You are listening to the already gone podcast sharing stories of the missing, the

murdered, the mysterious, and the lost.

While I was born and raised in the Detroit area, my father is a transplant. He was born in Beckley, West Virginia and called the mountain

stayed his home until he finished college, when a job offer from General Motors

lured him to Michigan. His parents remained in West Virginia, and a child one of our regular family trips, usually over a long weekend, was to make the 400-some mile drive south to Beckley.

Beckley is a small town perched in the mountains and it's located

about 40 miles south of Charleston, the capital of West Virginia.

It's in this small mining town that my father was born and raised. He was the son of a business

owner. My grandfather operated a small working man's bar downtown, a convenient place to grab a beer at the end of your shift, and you could have your beer three

ways, on tap, in the can, or from the bottle.

Now if you wanted something harder, you had to visit a state ABC store.

His place wasn't just a bar though. Each day Grandpa headed to work at 5 a.m. to prepare the kitchen, because starting at 6 o'clock, hungry locals were

arriving for hot breakfast, eggs, toast, hot cakes, fresh coffee.

It was a busy place. Sadly, the recession of the 1970s paired with my

paternal grandfather's advancing age led to his retirement. He sold the bar to a

local man who took over the business and kept things running a few years more.

Beckley, like many small working towns, she faced hardships over the last 20 or 30 years

as people moved away from the city center and jobs went with them.

If you were to drive by what was my grandfather's storefront now, you'd never know it was there, much like Murphy's, the Five and Dime store up the block on Heber

Street. It remains only in the memories of a few old timers. And I have a story from this era, an unsolved murder from Beckley. One my grandfather read about in the local papers, the Beckley Post Herald and the Raleigh Register. He did love to read the paper and stay informed about

the community that he'd called home for almost 50 years. I'm sure he read about

this crime and likely tudded to my grandmother over the dining room table, about changes in the Beckley they knew and loved.

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