Word: klingensmith
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...backyard when I was three and thinking about God. Looking at the green grass and the moss on a stone--that's all I can remember, but somehow it was very proto-spiritual." Twentieth-century Harvard produces few Calvinist theologians, but this morning it will graduate one Charles Dana Klingensmith...
Beckley (pop 20.492) sits in the southern coal-mining region of West Virginia, "not exactly desolate, but certainly way out in nowhere." Klingensmith's family has lived in the Mountain State since the 1840s, but they're not hillbillies--Charles is the third generation to earn a Harvard degree, and his father is a thoracic surgeon. Not snobs, either, though--the Klingensmith home may have been an "oasts of civility," but its younger members were taught "a deep appreciation for the people who lived around us and for fellow West Virginians...
There is coal money in Beckley now, but it's "inequitably distributed...The people who are poor are poor." Klingensmith says. "It's all government-funded poverty, and it comes largely from just shiftlessness. At least the poor in New England keep their property tidy: they don't in West Virginia. There's garbage strewn all over." And the people who are rich, mainly mine operators and speculators, "do not wear their money well." One summer Klingensmith worked on a construction crew building big private homes. Minutes after the plumbing was installed in one, the rumor spread that the toilet...
...between there's a solid working class, and a few families like the Klingensmiths. "We learned to think critically, we were trained to read a lot: we didn't watch TV" And in a state described on its "Welcome to West Virginia" border signs as "The Closest P'ace to Heaven," a state where a town of 3000 might boast a dozen churches. Klingensmith learned about God, in the backyard with the moss and the grass, and in a relatively liberal Methodist congregation...
...very first Columbia play, Frank Ulcickas spilled Roberts' receiver, Bob Klingensmith, for a 12-yard loss after Archie was hit trying to pass. Then Ulcickas dumped Roberts for a six-yard loss and the pro scout who had come to watch Archie wrote down Ulcickas' name...