War, West Virginia
War is the largest town in the Big Creek District of McDowell County, (which most locals pronounce as"MacDowell.") which has the 6th poorest county population of any in the United States. War is still really, really small. But the people are friendly, and they have a rather good pizza place in town, where I had lunch, wrote a book proposal, abstract, and chapter outline, and talked to one of the local kids who is a political science and history major at Concord College. He wants to be a lawyer in Welsh, a town 15 or so miles down the road that is one of the biggest in the county and is not part of the Big Creek District.
My project while here is something pretty amorphous --"Policy Listening." There are three of us doing this, and I get to do the sort of thing that plays to some of my strengths -- I am conducting interviews with local officials and then putting together a write-up and small analysis of the conversations. The idea is to get a sense of the community's wants and needs by letting them convey those needs to us.
I get to deal with policy issues more directly by speaking with folks such as Tom Hatcher, War's Mayor. War is a few miles down windy Route 16. I got an hour or so yesterday to speak with him in his office in the small city building, a former railroad station that also houses the War Police Department. Hatcher was born and raised in the Big Creek area, but in 1958 he moved on to go to college and then forge a career. In 1991 he decided that he wanted to retire back in War, the main town in which he had been raised. Although not an especially political type, he was encouraged to run for a vacant city council seat, and after serving a two-year term, he won the mayor's office, a position vacated when Hatcher's predecessor was caught with his hand in a Medicaid scam cookie jar related to his business. Apparently the town also could have pursued charges against him, but they did not, and in any case he ended up spending 33 months in federal prison.
From what I can tell, Hatcher is respected and liked in the area. He has developed, with a group of several dozen local folks (springing initially from the existing Neighborhood Watch program), an ambitious, multi-pronged economic development plan that involves everything from utilities to using abandoned school buildings (the area is going through an ugly losing battle with the state over school consolidation that is going to force some Big Creek children to travel two-plus hours each way to schol when Big Creek High is forced close) to tourism to public housing to recreation. Money is tight here, of course, moreso even than most places, but Mayor Hatcher seems to believe that local initiative and his growing ability to locate funds will lead the plan to fruition in a decade.
I cannot say that I really got to know Tom Hatcher in our time together, and I have no idea if he is a good mayor or not, if he is going to be successful. But in my short period of time here I have come to hope so. This is a very isolated part of the world with people who often have been on the receiving end of a pretty exploitative system. But the resources in human capital appear to be here. Hopefully I'll be able to return here someday and the War/Big Creek Economic Development Plan will be a reality.
Tomorrow I will be spending some time with a candidate for State Delegate. He is an African American man based in Welsh, and he has already sewn up the Democratic nomination, meaning that he is likely to win the general election in the fall. By all accounts he has star written all over him. It should be interesting.