You CAN go home again

In "You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe's novel, he has beginning author/protagonist George Webber utter the immortal paragraph:

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

When it comes to Monongah, a West Virginia coal mining town with a population of 911, about the same as when I was a boy growing up there, Wolfe got it wrong.

I went to my Monongah High School Alumni Reunion over Memorial Day weekend and little had changed, other than the ravages of time on the faces and bodies of my fellow Class of 1950 graduates. This is a hills-and-hollers town that survived the deaths of 362 miners in a 1907 explosion and puffs with pride over its two-time state champion quarterback, Nick Saban, becoming the only man to coach two colleges to national titles (at LSU and Alabama).

But the tales at Green Hills golf course, Muriale's Restaurant and Westchester Village took us "home" again to those tumultous, glorious days "back home to our childhood."

I know you won't know anyone but me, but if you click on the headline you'll see photos of people from the Town That Never Changed.