Zack Harold, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Remembering Travis Stimeling, A WVU Professor, Scholar Of American Music, Musician And Friend

In walked Travis Stimeling. Burly and ebullient, Stimeling grew up playing guitar in church as a child in Buckhannon, West Virginia, then went on to study trombone in college. That eventually led to a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a teaching gig at Millikin University in Illinois.

This story originally aired in the March 10, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Sophia Enriquez didn’t know it at the time, but one music history class in her freshman year of college would change the entire direction of her life.

It was 2013, and the music department at West Virginia University (WVU) was looking to hire another professor. As part of the interview process, the university wanted finalists for the position to teach a sample lecture. A “job talk” in academia lingo.

“I was in the guinea pig class that they gave their job talk to,” Enriquez said.

Now Stimeling was looking to come back home.

“They gave a job talk for music history class and talked about country music and Taylor Swift. And that had everyone so excited,” Enriquez said. “So that’s how I met Travis.”

Stimeling, whose pronouns were they/them, got the job. It was the beginning of what would be an extremely fruitful period, both for Stimeling and WVU’s music program.

Over the next decade, Stimeling established Appalachian music and Appalachian studies minors at the university. They published reams of articles and a shelf full of books. That includes co-authoring the autobiography of legendary session musician Charlie McCoy, and compiling a book of interviews with modern West Virginia songwriters.

Nashville Cats, one of Stimeling’s many books, is about the backing musicians who made Nashville into “Music City.”

*Photo Credit: Zack Harold/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

All these books and articles established Stimeling as a leading scholar in the study of traditional Appalachian music. But Stimeling wasn’t only a scholar — they were a musician, too. So they founded the WVU Bluegrass and Old-Time Band in addition to their academic pursuits.

Enriquez joined the band in her junior year. She originally came to WVU to study orchestral trumpet, but caught the bluegrass bug from some friends.

“I just walked right into Travis’s office one day and said ‘I think I want to do this,’” she said. “They said ‘OK, well sing me something.’”

Enriquez didn’t really consider herself a singer. But soon she was belting out the old Flatt and Scruggs tune “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” with Stimeling backing her up on flat top guitar.

“So then they’re like, ‘OK you’re in,’” she said.

But Stimeling didn’t just help Enqiruez find her voice onstage. When she was nearing the end of her undergrad, she was unsure what to do next. One day, Stimeling sat her down and laid out the options.

“They said ‘I don’t think you’d realize you’d be really great at doing what I do,’” Enriquez said.

Enriquez went on to earn a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. On the day she received her doctorate, she received a voicemail from Stimeling.

“Dr. Enriquez, this is Dr. Stimeling, calling on important doctor business,” they said. “But really, congratulations. I’m just so dang proud of you, so I thought I’d call and wish it to you directly. Looking forward to celebrating with you the next time we’re together. Talk to you soon. Bye.”

Enriquez said Stimeling referred to themselves as her “academic papa.”

“I know they played that role for a lot of other people. A lot of my close friends, we were all mentees of Travis’ at some point,” she said.

Another of Stimeling’s many academic offspring was Mary Linscheid.

Linscheid grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, the child of two classical musicians. She began studying classical violin at the age of five. But she fell in love with old-time and bluegrass music as a tween.

In eighth grade, Linscheid made a fateful trip to WVU’s Mountainlair Student Union to see the university’s bluegrass band perform.

“So I graduated high school and applied to WVU — that’s the only school I applied for because I knew I didn’t want to leave,” she said. “I wanted to be in the bluegrass band. That was one of my top reasons for going.”

Stimeling, second from right, and the WVU Bluegrass and Old-Time Band pose with WVU President Gordon Gee, center.

*Photo Courtesy of Mary Linscheid*

Linscheid ended up in Stimeling’s Appalachian music and Appalachian studies minors, and she joined the bluegrass band. And like Enriquez, it was in that band that Linscheid found her voice.

“Travis actually got me singing. Before college I would never sing, especially in public. I went to church and everything, and I lip-sang,” she said. “But Travis was like, ‘If you’re going to be in the bluegrass band, everybody has to sing.’”

Linscheid started writing songs, compiling enough to record her debut album, A Place to Grow Old, in 2022. Stimeling produced that project and played and sang backup on several tracks.

“Travis was always my first listener. My first reader of anything,” Linscheid said.

Stimeling and Linscheid performing together.

*Photo Courtesy of Mary Linscheid*

The two became close friends and bandmates outside the university. They first performed together in a square dance group. Recently, Linscheid and Stimeling had started playing gigs as a duo. They had their first big performance last summer, at Jerry Run Summer Theater in Webster County.

“Travis just seemed like they were finally free in their music and ready to take off with that and go in a whole different direction with their life,” Linscheid said. “They were really excited about this next phase of their life.”

Stimeling and Linscheid were set to go into the studio to record a duet album but ended up postponing the session at the last minute. Then, just a week later, Stimeling was gone. They died unexpectedly in their home on Nov. 14, 2023.

Now, instead of recording an album, Linscheid was left to organize a memorial service. She knew she would need to include Ginny Hawker on the set list. Hawker is an expert in the old-time Primitive Baptist style of singing, so Linscheid asked her to lead the crowd in “Amazing Grace” — sung in the call-and-response style of the Primitive Baptists.

Hawker doesn’t remember exactly how she and Stimeling became friends.

“Our paths keep crossing,” she said.

Ginny Hawker (left) and Mary Linscheid sing from the Primitive Baptist hymnbook in Hawker’s Elkins, West Virginia home.

*Photo Credit: Jennie Williams/West Virginia Folklife Program*

Stimeling became fascinated by Hawker’s style of singing and the two were beginning a formal apprenticeship.

“I think we were going, Dec. 10. We were supposed to go to a Primitive Baptist church in Clay County and just listen,” Hawker said.

As they dove into the repertoire of the Primitive Baptist church, Hawker and Stimeling came to make a vow. Whichever of them died first, the other would sing the hymn “Dear Friends Farewell” at the other’s funeral.

Hawker didn’t think about her promise as Linscheid was preparing the setlist for the memorial service. She never imagined she would have to keep her end of the bargain. She assumed it would be Stimeling, singing at her funeral.

But as she sat there, listening as the WVU Bluegrass Band finish up their set with songs like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and other classic country songs Stimeling loved — Hawker remembered.

She climbed back onstage, stepped up to the mic and kept her promise to her friend:

“Dear friends, farewell, I do you tell,
Since you and I must part;
I go away and here you stay,
But still we’re joined in heart.”

——

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.

A Family Heirloom, In Your Grocer’s Freezer

In a dining room in a tidy, little house in Charleston, West Virginia, Louis and Sonny Argento introduce us to the Argento family sausage — a recipe that has brought pride and acclaim to their Italian clan for nearly a century.

This story originally aired in the Sept. 3, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Louis Argento is elbow-deep in a mixing bowl filled with ground pork and a closely guarded blend of spices. His dad, Sonny Argento, is supervising.

“How do you say ‘fennel’ in Italian?” Louis asks his father.

“Finocchio,” Sonny answers, making sure to get the accent right.

We’re in the dining room of Sonny’s tidy, little house in Charleston, West Virginia. Louis and Sonny are introducing me to the Argento family sausage — a recipe that has brought pride and acclaim to their Italian clan for nearly a century.

Usually, once the meat is mixed together, the family stuffs it into natural sausage casings. This time, Louis patties out the mixture like hamburger and throws it in a skillet. The Argentos like their sausage on pizza, in spaghetti sauce or served on a hoagie bun — but they eat it for any meal of the day.

“We like it with fried eggs and applesauce in the morning,” Louis said. “You know apples and pork generally goes well together, so we do applesauce — or fried apples, even better — with some toast on the side.”

Sonny is 82 now and he’s been eating this stuff all his life. The recipe came from his mother’s family, who hailed from the Calabria region of Italy. He grew up hearing stories about how his grandfather made it in the old country.

“They would chop the pork up with knives. They didn’t have any electricity. They couldn’t grind the pork,” Sonny said. “So they would chop it up as fine as they could get it, which wasn’t very fine, mix the seasoning in it, and he had a hollowed out cow horn. My grandmother would clean the casings … and he would skin him up on the cow horn and stuff it with his thumb.”

Sonny’s mother, Sarafina, eventually taught the recipe to Sonny’s father, Angelo Argento.

The Argentos came from Sicily. Angelo came to West Virginia from Sicily when he was six years old. He became a coal miner at just thirteen, but when he wasn’t below ground, Angelo worked for a local grocery store.

By the time he was 26, he left the mines to start a store of his own, three-and-a-half miles up Powelton Holler in Fayette County.

Sonny’s parents Angelo and Sarafina Argento on their wedding day.

*Courtesy of the Argento Family*

He called the little shop A. Argento & Co.

“He said two men could stand fingertip to fingertip, and their other hands could touch the wall. Yet he sold almost everything in there,” Sonny said.

That store only existed for about five years before it burned to the ground. Angelo didn’t have any insurance or savings, but he was already so well-known for his work ethic and honesty that a bank in Montgomery loaned him the money to build a new store — on little more than a handshake. He called this store Angelo’s Market.

“This guy had a fourth grade education, but nobody’s fool. And you weren’t going to beat him out of a nickel,” Sonny said.

In 1960, young Sonny Argento found himself stationed in the mountains of Turkey with the U.S. Air Force. He was 20 years old, away from West Virginia for the first time and chronically homesick.

He borrowed another airman’s reel-to-reel tape deck and recorded an audio message for his family back home. When they got it, his family borrowed a reel-to-reel to make a recording of their own.

Everybody in the family passed around the microphone, telling him about the ball games they won, report cards they got and the colds they had caught. When it was Sonny’s dad’s turn, Angelo made sure to give an update on the family meat shop.

“Boy, you should’ve been here this week. We’ve sure had some weather,” Angelo says on the scratchy tape, clearly choking back his emotion. “Made some pepperoni the other day and it sure was cold.”

When he heard the tape, Sonny says he immediately pictured his father’s grocery store, the meat shop and its big metal sausage mill with the feet nailed to the wooden carving block. He could see his father spooning the fragrant mix of coarse-ground pork and spices into one end of the machine and turning the crank. And he could see his mother on the other end, catching the long links of plump pink “pepperoni” — that’s what Angelo called his sausage — as it spilled from the machine.

It did very little to alleviate Sonny’s homesickness. But after five years in the Air Force he eventually made it back to Fayette County to help his father run the business. He took over completely in 1977, a few years before Angelo passed away.

Sonny (left) and his father Angelo pose in front of the meat case at Angelo’s Market in Powellton Hollow.

*Courtesy of the Argento Family*

You can probably guess where this is going: A small, family-owned store, trying to stand against the tide of big box, mega-marts and the dollar stores that seem to be cropping up in every Appalachian holler and town. More and more customers were lured away, and the Argentos just couldn’t compete.

Angelo’s Market closed in 2008, after more than 70 years in business. But here’s the thing — when it closed, the family didn’t just lose the family business.

“We had no need to go to Kroger or Walmart or any other store to shop. And when our store closed, we realized … that there was no quality Italian sausage in the stores,” Louis said.

So they just kept making the sausage, first in Sonny’s kitchen and then in a makeshift meat shop they set up in his garage. Once family and friends found out, the family started getting orders.

“A lot of people, especially the Italian-Americans around here, like the sausage for their Christmas dinners or holiday parties,” Louis said. “Next thing you know, we have an order for 500 pounds of sausage.”

The demand was so great, Sonny decided maybe it was time to try a new kind of family business.

There was a problem, though. While it’s fine to make sausage in your garage for family and friends, the government doesn’t want you to sell it. Luckily, one of Sonny’s friends owned a few grocery stores in Charleston and loaned the family the use of a health department-licensed meat shop. By making it there, the Argentos could sell their sausage in the store and offer it to local restaurants.

They named their product “Angelo’s Old World Sausage.” The label features an old photo of Sonny and his dad, Angelo, in ties and white aprons, grinning in front of the old store’s meat case.

The family made their sausage in that grocery store meat shop for about two years, but they eventually outgrew the space. They couldn’t produce as much sausage as they needed and, because it wasn’t a U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected processing facility, the Argentos couldn’t sell the sausage in other stores.

For a while, they considered building a factory of their own, but that was too big of an investment for such a small company. So they started looking around for a co-packer. After some searching they found Wampler’s Farm Sausage in Lenoir City, Tennessee. It’s also a family business — albeit one with a modern, solar-powered meat processing facility attached.

“I saw all these guys in white coats and a federal inspector walking around with their arms folded — and a tear came to my eye,” Sonny said. “I remember my mom and dad standing over the meat block making sausage … and occasionally my mother would have to put her finger in it, touch it to her tongue and say, ‘It needs more salt.’ And I’m thinking, we can no longer do that.”

Wampler’s factory is capable of turning out as much sausage as the Argentos could ever need.

And everything is still made to the family’s exacting standards, from the coarseness of the ground meat to the blend of spices that gives the sausage its unique flavor.

“We sample every batch, still,” Louis said. “As good as Wampler is, we want to make sure the sausage our customers are buying is consistent.”

Louis (left) and his father Sonny Argento pose in front of a meat case featuring their Angelo’s Old World Sausage.

*Courtesy of the Argento Family*

Louis said the appeal of Angelo’s Old World Sausage is as much about what they leave out as what they add in. There are no extra binders or additives like you might find in big commercial sausages and no preservatives.

“And it’s a joy to give people a bite of our sausage for the first time and see their face light up,” Louis said. They’re like, ‘Man, I’ve never tasted anything like this.’ Yeah, so go put your corporate sausage down and get some really good stuff here that has no preservatives in it.”

But the same economic forces that put Angelo’s Market out of business make it difficult for Angelo’s Old World Sausage to survive, too.

Their products are now available in about 30 stores in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky — although that growth has been a struggle. It can be difficult to convince managers to carry their product, when every square inch of chain grocery stores’ meat cases are rented out by major corporate producers. Angelo’s isn’t a big enough player to get into the big box stores’ warehouses, so their sausage also doesn’t appear in shopping apps.

That leaves the Argento family to depend on a more grassroots approach based on word-of-mouth, some social media advertising and setting up taste-tests in grocery stores. They’re confident that if shoppers try a bite, they’ll be hooked.

“The big challenge is getting more people to try it and to realize there is indeed a quality Italian sausage available in grocery stores. Sometimes we may cost 25 or 50 cents more, but it’s worth it,” Louis said.

Sometimes, when Sonny is working at a store taste test, he’ll offer customers a piece of sausage but they’ll politely decline and continue down the meat aisle.

“I want to just run up and tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing, if you’ll just give us a try,’” he said.

After all, this isn’t just sausage — it’s the Argento family’s most precious family heirloom.

——

‘Where We Learned About Pepperoni Rolls’ — Uncovering The Story Of the Kanawha County Schools’ Pepperoni Roll

It starts — as all pepperoni rolls do — with the dough. But not just any dough. That’s one of the secrets of Kanawha schools’ pepperoni rolls. They are made using the same recipe as the delicious, soft and sweet hot rolls that accompany every school Thanksgiving dinner and Salisbury steak.

This story originally aired in the Aug. 13, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

It’s 7:30 a.m. in the kitchen at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, West Virginia. Breakfast just wrapped up, but lunch is already heavy on everyone’s minds. There’s a lot of cooking to do between then and now.

Food Services Coordinator Lori Lanier shows me how to make Kanawha County Schools’ famous pepperoni rolls.

“I don’t care how many times you make them, sometimes you may have a pinch more flour or a pinch less flour. You just have to watch the consistency, because it’s all on how the flour is sifted,” Lanier explains over the rumble of a jumbo-sized stand mixer.

It will take several batches of dough to make enough pepperoni rolls for the school. Each batch then has to raise for half an hour before the process can continue.

After the dough has risen, cooks still have to individually stuff and shape the rolls, filling giant sheet pans that go into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes. Once the tops are golden brown, the rolls come out of the oven and are brushed with a coating of melted butter.

Lori Lanier, Kanawha County Schools food services coordinator, mixes up a batch of pepperoni roll dough at Horace Mann Middle School. Lanier previously worked at the school as a cook.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Cooks will tell you — this is one of the most time consuming lunches to prepare. A lot of schools shift pepperoni roll day to the end of the week so they can work on the rolls a few days in advance. Horace Mann made half of their rolls the day before I visited, storing them in the walk-in cooler until it was time to pop them in the oven.

But there is a good reason to go to all this trouble. These pepperoni rolls are beloved by generations of school kids.

“On pepperoni roll days, the teachers would let you out five or ten minutes early so you could get to the cafeteria, because there was always such a long line,” said Whitney Humphrey, a friend and former co-worker who graduated from Riverside High School in 2007. “Because even kids who typically didn’t eat school lunch would eat lunch on pepperoni roll day.”

It was a similar story at Capital High School, where Brittany Carowick graduated in 2006.

“We’d always try to talk our teachers into letting us, in class, at the door so we could run all the way across the courtyard and be first in line for pepperoni rolls. Because they’re so good,” she said.

And Carowick really shouldn’t have been eating the pepperoni rolls.

“I’m actually allergic to pepperoni. But I still loved the pepperoni rolls. So I would unroll them, take the line of pepperoni out, hand it to all my friends, roll it back up and eat it,” she said.

Tom Bragg is also a former coworker of mine. He graduated from Nitro High School, where his love of pepperoni rolls turned him into something of a scam artist.

“Twenty years ago, you were assigned a lunch number. It wasn’t like a scan card or a barcode,” he said. “They told you, ‘Here’s your three-digit or four-digit number — don’t forget it.’”

At some point, Bragg realized these numbers had been assigned alphabetically and in numerical order. So his best friend, who just happened to share the same last name, had a lunch number just one digit away from his own.

“My best friend always brought his lunch or would skip school and go get lunch somewhere else,” Bragg said. “So I was like, man, he’s not taking advantage of pepperoni roll day. And his number is one before mine. So I’m just going to go back through line and get a second pepperoni roll.”

The plan went off without a hitch — until his friend’s mom received a lunch bill.

“We were at his house and the lunch bill came. His mom was like, ‘I thought you didn’t eat lunch at school,’” Bragg said. “And I started giggling. She was like, ‘Tommy you owe me $10 for the pepperoni rolls you ate last month.’”

This probably comes as no surprise. At this point, pepperoni rolls are an iconic West Virginia food: invented in the north-central part of the state by Italian immigrants who wanted a portable lunch to take into the coal mines. The story is as well-known as John Henry or Mothman.

But if you’re a West Virginian who didn’t grow up within an hour’s drive from Clarksburg, cast your mind back about 20 or 30 years. How prevalent were pepperoni rolls back then?

I went to school one county away from Kanawha, in Boone County. We never had pepperoni rolls on our school menu. I’ve polled folks around my age who grew up in neighboring counties — Putnam, Lincoln, Jackson, Logan, Clay, Nicholas — and none of them had pepperoni rolls at school, either.

Even my Kanawha County friends who enjoyed pepperoni rolls at school didn’t have many memories of them outside the lunchroom.

“Kanawha County Schools is where we learned about pepperoni rolls,” Bragg said. “You started seeing them pop up in gas stations after that.”

Trays of pepperoni rolls, ready for the lunch rush at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, West Virginia.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

So here’s what I decided to figure out — when did pepperoni rolls first appear in Kanawha County Schools, and how did the dish come to appear on the menu?

“It became kind of a quest,” said Diane Miller, Kanawha County Schools’ director of Child Nutrition.

Once Miller heard about my research project, she started fishing around, too. There’s apparently no paper record of the pepperoni rolls’ first appearance. There’s no archive of school menus that we could dig into. So she had to rely on school employees’ memories.

“They believe it started between 1992 and 1994. But we in Kanawha County can get it back to ‘97, ‘98.”

She talked with the Kanawha superintendent and folks from the West Virginia Department of Education. She even found some retired school cooks and picked their brains.

That’s how she discovered a possible origin story.

”They were making their own pizza breads and they ran out, and didn’t know what else to do. So they decided — they had roll dough for the next day, so they put them together. They’d had pepperoni rolls with their families that were working in the mines,” Miller said.

I asked Miller to connect me with a cook who might know some of the history — and she directed me to Nancy Romeo.

“I have made more pepperoni rolls than you can shake a stick at,” she said.

Romeo retired in 2010 after 20 years with the county. She says pepperoni rolls were already on the menu when she arrived in 1990. She even called a former coworker to make sure.

“We were hired about the same time. Both of us agree that they were making them before we both were hired,” Romeo said.

That was as much information as she could give me. But I had one more lead.

I called in a favor at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. There was a time when the paper printed the Kanawha schools’ menu for each week. Using that, I thought maybe we could pinpoint the first reference of pepperoni rolls.

My connection checked the newspaper archive and it turns out school menus didn’t run in the paper in the 1980s and early 1990s. But I did get the name of another retired school cook — Ellen Carter.

I found Carter in the kitchen of the Rand Community Center. She told me she didn’t really have time for an interview. But she agreed to let me hang out while she made hot rolls.

“This is going to make 120, and I feed about 112 or 115 people,” she said. “The pepperoni rolls are made out of the same dough.”

Carter has worked in this same kitchen for most of the last 50 years. She went to work for Rand Elementary in 1970 and stayed until 1999. The school shut down a few years later and became a community center. When that happened, Carter came back to cook for the center’s senior nutrition program.

“I’m 89, and in October, I’ll be 90,” she said.

Ellen Carter makes hot rolls in the kitchen at the Rand Community Center. Carter has worked in this same kitchen for much of the last 50 years.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

I figured if anyone would remember when the pepperoni rolls made their school lunch debut, it would be Ellen Carter.

“I think it was the early ‘80s that they started making pepperoni rolls,” she said.

Carter couldn’t give a more exact time frame. She had no idea how the rolls came to be on school menus in the first place. But she said the recipe probably was disseminated in one of the school cooks’ regular meetings.

“We used to have monthly meetings. And we’d go to a different school, we’d take a covered dish, we’d take a menu to the dish we made, and they’d make a copy of them. I have gobs of them,” Carter said.

One thing Carter does know — the way she was taught to make the rolls is not the way cooks are making them now.

Instead of shaping them individually, she’d get a big lump of dough rolled out flat.

“Then you go back and roll it with a rolling pin,” Carter said.

She would top it with cheese and pepperoni, then roll the whole thing into a log.

“And then you cut it and roll your pepperoni rolls,” Carter said. “I don’t know anybody that rolls them out like we do.”

Carter still makes a lot of pepperoni rolls. She recently got a call to make 1,000 for a local high school, which was selling them as a fundraiser. She doesn’t usually make them for her senior citizens, though. They’re not huge fans.

“They like a hot meal. Like today, we’re going to do a baked potato and a salad,” Carter said.

Carter’s senior citizens might not care much for pepperoni rolls, but I know some folks who do.

The pepperoni rolls were going fast the day I visited Horace Mann Middle, but I managed to snag a few and tuck them away in my bag. That way, once I got my friends to open up about their pepperoni roll memories, I could surprise them with a taste of the past.

“This is exactly what I remember. Look at all that pepperoni. You can see the cheese has a little bit of that pepperoni grease on it,” Whitney Humphrey said as she tore into hers. “It’s divine.”

“Oh my gosh, that’s a trip down memory lane. That is so good,” Tom Bragg said between bites. “The meat-to-cheese ratio is great. The cheese is melted but not like lava — cooked long enough that the grease from the pepperoni has soaked into the bread but hasn’t burned it or overtaken it. This is great.”

Brittany Carowick — whose skin still gets a little itchy when she eats cured meats — quickly fell into her old habits.

“I’m pulling apart the outer layer of bread, and then you hit the spiral and you can pull that apart with your fingers,” she explained as she expertly dissected her pepperoni roll — years of muscle memory coming back into play.

With the pepperoni safely removed, she took a bite of the cheesy bread that was left.

“It’s so delicious,” she said. “That is solid cheese.”

Memory is a funny thing.

The Kanawha County Schools’ pepperoni roll is beloved by generations of school kids. And between me and the folks at the Kanawha County Board of Education, we probably talked to dozens of people trying to track down its origins.

And the best we could come up with was a hazy timeline that puts us somewhere in the early to late 80s, and a plausible — but not exactly conclusive — story about a school that ran out of pizza subs one day.

This whole story unfolded within recent living memory, and this is the best we can do.

And yet, Humphrey and Bragg and Carowick have these vivid memories that all came flooding back with a single bite.

“I’m 34 years old and I’m sitting here talking to you about pepperoni rolls, because it’s had such a presence in my life,” Humphrey said. “I don’t have very fond memories of school, but I do have fond memories of school pepperoni rolls. That seems kind of silly, but it’s true.”

——

Bamboo Fly Rods Are A Tie To Tradition, Made With Hand Tools And Time

When Lee Orr goes fly fishing, he doesn’t haul his rod in one of those racks on the front bumper of his pickup. He doesn’t wedge it into the back seat. He doesn’t throw it in the bed to rattle around with his tackle box and cooler. Orr keeps his fishing rods in a hard plastic case.

This story originally aired in the July 2, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Orr keeps his fishing rods in a hard plastic case. Inside of that case, the pole is shrouded in a hand-sewn linen pouch. You understand why when he takes it out.

The two sections are made of honey-colored wood — bamboo, actually — and come together inside a delicate brass fitting. Both sections are accented with bands of red silk thread. Besides looking good, the thread holds down the rod’s hand-bent line guides. The bottom of the rod, where the reel attaches, is made from dark walnut. The handle is crafted from cork.

Lee Orr inspects one of his bamboo fishing rods.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

This isn’t just a fishing pole. It’s a work of art. It even has the artist’s signature right there on the shaft, written in black ink. Orr put it there himself.

He made this rod and 133 others like it. All it took was some hand tools and a whole lot of time.

Orr discovered fly fishing as a kid. He grew up in West Virginia but spent each August in Montana, where his dad grew up.

“A couple guys came up this little creek, up near the Wyoming border. And they were just catching fish one after the other,” Orr said. “So I told my dad I want to learn how to fly fish.”

Bamboo rods were a tougher sell for him. He had tried a few but found them heavy and unwieldy. His opinion changed at a workshop he attended.

“Somebody had a little seven-foot Orvis bamboo rod. And I cast that, and I really liked it,” Orr said. “I did some research and was shocked to find you can build these things in your basement.”

Twenty years ago, that’s exactly what he started doing. The process starts halfway around the world, in the Gulf of Tonkin. This region on the border of Vietnam and China is home to a variety of bamboo that is coveted by fishing rod makers. The walls of Tonkin cane are thick, and its fibers are both strong and flexible.

Orr’s collection of raw bamboo is his workshop.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

These culms of bamboo are cut down and loaded into shipping containers headed for the United States. They eventually find their way to basement workshops like the one Orr keeps in his Charleston, West Virginia home.

The process of turning bamboo into bamboo fly rods begins with a dull knife.

“You actually take a knife, and twist and break it apart,” Orr said. “And then you break it down into six individual strips. And then you have to work it and straighten it, get the little bumps and hooves out of it.”

Orr breaks down a culm of bamboo in his Charleston, West Virginia garage.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Once he breaks the bamboo into strips, they go into his planing form. This is a four-foot-long hunk of steel with a groove running down the middle, which holds the strips at a precise 60-degree angle.

Orr places a strip in that groove and goes to work with a wood plane. He makes pass after pass, using smaller and smaller wood planes, to shave off thin ribbons of bamboo. He keeps going until the top of the strip is flush with the top of the form.

He then repeats the process five more times: making three strips for the tip section of the rod and three for the butt section.

Orr also makes metal loops for the rod’s line guides, which he ties on with silk thread. He makes the rod’s reel seat by turning wood on a lathe. He stains and finishes the wood, and shapes the handle from cork.

“There’s still a couple pieces I don’t make, but eventually I’d like to get to the point where I make it, stem to stern, every bit of it myself,” he said. “I probably have to retire before I do that. And get a little more equipment.”

At present, it takes Orr somewhere between 60 to 80 hours to complete a rod. He’s working on rod number 135, which means he’s spent the equivalent of a year of his life, sitting at his work bench planing, wrapping, gluing and shaping. That’s probably a conservative estimate. Some rods take longer than others — and the whole process took a lot longer when he was first starting out in the early 2000s.

An up-close look at the details of one of Orr’s bamboo fly rods.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

There weren’t a lot of books on the subject and certainly no YouTube tutorials. Orr got his introduction to the craft on an email listserv. For those who weren’t on the internet back then, a listserv was like an email version of a group chat. Anytime Orr would have a question, he’d shoot out a message and someone would write back.

“Just a bunch of cranky old guys. That’s the community, but they’re really helpful about passing down information,” Orr said.

But the community wasn’t just generous with its knowledge. The planing forms Orr uses to whittle his bamboo strips were given to him by another rod maker — who filed down the steel by hand. The job probably took hundreds of hours.

When Orr was making the tool he uses to twist wire into line guides, another maker stepped in to help.

“There were plans online and I didn’t have the stuff for it,” he said. “And someone sent me the stuff — and just said ‘Hey, the next time somebody else needs something, you just pay it forward.’”

Orr has paid it forward. As the community migrated off that listserv and onto forums and Facebook groups, he’s become one of the old guys of the group — though not quite as cranky as the ones who took him under their wing.

“I found an old chunk of American chestnut in an old house that had fallen down, and got on that forum and said, ‘Hey does anybody want some American chestnut to make some reel seats?’” he said. “I wound up sending that stuff all over. ‘Give me the shipping and I’ll give you the wood.’”

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

Orr contends it’s self-preservation. As long as there are bamboo rod makers, folks will continue to import Tonkin cane from the other side of the planet.

But talking to Orr, you get the sense that isn’t his only reason for passing down his knowledge. For one thing, he’s just a natural-born teacher.

When I tagged along as he fished the Elk River last fall, I told him I just wanted to observe. Orr couldn’t help himself. Although I didn’t even have a rod, I still got a beginner’s class in fly casting. Don’t throw it over your head, he hollered at me over the sound of the water, throw your line out to the side.

“You wouldn’t throw a baseball like that,” he said. “The motion is just exactly the same as throwing a baseball.”

Lee Orr fishes the Elk River in fall 2022.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Orr also shares his knowledge because he wants to preserve what his old-school rods represent: a link to a time when you put your catch in a wicker creel instead of a Yeti cooler. A time before sportsmen traded in their fedoras for baseball caps and canvas canoes for fiberglass bass boats.

“If I just wanted to go catch fish, I would fish a carbon rod and I’d fish live bait. And I’d catch more fish,” he admits.

All that stuff is readily available at any well-stocked Walmart. It’s fairly cheap. Orr says it would work “just fine.”

“But there’s a lot of things that are ‘just fine’ that lack a little bit of soul,” he said.

To see Lee’s rods, or place an order for one, visit 304rodcompany.com.

——

Making Faces: Behind A Face Jug’s Grin Lies A Long, Dark History

Folkways Reporter Zack Harold traced the story of Face Jugs. Examples of this type of art turn up everywhere, but some of them are connected to African Face Jugs, an art enslaved people brought with them to America.

This story originally aired in the May 21, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

The tools of Ed Klimek’s trade look like something you’d find on a dentist’s tray. But that’s not what he uses them for.

“These, I can slice eyeballs in half. This one, I can put in the corner of the eye and mouth. Maybe separate the teeth a little bit,” Klimek said.

I realize that makes him sound like some kind of homespun Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Moreau — but Klimek prefers to work in clay. For over 20 years, his Shinnston, West Virginia pottery studio has been churning out all kinds of creatures. Some look like Santa Claus, or gray man-style aliens. Klimek also has a penchant for making devils.

“Like that guy right there,” Klimek said, gesturing toward a blue jug with horns protruding from its forehead. “He’s smiling, right? But you don’t know why he’s smiling.”

These characters appear on hand-thrown ceramic jugs, about the size of your standard two gallon milk jug. Klimek makes faces on coffee mugs and cookie jars, too. And shot glasses. Though, due to their size, they only have one facial feature apiece — a nose, some lips, or a single, unblinking eye.

“You have a drink with a friend, you say, ‘Here’s lookin’ at ya,’” Klimek said.

Ed Klimek’s shot glasses often feature one facial feature apiece — like this one, with a mouth sticking out its tongue. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Klimek’s face jugs, sold under the name Jughead Pottery, are well known in the West Virginia art scene. He’s been featured in galleries all over and was juried into the state-run Tamarack Market, where collectors snatch up his work.

But Klimek’s journey to becoming a successful full-time artist was a long one. Growing up and then as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, he tried his hands at different art forms like painting, silversmithing and woodcarving. Then came the Vietnam War, which derailed his plans for graduate school. He ended up spending eight years in the Air Force, working much of that time as an illustrator.

Once his enlistment was up, art remained a hobby as he worked a series of blue collar jobs as a carpenter, window installer, and finally as a pattern maker at a foundry in Fairmont, West Virginia. About 20 years ago, news came that the foundry was shutting down. Klimek was laid off. But instead of looking for another 9-to-5, his wife encouraged him to try the art thing full-time.

“She told me, ‘You don’t know until you try it. So go for it, dummy,’” Klimek said with a laugh. “So I did. It was a little bit of a struggle in the beginning. It takes time to get a business started.”

Ed Klimek in his basement pottery studio. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

At the time, Klimek was working with raku, a traditional Japanese style of pottery. But there wasn’t a whole lot of interest in this work. Then he saw a TV program by interior designer Lynette Jennings.

“I forget what the name of the program was, but it was about home decorating,” Klimek said. “And she had a thing on there about face jugs being very popular and collectible. It was a southern thing.”

Inspired by that program, Klimek started to make face jugs of his own. But as he’d learn, the vessels were more than just “a southern thing.” The art form has its roots in Africa, having crossed the Atlantic in the minds and hands of enslaved people.

In fact, we can pretty much trace the tradition to a single slave ship, as historian Wayne O’Bryant said.

“In 1808, you were not supposed to bring in anymore enslaved Africans from Africa,” O’Bryant said. “In 1858, 50 years later, a gentleman named Charles Lamar decided he wanted to reopen the slave trade. And he said, ‘Catch me if you can.’”

Lamar found himself a racing yacht dubbed, “The Wanderer” and set out for Africa.

“He sailed over to the Congo in West Africa in 1858, took about 400 Africans onboard, and brought them back to the U.S. The authorities did hear about it, but he outran them to the coast,” O’Bryant said.

Lamar landed on Jekyll Island, in Georgia. But even after escaping the authorities, he had a big problem. He was in possession of dozens of people who did not speak English, had never had any contact with the West. It was obvious they had been illegally trafficked. So he needed to disperse these enslaved people, fast.

A cousin took some of them up the Savannah River into South Carolina, eventually ending up in Edgefield County. Then as now, the area was known for its potteries. Many of the people Lamar smuggled ended up making ceramics. And in their off hours, they started making traditional vessels from their homeland.

“Somebody actually recorded these Africans that just landed here making these grotesque face vessels,” O’Bryant said. “Almost all of these face vessels date from after that time, after 1858.”

One prominent feature of these jugs was their stark white eyes and teeth. These were made with kaolin, a white silica clay also used to make fine china. The enslaved potters recognized it, because they had it back home in Africa, too.

“On the African continent, that is the ingredient that gives the vessel power,” O’Bryant said.

No one was selling face jugs at the time. They were meant for personal use in spiritual rituals.

“These practitioners can reach to the spiritual world to get information,” O’Bryant said. “And they would use these objects as a tool.”

Those Kaolin eyes and teeth were essential for those practices.

“The kaolin would be the battery in the phone. So without a battery, you still have the object but it won’t work without the battery,” O’Bryant said.

The power was largely cut off following the Civil War. Pottery is an expensive craft and after the war, many Black potters lost access to the materials they needed to make their art.

White potters, meanwhile, saw the popularity of the face jugs and appropriated the art form. They started making the vessels to sell to tourists who came to see the post-war south.

“You know, they say ‘The sincerest form of flattery is imitation,’” O’Bryant said.

But once the art form was out of Black potters’ hands, the history of face jugs as sacred objects started to be forgotten. Stories still circulate that the vessels were used to scare kids away from the beer or moonshine kept inside — even though enslaved people weren’t usually allowed to have alcohol.

The traditions were not lost completely, though. If Black potters and their face jug traditions could survive the Middle Passage and slavery, they could survive anything. Today, the tradition lives on through a new generation of potters like Jim McDowell of Weaverville, North Carolina. McDowell grew up hearing stories about face jugs.

“My granddaddy was a tombstone maker down in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And he started telling us about face jugs,” he said. “There was an ancestor in our family, and they said she made face jugs. It was family history. Oral history.”

North Carolina potter Jim McDowell is continuing the Black face jug tradition. *Courtesy*

Though he displayed artistic talent from an early age, McDowell did not take up pottery until he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany, where he started hanging out at a pottery studio in Nuremberg. He continued his study of the art form back in the states.

“I was at this university in Pennsylvania, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. There was a white guy making face jugs,” he said. “And I looked at that thing, and I said, ‘No, I think I need to make it myself.’ So I started making them, but I put Black features on them. The scarification, the big noses, exaggerated ears, and used glass for teeth or broken china plates.”

Unlike Klimek’s face jugs, with their realistic, if exaggerated-looking faces, the features of Jim McDowell’s jugs are rougher — more reminiscent of the look of the original Edgefield face jugs. He once told the Smithsonian, “My jugs are ugly, because slavery was ugly.”

“I don’t have any preconceived notions of what I’m going to make. I have an idea, like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King or John Lewis. I think that thought is there, but when I put the nose on, I feel like I get influences from the ancestors,” McDowell said. “And I do certain things that maybe I don’t even realize. I’m versed in pottery as far as aesthetics and how to put it together. But the ideas — they don’t come from me.”

McDowell feels a particular kinship with David Drake, an enslaved Edgefield potter whose work now sells for millions of dollars and was recently featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“His pots are still here because the writings reflect what he was going through,” McDowell said.

In a time where it was illegal to teach enslaved people how to read and write, Drake was making inscriptions on his pottery. And not just inscriptions, but poetry — clever, funny and heartbreaking poetry, inspired by what was happening in his life.

After Drake’s master sold his son and wife to another slave owner in Texas, he inscribed a pot with the couplet: “I wonder where is all my relations / Friendship to all and every nation.”

“He was p****d,” McDowell said.

McDowell expresses his own frustration and anger in his face jugs. Some of his recent works have been inspired by the murders of Emmit Till and George Floyd.

“I do it because if I don’t do it, I feel like this story is going to die,” McDowell said. “Somebody has to tell, even though people may not want to listen.”

“Miss Cissy” is Jim McDowell’s response to the murder of George Floyd by police. On the back, an inscription reads: “I’m coming for you son.” *Courtesy*

For someone with such a deep spiritual connection to this art, we asked McDowell how he felt about the history of white potters co-opting it.

“I’ll be honest with you, I really don’t have a problem with it,” he said.

He says he doesn’t begrudge white potters who make face jugs because everybody’s got to make a living. Plus, there are European traditions of ceramic vessels with faces on them.

But remember what Wayne O’Bryant told us? A traditional face jug without kaolin is like a phone without a charge: no power, just an object.

To McDowell, a modern face jug that isn’t shaped by the Black experience is like that. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine to look at. It just doesn’t have the same power.

“They cannot put the spirits and the ideas and the thoughts that I have, because they don’t have that history. Their history is from England or Scotland or over there,” he said. “So I don’t quibble on it, because you can’t copy me.”

——

Charleston’s Hottest Lunch Is A Spicy Eastern European Stew

General Steak and Seafood’s Yugoslavian stew has been a local favorite for 40 years.

This story originally aired in the March 19, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

It’s lunchtime on the first Friday of Lent, that season when many Christians abstain from mammal meat, and it’s getting busy at General Steak and Seafood in downtown Charleston, West Virginia. Folks are stopping to buy shrimp, salmon and cod. But nothing is selling faster than the Yugoslavian stew — “Yugo stew,” if you’re a regular.

The shop started at 10 a.m. with about seven gallons on hand. There’s only a few quarts left.

“It’s very good,” longtime fan Philip Michael said. “It’s spicy. It’s got every kind of seafood, scallops and shrimp. It’s just very tasty and very filling, actually.”

The shop started getting calls as soon as it opened from regulars like Michael hoping to reserve a few containers.

“Sometimes they might be having company and want three quarts or four quarts or more,” General Steak and Seafood co-founder Robin Harmon said. “Some people buy five or six pints, take them to the office and give everybody one. It sells out every day.”

Regulars often phone ahead to reserve containers of Yugoslavian stew. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

It’s been this way for over 40 years, before this current market existed. Back then, Robin and his brother Joe owned a combined restaurant and market a few streets over, as well as a bustling catering business.

Even then, the Harmon brothers were known for having the freshest seafood in town. But they had a problem. In those days, scallops didn’t come neatly wrapped and packed on refrigerated trucks. They arrived at Yeager Airport every day in 40 pound sacks. That led to a lot of broken pieces — perfectly edible, but not pretty enough to sell to customers.

The operation was also peeling 100 pounds of shrimp each day, between all of the businesses. Some of them inevitably looked a little worse for wear.

“Then everybody wants six- and eight-ounce center-cut pieces of fish, so we have all kinds of end pieces and trimmings,” Robin said.

The brothers had all perfectly good stuff, too delicious and expensive to throw away. They just didn’t have anything to do with it. Then one day, they found the solution in a copy of the newly launched “Cook’s Illustrated” magazine. It was a recipe for Dalmatian stew from the coastal region of Croatia — then part of Yugoslavia — where a lot of the local diet comes from the ocean.

“So it was actually a catch-all stew to use a lot of local marine life,” Robin said. “I modified it for restaurant use, because I wanted everything to be bite-sized and nothing in the shell, so you didn’t have to take things out of the shell, peel shrimp, and all that kind of stuff.”

Robin made other changes, too. He added extra spices and a lot of hot sauce. Perhaps most importantly, he changed the name.

“When you spelled it out, it looked like ‘Dalmatian.’ So I didn’t want the dog thing with it,” he said.

But Dalmatian stew, by any other name, tastes just as delicious.

Though the fish is always fresh, Robin usually makes the soup base a day or two ahead. He starts by speed-chopping five onions. He throws them into a pot with warm, shimmering olive oil alongside several chopped stalks of celery and two whole heads of garlic, finely minced. Then come the spices: parsley, oregano, basil and three kinds of pepper — black, white and red.

Robin Harmon chops onions to create his Yugoslavian stew base. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

He adds chicken stock and lets the mixture bubble away, allowing the flavors to condense. After that, he adds several gigantic cans of diced tomatoes and tomato sauce, granulated garlic, sugar and three kinds of hot sauce — Tabasco, Frank’s Red Hot, and Sriracha. Sriracha was a pretty exotic ingredient back when Robin first started making this stew in the early 1980s. His shop was probably the first place in Charleston to sell it.

“We bought it out of Cleveland,” he said. “Before you could buy it at a grocery store or anything, we sold it out of Broad Street.”

The soup base is finished once the hot sauce goes in. Tomorrow morning, Robin will heat it up and add the fish. This is the only part of the recipe that changes from day to day. It depends on what comes across the shop’s cutting boards — whether that’s salmon, swordfish, mahi mahi or catfish.

“There’s always calamari and shrimp and scallops in there, too,” Robin said.

Most of the fish goes in about 10 minutes before the soup is ready to serve. It doesn’t take long to cook. The shrimp takes even less time, going in the pot for just a couple minutes.

That’s great, because by this point, people are usually lining up for their Yugo stew.

Yugo stew is so popular, General Steak and Seafood put it on a t-shirt. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Densie Workman, a substitute teacher at a nearby elementary school, hopped over on her lunch break.

“It’s spicy and delicious, filled with seafood,” she said. “I have the recipe that was in the paper a few years ago. But I’ve never tried to make it. You can’t top this.”

Kim Brown, who entered the store just minutes after Workman, wasn’t so lucky. All the Yugo stew was gone.

“Darn it. I knew I was probably too late,” she said.

It seems like everyone in town has a hankering for this dish — everyone, except for one person.

“My brother still eats it. The other people who work here still eat it. But they don’t make it every day like I do,” Robin said. “It’s the first thing I do every day when I get here, put it on the stove. I haven’t eaten it in years.”

Well, that’s just more for the rest of us.

——