Below is the opening to Chapter 1 of my new Jerry West biography, scheduled to be published by ESPN/Random House in January, is now available for pre-order on amazon.
My book on Jerry West now available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Jerry-West-Life-Legend-Basketball/dp/0345510836/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
01/ SAGA
Roane County, West Virginia, December 1910
The small boy placed everything that was his, mostly a few tattered clothes, in a paper bag and set out over the hill for the long walk in the cold to a neighbor’s farm. It was Christmas 1910 and his mother had just died. There had been a pine coffin and a hurried funeral, and now he was all alone. Fear and confusion welled up in his 10-year-old heart as he trudged along, holding tightly to that bag.
For the rest of his life, Howard West would think back to that frightful day and his trek over that hill. His mother, Salena Kile West, had slipped away at age 41, worn down by a succession of troubled maternities amidst a world of toil. She had birthed nine children in fourteen years, a succession of labors that defined the wretchedness of subsistence farm life in rural West Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a life wrought with unrelenting difficulty for women in that age before rural electrification. Pregnant year after year, all the while faced with the staggering work load of a farm woman, the cooking, washing, cleaning, cutting wood and tending stove fires seven days a week. Salena had somehow raised the brood of children needed to scratch out a life from the thin soil of the West Virginia hills in rural Roane County northeast of Charleston. Like so many women of the period, her life had been an act played out in drudgery and isolation. Her first six pregnancies had brought the supposed blessing of six boys to help with her husband’s work, but that also meant that for much of her life she had been the only female to support a family of seven farming males.
