Zack Harold, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Water Aficionados Still Seek Healing At Berkeley Springs

In the years before indoors plumbing, many Appalachians got their fresh water from the natural springs created by our ancient mountain range. But in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, people are still filling jugs with spring water to lug back home. Some do it for the taste, but others say the water has healing properties — a tradition that also goes back centuries.

This story originally aired in the Oct. 7, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Every couple weeks, Lauren Lee stuffs a few dozen gallon jugs into a big black laundry bag. She brings it to a covered pavilion right in the middle of Berkeley Springs State Park, which itself is right in the middle of downtown Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

She chooses one of two brick water fountains and begins to fill her jugs, one by one, with water drawn from the seven underground springs.

“I like coming down here. I always meet new people. I’ve never been able to do this anywhere I’ve ever lived,” Lee said.

She doesn’t just come here to socialize though.

“We have well water where we live, so it’s a lot easier to use this in our machines, like for coffee,” Lee said. “And for the plants, because our water kills our plants.”

The water is free. But of course, it wouldn’t be much more expensive to just buy water at Kroger or Dollar General. It would certainly be more convenient. No empty jugs or laundry bags necessary.

But the water Lee draws from these springs has something store-bought water does not.

“I feel like this is part of the healing and just the nutrients I’m getting from the earth,” she said.

People have been coming to Berkeley Springs for centuries, looking for a healing. It was native people who apparently introduced Europeans to its medicinal properties. The springs were already such a popular destination by the mid-18th century that a young surveyor named George Washington made sure to stop when he visited the area.

Washington would return a few times — once to cure his rheumatic fever and later with his wife Martha and her daughter Patsy, hoping to treat the girl’s seizures.

In 1776 — when Washington was probably busy with other concerns — the Virginia General Assembly established a town around the springs. They called it “Bath,” after the spa town in England. That began a flurry of development in town, and some buildings from that time still survive.

There’s the two-story Roman Bathhouse, built in the 1780s. For a small fee you can still enjoy a half-hour soak in a 750-gallon tub filled with spring water. The Gentlemen’s Spring — where you find the drinking fountains — arrived in the 1800s. So did the Ladies’ Spring, today known as the main bathhouse.

The bathhouse also sells empty gallon jugs for anyone who wants to take some water home — provided they have them in stock.

Should you arrive without an empty jug, you can pick one up from the main bathhouse.

“I sold 15 to one person on Saturday,” said Leslie Smith, who runs the front desk at the spa. “People swear by that water. They take a bath in it. They wash their hair in it. They cook with it. There’s a woman that comes from China, they come in here and all day long [they fill] five-gallon jugs. Like 50 of them.”

Inside Appalachia didn’t encounter anyone from China when we visited — but we did find someone from Lebanon.

“My friend told me about it a long time ago,” said Fadi Talj. “Then when I moved closer, I realized I’m only 30 minutes away. And that’s when I started coming to get it.”

Talj is from Lebanon originally, and then lived in Frederick, Maryland before moving closer to Berkeley Springs and its water.

“You don’t find many of these places around, so if you find one close, you take advantage of it,” he said.

Dorothy Vesper, a geology professor at West Virginia University, is a fan of Berkeley Springs water, too.

“Every time I go by, I fill my water bottle,” she said via Zoom call. “It’s good stuff.”

Vesper is not sold on the health claims, though. A few of her graduate students have studied Berkeley Springs water. They found there are minerals present: magnesium, as well as potassium, sodium, calcium and other members of the periodic table. But all the chemicals exist in vanishingly small amounts.

“You’d have to drink a lot of it to get enough of anything that was nutrient-helpful,” she said.

The research has yielded some good news. Not all natural springs are created equal. Some are not safe to drink from. Some have been contaminated by their surroundings, while others are really just discharge from old, abandoned coal mines.

Berkeley Springs, on the other hand, is pristine.

“It doesn’t have a metallic [taste]. It’s sort of a soft spring water. I just think it tastes nice,” Vesper said. “I have no qualms whatsoever, I would drink it right out of the spring.”

Aside from the taste, though, Vesper said the spring water is no better for you than what comes out of the tap at home.

So what about those who feel like they’ve been helped by this water? What about those who believe they have been healed by it? Is this all just the placebo effect?

Vesper made clear, she is not a physician, but she has a theory.

“Personally, if you let me go and spend two weeks hanging out at some springs — I’d feel better,” she said.

There might be something to that.

There is a peacefulness at the park among the spring-fed pools and the cherry blossoms. Maybe the benefit Lee and Talj ascribe to the water actually comes from the ritual of returning week after week and bringing water up from the earth, just as our forebears have done for centuries.

If the healing isn’t in the magnesium — maybe it’s in the memories that are mixed in there.

——

This story contains music by Joseph Haydn and the Staples Singers.

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 Appalachianfolklife, arts, and culture.

Charleston Company Launches Butcher Apprenticeship In Move To Keep Meat Local

Breakdowns in the food supply chain from suppliers to our grocery stores have raised concerns and increased prices. Buzz Food Service in Charleston is trying to alleviate some of that in our region by training new, local butchers. Folkways reporter Zack Harold has the story.

Beau Bellamy gets to Buzz Food Service at 7 a.m., a full hour before the day’s meat cutting begins.

Buzz sells fresh meat and seafood to restaurants, resorts and other commercial customers in seven Appalachian states — all from a headquarters just outside Charleston. But before any of that can happen, the butcher shop has to pass a daily inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s why Bellamy’s here: to get things ready.

“They’re not looking for chunks of meat. They’re looking for tiny little specks,” Bellamy said. “And if they find something like that, you either have to fix it or they can shut you down altogether.”

He spots a tiny piece of meat, smaller than the size of a match head, wedged between two tables. He takes a cloth and cleans it off.

“That’s enough to get you in trouble with the USDA,” he said.

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

Bellamy clearly knows his way around this meat shop, even though he’s only been doing this for about a year. He spent the 10 years before that as a paramedic, riding around on ambulances.

Then the pandemic hit. Beau and his wife had a premature newborn baby with breathing troubles. He didn’t want to risk bringing anything home, so he quit. He delivered bread for a while, then worked for a friend’s asphalt company. Finally, he saw a billboard for a brand-new paid apprentice program at Buzz.

Buzz was expanding. The company built Appalachian Abattoir just down the street from the meat shop. Abattoir is French for “slaughterhouse.” It’s where Buzz processes locally raised cows and pigs.

Most of the time, animals raised in Appalachia get shipped off to the Midwest where they’re fattened up, slaughtered, processed and butchered. The meat then makes the whole trip in reverse, traveling thousands of miles to end up in your grocery store.

Buzz built its abattoir to keep at least some of that meat right here at home.

“Essentially, four companies in the Midwest produce 85 percent of the beef and pork we eat in this country,” Buzz President Dickinson Gould said. “We put ourselves, essentially, in the position to supply ourselves.”

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Buzz sells fresh meat and seafood to restaurants, resorts and other commercial customers in seven Appalachian states.

Buzz staffed its new venture with employees from its butcher shop. This created a problem. They needed more employees to replace them, and experienced meat cutters aren’t in ready supply.

“I had many people say to me, ‘That sounds like a great plan but where are you going to find the people to do that kind of work?’” Gould said. “And the best idea we came up with, and we kept coming back to was, let’s start from scratch with a real apprentice program and teach people from the ground up.”

Previously, Buzz trained meat cutters one-on-one. New hires learned at the elbow of a more experienced butcher. That process would no longer suffice with so many newbies coming aboard all at once. The company needed to formalize the process.

When Bellamy and four other apprentices started working at Buzz in September 2021, they began an intensive curriculum that covered every aspect of the meat business. They learned about cutting meat, as well as the economics of it. They learned about the biology of cattle. They’ve taken field trips to other processing facilities. They get the chance to work shifts at General Steak and Seafood, Buzz’s retail operation in downtown Charleston.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Beau Bellamy gets to Buzz Food Service at 7 a.m., a full hour before the day’s meat cutting begins to get things ready for a daily inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As it turns out, this approach has helped apprentices become much more proficient much faster.

“In the past it would take about a year and a half for a new staff person to really be able to work completely independently and really cut some of the higher end or more expensive cuts we process here,” said Angela Gould, the company’s chief operations officers. “Now we’ve found with this group, that is reduced down to about six months.”

There is no better example of this than Bellamy. He is now a maestro of the meat shop’s band saw, using the screaming machine to turn giant hunks of beef into delectable-looking steaks.

He is even training students of his own. A second class of six apprentices started in January 2022.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Bellamy uses the meat shop’s band saw to turn giant hunks of beef into delectable-looking steaks.

“It’s two years as a paramedic before they allow you to get on an ambulance,” Bellamy said. To be able to walk in the first day and start to learn — and then after 5 months to be able to teach someone else — it’s certainly a credit to the program and the people.”

Despite all that, Bellamy’s education is only half over. The whole apprenticeship program takes two years to complete. At the end, he’ll hold a certificate recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s a ticket to any kind of life he desires.

Have you noticed there aren’t as many grocery store butchers these days? Buzz President Dickinson Gould said that isn’t because stores no longer find it profitable — they just can’t find anyone qualified to do the job.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

“Grocery stores are essentially realizing, where is the next generation of people qualified to do this work?” he said. “They don’t exist, nor is the school you can send them to for training. It’s exactly the kind of training we’re building here.”

Bellamy plans to stick around at Buzz. But even if he does leave and go to work for a grocery store or start a butcher shop of his own, it would still serve Buzz’s overall goal for the internship program: to make the supply chains that we all depend on a whole lot shorter.

——

This story originally aired in the Aug. 26, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

TheFolkways 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.

Wheeling Is Crazy For Cold Cheese Pizza. But Which Restaurant Serves The Best Slice?

People in Wheeling, West Virginia are passionate about their pizza. That’s because an accident of history led to a new style. Consider it Appalachia’s contribution to America’s great regional pizza traditions. And it goes by the name “DiCarlo’s Famous.”

If you need some reading material while waiting for lunch at DiCarlo’s Famous Pizza in downtown Wheeling, West Virginia, check out the big plaque just left of the front door.

It tells the whole history of Ohio Valley Pizza, a regional cuisine with a story that begins just up the road in Steubenville, Ohio in the late 1800s. That’s when the DiCarlo family left their home in Sora, Italy to come to the United States. They opened a little grocery store to serve their fellow immigrants and the store soon became renowned for its Italian bread. It got so popular the family converted the whole business to a bakery, making bread as well as cakes, donuts and cookies.

Then came World War II. Primo DiCarlo found himself stationed in his ancestral homeland. It was there he discovered a delicacy called “pizza.”

He returned home determined to get into the pizza business. He borrowed cookie sheets from the bakery—and the family bread dough recipe—and started tinkering. But the DiCarlo’s ran into a problem. They didn’t have a pizza oven.

By the time the crust was as crispy as Primo liked, the cheese on top was burned. So he just added the cheese after it came out of the oven.

Primo single handedly, accidentally, created a brand new kind of pizza: cold cheese on a hot crust. The dish would eventually take the region by storm and come to be known as Ohio Valley Pizza or Wheeling Pizza. But more often than not, it is still called “DiCarlo’s pizza.”

Primo opened his first store in Steubenville in 1945. He and little brother Galdo opened another in downtown Wheeling four years later.

The business has only expanded from there. There are DiCarlo’s franchises and imitators springing up all over Ohio and West Virginia. Their numbers seem to be increasing by the day. There’s even a location in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The DiCarlo’s family hopes their cold cheese pizza will soon take its place in the pantheon of American pizza styles, alongside New York’s big floppy slices, Chicago’s deep dish and Detroit’s thick crusts.

But there’s a catch. According to locals, not all DiCarlo’s are selling the same pizza. There are subtle differences in the crust, the sauce and the cheese.

If Ohio Valley Pizza is about to go national — which is the real deal?

I decided to hit the road to find out. (You know, for journalism.)

I came to the downtown location at the suggestion of local journalist Jeremy Morris. He wrote a pretty extensive history of the Ohio Valley pizza phenomenon for the website Weelunk.

“I’d go grab a couple slices and watch the barges and look at the architecture on the island,” he said. “There’s no finer way to spend a lunch hour or an evening in Wheeling than some DiCarlo’s by the river.”

That’s exactly what I did, and my first bite was revelatory. The crust was way crispier than I expected. You could still see the individual shreds of cold cheese. It was salty and chewy, calling attention to itself in a way that melted cheese never does.

My pizza research was just beginning, though.

Another name that comes up quite often when you’re discussing Ohio Valley pizza is Patsy’s in Elm Grove. Wheeling native Patrick Yoho gave me the scoop.

“If you pull in here and wait for pizza, you’re going to be sitting here for 45 minutes. You call in and you get a number,” he said. “We’re number 74.”

Patsy’s used to be a DiCarlo’s. Galdo DiCarlo originally opened this shop before turning it over to employee Pasquale Vespa — “Patsy” for short.

Patsy’s Pizza used to be a DiCarlo’s. Galdo DiCarlo originally opened this shop before turning it over to employee Pasquale Vespa — “Patsy” for short.

The family did that sometimes. But these franchise agreements weren’t as heavy-handed as seen with national fast food chains today. Owners like Patsy had the freedom to make small tweaks where they saw fit.

“Patsy’s is different,” Yoho said. “The sauce is different. The cheese is crumbled instead of grated like long slices. The sauce is spicier, it’s got a green pepper kick to it. And the crust is airy thin most of the time.”

Molly Poffenbarger is originally from Charleston but moved up to Wheeling after college.

“It scared me to death as a transplant,” she said. “I was intimidated by the whole thing, because somebody was like, ‘this is what you have to do, and there’s no extra toppings.’ If you were to say ‘can I get black olives?’ they would blackball you.”

Yoho, in all his years eating at Patsy’s, could only point to one change to the pizza in recent memory.

“In the last 10 or 15 years, they’ve added pepper rings you can get on the side, in a bag,” he said.

There’s a reason so little changed.

“You don’t fix it if it’s not broke,” said longtime Patsy’s employee Erica Mitchum. “As far as fresh pizza, we’re kinda toward number one. Because we don’t box it, we don’t prepare it until you get here. So it’s not like it sits on the oven.”

Yoho, a seasoned veteran, does have one suggestion to make the pizza taste even fresher. Patsy’s crumbled cheese melts faster than the shredded cheese at other locations, so he orders a plastic bag full of extra cheese. He sprinkles that on top immediately before eating, ensuring he gets a taste of cold cheese with every crunchy bite.

By the time I left Yoho and Poffenbarger, I’d eaten pizza for both lunch and dinner. But I still had one more stop on my tour — the DiCarlo’s in Wellsburg, about 20 miles north.

I came here at the suggestion of my friend Candace Nelson. You might know her as the author of “The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll Book.” She’s also a Wellsburg native and a die-hard fan of the DiCarlo’s there.

“Growing up, DiCarlo’s was a treat. There’s something about knowing that, on payday, you get to go to DiCarlo’s. And even if you have to wait for an hour, it was worth it,” she said. “Because you knew when you got home, you’re going to have the best-tasting pizza you’re going to have until the next time you can afford this treat.”

When I arrived at the Wellsburg DiCarlo’s, I found Mark Vaughn working the ovens, just as he has for the last 20 years. He told me this was one of the most traditional DiCarlo’s, opened by Galdo himself back in the day before being taken over by owner Tim Morris.

“Same oven. Everything’s pretty much the same. Couple updates here and there, paint jobs and whatnot,” Vaughn said.

I’d eaten a slice of pizza for almost every hour I’d been awake. So this time, I only ordered one.

Mark suggested trying one with extra cheese and mushrooms.

I ate it in the customary way — standing in the parking lot, box on the trunk. It was crispy, cheesy and chewy. The mushrooms lended some extra flavor and texture. It was delicious — just like all the other pizza I’d had that day.

That’s no cop out. Each of the three locations I visited have their subtle differences. But I can’t say one is better than the others.

Let’s say Ohio Valley pizza does go national. When they open the first DiCarlo’s in Sioux Falls or Pensacola, pizza lovers are going to rave over the crispy crust, the tangy tomato sauce and the cold cheese. They won’t know whether they got the downtown version, the Elm Grove version or the Wellsburg version.

Maybe a few of them will be inspired to trace this pizza back to its source. That’s when they’ll discover all that nuance the people of the Ohio Valley — the true connoisseurs — have been debating for decades.

Everybody else? They’re just going to be happy they got a darn good pizza.

——

This story originally aired in the Aug. 19, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

Traditional Murder Ballads Reveal A Dark Truth About 'True Crime' Media

There are many murder ballads from Appalachia — and most of them are about men killing women. Folkways reporter Zack Harrold is a musician himself. In fact, you can hear him playing guitar and banjo on a song called “Little Sadie” that appeared in the May 20, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia. “Little Sadie” is a ballad about a man killing his sweetheart — exactly the kind of song Zack sought to understand in his reporting about murder ballads. What can they tell us about history? And is “true crime” the modern-day equivalent?

I got really into bluegrass when I was in college. And it didn’t take long before I ran into my very first murder ballad — “The Knoxville Girl,” as performed by Jim and Jesse McReynolds.

I’d never heard anything like it. Bleak, disturbing lyrics set to such a lively major-key melody. And as I learned more about the bluegrass canon, I kept running into more songs like this. Like “Pretty Polly” and “Katy Dear.”

The more of these songs I discovered, the more I noticed odd similarities in the stories. Almost every time, a jealous lover takes his girl out to the woods or down by the river. She, evidently sensing something is amiss, begs him not to hurt her. Then he kills her — usually with a knife.

And for some reason, the guy’s name is usually “Willie.”

After years of pondering the subject, I decided to get to the bottom of this murder ballad mystery. That’s how I ended up on the phone with Mark Charles of Louisville, Kentucky. His band Vandaveer recorded a whole album of murder ballads — called fittingly enough, “Oh Willie Please.” Having spent so much time with these songs, I wondered if Charles had gained any insights into their creepy similarities.

“Certainly you start noticing thematic similarities and overlapping details,” Charles said. “Some of that’s to be expected because so much of the ballad tradition is storytelling and passing down stories from one generation to another or from one town to another.”

Folk music, by its very nature, takes elements from old songs and transforms them into something new. Many murder ballads such as “The Knoxville Girl” have roots in the British Isles, where they were printed in broadsides — cheap pamphlets that were the 17th century version of tabloid newspapers.

For this reason, early musicologists dismissed American murder ballads as rip-offs of their English forebearers. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to murder ballad scholar Christina Blanton, the American tunes are trying to telegraph something very specific about 19th century white American society.

“There were absolutely warnings to women about what happens when you are not well behaved, when you fall in love with the wrong guy, when you are not abiding by the accepted moral code,” she said.

The songs were a way of reinforcing society’s standards for women. It’s no mistake the murders typically take place in the woods or by the river.

“She’s always lured away from that Appalachian town that represents codified society, a place of safety,” Blanton said.

It’s also not a mistake that the songs’ drownings evoke images of old-time river baptisms.

“After they’re dead they do finally attain that perfect feminine nature,” Blanton said.

The songs clean up their victims in other ways, too. The stories are strikingly similar and, if you pay close attention, so are the victims.

“A woman needs to be pure and good and she’s misled by this mean, mean horrible man. And this mean, mean horrible man doesn’t want the responsibility of fatherhood, in a lot of cases, or to provide financially — so he offs her,” said Madison Helman, a graduate student at West Virginia University who is currently working on a dissertation about murder ballads.

Helman has dug into old court records and newspaper reports about the crimes that inspired several famous songs. She’s found interesting disparities between what actually happened and what made it into the lyrics.

Take the ballad “Omi Wise,” for example. It’s based on a real murder in north carolina from a few hundred years. In the song, a guy named John gets Omi pregnant out of wedlock. He lures her into the woods, promising to elope, and instead drowns her in the river. Toward the end of the song, the whole town goes out to look for her body and bring John to justice.

In real life, Omi already had kids with other men, and was likely meeting with John so he would sign some paternity papers.

“And there’s not really this angelic virginal maiden who was led astray by love. It’s a woman who was doing her own thing, living her life kind of on the outskirts. And when she went missing, not that many people went looking for her,” Helman said.

It seems murder ballads only interesting in telling the stories of women who fit a particular profile. If victims didn’t fit the profile, like Omi Wise, sometimes their stories got changed. Other times, the stories don’t get told at all.

It’s something we still see in true crime podcasts, documentaries and books.

“The cases that still get the most press are a pretty white well-off blonde girl,” Helman said. “And I’m not saying they shouldn’t also get sympathy and elicit support, but there are hundreds of women who don’t fit that profile and are in that same situation, and we don’t hear about it.

“That happened back then, too.”

So why do we continue singing murder ballads? Or consume any other kind of true crime media, for that matter?

“People are fascinated by pretty dark stuff,” said Mark Charles of Vandaveer. “It’s fitting and telling that in the ballad tradition, the more heinous the story, the more memorable it might become.”

Folks might be drawn to these dark stories, but when Vandaveer went on the road to promote their murder ballad album, they found audiences had a limited appetite for the songs.

“We quickly found that on stage a couple of murder ballads go along way,” Charles said. “Put three in a row in a set, and you can feel the air escape the room.”

Of course, Vandaveer knew it was dealing with dark stuff when it decided to make the album.

That’s why they also decided to give a portion of the proceeds to a womens’ crisis center in Louisville, Kentucky.

“It was important to us that we have some perspective and make sure that the audience was aware of that side of the project too,” Charles said.

Because as grim and disturbing as these stories can be, they are also depressingly familiar.

“The victims in the songs were women. And you know, stories of domestic abuse have not abated and instances of domestic abuse have not abated,” Charles said. “It’s a little bit like shining a light on a problem that’s been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

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

This Folkways story originally aired in the May 20, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

A Guitar Surgeon Gives Old Instruments Their Voices Back

Bob Smakula of Elkins, West Virginia has made a career out of fixing old musical instruments so modern musicians can keep playing them. He tries to make repairs to fix an instrument’s problems while also staying true to its history.

Walk through the front door of Bob Smakula’s workshop and — it’s a lot to take in.

Every flat surface is covered in clutter: chisels, screwdrivers, paint brushes, a fork, a bottle of lighter fluid. One whole wall is just wood clamps in various sizes and denominations.

But eventually you see past the jumble and begin to notice all the musical instruments, in various states of repair.

There’s a ukulele on Smakula’s workbench. It’s a Martin from the 1920s; a beautiful instrument and a real collector’s piece, but it has problems.

“For some reason Martin used mahogany for the tuning pegs so they’re fussy. Extra fussy,” he said.

These tuners are held in place by friction, like the ones on a violin. That friction caused one of these brittle mahogany pegs to break.

“I’m going to replace those with a comparable ebony tuning peg. And that’s going to work better for him. He’s going to be able to get things in tune a bit better,” Smakula said.

This is Smakula’s style. He could have slapped a set of modern, metal geared tuners on this uke. It would have stayed in perfect tune. But that wouldn’t be right for a 100-year-old instrument like this.

Smakula tries to make repairs that fix an instrument’s problems while also staying true to its history.

“I’ve definitely honed my skills to try to be invisible,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to know I was ever there, except to go ‘Hey, this plays better than they usually do,’ or ‘This sounds better than they usually do.’”

Smakula has been honing his invisibility powers for a long time. He’s originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where his parents were involved in the folk music scene of the 1960s and ‘70s

In those days, new acoustic instruments were overbuilt and heavy. Folk musicians tended to seek out older instruments, but those often needed repairs. So Smakula’s dad Peter, an engineer by trade, started fixing them.

Smakula also took an interest in the inner-workings of musical instruments. He learned to play his mother’s lap dulcimer and wanted one of his own. He didn’t have the money, so he sent away for a build-your-own dulcimer kit.

“My parents’ friends saw the instrument and said ‘Hey, you made that. Could you make me one?’ The next thing I knew I was 14 and in business making dulcimers for people,” he said.

Father and son eventually joined forces and opened Goose Acres Folk Music Center in Cleveland where they bought, sold, built and repaired folk instruments.

Instrument repair was a difficult trade to learn in those days.

“We were definitely inventing the wheel,” he said. “The information age of instrument work just wasn’t there. There were a few books out there, and so I’d grab everything I could in printed sources. But it’s not like now, where you can find dang near anything you want to know via the internet.”

Smakula learned much of what he knows from the instruments that appeared on his operating table.

“Maybe a part needed to be replaced. We’d study that and put on something similar. Every builder has their own little quirks, or their own little design style,” he said.

His work developed such a reputation that Smakula decided to leave Cleveland — and the business he started with his dad. He followed his new bride Mary, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Elkins, and moved his operations to West Virginia.

“I decided I could do my work anywhere in the world. It didn’t have to be in Cleveland,” he said. “Anywhere a UPS truck can come, I can fix an instrument and send it back to the owner.”

He was right. In addition to his repair work, Smakula also taught instrument repair classes at the nearby Augusta Heritage Center. That is how he found his apprentices Nate Druckenmiller and Andy Fitzgibbon.

Now customers from all over the country ship their banjos, mandolins, fiddles and guitars to this little shop in the woods so Smakula and his team can get them singing again.

Like one particular banjo from 1887.

“[It was] made by a talented woodworker who, maybe banjos wasn’t his main thing. But it’s really interesting,” Smakula said.

On a recent Monday morning, the instrument was laying on Fitzgibbon’s workbench. He has worked for Smakula for over 20 years and is the shop’s go-to banjo guy.

“You see a lot of unique, one-off home-built ones like this. [They] vary in quality anywhere from really crude to really nice. And this one is a really nice one,” Fitzgibbon said. “It’s nice to get them back up and running again.”

But as nice as it is, there are some things about this old banjo that don’t live up to modern standards.

Nowadays, builders know frets need to be precisely placed, down to hundredths of an inch, for an instrument to play in tune. The frets on this 1887 banjo weren’t placed with nearly that precision.

“At this point you have to balance playability with the historical aspect of it,” Fitzgibbon said.

Since this instrument is more of a collector’s piece, Fitzgibbon decides to keep the wonky fret job. But the balance might tip in the other direction if the instrument was going to be played onstage, or if the original construction compromised the banjo’s structural integrity.

In those cases, Fitzgibbon would apply a bit more modern know-how. That’s what happened with Smakula’s own 1903 Fairbanks banjo.

It’s a family heirloom. His uncle found it in a bar in Newton Center, Massachusetts.

“He goes in one day and sees this banjo in the corner,” Smakula said. “He says ‘Hey Tom, what’s with the banjo?’ And Tom says ‘Eh, somebody used it to pay a bar tab. You want it? You can have it.’”

It had a lot of sentimental value, but wasn’t a great player.

“All the time I’ve had it, I always thought there’s something missing. There’s something that needs to be done to make it the best-playing banjo for me,” he said.

The fingerboard was made from ebonized hardwood. That’s a technique where woodworkers imitate the look of ebony by creating a chemical reaction with the wood’s natural acids.

“The acid dies they used 120 years ago causes slow degradation to the wood’s cell structure,” Smakula said. “Without it being a good solid piece of wood, it would bend ever so slightly and make it harder to play.”

After years of working on instruments like this, Smakula and Fitzgibbon decided to rip out the old fingerboard and replace it with real ebony. They replaced the wood on the peghead with a special kind of poplar that matches the color of old ebonized wood but is more stable.

“And this banjo went from my favorite family heirloom to my favorite banjo to play,” Smakula said.

Smakula had been playing this banjo for nearly 40 years before making that repair. Why the delay? Well, the instrument really belonged to his dad. It didn’t pass into Smakula’s possession until Peter’s death in 2008. But that worked out perfectly. By the time it was actually his, Smakula had the years of experience necessary to know exactly how to fix it.

Smakula doesn’t make his customers wait quite that long for their repairs. Some take only hours. A severe case might take six months. You’ve just got to find a place in his unending wait list.

Which is why, when I was saying my goodbyes, Smakula made a request.

“When you’re airing this, I wanna make sure you don’t give away my exact location,” he said. “Say ‘North of Elkins.’”

I said I noticed he only had a PO box on his website. Was he worried someone would break in and make off with somebody’s vintage guitar? No.

Turns out, Smakula’s worried about something even more precious.

“You see how busy we are,” he said. “If I did have my address, people would just stop by. ‘Oh, just wanted to see what you have.’ I have … no time.”

Turns out, he’s got more than one reason to be invisible.

A Taste Of Home — How Pinto Beans And Cornbread Became An Appalachian Tradition

Last year, I posted this tweet:

“Appalachian folks: I’m hunting for some @InAppalachia story ideas. What’s something your momaw made that’s unique to where you’re from?”

It got dozens of replies, a large number of which mentioned pinto beans and cornbread. I found that strange because beans and cornbread are the opposite of unique. You can find a bowl of beans anywhere there’s a Cracker Barrel or Bob Evans. It isn’t exactly an Appalachia-specific meal.

And yet, it was clear many Appalachians identified this decidedly non-Appalachian meal with home.

So how did it get this way?

I had no idea where to find the answer, so I just started contacting people who replied to my tweet. That’s how I ended up on the phone with John Porter. And lucky for me, the guy knows his beans.

Porter works as the urban agriculture program coordinator for University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s extension service. And Nebraska is the nation’s No. 3 producer of pinto beans, behind the Dakotas. But while he lives and works in the Midwest, Porter grew up in Wayne County, West Virginia.

“My dad, his family was really poor. The way he put it was, ‘We had beans and taters for dinner and taters and beans for supper,’” he said. “Beans and cornbread is probably what made it possible for people to live in this state. Beans and cornbread are all the amino acids your body needs. So it’s basically the nutritionally perfect food.”

This was something that Native Americans figured out long before white people showed up. Throughout North America, tribes practiced “Three Sisters” farming, where they would grow beans, corn and squash together.

“If you’re thinking about a traditional corn field, imagine that with beans and squash worked into it. That was the scale it was practiced at by the historic Cherokee nation,” said David Anderson, horticulture operations supervisor for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

These weren’t pinto beans. Those originated in South America. The Cherokee and other native people had their own varieties of dry beans they’d raise every season. They’d also raise corn and grind that into meal.

So, really, a pot of soup beans and cornbread have been a go-to meal in these mountains for as long as humans have lived here.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when pinto beans showed up in Appalachia, but it was probably around the turn of the 20th century. Advances in transportation made it easy to ship dried beans from the Midwest all over the country. Appalachian folks, prudent as always, realized it was cheaper to buy these bulk beans than to grow their own.

That’s what happened in my family.

“My mom bought them in 25 pound sacks. That would probably last us a week,” Momaw Ev told me recently.

Momaw Ev’s mother, Memory, had eight kids and a husband to feed and not a lot of money to do it with.

“Back then we had beans and taters and taters and beans. And biscuits and gravy for breakfast,” Momaw said.

Momaw learned how to make beans and taters and biscuits and gravy, too, because Memory was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was about 11 years old. That diagnosis was a death sentence in those days. So in the time she had left, she taught Momaw how to cook.

It was a matter of survival—all of Memory’s other daughters were grown and had families of their own. Momaw would be the woman of the house once her mother was gone.

But as much as it was about survival, I think it was also a matter of family legacy. Theirs was a poor family. Memory didn’t have any heirlooms to hand down to her daughter. But she did have recipes. They were something her daughter could remember her by.

That’s exactly what happened. This is something I didn’t realize until reporting this story, but I have been eating my great grandmother’s pinto bean recipe all my life. Momaw Ev still makes them exactly the way her mom showed her.

Each Sunday night, she sits down at her kitchen table and dumps a pound of pinto beans directly onto her kitchen table’s floral tablecloth. She picks out all the ugly and broken beans, as well as the occasional rock, and rinses what’s left. She then puts the beans into a slow cooker with water, a few slices of bacon, a little “meat grease” and a hunk of butter.

“I never measure anything,” she said.

She cooks them all night and most of the next day. They’re ready by the time we arrive for dinner on Monday evening.

The guest list is almost always the same. It’s Me, my wife Whitney, our daughter Sadie, my mom and dad, and my sister Genna.

This is also part of the nostalgia that beans and cornbread evoke. It’s not just the food, it’s the ritual surrounding it. And the people we share that ritual with.

If history or economics or necessity had worked out another way, my family might gather around the table every week for a big serving of spaghetti and meatballs.

But for us — and many of you, apparently — it’s pinto beans and cornbread.

Music at the end of this story is by Louis Jordan