When W.Va. lost its voice: JFK's death still resonates

Rick Hampson | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption W. Va. still mourns loss of JFK West Virginia coal country still mourns loss of John F. Kennedy fifty years after the assassination of the President.

When Kennedy campaigned here%2C McDowell County was America%27s top coal producer

Today%2C 70%25 of children in the county live in a household without a working adult

Since 1960%2C McDowell County%27s population has fallen from 71%2C000 to 21%2C000

A previous version of this story misstated the day of the week Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. It was a Sunday.

WELCH, W.Va. — The coal fields of southern West Virginia have never gotten over the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Not just because it was here that Kennedy won the state's 1960 Democratic primary, ensuring his nomination and smashing the myth that Bible Belt Protestants wouldn't vote for a Roman Catholic.

Not just because it was here that the rich young senator forged a bond with the poor that has been his family's political signature ever since.

Not just because he promised help and, when he reached the White House, gave it.

It's this: Things have gotten so much worse here since Kennedy's death that his loss seems even more disastrous than it did 50 years ago.

When Kennedy campaigned here, McDowell County was America's top coal producer — "the nation's coal bin." But a collapse in the demand for coal and the mechanization of how it's mined cost the county its two prime assets: jobs and people.

The county whose poverty shocked Kennedy in 1960 has become a socioeconomic disaster area where 70% of children live in a household without a working adult, and 46% live in one with neither biological parent.

Most of those who met Kennedy have died or moved. Since 1960, McDowell County's population has fallen from 71,000 (third-largest in the state) to 21,000 (29th). Life expectancy for those who remain is the lowest in the USA for men, second-lowest for women.

Kennedy helped expose Americans to the scandal of Appalachian poverty, and he planted the seeds for his successor's War on Poverty. Now, however, few outsiders seem to care, aside from humanitarian agencies and missionaries. Politicians, who once trooped here like pilgrims, come less often, Mayor Reba Honake says. "We don't have the votes anymore."

Jimmy Gianato, 86, keeps a photo of Kennedy from the 1960 campaign in his half-empty grocery as a reminder of better days. "That's when Washington listened to us,'' he says. "Now they ought to send us a casket."

Kennedy in West Virginia is a great story of American politics. A candidate found his issue, found his voice, kept his promise. Kennedy, in some sense, became Kennedy.

But if it's a story of what politics can do, it's also about what politics can't.

Nov. 22, 1963

Eleanor Breckner was cleaning the refrigerator when a neighbor knocked on her door. Fred Muckenfuss was in the newspaper composing room, having just put out the first edition. Raymond Bean, butchering meat at Henderson's Supermarket, saw a crowd around the TV in front. Jay Chatman was getting onto the school bus down the hill from the high school. Reba Honake was pulling into her driveway, with the car radio on. Shelia Dangerfield was sitting in class when the intercom crackled.

Americans above a certain age remember what they were doing that afternoon when they got the news. What many remember here about the hours and days that followed is the silence, and what Jean Battlo calls the"awful stillness" of people frozen in place — holding up a can of peas in a market, standing in a doorway, sitting at a green light — as they listened to radio or watched TV.

Battlo was a 21-year-old idealist half in love with the dashing president she regarded as "a philosopher-king." His murder turned her town into "Zombieland. … You couldn't say anything. They couldn't say anything. It was like a death in the family."

People consoled one another, at informal gatherings at coal mine company stores, at a big interfaith service at the elegant Pocahontas Theater downtown.

Mostly, they stayed in and watched the TV coverage. After Lee Harvey Oswald was shot Sunday morning, "you were afraid if you got up, you'd miss something," Eleanor Breckner says.

Civic life stopped. The crowning of the Elkhorn town queen, the meeting of the Welch Methodist Men's Club, the band concert in Gary — all canceled. On Monday, the day of the funeral, schools, offices and most stores were closed. The streets were almost empty.

If the election did not bury the myth of Protestant intolerance, the assassination did. The preacher's Sunday sermon at the Baptist church in the town of War was dedicated to JFK. The Presbyterian pastor in Welch eulogized him as "first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

What the mayor called simply "this terrible thing" had a "special poignancy" in McDowell County, editorialized the Welch Daily News; Kennedy visited the city three times in less than a year.

"Why," the newspaper asked, "would anyone want to take his life?"

Battlo recalls "a sense of doom. We felt, 'This was a man who cared about us.'"

He'd addressed their worries, shaken their hands, remembered their names. Which is why, a half-century later, they would recall the days Kennedy visited at least as vividly as the one he died.

April 27, 1960

Standing on the second level of the municipal parking garage, Eleanor Breckner, 22, beheld an incongruous sight below: a millionaire in an expensive suit, tanned from a vacation in Montego Bay, covered with coal dust.

Stranger still, here was a Catholic presidential candidate wildly cheered by Southern Baptists.

JFK was an hour late, having lingered at a coal mine where he sat against a rail car and talked with miners between shifts. When he arrived in Welch, the crowd was so big — including shrieking teenage girls — that he had his sound truck pull outside the parking garage, despite a gathering windstorm. He hopped on top, reached in his suit pocket and pulled out what he said was a telegram from his father, tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy, who had been accused of trying to buy his son the election.

"'Don't buy one more vote than necessary,'" Kennedy read. "'Damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.'" The candidate smiled; the crowd roared.

Two weeks later he was back, speaking at the courthouse. In a voice hoarse from weeks of campaigning, he noted that because of automation, McDowell's mines were producing more coal with fewer workers. The problem was "what to do with men when machines have thrown them out of work." Absent a solution, he warned, "What has happened here is going to happen across the country."

Hundreds jammed the courtroom; hundreds more spilled into the halls and onto the street. "Help me," he told them, "and I will help you."

He knew they needed it. He saw wives line up for surplus government food. He heard about kids who saved their school milk for younger siblings at home. He passed abandoned miners' houses with boards over the windows — "Eisenhower curtains," he called them, referring to the president he was running to replace.

He called it his "education."

In a debate with his Democratic opponent, Sen. Hubert Humphrey, he pulled out a sack of cornmeal and said, "This is what people are living on."

He had started the campaign as an outsider, speaking stiffly to strangers about abstractions, but Kennedy found more than votes in the coal fields; he found himself. "Traveling around here changed him,'' says Raamie Barker, then a high school student, now senior adviser to Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. "He learned to become president."

On Primary Day, Kennedy got 61% of the vote in a 95% Protestant state — and a clear path to the nomination.

His victory helped make a reputedly backward state — stereotypically, a land of toothless, unschooled, moonshining hillbillies — seem a model of tolerance.

Kennedy's first executive order as president started a pilot food stamp program. On May 29, 1961, he sent his secretary of Agriculture to Welch to deliver the nation's first food stamps — $95 worth — to Alderson Muncy, an unemployed mineworker with 13 children.

Shelia Dangerfield heard her parents talk hopefully about Kennedy: "He was going to be McDowell County's saving grace."

McDowell County, 2013

MaryAnn Keen was born the year Kennedy died. She, her coal miner husband, Jim, and their four children live in the last house in a hollow about half an hour from Welch. Mining jobs are so scarce that Jim, a life-long union man, had to take work in a non-union mine, thus losing his union card. "He felt like a traitor," says Mary Ann. "This man was union.''

His pay and benefits are far less generous, and this summer, their monthly health insurance premium went from $386 to $526. But Jim is lucky to have a job. Since the fall of King Coal, the social safety net Kennedy helped create is all the economy McDowell has left. The top employers are the board of education and two prisons.

What Mary Ann calls "a beautiful place with wonderful people" is also a welfare state whose population is not well. A third of adults are in poor or only fair health, mostly because of obesity, inactivity, drinking, smoking or diet.

The county also averages a dozen fatal prescription-painkiller overdoses a month — on a per capita basis, tops in the nation. It almost makes Mary Ann yearn for the time of another abused substance: "If it was just moonshine now, that'd be great."

She sees the county's political dysfunction reflected in the schools, so troubled that the state took them over in 2001 and relinquished control only in July.

Teacher and administrative turnover is chronic; last year, her daughter Nevaeh ("Heaven spelled backwards") had four different third-grade teachers.

The problem is teachers aren't eager to work long in a place with so little to do: no gym, no place to eat dinner, few places to walk, swim or run. Much of the housing is either substandard or unaffordable.

The biggest turnoff is isolation. Cellphone service is poor; roads are narrow. Asked what a latter-day Kennedy might give McDowell, Mary Ann points out that the state's southernmost county has not a mile of four-lane highway.

She takes heart from an initiative called Reconnecting McDowell, a collaboration of government agencies, private companies, unions and non-profits that seeks to combat the county's isolation.

Her son Abel, 6, is in an after-school program started by Save the Children, an agency better known for its work overseas. And there are plans for a "teachers' village" in downtown Welch to give outside recruits a place to live, with amenities like a health club and a cafe.

Postscript

Kennedy returned to West Virginia on a rainy day in 1963 for the state's centennial commemoration.

Speaking on the steps of the state Capitol, he acknowledged that without the state's support, "I'd not be where I am today." He ended with a remark West Virginians still on occasion repeat: "The sun does not always shine in West Virginia, but the people always do.''

Five months later, he was dead. Fifty years later, McDowell's children learn about him in school — Keen's seventh-grader Chastin was astounded by the assassination — and its adults wait for a leader like him.

Had he lived, could Kennedy have changed history? As a girl, Mary Ann Keen heard her parents say so. She thinks that despite all the revelations after the president's death — affairs, health secrets, arrogance of power — "here, we see the good in people, and we see the good in him."

Could Kennedy have changed history? "I honestly don't know," says Eleanor Breckner, now 85. She's looking at a photo of Kennedy outside the garage that day in 1960, jabbing his right index finger to make a point. "I know he would have tried."