08/29/2026
These are credit booklets from my Daddy's store in West Virginia.
It was torn down a month ago, and most of these were hauled away to the landfill.
I guess, in a way, how he gave to the community, the proof, went with them.
But the community does know. . .
He worked in the coal mines, first underground and then as a demolition man, before borrowing money from an older brother to open a general store in Lincoln County.
In his first store and those after, he worked 6 days a week, only closing Sundays until right before he died in 2009. When he opened in the 1950s, he was the first to offer self service gas pumps. Lucas Grocery sold far more than food; it was where everyone soon bought everything . . .
Except, many did not have money to buy food.
While John F. Kennedy restarted a revised Food Stamp Program, which had roots in the Great Depression, after visiting West Virginia and being struck at the level of poverty he saw in 1960, the routine ability of people to access food if they were tremendously poor was non-existent, by and large, if those in their community did not offer a helping hand back then.
When Daddy opened his store, before food stamps, credit cards use or large scale charity outreach, I'm sure he remembered all too well how hunger felt. He grew up during the 20s without a father to help his mother. I often wonder how big a man Daddy might have been if he'd had enough to eat as a boy.
These booklets, well. . . they are just one breath in and one out of his life spent extending himself to people.
Most of these were never paid, but inside these books are there evidence of a man working and feeding thousands of people.
That weight was heavy. By the time I was born in 1982, he'd certainly resigned to carrying the burden of people ever wanting something from him.
I remember being with him at his trailer in the middle of the night where people would show up asking, asking, asking. Oh, and the times through my 41 years where people see me and know I'm his daughter, then say, sometimes with tears, how their mother, father, grandparent or selves would have gone without food and suffered unspeakably without him.
But I don't need them to tell me. I know first hand what he gave. And it did take the life out of him.
Every time I talk to his only living sibling, his sister Peep, who is in her mid 90s now, she remembers the amount of people he fed and kept in necessities, always ending on, ''Tiny never turned anything in on them if they didn't pay. People will never know all he did from that little store.''
But they will because I will keep telling them.
They named a bridge after him some years back that heads from Lincoln into Wayne county. But you know, all he ever wanted was to escape, driving down Rt 37, eventually to Kentucky down 23 all they say to Tennessee and live there away from things were so heavy.
Me, too, Daddy, but I'm like you, and I don't guess I'll ever get away, either.
