In 2008, the woman I lived with, who became my wife later that year, got her PhD. She began looking for jobs at universities, & even though the economy went kablooey that year, managed to find a tenure-track position at Marshall University in the spring of 2009. That's in Huntington, West Virginia, a state I never thought I'd ever visit because it was a state I never thought of. Knowing how my roots were in Texas, & Austin in particular (I'd lived there basically since 1986), my wife thought I might stay there while she lived in West Virginia & return on the weekends. That was absolutely untenable, not the least because we had three dogs & two cats to take care of, & I would be at work most of the day. No, I felt the time had come to leave Austin, & although neither of us were very happy in Huntington, I'm glad we left.
The city was very small, very provincial, very conservative & poor. In our neighborhood - we lived quite close to a park - there were houses that were built seventy or eighty years prior (our house, pictured above, was built in 1934) that just sat empty. One of our neighbors worked for the Census that year & frantically attempted to count people because the city was depopulating, & would lose some status if it dropped under 50,000 residents. They wanted to count the students before they disappeared for the summer.
Huntington has the reputation of the most unhealthy city in the country. While we were there, British cooking person Jamie Oliver was filming his attempt to remake school lunches or something. There's some controversy over whether he helped or hurt. I recall our neighbors being a bit resentful of his presence.
We had to buy a place - this became a common refrain - because you couldn't really rent with five pets. The house was nice, three stories, so too big for us, & not good for our dog George, who was elderly at this point, & not so great on the stairs. We liked the house, somewhat, but the town was dark, it got cold, & my wife was miserable. Not only did she hate her job, she hated the city, & we took to going places on the weekend - we visited Athens, & Columbus, & Cincinnati, Ohio, we tried to find things to do in Charleston, but most often we found ourselves in Lexington, Kentucky, about two hours to the west. I've never been the sharpest tool in the shed, but I should have known that our constant attempts to escape the city boded ill for our time there.
There was a student station, WMUL, that let non-students volunteer & do shows, & perhaps I've written about the issues I had while deejaying there. It was fundamentally organized around commenting on & calling sports games. Its music shows were afterthoughts, & in fact most of the time its automation system played the same songs. My last show there I believe was late Monday, maybe from 10 to midnight, maybe later. I can't recall. I would go to the campus police, get a key, let myself into the building, turn off the automation, do Self Help Radio, turn the automation back on, & then return the key. It was lonesome & not much fun. One night in December however I went in to do my show & returned to find the world covered in snow. That was amazing.
(I did a late night show because any other time my show might be preempted for sports. One time I couldn't do a show because they decided to air a little league game to give the sports guys some practice. That's a true story.)
We had decided to relocate to Lexington by the summer of 2010. My wife went to Madagascar for research in June but we found a place to rent which you'll see next week. I left WMUL in June before we knew we were going to move to Lexington. I am hesitant to talk smack about radio stations but I was incredibly dissatisfied at WMUL & I found many of its practices distasteful. I knew I didn't have much of a future there, & was thinking about trying to deejay at a station in Lexington, driving the two hours there every week to do the show. It turns out I didn't need to drive that far once I got to the station.
One very nice thing about Huntington was we adopted our cat Bronte there. I talked about her here & here. She's doing quite well at 13 which is a surprise as we didn't think she'd make it this long. After Beatrice died in 2018, she became much sweeter, & often visits us to purr loudly in our face. To find the picture of the house above, I went through many photos of her tiny self when she first arrived. She's a sweetheart.
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