/Kingwood branch of the NAACP. “Here, Chief Powell has accepted the process outlined in the ordinance but the FOP says he cannot do so. Under a strange interpretation of West Virginia statutes, the FOP is attempting to dictate the chief’s process and to tie his hands. Council should not bend to their threat.”

Cohen was one of seven speakers during the public comment portion of Tuesday’s council meeting. Community members and representatives from the Morgantown Human Rights Commission, ACLU of WV, and Morgantown/Kingwood NAACP all spoke in favor of the bill.

“Whenever we help marginalized communities, we help everybody,” said Jerry Carr, president of the Morgantown/Kingwood branch of the NAACP. “So, I just want to make sure that people understand that no one got in this business thinking that it was just about helping that one group. This is something that’s ubiquitous, it can impact every facet of what’s going on, including the police department.”

Under the ordinance, civilians can file complaints against police officers with the board. The board will pass them onto the Morgantown police chief for investigation.

Fetty said this is a significant change from the previous system that required community members to go to the police department and file a complaint directly.

“At the end of the day, the most critical piece is that we will, as a community be contributing to this discussion about how policing will work in our community and how we’d like to see it unfold and how we can contribute and cooperate with the Morgantown police department to ensure that policing happens in a safe and careful way that is respectful of everyone’s constitutional rights, and respectful also of the rights that our officers have as employees of the city,” said Fetty.

'There's No Room To Grow': Nursing Student Talks Leaving W.Va.

There are fewer West Virginians than there were a decade ago.

Since 2010, West Virginia’s population has decreased by 3.2% or almost 60,000 people, according to 2020 census data released last month.

To put that in context, it’s the same as if a giant, town-sized pothole swallowed up both Morgantown and Parkersburg.

West Virginia is also one of the oldest states in the nation, has one of the lowest birth rates and the highest death rate.

There’s a growing cohort of college-bound West Virginians who get a degree and get out. They’re moving away to find a future somewhere else while leaving family and friends behind.

But, there are also people staying who see West Virginia as a place to settle down and start a family.

The decision is not easy, but it is one that confronts many soon-to-be and recent graduates in the state.

This article is the first in our series “Plugging the Brain Drain” with stories of how young West Virginians are deciding whether or not to leave the state.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting spoke with NaBryia Palmer, a nursing student in Cabell County and Charleston native.

‘There’s No Room To Grow’: Nursing Student Talks Leaving W.Va.

NaBryia Palmer My take on it is, I love my state, I love my mountain mama, I really do. It’s where all my family is, everyone I know is here. But, I just honestly feel there’s no room to grow. I want to be able to see more and do more. And I feel West Virginia just doesn’t have anything to offer in that sense. I have just the rest of this semester, and then one more year in school left. And I don’t know, I don’t think I’m gonna stay here. I really want to move.

WVPB: Once you have your degree and you’ll have graduated, how are you thinking through that whole decision of where do I move?

Palmer: As soon as it gets close to graduation, I’m going to look at places hiring in potential states that I want to move to, see what they have to offer, look at pay, living conditions, and stuff like that. I like to travel alone sometimes. And so when I go out of state, and I visit different areas, I’m just like, “Oh, this would be nice. Oh, here in West Virginia, we don’t have that.” We don’t have a lot in West Virginia. And it’s always really good to go to states and see what they have to offer.

WVPB: What types of things have you seen traveling that you go, “oh, I’ve never seen this back home.”

Palmer: I’m a big food person. So, when it comes to restaurants and stuff, I get really excited when there’s a new restaurant I’ve never seen, I’ve never tried because there’s not one near my area. And so that gets pretty exciting. I also like to do a lot of shopping. So I’m really impatient, too. With living in West Virginia, we don’t have a lot of stores and as we speak, a lot of stores and stuff in the mall are closing. So we have less and less options. I’m constantly having to shop online and wait for it to come in. When, in other areas and other states, they have a broad variety of shopping malls and stores. And I just feel we’re just missing out on a lot of things.

WVPB: How do you balance, both you’re thinking about leaving and all your family is here in the state?

Palmer: Well, I’ve always been a pretty independent person. And my family knows that. So, of course, I love being around my family, I love seeing them. But they know that I do also like to be able to do things on my own. Because you know, I’m an adult, I like to be able to have my own. So with that, say I do move. I plan to always come back for holidays. I’m really big on holidays and spending time with family. And then to certain vacations, just be able to come back and see them whenever I really just want to.

WVPB: Does finding job opportunities play into that decision at all?

Palmer: Kind of yes and no. Since nurses are in demand, I feel like it won’t really be that hard, especially with COVID. I don’t think it’d be extremely difficult to find a nursing job that I would like.

WVPB: What do you think you’ll be thinking about when you get to that moment where you’re deciding whether or not to go someplace else or to look for a job in West Virginia?

Palmer: I don’t know. I’m real set on moving – like I’m real set on moving. I have, just I’ve honestly been looking at places even though I still have a while to graduate. I’ve been looking at places out of state and seeing affordability and neighborhoods and stuff like that.

WVPB: How detailed has it gotten, looking at neighborhoods?

Palmer: I’ve actually gotten to the process of looking at places that are for rent and where they’re located, how close they are to certain hospitals, commute, grocery stores, all that. I’ve gotten really into it, I’m real set on moving. I haven’t done that for a lot of states. I’ve only mostly done that for Texas. And I say that and I think it’s so funny because I’ve only been to Texas once, but I just enjoyed it so much.

WVPB: Does your family care or not want you to leave or want you to leave?

Palmer: They don’t want me to leave in the sense of, I’m going to be away. We’re a really close family. We are always used to being with each other. I think it’s funny. My mom, my cousin, my brother and my granny, they all live on the same hill, on the same block. So it’s like we’ve always been really close, always been. ‘Oh I’m about to walk up to Granny’s house or about to go see my brother,’ because it’s just literally a two-second walk up the hill. And so me being even here in Huntington away from Charleston is still really different because we’re always used to being there. So when I do move out of state, it’s going to be pretty drastic for our family since we’re not able to just take a quick little drive and see each other. It’s going to be some planning. So that’s going to take some getting used to for sure.

This story is the first in our series “Plugging the Brain Drain” with stories of how young West Virginians are deciding whether or not to leave the state.

Morgantown Man Denied Bail Again On Capitol Riot Charges

George Tanios, a Morgantown resident and owner of Sandwich University, will remain behind bars pending trial on charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

Tanios and Julian Khatar of Pennsylvania face 10 felony counts, including conspiring to injure police. The two men were arrested by federal law enforcement in March and were denied bail in a joint hearing Tuesday.

During a March hearing in West Virginia, prosecutors said Tanios purchased bear and pepper spray at a Morgantown store before the two men traveled to Washington, D.C.

According to court documents, Tanios handed chemical spray to Khatar who then used it on U.S. Capitol Police. One officer, Brian Sicknick, suffered two strokes and died of natural causes the next day, the District’s medical examiner said in a ruling released last month.

Tanios had previously been denied bail in March by a West Virginia federal judge.

The West Virginian Who Created Mother’s Day And Regretted It

Anna Jarvis grew up in Grafton, West Virginia in the late 1800s. She was one of 11 children but one of just four of the children who lived to adulthood. As the oldest daughter, she shared a close bond with her mother. Anna often wrote her mother letters and took care of her as she developed heart conditions. She died in 1905.

Her mother’s death led Jarvis to devote her life to the holiday now recognized as International Mother’s Day.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Duncan Slade spoke with Katharine Antolini, a history and gender studies professor at West Virginia Wesleyan University and the author of Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Slade: What impact does her death have on Anna Jarvis? How does it go from the death of just her mother to this holiday? How does that happen?

Katharine Antolini: When going through her writing and what she would claim is that it all begins in the 1870s. Anna is 12 years old. They’re in church at the Andrew Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton. And her mother, Mrs. Jarvis, is a Sunday school teacher. And so she was listening to her mother give a Sunday school lesson on mothers of the Bible. You know, it was her mother’s favorite Sunday school lesson. So at the end of that Sunday school lesson, her mother gives this prayer that she hopes and prays that someday somebody will create a memorial on Mother’s Day to honor women. So Anna swears she remembers that.

Slade: What is the first Mother’s Day and how does it progress?

Antolini: Mrs. Jarvis dies in 1905. So 1906 to 1907, all that Anna organizes are small little memorials in Grafton at what is now the International Mother’s Day Shrine. And then, she decides she wants not just little memorial services to her mother, she wants this Mother’s Day. So she starts this huge letter-writing campaign in 1907. And she’s writing to anybody she thinks that can help her. She’s writing to politicians, she’s writing to merchants, she’s writing to church organizations. And she lucks out because she finds a supporter, and John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, a huge merchant.

Inside the church where the first Mother’s Day ceremony was held.

On May 10, 1908, is the first official Mother’s Day when the first ceremony is held in Grafton. So that’s why West Virginia we claim to be the ‘mother state of Mother’s Day,’ because we hosted it in Grafton in the morning. So by 1909, it’s spreading to other states. By 1912, Mother’s Day is being celebrated in every state in some capacity. So by the time we get to 1914, and Woodrow Wilson makes it a national holiday, it’s already being celebrated by every state. So, Congress and Woodrow Wilson are kind of making official a holiday that is already being celebrated on the state level for a couple of years by then.

Slade: From the first Mother’s Day to a national holiday in like, what seven years? It seems like such a feat with basically just these letters that are going out and one woman’s energy. What is her pitch in those letters?

Antolini: Well, it depends on who she’s writing to. She would tailor her argument to the audience that she’s writing to. For example, one of my favorite letters, she’s writing to Theodore Roosevelt. And Theodore Roosevelt, if you remember, his big thing, especially in the early 20th century, was every man needs to fight for his country. And for a woman to serve her country, she needs to have children. So, Teddy Roosevelt equated motherhood to patriotism. So obviously, then when Anna’s writing to him, saying you need to support this holiday, because we need to honor these women who are patriots, these women who are having children right for America, and are serving their country just like men who go to war, but women are serving their country by being mothers.

Slade: I was thinking about how nowadays Mother’s Day is this big thing where there’s candy, you go to brunch afterwards, there’s flowers involved. There’s all this other stuff. When does that commercialization start? And then how does she deal with that?

Antolini: Alright, so by 1912, she’s already mad at the floral industry. So it starts pretty quickly, because once the holiday starts to spread — by 1912 it’s been recognized throughout the United States — of course, the floral industry is gonna jump on that. And so by then she’s mad. She’s mad because they’re actually kind of claiming that was their day. The floral industry would have advertisements saying “this is our day.” By 1922, she’s leading boycotts for the floral industry. In 1923, there was a confectioner’s convention in Philadelphia and she crashes that convention to yell at them. In 1925, she’s arrested for disorderly conduct for crashing another convention of charities who are trying to use the day, so yeah. She’s pretty passionate about her day.

Slade: Over a century since it started, what is her legacy? Is it the person that started this holiday? Is it the person who opposed this commercialization that got out of control? Where is her mark on the world now?

Antolini: Well, the fact that we still celebrate the holiday, and there aren’t that many holidays that celebrate just women. I mean, I think if you Google it, there’s seven honest holidays. I mean, there’s like 14, if you count like National “Don’t wear a Bra” Day and silly, stupid things like that. But there’s only like seven holidays that celebrate women. Mother’s Day is the most popular holiday that celebrates women. So she would be happy that the holiday is still the most popular, you know, holiday that celebrates women, but she would be upset that nobody knows who she is. Because her ego is so wrapped up into it because she dedicates the rest of her 40 years — 40 years of her life is dedicated to this movement. And even long after the holiday was established in 1914. She’s defending it for the rest of her life.

She never backs down from anybody, right? I’m not talking just the floral industry and the greeting card industry. She went toe to toe with the Roosevelts and New York City businessmen and people who had more power than her and more influence than her. She didn’t care. They were whoever she was fighting against. Whether it’s the president or the florist down the street. They were using her day in a way that she didn’t agree with and she was gonna tell you all about it.

Listen To Mountain Stage At The Mother's Day Shrine

The Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, W.Va., is a national landmark, recognized as the International Mother’s Day Shrine.

On May 11, 2008, Lucy Kaplansky and the Mountain Stage band commemorated the holiday with a tribute to all mothers in the same church where the holiday began 100 years ago.