Articles by Peter Slavin
Letter: Stamford High Class of ’72 looking for alum for 50-year reunion Original
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Dear editor, In the age of Facebook and other social media options, high school reunions may have lost their importance. But that’s not the case for the Stamford High Class of 1972! We have gathered every five years since graduation, except one, to recall our glory days — from two state football championships and award-winning theater productions to favorite teachers, lots of fire alarms, and those mini-skirts and weird hairdos.
Letter: Stamford High Class of ’72 looking for alum for 50-year reunion
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Dear editor, In the age of Facebook and other social media options, high school reunions may have lost their importance. But that’s not the case for the Stamford High Class of 1972! We have gathered every five years since graduation, except one, to recall our glory days — from two state football championships and award-winning theater productions to favorite teachers, lots of fire alarms, and those mini-skirts and weird hairdos.
Letter: Stamford High Class of ’72 looking for alum for 50-year reunion
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Dear editor, In the age of Facebook and other social media options, high school reunions may have lost their importance. But that’s not the case for the Stamford High Class of 1972! We have gathered every five years since graduation, except one, to recall our glory days — from two state football championships and award-winning theater productions to favorite teachers, lots of fire alarms, and those mini-skirts and weird hairdos.
After Coal, a Small Kentucky Town Builds a Healthier, More Creative Economy
Nearly 50 years ago, on a presidential campaign swing through eastern Kentucky, Sen. Robert Kennedy promised to help a disabled coal miner build a community center in the tinymountain town of Hemphill to give idle youth and others a place for recreation and meetings. James Johnson used the brick-making machine and VISTA workers that Kennedy supplied to create community space and built a park and area for horseback riding.
Harvard Study Finds U.S. Rental Affordability in Crisis Despite Housing Recovery
While the U.S. rental market has continued to expand, the markets for single-family houses and condominiums is still recovering. Affordability is an acute problem in both, according to the findings of the latest State of the Nation’s Housing report, issued by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Service, Music and Community at Appalachian South Folklife Center
The Appalachian South Folklife Center in southern West Virginia has weathered many storms over the past half century, yet continues to provide help to residents in need, education for youth, and a safe harbor for activists. Despite early denunciations of its founder’s political views, government harassment and a fire, the center has become a gathering point for locals and visitors drawn to the center’s beautiful setting, music and opportunities for service.
Walkable Downtowns Drawing Companies and Talent
Suburban office parks, which developed and spread far and wide as businesses left American cities, are now losing ground to those same cities. Hundreds of companies have moved to walkable downtown neighborhoods across the country in the past five years. According to a new report from Smart Growth America, “As job migration shifts toward cities and commercial real estate values climb in these places, a vanguard of American cities” have bet on walkable neighborhoods.
Cities Outpaced Suburbs in Job Growth during the Great Recession
From 2007 to 2011, jobs grew faster in many downtowns than in surrounding areas, reversing a nearly 60-year-long trend in the United States. This is according to research by economist Joe Cortright of the City Observatory, a think tank based in Portland, Oregon, funded in part by the Knight Foundation.
In 13 States, Land Banks Stabilizing Weakened Municipalities
From 1971 to 2008, only five states passed legislation enabling land banks; but in the last six years, another eight have done so. As vacancies and blight have plagued parts of the United States still recovering from recession and the mortgage foreclosure crisis, so too has land banking grown. There are now some 120 land banks and land-banking programs, with West Virginia joining the list in 2014.
Former Defectors Work for Change in North Korea
Jo Jin Hye enters a building at Annandale High School in Virginia where she attends night high school for adults. For a long time, Jo Jin Hye led two lives. Most people knew her as a home health-care manager living outside Washington D.C., or as a night student at a high school for adults. But she had also become one of the United States’ leading activists for human rights in North Korea, her native country.
Goin’ to the Mountain
BLAIR, WEST VA.–In late summer of 1921, a veritable army of at least 10,000 armed coal miners marched across southern West Virginia bent on ending the oppression they lived under and bringing their only hope–their union, The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)–to fellow workers. At the time, miners were no better than serfs, and could be shot down like dogs if they crossed the wrong person. Some moved south by car, some by wagon, some on foot, and others commandeered trains.
Concerts in the Woods
It sits in the woods in the middle of nowhere, a part of central West Virginia so remote that there is only one town within 25 miles and it has fewer than 800 people. It’s the last place you’d expect to find a concert hall, much less one that is a beautiful all-wood creation that seats 150, has enviable acoustics and is the work of one man.
Long Way Home
Morning comes early for 17-year-old Monica Shaffer. She’s outside at 6:40, waiting high on Brown’s Mountain outside of Hacker Valley, West Virginia, with her younger brother, Raymond, when the feeder bus pulls off Replete Road. It’s the first leg of their 40-mile, nearly 90-minute trip to Webster County High School, located almost in the dead center of the state and the only secondary school in this sweeping, mountainous county. The bus starts down the mountain, the road barely wide enough for it.
OVEC Issues - Mountaintop Removal
Originally Published in the LA Times Sunday Magazine May 5, 2002 Fair Use Notice Razing Appalachia By Peter Slavin For Years a Giant Company Has Been Mining in West Virginia's Big Coal River Valley, Heedless of the People Living There.
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