Huntington, West Virginia
The day before their wedding, would-be brides run around frantic, organizing a million details of peri-nuptial bliss. At such times smart guys get scarce and go find something to do to stay out of the line of fire. I took Bill with me on a little road trip while Judy did those things only brides know about.
Huntington turns out to have glorious public amenities and cultural treasures. It’s a curious delight of travel to do just-in-time learning of a new city and then show it to the locals. So often I find things locals have never seen. How grand it is to show them beauty in their own worlds. Ritter Park is a serpentine emerald swath that stretches several miles through the southern aspect of this city arrayed along the Ohio River. Ritter Park contains a splendid Memorial Arch to those who died in the Great War, an arch reminiscent of the inspiring Wellington Arch in London or the grand Arch de Triumph in Paris. Along either side of the park is an amazing collection of magnificent house built in the past century in every conceivable style. What fun it was to ‘collect’ dozens of these with cameras, knowing I don’t have to pay the taxes or mow the grass. The several locals I inquired of had no knowledge of the even larger Rotary Park on the east end of town.
On top of the hills enclosing the city to the south one find a grand art museum complete with a fine conservatory filled with resplendent tropical plants. The manicured gardens contain fine bronze castings of various sorts.
Some cities are presented with certain iconic experiences they would not embrace if given a choice. New Orleans has Katrina. New York has the Twin Towers. LA has earthquakes. Ad infinitum. Huntington has the fateful jet crash in the fall of 1970 in which seventy-five football players, coaches, and supporters from Marshall University died in a fiery disintegration of a DC-9. This vast tragedy for a tight-knit college town was made into the tastefully done film, “We are Marshall”. For reasons unknown to me this event has always tugged at some inner part of my being. Going to the Marshall University campus today and visiting the memorial to those lost forty years ago was a bit like going on some kind of mini-pilgrimage. I don’t know what this was about but it was most poignant. There was a powerful serenity in the inner commons of this compact city campus.
Huntington has developed its waterfront with a small amphitheater and a vital pedestrian shopping district with horse drawn carriages. A town that has faced severe economic challenges for decades and other social challenges on top of epic tragedies shows plenty of evidence of new vitality and promise.
I got with the guys in the evening for Bill’s last supper before he becomes an old man tomorrow. It was grand fun, almost like long ago when our school mates were getting married off when we were merely in our twenties – a pleasant reversal of time, if but for a few days.
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