I met Jim when I started to teach at Whitesville. Jim was the librarian there, he was from Parkersburg WV. He went to Parkersburg HS and graduated from Glenville College.

He was hired at Whitesville for the 1970-71 school year. 4 years before I was hired. He was at Whitesville for 10 years. He lived in Nina Price’s rooming house in town which was across from the theater. He stayed there for 2 years and then got married. Him and Vicky bought a trailer and moved to the Trailer Park just below Sylvester.  Vicky worked at the Whitesville State Bank in town.

Interestingly, I stayed at that same rooming house when I first came. Except then it was owned by Gifford and Nola Webb. Nina Price, the former own was a 5th Grade teacher who had retired which created the opening for the 5th grade job I was hired for. We became good friends my first year, 74-75. We were both befriended by CW Hoffman and his wife Wilma.

We had a lot of mutual interests. Board games, computer games, tennis, shooting, college football, ping pong, Frisbee golf, computers, video cameras, magic tricks and making homemade ice cream.

We were competitive with all the games except Chess. That did not go well, he was a Master and I was 2 levels below a Novice I think. Our first game (and last) lasted 4 moves and he said Check Mate. Chess was erased from things we were competitive at.

We played tennis at the Whitesville school courts and later when had moved back to Parkersburg we play at the Parkersburg city courts and Parkersburg’s South’s courts. He taught tennis classes for several years while he was at Whitesville. I also taught tennis classes at Whitesville for a couple of years after he left.

When they first moved back to Parkersburg he was hired as the librarian at Fairplains Elementary school. They lived in an apartment for a little while in Parkersburg before he purchased the house he grew up in. Once I stopped in for a visit there and he showed me some magic tricks he had gotten. This inspired me and got into that too. I used those magic tricks in Bible Club at Whitesville and with friends.

Jim had a 22 Ruger rifle that we shot at an old Drive In which was just below his place. We would set up various targets to shoot at. Once we bought a big plastic soldier and ran a string from one tree to the other and tied a string on the soldier. One of us would pull the soldier across the span while the other one shot.

Jim was a good shot, I would throw up a piece of coal and he would hit it in the air. That amazed me. He said he was not shooting it while it was moving. He said at some point the coal stopped going up and headed back down, that’s when he shot it. I eventually was able to do that to but not as frequently as he did. He was also quite the hunter and fisherman.

Jim was usually the trail blazer finding most of the games we played and then I would get them and other times I would find one and he would get it.

The first board game we played was Tobruk, a WWII strategy game by Avalon Hills. I also bought the game and we doubled the forces. We would play for hours and hours. One would take the German side and the other the British side and then the next game we would switch. The board was a desert terrain. He had an initial advantage over me as he read the directions and I didn’t at first.   

The next board game we played was Squad Leader, another Avalon Hills game. This game board had a mountainous terrain with forests and rivers. He ended up buying one and we doubled the forces as we did with Tobruk. I remember on January 11, 1975 we started a game on a weekend at his place in Sylvester and played through the weekend. In the middle of the weekend a big snow came dropping 12 inches of snow. School was cancelled and we played for several more days. The only time we took a break was when we went up to my place at Pettus Bottom to shovel the snow off the roof of my car port.

An additional note about big snows… On April 2-5 1987 there was a snow fall of 17 inches in Parkersburg. I was visiting him at the time and we were playing games when the storm hit. I couldn’t leave for several days.

We played the following SSI Computer games…
Computer Ambush, Steel Panthers, Computer Baseball and Computer Quarterback. I started a Computer Baseball & a Computer Football league while I was at Whitesville. I still have Steel Panthers and play it once in a while.

Another game we played for a short while was Mattel’s Intellivision’s Football & Baseball. I also got one of them.

While at Whitesville he started Scuba WV, teaching scuba classes at the Charleston YMCA. His good friend Marvin from Parkersburg was teaching scuba up there. When Jim moved back to Parkersburg they partnered together. Jim has taken 36 trips to Bonaire, 1 to Belize, 1 to Rotan, 2 to Truk and 2 or 3 to the Galápagos Islands.
Video:Scuba WV Shop   Video:Truk Trip  

One weekend when I went up to visit him in Parkersburg and he had a scuba class at a local YMCA and I stopped to watch. He suited me up with a tank and mask and I got to play around in the shallow end while he was instructing in the deep end.

One of Jim’s instructors, Don, came up with the idea of playing Frisbee golf. On trips when there was down time and space he would play Frisbee golf with those who went on the trip. It was a big craze.

When I was up one weekend we played in Jim’s yard and his neighbors. It was fun and I created a course at my place in PA.

In the early 1980’s Scuba WV bought 4 season tickets for WVU games. At some point I went to one of the games and enjoyed it. After Scuba WV quit buying tickets I bought 2 season tickets.

The WVU football weekends were great. After school on Friday I would go up to Jim’s. We would play games Friday night and get up early Saturday and head for WVU. We would stop at a Bonanza for the breakfast buffet and head over to the stadium and watched the band. After the game we would wait a while till the traffic thinned out. During that time we would collect the plastic cups. I would hand them out in school for those who got an A or a B on their spelling test.

A couple notes about WVU football…
* I got to watch a WVU vs Penn State game at the old Mountianeer Stadium. Mr. Hendricks who worked at the State House in Charleston got some tickets for the game. He invited me and Bob Milam (President of the Whitesville State Bank) and my dad and a friend who came down from PA and met us there.
* Doug Flutie never won against WVU during his college career.

After Scuba WV and me quit getting season tickets I would go up to Jim’s on the weekend and watch the WVU games on TV. On Friday we would play board and computer games and make homemade ice cream. During the game we would drink Vicky’s ice tea (the best in the World) and eat Mr. Bees potato chips.

Around the middle of the 1980 I got into computers. I had 2 Franklin computers, they were similar to the Apple 2 computers. Back in the day of the 5 ¼ floppy disks. I also had a Commodore 64 computer. I had one of the Franklin’s and the Commodore 64 in my classroom for the kids to become familiar with computers and the other at my palce.

Meanwhile up in Parkersburg Jim had gotten into computers where he got a Franklin computer too. Shortly after that he got a PC with a 10 MB Hard Drive. We were at awe about that,  wondering how could anybody fill up that much space. About a year later he got a Hard Drive with 20 MBs of space.    

I had gotten an 8mm video camera in the middles 1980 and bought editing equipment. I officially started ACW Productions in 1988 while still teaching at Whitesville. Jim had moved back to Parkersburg around 1987.  He got an 8MM video camera he used to film his Scuba WV trips to various locations around the world.

I moved back to PA in June of 1990 after the death of my mother. I had ACW Productions fully setup with multiple cameras, full editing capabilities with music and graphics. I also had duplication capabilities.

In early August of 1990 Jim came to my place in PA and we produced his 1990 trip to Bonaire. Jim had filmed the trip and I did the editing, created the intro and ending graphics and made copies.

We would edit, play Frisbee golf and make homemade ice cream. His boy Scott came with him a few times.  It was a fun time. We did this for multiple years.  Course Layout  Scores  Video:Frisbee Golf

We still stay in contact by telephone and he visits occasionally.