Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 27, 1993 TAG: 9301260257
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHWOOD, W.VA. LENGTH: Long
COUNTRY EDITOR ENDS AN ERA
When the Saturday Review described Jim Comstock's West Virginia Hillbilly as "sophisticated" reading, he demanded a retraction."I knew I couldn't circulate a paper in West Virginia if I was considered sophisticated," he says.
When Comstock published his newspaper with ink scented like malodorous mountain onions, he aroused the ire of the postmaster general himself.
"Now we're the only newspaper under orders from the federal government not to smell bad," Comstock says. "That's an awful thing to do to a striving newspaper."
When interstate highways were new, Comstock saw their potential for keeping troublemakers out of his mountains.
"Traveling newspapermen and magazine writers won't be able to see a thing," he wrote.
Few would see as much as Comstock has in his 35 years as editor, publisher and writer for the pugnacious weekly known for its keen doses of Appalachian common sense and humor.
"My dad once told me that the Lord paid special attention to fools and drunks, and kept them pretty much from harm," Comstock once wrote. "I add country editors."
Comstock, 81, has been a self-described troublemaker for much of his life, always dismissing himself as "a country editor in the boondocks."
Inside his head lurk a melange of mountain morsels about the amusing men and women who make up his much-maligned state.
"There are so many stories to tell," Comstock says.
Now he has passed the torch. On Jan. 1, Comstock turned over the Hillbilly to two Ohio publishers and relinquished a generation-long tradition.
Through it all, he kept things modest. The Hillbilly's Page one nameplate labels itself, "A newspaper for people who can't read, edited by an editor who can't write."
It is wrong. Comstock takes laughs seriously and seriousness laughingly.
Today, 6,000 people in 40 states and six foreign countries subscribe to the West Virginia Hillbilly, and 3,000 more copies are distributed to classrooms as part of a West Virginia Studies course.
"We send more copies to New York than the New Yorker sends here," he boasts.
Comstock's writings have been anthologized nationally, revered and reviled locally. Still, only 19 of Richwood's 3,000 residents subscribe.
"Never caught on here," Comstock says.
In retirement, Comstock will continue to pen his oft-acerbic back-page feature, "Comstock Load."
The new publishers, R.L. "Sandy" and Carolee McCauley, have a lot to live up to.
"You have assumed custodianship of a West Virginia treasure, thanks to the lifetime work of Jim Comstock," wrote Richard Marks, a West Virginia native who now lives in Gambrills, Md.
Disease has shriveled Comstock's left hand, and the weathered old Underwood typewriter that was his trademark sits unused.
He now writes all his columns in rapid longhand. He laments that he has lost "the grasp of expressiveness I once had."
West Virginians, who see Comstock as an expert promoter of West Virginia and of himself, recognize that being publisher is but one facet of the man.
Part sincerely and part tongue-in-cheek, Comstock founded the "University of Hard Knocks" to honor overachieving Americans who never earned college degrees.
Among its 2,000 "graduates" are Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., former Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and Charlie Finley, former owner of the Oakland A's baseball team.
Applicants must be successful in a particular field, donate $100 to their alma mater that wasn't, and buy a subscription to the Hillbilly.
Because no one else had, Comstock wrote and published the West Virginia Heritage Encyclopedia, complete with hand-lettered bindings. It has become the definitive, if somewhat rustic, reference for state history.
It is 51 volumes.
"It was something to do," Comstock says.
Comstock also sank thousands of dollars into reprinting long-forgotten books about the state. He amassed 100,000 volumes and ultimately sold them to Davis & Elkins College for $1 apiece.
He also spearheaded the purchase and preservation of the birthplace of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck in Hillsboro and he bankrolled the rescue of a historic railroad near Richwood.
Once he was amused by the proliferation of "do-it-yourself" manuals, so he wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about removing one's own appendix.
The article was distributed worldwide, and a Mr. J.W.C. Fox from London wrote Comstock asking for further details.
"Apparently he wanted to remove his own appendix and was tired of waiting," Comstock says. "The English don't know when you're kidding."
He sent Fox his story, then alerted London police of the man's address because there "might be a situation" there. Then he called a London newspaper and warned them to be on the lookout for "quite a story."
He never heard from the man again.
"All I know," Comstock once said, "is that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, and after I have checked with St. Peter to see if my wife has arrived, I am going to ask about Mr. J.W.C. Fox.
"I want to know if he has arrived. And if so, I'd like to know the circumstances."
Comstock's career began when, fresh from the Navy and World War II, he founded a Richwood newspaper he called the Newsletter.
The postmaster didn't like the name, Comstock recalls, and demanded to know whether it was a newspaper or a letter. So he changed the name to News-Leader, a weekly newspaper his son, Jay, still publishes out of the same shop as the Hillbilly.
The Hillbilly was born in 1957.
"I wanted it to be a paper for all West Virginia," Comstock says.
Comstock sold the paper in 1981, then bought it back five years later on his 75th birthday. Open-heart surgery in 1987 forced another leave-of-absence and, since then, Comstock has had more bypasses than a major city.
The sale to the McCauleys, he says, is for real and for good.
In Charleston, about 175 people are working to get a memorial to Comstock erected on the state Capitol grounds aside statues of Abraham Lincoln, Stonewall Jackson and Booker T. Washington.
But a state law requires such heroes to be dead at least 50 years.
Still, businessman Walt Painter, who bottles spring water, has been trying to persuade Gov. Gaston Caperton that his friend Comstock should be an exception.
"No one's going to know Caperton's name 50 years from now, but they'd know if it was next to Jim Comstock's name on that monument," Painter says. "Jim will live on from now until Doomsday."
When it happens, people predict Comstock won't be far from Richwood.
"I picture Jim Comstock dying at his desk at Hillbilly," says Maxine Corbett, executive director of the Richwood Chamber of Commerce. "If he can still breathe and write, I don't think he can quit. As long as the Hillbilly is there, Jim Comstock will always be a part of it."