Cruising the Acropolis: Short Stories from Sarvice Mountain (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781540463906)

I am the eighth generation born on Big Coal River in Boone County, West Virginia. When I was born in 1936, my Dad, Weldon "Pepper" Martin, was a twenty year old underground coal miner, who was four years later blinded in one eye in a coal mine accident. My mother, Ruth (Barker) Martin, was a very smart nineteen year old housewife who years later was a leader in our Methodist Church and Practical Nursing activities. As a Little League baseball mother, she integrated the team picnic in 1955. My mother's father, Charlie Barker, and his brother great uncle Kin Barker, took part in the Battle of Blair Mountain. My grandpa Charlie told me that, "when they killed Sid Hatfield that was the last straw." Grandma said that a woman they called "Mother" came to talk to the miners-she was speaking of the famous labor organizer, Mother Jones. Labor heroes Sid Hatfield, Bill Blizzard, Frank Keeney, Fred Mooney, Cesco Estep, Mother Jones and the Battle of Blair Mountain were never mentioned in my twelve years of public school education. My twenty-two year tenure, 1977-1998, at Duval High School included: Serving as building representative for the teacher's union (the West Virginia Education Association), practicing a philosophy of student centered, hands-on classroom activities, three unsuccessful attempts by the "eat up with politics" administration to fire me, seven stitches in my eyebrow as a result of an assault at a Lincoln County board of education meeting by the brother-in-law of the superintendent who, since then has served time in the state penitentiary for murder, being publicly called in one breath "a hippie, communist and outsider." On my first day of retirement from teaching, my wife, Mae Ellen Wilson, and I traveled the summer of 1998 taking "Save Blackwater Canyon" petitions to fairs and festivals throughout West Virginia. With the help of volunteers, we collected 5,000 signatures and 20,000 were collected by the end of the petition drive. In 1999, Larry Gibson and I walked across West Virginia carrying signs against mountain top removal. We met with media in towns along the way to get our issue publicized in newspapers and on television. The West Virginia Environmental Council designated me their 1999 Grassroots Organizer of the Year Award. In 2009, the West Virginia Environmental Education Association gave me a plaque "For Outstanding Achievement in Environmental Education".