Up until I started working at The Logan Banner, I had not been to Logan County since the early 1980s.

For the last few years of their lives, my great grandmother and great grandfather Walter “Poppy” and Rosa Dillon had lived in a very nice nursing home here in Logan County.

We came over on Saturdays to visit them and sometimes do a little shopping. At that time, after the 1977 flood which devastated much of our region, there was not really a whole lot of shopping places compared to right now. I recall one big chain store that had the old “Drygoods Markdown”-type of sales, but it would sell the items for the standard price and claim they had been marked down.

Oh, how things have changed from my early childhood to today.

When I was a very small child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we would come to Logan a lot. Back then, Mommy and Poppy lived up Dingess and I would always get a spooky chill when riding through the tunnel to get to their place. Being a little kid, I was always looking to see the Batmobile from television racing down one of those country roads. I guess I never comprehended that Gotham City was so far away as on television the caped crusaders roared out of a tunnel onto an old dirt road identical to old dirt roads all over eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia.

Here it is decades later and I can still recall how chilly the tunnel was on the inside even on the hottest of days. Ironically, I can’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday, but I can still remember something over 30 years ago like it was today.

I used to look for the mummy in those man-size inside the tunnel. I watched “Chiller Theater” on Channel 13 when I was a kid on Saturday nights. Back then, even if you had cable you only got about five channels. You got WSAZ Channel 3, which was an NBC affiliate in those days and the home of Jules “Mr. Cartoon” Huffman, the hero of every small child in the tri-state area. You had Channel 8 which was the CBS affiliate back then, and you had Channel 13 which was the ABC affiliate. I remember it best for the Wonderful World of Disney Sunday night movies. You also had two PBS channels — one in West Virginia one in Kentucky.

Of course, it seems there was a lot more on in those days than now.

For example, on Saturday, one of the local stations used to broadcast Tarzan movies and episodes of the television show with Ron Ely pretty frequently.

That got me in trouble once as I scampered to the top of the roof of our house in Lovely, Ky., (I could climb like a monkey as a child) in a pair of shorts with a butter knife in my waistband. I gave the fearsome cry of the jungle, “Ah-ee-ahhhh-eahhhhha-eahhh-eahhh!!!!” and promptly slipped and fell from the roof. I could not hold onto the corner where the roofing tile was like sandpaper and fell to the ground landing flat on my back.

I thought I was going to die.

My ears were ringing and I could not breath after I hit the earth with such force. I lay there gasping for air like a fish out of water and every bone in my body hurt.

Amazingly, I was okay, just had the wind knocked out of me.

One of my neighbors found me and I lied and told him a bigger boy hit me from behind. Thank Heaven I didn’t get impaled on the butter knife. Not only did I never climb a roof again, I developed a fear of heights after that. I seldom climbed anything higher than the neighbor’s tree, until I took a job at the Chevy Garage in Inez, Ky., and had to climb a tall ladder to close the bay doors in the summer.

Back to Logan County memories ... Logan County was a great place to visit as a kid. There were trains running downtown back then, and a lot of busy shops. One of my favorite places was the Army-Navy store. My grandfather knew the proprietor who always teased me about the giant pants hanging on the wall saying if I didn’t slow down one day they would fit. Years later, I think he was right.

On Saturdays, we would go around and shop with Grandma and Grandpa Dillon. On Sundays, we would stay at their place, which was sort of a farm with chickens running around and have dinner, or go to one of those “dinner on the ground” church meetings.

I was startled one time when Grandma Dillon chopped a chicken’s head off and it ran around the yard awhile with her chasing it with a hatchet. I had to help her pull feathers off it, too. They had running water in their humble home ... sort of. It was actually a pump in the back of the kitchen. Mommy and Poppy did not seem to mind not having many of the “modern conveniences” that we had in our home. To take a hot bath on a cold morning, they would fill the bathtub with water and put hot bricks in it to warm the water up.

There were cattle and chickens and other animals on their property as well as snakes. Sometimes the chickens would get to pecking at the snakes which Poppy Dillon always found amusing. Often, he and I would sit on the old wooden bridge across the creek to their home and fish some, even if we never caught anything bigger than a minnow. One of my Grandmother’s brothers, Diggs, I think got nicknamed the Goat Man by me, because of his beard. Years later, I got the same nickname from my pal Steve. Most of my great uncles lived in Ohio at that time except for my Uncle Paul and Uncle Walter. When the whole family got together it was something.

In addition to weekend visits to Mommy and Poppy’s place, you could ride a train from Kermit to Logan once a week and my grandmother and I did that a lot. When my grandfather got off work he would stop and pick us up at Kermit.

The years went by and Mommy and Poppy eventually moved to the nursing home. After they passed away, I thought I would never come back to Logan. But fate takes strange turns that we often don’t expect.