DATE: Tuesday, October 7, 1997              TAG: 9710070033

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  103 lines

INTRODUCTION: SOME MAY TAKE EXCEPTION TO BOOK'S DIALECT, BUT THE STORY IS SURE TO PLEASE

IVA NIGHDEE why I was asked to write this story.

Being West Virginia born, I know that ramps are weeds you eat, not highway exits and that holler means a split in the hills, not a shout. I know that a run has a crick in it and a crick is full of worter, unless it's a dry summer.

In other words, I speak the lingo.

I am used to translating my mountain lexicon for Southern editors when they don't have a nighdee what I'm talking about. My grandma had a nighdee all the time. Enunciated carefully, it means ``an idea.''

My editor had a nighdee that I could say whether or not ``Shiloh'' fairly depicts the Mountain State, with dialect and poor folks and huntin' dogs.

And I say, yes, it does. And, no, it doesn't.

Yes, there are families who live in four-room houses who have to cut the toes out of children's too-small shoes until they can afford to buy a new pair. Just like there are in Hampton Roads.

But Sistersville, W.Va., the biggest small town near where the book is set, is full of mansions built by millionaires who made a killing in oil and gas around the turn of the century.

``They built lovely big homes that look out of place,'' said Trudy Madden, who owns the real Shiloh - the dog on which the book was based.

This is a little confusing, so pay attention:

The dog is really named Clover. It's called Shiloh in the book because that is the name of the small town where, in 1989, author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor first saw her, shivering, starved and frightened but still hopefully wagging her tail. Madden lives near Shiloh, but her post office address is Friendly, so that's where Naylor set the book.

Anyway, Madden says most people are thrilled with the book, dialect and all. Except for some book reviewers for West Virginia newspapers, who took umbrage. One of them even said that she omitted the dialect when reading the book aloud to her own children.

``She didn't think people from West Virginia speak with a dialect,'' Madden said. ``But they definitely do. If you know West Virginia, you know that they do.

``Three or four years after we moved here, I was talking to my daughter on the phone and she said, `Oh, Mom, you're beginning to pick up that West Virginia dialect.'

``I said, `I am not,' and she said, `You don't recognize it, that's the problem.' ''

Author Naylor says she wrote in dialect because that's the way the main character, 11-year-old Marty, spoke in her mind.

``It was just as though Marty Preston sat on the arm of my chair and started telling this story and that's how it came to me,'' Naylor said from her home in Bethesda, Md.

``There are people with very pronounced Southern accents in West Virginia and then there are people who don't speak that way.''

Naylor was certain, from the moment she saw the dog, that it had been abused.

The more she watched it, the more she thought: ``What if I knew who was abusing it? What if I knew who it belonged to? What if the dog kept running to me?''

Naylor cried all the way home from West Virginia.

Madden had intended to take the dog to an animal shelter, but she couldn't. ``When Phyllis wrote to tell us she was writing this book, we wrote and told her we had adopted the dog.''

Clover was frightened of being locked up, terrified of umbrellas and canes and children. Over the years, she has lost her fears, Madden said, and gained fame.

Naylor was so accurate in her descriptions of the area, Madden said, that readers can follow directions in the book and its two sequels and find the houses, mill and schoolhouse that are mentioned.

``If you cross the bridge, you get into the main part of a little town called Shiloh,'' she said.

``That, at one time, was a thriving community. Someone told me that 1,600 people lived there. I find that very hard to believe. When they died, they must have taken their houses with them.''

Lots of visitors find their way to the Madden house as well. Shortly after the book was published in 1991, the Friendly post office put up a sign saying that, yes, the real Shiloh lives just up the road, but please call this number before you drop in.

Shiloh, a.k.a. Clover, also made lots of road trips.

``We've put in quite a few years of taking her around to local schools so children can see her and pet her and get her paw print,'' Madden said. ``But at this point, we've turned down those requests because she's just not up to it.''

Clover, now about 10 years old, spends her days lying under the bushes in front of the house, where she is too lethargic to bark at deer or visitors or even the cat. The Maddens used to take a 3-mile walk every morning; now they take turns turning back after half a mile because Clover is just too tired to make it any farther.

Clover's popularity didn't keep the aforementioned West Virginia newspaper writers from complaining, however. One writer, in the state capitol of Charleston, said she had never heard of anyone in the state eating lard on bread.

``But when I grew up in Charleston, there were people who did,'' Madden said. ``They were lucky to get that.''

Her own relatives, she said, used to go out and shoot a bunch of squirrels to make stew.

Speaking for my own self, I never ate squirrel, but I did grow up with bean dinners every Saturday night, just like Marty's sister was eating on the very first page of the book.

Iva nighdee that those other newspaper writers maybe did too.

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