When I was four years old we moved up the river to Jordan. We had a three room house with running water and electricity. I could not figure out how the electric lights worked and there wasn't any one who could explain it to me but Harry Reed took me to the filtration plant and showed me how he pumped the water up from the river and how it went through the filters. Then he added the chlorine and pumped it to the tank on the hill. The houses in Jordan didn't have bathrooms but one day my mother took me to visit June Roby. She was the daughter of the Mine Superintendent. And they lived in a big two story white house and I got to see a indoor bathroom. I had began to see what it was like to have money. I started my formal education when I was six years old. Jordan had a one room school, well it had two one room schools one for whites and one for blacks which never made sense to me because at recess we all played together. They tried to teach me prejudice but it never took but that's another story. Mrs. McClellan was the teacher and she taught me to read and arithmetic. The most important thing she taught me was if you can read you can learn any thing you want to. My father subscribed to the Fairmont Times news paper and I read it every day. I read there was something called the theory of relativity which only seven people on earth understood. When the county book mobile started to coming to Jordan on Thursday afternoons, I ask the driver for a book about  the theory of relativity. The next week I got Einstein's Universe. A couple of the things I learned was if some one was traveling away from you at a high rate of speed their watch ran slower than yours and they aged slower than you did. A large body like the sun can bend a light beam. The sun's gravitational field bends empty space around it and the beam follows the distorted space. I didn't have any preconceived idea of how the universe worked so I accepted it. I was glad that there was eight people who understood the theory. The most important thing I learned was I could ask the book mobile Guy to get me any book I wanted. I ask him to get me a book about electricity. I don't recommend self education but it has it's advantages you can skip what you don't like. I didn't get interested in history till thirty years later and I decided to do it right, I went back and started with Lucy. She lived two and half million years BC.

  Ross