Of course, we should have told you this story about a Christmas parade picture that first ran in the Post in 1948 before Christmas because that’s when Diane and Wesley Crow of Troutville, Va., sent it to us.
But it got buried on my desk, and by the time it surfaced, the holidays were over.
So we pondered. Should we save it for next year?
No way. It’s too good to risk burying it again.
Besides, when I called to apologize, Diane told me she and Wes, who celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last September, have a copy of that 1948 Salisbury Christmas Parade picture hanging on their living room wall in Troutville, Va., right now.
“It hangs year-round,” she says. “My mother’s picture is packed away. I’m not sure I know where it is. But when we got married, Wes’ mother gave us hers because she thought it was such a good story.”
So if the picture hangs year round, why can’t the story be told in March, when the crocuses are up and the daffodils are waving their heads at us and the flowering pear trees are acting like it’s spring? If they can be a little out of sync with the calendar, why not us?
Wes and Diane were married here in Salisbury on August 27, 1961, but they celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last September in Troutville, where they’ve been living for years, with nearly 100 family members and friends there.
Their children , Regina, Leslie and Marty and their families, gave the party, and everybody looked at the picture again and marvelled over it. They remembered those old days when Wes’ parents, Edith and Irwin Crow lived on Fairbluff Ave. in Salisbury, and they talked about everything, like the house being moved.
“Our house was moved when Interstate 85 came in,” Wes says. “It was right in the middle of where the cloverleaf is now.”
But it hits him.
That cloverleaf is being changed again right now, isn’t it?
But the house will stay this time. It was at 1207 E. Council St. Extension — he still remembers that address — and they had to move it to 531 Fairbluff Ave. His sister, Barbara Ritchie, still lives there.
“Now,” he says, “Corbin Hills is between where the house is and where it was.”
Diane’s mother, Betty Culp, and her brother and sister, Benny Culp and Sharon Turner still live here, and the Rev. Gene Bruce and his wife, the former Pat Moore, who was maid of honor in their wedding, have moved back to Salisbury recently.
So Diane wrote a story about that picture and made a display of them and their wedding pictures “and all kinds of good stuff” that told the story of what happened after that Post photographer — it must have been the late Johnny Suther — unwittingly brought them together in that picture with Santa Claus.
For about six months after they got married, Wes worked for the old Piedmont Airlines radio shop in Winston-Salem. Then he was transferred to Washington, D.C., for a year and then to Roanoke, Va.,
Piedmont was taken over by U.S. Air in 1989, and he retired from U.S. Air on Jan. 1, 1999, after 38 years, 30 of them in the radio shop, the rest with ground support equipment, which he was in charge of by then.
“And I was a house mom until the children grew up,” Diane says. Then she worked at a print shop in Roanoke, but retired when Wes did because they had other things to do.
Play with the grandchildren, for one. Regina and her family are right outside of Baltimore, and Leslie and Marty are near Roanoke, so that was convenient.
And they wanted to hike.
They lived near the Blue Ridge Parkway and hiking was convenient, too, and it had been fun when the children were little.
“On Sunday afternoons we’d take the kids and the dog and hike to the top of a mountain,” Wes says. “They’ve got a plaque where Audie Murphy crashed, which was near Roanoke, and we have pictures of the children at the monument. And we’ve hiked the Twin Peaks of Otter — Sharp Top and Flat Top. They’re one of the major attractions on the Blue Ridge in Virginia, and our son, Marty, and Allison were married there.
“And after we retired, we planned to do the whole Appalachian Trail,” Diane says, because they chanced upon a documentary about ordinary people doing that on PBS.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” she asked Wes.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
And they started planning — read books, talked to people, figured when was the best time of year to be where, and selected the right dried food so it would be light to carry.
“The kids gave us a food saver, which is a dehydrator,” Diane says, “so we had supplies ready in boxes that were light to carry and our own water purifier, so we could get our water out of springs. We always made sure we weren’t low on water.”
If they met situations they hadn’t learned anything about, they’d apply common sense — but they’re amazed at all they learned.
“Like you don’t want to carry anything cotton to wear,” Wes says. “Cotton kills. You’ll get to sweating climbing a hill, and then you’re wringing wet. It just won’t dry. So you wear wicking underwear. With wicking underwear, the wet shirt won’t touch you.”
The lowest temperature they endured was 16 degrees, “but we never got cold,” he says.
And they did get hot.
“At 92 we took socks, tied them together and wet them and made a head band out of them. Here I was 60 years old carrying a big backpack in that kind of temperature, but with those socks,” he says, “we could function.”
And he learned quickly that a 60-pound backpack was too heavy. He dropped back to 40, which was what Diane carried, and that still let them carry 10 days of supplies.
They started on March 20, 1999, and by late May they had hiked from Troutville to Port Clinton, Pa., a used-to-be railroad town a lot like Spencer, and Diane was having trouble with her Achilles tendon.
“I tore it playing with the kids at Christmas,” she says. “They wanted me to come dance with them, and I ran down the steps and jumped and felt a snap in my leg.”
A walking cast helped, and they started their hike again, but in northern Pennsylvania, the tendon snapped.
“Just let go,” she says.
They had hiked 500 miles, but she had to go home for surgery.
“I had my toes higher than my nose for about two months, and Wes washed and cooked and cleaned,” she says. “I believe that’s the reason I got well so fast. He really kept me off of it.”
By January she began to get in shape again. They did day hikes from Roanoke south to the North Carolina border.
And in March, they went back to Port Clinton and covered the Appalachian Trail to Salisbury.
But not our Salisbury, N.C., of course. They were in Salisbury, Conn., even if they did call the children to say they’d hiked all the way to Salisbury and thought they’d stop for a while. That got a laugh, of course.
And this time they’d used the common sense they’d counted on — and took a car and a camper along. They’d park one at one end of the trail, and the other at the other end of a hiking goal, and just kept rotating them from one leg to the other.
“That’s the way to camp,” Wes says.
“It gives you a chance to go into town and sightsee and get ice cream cones, but some days we’d be on the Trail for three or four days before we could get to the car.”
And they made another decision.
It was summertime, the right time to hike at the 5,000-foot levels in Maine, which they wouldn’t be able to do in the fall because it would be too cold. So they skipped Massachusetts and drove to Bennington, in the corner of Vermont, hiked about two-thirds of the way through New Hampshire and then skipped to Mt. Katahdin and the final four miles of the Trail in Maine.
The hopping and skipping had accumulated another 600 miles of hiking.
Added to the 500 the summer before, they’d hiked 1,100, over half of the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mt. Katahdin, Me., — and they quit.
“The kids were having children and buying homes, and we just got homesick. We missed them. We’re family people. We like to be around the family doing stuff.”
Are they through?Or will they take off on the other 1,000 miles?
Wes also had orthoscopic surgery on his knee, but the doctor told him he was good for another 1,000 miles.
“I’m in as good shape now as I was before. We were couch potatoes. I weighed 240 pounds when we started, and when we got home, I weighed 180.”
And they loved it.
“Fifteen miles a day is good for us,” Wes says. “The younger ones are doing 20 and 30, but the way we did it was more fun than we could ever explain to anyone — the snakes, the moose, the bears, everything, sharing a shelter with 15 people and a little dog bouncing from one to other.”
“Sometimes we’d go for five days and not see another person,” Diane says. “When we came into town, people gave us a wide berth sometimes because we were a little stinky.”
They’d designate places where their children would meet them with supplies, and the first summer they’d go to a motel for a night so they could clean up and start again, and the second summer they took their camper.
So who knows?
“We’ve still got 1,000 miles to go,” Diane says, if they’re going to finish it all — and they might.
“We planned to do the whole thing, but after the 1,100 miles, we decided we’d rather be home.”
After they’ve been home awhile, maybe ...
But not right now. First they went to AAA and got a map to see what road to take to get to Alaska. After all, they’ve got a camper.
But then they thought about all those years Wes worked for U.S. Air and the reduced rates they can get if space is available and knew the Appalachian Trail will be there waiting when they get home, and so about the 10th of May, these Crows are going to take to the air ...
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