This is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Hey there, I'm David Marcum, and welcome to Mountainthology.

A series covering a wide range of topics from throughout the mountain state.

Our goal is to shine a light on the lesser discussed wonders of the Wild and Wonderful.

Let's get started.

What started off as a piece about a popular hiking and biking spot 180'd into a story about community.

Producer Ethan Rayment met with Brendan Doerner, president of the Meeks Mountain Trail Alliance, and he discussed how a community came together to build a mountain.

Being able to explore West Virginia as a whole is really unique, and you can do all of that on a mountain bike.

(Biker yelps) Hi, my name is Brandon Doerner and I'm the lead fun officer, president of the Meeks Mountain Trail Alliance.

I was traveling quite a bit outside of West Virginia doing a lot of real estate development.

There's a group called the Hurricane Development Authority here in hurricane.

And a good friend of mine named Tony, he had asked me to join this meeting because he thought that with my background that it would be helpful for Hurricane.

And so I step into this first meeting with the Hurricane Development Authority.

And the first thing they're talking about is, oh, we've got this 15 acres and we want to build trails.

And, and Tony turns to me and basically says, well, Brandon, don't you know something about trails?

And so I got to thinking, wow, this may be an opportunity for us to build an asset right here in the city of hurricane.

And I thought, well, 15 acres isn't really going to do this.

So as a real estate guy, I'm looking at the map and I realize this family, which is the Meeks family, owns 600 acres around this 15 sat down with them and I said, listen, guys, I said, you know, as real estate guy, I manage 80,000 acres.

I've managed over 2.5 million square feet of commercial building space.

If you just give me the opportunity to go out on the trails to spend a year, and I'll go out there quietly and just study your property, I'd really like that opportunity.

We shook hands.

I said, absolutely, go right ahead.

So I came out and I studied the trails for for a year.

Before I knew it, I'm like starting to sketch it.

And I've got 26 miles laid out on this map.

We got to start building.

And so I thought, I'm going to grab my son and daughter who were, you know, six years old at that time.

And we came out, we built a mile of trail together.

And then there was a divine intervention.

We were coming across the railroad tracks one evening and two guys showed up and they said, "Hey, we know you're building trails.

We want to help."

If people were this excited about it, then we need to make something happen.

So, said every Saturday morning from 8:30 to 12:30- "Guys, just to let folks know we're going to we're going to start building That first weekend, they came up.

Seven people showed up.

The next weekend, 20 people showed up.

And before I knew it, every single Saturday, we'd have anywhere from from 15 to 30 people showing up.

We started on what's called the red white loop now, and before I knew it, there was a couple businesses that said, hey, we want to participate in this.

We have volunteer days.

So we're not only getting volunteers, you're getting businesses that are involved in this who are helping promote with our employees.

And this thing started spreading like wildfire.

And so I started getting serious and I thought, you know, I've got to release this plan - the 2-5-5-2-6 trail plan.

We're going to build five miles in two years, and we're going to build 26 miles in five years.

And and surprisingly, there's no questions of that.

Fast forward to this whole process.

And we have 32 miles and we build it all within four and a half years.

I don't think that's ever been done across United States.

Every trail system has their own designs, and I respect all of that.

I didn't want them to have arrows of, you got to go this way or that way, or, you can only go this way this time of year and this way that time of year.

You know, I really wanted people to come out and and explore on their own and have that freedom, because that's what we're coming out to the woods for, is having some freedom.

And so as I'm thinking about the blaze, I'm thinking about those that are directionally challenged.

You know, red whites are colors here.

Our city of hurricane.

So the first blaze, the first three and a half mile loop, or the 5K loop that I laid out was a red-white.

The second loop that I started laying out was a green-white, which was, you know, a lot of people may think that it was Marshall at the time, but it's Winfield because it's part of Putnam County.

And then the third loop of that was the blue-gold, which is part of our Buffalo folks up in the northern part of the county.

And then we ended up having a purple-pink and a purple-pink is just for the fun folks.

There's some really fun characters that helped build this trail.

And I thought, man, that's some fun colors for them.

Woo!

The, the very first event was a trail race.

It was a running race, and that was in October of 2020.

Actually, I can't remember that was 2019 or 2020, but that's when the first event was.

And now we have at least, I don't know, six, 6 to 8 events a year.

Like we have wild mushroom hikes.

We have, wild edible hikes, we have, medicinal hikes.

And we have all those education events that go along with this.

We have the West Virginia mountain Bike Association, WVMBA I had a good friend who came out, actually, I didn't know him at the time, but he came out and he was an attorney.

He's a runner.

He's helping build trails.

And, he says, "Brandon, you oughta really think about organizing this a little bit more into a nonprofit organization."

I thought, man, this isn't for me.

I just want to come build trails.

I said, but if we're going to do this, I got to have a team.

I've got to have somebody who understands websites.

I've got to have somebody who understands education.

I've got to have somebody who understands events.

I've got to have runners.

I've got to have mountain bikers.

We started Meeks Mountain Trail Alliance and, it was, it was really interesting and how it all began because none of us really knew each other.

But when I showed up at the meeting, I showed up with a bundle of sticks.

I had 11 sticks in my hand.

I said, guys, we're going to have to make tough decisions and we're going to have to do things that we never thought we were going to do.

But as I showed them the sticks, I showed them that you can't hardly break that bundle of sticks that are 11.

But as I started taking the sticks away, it was easy to break 2 or 3 of the sticks or four sticks or whatever.

But the 11 together, there was a lot of strength in that, and I think that resonated with all of them.

The fact that we're in this together.

No matter if we disagree as a board, that we're not going to walk away and say, well, that's not what I want to do.

And that has never been the case with us.

We've always walked away from meetings in a harmonious manner, and there may be a difference of opinions, but these folks are serious and they're passionate about this trail system and what it's done for the community.

The most important part of our mission statement is building trails, building community, building people.

And wholeheartedly, this main thing is all about building people within our community.

We've had guys that have started mountain biking.

We've got one individual who's helping maintain trails right now and within a year's time has lost 200 pounds.

That is the type of impact that this trail system has had on our community.

There's so many stories like that.

So it's not only affecting us socially, mentally, but physically as well.

But it all gets back to the people.

So when folks ask, you know, you're out there building trails.

Yes, we're building trails.

We're building community.

But most importantly, we're building people in all of this.

West Virginia is home to a number of sports legends, but none have a story and an influence quite like Earl Lloyd.

Our producer, Janet Kunicki, brings us the story of the first black player in the NBA and the ways his legacy is being preserved today.

Everybody knows Jackie by one name.

How do you not know Earl Lloyd's legacy?

Earl always deflected to Jackie because Jackie broke the color barrier in baseball.

I always told Earl, you know, you went through the same hardships and troubles.

Just to say, you know, 1950, that when they were traveling to these cities... Some of the cities you went to, you couldn't stay at the same hotel.

Some of the cities he did go to, he could stay at the hotel, but he couldn't eat with his teammates.

My father grew up dirt poor, and that was in Virginia.

How a small black kid from Alexandria, Virginia, made it to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

And you don't make it by yourself.

You have a lot of handprints on you along the way That- they showed you how to do it.

You grew up- Jim Crow, to the CIAA From the CIAA to the NBA.

And you have rules, things you can do, things you cannot do.

And my father knew the rules, and he followed the rules quite well.

After his sophomore year, which is when they went undefeated, they were there.

That was 1948.

They were the only team in college basketball at any level.

That was undefeated.

They were 30, you know, thought they were going to get an invite to the NIT because back then the NIT was bigger.

Or just as big as the NCAA tournament.

And so they thought they were going to get a bid to the NIT.

They did not, because it was a black school.

And the undefeated season was 1948.

They gave my father's team, the Black National Championship Award.

And so he and his team and Mark Cardwell did what they called a barnstorming tour, and they took train all the way out to California and played Saint Mary's - White School - in the the Cow Palace.

Right?

They then went on to play, I think, in a penitentiary against the team there as well.

And so, you know, Earl and those guys, you know, kind of exuded what, you know, they needed to show other teams to be.

And so Earl used to say when they would be coming back from road trips, when they saw that water tower, they knew they were safe because this was their safe haven, was this campus.

And so when they saw the water tower, all is good.

We're home.

I'd be remiss not to mention Chuck Cooper and Sweetwater Clifton, because in 1950, you know, they kicked the door open together.

And when my father's playing in the 50s, and I'm sure for Chuck Cooper and Sweetwater Clifton also, it was rough.

In 1950 they only had eight teams and ten people on the team, which means my father was proud of any players that that made the league.

He was one of them.

You know, you only got three players, three blacks in the NBA.

You go to some rough towns Fort Wayne, Indiana, Saint Louis, Boston.

Well, you hear all kinds of things.

He had no problem with his teammates open arms, open arms.

It was just the crowd.

Spectators.

My father told me his first game in Rochester, New York.

The Washington Capitals were playing the Rochester Royals in one.

One fan said to the other fan, with my grandparents right next to me.

"Do you think this 'N-word' can play?"

And my grandmother touched the other guy like "Believe me, he can play."

But it was rough.

When they started playing, when my father heard the N-word or somebody spit on my father.

you know, he had to keep his composure.

Because if he went into the stands, and hit somebody or grabbed somebody... he may have said NBA back by ten years, 15 years, you never know.

He said his mentality was, "I got to do what I got to do to make this team."

That's what I've got to, you know, figure out what do I have to do to make this team to make an impact in these practices, to where they got to say, I got to keep Earl Lloyd on this team.

And so he did that with his, you know, hard play and rebounding and defending and those things.

The way the schedule fell, Earl, October 31st, 1950, was the first black player to step foot on an NBA basketball court during a game.

He got drafted into the Army.

When he gets out, he gets picked up by the Syracuse Nationals.

Really because of George King.

George King played at Maurice Harvey at the time.

Earl and George King never met each other while they were both on these two campuses.

Eight miles apart.

Never met each other.

But George was playing for the Syracuse Nationals at the time, and George told the administration, "Hey, Earl, Lloyd's available.

That's who you need to pick up."

We need to pick up Earl Lloyd.

And so it's kind of ironic that those two played so close together.

Never met each other, never spoke, never played against each other, but then in the professional ranks became teammates and became friends.

And so that's where Earl and a guy by the name of Jim Tucker in 1955, become the first two black players to win an NBA championship was with the Syracuse Nationals.

Duquesne actually put together a classic, to honor Chuck.

Invited Earl up there and wanted West Virginia State to play a prelim game at Duquesne.

Earl was there, spent the whole weekend with us and pregame meal with the team.

Obviously, the game is different now than when Earl played, um, you know, back then it was not as much scoring.

It was more, you know, inside-out.

Today's game is now more outside-in- shooting threes and those kinds of things.

So.

So the game is different.

The game at Duquesne, he was in there for our pregame talk.

And you know I think the the language is a little bit different in, you know, the schemes and how you're going to guard ball screens or what have you blitzing or trapping.

And so I think that kind of verbiage was a little bit different.

So, you know, I went through my pregame talk and all that and I said, "Mr.

Lloyd, you got anything to say?"

He goes, "I'm not sure what coach just told you guys."

He goes "I don't understand all that language.

All I'm saying is go out there and play as hard as you can.

Go out there and play as hard as you can."

And that's what Earl Lloyd was about.

And that's what made his name.

He could score, but he played extremely hard, defended and rebounded.

And and that's what made his NBA career.

My wife wanted to go to New Orleans.

So we decided, okay, we'll go back to the Final Four this year.

And I go into that expo and across the way is this huge statue of Shaq hanging on the rim, dunking it.

And I walked in and I'm looking at this statue, and this smaller white gentleman walks up beside me and he says, "Can I help you?"

And I said, "yeah, how much would one of those cost?"

Because at that time, the state had already appropriated money for us to have a new arena, and I wanted a statue of Earl Lloyd in this.

All right.

And so, the guy says, "I don't know.

Who you want one of?"

And I said, "Earl Lloyd" And he said, "You mean <i>the </i>Earl Lloyd?"

And I said, "Yes- the first black player to ever play in the NBA.

He played at our school, West Virginia State.

We're getting a new arena.

I need a statue of him."

"Done deal.

I'm doing it."

I'm like, "How much?"

"Don't worry about that.

We'll talk about that later."

I know they're not free.

Come to find out, this guy is a guy by the name of Brian Hanlon.

Brian Hanlon became the official sculptor for the Basketball Hall of Fame the same year that Earl Lloyd got inducted.

Brian ends up charging us nothing for his artistic work.

They don't hand out statues.

They say thank you.

Job well done.

I was here yesterday and I was looking at my father's, retirement number, his jersey in the new gymnasium.

Almost had a moment of what kind of person my father was.

Because once again, if they don't think my father was worthy or a good person, he wouldn't have no statue.

He wouldn't have no street name.

His jersy wouldn't been in the rafters.

If I can fill half of my father's shoes... I won.

I know I can't fill them for sure but if I can fill half his shoes... I won Here in West Virginia.

More and more areas are adopting wind energy, with acres of wind turbines being built all over the state.

With that comes more jobs requiring specialized training.

Our producer, Bryce Smith sat with Michael Arquin who's doing everything he can to bring wind energy education into the classroom and aiding instructors every step of the way.

What we're doing at Eastern today is a teacher training around wind energy.

It's part of a larger project in Grant and Mineral counties to sort of bring wind energy education down to the K-12 level.

This is funded by a grant from Toyota who is very interested.

They buy all the wind electrons from the wind farms up in this area to power their facilities in southern West Virginia.

We've got about ten teachers today up here, and we'll come back in the fall and do a bunch more training and a bunch more schools.

and KidWind was born about 20 years when I was teaching in sixth grade and I had done a lot of solar with my kids and I went to go find some stuff and wind energy and I found nothing.

So we started develop our own tools and equipment and we started doing my kids and I got a teacher fellowship to develop it all out.

And it turned into an accidental career for the last 20 years, to be perfectly honest with you.

I would say that our growth has been pretty crazy in the last ten years.

We're in probably every state in the United States.

I have 500 trainers around the United States and we have thousands upon thousands of kids doing wind energy and other renewables at many different levels all across the United States.

really here because we were here first, not because we were smarter.

We just did it earlier.

we used to manufacture all our own equipment.

Like a lot of the equipment you're going to see up there, I invented and we had a multimillion dollar business, but I did not like running a warehouse and stuff.

So I sold that to another company just to focus on the teacher development side.

and how we know they're getting better is we kind of continually have to make the challenges more complex, more interesting, because they're just getting a lot smarter and they're getting a lot more creative.

So we kind of like have to stay ahead of them.

(Michael laughs) So like we have every year we have a national one challenge where like 700 kids show from all these events around the States and each year they just kind of continue to like invent the craziest things they're using like 3D printers, laser cutters, CAD design.

They're going like crazy.

I don't think we do anything radically different than what we did 20 years ago.

We have a lot more curriculum, we have a lot more materials and kits that we've developed over time.

But the core of it doesn't look a whole lot different than what we were doing 20 years ago.

So as science teachers, you're always looking to create spaces where your kids can explore open ended topics.

Wind energy tends to be- and by accident I discovered this- a space where there's kind of never-ending amounts of complexity.

But you can also do really simple things like the thing we were doing this morning with MacGyver Wind like popsicle sticks and paper.

I can build a wind turbine.

I can do some very complicated things with college kids, and it scales like crazy.

That means kids can continue to explore and explore kind of as they are kind of going through the process.

It's about creating those spaces.

It's also to why we get teachers involved is it helps them teach the content matter.

They have to teach like the science standards, the technology standards, so it helps them do their job just in a new and interesting way.

So, electricity and where we get our electricity from is kind of this black box that most people don't understand and most science teachers are pretty interested.

So when you start to open up that box, they get pretty interested in how that system works and then especially how wind or solar or other systems plug in to that system.

So they're- science teachers are naturally curious.

If you open it up a little bit for them, they're going to stay curious.

And then the other key is activities.

We spend a lot of time developing activities that are very engaging hands-on, that they're going to want to do in their classrooms.

We're not going to give you 2 hours of PowerPoint.

We're not going to do that kind of stuff.

So we're we're giving them activity.

We know work, we've tested them.

Our model of the way we run the organization is very decentralized.

Like we, we kind of generate a lot of content.

A lot of it's open source, meaning anybody- is all free to download off the site.

So that helps.

Teachers are notoriously underfunded.

I get $400 a year to pay for all the supplies for chemistry, physics, physical science, AP biology.

It's...Yesterday, I was given three turbines to take home to my classroom, and the teacher next door to me got three also.

So now we have six turbines that we can both borrow from each other to do labs.

So it's it is the free stuff that I'm actually making the effort for as well as the education, because we're not funded well, we're just not.

With the resources from Toyota we can now do to the next step.

So these teachers will get an email that says, Hey, you saw some cool stuff the last two days, I have some money.

We can buy you some equipment to do that in your classroom.

Then we'll get them all the materials.

Then if they do it and they write up, say, a half a page paper, we're going to pay them.

Because I'm a big believer that you have to pay teachers for their time to integrate new content.

and then we'll come back later, do additional training and continue to build their knowledge.

So a lot about teacher training and teacher uptake is like sustained support.

You can't just come in for a day, do it, then walk away.

It's going to be like a two year process where we continue to like, improve their knowledge and skill sets and things like that to.

A big report came out from the feds.

It was called the Wind Vision Report.

Their study came out and said, we have all this technology, we just don't have- We're not going to have the employees.

For ten years, we're saying, 'yes'.

And there's a lot of research like where does workforce begin?

Does it begin when you're in college?

When do you want to do the thing you want to do?

And there's a lot of research shows like fifth to seventh grade, you need to lay the seeds that these careers exist.

So we've been like harping about this for a long time.

We are now at a moment where we need so many employees in these fields.

We didn't do our homework and it's going to be a big problem right now.

What's happening is I'm getting more money than I've ever raised in my life because they're like, we need workers, we need workers!

Well, they're sitting in fifth grade.

They're sitting in seventh grade.

Yeah, we can take some high schoolers and turn them into workers, but this is a long term problem.

So I would say now we have the resources, but it's going to take time.

And if we don't do it, we're just not going to have like we are right now- the offshore wind industry.

United States is like...wants to be very big.

Most of those workers, are now going to be imported from Europe or we're going to send them to Europe to get trained.

We have not built that industry and these are ten year long processes.

So we're reaping a little bit of that problem right now.

if we don't do it, we just won't have the bodies to work in these industries.

And the other big thing in these industries, like utilities or electrical, is a lot of the people in them are kind of retiring.

They're getting older.

So it's- you have two problems, you don't have enough workers, and the ones who know what's going on are getting out of the business.

So it's a pretty big issue.

So we're already there.

So we got to work on it harder.

But we do have a lot of anecdotal stories nowadays.

I have lots of them in my files, like, Hey, I went, I learned about KidWind or KidWind Challenge and now I'm in college and I'm going to be a wind engineer.

I'm going to work in the wind industry.

So we have like lots and lots of anecdotal stories.

Those are very rewarding.

The most rewarding part of the job for me is this I like hanging out with teachers and training them and helping them understand how to bring it into their classrooms and customizing it for their spaces.

Thanks for following me to explore some of West Virginia's lesser known stories.

Stay tuned to West Virginia Public Broadcasting for the next episode of Mountainthology.

Until then, extended versions of the stories you saw today are available on passport and later on our YouTube channel.

I'm David Marcum, See you next time.