By Gayle Rancer
The phone calls and voicemails have been pouring into The Hinton News Circulation Department since the new first edition hit the streets last week. Calls from new and previous subscribers, some of whom shared stories of family heritage, growing up in Summers County, moments in history they’ll never forget, old friends, their childhood schools and reconnecting with the hometown they love.
Subscribers locally in Summers County and from Ohio to Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida had many wonderful things to say about how much this little hometown newspaper has meant to them over the decades. Some remembered the days when Hinton was booming, the air was thick with steam, smoke and coal ash from train engines, busy tracks and lots of coming and going by rail for business or pleasure. The tracks led many young people away from Hinton in search of jobs, military service, college degrees, skills training, promotions and diverse careers elsewhere and everywhere.
John Bragg was one of the first of the week’s subscribers, the John Bragg who joins Sylvia Mathews Burwell as the second kid to grow up and represent us in appointed roles in government. He was approved by the Senate to serve on the Railroad Commission in February 2019. Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services under Obama helped establish expanded Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act for West Virginians and Americans around the country. Burwell now serves as the President of American University, and Bragg may be spending more time in D.C. as his appointment came with a 5-year term and 5-year renewals.
Danny Campbell, son of Hinton’s Police Chief in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, shared a wealth of history. Danny is mentioned, as promised, for the first subscriber of the week to sign on for The Hinton News with his credit card. (Thank you, Danny!) His mother, Joyce worked in the new Dairy Queen during those President Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson years, and at the Old Hinton Hospital during Richard Nixon’s early years. Campbell recalls a town as large as 12,000 residents and 20,000 countywide. You could hear him beam as he recalled Hinton’s past glory and memorable attributes of this historic railroad town. Among them the fact that the old Hinton Hospital actually used to house a nursing school.
Many subscribers liked keeping up with home over the years, and many have come home to roost. Norman Liddon, now retired in Talcott, recalls how he used to guard his Hinton newspaper from his friends. “The paper didn’t look like much during my years away in Michigan,” he laughed, saying his friends in the cities made jokes about it and its absence of many pictures. “I wouldn’t let them touch my hometown paper”, says Liddon. “I’ve been a subscriber since the 1970s, two wives and everything else, lol. When my nurse handed me The Hinton News last Wednesday I was dumbfounded. I really thought it was gone for good. I sincerely appreciate that the new owners, the Refslands, have brought it back to us.”
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