Eric Douglas, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

New Book Tells Inside Story Of Beginnings Of Opioid Crisis

Former Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his investigation into how drug distributors pumped powerful opioids into some of West Virginia’s most rural counties. In his new book, Eyre takes readers on a journey through the reporting it took to uncover the story, beginning with a single death in one family and detailing how those distributors ignored how addictive the drugs could be.

“Death In Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic” chronicles Eyre’s years-long probe, which began when he was covering the West Virginia statehouse beat, including newly elected West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

“We got a tip that his (Morrisey’s) wife worked for one of these distributors that distributes opioids and other drugs, called Cardinal Health,” Eyre said in an interview “And then we found out that Cardinal Health had donated to Patrick Morrissey’s inaugural party. And it kind of just snowballed from there.”

The story wasn’t an easy one to cover. There were legal fights and efforts by the pharmaceutical industry, the manufacturers and even the Drug Enforcement Agency to conceal records. Morrisey also launched an investigation into the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in what Eyre believes was an attempt to quash the investigation.

“That really took our owners and management back. They were concerned about this aggressive reporting,” Eyre said. Ultimately, the publisher and executive editor at the paper told Eyre to keep at it. “And we won in the end.”

In honoring him the 2017 award for investigative reporting, the Pulitzer Board praised Eyre’s “courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest overdose death rates in the country.”

One guiding principle for Eyre was the idea of “sustained outrage,” a term coined by Former Charleston Gazette publisher Ned Chilton: Newspapers shouldn’t write about an injustice once and then move on, but report story after story on the topic until something changes.

In today’s news climate, with newspapers closing their doors and laying off reporters, Eyre worries that it may be difficult to continue that tradition.

“We laid off upwards of three people the week before last and then another two the previous month and more cuts are coming. This is not just the Gazette-Mail. This is happening all over the country,” he said.

Eyre resigned from the Gazette-Mail on March 31, the day his book was released. He said he wants to focus on his health. In the book he revealed that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2016.

With the coronavirus dominating headlines around the world, Eyre is concerned that the opioid crisis might recede into people’s minds. He noted that many of those same pharmaceutical distributors are using the coronavirus pandemic to “to duck and dodge responsibility for the opioid crisis.

Eyre said he hopes those recovering from substance use disorders don’t experience a setback while the country follows stay-at-home orders.

“A lot of these people who are in recovery, they really, really look forward to group therapy where they have 12 to 15 people. They say that the best part of the whole process is getting together with groups of people. I guess maybe they can do it on Zoom or something or telemedicine, but I don’t think it’s the same,” Eyre said.

He also noted that in more rural parts of the state, and the region, large percentages of people do not have access to reliable high-speed internet and may not be able to join in those online sessions.

“They say the opposite of addiction is connection and we’re not getting much connection now,” Eyre said.

This story is part of an occasional series featuring authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

'Growing Up Black In Appalachia': How One Storyteller Is Changing The Narrative

W.I. “Bill” Hairston is a professional storyteller. He spins tales about a number of different topics — some made up and some real.

During a recent talk at the West Virginia State University Economic Development Center on Charleston’s West Side he devoted his entire presentation to the topic “Growing Up Black in Appalachia.”

Hairston was originally born in Phenix City, Alabama in 1949. He describes the area of the town where he lived as being predominantly black.

“My dentist was black. My teachers were black. The lawyers were black. The pharmacists were black — everybody was black,” he said. “White folks sort of showed up here and there, and they were in town, but they were in another part of town for one thing. And other than the mailman and the potato chip guy that came to the store and the store owner, we really didn’t see a lot of white folks on a regular basis.”

That all changed for Hairston when his father announced he was retiring from the military and they were moving to join Hairston’s grandfather in the predominantly white town of St. Albans, West Virginia. Hairston said his family was the only one of color in the area.

As kids do, Hairston and his younger sister spent that first summer in West Virginia playing with the neighborhood kids. As summer came to an end, it was time for Hairston and his sister to go to school, and unbeknownst to them West Virginia’s schools were desegregated.

“We noticed that the little white kids that we played with all summer long were walking with us and we sort of said to ourselves, “Well, maybe, maybe they use the same bus stop.” And we got on the bus and right behind us came these white kids. We said, “Well, maybe they use the same bus,”” Hairston said.

Sixty years later Hairston considers himself a West Virginian, and although he said he has faced racism, it is because of those difficult experiences that he became a storyteller. He added that growing up storytelling was a form of entertainment.

“It goes all the way back to St. Albans. People would just sort of sit on their porch and share all kinds of stories,” he said.

For his last two years of high school, Hairston moved to Charleston’s West Side.

“There was a place right over here. There was a VFW club with a big ol’ oak tree outside. On Saturday night, the men would gather there,” he said. “As a kid you couldn’t say anything, but they would pass the bottle and tell each other some of the biggest stories in the world.”

However, not all of his stories are as fond of memories. In his talk, Hairston told a story about lifeguards that did not want to desegregate a pool in 1960s Charleston. They sprayed Hairston and his friends with water hoses to forcibly remove them.

But he also told a story about encountering a more subtle form of discrimination at an event more recently. Some things were said that had implied racial bias. That evening, he used a story from the main stage to point out what had happened and why it needed to change.

Hairston said he uses stories, often laced with humor, to help people understand the issues, especially when it comes to race, that surround us.

“I realized that in West Virginia — as much as I love it, and I love it to death — there are issues that we don’t deal with. There’s some things that we need to work on always,” Hairston said. “I hope this message keeps conversation alive, keeps people talking, making people aware so that when they hear something among their friends or their fathers or their uncles or whatever, they at least challenge it a little bit. I think we all become better.”

Hairston travels the region telling stories about his childhood that, he hopes, give his listeners a better understanding about what it means to grow up ‘Black in Appalachia.’

Book: ‘All This Marvelous Potential’ Looks At Kennedy’s 1968 Tour Of Appalachia

In February 1968, US Senator Robert Kennedy visited eastern Kentucky to investigate the successes and the failures of the “War on Poverty.” In the new book “All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia” author Matthew Algeo examined the trip and digs into what Kennedy saw, what has changed since then and what remains the same.

Algeo said he used small stories to try to tell bigger stories in American history. He focused on Kennedy’s tour to highlight bigger issues he discovered in his research.

“I found out some incredible things were happening in Appalachia; protests against strip mining, protests against the school systems and education there, even protests against the Vietnam War,” he said.

Algeo added he was surprised about the war protests specifically because the region supported the war by a large margin.

“But they saw their own sons on the front lines of this war and so that led them to question it,” he said.

One of Algeo’s most interesting discoveries in his research was a recording of Kennedy speaking to students and faculty at Alice Lloyd College during his tour. During an interview with Reverend Lawrence Baldridge, the minister at a Baptist Church in Pippa Passes, KY, Algeo asked about a recording. Baldrige said, “Oh, yeah, Benny Lee Moore. He’s got a copy of it.”

Moore discovered a copy of the recording a few months after the speech and kept it. He later digitized it and gave the school a copy as well.

Algeo said he sees how the country could be different if Kennedy had not died later that year.

“On the one hand, he did have a reputation for being kind of a tough SOB and for fighting crime. But at the same time, he clearly had this innate compassion for the dispossessed and for the poor. And I think in American politics he had the ability to combine those two qualities into real political realities that he could have gotten things done,” Algeo said.

The title of the book, “All This Marvelous Potential” comes from a line in Kennedy’s speech at Alice Lloyd College.

“It really just stuck out to me as his view of the situation in Eastern Kentucky,” Algeo said, “at that time and you know, I think a lot of people would say you could say that the same thing even today.”

It is hard not to apply the line to Kennedy himself, though, thinking about what could have been.

Matthew Algeo’s “All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia” is available for purchase now.

This interview is part of an occasional series with authors from Appalachia or writing about the region.

Serialized Novel Celebrating Love And Hope In Wheeling, W.Va. Goes Online

Stories told in serial fashion are stories with chapters released on a regular basis, often weekly. Publishers began releasing serial fiction in the 1800s. The format really took off in the 1920s with cheap publishing options and penny magazines. Authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who penned the “Sherlock Holmes” short stories and novels, published in serial form.

Author Nora Edinger is using the internet to add a unique twist to this older technique. Her novel “Suspended Aggravation” is being released weekly on Weelunk.com, a website devoted to daily life in Wheeling, West Virginia. The romance story features locations in the north-central West Virginia community.

Author Nora Edinger beside the Wheeling Suspension Bridge from her serial story Suspended Aggravation.

Edinger said she wrote the story as a novel and always intended for people to read it on paper, but the opportunity to publish it weekly through Weelunk, a Wheeling-centric website, came available and she jumped at the chance.

“I thought ‘this sounds like fun to me,’” she said. “Both the serial nature and the localization nature really appealed to me as a way of almost interacting with the community and in a fictional form. It feels like it is unfolding in real time in Wheeling.”

Rather than writing the story as she goes, the book is done. But as she prepares each weekly chapter to be posted online, she reviews and localizes it a bit more. Edinger also updates the story to stay in line with current events, as appropriate.

“We’re trying to put together one month of releases at a time and I’m working with editors that we love and photographers that we love, who are looking at each chapter as it comes out,” she said. “We’re deciding what photos that we want to use to illustrate and we’re trying to sneak some local people in cameos either into the photos or into the story.”

She did caution, though, that she will never put fictional words into a real person’s mouth.

“If we see something happening in the news that we know people will remember like the [Jennifer Lopez] halftime show at the Super Bowl or the potholes that opened up on I-70, we realized that’s something that we could slip into the story,” she said.

Edinger explained that the story is a romance with an element of suspense to it. She said she attempted to keep it light and humorous.

“It’s a love story. It’s a story of hope,” she said. “I’ve lived in Wheeling for about 14 years now and about 25 years total in the state of West Virginia, and I’ve really watched this community in its early stages of reinvention. And I think it’s kind of neat to have a story of hope that focuses on two young people during a time when the city seems to be experiencing a real resurgence of hope and reinventing itself.”

“Suspended Aggravation” is being released online, one chapter a week. It will continue through the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Follow “Suspended Aggravation” online or explore more Appalachian Author Interviews.

Education Author Looks At Education Reform And Teacher Strikes

Diane Ravitch is an author and public education historian turned education activist. Recently, she was in Charleston speaking at the Red For Ed Celebration on the second anniversary of the West Virginia teacher’s strike. She spoke with Eric Douglas about the teacher’s movement and her book, “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.” The book details the massive private funding in the educational reform movement that began in the George W. Bush era and the teacher’s movements that have spread across the country in its wake.

***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Explain what makes you an expert in education and education reform.

Ravitch: I have a doctorate in the history of education, American education specifically. I began my career by writing the history of the New York City public schools, because that’s where I was living. And since then, I’ve written about a dozen books. In 1991, I went to work as Assistant Secretary of Education for the first President Bush for two years and stayed on a year at a think tank. And then I became very involved in conservative think tanks. I was an advocate for testing and for choice and for all of those things.

Then about 2008 or 2009, I became disillusioned with the things that I had been in support of. And I wrote a book renouncing high stakes testing, renouncing choice, and saying that we needed to support our public schools. It was called “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.” I have written other books and spoken all over the country about the importance of public education and the importance of making it far better than it is today.

Douglas: In your book, you talk about the difference between reformers and disruptors. Can you explain that?

Ravitch: The people who now call themselves reformers are actually funded by billionaires. They’re funded by the [Jim, Rob and Alice, children of Sam, founder of the Walmart chain] Walton family, by the [Betsy, US Secretary of Education] DeVos family. I have a whole chapter listing all the billionaires who are funding this so-called reform movement. They’re really not interested in reform. What they’re interested in is privatizing public education so that your local public school will be run by an entrepreneur or corporation or by religious organization and not by the community. And I think this is a disaster. I try to show in the book that none of the things that they have tried have worked. And it’s time for them to start doing some things to actually help children and families and communities rather than putting all of their money into destroying public education.

Douglas: You started out in conservative think tanks and working for a Republican president. You make the point, though, that both parties are to blame. This isn’t a Republican versus Democrat sort of thing.

Ravitch: President George H.W. Bush supported choice. He didn’t get anywhere with it. He supported testing. He didn’t get anywhere. And then President George W. Bush promoted something called No Child Left Behind, which required every school in America to test every child every year. The reason for it was he said there had been a Texas miracle. And 20 years later, we know there was no Texas miracle but we’re continuing to do what he recommended.

Then President Obama came along and adopted the George W. Bush plan of No Child Left Behind. And he added something to it called Race to the Top, which was even worse than No Child Left Behind because it was very punitive.

I spent seven years on the national testing board and I became a very strong critic of standardized testing. I don’t think it’s helping our children. I think that the more we test, the less kids learn, because there’s less time given to instruction. So we have a problem that we have both parties aligned with a very destructive agenda and both Obama and Bush and now Trump have supported charter schools and Trump in particular supports vouchers which has actually been a disaster because wherever vouchers had been enacted, kids are going to schools with uncertified teachers. In Florida they’re taught by high school dropouts. And it’s taking billions of dollars away from public schools. So we’re destroying our public schools in pursuit of something that’s worse than our public schools.

Douglas: I want to talk just a little bit more about testing about why testing is a problem. What’s the biggest issue with standardized testing?

Ravitch: The biggest issue with standardized testing is that first of all, it doesn’t make kids smarter. The more you test them, they don’t get smarter. And we’ve been testing kids now for 20 years, every child, every year; grades three through eight. That’s what George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind decreed. And that’s still federal law.

With No Child Left Behind we had a federal takeover of public education which had never happened before. The states are responsible for education, local school districts are responsible for education. But now the federal government makes the rules.

The problem with standardized tests is that they are all normed on what’s called a bell curve. The bell curve never closes. And it’s completely predictable that the kids who have the most, who have the highest family income, highest family education dominate the top of the bell curve. The kids who have the least dominate the bottom of the bell curve. That never changes. That’s true of every standardized test, whether it’s the SAT, the ACT, international test, state test, whatever. Any standardized test you mention will have a bell curve that never closes. And that benefits the haves and disadvantages the have nots.

Douglas: There’s a movement to discredit teachers in general. Where did that come from? Why are we suddenly trying to villainize teachers?

Ravitch: Well, it didn’t happen all of the sudden. I traced it back to a report from the Reagan era called “A Nation at Risk.” This report came out in 1983 at a time when the nation was in the midst of a deep recession. So, the report said our schools are failing and that’s why our auto industry is in trouble. All these industries are in trouble because of our schools, which on its face was a ridiculous idea because schoolteachers and children had nothing to do with macro governmental decisions about the auto industry. The fact was we were still producing gas guzzlers. So they blamed it on the schools.

When the economy got better, nobody turned around and said, ‘Oh, guess what, our schools are not failing anymore.’ So the governors and the presidents kept up this drumbeat of ‘We have to do something’ about the schools. By the time of No Child Left Behind, there was a consensus that the problem with the schools was not the children, it was the teachers.

There was this national narrative of ‘How are we going to get better teachers? Well, let’s have merit pay.’ Being an historian of education, I traced the history of America and found out that it’s been tried for about 100 years now. I think the first experiment was in 1925, and it failed. Then they tried it again, and it failed, and it kept on failing. And the biggest experiment with merit pay was just in 2010, at Vanderbilt University, and they used Nashville for their experiment. They said, we’ll pay $15,000 reward to math teachers who can raise test scores, and they had a control group and an experimental group. Both groups got the same results. Merit pay didn’t make any difference. And the reason for that was that both groups of teachers were doing their best. They knew how they weren’t hiding their secret lessons, waiting for somebody to offer them money. So they were teaching their hearts out and they couldn’t get better than that than what they were getting. Teachers can knock themselves out, but in the end, the test scores say more about who’s in the classroom rather than whether the teacher is a good teacher or a bad teacher. So the teachers got demonized, got blamed. We’ve had 20 years of this. And that leads me to why I wrote this book.

Douglas: Go ahead and continue. Why did you write this book?

Ravitch: Well, I’m in West Virginia to celebrate the second anniversary of the West Virginia teacher’s strike. I wanted to be here to thank the teachers, because what they did was incredibly courageous. They started a wave of strike saying, ‘We demand dignity, we demand respect. We demand to be treated as professionals.” Their example started a wave of teacher’s strikes across the country. It’s spread from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Colorado to California, to lots of other states.

I don’t think that wave of strikes is over, but it really gave hope and inspiration to teachers all over the country who realized that they weren’t being paid enough to live a decent life, that their pensions were in jeopardy, that their healthcare was in jeopardy. Class sizes were too large for them to teach effectively. And the children were living in many cases in desperate poverty and that they needed to have social workers, they needed to have a nurse in the school, they needed to have a library and a librarian.

I went to public schools in Houston, Texas. I didn’t go to an affluent school, I went to a regular public school. And we had all those things. We had a nurse every day, we had a library with a librarian. Why is this something we can’t afford anymore? This is the thing that puzzles me.

Douglas: Did the teachers in West Virginia accomplish what they set out to, and elsewhere, not just in West Virginia, were they successful?

Ravitch: I think they were incredibly successful because what they did was unleashed a movement and they stood together, probably for the first time in their lives. They realized that they had power. And anytime in the future if people are ignoring education, refusing to fund the schools, this could happen again. And it should happen again. If the legislature continues to underfund the schools and to give tax breaks to big corporations that are already making millions and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars while not paying to educate the children.

Did they achieve every demand? No, they didn’t. One of their demands was no charter schools. And the Legislature went right behind their back and passed charter legislation. And this will not help the children of West Virginia. It hasn’t helped. All it does is take money away from public schools. When you take money away from already underfunded public schools, you’re certainly not helping them.

Douglas: That was actually my next question. The Legislature approved legislation to allow three charter schools over the next three or four years. Why not give it a try?

Ravitch: Why not give it a try is we’ve had 30 years of charter schools. So, it’s not like you’re trying something that’s never happened before. It’s happened all over the country. If charter schools were the answer, if vouchers were the answer, we would be looking to Milwaukee and Detroit as models. About half the kids in Detroit are in charter schools. It’s the lowest performing city in the United States.

In Milwaukee, there are three equal sectors in terms of numbers. They have vouchers, they have charters and they have a shrinking public-school system. The public-school system in Milwaukee is overloaded with kids with disabilities. Because the charters and vouchers don’t want those kids. They’re overloaded with kids who don’t speak English because they’re rejected by the vouchers and the charters. And all three sectors are doing the same.

So when you hear promises of ‘Oh, this is going to be a bold experiment’ – nonsense. We’ve been doing it for 30 years. And what actually happens with charters is you’re inviting entrepreneurs to come into your community and instead of having schools run by the local community, you’re having schools that are run by a corporation, whose headquarters may be in Houston or Los Angeles or some other city and if you have a problem with it, they’ll just say leave.

Douglas: So where do we go next? What’s the next step in fixing education in the United States?

Ravitch: Well, I’d say the next step is that we need to have a commitment as a nation to first of all having a federal government that recognizes its limits. I would love to see the elimination of the federal mandate of standardized testing in grades three through eight. I look at the top performing nations in the world,none of them have a requirement of standardized tests every single year. We’re not a top performing country; we’re right in the middle. But the ones who are far higher than us on the standards on the international standardized tests are not requiring annual testing.

I went to visit the country of Finland. They have no standardized testing at all. What they emphasize is raising healthy children who are excited about learning. And so they have a recess after every single class, no matter what the weather kids run outside. They’re not told what to do. They just run and play. It could be raining, it could be snowing, they could run out and play.

They emphasize music and art and they try to make learning as fun as possible. They only hire the best teachers. It’s really hard to get to be a teacher in Finland, but there’s no standardized testing. And when we look at the international test scores, we see that Finland is one of the top performing nations in the world because they emphasize creativity and thinking and love of learning. Things that we’ve completely forgotten about.

I’d also love to see all these billionaires who are leading the privatization movement come to grips with the fact that they’ve totally failed. I mean, they’ve spent and our federal government has spent billions of dollars opening charter schools. The federal government alone has spent $4 billion starting charter schools, almost 40 percent of the ones they’ve opened have either never opened or closed right after they open.

In Florida, where there are about 650 charter schools, they have as many charter schools closing every year as they do opening. So this is running schools like a business. And you put your kids there if the charter school will take them. And you may show up one day in January and find a note on the door saying sorry, we’re closed.

'Beyond The Sunset' Review: Wayne Winker Reveals the Rebirth Of The Melungeon Ethnic Group

The Melungeon people of east Tennessee were isolated and discriminated against throughout much of their history. They began to be “othered” in the 1800s for being mixed-race Appalachians.

Melungeons are considered a tri-racial isolate, meaning they are a combination of traits from multiple ethnic backgrounds, thus, creating their own unique culture. Today we know the Melungeon are African, white European and Native American.

In the 1800s and into the mid-1900s, they claimed to be Portuguese or the descendents of various Mediterranean cultures to explain their dark skin, and to try to avoid discrimination.

In the 1960s, a group from Sneedville, Tennessee got together to stage an outdoor drama about the Melungeon to attract tourists to their small town. That was a turning point for the group.

In author Wayne Winkler’s new book, “Beyond the Sunset: The Melungeon Outdoor Drama,” he delves into the drama and the influence it had on the Melungeon people in general.

Winkler is himself a Melungeon, although that was not a word that was commonly used in his house growing up.

“When I was about 12 years old, I was at my grandmother’s house and read about the outdoor drama that was planned for Sneedville. It was about the Melungeons and I’d never heard that word before. I came to find out that my dad’s family shared that heritage,” he said.

If not for the staging of the outdoor drama, called “Walk Toward the Sunset,” Winkler said the Melungeons might have been assimilated out of existence. Until that period, Melungeon was an epithet and no one used it for themselves.

Wayne Winkler, author of Beyond the Sunset.

“I think one of the major impacts of the outdoor drama was to give people a sense of pride in their heritage, but it didn’t happen all at once,” he said. “It made it okay for Melungeons to talk about their ancestry. I think the outdoor drama, it kind of came and went, but it left a kind of a seed among our people.”

Winkler said he thinks of the Melungeon story as a parallel version of the story of Appalachia. Where once very few people claimed to be “Appalachian” in recent years many people wear it as a badge of honor.

“I like to think of us as sort of Appalachian concentrate. In the small story of the Melungeons, you can see the bigger story of Appalachia as a whole. It was around the same time (as the drama) that people in Appalachia began to take pride in their heritage. So yeah, I think there are a lot of parallels between this story and the story of Appalachia as a whole,” he said.

Heather Andolina, the president of the Melungeon Heritage Association.

Heather Andolina is the president of the Melungeon Heritage Association. She only learned in the last few years that she is Melungeon and now her family is working on a documentary about the discovery.

“Our grandmother, she was a light mocha color. She underwent discrimination and prejudice. She was always said she was Cherokee. But then we started doing a little more family research and got into the DNA. When we learned about the Melungeon people, we realized that’s where our grandmother’s from. And her mother and her father, and we’re like, oh wow, this is so fascinating. It’s our own story,” Andolina said.

Andolina said her family documentary, “Infamous Characters, Notorious Villains” should be out by the end of 2020.

This story is part of an occasional series of interviews with Appalachian authors.