Reflections on My Friend Sue

FEATURED AUTHOR—MEREDITH SUE WILLIS Reflections on My Friend Sue David C. Hardesty, Jr. Meredith Sue Willis, whom I still call Sue, was my childhood friend. I have known her as long as I can remember. We have stayed in touch all of our lives, originally through our parents, and now through the wonder of e-mail. We grew up together, the children of best friends, in a small town called Shinnston, West Virginia. It lies squarely within Appalachia. During our childhood, Shinnston was a coal town suffering from the closing of mines in our region. It had been founded on the banks of the West Fork of the Monongahela River as a farm town in about 1773. The founding families were, I believe, Quakers. It voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln and statehood. Our fathers had also been childhood friends during the Great Depression and had established their homes with their new brides shortly after World War II. Our family relationships were, therefore, deep and close. We were taught love and respect by our respective parents, and played and visited together throughout our childhood years. The town was full of the new and old Appalachian families of the day: families such as ours traced their roots back generations. The Hardestys came to Shinnston in 1841, and some remain there today. Sue's father's family came later, but her mother's family had been in our county a long time. There were also more recent immigrants Shinnston. They came to work in the mines: first generation Italians, Syrians, and others had come to work in the large and small mining companies so numerous at that time. And there were others from across America, like my mother, who, though from the deep South, moved to Shinnston to be with the dashing soldier she married during the war. The mines also drew African Americans to a variety of good jobs, and accountants and engineers came from other states and nations. Our fathers had grown up and had played and studied together in "East Shinnston," in what Sue called in one of her books, an "amazing Technicolor version of Our Town." The town and its Appalachian folk 29 provided characters and story lines for Sue's early works. To be honest, their childhood lives were not that different than ours. My father was associated, as his father had been, with the mining business. My mother was a nurse. Sue's father was a science teacher at Shinnston High School, one of many truly excellent, experienced teachers to whom Sue and I were exposed growing up. Her mother I remember asbeingmostly athome, buther roots were also ineducation. Our parents and their friends, pillars of the community, were hard working, honest, loving, church-going and civic-minded people of modest means. They loved their families more than anything else in the world. They were members of what some have called "the Greatest Generation." We grew up less than a block away from each other, and Sue was always special to me. Only later did I learn how truly special, even gifted, she was. She was my friend more than my "girl friend," but I think I always wanted to marry Sue or a girl like Sue. I truly respected her, talked to her and cared about her. I had my buddies, of course, played football and camped out and did other things that boys in Shinnston did, but Sue was really part of my family, and I was part of hers. Some of my earliest memories in life are family picnics at the Willis home and taking baths together after a day of running in the yard while our parents looked on. We spent most New Years Eves together, and we visited state parks and the town swimming pool with our families during the summers. We were in school activities together. We shared our respective joys and tribulations. Sue had a ravenous appetite for learning. She did extremely well from kindergarten through high school, taking the increasingly demanding courses and engaging in outside activities that furthered her dream of becoming a writer, such as editing the Spartan, our high school yearbook. She also learned storytelling at...