Nine, Nine children, what were they thinking?

Two people got married.  Children came in a flood.  Kadizzle was number seven of nine.  In twelve years my mother produced nine children.  A tribe was created.  There is no shortage of stories.  Remember any event, and you get nine versions.  After 68 years seven of the nine still breath air.  Heart attacks have been popular.  Younger brother went on to the great beyond at 49 as his heart gave out.  Oldest and second from the start had a heart attack that came within inches of getting him.  The big Kahuna sister had her episode with the heart.  Mother died at 60 when her heart went bad. Number four went out on the couch in the middle of the night and never woke up.  Another heart failure. Kadizzle sits here still ticking strongly.

A family of nine has it all.  We have some genuine crazies, some marginal.  We have one down and out. When the dust settles both our parents would probably be amazed how well most of the gang turned out economically. It would be fair to say eight out of nine crossed the line into good prosperity.  A lot of college degrees came out of the flock. Two sisters completed law school. One sister got her PHD from a famous school. All but one of the nine attended college. The one that missed college took his turn being an alcoholic, then gave that up to start a very successful business.  One lessen everyone learned was, " Don't have nine children".  No one had more than two.  Think about it had we followed our parents there would be 81 grand children.

Someone should have written down all the trials and tribulations. The history would have made a good book. All of us were raised back in the hills of West Virginia.  Everyone like to think of West Virginia as a bunch of hill billies, but that is far from accurate. We grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. Wheeling was a very sophisticated city.  In 1894 it was the wealthiest city in the United States.  That wealth lingered for a long time, and Wheeling was not a city of miners shacks. Wheeling was a city of marble mansions and a large flock of the Bill Gates type. Wheeling was a steel town, but also the home town of many companies that went on to join the Dow Jones top companies.

Wheeling was the jumping off point for people going west. As St. Louis took over Wheeling gradually sank.  When he steel mills shut down it was pretty much game over. Right after World War two my grandfather was the mayor of the town. At that time Wheeling was cooking right along with a population of about 80,000.  Steel mills, coal mines, heavy machine works, casting, a thriving glass industry, and being the western terminus of the B&O made Wheeling a hub of prosperity.  Wheeling hosted WWVA.  WWVA was the second radio station in the country.  Watch any old movie and when you see people sitting around the radio you will hear the radio station identify itself as WWVA.  The radio station reached deep into Canada and across the U.S.  People came to Wheeling to gamble illegally, to enjoy the whore houses, and the horse race track on Wheeling Island.

The Interstate was the ruination of West Virginia. Prior to the interstate it was a struggle to get through West Virginia, now you just buzz by and don't spend a dime. West Virginia's saddest legacy is the people bought into the Republican Party.  In the old days West Virginia was about as union and democratic as you could get.  That was back in the prosperous days.  Today West Virginia has succumbed to the right wing rhetoric of Fox News.  Now all the people in the hills are being fed lies by Trump that the coal industry will come back.  It ain't going to happen, but it is fun dream.  Just like the lottery ticket the fool buys, the Republicans thrive on selling false dreams so it goes.  So out here on the prairie Kadizzle sits thinking about those folks in the hills who are cashing their welfare checks waiting for The Donald to make them great again.  Enjoy that welfare cheese, and keep on believing.