WVPB Staff, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

What Is Appalachia? We Asked People From Around The Region. Here’s What They Said

Appalachia connects mountainous parts of the South, the Midwest, the Rust Belt, even the Northeast. The Appalachian Regional Commission defined the boundaries for Appalachia in 1965 with the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. It was legislation that sought to expand social welfare, and some localities were eager for the money, while others resisted the designation. The boundaries and definition of Appalachia can only be changed by an act of Congress.

Politically, Appalachia encompasses 423 counties across 13 states — and West Virginia’s the only state entirely inside the region.

That leaves so much room for geographic and cultural variation, as well as many different views on what Appalachia really is. For Inside Appalachia this week, we’re turning our entire episode over to the question, “What is Appalachia?” With stories from Mississippi to Pittsburgh, we ask people across our region whether they consider themselves to be Appalachian.

Mississippi

Bob Owens is a watermelon farmer outside New Houlka, in the northeastern part of Mississippi. Owens said he was aware that Mississippi is part of Appalachia, but that no one in the state would consider themselves Appalachian. “I consider myself the worst redneck you’ve ever seen,” Owens said. “I live in the area of the Appalachian mountain range—not part of it, but close to it. So I guess you call me a redneck Appalachian.” This is the general consensus among the people in Mississippi we spoke to.

Geographically, the foothills of the Appalachian mountain range are located in northern Mississippi. The state’s tallest point is Woodall Mountain, 806 feet in elevation. For reference, the highest point in North Carolina, Mount Mitchell, is more than 6,600 feet in elevation, eight times higher than Woodall Mountain.

Co-host Caitlin Tan spoke with Texas State University History professor Justin Randolph, who wrote an essay for “Southern Cultures” called “The Making of Appalachian Mississippi.” Randolph argues in his essay that Mississippi became part of Appalachia for political and racial reasons, as well as economic advantages the designation brought the 24 counties in Mississippi that were included in the ARC’s boundaries.

Shenandoah Valley

In the 1960s, while some localities were clamoring to get into Appalachia, on the eastern edge of the region some lawmakers fought to keep their counties outside the boundaries, including politicians in Roanoke, Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. Appalachian Studies associate professor Emily Satterwhite said explaining to her students why some counties in Virginia are included in Appalachia, but others aren’t is confusing. “The students in front of me are wondering why they’re not included,” White said.

Pittsburgh

Appalachia’s largest city is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When we asked people from that city to tell us if they consider it a part of Appalachia, about half said no. “I definitely do not feel that I am Appalachian culturally,” said Mark Jovanovich, who grew up just outside Pittsburgh’s city limits in the Woodland Hills area. “Personally, I would consider the city of Pittsburgh is sort of like a mini New York City. I guess we’d probably be lumped in as like a Rust Belt city, which makes enough sense, but definitely not Appalachian culturally.”

Writer Brian O’Neill disagrees. He wrote a book called “The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-First Century.” “My original title for the book was ‘I love Pittsburgh like a brother and my brother drives me nuts.’”

An editor advised him to change the title of his book to a phrase that he said is sometimes used to refer to Pittsburgh derisively. “I couldn’t figure out why that should be a putdown, because Paris is nice. And Appalachia is a beautiful part of the world. And if we were called the Paris of the Rockies, we wouldn’t run from that. So why would we run from this? Why don’t we embrace it? So that became the title of my book.”

He said that geographically, Pittsburgh is clearly in the Appalachian Mountains. “I mean, this is one mountain range that stretches from Georgia to Maine. And the idea that it belongs only to the southern part of the mountain range defies logic to me,” O’Neill said.

What Do You Think?

How about you? Do you call yourself an Appalachian? Why or why not? Send an email to InsideAppalachia at wvpublic.org.

Reporters Jess Mador, Shepherd Snyder and Liz McCormick contributed to this episode.

Roxy Todd is our producer. Our executive producer is Andrea Billups. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi and Eric Douglas also helped produce this episode. You can find us on Twitter @InAppalachia. You can also send us an email to InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

COVID Could Create Silver Lining For West Virginia's Economy

As the coronavirus pandemic lingers in the United States, and as many who can, continue to work and live in the narrow confines of their home, Americans are taking a long, hard look at why they live where they live. For many, the question has become, ‘if I can work from anywhere, why am I living here?’

“We’re seeing that people not only want a less dense neighborhood, they want less overcrowding within their own particular home,” said Jessica Lautz — vice president of demographics and behavioral insights for the National Association of Realtors. “So they need more personal space. But they also are looking for a place with a yard or acreage, a place where you can get fresh air without having to worry about your neighbors who could be an unattached apartment or condo building as well.”

Lautz said they’re seeing people start to migrate out of cities and into suburbs and small towns.

“I actually think that it might expand the American dream to some people,” she said. “If you can take advantage of low interest rates right now and perhaps you can look at a more affordable place to move and have a bigger home than perhaps a crowded city center. This could open up a lot of opportunities for people to purchase their first home, to be able to raise perhaps their family in a larger single family home than they could have imagined.”

Which poises places like West Virginia at the precipice of opportunity.

For decades, West Virginia has been losing population, with aging communities and many people moving away to find better economic opportunities. It’s a problem that politicians have been talking about for years. And in an unexpected way, some experts believe coronavirus could present a solution — if leadership moves fast enough.

“I think West Virginia has a lot of potential and we need to just start to recognize this potential and really start to market ourselves to remote workers,” said John Deskins, director of West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business & Economic Research.

“People see potential to live in a less congested environment, and a lower cost of living environment, in an environment where they can enjoy some of the best outdoor recreation opportunities in the country with whitewater rafting, rock climbing, mountain biking, etc. And they can still work their normal jobs in a big city. It can be a real win-win for a lot of people in a lot of cases.”

New York to West Virginia

Mila Palasin and her husband Ken Magill have lived in Central Valley, New York, about 45 minutes north of Manhattan since 2008. Magill, a freelance writer, had been working from home for years, while Palasin had been spending about 20 hours of her week commuting about into the city for her advertising job. When the pandemic hit New York City, though, she stopped commuting.

But moving home to work had no impact on her ability to do her job and a huge impact on her quality of life. And so, an idea was born.

“Very quickly, like within a day, we discussed it and we’re like we need to move,” said Magill.

The impetus was economic. Magill said they pay $12,000 each year in taxes on their New York home. If they could cut down on some of those taxes, they could put more in retirement and raise their standard of living.

They started looking at where they wanted to live.

“So we started looking at different areas. And we eliminated Georgia and and North Carolina and South Carolina, Florida is a little hot and hurricany for our taste,” he said. “And then we finally settled on West Virginia and made the decision. Like, we made the decision on a Tuesday. The following Wednesday, I was down there putting an offer on a house.”

Magill said for them, moving to West Virginia will be a game changer. They were able to buy a home in Charleston with cash pulled from their retirement accounts. Magill said once their New York home sells, they’ll put the money back in that account. But they are excited about the opportunities moving to West Virginia will bring them.

“Now, I understand you have issues in that state — I get that,” he said. “But I’m also thinking we might be part of a wave that drives West Virginia’s economy forward.”

“We’re going to be renovating, we’re going to be buying appliances,” Palasin said. “We’re going to be painting, we’re going to be, you know, doing all sorts of investment in our new home, and that will go straight into the local economy.”

Palasin and Magill are moving to Charleston — one of the only places in the state with fast enough broadband for them to work remotely. Lack of broadband outside of the metro areas, is really going to cripple West Virginia’s ability to capitalize on this migration Deskin said.

“For most areas of West Virginia, this discussion has no relevance. For places like Pendleton county or Pocahontas county where the Internet is just lacking, they have to bring in the Internet first before they can really participate in this discussion.”

And the window for participating, he said, may be right now, as the pandemic is still in the forefront of people’s minds, pushing them to rethink how they want to work and live.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.

Q&A: Reckoning with Sexual Assault

On this West Virginia Morning, the latest episode of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Us & Them podcast focuses on the subject of sexual assault on…

On this West Virginia Morning, the latest episode of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Us & Them podcast focuses on the subject of sexual assault on college campuses. This is an emotionally charged and a delicate subject. Our assistant news director, Glynis Board, spoke with Us & Them Host Trey Kay about the episode titled “Reckoning with Sexual Assault: Righting a Wrong.”

Also on today’s show, in West Virginia there are 27 craft breweries. Three quarters of them opened in the past five years.

Most of them make smaller batches. That gives them the flexibility to make unique offerings. You can find West Virginia beers that contain traces of coffee, berries and even tree branches.

Eric Douglas recently visited Weathered Ground Brewery in Raleigh County, and brings us this story.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from West Virginia University, Concord University, and Shepherd University.

Aging in Appalachia: Dying with Dignity

Hollywood tells us that love stories are about the beginning — catching an eye across a crowded room, a first date, a dramatic proposal. We see little, if anything, after the fairytale wedding. But for many, the greatest testament to love is not the first moments, but the last.

And, for some of us, navigating the last moments means asking for help.

Yet people in Appalachia can be suspicious of end-of-life care, especially hospice care. There’s a perception that when hospice comes in, it’s only for the last hours before someone dies, rather than easing the last weeks or months of life. That was certainly what Sheila Brown thought.

Sheila and Waitman Brown were married for 50 years. They were high school sweethearts and raised two children in rural Wyoming County — in southern West Virginia.

“He was a coal miner,” said Sheila. “We got married in ‘67, I graduated high school in ‘68. And then I got pregnant with my son in the latter part of ‘68 and he was shipped to Vietnam.”

There, Waitman was exposed to Agent Orange. Combined with later years in the coal mines, Waitman struggled with his health. He had three bouts of cancer. The last time he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

“I would walk him down the stairs and put him in the shower and I’d have to get in the shower with him and bathe him and stuff,” she said. “I’d get him out and sit him on the commode and by the time I’d get him dried off I was worn plum out. I stayed real tired all the time and they said ‘this is what hospice is for — hospice will help you with all this stuff.’”

At Sheila’s urging, Waitman decided to try treatment, which the doctors told them would not cure the cancer, only prolong his life. He couldn’t keep it up. So someone at the hospital recommended hospice.

Sheila was pretty resistant at first. She said she was scared because she had always been told that when hospice comes, you only have a few days left.

And hospice doesn’t always have the best reputation. A 2017 joint investigation between Time Magazine and Kaiser Health News found over 3,000 complaints filed over a five-year period against the nation’s 4,000 hospice organizations. The complaints referenced everything from hospice workers failing to show up to unreturned phone calls and broken hospital beds.

Medicare now has a link on its website from which you can compare hospice agencies in your area. Most, like the one that served the Browns, are non-profits and rate well. And most people, like the Browns, have a good experience. In fact, hospice worked with their family for almost a year.

“It helped my husband [with] what time he had left when he felt good,” said Sheila.

Landon Blankenship is the chief nursing officer of Hospice of Southern West Virginia,the agency that worked with Sheila and Waitman. He said from his perspective, the point of hospice is exactly the benefit that Sheila described.

“Our goal is to make the last days, the best days. A lot of people think hospice is for the dying. We tend to think hospice is for the living.”

Blankenship said when hospice staffers come in, they aim to help the patient live their last days as comfortably as possible: with no pain; able to breathe freely; able to accomplish that last bucket list item — attend their daughter’s wedding, go to the family reunion, make one more birthday. Yet in southern West Virginia, he said there are a couple of hurdles for getting people to use hospice in the first place.

“Well, we [West Virginians] take care of our own,” said Blankenship. “Getting in the home is the problem. Once you’re in, you’re treated like family, so it’s just breaking through that barrier there to actually have some to accept you into their home.”

He thinks the hurdles start with late referrals from medical providers

“A lot of physicians are hesitant to make referrals earlier on,” he said. “Our rule of thumb is if you have a patient and you think that there’s a possibility that they can pass in the next year, that’s probably an appropriate time to make a hospice referral.”

Yet doctors are taught to treat. They often try and “save” the patient no matter the cost, which Blankenship thinks is the wrong tactic.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of framing of goals,” he said. “Everybody wants hope. Everybody wants that next best treatment. Everybody thinks it’s in that next chemo, it’s in that next pill, but it’s in that next surgery. The unfortunate thing is sometimes there is no hope in another treatment. So we need to get to the point in my opinion that we do a better job in the medical community of reframing our goals.”

Which may mean teaching medical providers to sit down with patients and their families and to truly talk through what their goals are for the next phase. For Waitman Brown, that was getting to his 71st birthday, which he did. Sheila threw him a huge party and the community, including one of the hospice nurses on her day off, turned out to celebrate his life.

“It was snowing that day,” said Sheila. “But my house was packed out full. I mean we had him a big birthday party and he was tickled to death, but he didn’t have hardly enough oxygen to blow his candles out.”

Two months later, he was moved to the Bowers Hospice House in Beckley, where he could receive even more attentive care. He passed away shortly thereafter.

Blankenship continues to check on Sheila periodically. She’s got health problems of her own and her son moved her from Wyoming County to just outside Charleston to be closer to him and her doctors. But she said when her time comes, she won’t have any problem with using hospice herself.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.

Aging in Appalachia Series Wraps Up With Spotlight on Hospice

On this West Virginia Monring, people can be suspicious of end-of-life care, especially Hospice. There’s a perception that when Hospice comes in, it’s…

On this West Virginia Monring, people can be suspicious of end-of-life care, especially Hospice. There’s a perception that when Hospice comes in, it’s only for the last hours before someone dies. In the final story of the series about aging in Appalachia, Kara Lofton found that for some families, Hospice services can not only help the dying live, but ease the caregiving burden on their families for weeks or months.

Also on today’s show, West Virginia native Emily Calandrelli goes by the name “The Space Gal” online. She has a passion for space exploration and getting more young people, especially girls, into science technology, engineering and math. She recently spoke in Charleston and Eric Douglas caught up with her afterward.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from West Virginia University, Concord University, and Shepherd University.

Outside in Appalachia Part 1

A little over a decade ago, a psychologist named Richard Louv coined the term “Nature Deficit Disorder,” meaning that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors, to the detriment of their mental and physical health. It’s not an officially recognized medical disorder. But health professionals from various fields are embracing the idea that America’s shift toward sedentary, indoor lifestyles is harming our health.

“Well, research has shown that people feel better, it improves our mood! Nature is a healer,” said Scott Geller, a professor of psychology at Virginia Tech. For the last 50 years he’s been studying how psychology and the environment interact.

“It’s been shown clearly that nature, that the environment, increases subjective well-being. Now, if we’re stuck behind the television, indoors and we’re sitting on that couch — couch potatoes — we’re missing opportunities to get up and moving. And, of course, there’s a health benefit to moving, and the environment naturally inspires us — once we’re out there — to keep moving.”

Ross Arena is a professor of physical therapy at the University of Ilinois Chicago who focuses on something called “healthy living medicine,” which is using exercise and nutrition to prevent and treat chronic disease with a much greater community focus. He advocates “moving away from the hospital and more towards where people live, work and go to school.”

Arena said the health benefits of being active are not reserved for people training for marathons or gym rats.

“Movement is highly beneficial,” he said. “Instead of ‘let’s talk about exercise,’ let’s talk about movement and actually thinking about three facets of that: so your steps per day, your sitting time, and then participation in a structured exercise program. And all of those are independently valuable. When you synergize them together, they’re even more valuable.”

And the easiest way to do that, he said, is just to go outside. Walk around your block, do yoga on the back porch, visit the local park. And bring the whole family.

“Like a lot of behaviors, what you practice within the families, tends to be what happens,” said Earle Chambers, a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

“So your dietary choices are reflective of whoever is the one making the meals in your home, and it’s the same thing with activity. If you don’t live in a family that’s particularly active, then you tend to not be as active too,” Chambers said.

Familial inactivity has resulted in an all-time high of childhood obesity, diabetes, hypertension and asthma. Despite a myriad of outdoor recreation resources, Appalachia in particular has shockingly high numbers of these diseases – and so far, they’re continuing to rise.

For addictions researcher Peter Thanos, getting outside and exercising could be a tool for preventing and treating addiction.

“Chronic aerobic exercise had an impact on brain chemistry in a way that is consistent with what we know in terms of decreasing vulnerability to drug abuse,” he said. “And this was something that was very, very profound.”

Thanos is referring to research published last month in the online journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

“Because aerobic exercise has this effect at essentially restoring the balance of brain chemicals in the brain,” he said. “That same imbalance is what’s also found for individuals who have either a vulnerability or dependency for opioids or other drugs.”

Basically, the experts agree – getting outside, being active and enjoying nature are all hugely beneficial to human health. So this summer, I’m heading into nature and inviting you to come along as we find hidden gems, hiking favorites and rivers worth exploring, Outside, in Appalachia.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.