Zack Harold, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Retirement Of Longtime Captain Begins New Chapter In Sistersville Ferry’s Long History

The town of Sistersville, West Virginia is home to the last ferry crossing in the Mountain State. The Sistersville Ferry has been serving this tiny Tyler County community for more than 200 years, and when it reopens next spring, there will be a new pilot at the helm. Reporter Zack Harold stopped by to witness the last ride of Captain Bo Hause.

This story originally aired in the Dec. 8, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Let’s say you find yourself in Sistersville, West Virginia and you really have a hankering for a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich from the Riverview Restaurant just across the Ohio River in the tiny unincorporated town of Fly, Ohio.

You have a couple options. You could drive up to New Martinsville, West Virginia, cross the bridge and head back down. That’s about a 30 minute trip. Or you could drive down to St. Mary’s, West Virginia and cross there. That’s about a 45 minute trip.

Or you could just take the Sistersville Ferry, which will only require 10 minutes of your time — and $5.

“There is not a schedule. It’s what I call on demand,” said captain Bo Hause, who piloted the ferry for the last 12 years. “Right now we’re on the West Virginia side (and) a car pulled up, so we’re getting ready to go to Fly, Ohio. We’re going to sit there until a car shows up there, or a car shows up on the West Virginia side. Then we’ll come back and get them.”

Hause looks the part of a wizened river man: long gray beard, long gray ponytail, arms sleeved in tattoos. But he’s just the latest in a long line of pilots. The Sistersville Ferry has served this community for over 200 years, mostly without interruption.

Captain Bo Hause in the pilot house of the Sistersville Ferry.

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

The boat only makes two stops — Sistersville and Fly. It’s the only ferry in West Virginia, and one of only six ferry crossings left on the entire Ohio River.

When the area’s economy was in better shape, this ferry used to run every day. Now the ferry is mostly just a local tradition and tourist attraction. The schedule reflects that. It is only from the beginning of May to the end of September, Thursday through Sunday.

Hause came to the job back in 2012 after retiring from the Coast Guard. His daughter worked for the local newspaper and learned the ferry board was looking for a new pilot.

“I put in a resume and I was working the next day,” he said.

Though Hause had taken the helm of lots of different ships during his time with the Coast Guard, there was a learning curve once he got on the water here.

“I’d never driven a tugboat. That was a little different, just because of the setup in the pilot house,” he said.

The driver’s seat of this boat is probably unlike anything you’ve seen before. The pilot controls the boat by yanking on a series of horizontal chrome levers to control the throttling of the boat’s giant diesel engine.

“So it took a little practice. It took me about a month (before) I could do it on my own,” he said.

After 12 seasons, Hause knows all the intricacies of this crossing. He knows how a wind from the north will push the boat, and the location of the sandbars hidden beneath the water’s surface. He knows how the current will affect his angle of approach to the muddy landing on the Ohio side of the river.

But now Hause is leaving. The 2024 ferry season was his last, and he spent those months trying to impart his knowledge to the ferry’s incoming captain, Tom Meek.

“Bo gave two years’ notice. And no other qualified pilots had ever applied. No one showed any interest,” said Meek, a retired police officer who started as Hause’s deckhand in 2023. “So about two-thirds of the way through the season last year they asked if I’d be interested. And I said ‘Sure.’”

There was one small problem. Meek had never driven a boat before.

“So this, to him, would be like a newly licensed individual learning how to drive a tractor trailer first,” Hause said.

But Meek has proved an excellent student.

Former deckhand Tom Meek will be the next pilot of the Sistersville Ferry.

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

“In fact if he had his license right now I’d say, ‘Give him the keys,’” Hause said.

During the offseason, Meek plans to attend pilot school in Huntington and earn his pilot’s license. Under Hause’s tutelage, he has already learned the ins and outs — or rather, the backs and forths — of running this ferry. Meek also learned quite a bit about its clientele.

“Today, because it’s the last day of the season, there are a lot of people who’ve never been on this ferry. Because they’re pulling up asking ‘How much?’” Regular riders, they know the price,” Meek said. “A lot of times I can see, ‘Oh, that’s a regular.’”

Turning the driving over to Meek has allowed Hause to spend more time with those regulars. These are folks he’s known for over a decade, but on busy days could only wave to from the window of the pilot house.

On Hause’s final day, the Eastham family pulls their red Ram pickup onto the ferry at the Sistersville dock. As they roll onto the boat, mom Nicole Eastham hollers out the passenger at Hause.

“Today’s the day!” she said, sounding congratulatory but with a twinge of sadness in her voice.

The Eastham family are regulars and are headed to some property they own on the Ohio side. As soon as the truck is in “park,” daughter Kaylin and son Avery jump right out to talk to Hause. Nicole said the captain is basically part of the family.

“He’s known my daughter since she was just a baby and he knew Avery before he was born,” she said. “I rode when I was pregnant. So he’s seen him grow up.”

Huase talks with regular passengers Avery and Kaylin Eastham.

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

Interacting with kids has been a highlight of Hause’s time as captain. He remembers when Kaylin, still in a booster seat, would pay the ferry toll.

“She’d hand her little arm out the car window and say ‘Here you go!’ I just enjoy watching families grow, watching kids grow up,” he said.

Ferry board member Helen Buccella-Costa said Hause’s warm personality is one of the boat’s main attractions.

“He’s just got a great heart and a wonderful heart and a great smile. He comes down and gives bones to all the dogs and candy to the kids,” said Buccella-Costa. “He makes you feel happy to be on the boat.”

The sky is overcast and drizzly and business is slow as Hause’s final day comes to a close. But the ferry has one final run to make. The crew must go back to Ohio and turn the sign around, so drivers will know the ferry is closed for the season.

Meek climbs out of the pilot house to give his mentor one final turn at the wheel.

“When I retired from the Coast Guard my wife asked me if I was going to be OK because I wasn’t going to be on the water,” Hause said. “I don’t know that I’ll miss it, but I definitely enjoyed it while I was doing it.”

W.Va. Factory Keeps Old-School Playground Game Rolling

A line of third-graders files into the gymnasium at Ashford-Rumble Elementary School and onto the wooden bleachers. Nearly every kid has a box or plastic bag in their lap, filled to bursting with marbles.

For a couple weeks each March, Ashford-Rumble’s physical education teacher, Jerry Halstead, puts up the jump ropes and basketballs. For the next 10 class periods, his kids are consumed with marble madness. It’s a tradition that dates back to Halstead’s first year of teaching, at this same little school.

“Being a young PE teacher, we don’t have nothing to go by,” Halstead says. “We have to make our own units. I wanted to introduce old-school recess, 1930s type [games].”

He wanted to teach old-school playground games like hopscotch, jacks and marbles. The thing is, he didn’t know how to play marbles. And this being the late ‘80s, there were no YouTube videos to show him how.

So he turned to his uncle, Ray Riggs.

“Everybody knew my Uncle Ray was the man of marbles. And he told me how to play,” Halstead says.

Halstead took what he learned from his Uncle Ray and introduced it to his students. It was an immediate hit.

“I did jacks and they didn’t bite on that. They didn’t bite on hopscotch either,” Halstead says. “But they bit on the marbles.”

I attended Ashford-Rumble Elementary where Halstead was my PE teacher. Thirty years later, I still remember how obsessed my friends and I were with the game. We played it outside gym class, at recess and at home. As with most games of skill, I generally got my butt handed to me. But that didn’t matter — there was nothing more exciting than throwing my marbles into the ring, and playing for keeps.

Jerry Halstead and Addy Taylor during PE class.

*Zack Harold/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Sometime after I left Ashford-Rumble Elementary, Halstead did too. He taught at a few different schools and everywhere he went, he took his marble unit with him. And everywhere he introduced the game, students fell in love.

Eventually he returned to Ashford-Rumble Elementary, only to find a school more passionate about marbles than any he’d seen.

“They carry marbles all year long. You walk down the hall, you hear their bags rolling,” Halstead says. “They’re always trading on the playground. It got to the point they were driving their teachers crazy.”

These kids enjoy playing, but it’s the marbles themselves they’re really crazy about. Their favorites feature swirls of color and metallic flakes. They’re called “vampires” and “iguanas,” “Milky Ways” and “rainbow bennington leg-breakers.”

Grayson Casto shows off his favorite marbles.

*Zack Harold/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

I don’t remember any of these fancy designs in my marble rings. We mostly had swirlies and cat’s eyes. But of course, we didn’t have Amazon.

Many of the marbles Halstead’s students now covet are imported. There’s only one factory in the United States still churning out marbles, and they’re the old-school kind I remember.

This factory just happens to be a few hours away on the banks of the Ohio River in Paden City, West Virginia.

This is Marble King, the last remaining industrial manufacturer of marbles in the United States.

Pulling into the factory’s parking lot, you hear its monstrous furnace long before you see it. Workers feed this fiery beast with buckets of recycled glass shards. The molten glass comes out the front, riding a corkscrew gear that shapes the red-hot orbs into perfect spheres. When it’s fully up and running, the machine spits out a million marbles a day into big black buckets.

“Those marbles are approximately 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit,” Marble King president and CEO Beri Fox tells me. “If we put a piece of paper in one of those buckets, it would actually ignite it.”

Marble King president and CEO Beri Fox gives a tour of the factory floor.

*Zack Harold/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

It takes 24 hours before the marbles are cool enough to be handled. Then employees hand-check every single one. There is still no replacement for the human eye when it comes to detecting defects.

Precision is important because most of the marbles Marble King produces are now used in industrial or architectural projects. Marbles can be found in everything from washing machines and dishwashers, to NASA air balloons and spray paint cans. Architects work them into fountains and murals.

But the company hasn’t forgotten its playground roots.

Marble King still makes plenty of marbles used exclusively for fun. The on-site gift shop features playing mats, racing tracks and other marble-powered toys. Kids can pick up a shooter marble emblazoned with the company logo, or fill a leather pouch with a rainbow of cat’s eye marbles — a style of marble that Fox’s dad Roger Howdyshell pioneered.

“My dad actually formulated a process where the cat’s eye is a true eye. When you look in ours, you’ll see four veins of glass in the interior portion,” Fox says.

A photo of former Marble King owner Roger Howdyshell in the company’s office.

*Zack Harold/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Howdyshell started working at Marble King fresh out of college. He worked his way up through the ranks and in 1983, he bought the business at the age of 60. He died just eight years later, leaving Fox’s mom Jean Howdyshell to take over. Up until then, she’d been a full-time homemaker. Running Marble King would be her first paying job.

With support from her kids — and the company’s longtime employees — Jean Howdyshell was able to keep the factory afloat and eventually turn it over to her daughter.

Marble King will celebrate its 75th birthday later this year. To mark the occasion, they asked employees to come up with a special edition marble to honor Roger Howdyshell. The result is a beautiful peacock blue marble — featuring the cat’s eye design he invented.

“[They] turned out beautifully, the ones we’ve made so far. And the guys love…that part of this job: Making the different cat’s eyes, making the unique swirls, trying to do unique things with this glass,” Fox says. “Be a glass artist, do what you want. Here’s the stuff, let’s see what you can make.”

Marble King will release a special peacock blue catseye to celebrate its 75th birthday,

*Zack Harold/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Just as Marble King faces competition from overseas competitors, the game of marbles faces lots of competition for kids’ attention spans. But Fox says the game still holds an appeal.

“A lot of times today, as opposed to it just being an in-school activity, it’s a marbles club. It’s a group. They learn how to play marbles…and they learn good sportsmanship,” she says.

Halstead knows something of the game’s lasting appeal, too.

“You ever see someone like grandpa, 80, and he has a jar of marbles in the attic? Why do they still have them, when they’re 80? Because they won them and they won’t let them go,” he says. “Even though they’re 80, they won’t get rid of them…because they’re trophies.”

While none of his former students are quite 80 — yet — there is a growing chance there’s a grandparent somewhere with a jar full of marbles they won in this gymnasium, under these same buzzing lights.

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.

——