Berkeley County, West Virginia

It's been a few weeks since I took this trip. Since then, we've been to Philadelphia and back, are planning a move in May, and are preparing for Passover. Busy.

My plan since we moved here in July 2012 has been to visit one county per month, within three hundred miles. I missed January because I was sick half of the month, and in February, I waited to find a time when I had two days free, the weather would rise above freezing and it wouldn't be snowing. Those three things never happened. The first week in March we had a short stretch of decent weather, and that is when I took off.

Martinsburg is the county seat of Berkeley County. If you are on I-81, you drive south from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to Hagerstown, Maryland, to Martinsburg, and then to Winchester, Virginia. 

It's one hundred fifty miles from Morgantown to Martinsburg. I stayed one night free with points from our expensive stay in New York with the same chain.

Like much of this part of the world, the Civil War plays a major role in the town's history. One of the main landmarks in Martinsburg is the B&O Railroad Station, now restored. It was rebuilt after the Civil War. Confederate troops coming south from Antietam, just over the Potomac in Maryland, burnt it to the ground. The Union had pressured Berkeley County to join West Virginia and not secede, mostly because of the railroad. The Eastern Panhandle, as it is called here, is cut off from the rest of the state. To get from Morgantown, one drives eighty miles through Maryland before returning to West Virginia.

Martinsburg is a "boomberg," a term I picked up from Joe. He learned it from a professor of demography in rabbi school. It means somewhere far from a major city that is growing rapidly with commuters. In Martinsburg, the MARC, Washington's commuter train network, runs trains from Martinsburg. This has caused the county population to explode, unlike most of West Virginia, where the population is shrinking. There are new apartments and town homes springing up all around Martinsburg.

I spent the afternoon of my arrival looking at historic places in town. The next morning, I drove out into the countryside to look for more history. I came home that afternoon.

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Martinsburg Shops

Boyd Avenue Historic District, Martinsburg

Winchester Avenue, Boomtown Historic District, Martinsburg.

Burwell House, Ridgeway

Campbellton, Gerrardstown

The Morgantown Human Rights Commission

The city of Morgantown has a Human Rights Commission. I've met some of the members, all dedicated, optimistic, and trying to make Morgantown more "inclusive." The commission's website says "The purpose of the Human Rights Commission is to provide leadership for addressing community interaction and fairness concerns. It works to ensure that the City is not only providing services, but maintaining ways in which a community can live together inclusively, functionally, and justly, despite differences, complexities, and conflicts."

The Commission ran a survey last year that asked respondents what their issues are in Morgantown about inclusivity. We were not eligible to participate because we live outside Morgantown's city limits, as do most people in this county. Many reported that they felt the city was not welcoming to people of color, those with disabilities, and LGBT people.

Last night (Wednesday, March 25), the Commission held an open meeting to discuss the results of the survey and come up with ideas that could be implemented by the City Council. We will be residents of Morgantown, within the city limits, when we move in May, so I felt qualified to go. We were divided into four groups: housing, transportation, jobs, and help for the disabled.

I picked transportation to deal with. We were chaired by Don Spencer, a member of the Commission, an acquaintance, and a genuinely good person. We were maybe ten in our group, mostly women, some from an advocacy group for the disabled, a man who is the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, and someone from the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization.

We had lots to talk about. Many of the streets here are too narrow to acommodate a sidewalk , the very limited bus service doesn't run weeknights and Sundays. The PRT, our once futuristic driverless rail system, is run by West Virginia University. It's great, but doesn't run as well as it did in the early 1970s, when it was created, and certainly hasn't been expanded. It also doesn't run Sundays, and was off all last summer for repairs. Sidewalks downtown were upgraded in the last few years with fancy lamps and "street furniture," but advocates for the disabled say it is now impassable for people in wheelchairs to move safely down the street. There is a lack of door-to-door transportation for elderly and disabled people to get to medical appointments. Even the meeting last night, at a city park, was not accessible by transit.

Joe Statler, a state legislator from our district, came over to our table. I couldn't stand it. Statler is one of two of our five legislators who signed on to a resolution to ask the US Congress to hold a constitutional convention to ban recognition of any rights for same-gender couples. "Inclusivity" indeed. I got up and walked away from our table. I couldn't stand listening to this jerk talk about transportation issues, or anything, for that matter.

I listened to the housing group next to me. Their group was predominantly African-American. They felt that landlords discriminated against them, there was a dearth of decent low-cost housing ( decent middle-class housing, too, from our house search) no public and very little subsidized housing. They felt landlords only want to rent to  WVU students.

Eventually I calmed down enough to rejoin our group. I wrote on the form where they asked for problems and solutions, that our problem was "bigoted legislators" and the solution would be to call them on it from the city council. Don offered to introduce me to Statler, as a conciliatory gesture. I had met Statler at the League of Women Voters debate in October. Last night, he denied signing on to other anti-gay legislation ( I can check that out) and said he didn't really understand the resolution banning recognition of same-gender marriages. He said "I'm just a farmboy. I don't know about this stuff." He's 70. I said "I'm from an insular suburb, but I got out and learned about the world. Don't use your background as an excuse." Maybe those weren't the exact words exchanged, but something like that.

I also confronted the Chamber guy. He wants to raise the sales tax in Monongalia County to pay for transportation projects. I pointed out that raising the gas tax would be a better solution, since sales tax hurts poor people more than the rich. They didn't think the state would go for that.

I'm too old to have to put up with bigots and make nice to one-percenters from the Chamber of Commerce. I also have to learn to be much calmer, in order to get along with people, but also to maintain my own health.

I'm not sure Morgantown's Human Rights Commission can actually accomplish anything other than make people with little or no influence feel they have some. I don't doubt the sincerity of the people on the Commission, I just don't know if the Commission has any power.

Philadelphia- The Rabbis' Convention

CCAR, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, is the organization for Reform rabbis in North America. There is a conference each year at a different city in the United States, sometimes in Canada and often in Israel. We started going two years ago when the conference was in Long Beach, California and I wanted to see my old friends. Joe can pay for the conference through his discretionary fund. Last year we drove to Chicago, and this year, to Philadelphia. This was the first time I signed up to fully participate.

Joe likes the workshops on esoteric passages from the Talmud, and the other deep study sessions. I prefer sessions about more practical things- money, for instance, or how to avoid burnout.

I skipped many of the speakers and study sessions to go out walking. Wikipedia has a page for places on the National Register of Historic Places in Center City Philadelphia. There are 149, and I visited twenty-five of them, for an average of five per day. I saw much more than that, just walking around. Philadelphia has a hopping downtown, including a "gayborhood" near our hotel, where the street signs have rainbow flags on them. We dined out with friends, mostly people who started school with Joe in 2004. We grabbed a fast lunch most days at Reading Market, near our hotel. It's a fancier version of Baltimore's Lexington Market, with many more options for places to eat, and in a less sketchy part of downtown. We ate with friends one evening at Sahara, a Middle Eastern restaurant, and had a prix fixe dinner at a Parisian-style bistro the last night. It wasn't nearly as pretentious as it sounds. We drove back around Baltimore, and had lunch Thursday at Suburban House, an old-style Jewish deli in Pikesville, near where I grew up.

Joe has  two first cousins in the area, and he made arrangements to meet them one evening. We had a fine dinner with his family members, the descendants of his father's two sisters, at the home of a cousin.

I loved spending time with Joe's family, most of whom I have met before, and I love exploring Philadelphia, which I used to visit on day trips when I lived in Baltimore in the 1970s. Our hotel was in the landmark Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, at one time the tallest building in town, and in 1932, when it opened, the first International Style skyscraper in the United States. There are some beautiful spaces in the building. If you don't look closely, you could miss the fine wood paneling, the black marble floors and brass elevator doors (no longer in use, they have new elevators). The hotel did a fine job of preserving the important features of the building.

We met some new people. At breakfast one morning, we sat with a couple who are retired from one of the big congregations in Baltimore. At another breakfast, I met a male rabbi who told me his husband was home with the kids. We also met a rabbi and his wife from Paris. Everyone had questions for them about the anti-Semitic attacks there. I spoke to Joe's classmates, who are now moving up to senior rabbi positions in large congregations in big cities. Part of me is jealous, but part feels that Joe has found a unique niche here in Morgantown, and I should honor that. 

Rabbi Denise Eger, who I met in Los Angeles in 1988, is the new director of the CCAR. She is the first open lesbian to head the organization, and she was on a panel at the conference with another rabbi who is a gay man, a rabbi who is a lesbian, and the deputy consul for Israel in Philadelphia, who is also a gay man. It was moving to see how far the Reform movement has come. It was 1990 before one could be gay at Hebrew Union College, and the panelists talked about how hard it was to not be open at school. One of the panelists attended the Reconstructionist College, near Philadelphia, because they were open to gays before Hebrew Union College.

The last night, a speaker came to talk about the election in Israel. Reform Jews are generally not friends of Benyamin Netanyahu. As a group, we are likely to support peace plans, religious plurality, gender equity, and negotiations with Iran.  Many people were visibly upset with the election Tuesday, while we were at the conference. The speaker urged patience and negotiations. He was conciliatory towards Netanyahu and Obama, who have been at odds. He offered hope that things will work out. I'm not sure people were convinced.

It was great to get away, to get some fresh ideas about Judaism, to eat in restaurants, and for Joe, to be with his peers in the rabbinate. At morning prayer services, hundreds of people knew all the words and the tunes. Everyone there is working to make Reform Judaism responsive to the need of the congregants, socially conscious and progressive. I am proud to be part of this movement, even in a supporting role.

The view looking East from our hotel to toward the Delaware River

Rabbi Joe at breakfast with his friend, Rabbi Laura Schwartz Harari

Rittenhouse Square

Independence Hal

Dinner with Joe's family

The Academy of Art, late 19th century. The architect, Frank Furness, was a teacher of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Philadelphia City Hall

Real Estate, Part IV

We didn't get the house we first looked at. We offered them lots less than they were asking. They had another offer they didn't like and asked both of us if we could come up with more money. We upped our bid as much as we could; the other party offered more.

We ultimately looked at eleven houses, including a  two-bedroom, two-bath apartment overlooking the Monongahela River. It would have been perfect, if we could have gotten rid of ninety-percent of our belongings, and lived a minimalist life. We finally settled on a small townhouse with a basement and a giant addition on the first floor. It's in Suncrest, a mile west of where we are now, still too close to the hospitals and between the basketball coliseum and the football stadium, three miles across campus to Tree of Life. We are in the City of Morgantown, which means we will have curbside recycling, and better local representation than we have now in an unincorporated part of Monongalia County.

There have been distractions the last few weeks. We had the Jewish holiday of Purim. It's become traditional to perform a play based on the book of Esther, with costumes and funny characters. Joe writes parodies of famous musicals, writing new lyrics to the familiar songs. This year, it was "Little Orphan Esther" base on the musical "Annie." I played King Ahasuerus, in a crown I made as part of the Purim carnival that preceded the play, and an old royal blue bathrobe with white stripes and Joe played Mordechai. He spent hours working on his play, and we had a few nights of rehearsals.

The weather this February was Minnesota-like, often below zero or snowing. Just last week, after bitter cold weather for weeks, it warmed up. Then it rained like in the days of Noah. The rain turned to snow as temperatures dropped, until we were left with more than eight inches of snow, and one day in early March, a low of -3, setting a record for the month.

This isn't an easy place to live. Two of our five delegates to the West Virginia Legislature signed on to a resolution to the United States Congress to call a Constitutional Convention to ban any recognition of same-gender relationships in the entire country. This sixty-day term, which ends this week, the Republican-led legislature passed bills to overturn mine-safety regulations, to allow anyone to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, to delete the state requirement, after last year's disastrous Elk River chemical spill, which left all of metropolitan Charleston with no water for weeks, to have all chemical tanks in the state examined annually. Many people have expressed disgust with the whole state, and threatened to move away.

I credit Barbara Evans Fleischauer with our decision to stay and put down roots. She is the one liberal from Morgantown in the legislature, and the fact that she has support made me think we can find more people to hang with. West Virginia University's new president, E. Gordon Gee, has expressed unflinching support for gay rights. We are dining with him April 1. Joe says "We are winning the gay rights battle, even here." I have to go with his optimism.

So despite living in a politically hostile town, with below-zero weather and terrible storms in winter, we are taking the leap and buying a house. We will try to make this place work for us, even if I have to run against the legislative troglodytes myself in 2016. We're already talking about taking Joe's vacation in February next year. Meanwhile, we are nervous and excited. We move the second week in May. Here's a pic of our house. It's semi-detached, so we only have the left side.  We met with the inspector today, who found some small wiring and plumbing issues. We hope the current owners will correct these issues.

House Resolution 99

Here in West Virginia, we have one of the worst state legislatures in the nation. The Legislature was never much good, but this year, the first time in many years there was a Republican majority, it has been nightmarish. While promising jobs and a fix for our state's awful road system, they have filed bills to limit abortion, overturn the efforts to make our water safer, gut mine safety regulations, overturn the Affordable Care Act, shield mine operators, nursing homes and used car dealers from lawsuits, and allow anyone to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. No jobs and no improvements to the roads.

Now a large group of legislators has filed a resolution, HR 99, to call for an amendment to the United States constitution stating:

 "Only a union between one man and one woman may be a valid marriage in the United States. The states and their political subdivisions may not create a legal status for same-sex relationships to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities or effects of marriage"

Twenty-eight state delegates signed on to this; two are among the five delegates from Morgantown.

I would note that both the City of Morgantown and West Virginia University, represented by these people, have non-discrimination ordinances which include LGBT people. The Morgantown City Council voted to support same-gender marriage last year.

Here are the letters I wrote to those two. Both are Republicans.

To Cindy Frich:

 I am your constituent and I am in a same-gender marriage conducted in California in 2008 by clergy of my religious denomination, and affirmed by the courts as valid in West Virginia. You have cosponsored HR 99, which, as you know, calls for a United States constitutional amendment prohibiting any legal same-sex relationships. In addition to being a colossal waste of time, as this will clearly go nowhere, it is a narrow-minded and hateful resolution. If you want to be seen that way, that's up to you. I will do everything in my power to see that you are not re-elected.

You promised to fix roads and provide jobs. All you've done in this session is introduce bills to allow every highly disturbed, undiagnosed individual in the state to carry a gun anywhere they want without a permit. You have set this state back fifty years in this session alone. I am disgusted.

Barry Wendell

To Joe Statler:

 I am your constituent and I am half of a same-gender marriage conducted legally and by clergy in my religious denomination in California in 2008. Our marriage has been confirmed as legal in West Virginia by Federal courts. You have cosponsored a resolution to the US Congress for a constitutional convention to ban any legal recognition of same-gender relationships. In addition to being a colossal waste of time, as this will clearly go nowhere, it makes you look like a bigot. If that's how you want to be perceived, then so be it. I will work to make sure you are not reelected.

Morgantown and WVU are both tolerant and gay-friendly places. This is one of the few counties in the state that has had any economic growth in the last twenty years. People like you are working to give this place the kind of "backward" image that plagues most of West Virginia.

I also saw the letter in today's Dominion Post criticizing you for siding with mine owners to overturn safety regulations for miners. If you succeed in that, then you are potentially a murderer as well as a bigot.

Barry Wendell

At this point, the resolution is in the House Judiciary Committee. The session ends soon; it may not get out of committee.

I don't expect to hear back from these delegates.

Update: I did hear back from Joe Statler by e-mail:

"Thank you sir I appreciate your comments believe me sir I do not judge people on their life styles and I do make mistakes"

Just like that - no punctuation.