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This is a historical chronicle of two time travelers from
rural
West
Virginia. The first was Max Nunley aka "Mad Max" a big guy who
played football and basketball with me in high school and later
became about my best friend over a period of about 50 years. His
fellow hero is Joe Nicely who also played ball with me and “Max”.
"Joe" was better than “Max” and a lot better than me in football. He
actually got a scholarship to the
University of
Minnesota. This well researched chronicle is all about “Max” and
“Joe” and all of the strange creatures that they met and all of the
strange things that happened to them in a place and time back before
TVs and the Internet. “Max Nunley” and “Joe Nicely” are code names.
Lotsa
laughs: The story
begins when Max and Joe were walking down the old route 60 near
Williamsburg looking for American Indians of the Seneca tribe. They
were really looking for Chief Corncob because they wanted to
copyright his name for a toilet paper substitute that Max wanted to
produce and market. The only response that Chief Corncob gave them
when they asked about the copyright was when he said “Minnehaha”.The
chief was so tickled at his own joke that he named a resort that he
founded, Minnehaha Springs
A
Mule riding a donkey: Several months later after they had walked for
three weeks, they decided to go take a rest under a shade tree in a
community known as Alderson. There was a donkey basketball game
going on at that time in Alderson. One of the girls from Alderson
named
Tokyo Sallie had ran off with one of the donkey riders, "Mule”
Bennett who was from Hinton. Also it was reported that somebody had
stolen some donkeys from the gym. Immediately, because no one was
real familiar with Max and Joe, the town elders placed them under
suspicion as the donkey’s rustlers. Well, the entire town was in an
uproar and they wanted to throw the book at the boys. A local
politician asked if either of the boys could ride a donkey. They
both responded that the only way they could get around was walking.
They also said that as tired as they were of walking, there was no
how no way they were getting on a donkey. The local politico
indicated that even though they looked kind of suspicious, he
thought they should be let go free. The town elders were not
convinced. Max stood up and told the town elite that he had a fail
safe way to prove his innocence. About that time Nancy Lugosi one
of the town elders shouted out, “Hee haways says that”. Well by then
it was clear to most people at the gathering that Nancy Lugosi, who
was Bela Lugosi’s grandmother, seemed to know a lot more about the
donkeys than either Max or Joe. She moved up to prime suspect as the
likely culprit of stealing the donkeys. Elder John Alderson said, ”Nancy that's enough out of you." And that was that.
An
Ancient resort: The boys were much relieved but they decided to head out
of town quickly before someone changed their mind and put them in
jail. They decided that they better take a different route so they
headed out the Blue
Sulphur road to Blue Sulphur Springs. By my calculations since
they walked a mile in about 15 minutes and since it was 8 miles to
Blue
Sulphur it must have taken them 120 minutes or two hours, but I am
not allowing for the earth’s curvature. You know when you run on
the highway with the road’s pitch that it isn’t really level. On
the other hand with the earth’s roundness and curvature what does
level mean anyway.
Blue
Sulphur was a tourist designation where the people from the south
came in the summer to get away from the heat and get cured and
soothed in the sulphur springs. All that is left of the resort today
is a Grecian spring house that might be on the historical register.
One of the first jobs that the boys had was to help build the spring
house.
The boys wandered around Blue
Sulphur and then headed to the east where they saw a huge creature
that looked like" big foot”. The boys did notice he could sing a
pretty mean tune. Well the boys in recent years did some
checking and used carbon dating, DNA and other technologies. They
determined that the big tall guy that looked like “big foot” was
Perry Como's grandfather and not some antecedent of Elvis Presley as
has been speculated. Their research can never be challenged because
they used some magic potion called "scientific peer review”.
Uncle Jim, Bruce and Nancy: Uncle Jim Jarrett Bosworth
owned land from Blue Sulphur all the way to Green Bank in
Pocahontas
County. Uncle Jim’s grandson Bruce Bosworth played football at
Green Bank was an all American at
West Virginia
University and was later an all pro with the
San Francisco 49ers. Nancy Lugosi, who we encountered earlier, was a
time traveler like Max and Joe. After she left
West Virginia under a cloud, she moved to
San Francisco where she met Bruce Bosworth .She told Bruce that she did
not steal the donkeys and that she was moving to
San Francisco to get into politics. Bruce agreed to help her change her
name and pay for some cosmetic surgery associated with face lifts.
Although it required a wide shift in cultural values, the people of
Pocahontas
County eventually grew comfortable with the fact that Bruce was
living in
San
Francisco and all that might entail or suggest. However they never
forgave Bruce for paying for the face lifts for Nancy Pelosi because
they had to look at her perpetual smile on CNN every night.
Big Time Builders: The boys later spent many years in Alderson and
helped build the Alderson Federal facility, Camp Greenbrier, and the
Alderson schools. Several interesting things happened to the boys
during these years including the following:
-
In order
to get into high school football games free, they used to serve as
temporary policemen on the road that ran through the football
fields and stop the players when cars passed through the fields
during the games.
-
The boys
always cooked for the construction crews. They also used to
provide cupcakes for all the construction workers and that was how
the federal facility got its name “Camp Cupcake”.
-
Max was
known as "the hitchhiker" and probably was one of the first
hitchhikers in this country. Nobody would pick up strangers along
the road back in those days. Max came up with the bright idea of
giving the motorists the thumb rather than the finger. It worked
and people started imitating him all over the world.
An Alderson Queen: During one summer when the boys were still in
Alderson, Joe ran into the most unusual woman that he had ever met.
She was named Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith. Joe
first met her when he won the hundred yard dash by 5 yards at the
summer festival. Joe was one of the fastest people that ever came
from the Alderson area. The reason I know was because he ran the
entire race backwards and still won by 5 yards. Nobody ever knew how
fast Joe could really run because he would never run the race facing
forward. Joe was smitten with Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise
Virginia Smith but one night she had to come to tell him that she
was leaving. He said, “Must you go to never return?” She said, "Mais
oui" and headed off to Paris, France where she became known as Brick
Top.
Show me the Real Money
There was another unique woman who came to
Alderson named Lady Jane Grey. She was the most beautiful girl that
Max had ever seen. She was fascinated by counterfeit money. She
could not help herself. The minute she got out of the facility she
would go to
Latrobe,
Pennsylvania where she would go back to making fake money and restart
the cycle of counterfeiting/prison, all over again. This meant that
after a year or so she would come back and Max would get to see her.
Eventually as the American currency continued to decline in value,
Lady Jane Grey decided that counterfeiting was no longer profitable
and went into Medicare fraud. This turned out to be very profitable
and unlike counterfeiting there was zero chance of getting caught.
Lady Jane Grey went on to a life of riches and anonymity and Max
never saw her again.
Warshington and Spaceships: Around the late 1950s the boys needed a
change of scenery. Everybody else from Alderson was heading out for
the big cites like Warshington and DeeTroit. The boys knew Christy
May Higgonbottem who was an NASA astronaut. Christy May introduced
the boys to some of the NASA fellers. Well it turned out because the
boys were time travelers and had spent so much time on earth
observing the moon, the sun and the stars, that they had developed a
special talent to navigate in outer space. The top brass wanted the
boys to enter into training to become astronauts. That sounded
almost like communism to the boys. They did agree to sneak on the
space flights and provide whatever service they could. Very few
people know that the Russian who were in a space race with the
Americans sabotaged a secret American space mission by disarming all
of the electronics on the spaceship. The Americans did not hesitate.
They put Max and Joe in charge of navigating the spaceship without
any electronics at all. The boys charted the vessel through space
for three weeks as if nothing was wrong. The Russians were so
shocked and confused that they never recovered and eventually loss
the space race. It never came out about Max and Ed because there was
fear that the Russians would kidnap them.
Roll Bama I mean WVU: After several years, the boys got tired of navigating
spaceships and asked to be transferred to the NASA facility in
Huntsville,
Alabama where they were assigned to do intergalactic research. The
boys had done some scouting for the
Washington Redskins when they were in Warshington and had a pretty
good eye for football talent. They saw one young player from
Daphne,
Alabama who really impressed them. They told the WVU coach, whose
name is never mentioned in
West Virginia, about him and WVU recruited Pat White. The coach was so
indebted that he asked the boys how he could repay them. Joe said,
“Coach we would like to call one play in a game sometime.” In the
2006 Nokia Sugar Bowl WVU was hanging on to a slim lead against
Georgia with only a few moments left. The mountaineers had lost
the momentum to
Georgia late in the fourth quarter and were force to punt. Ed went
up to the coach and said, “Coach we want to call our play now. Call
a fake punt.” The coach said, “You are insane. This is no time to
call a fake punt. “Ed insisted and the coach called the fake punt
which worked beautifully and WVU held on to win the game.
On
Kenny's Knob Things are not what they seem: When the boys finally
retired from NASA, the President of the
United States asked what
America could do for the boys because they had meant so much to
this country. Max asked the President if the government could fund a
secret delta forces training facility on Keeny’s Knob near Alderson.
The President handed them a blank check and said” Make it so”. If
you ever go to Keeny's Knob, resist the temptation to saw down trees
or kill large turkeys or bears. Every other tree, turkey or bear may
well be a delta force solider in training.
Conventional wisdom is that the sink holes in
Greenbrier
County are caused by karst limestone that has been fractured by
groundwater and that the mountain top removal in southern
West Virginia is a result of explosives being set off. Very few people
actually know that the
Greenbrier
County sinkholes were caused by Delta Forces training on
explosives or that Mountain top removal in southern
West Virginia was caused by practice missiles launched from predator
drones that were based on Keeny’s Knob. If you are ever in Alderson
and hear a big” swoosh” overhead don’t worry, unless you hear the
words “incoming”, it is only a drone in training.
Time travelers kick back: Max and Joe after more than 230 years of
battles and adventures are pretty much relegated to emailing and
chatting on the Internet now. I don't know what happened to all of
the characters in the story. Some I have heard about. Nancy Pelosi
became speaker of the US House of Representatives in the daytime and
a TV promoter where she does late night testimonials for a San
Francisco plastic surgeon. The
WVU coach, whose name is never mentioned in
West Virginia, went on to have the worst record in the
University of
Michigan football history. He is now paying WVU more than $2
million for his breach of contract.
I also know that Mule Bennett and Tokyo Sally, also time travelers,
became very rich from trading donkeys and a tanning bed /tattoo
franchise that they established. They later provided an endowment of
$ 5 million to Concord College for the Institute for the Advancement
of Appalachian Culture. They have houses in California, Las Vegas
and the Caribbean. They don't get back this way much anymore. |
