With Valentine’s Day coming up, love is on a lot of people’s minds…but what about animals?
If you have ever watched animals interact, it seems like they feel love. Penguins mate for life. Elephants form a bond through wrapping their trunks together before they mate. Some types of wolves mate for life and help raise the wolf pups. So, do animals actually feel love?
Our Inside Appalachia team stumbled into this idea after producer Roxy Todd remembered a single, lonely otter she had once seen at the West Virginia State Wildlife Center.
“She looked really sad, all by herself on the rocks, not playing and not swimming,” Todd said.
She had expected to see not one otter, but lots of otters, doing what otters typically do.
“You know, when you picture otters, what do you picture? They’re having fun,” Todd said. “I had this expectation they would be frolicking doing tricks in the water.”
But she said this otter seemed despondent.
“I just kept wondering, what happened, and what was going through her head,” Todd said. “Could she feel loneliness?”
And if she could feel loneliness, Todd wondered, could the otter also feel other emotions? Like, could she feel love?
Well, this question is up for debate.
Most biologists will say that animals cannot feel love.
“Love? No, there’s no such thing in the animal kingdom,” said Rich Rogers, the furbearer biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. Rogers is helping study the regional otter population. “[Love is] an emotional term. There’s a fidelity to that family unit until those young disperse, and then no, there’s nothing there.”
So Rogers said love is an emotional term, but animals have emotions, right?
“Since Darwin, scientists have thought that there are some basic emotions that animals can feel,” said Cynthia Willett, a professor of philosophy at Emory University.
Willett published a book called ‘Interspecies Ethics’ in 2014, which explores animals’ wide variety of emotions. She said some of the obvious ones are happiness and sadness.
“But Darwin did not include love among those basic emotions. And so there’s been this prejudice or this bias, at least since that time, that animals could not experience love,” Willett said. “And yet we see it all the time with animals. So why is it that we tend to not believe what we see?”
There are a few different types of animal love Willett has studied — the mother to offspring love, which she said is clearly established. But also friendship love. Willett said in 2006 at a zoo in Japan, a snake became friends with a hamster — its prey! They even cuddled together.
And the third type of animal relationship?
“The most surprising kind of love at all is romantic love,” Willett said.
Like, love love — not just friendship love.
A good example of this behavior is with birds, Willett said. Similar to humans, birds have courtship rituals — basically, they date. They bring food to one another, do dances, clean one another, etc.
Animals generally are social creatures, Willett said, adding that they need companionship, which in a way is a form of love.
“And without it, they start to lose that ‘joie de vivre’, that sense of being alive.”
‘Joy de vivre’ is a French phrase that describes the sense of life that gives us purpose, that makes life fuller and richer — something we often find through relationships and love. And Willett said animals feel it too.
“And when they don’t have that, they shrink. They diminish. They have less energy. Life goes dull,” she said.
Although Willett has not studied otters specifically,anecdotally she said she has seen them play and bond with each other and humans. They kind of remind her of how dogs love, Willett said.
So yes, Willett said she believes otters dofeel love. She added that it is not that the science or biologists are wrong, there just might be more nuance.
And for the solitary otter at West Virginia Wildlife Center? Well, Trevor Moore — the biologist at the center — said he cannot definitively rule one way or another on love, loneliness or any human-like emotion.
“Animals definitely have personalities. There are definitely individual personalities,” Moore said. “You can see that, that’s very well documented throughout science and in captivity and in the wild. But how much we project our own emotions and our own view of them? I don’t know.”
“Fraser firs are basically the Cadillac of Christmas trees,” said Anne Taylor who runs the Shepherdstown location and is married to co-owner Dan Taylor. “They’re my favorites. They hold ornaments great. They look really nice decorated. They have some open spaces for larger ornaments.”
Taylor said it takes a lot of time and love to grow strong, healthy Christmas trees, and they plant thousands of new trees every spring.
“It takes about two weeks to get everything in the ground,” Taylor said. “Preparing the fields for planting, it’s about a two week procedure … We’ve never taken a spring break, because that’s when the trees come … They grow about a foot a year.”
Dan Taylor and Bryan Holler own and operate Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees. They have three locations: Shepherdstown is their main site, one is in Washington, D.C. and the other is in Chevy Chase, Maryland. All together, they own 80 acres.
Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees may have earned the coveted Blue Room spot this year, but the company has been supplying Christmas trees to help line the White House halls since 2009.
The farm’s history also goes a bit farther back than that.
Liz McCormick
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees in Shepherdstown, Jefferson County. The farm sells thousands of trees each year around the holidays.
Dan and Bryan took over the operation from Eric and Gloria Sunback who ran the farm for decades, starting in the 1960s. Formerly called Sunback Trees, the Sunback’s sold many Christmas trees to big names in Washington, D.C. including George H. W. Bush. The Sunback’s hired Dan and Bryan in 1985 and taught them everything they know, from landscaping to genetics. By 2007, Dan and Bryan took over the entire operation from the Sunbacks and renamed it Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees.
According to their website, the Sunbacks still own about 30 acres where they continue to work on tree-related genetics.
This year was the first time Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees won the White House Blue Room contest. Taylor said she, her husband Dan, and their daughter delivered the tree to the White House and met with First Lady Melania Trump.
“We had 15 minutes with her approximately, which was really nice,” Taylor said. “She was very elegant. Very down to earth. More so than you would think.”
But for Taylor, she said the highlight of every year is getting to see all the families who come out and buy their Christmas tree. This year was particularly significant because of the pandemic.
“This is an outside activity where you can be socially distanced from people in the field,” Taylor said. “Families came in groups of four or five and spent the whole afternoon out here. We had one group of people, they must not have seen each other for months, because they came, and they parked out here, and they got their trees, and then they tailgated and had a picnic. The kids played. It’s an experience for people. They love it.”
Liz McCormick
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A truck at Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees hauls freshly cut trees that will be sold at either the Washington, D.C. or Chevy Chase, Maryland locations.
Dan and Bryan Christmas Trees sold between 4,000 and 6,000 trees this year, between retail and wholesale.
Their main site in Shepherdstown sold out of trees two weeks after opening for the season.
Featured song in the audio postcard is “O Tannenbaum” by Vince Guaraldi from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin hosted a virtual listening session Friday evening with Reverend Ronald English and other black faith leaders from across West Virginia. It was the first of a planned series of discussions called From Hurt to Healing.
In the wake of national protests prompted by the killing of George Floyd, Manchin’s office announced the series in a news release hoping to “amplify African American voices and encourage every West Virginian and American to think about how we can move forward toward an equal and more just society.”
Sen. Manchin began the online forum quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said riots are “the language of the unheard.” Manchin called for unity and compassion to address systemic racism throughout the state and nation.
“You don’t care about the color of a person’s skin when you’re 1,000 feet underground in the coal mine. You care about who they are at their core, because that person will help you come home alive to your family.”
Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Charleston from 1972 to 1993, the Rev. Ronald English offered thoughts throughout the virtual listening session. English, who was mentored by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said moving toward a more equitable future would require learning to acknowledge racism where it exists both consciously and subconsciously. He also noted that he was encouraged by youth leadership on display at protest events throughout the country.
“We did not know that kind of leadership and compassion was among us until it showed up in this way,” he said, “and I think that we have found a fertile ground for further leadership advancement and leadership recruitment in the midst of those who have come forward.”
English also pointed to the coronavirus as a component of the civil unrest throughout the nation.
“I think it is by providential design that all of these events came together at the same time, to alert our attention and to stir us from heart, not just from head, in terms of how we move forward.”
English and other faith leaders took questions, discussed issues, such as how to overcome racism when faced with racist leadership, and underscored the need for transparency and accountability.
Artist Della Brown Taylor Hardman was born in Charleston on May 20, 1922. After graduating from Charleston’s segregated Garnet High School, she attended…
Artist Della Brown Taylor Hardman was born in Charleston on May 20, 1922. After graduating from Charleston’s segregated Garnet High School, she attended West Virginia State College (now University) at Institute and Boston University. For 30 years, she was an art professor at West Virginia State.
Hardman traveled and studied widely, including at colleges in West Africa and Canada. She finished her Ph.D. at Kent State University at age 72. Her dissertation was about William Edward Scott, the second black artist to graduate from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Hardman’s artwork, featuring fabric and ceramics, has been exhibited in galleries ranging from the Huntington Galleries (now the Huntington Museum of Art) to a showing in West Africa. She’s considered one of the most influential female and African-American artists from West Virginia. She later moved to Massachusetts and was awarded the first Humanitarian Award from the Martha’s Vineyard NAACP for her community service.
Della Brown Taylor Hardman died at Martha’s Vineyard in 2005 at age 83. The fine art gallery on the campus of West Virginia State University is named in her honor.
The Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston released a “list of amends” last week for the former bishop Michael Bransfield to consider. That list comes in the wake of multiple investigations revealing sexual and financial misconduct. The diocese wants Bransfield to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and to apologize.
Former seminarian, Wheeling resident and Morgantown native Vincent DeGeorge has spoken out about abuse, saying he was among those targeted by Bransfield. He offered these thoughts on the Diocese’s list.
Board: What was your overall reaction to that list?
DeGeorge: On the whole, I’m pleased that the Catholic Church in West Virginia is trying to make amends. And in this plan, this list proposed by Bishop Brennan is an attempt, and effort, to do that. I’m pleased. However, there are significant and concerning aspects lacking to this amends plan.
I saw the list as soon as it came out, and I read the letter and was honestly stunned. I was surprised by emotions that I didn’t realize were still there. I was surprised by how much hope I still had in the diocese without realizing it. I was really counting on these events to make a difference in a positive direction. And as I read the amends, that hope gave way to disappointment. I didn’t think I would or could let myself continue to be disappointed by the diocese.
Board: What about the amends, first of all, did you find positive?
DeGeorge: That they’re making amends is huge, and that the first three are apologies, asking for Bishop Brandsfield to make an apology for the people he’s hurt — the people in the diocese the people who work for him and the people who he abused: priests, seminarians, deacons, employees. That’s huge. It can’t be understated that we as Christians, as Catholic Christians, have a tradition of forgiveness and reconciliation that starts with one, admitting our faults, our shortcomings, what we’ve done wrong; and two, saying sorry for them. And that is a fundamental step that thus far the Catholic Church has been lacking in. Bishop Bransfield hasn’t apologized. His investigators haven’t apologized. The people who were complicit or participated in his abuse, haven’t apologized. And as a Catholic, and as someone who was abused by Bransfield, it’s hurtful.
Board: What’s missing? What’s disappointed you?
DeGeorge: The last five amends, four through nine I think it is, deal with money and exclusively money. The Vatican gave the Bishop of West Virginia and the Diocese Wheeling-Charleston a tremendous opportunity to effect positive change in asking them to come up with amends for Bishop Bransfield. They could have made the diocese safer for young people, for seminarians; they could have changed the clerical culture in the church. But instead of any ongoing policy change, the diocese chose money, namely their own money. As a victim of Bransfield, as just a Catholic in West Virginia, it’s very disappointing to see the diocese own financial wrongdoing, and I admit there’s financial wrongdoing there. But to see the diocese pick their own financial harm over the human harm that Brandsfield caused on the people of West Virginia, we have to look beyond money. The toll of Bransfield was not in dollars, it was in human lives and the faith of West Virginians.
Board: Do you think Brandsfield is likely to make an apology? Is he likely to accept any of these terms or conditions?
DeGeorge: I have Christian hope that he will. As almost a safeguard, I am trying not to set myself up for disappointment by the Catholic church anymore.
Board: You’ve heard from other victims, and you’ve had an opportunity to talk with people who’ve dealt with similar sort of abuses. Do you have a message for other people who’ve experienced abuse or just people in general?
DeGeorge: I want other Catholics in West Virginia, born here or come here, or if you’re a West Virginia Catholic who’s currently away, to know that the church we knew that we experienced is real and is meaningful, and it doesn’t need to be gone. To the victims of Bransfield, surely that you are not alone, and that no matter how bad Brandsfield or the church has made you feel and continues to make you feel, you are not alone, and this won’t just go away, the way that the Church says people want. Our want for accountability, our want for healing is legitimate. You deserve that.
And I have to note, the amends letter begins with all these prefaces. And Bishop Brennan, who again I think is trying, it said Bishop Brennan has met with a bunch of experts and has met with victims of Bransfield. And the suggestion there is that he’s met with all victims of Bransfield. And I can speak for myself and the other victims that I am in touch with, that that is not the case. I offered, I went to the Catholic Church for more than a year. I was absolutely ignored by the Church. I honestly have some inclination that Brennan is trying and thinks that he is listening. But the system that’s in place is a system where clerics have the first and last say, and as long as that’s the case, as long as we’re not willing to give an iota of power to lay people, especially in this issue of clergy sex abuse, then we can’t expect the Church to operate in any new way.
The jet dropped like a silvery stone out of the sky overtop West Virginia’s capital city. It evened out just over the Kanawha River and roared down its…
The jet dropped like a silvery stone out of the sky overtop West Virginia’s capital city. It evened out just over the Kanawha River and roared down its length, water flashing in the jet’s wake.
Crazily, the pilot charged toward a bridge over the river. Was he going to pull up?
Joseph Ellis Turner, age 11, watched in awe as the jet dashed under the bridge, not over it.
Immediately, the jet leapt skyward like a firework. It rolled once in the sky.
And was gone.
The year was 1950. Turner, now age 79, recalled his reaction as he stood stunned by what he’d just seen the daredevil West Virginia aviator Chuck Yeager do.
“I want to be like that guy,” he said.
‘Just a Guy Trying to Survive’
Turner would indeed follow Yeager up into the sky.
The Charleston native’s career as a front-line pilot in Vietnam, as the first African-American Brigadier General in the South and as a long-haul Delta Airlines pilot would be an esteemed one. So esteemed that on August 5, Turner was inducted into the West Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame.
He joins the likes of famed Tuskegee Airman George “Spanky” Roberts, West Virginia’s first African-American military pilot, and Katherine Johnson, famous for her math genius that helped NASA put humans into space and on the moon.
Don’t call Turner a hero, though. He’ll turn down the offer. “I’m just a guy out here trying to survive.”
Survive, he did. And thrive, even in the face of segregation, growing up in a segregated neighborhood in Charleston and later facing the segregation of the U.S. Army’s flight training program.
He’ll eventually get around to telling you, in his happy-go-lucky and self-effacing way, how even segregated cafeterias helped his Hall of Fame career.
“Everything I’ve done I’ve enjoyed,” Turner said.“I don’t know how I fell into all this. I think I’ve been blessed by God because I’m not the smartest individual in the world, believe me. But it’s always worked out for me.”
A Role Model Closer to Home
The bad-ass white guy in the jet was surely a lifelong inspiration. “He inspired the devil out of me,” Turner said.
Yet Turner has never met the legendary Yeager–though he’d like to.
But there was a legendary black guy who was an equal, if not greater, inspiration to Turner. That is perhaps because he knew Charles Rogers personally. He grew up with Rogers after Turner’s parents split up and he moved to Fayette County to live on his grandparents’ farm for some years.
Turner tended to the pigs and horses as his grandfather trooped off daily to slip underground into a local coal mine. And he soon took notice of the older kid, 10 years his senior, who lived nearby.
“I lived right around the hill from him. I won’t say around the block,” he said, chuckling, given their upbringing amid the hills and hollers of southern West Virginia.
Rogers was an All-American before the term was ever bandied about. He was a star in multiple sports and a straight-A student with a lifelong laser focus on God and church life who went on to graduate in 1951 from West Virginia State College (now University) in Institute. Rogers was part of a book-worthy crop of African-American officers that trained in the small college’s ROTC program, who would serve with distinction in the Vietnam War and beyond.
Turner, who followed Rogers a decade later into the battle zones of Southeast Asia, knows Rogers’ story by heart. In 1968, Rogers’ battalion was overrun by North Vietnamese on a march south along Ho Chi Minh Trail heading to Saigon. With bombs exploding and bullets flying, his 300 troops faced off with about 3,000 North Vienamese. He was shot in the face, leg and arm, but Rogers pushed through two days of hand-to-hand combat. And survived.
Rogers was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for “dauntless courage and heroism” that day. He finished his career as a two-star general. He died in 1990.
A bronze bust of Rogers is now displayed at West Virginia State University honoring the notable black soldiers and commanders produced by the school. On the “Wall of Stars” behind the Rogers bust are bronze plaques, one honoring another two-star African-American general from the Mountain State: Joe Turner.
Turner, visiting from his home near Los Angeles, was inducted into the school’s ROTC Hall of Fame in 2016 along with several other generals and ROTC graduate soldiers who went on to distinguished careers.The wall plaques laud 15 of the school’s ROTC members who achieved the rank of one-star brigadier general, two-star major general and three-star lieutenant general.
Just like his boyhood hero, Charles Rogers, Turner would achieve the same high rank by the end of his own impressive career.
‘First Class in My Own Mind’
Humid air enveloped a rural Alabama airport. The summer day was quiet. From a distance, came a buzz like a swarm of locusts.
It was indeed a swarm, not of insects but of de Havilland Caribou jets, made in Canada.
Credit Courtesy of Joe Turner
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Joe Turner, left, served as one of the U.S. Army’s first Caribou pilots
In 1962, the Caribou were a new thing the U.S. Army was testing. The STOL—Short Takeoff and Landing—planes could be put down and lifted off from a strip no longer than a few football fields.
Joe Turner, left, served as one of the U.S. Army’s first Caribou pilots. Photo: Provided
As the squadron of Caribou touched down, most of the flight crews that got out to refuel and eat were white guys. But Joe Turner was there and one other black pilot who had survived the training so far. This was the Deep South in the early 1960s. The airport cafeteria was off-limits to a black man.
Turner shrugged it off. He’d brought a sack lunch. He refueled. He took off with his mates.
“It didn’t bother me. That’s the way it was and we accepted it,” he recalled. “You couldn’t do anything about it.”
Not spending time in segregated cafeterias meant he left sooner. He got more flight time in. So, Turner finished the Caribou training before many of his classmates–certainly one of the few historical benefits from segregation’s long, painful history.
“It was great because when it came time to graduate we were finished about two months ahead of everybody else. Because we were flying all the time!”
It wasn’t as if Turner wasn’t already intimately familiar with segregation. Growing up in Charleston, he wasn’t welcome to eat downtown at local landmarks.
It didn’t bug him. He says he was never really upset by it. But his mother was.
Turner learned early on useful life lessons from her. She drove a mail truck at the state Capitol, an unusual job at the time for a black woman.
He ended up working around the Capitol, too. Then, he followed his mother into the privileged homes of the well-to-do in the South Hills neighborhood where she cleaned houses. She taught him how to do a job right the first time, he said, and how to get along with people no matter their skin color.
“It never bothered me being a second-class citizen. I mean, I was first class in my own mind, as far as I’m concerned. That’s the big thing.”
Line of Sight
Flying Caribous in the early ‘60s was fun, Turner remembers. They’d keep the trainees flying huge distances, topping up the plane’s gas and oil tanks mid-flight from tanks in the cargo hold.
“We didn’t know why we were doing it,” he said. “We’d just take off and go up and down the coasts. Turn around in Massachusetts, come back down the coast. Fly to Florida. Go down to Puerto Rico and land.”
It turned out there was a method to such flights, which could last up to 15 hours.
“They were getting us ready to go to Vietnam,” Turner said.“They wanted these aircraft to be over in Vietnam.”.
He began his military career as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. In 1965, he got a call while on leave in Institute, just outside of Charleston, to pack up. He was bound for war.
Turner had a wife and two kids by then. His family didn’t want him to go. “But I had an obligation. I’m an officer in the Army. I’m ready to do my job.”
Credit Provided by Joe Turner
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Turner served a tour of duty in Vietnam
All the other black pilots had washed out or quit Caribou training so Turner was the only black pilot among those who flew a squadron of the planes, hopscotching across America, then to Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines and on into Vietnam.
The 16 Caribou planes and crews were sent to the country’s central highlands and the front lines. They provided support to the First Air Cavalry Division. (The division’s story was told in the movie “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson.)
Turner’s first mission was to fly a Caribou to snatch back the remains of a helicopter pilot shot down weeks before. The body bag was put in the back of his plane. “The smell was terrible,” he said.
He thought he might have more such missions. “Luckily, I didn’t.”
Training flights in America became the real thing in Vietnam’s skies. The only way for a commander to send orders to front-line troops was by line-of-sight— from headquarters to a bunch of radio antennas hanging out the backside of a Caribou.
“The commander of the division could call through to my aircraft. And the aircraft would relay it back to whoever was fighting on the ground,” Turner said.
He piloted racetrack-shaped figure-eights at 10,000 feet. The flights sometimes lasted 10 hours. America had air superiority over the Vietnamese, “so nothing was going to fly and knock us out of the air,” he said.
Ground fire was a hazard, however.
“My aircraft did get hit a few times. Small round ammunition. We didn’t have anyone killed. But you could find the bullet holes in the airplane. The crew chief would find them and patch ‘em.”
Turner once looked down and saw clouds of smoke billowing in the jungles below. “What the hell is that coming from?” he wondered aloud. “They really have a battle down there.”
But the battle was coming from up above his head.
“The B-52s had been called in. And they’re flying over our heads and dropping those bombs,” he recalled. “Did they see us? I don’t know. That’s something that made me nervous.”
Six months later, Turner moved on to serve as a signal officer with the 17th Aviation Combat Group. His second tour of duty was as commander with the Headquarters Company of the 210th Combat Aviation Battalion. It took him off routine duty over the front lines.
“Generals would come in and visiting Congressmen would come over. We would fly them to wherever the mission was. Which was pretty good duty.”
A Wasted War
Turner retired from active duty in 1970.
“They were going to send me back a third time to Vietnam flying helicopters and I didn’t want to do that.”
Ask him today about what he thinks about the Vietnam War, and his answer, after a slight pause, comes out in a tumble of words.
“I thought it was a waste. We were getting a whole bunch of people killed for no damn reason. Because of politics is what it was.”
It wasn’t just American lives wasted, he said.
“Think of all the Vietnamese we killed. And that Agent Orange stuff we sprayed over there to defoliate the jungle, so they could see who they were shooting at? That stuff got into our system and killed a bunch of people.”
The toll from Agent Orange is personal for Turner. He’ll attend an internment in Washington, D.C., this month for his dear friend, Lt. Colonel Ron McLeod, another distinguished graduate of the Yellow Jacket Battalion at West Virginia State College.
McLeod, who served in the infantry in Vietnam, died earlier this year. He battled for decades with cancers he traced from exposure to Agent Orange.
“I really loved that guy,” said Turner. “We would talk two or three times a day.”
“It was a wasted war. Just no reason for it.”
A Decorated Career
But even after his retirement, Turner stuck with military life as a reserve officer. He split his reserve service with a long career as a pilot for Delta Airlines, carrying tourists from Los Angeles to Honolulu, among other routes.
Turner became a two-star general in the Army. Photo: Provided
Credit Provided by Joe Turner
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Turner became a two-star general in the Army.
His star continued to rise in the reserves. In 1988, he became the first African-American Army Brigadier General in the South with the 335th Signal Command out of Atlanta. The reserve unit had a forward-deployed active duty unit in Iraq, providing communications for the Third Army.
He was later promoted to Major General of the unit, becoming a two-star general.
After that, he became vice director of the Information Systems for Command, Control, Communications and Computers at the Pentagon. The position was the second highest in the Army Signal Corps in the Defense Department.
He retired as a two-star general in 1998.
Turner, a student of history, is pleased with the West Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame honor, which puts him in the same grouping as one of the great Tuskegee Airmen who paved the way for so many distinguished African-American soldiers.
There was a time before the Tuskegee Airmen that people said “black people couldn’t fly airplanes,” Turner said.
His 11 Air Medals, two Bronze Stars, Legion of Merit and other military accolades beg to differ, although Turner doesn’t bring them up in conversation.
He’s just glad to be included in such impressive company on the “Wall of Valor” of the Aviation Hall of Fame.
“I feel like I’m rubbing elbows with some great people. I’m happy to be joining them.”
