Lee Maynard’s Homecoming

#527 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002

On a rainy, cool Thursday night 23 years ago this week, The Flood trouped into the warmth and light of Ceredo-Kenova High School to play for a special event: the homecoming of the controversial, but beloved author Lee Maynard.

Even at 66, Lee was still a literary bad boy.

Earlier that year, Tamarack saw to that. The state-owned artisan center near Beckley very publicly refused to stock Maynard’s novel Crum, deeming it unsuitable because of its sexually explicit language and for what it considered negative portrayal of the state.

“My first reaction was about 30 seconds of rage and indignation,” Maynard said years later. “I was like, my god, who would do such a thing?

“Then I thought, hey, I’m in some good company — Twain, Faulkner, Maya Angelou, Shakespeare — they have all had their books banned at some time, in some place. … Ultimately, it didn’t bother me at all.”

Lee’s reception at his old high school that October night must have gone a long way to also ease the pain. Many folks in Wayne County were happy to see their native son, filling the Ceredo-Kenova High School band room to hear the music, greet the author and buy signed copies of his books … including Crum.

As James E. Casto wrote not long ago in The Herald-Dispatch, Maynard was born and raised in Crum, a tiny Wayne County coal-mining town about 50 miles south of Huntington.

For 20 years, Lee regularly wrote articles for Reader’s Digest and other national magazines. When he turned his hand to fiction in 1988, his first novel, titled Crum, was a highly fictionalized account of his 1950s boyhood.

Maynard was 14 when he and his family moved away from Crum. Over the years he traveled widely, eventually settling in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“It’s likely a good thing Maynard left Crum behind,” Casto wrote, “because his novel rubbed some folks there the wrong way. He put a disclaimer on the book’s first page: ‘Other than the town of Crum nothing in this book is real. The people do not exist, the events never happened.’ But that didn’t stop people from seeing themselves and their town in the book. And many didn’t like what they saw.”

Crum sold poorly, like many first novels, and soon was out of print, “but,” noted Casto, “word of mouth made it a cult classic, with secondhand copies often selling for $100 or more.”

When West Virginia University Press reprinted the book in 2001 (the first title to be published by its new Vandalia Press), it set the stage for the Tamarack controversy, and, by extension, the homecoming party where The Flood played at C-K, all sponsored by the Wayne County Public Library.

Dick Griffith of Kenova told Christina Redekopp of the Herald-Dispatch he remembered when Maynard was in high school and worked for him cleaning the floors at Griffith and Feil Drug Store.

“We’re proud of Lee and what he has done and the recognition he has brought to West Virginia with his writing,” Griffith said.

Dave’s Own Crum Story

Meanwhile, Flood co-founder Dave Peyton, whose stories and columns appeared for decades in the Huntington newspapers, had his own controversial connections with Crum, WV, as he noted in the audio below from a Flood jam session one evening:

Dave told the rest of the story in a column a few weeks after Lee Maynard’s death at 80 in 2017, noting that it was in 1960s when he’d gotten word that some kids in Crum Elementary School were eating their lunches from the school’s garbage cans.

“The Wayne County Board of Education was not a friendly group at the time,” Peyton wrote. “They held their meetings in secret. If you wanted to address the board, you waited in the hall until you were called inside, where you said your piece and left. All votes were taken in secret.

“But why were school kids eating out of garbage cans? The Wayne board refused to take advantage of the free lunch program sponsored by the federal government. The board apparently thought the program was socialism.”

So, Dave wrote a story about the hungry kids, which was published one Sunday in The Herald-Advertiser. About noon on that same day, he got the threatening phon call he referred to in the above audio.

“I left home for the remainder of the day. The man apparently never showed up. And in a matter of weeks, the Wayne board subscribed to the free federal lunch program. I won.”

More Flood Stories?

By the way, some readers have wondered if there is an archive of Flood yarns, like the one Brother Peyton related in the audio clip above. Sure is! Just visit the band’s website (www.1937flood.com) and click on the “Our Stories” link to reach this page: