It shows up once a week.

No alert. No ping. No little red dot telling you to hurry. It comes in the mail or off the rack at the gas station, and you carry it to the kitchen table like company.

That's the weekly newspaper. Think of a friend who never overstays, never talks over you, and always knows who's in the hospital.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to write about some of the ones in Appalachia. This is a series, three parts, and this is the front porch you walk across to get to it.

Here's what these papers do, and most of it is so ordinary you'd miss it.

They print who was born. Who graduated. Who won the 4-H ribbon, whose boy made the all-county team, and whose church is holding a supper Saturday. They print who died, and where the service is, and who's left behind. For a lot of folks, the weekly is how they find out.

They print the dull stuff nobody asked for. The water rate hearing. The school board's budget. The legal notices in tiny type that tell you what the county is fixing to do and when you're allowed to say something about it. Dull is the point. Somebody has to sit through the meeting so you don't have to.

They give you a voice. The letters to the editor page is the oldest comment section there is, and it comes with a rule the internet never learned: you sign your name. A woman can tell the county commission exactly what she thinks of that road, and her neighbors will read it Thursday and know it's her.

And sometimes they lead change. The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, told the country about hunger and strip mining and black lung when plenty of people would've preferred it hush. It paid for that. Advertisers pulled out. Somebody burned the building down. It printed the next week anyway.

Not every paper in this series is a crusader. Some of the best ones are just funny. A West Virginia editor once mixed ramp juice into his ink and got a talking-to from the post office.

Both kinds count. A paper that makes you laugh at yourself, and a paper that makes the powerful nervous, are doing the same job from different ends. They are keeping a record of a place by people who live there, and they are telling the truth about it as best they can with a small staff and a bad chair.

That record is getting harder to keep. Papers are folding. Counties are going without anybody covering them. In Welch, West Virginia, a woman told a reporter that now, when people die, a lot of folks don't even realize it.

I spent more than forty years in this business, and I can tell you the people who built these papers weren't famous. They were mostly tired.

So pour a cup of coffee. Part One is about a man who put "edited by an editor who can't write" right on his masthead.

- Wayne K.

The masthead said it plain.

"A newspaper for people who can't read, edited by an editor who can't write."

His name was Jim Comstock. The paper was the West Virginia Hillbilly, out of Richwood, an old logging town in Nicholas County. He started it in 1957 with a partner named Bronson McClung. On the masthead he called it a "weakly."

Of course he did.

Comstock claimed only 19 of Richwood's 3,000 or so residents subscribed. Maybe so. Folks everywhere else did. At its peak the paper sent somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 copies to readers in forty states and six foreign countries. He called West Virginians who'd left home "chickened-out West Virginians." Mailed them the paper anyway.

Every spring Richwood throws a Feast of the Ramson, a party for the ramp, a wild onion with the manners of a skunk. Comstock once mixed ramp juice into the ink. The post office smelled like a ramp patch. The postmaster asked him not to do it again, and Comstock told the Associated Press: "Now we're the only newspaper under orders from the federal government not to smell bad."

He ran a mock ad for a do-it-yourself appendix removal kit. Serious inquiries came in from Britain.

He once showed off a captive mountain lion to convince a rival editor, Calvin Price, that the cats still roamed West Virginia. They didn't. Once the hoax came out, the cat got moved to a state-run zoo, and Price got to be mad about it in print.

In 1964 he ran for Congress as a Republican in a district that voted Democrat like it was a church obligation. His platform opposed motherhood. He lost, home precinct included.

When a New York magazine called the Hillbilly "sophisticated," he demanded a retraction.

Here's what the jokes were hiding. Comstock fought to save Pearl S. Buck's birthplace. He led nature walks into the Cranberry Glades. His back-page column, "The Comstock Lode," was the part folks read first, and it ran heavy on mountain cooking, mountain talk, and mountain people he plainly loved. The foolishness was the front porch. Behind it sat a man taking inventory of what the place had before somebody hauled it off.

He wrote about mountain people for mountain people, and about what the place was losing, in a voice that never once sounded like it was apologizing. Plenty of papers that took themselves serious couldn't say the same. His readers didn't have to be told they were being laughed with. They were in on it, and that's a kind of loyalty money can't buy. He never did turn a real profit on the thing. Advertising never quite carried it. Didn't matter much to the people holding a copy.

He also had opinions on haircuts. A real country editor, he said, measures one in galley proofs. Three galleys long. Read your proofs in the barber chair, no sense wasting the time.

Apparently, this is an activity now. You can plan a trip around it, consult a map, book a room, and purchase clothing suitable for looking at a tree.

We used to call it going for a ride.

Somebody would look out the window after Sunday dinner and say, “Let’s go see if the leaves are turning.”

That was the planning committee’s entire report.

Nobody checked an app. Daddy might have checked the gas gauge, although sometimes that appeared to be more of a suggestion than an instrument.

Then everybody got in the car.

In the mountains, a fall drive didn’t require much navigation. You picked a road that went uphill and stayed on it until somebody said, “I don’t believe we’ve ever been this way.”

This was generally followed by somebody else saying, “Yes, we have.”

A discussion would develop.

The leaves were beautiful, but occasionally they had to compete with a marital hearing about whether that was the same barn we passed coming back from somebody’s funeral.

There was always something to see.

A hillside gone yellow. A red maple standing by itself like it had dressed up for church. A little house with smoke coming out of the chimney and a dog who considered traffic a personal insult.

You slowed down.

Partly for the scenery. Partly because there might be a tractor around the next curve, and its operator had no particular interest in your afternoon schedule.

Sometimes you stopped at a roadside stand.

Apples tasted better when they came out of a wooden basket beside the road. I cannot prove that scientifically, but I am willing to participate in further research.

If there was cider, you bought some.

If there were fried apple pies, the trip had fulfilled its purpose.

What I remember about those rides is how little pressure there was to accomplish anything.

We weren’t trying to reach an overlook before a reservation. Nobody needed a photograph proving we had enjoyed ourselves.

We could look at a mountain without immediately turning our backs to it and holding up a telephone.

Sometimes nobody said much for miles.

Then somebody would point out an old homeplace, and a story would start. Who lived there. Who married whom. Who moved to Ohio and eventually came back.

You learned a surprising amount of family history from the back seat of a car, provided you could hear over the argument about the barn.

I understand the appeal of a fall getaway. These mountains deserve the attention.

But I’d hate for us to think enjoying October requires a reservation.

Pick a road. Take somebody whose company you enjoy. Leave enough time to stop when something catches your eye.

The leaves won’t stay much longer.

And if you pass a little stand selling fried apple pies, pull over.

You can admire the scenery while you eat. That way, if the colors aren’t quite what you hoped, you still have a perfectly good reason to declare the trip a success.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Start with a dead man who never showed up.

Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion, died in California in 1953. In his whole life he never once visited the Pennsylvania town that carries his name.

The town was called Mauch Chunk then. Two boroughs, Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, stacked up on the hills along the Lehigh River.

Thorpe's widow, Patricia, had a memorial back in Oklahoma that stalled out. Mauch Chunk made her an offer. His son Jack always said it came down to money.

The two boroughs merged in 1954 and took his name. The town paid to ship the body east. Held the funeral at St. Benedict's. Built a mausoleum at Fairview Cemetery and set it on soil from Oklahoma and from the stadium in Stockholm.

Then the sons sued to take him home. A judge ruled for them in 2013. An appeals court flipped it in 2014. In October of 2015 the Supreme Court said it wouldn't hear the case.

Jim Thorpe stays in Jim Thorpe.

Plenty of locals still say Mauch Chunk. Folks tried to change it back in 1964 and again in 1992. Neither took.

I know what you're asking. What's a Kentucky hillbilly doing writing about Pennsylvania?

Coal doesn't care where the state line is. The Appalachian Regional Commission counts Carbon County as Appalachia, and this year rates it Transitional. That's good enough for me.

The county is named for what's under it. Carbon, as in anthracite, the hard coal. The state carved it out of Northampton and Monroe counties in 1843. A hunter named Philip Ginter, by the usual telling, kicked up some black rock on Sharp Mountain back in 1791, and nothing was ever quite the same.

Then the company showed up.

In 1827 the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company built a railroad about nine miles long, from the mines at Summit Hill down to the river at Mauch Chunk. No engine. Loaded coal cars rolled downhill on gravity. Mules hauled the empties back up.

Folks call it the Switchback. It was among the first railroads in the country.

Then somebody noticed people would pay to ride it.

By the 1850s thrill seekers were handing over fifty cents a trip. By the 1870s the coal line was one of the first tourist railroads in America, drawing something like seventy-five thousand visitors a year. Only Niagara Falls drew more. Cars hit speeds up to fifty miles an hour, and one rider called it a hair-raising trolley ride.

It's often called the grandfather of the American roller coaster. Coney Island built the first one in 1884.

The last car rolled down in 1933. The whole thing was sold for scrap in 1937. Today the old right-of-way is an eighteen-mile trail, and the bike shops in Jim Thorpe will haul you and your bicycle up to Summit Hill so you can coast back down.

The mules would have loved the shuttle.

Not everything in Carbon County turned into a ride.

The 1870s were hard on coal miners, and the Irish ones got the worst of it. A secret society called the Molly Maguires took the blame for a run of killings across the coal fields. Historians have argued ever since over who they really were, and whether they were much of anything at all.

Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway and the coal companies that went with it, hired Pinkerton detectives to go after them. Then he helped prosecute some of the cases himself.

The man who ran the mines hired the detectives and helped prosecute the miners.

On June 21, 1877, ten men were hanged in one day. Six at Pottsville. Four right here at the Carbon County jail in Mauch Chunk.

Alexander Campbell. John "Yellow Jack" Donahue. Michael Doyle. Edward Kelly. Convicted of killing two mine bosses.

Twenty suspected Mollies went to the gallows in all.

The story they tell about Campbell goes like this. Before they hanged him, he slapped a muddy hand against his cell wall and said that mark would never be wiped out. Said it would shame the county for hanging an innocent man.

The handprint is still on the wall, they say. Folks have tried to get rid of it, even built a new wall in front of it, and it's said to keep showing through.

That's how the story goes. Whether it was Campbell's hand or not, I couldn't tell you.

In 1979 Governor Milton Shapp pardoned another of the men, John Kehoe, a hundred and one years after they hanged him.

The jail kept locking people up until 1995. Now it's the Old Jail Museum, and you can buy a ticket and walk under the gallows in the warm months.

Over in Palmerton, you'll find a company town that still looks like one.

New Jersey Zinc built it around two smelters, one in 1911 and one in 1912. Numbered streets. Avenues named for colleges. Rows of doubles, one house split down the middle with a family on each side. Men came from all over Eastern Europe to work the furnaces.

The smelters shut down in 1980. By then, what came out of the stacks had settled on Blue Mountain. Heavy metals and acid rain killed everything growing there. Two thousand acres, say the EPA numbers. Three thousand, says a local TV report. Either way, a mountain turned to bare rock.

The company left behind a pile of slag, thirty-three million tons of it, two and a half miles long and over a hundred feet high.

That's a Superfund site now, and folks have spent years putting the mountain back. Native grasses. Thirteen thousand trees, four thousand of them American chestnuts, the tree the blight took from these ridges a hundred years ago. Planes have dropped seed, fertilizer and limestone on the slopes more than once, because that's how you plant a mountain too steep to walk. The Lehigh Gap Nature Center runs the habitat now.

Some numbers, since I always seem to have some.

In 1930 Carbon County counted 63,380 people. By 1970 it was down to 50,573. That's about one in five gone. The 2020 count came in at 64,749, and the latest estimate says 65,868.

Most coal counties I write about only know the one direction. Carbon came back.

I'd tell you why if I knew. I'd only be guessing.

You can't write about the Pennsylvania coal region without cabbage.

Haluski is cabbage and noodles, meatless, cheap, brought over by Polish and Slovak families. A coal region cook told WVIA hers was a Lent dish, a good Friday thing, and that the secret was sweet Hungarian paprika.

Weatherly, right here in the county, threw what WNEP called the first cabbage festival in Pennsylvania. The mayor says folks laugh when they hear it, then admit they all love haluski.

For a sit-down meal, go to the Molly Maguires Pub & Steakhouse, ground floor of the Hotel Switzerland, 5 Hazard Square in Jim Thorpe. Folks call the town the Switzerland of America. The hotel dates to 1830 and bills itself as the oldest operating commercial building in town. Wood everywhere, a long bar, a heated patio. The menu is Irish comfort food and local favorites, pierogies and shepherd's pie and fish and chips.

A pub named for the Mollies, in the same town where they hanged four of them. Dark humor or local pride, I couldn't say. They serve pierogies either way.

Look at what this county has done with itself. The coal railroad rents out bikes. The jail sells tickets. The ruined mountain is growing chestnuts. And a town took a dead man's name and wouldn't give him back.

Come see your neighbors.

See you next week! In the meantime, please forward this email to friends who might enjoy it.

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