wrote controversial editorials, including one questioning the validity of
standardized tests, which provoked an irate letter from the head of the
state Department of Education. Nothing worked.
One day a student I was trying to get to buy the Wave told me he had no
use for it because the same names appeared in the paper again and again:
the school's athletes and cheerleaders and the handful of kids known as
slide rules who always won the academic prizes. So I started a column
called. "Birthday Corner," listing the names of the eighty or so people
who had their birthday in the coming month. Most of these people had
never appeared in the paper, and they were so excited to see their names
in print, they bought several copies. Circulation doubled. Miss Bivens
wondered aloud if. "Birthday Corner" represented serious journalism. I
told her I didn't care—it sold papers. Chuck Yeager visited Welch High
that year. I'd been hearing about Chuck Yeager all my life from Dad,
about how he'd been born in West Virginia, in the town of Myra on the
Mud River over in Lincoln County, about how he joined the air force
during World War II and had shot down eleven German planes by the
time he was twenty-two, about how he became a test pilot at Edwards
Air Force Base high up on the Mojave Desert in California, and about
how one day in 1947 he became the first man to break the sound barrier
in his X-1, even though the night before, he'd been up drinking and had
been thrown from a horse and cracked some ribs.
Dad would never admit to having heroes, but the brass-balled, liquor-
loving, coolly calculating Chuck Yeager was the one man in the world he
admired above all others. When he heard that Chuck Yeager was giving a
speech at Welch High and that he'd agreed to let me interview him
afterward, Dad could hardly contain his excitement. He was waiting on
the porch for me with a pen and paper when I got home from school the
day before the big interview. He sat down to help me draw up a list of
intelligent questions so I wouldn't embarrass myself in front of this
greatest of West Virginia's native sons.