Growing Up in the Last Small Town

Growing Up in the Last Small Town: A West Virginia Memoir, a humorous and poignant account of the early life of retired Marshall University scholar Bob Barnett, a self-described bad student and undersized athlete coming of age in the 1950s. It is also the story of all of us who grew up in small-town America between 1940 and 1960. For Bob and the other children in unincorporated pottery town Newell, West Virginia, it was a time of simple pleasures: shedding winter coats on the first day of spring, playing baseball until dark, watching four-hour children s matinees on Saturday afternoon, and breaking plates in the town dump, their favorite playground. It was a time when getting the right date for the prom was more important than the election of the president. This story captures the rhythm of small-town life that we thought would never change. But change came quickly. Television became a staple of modern life in the 1950s offering Elvis, the evening news, and a vivid view of our changing world. School consolidations robbed towns of their souls, supermarkets eliminated the need for corner grocery stores, and the closings of mills and factories brought an end to small towns as we knew them. The generation whose story is told in this book grew up in the last small town in America.