The thing that struck me most about meeting Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit (you know, the folks who make the QuickBooks and Quicken software to manage your money), was how genuinely emotional he got when talking about his love for his home state. A native of Kenova, WV, near Huntington, Smith is among the technology elite in Silicon Valley…Yet his heart and mind are often right here. According to Smith, he often speaks with the other two Silicon Valley tech titans hailing from WV, Cisco CEO John Chambers and high-powered venture capitalist Ray Lane, about their common WV bond.
Is there any other state that exhibits such emotions from its natives? Possibly Texas, but there’s is more of a “Texas – We’re like a whole other country” mentality. In fact, that’s their current slogan.
John Denver captured the feeling in Country Roads:
All my mem’ries, gather ’round her
Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eyeI hear her voice, in the mornin’ hours she calls to me
The radio reminds me of my home far a-way
And drivin’ down the road I get a feeling’
That I should have been home yesterday, yesterdayCountry roads, take me home
To the place, I be-long
West Virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Dang it! I just got a tear drop in my eye while I read those lyrics. My wife has long since stopped looking at me in amazement when that happens. It’s a given. My proudest moment in life? When my two girls Sonora (age 9, born in Philadelphia) and Shelby (age 6, born in Seattle), began requesting “Country Roads” and singing at the top of their lungs in the car. My work as a parent is done. They’ve been raised right.
The instantaneous bond of West Virginians who may be traveling around the country is uncanny and often comical. You know how it goes. You see a WV license plate in the parking lot while on vacation, and you instantly start looking around to see if you can find them. Expatriate West Virginians living in other states beam with joy upon learning you’re visiting from their home state. Heck, even second-generation ex-pats get excited: “My grandmother is from Oceana, we visited there every summer!”
It’s the small town culture. It’s the warm nurturing of the hills growing up. It’s sometimes a shared “us against the world” feeling. Whatever it is, it’s special. And it’s a beautiful part of our stereotype.
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