Mason Adams, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

How Appalachian NASCAR Hall Of Famer Leonard Wood Reinvented Racing

Stock car racing’s roots run deep in Appalachia. Our twisty roads and dark hollers were home to moonshiners — and moonshine runners, who became known for their driving skills. And they became some of NASCAR’s first stars when it formed in 1948. But NASCAR’s oldest continuous racing team had nothing to do with moonshine.

This conversation originally aired in the April 21, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Stock car racing’s roots run deep in Appalachia.

Our twisty roads and dark hollers were home to moonshiners — and moonshine runners, who became known for their driving skills. And they became some of NASCAR’s first stars when it formed in 1948. But NASCAR’s oldest continuous racing team had nothing to do with moonshine.

The Wood Brothers first started running races in 1950. Glenn Wood drove their cars, and he was enshrined in the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2012. His brother Leonard followed in 2013. Leonard worked on the cars, and was part of what was known as “the most skilled pit crew in the world.”

Glenn Wood passed away in 2019. The team is run by his kids and grandkids. Leonard is now 89. And he still works daily at the Wood Brothers Racing Museum in their hometown of Stuart, Virginia.

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams dropped by to speak with him.

NASCAR Hall of Famer Leonard Wood at the team’s museum in Stuart, Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Adams: The first thing I wanted to ask you is, I’ve had people tell me that drivers help but it’s really mechanics that win races. Is that true?

Wood: It’s both. You can have the best car in the world and the driver not do his job like it’s supposed to. But yeah, a good driver is a big credit to your winnings, but he can’t carry it on his back, he’s got to have something that’ll perform. I’d rate it equal, one or the other.

Adams: Were you mechanically inclined as far back as you can remember in life, or was there a moment where it kind of clicked for you?

Wood: No, I was always mechanical in mind. I’d always tear my toys apart. Brother Delano, his next Christmas were like brand new, and mine all torn to pieces. Back when I was just 12 years old, I was making little Jeeps out of wood. Then I made one and had a steering wheel on it and I would come roaring down that hill, the back of the hill. We used to have a bottle of oil, and we’d oil the axles and put the wheels back on so they drove faster, you know. Those little bottles are still buried up there for a long time. Then I made a gasoline-powered go kart when I was 13. It’s in the museum over there, and it’s got a washing machine motor on it.

I can remember when I was just a young thing, I told my dad I wanted something with a motor on it. And so then my sister’s husband’s dad had a washing machine with a gasoline motor on it, and when electricity came along, he took the gasoline mode off and put an electric motor on it. My brother in law gave me that motor, then I made a go kart out of it.

Hall of fame racing hands.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Adams: Oh wow. So my 11 year old loves tearing stuff apart and sometimes builds it back together, sometimes not. What advice would you have for him?

Wood: Well, when you decide to make something, you do heavy concentration and you stick to that until you get the thing done. You don’t just do a little bit here and lay it down and all that. When you start to make something, concentrate hard on what you want to build and how you want to build it, and keep doing it ‘til you get it fixed.

I used to design zone cylinder head ports and intake manifolds and all that, and when I’d start, I’d just keep at it ‘til I got it like I wanted it. I didn’t lay it down and forget about it, come in next week and work on it. When you really want to make something and make it run, you just concentrate ‘til you fix it. I don’t know at times that I have thought of ways to do it, and something just triggers my mind how to do it. And then before I get done, something else triggers my mind, “No, this is the way you do it — even better.”

I tell people, “I know what I do know and I also know what I don’t know.” My dad always said what he didn’t know it make a great big book, and I feel the same way. But I do thank the Lord [for] the talent he gives me to do the things I do.

Adams: What’s your next project?

Wood: Eddie and Len always come up with something for me to do. They decided to have me make a half-size 427 engine. We started making it. I have a great machinist — Bennie Belcher. He’s the greatest I’ve ever seen. He can take regular milling machines and turning lathes and all that, and make it look like a CNC made it. He and I together, you know, we made this 427 half-size like we ran at Daytona.

So Eddie tells Edsel Ford what they’re going to have me to do. Edsel says, “Well, it’d be nice to have it to look like a 427 that won Le Mans in 1967.” So that’s what we ended up making, was one like that won the Le Mans race in 1967. Edsel said, “We’ll put it in the Ford museum,” so that’s where it is now. So now they decided to make a 429 Boss Hemi engine like David Pearson drove in the ‘71 Mercury. So we got that about two-thirds done right now. And we’re going to make that one run. The one in the Ford museum, the manifold, all that’s fixed, but you don’t have any parts to make it run. But this one’s gonna run.

A workshop at the Wood Brothers Racing Museum in Stuart, Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Adams: I’ve thought about that famous Wood Brothers pit crew and how tight y’all had that system. Where did that come from? Was that a combination of the mechanics applied to the pit crew and maybe some military background? Or do you know?

Wood: We were at Charlotte in 1960, World 600, the very first one. And we had two cars. We prepared two Fords. So Fireball Roberts and Smokey Yunick made a pit stop, to change two tires and fuel. Took them 45 seconds. John Cowley with Ford Motor Company told us, “I think there’s some time to be gained in the pits.” We started working on it, so right away we was down to 25 seconds with the same deal. Then we just worked from there.

We would machine the studs, recess the end of them, you could put a lug nut on them and start the lugs. Then put a spring in the socket, so whenever you went from one lung to the other, throw the socket out and all that, and now we’ve got the tires changed. Now we’re waiting on the jack to get up. It took about 12 pumps. So I enlarged the plunger so it only takes like two strokes to jack the car up. So now I got the tires changed, now the gas won’t go in. So now we start working on the fuel system, streamline that to where it improved the fuel flow, and now we got a quick pit stop.

We was coming back from California and we stopped down at Greenville, South Carolina to fuel the truck and get a bite to eat. Brother Ray and I was in this little ton truck, and the race car’s on an open trailer and these people, these fans were all standing around looking at it. When we come out when it was 20 degrees, so we didn’t stand around and talk. We got in the truck and left.

We get between Greenville and Charlotte, ready to stop in Charlotte. And this truck starts vibrating and shaking and brother Ray said, “You can even feel it in the roof.” I’m looking at the one side to see if there was an airport nearby, an airplane warming up or whatever, and then it quit. Then we got up to Charlotte and we had to exit off, and it started up again. I look out the side glass and see steam coming out the exhaust pipe for the race car. And so I told Ray, “Stop this thing.”

We stopped and I went around, and I could see this silhouette of a human behind the windshield. I’m thinking now, one of the crew members has pulled a trick on us and got in the car. Then I’m thinking, no he ain’t that dumb, as cold as it is. I look in, this guy’s got Marvin helmet on. I said, “What do you think you’re doing?” And he said, “Let’s go!”

Anyway, we pulled him out and then about that time, a sheriff drives up, and we handed him over to the sheriff.

Adams: Oh my goodness.

Wood: I didn’t know the guy. I don’t know where he lives and haven’t heard from him since. I would love to get to talk to him. But I don’t know where he is, whatever happened to him.

Adams: Thank you very much. It’s been an honor talking to you.

Wood: Well, same here. You’ve been interesting.

——

View Leonard Wood’s 2013 hall of fame video and a video of him building a half-scale model.

Food, Fandom And ‘Porch Beers,’ An Appalachia Zine

Elliott Stewart has been making zines since he was 13 years old. His ongoing zine “Porch Beers” is an incisive look at Appalachian culture, through the eyes of a queer trans man.

This conversation originally aired in the March 3, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Elliott Stewart has been making zines since he was 13 years old.

His ongoing zine “Porch Beers” is an incisive look at Appalachian culture, through the eyes of a queer trans man. “Porch Beers” dives into pop culture fandom, West Virginia food and the life of a 20-something navigating moves from Huntington, West Virginia, to Chattanooga, Tennessee and back again.

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams contacted Stewart to talk about the newest issues of his zine, and what Appalachia in 2022 looked like through the eyes of a zine writer.

Adams: So I first found “Porch Beers” kind of randomly online using a different search engine than I tried before. I ordered a couple of copies on Etsy and was just blown away. I’ve read zines for a long time, and I’ve read Appalachian zines. These grabbed my attention as a reader.

The writing is fun and short and funny, but also serious and thoughtful. And the stuff you write about is all stuff that I’m interested in. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Who is this person that makes “Porch Beers?”

Stewart: I guess born-and-bred West Virginian, moved around a lot as a kid. We lived with my grandparents, who are ministers and moved out every three to four years to different parts of the state. So I feel like that wanderlust has always kind of been in me. One of my ways getting in and out and recording memories is writing. My grandma has little booklets I made when I was five or six that were maybe my first zines. It’s a good way to be front and center about a lot of intersecting identities that I have. I feel a lot of people come up to me and say that I’m the first person from X group that they’ve ever met. And I don’t know, that’s kind of cool. It has a lot of responsibility to it, but it’s kind of cool.

Adams: Everybody that comes in my house, when they see these zines, they always wonder about the name. Tell us about the name “Porch Beers.”

Stewart: Sure. That was a tradition in Huntington and I’m sure elsewhere where you have a porch. Huntington is a small knit community, to where everybody knows everybody pretty much. You can go by somebody’s house or on their porch, [and they ask,] “Hey, do you want a porch beer?” “Yeah.” So you sit down, you have a talk that could be about nothing. It could be about very important heart-to-heart stuff. But that’s just a hallmark of Huntington summers, and I wanted to reflect that.

Adams: The first issue was about fandom, and you have a few different essays about different arenas of fandom per se. The second issue is about West Virginia and its food. Three was about music. And then you came back to food in issues four and four-and-a-half. What pulled you back to food after you had already written about the different kinds of foods unique to West Virginia?

Stewart: When I go to make an issue of “Porch Beers,” sometimes I will set out and it will be, “I want X theme,” and write around that theme. But more often than not, it’s just, I write a couple of articles as to what I feel, and a theme loosely takes shape. That’s what was happening with this one, to the point where I had a couple of other runner-up themes that I was going with, and my partner was like, “You might as well write about food, because that seems like where this one is drawing you to.” I was like, yeah, he’s right. That was what was on my mind. I don’t know if there was any particular reason for it. But that’s just where the writing led me.

Adams: So I read through these five issues there on specific topics — whether it’s pro wrestling, or the Ben Folds Five or West Virginia Food. But there’s a larger story arc here, too. I mean, I can read growth in these zines. You moved from Huntington to Chattanooga, and back. When you read back the zines, what is the story of “Porch Beers” so far?

Stewart: I do go back and read them at times. It is a little painful to read some of the early stuff, just because I have changed so much as a person. But I’m glad I have a record of it, that these things happened. And honestly, it’s valuable to get stories of growth out there because not a lot of people record the minutiae of life in Appalachia or in the various sub-communities I’m in

Adams: “Porch Beers” tracks this geographic shift, but it also documents a different kind of transition. Can you share a little bit more about that?

Stewart: I am an out transgender man, I have been out in one form or another as trans since about 2018. Just slowly began socially transitioning and then medically transitioning, and considered myself queer as my orientation. It’s been an interesting experience with that, a lot of learning curves. Sometimes people, when they find out, will have … I like to assume that most people are in good faith when they ask questions, but sometimes they can be very awkward or a little hurtful. But I try to take it in stride. Like specific medical questions or things, and if I don’t feel comfortable, I’m at least to the point now, where I’m like, “Hey, that’s kind of a weird thing to be asking me.” A lot of times I’m the first trans person that someone has knowingly met. And that is wild to me.

Find Elliott Stewart on Instagram.

Why An Appalachian School Board Pulled 57 Books Off Library Shelves

School boards have become the latest front in America’s culture wars — especially when it comes to books in school libraries that some people think are inappropriate for students. That situation has been playing out in Rockingham County, Virginia, which sits midway down the Shenandoah Valley.

This conversation originally aired in the April 14, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

School boards have become the latest front in America’s culture wars — especially when it comes to books in school libraries that some people think are inappropriate for students.

That situation has been playing out in Rockingham County, Virginia, which sits midway down the Shenandoah Valley. In January, the school board voted to remove 57 books from school libraries, prompting an outcry from people who see this as a book ban.

Ashlyn Campbell has been covering the story for the Daily News-Record. Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams reached out to Campbell to learn more about what’s happening.

Adams: We’re talking about Rockingham County, located in the Shenandoah Valley, where the school board voted 4-1 to remove 57 books from school libraries. Why did they take this vote?

Campbell: This was something that multiple members of the school board campaigned on in November. A new majority came in who were very vocally conservative. They’ve said that they’re concerned over sexual content, profanity and violence. At the meeting where they took the vote, they said, we read the books, they’re deeply disturbing to us, and we want to protect the kids and the county. So that’s kind of the gist of why they wanted to remove the 57 books.

Adams: What kinds of books were removed? Can you share some of the titles?

Campbell: It’s a broad list of books. A lot of them have to do with the LGBTQ community, racial issues, mental health, stuff like that. One of the books, Felix Ever After, is about transgender teen, which is a coming of age story. There are some books on the list that are considered classics — books like The Bluest Eye, Beloved from Toni Morrison and Slaughterhouse-Five. There are books on the list that do have sexual content, profanity, violence. Looking for Alaska is on the list.

And then there are one or two books that don’t have any sexual content, profanity, violence. One of them is The Invisible Boy, which is a picture book. And then the other one is Drama, which is a middle school theater book that has kissing but no real sexual content. With The Invisible Boy, which is a picture book that talks about not feeling alone and having empathy, one of the board members said that they think it was mistakenly included. There’s another [similar] title that has to do with race and evangelical Christianity and stuff like that. One of the school board members did say that she thinks the picture book was mistakenly included on the list.

Adams: How did students and parents respond to this decision by the school board?

Campbell: [The school board] said that this removal is temporary while they develop a new policy to review library books. The vast majority of parents and students that I’ve talked to have been very upset about the ban. Students have walked out at several of the high schools. They held a rally about all of the issues going on with the book ban. I know a lot of people have sent a lot of emails to the board sharing their concerns — they don’t think they should ban books, because they help represent students, and it’s a slippery slope, and stuff like that.

There are community members that have spoken in favor of the removal. From their point of view, they don’t want sexual content in books at school libraries. But for the most part, the vast majority of parents and students I’ve talked to or have spoken out at meetings have been against the decision.

Adams: One of the things that comes up in your story is the board members do clarify like this, they say it’s not a book ban. It’s a “temporary removal.” So what happens next in terms of process?

Campbell: They’ve started the process of creating the policy of how books enter libraries, and how books are reviewed if they’re challenged. The other week, they met with school librarians to talk about what policies they have in place, what they would like to see from the policy, stuff like that. I think that was the first meeting to talk through what those policies will look like.

They’ve said they want to hear from community members, parents, teachers, librarians, all those kinds of people to start developing the policy. They’ve said that they would like to get it out sooner rather than later. They had that first meeting, and then I think they’re going to have another meeting where they hear more from the community. But from there, they’re going to develop a policy and we’ll see what they decide to include.

Adams: One of your follow-up stories notes that this isn’t an isolated incident, but part of a national trend. And certainly, we’ve seen other communities in Appalachia that have done something similar. Can you tell us a little bit more about what’s happening in the bigger picture?

Campbell: Rockingham County is not the only school division that has experienced both challenges, book bans and removals. A lot of school divisions have removed a lot of similar titles or have similar lists that they’re removing. A lot of that has to do with this website called Book Looks, which is a book review website that, while it says it’s not connected to Moms for Liberty, it has ties to the group.

For Rockingham County, the board member who compiled the list said, I pulled these from parent complaints, but then went and researched through Book Looks. She has this document that the vast majority of the books that she researched, which was about half of the list, she said is from Book Looks. There’s at least one screenshot for one of the books that she pulled directly for Moms for Liberty, too, which is a similar theme across a lot of school divisions where they’re using Book Looks or sources like Moms for Liberty to either pull directly from those lists of books, or, like in Rockingham County, the board member used to research it.

PEN America has said that book challenges [and] book bans are on the rise. A lot of this has to do with those groups that are now pushing removal of books, like Moms for Liberty, who in a lot of school divisions are directly going in and advocating for removing a lot of the books that are also on the Rockingham County list.

Adams: So this decision was made back in January, and it’s got a lot of attention. There was a Washington Post op-ed, I see there’s a thread on Reddit, and a lot of other outlets have picked up the general story. Do you think that bigger attention has made a difference in Rockingham County at all?

Campbell: For the school board, no. Now, the National Coalition Against Censorship sent a letter to the school board, advocating for them to put the books back and to have certain things in their process to review books. PEN America also worked with a number of authors to again advocate for them to return the books, to not have a book ban.

When I’ve talked to the chair of the board about this, he said that he’s not interested in national groups’ opinions about what’s going on because he’s listening to his constituents in Rockingham County. I think he sent a one sentence email back to PEN America that was like, “My constituents are in Rockingham County.” When I talked to him about the National Coalition against Censorship letter, he said something similar. He’s not taking anything that they’re saying into account, because he’s listening to people in Rockingham County.

Adams: Have there been any changes since this happened in January? It’s been a couple of months.

Campbell: The biggest thing that’s happened is that meeting with librarians where they shared their thoughts. A lot of them said that the decision really hurt them because the board didn’t consult them beforehand. But for the most part, I think the board is going ahead with the new policy to review challenged books, and then also to determine how books end up in school and classroom libraries. There’s been a lot of backlash. There’s been a lot of discussion about what’s going on.

But from what I’ve seen from the school board, I think they’re just going to go forward with their plan of how they’re going to develop the policy. In one of the work sessions, they did pull from a lot of other school divisions that have examples of policies for libraries. And they’ve said, not everything that are on those policies they want to include, but they want to pick and choose.

Adams: From reading your story, it looks like there are existing procedures already set up for the libraries. Can you tell us more about what those look like?

Campbell: They have collection development policies for each school. So they use things that compile reviews. There’s a number of websites that they use to look at books and determine what’s going to be included in their libraries. The division has also had a policy that was used to review challenged material for library books or instructional material. Now, the board has said that’s only for instructional material. It’s been a practice to use it for library material, but really, the policy is only written for instructional material. The policy has been used for library material for a number of years.

For the school division, libraries have collection development policies. Parents can go in and research what books are in their school libraries. And parents also have the option to be notified when their child checks out books, so they can see what their kid is checking out and, from my understanding, it’s in the single digits for the number of people that have actually utilized that option. So there are school-specific collection development policies. They use a lot of similar resources. There also was a county policy that they said is used for instructional material, but has been used for library material in the past.

W.Va. Mobile Home Park Tenants Fight A Media Giant

When a new owner took control of a mobile home park in Mercer County, West Virginia, its residents noticed immediate changes. Rents went up, and it seemed like the new owner was doing less to take care of problems like broken windows, or even a sewage leak. So one resident started looking into exactly who this new owner was.

This conversation originally aired in the March 31, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

When a new owner took control of a mobile home park in Mercer County, West Virginia, its residents noticed immediate changes.

Rents went up, and it seemed like the new owner was doing less to take care of problems like broken windows, or even a sewage leak. So one resident started looking into exactly who this new owner was.

What she found led to a story in Voices of Monterey Bay, an online publication from California. It’s titled, “The Davids in Appalachia fighting the Monterey Bay Area’s news Goliath.”

Julie Reynolds reported the story. She recently spoke with Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams from a van in the Mojave desert, north of Quartzsite, Arizona.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Adams: I think you are the first person I’ve interviewed who has been in a minivan sitting in the desert.

Reynolds: Most likely, but you know, the sound quality is pretty good.

Adams: The story you have is headlined, “The Davids in Appalachia fighting the Monterey Bay area’s news Goliath.” This story sprawls across the U.S., but let’s start where the story does, in Mercer County, West Virginia. Can you tell us about Elk View Estates, which is the property at the beginning [of your story]?

Reynolds: Sure. Elk View Estates, according to one of the tenants there, Valeria Steele, was a very nice mobile home park manufactured home community until about 2021, when a very mysterious entity bought the park. Tenants didn’t know who these owners were. They were told to send their rent checks to a place in Englewood, New Jersey to a man named Tom del Bosco and various other entities.

At different times, the rent checks went to a lot of different places. Valeria is kind of a citizen journalist, and she started investigating and digging into public records and connected the dots to see that the entity that bought her mobile home park was an affiliate of the same investment firm that had taken over a huge swath of American newspapers. She found my reporting about this company Alden Global Capital, and its related business Smith Management, and connected the dots and saw that the company that bought her mobile home park, Homes of America, was actually a business affiliate of Alden Global Capital, the same company that was known for destroying local newspapers.

Adams: Now the residents of Elk View Estates are suing Homes of America. What’s the latest on what’s happening there?

Reynolds: So a pro bono law firm called Mountain State Justice decided to support the tenants in all six Mercer County mobile home parks that were owned by Homes of America. They have filed several lawsuits, including one that’s a possible class action. They’re waiting to see if they get certified. And the reason I call them “the Davids fighting Goliath” is because they’ve actually had some successes. They were able to stop rent increases. They were able to halt some evictions. When Homes of America took over, rents just shot up. I mean, Valeria’s went up $300 a month, from $550 to $850 a month. Some went up 60 percent. And we’re talking about, many people in these parks are on very limited income — Social Security, veterans benefits — and can’t even fathom affording that kind of rent increase.

At the same time, they’re stuck there if they’re renting the land, but they own their mobile home. The costs of moving the home are prohibitive. You know, it can be in the tens of thousands of dollars to move one of these mobile homes. So many of them just left. The parks now have a huge vacancy rate. Valeria has told me that there’s been sewage leaks, that there’s overgrown grass, broken windows. And all of this took place since Homes of America took over the park.

The lawsuits, like I said, have had some successes. To me that was very inspiring, because journalists have been trying to figure out how to save their local newspapers, and so far have been kind of befuddled. They’ve been fighting back, and they’ve had a few small victories against Alden Global Capital. But this was stunning and inspiring to see these tenants organizing themselves. They went out with cell phones, shot photos of the sewage leaks and things like that, and put together a case.

Adams: What is the latest with their case at the moment?

Reynolds: They’re kind of on hold for a little bit. The judge handling the cases, the main one retired in December, and the new judge has not been appointed. So they had been in the middle of a process of submitting some motions, because Homes of America was not complying with the court orders. They were not supplying what’s called “discovery,” which is all the documents showing what’s going on. There is a motion still pending to order them to provide this discovery.

They’ve been ordered once and they ignored that order, and now they’re waiting for a new order to have some consequences because they’re absolutely ignoring the court’s order on this. So, they’re in a holding pattern right now. And we shall see what happens next. But they are still fighting.

Adams: You know, here in Appalachia, we’re seeing both of these trends play out in real time, with different companies buying up mobile home parks, and in a lot of cases, raising rent, and making it harder for residents to live there. At the same time, we’re seeing increasing numbers of newspapers acquired by corporate owners who appear to be stripping down the paper for parts. How does Alden bring these stories together? And how did you make these connections?

Reynolds: It was pretty easy because I’m a public documents nerd. Once I started looking at the deeds for these mobile home parks, I recognized the names. I recognized the address in Englewood, New Jersey, I knew that was Smith Management. That’s the firm of Randall Smith, the co-founder of Alden Global Capital. I saw names of Alden executives, all kinds of documents, acquisition papers, permits. Valeria has shown me a check that was cashed by an Alden affiliate was literally a firm set up by Alden completely unrelated to Homes of America. They play very loose and sloppy with all these business entities. There’s a lot of overlap. A lot of the same players are involved in them. So I recognized the names from many of the newspaper documents.

What was most disturbing was an entity — it was called, I believe, Tribune Finance MHP, LLC, something along those lines. That raised my hackles because Alden had recently acquired Tribune Publishing. And I have been trying to follow that trail to see if Alden actually extracted money from the Tribune newspapers to buy these mobile home parks. The name of that entity certainly makes it look like that. And it’s not out of Alden’s wheelhouse because they actually did the same thing with the newspaper chain I worked for, Media News Group. They extracted hundreds of millions of dollars and used that money to buy unrelated businesses that they profited from. Meanwhile, the papers were languishing. We literally had leaky roofs. We had no hot water in the building.

Alden just stopped paying bills, stopped doing maintenance — exactly the same activities they’re doing in these mobile home parks. To them, a business is just a way to extract cash. There’s no interest in journalism, there’s no interest in providing housing — these things that are essential to our society. Companies like Alden do not take that into consideration. It’s just a spreadsheet in their offices. They find ways to extract the maximum profit and provide the least amount of service because that’s what costs money.

Adams: This twin dynamic of corporations, pushing people out of housing or making it harder to live where they live and stripping down newspapers. They’re both pretty bleak. Where do you find hope in all this?

Reynolds: I find hope in Mercer County, West Virginia. I was very inspired by what these tenants are doing. They are not giving up, they are still fighting. These are their homes. This is the one thing that you can claim is yours and hold onto, and it gives you some sense of security. They are not letting go. They are tenacious. The cases are still winding their ways through the courts. Like I said, they have had some successes, and just the fact that they were able to halt the rent increases is a dramatic victory.

I think the hundreds of mobile home parks around the country that are going through the same situation, probably thousands, can look to Mercer County, and take some inspiration and study those cases and see where they’ve been able to have these successes. I mean, I’m just very inspired. I recommend journalists look at them, and study, how are they able to get this kind of success? Because if it’s not illegal, what Alden is doing, it is certainly unethical, it’s immoral.

In many cases, they have just completely ignored permitting processes, things like that. And so that’s where these tenants are able to catch them in the act and find, “Hey, you are not meeting the requirements to even get a permit to operate this business.” And the court says, “Hey, that’s true. Let’s do something about this. You can’t keep charging extra rent until you fix these things.” And in fact, I’m told by the attorneys handling the case that everything they have fixed has been because of a court order.

Adams: It’s pretty cool that a reporter from all the way across the country is still tracking these legal proceedings in West Virginia. Julie Reynolds, thank you for your work. And thanks for coming on and speaking with us on Inside Appalachia.

Reynolds: You’re very welcome. And it’s my pleasure. And both my parents are from Appalachia. So I have roots in eastern Kentucky.

Six Years Living Next To The Mountain Valley Pipeline

Coles and Theresa “Red” Terry have been fighting over the Mountain Valley Pipeline nearly since it was first proposed in 2014. The project connects natural gas terminals in Virginia and West Virginia with a 303-mile pipeline that stretches across some of Appalachia’s most rugged terrain. Almost immediately after construction began, protestors tried to block it by setting up and living in platforms in trees along the route.

This story originally aired in the March 24, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Coles and Theresa “Red” Terry have been fighting over the Mountain Valley Pipeline nearly since it was first proposed in 2014.

The project connects natural gas terminals in Virginia and West Virginia with a 303-mile pipeline that stretches across some of Appalachia’s most rugged terrain. Almost immediately after construction began, protesters tried to block it by setting up and living in platforms in trees along the route.

Theresa Terry, better known as “Red,” was one of those tree sitters, and she stood out. She was in her 60s — and she wasn’t just an activist. She was tree-sitting on her own land. Back in 2018, Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams interviewed her from on the ground, outside a police barrier that had been set up to prevent her from receiving supplies from her supporters.

Red Terry looks down from her tree sit against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in 2018.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Not long after the interview, Red was forced out of the trees by a judge who threatened her with a $1,000 per day fine. But Red and her husband Coles have continued to fight the pipeline in court.

Since Congress approved a law that included a provision to force completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, they’ve been seeing construction crews again. Adams wanted to learn more about what’s happened in the six years since Red came down from her tree sit. So he ventured out to Bent Mountain, Virginia, to talk to Red and Coles on their family land.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Adams: How long have y’all lived on this land here in Roanoke County? Did you grow up here?

Coles: I didn’t grow up up here. I grew up in town. My dad, he was an insurance agent. He had his own business. I grew up in Roanoke, but this property’s been in my family for, you know, several generations. We’ve lived up here since we got married. We were married in the front yard, and pretty much came back from our honeymoon into this house.

Red and Cole Terry embrace after she came down from more than a month in her tree sit in 2018.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Adams: So I remember the kind of pipeline being announced. When did y’all learn that the Mountain Valley Pipeline was supposed to come through this property?

Coles: March 28, 2015. We got a letter from the county telling us that our property was one of their proposed routes. Two-hundred and two landowners were served at one time, because it was just quicker and easier to take us all to court. I think we got one offer from them. It was a ridiculously low offer. [We] just said no, and the next thing I know, I’m being sued for eminent domain. There was no negotiating, there was no coming by and talking, “Hey, this is what we can do,” sitting down and talking to you about anything. It’s just, “Hey, no, we’re taking it. This National Gas Act allows us to do that. It put it in the national interest.” Unfortunately, the national interest doesn’t include also protecting people’s personal property, the water or people’s well-beings. It’s just, “It’s in the natural interest to get this pipeline in the ground and pumping gas.

Adams: That was 2018. Here we are now in 2024. I drove in and there are still visible pipeline crews.

Coles: Oh yeah. Everywhere.

Adams: What’s it like to live next to that for six years? How do you come to terms with that?

Coles: For a while, you still had the hopes that, because they were still working on getting all their permits and we were still commenting, and we were still meeting with people in these organizations who were supposedly there to prevent anything going wrong, [they’d] step up and say, “Hey!” But they just kept getting, “Well, this, this looks good to us. This looks fine. There’s nothing to see here. Go ahead. You can do what you need to do.” It just gets more and more disheartening every day. We’re still fighting. They’re still ongoing. We’re taking pictures. We’re trying to show where the sediment’s coming in, and, they’re basically not even getting a slap on the wrist anymore.

I don’t even want to be outside. I don’t want to hear them. Just the fact that I know they’re there is hard enough on me. It’s tough sometimes. Right now, I can hear them when I go outside. I can’t see them because they have finished burying the pipe behind my house for the most part. They still have to test it and then restore it and everything. But that could still take years.

Red Terry crosses a creek near her home just after coming down from a tree sit in 2018.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Adams: Red, you showed me your photo roll, and a lot of photos with the sedimentation and the slime. I remember you scrolled down a good way, and I was overwhelmed in a way, because you had other photos of family and things like that. But so much of your photo roll was just documenting this damage. Like every day when you drive out, you’re just surrounded by it. And you’re dealing with a bureaucracy that seems unresponsive. So I’m wondering, what keeps you going? What gives you hope? What helps you get up and keep fighting this battle day after day, after day?

Coles: For me? I guess it’s the hope that maybe somebody somewhere will will say, “Yeah, we need to stop this or slow this down.” A lot of it, too, is tried to stop it from happening to somebody else. They’re now proposing another pipeline that’s going to be just as big as this one and just as bad as this one. I admire President Biden for halting any new LNG [liquefied natural gas] buildout. We’re already one of the biggest exporters of LNG in the world. The UK and European nations are trying to get away from LNG, and so the market for that is going to collapse. But we’re going to force the country to build more infrastructure to support it. We don’t know where it’s even gonna go.

Red: From day one, it has been nothing but lies. When your daughter — who is just as mean and ornery and, in my eyes, perfect — looks at you and says, “I won’t be alive in two years,” because this bomb’s gonna go off. And we are in the blast zone. I’m 600 yards from that bomb. Everybody up here on this mountain right now, including myself, have pipes floating in water. That one out there floated in over four feet of water for a month. They came in and took two pumps to pump it dry, heat it up, welded it, threw it in there and covered it with mud. You’re not supposed to cover it with mud. But hey, okay, they’re in a hurry. They don’t have to really do anything that they’re supposed to do.

What gets me up in the morning? I don’t want to get up in the morning. I don’t want to do anything. I have so much **** to do, and I’m paralyzed.

Adams: So now MVP is telling investors and the press that they expect to be completed this spring. What do you all foresee in the future? What do you expect will happen?

Coles: Do I think they’ll be done by the end of March? I see pictures of pipe still above ground. I don’t know how long it’s going to take them to bore under [Interstate] 81. I know there’s some really hard rock there. I know that they might have finished one of the bores at my sister’s, but it took them a lot longer than they thought it was going to. They’re still blasting over there.

So, either they’ve given up boring or they’re just digging through, I’m not sure. I find it hard to believe this pipeline will be in service by the end of the first quarter of this year. “In-service” means a lot of different things to me. Even if the whole pipe’s in the ground, it still has to be tested. The right-of-way has to be restored. FERC [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] still has to approve it. I was told that it could take ‘til 2026 or 2027 to get everything restored.

Adams: That thing you said about Minor [their daughter] saying she doesn’t expect to be alive in three years?

Coles: Yes. Because she thinks once they start putting gas in this thing, it’s going to rupture and explode.

Red: This is one of the steepest, unbelievable, someone sitting in an office drawing a line. And I understand what they did because they have tried to go to the largest landowners so that they don’t have that many fights, so they don’t have that much opposition.

Coles and Theresa “Red” Terry at their home in Bent Mountain, Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Adams: When I was a cub reporter at the Roanoke Times and somebody gets shot and killed, you’d have to go to talk to their family — like that level of grief. That’s what this feels like.

Red: When Coles and I got married, and when we moved up here, this wall was falling in. This was screens that had been ripped and torn. These boards under here were this wide and they were spaced to have plenty of room between them. And my dearest husband hooked a come-along to a tree out here and pulled the house back out, put in the drop ceiling, put in the staircase here, put in the windows. We laid some floor, put some carpet down, opened the door. And every morning, every ******* morning. I would get up — my kids got me blinds to close for the MVP, I’ve never had blinds up — but every morning I would go out here and look, and just stand there and look, and think to myself, “I must be the luckiest person alive to have this view.”

Now, every time I look, I see the flags. I see the damage. I see the destruction. And I mean, my view, my hike through there, my apple orchard on the top where I went mushroom hunting, and all the critters in the world up here went up to that top orchard. Because the trees were so big. I had one up there that just produced so much. And all of that is now part of their LOD. And it just … it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking what they’ve done. I mean, I still love this mountain, but it’s heartbreaking what they’ve done to so many parts that were so beautiful. And then the other day, when my son was here, and I stopped at the mailboxes, and I parked on our road, our driveway, and I walked over to the mailboxes and all the MVP guys were leaving. So I “waved” to ‘em. And one guy went by me in a big blue truck, and he slammed on his brakes.

Now, you got a whole crew leaving, and he slammed on his brakes, and I’m standing at my mailbox waiting on them to pass. And he comes over and goes, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me. Don’t be shooting the finger at me.” And I looked at him. I said, “Are you a pipeliner?” He said, “Yes, I am.” I said, “Well, I don’t have to know you to know what you’re doing to my land, and yeah, I’d like you to go the **** home.” And he said, “I’m not going anywhere,” and he gets … he’s a little taller than I am. And he’s like, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you move?” And I’m like, “My husband’s family has been here for seven generations.” He goes, “I’ve been a pipeliner. We’ve got pipeliners for six generations.” But he gets up over me.

I said, “Bring in on, ***********. You don’t have anything that scares me. I’m old. I’m tired. And I used to be a redhead before you ************* showed up. So do your worst. I’m not afraid.” And the guy about 10 trucks back jumped out and came up and grabbed him. “Get in your truck and leave.” He goes, “I’m not finished.” He says, “Yes you are. Get in your truck and leave.” And I’ve never had such evil thoughts in my life. I have never wanted to hurt anyone. And things are changing. Things are changing. I would like to hurt somebody really bad.

——

After this interview, Inside Appalachia reached out to pipeline officials about the Terrys’ claims.

Pipeline spokeswoman Natalie Cox sent a statement:

“MVP project opponents continue to promote factual inaccuracies in support of their agenda, which includes a primary objective to stop MVP and other linear infrastructure. The MVP project has been subject to an unprecedented level of scrutiny, and the fact is the VADEQ, WVDEP, and other agencies continue to conduct daily project inspections, and the inspection process is working as designed. If and when any compliance issues are identified, Mountain Valley takes immediate responsibility to remediate the identified issue or concern. As has always been the case, completing construction and fully restoring the project’s right-of-way remains the best method of permanent environmental protection.

“Mountain Valley will continue to coordinate with all appropriate state and federal agencies, including FERC, USACE, VADEQ, VDCR, and WVDEP, to ensure the safe, responsible completion of the project, which includes building and operating the project in accordance with all applicable regulations, incorporating best management practices, and meeting or exceeding applicable industry standards for linear infrastructure.”

Construction continues on the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Company officials project it will be completed by June 2024.

How W.Va. Oil And Gas Industry Leaves Behind Radioactivity

In some places, the oil and gas industry is leaving behind industrial sites that are radioactive and dangerous — like Fairmont Brine in Fairmont, West Virginia. This abandoned site became a popular hangout spot for unsuspecting local residents. Investigative journalist Justin Nobel has written about Fairmont Brine. Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Nobel to learn more.

This conversation originally aired in the Feb. 25, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In some places, the oil and gas industry is leaving behind industrial sites that are radioactive and dangerous — like Fairmont Brine in Fairmont, West Virginia.

This abandoned site became a popular hangout spot for unsuspecting local residents. Justin Nobel has covered issues of radioactivity in the oil and gas industry for an upcoming book, Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.

Nobel wrote about Fairmont Brine for Truthdig. The story is titled “Inside West Virginia’s Chernobyl: A highly radioactive oil and gas facility has become a party spot in Marion County.”

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Nobel to learn more.

Investigative reporter Justin Nobel.

*Photo courtesy of Justin Nobel*

Adams: Your story describes an abandoned industrial site where locals are hanging out. That rings true to me from my teenage years a little bit. But in this case, there’s something else going on here. What did you find out?

Nobel: Over the course of my reporting into oilfield radioactivity, I’ve learned that a lot more comes to the surface with oil and gas development than just the oil and gas. The industry brings a lot of really toxic materials up from deep in the earth. Often you have heavy metals, you have carcinogens, like benzene volatile organics, and you have radioactive metals as well.

One of the most concerning ones is the radioactive metal radium, which is a known human carcinogen. You have this really big waste stream in the oilfield brine that comes up. The industry also calls that “produced water.” This is a major waste stream across the U.S. — three billion gallons of oilfield brine a day comes to the surface with oil and gas development, and the industry has to do something with that. So the industry has had an interest in trying to “treat” that brine — trying to take out the toxicity. Take out the heavy metals, take out the radioactivity, and you’ve got a lot of salt. So you can transform that into a usable product, maybe like road salts. Then with the watery component, you can use that to frack new wells. And that sounds really great to the industry. They love to promote that they can take the waste stream and repurpose it for something beneficial.

The problem with brine is it has such a complex brew of toxic elements that it’s actually really, really hard to treat. It’s really hard to remove all the different contaminants from brine and get this clean product that you can then send back out into the world. Even if you do that successfully, you collected all the toxicity, right? And if part of that toxicity is radioactivity, you’ve created a facility where you are concentrating and collecting radioactivity.

At this particular site in West Virginia, this is exactly what they were trying to do: They were trying to treat the oilfield brine. And if your plan isn’t working perfectly, you’re gonna get gunked up really quickly. And you’re building up heavy metals, you’re building up radioactivity, and you’re building up potentially all sorts of problems. And across the board, these plants fail.

The Fairmont Brine Processing site was covered with graffiti and littered with detritus such as beer cans and condoms, indicating the place has become a recurring party spot for locals. Yuri Gorby expressed particular concern about the highly elevated levels of the extremely dangerous radioactive element polonium. Anyone partying at the site is “going to be getting dosed,” says Gorby. “There are going to be long-term chronic effects from this.”

*Photo courtesy of Justin Nobel*

Adams: At Fairmont Brine, your Geiger counter reads about 7,000 counts per minute, which maxes out the unit. You later drive home the point that working at those levels of radioactivity for one week will take a worker over a yearly limit set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But yet, teenagers could wander in here without being stopped. What’s the status of this facility?

Nobel: I think anywhere in America, if you have this kind of busted up industrial site, it’s going to be a place where kids are going to want to hang out. You’ve got this site sitting there up on a hill, just outside the city limits of Fairmont — it’s an attractive place to just go and hang out. There’s grassy fields, there’s this big parking lot. There’s these weird, beat up buildings that you can wander around in. And then containers of stuff, all this different equipment.

What we realized and learned when we went there is wild. Parts of it are really, really dangerous and radioactive. But as soon as the article came out, the EPA really kicked into high gear. They had found levels of radioactivity even higher than we found. The EPA is now working with the community. They’ve set up a call center for local residents to get information on the site. I was told by an EPA official they’re in the process of fencing it off, and moving forward to see if it fits the role of a national Superfund site. So they’re in the process of — I wouldn’t say cleaning it up — but setting it up for a possible cleanup and at least making sure that people from the town can’t move around in it.

Adams: The other piece of this that’s alarming is that this is not a unique situation. You found sites like this elsewhere in Appalachia as well as the U.S. So this is not a singular phenomenon limited to Fairmont Brine.

Nobel: Some of these sites, they often don’t operate for longer than a year or two or three, because it’s a really difficult task to remove all the contaminants. To treat oilfield waste is a lot harder than these companies make it out to be. So what you find is, you have a bunch of sites that are currently operating, they’re hard to access, no one’s gonna let you in there and want to show an investigative science journalist around. And then you have these abandoned sites that aren’t operating anymore, but maybe they’re fenced off and they’re deep in the woods, and there’s still a security person guarding it.

Fairmont Brine was different. It was just right off the main road, and it was all open. Other people were hanging out there and they were entering it, and we entered it just like them. So it was really a rare window to ground truth. The concerns that had piled up over time.

Veolia’s Clearater facility in Doddridge County, West Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Ted Auch/FracTracker Alliance, 2020*

In other instances, such as the Clearwater plant, which is in Doddridge County along Highway 50 in northern West Virginia, I didn’t have access to the site and I still don’t, but there’s an equal amount of concern, in my opinion. This is another facility that was processing oilfield wastewater. This facility claimed that they could take 600 truckloads a day.

So if you go around the oilfield, you see the brine trucks. They look like these little septic tank trucks can hold maybe like 4,000 gallons. Six hundred of those trucks a day. That is a lot of oilfield wastewater, and they had grandiose language for how they were going to operate this plant. I mean, they claimed that this Clearwater plant was going to be one of the greatest environmental assets for the oil and gas industry in recent American history. The West Virginia governor was there giving a statement for the opening. There was really big money behind this plan. It cost like a quarter of a billion dollars, and involved a union between a Colorado energy company and Terra resources, which is big in northern West Virginia, and this really savvy fancy French waste and water management company called Veolia, which has operations all over the world.

It kind of represents an opposite end of the spectrum from Fairmont Brine, which was operated by a company based out of Pittsburgh. It’s pretty local. They’ve got investors, but it’s on a different scale than this company where you actually have a really major company that is known all over the world. But I was skeptical from the beginning. I visited that site with oilfield workers, and then after less than two years of operations, the site was shut down. I think what’s significant there is, the local news story was that it was shut because gas prices went down and it wasn’t economically viable any longer. But what I learned in reporting that story is the site was actually shuttered because it just wasn’t working again.

Whether it was the local capital setting up this small plant in Fairmont, or whether it was international capital setting up this major facility with a lot of gusto — both of them did not work. The difference though, is with Fairmont Brine, we go in and we saw the mess, and the mess is devastating. We were able to test to know exactly how radioactive the waste left on site was — and it’s very radioactive. Clearwater is a bit more of a black box, because I don’t have access to that site, and so I think there’s a huge concern of what is left on site there. But until I can connect maybe with a former worker who can serve as a whistleblower and lay out just what happened there, or get access to the site, or work with the state to try and enable them to get access, we still don’t know just what sort of mess is left up on that particular hillside.

Part of what strikes me, as I talk to community members as they learn about this, it’s kind of like I went down the rabbit hole as a reporter, and when I publish these stories, and a community member or worker reads what was actually happening at these facilities and what was left behind, they go down their own rabbit hole. They suddenly are learning about a part of the oil and gas industry they never knew about. And what I think has been really unfortunate is that these facilities are still getting built, they’re still getting permitted by the state, and in most cases, the community is still unaware.

You have these harms piling up, and people are not informed about them. And this is especially the case in communities where there’s a legitimate need for jobs. And so you know, it makes our mission of trying to spread awareness on this topic really important. It’s like profiting off the lack of knowledge that’s really worrisome to me. These are the things we try and get to the bottom of, and dig up. So I appreciate [that] I have a chance to expose this, because it does need to be exposed.