Welcome back to The Porte Crayon Applejack Society — coming to you from Porte’s hometown of Martinsburg, West Virginia where the top-ranked Martinsburg High School Bulldogs have improved to 5-1 on the football season with a lopsided 63-0 victory Friday night over Charles Town’s Washington High School.

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The fall festival season is underway. In nearby Berkeley Springs, where Porte’s family once operated a resort hotel, the 47th Apple Butter Festival kicks off this Saturday after a two year break because of the pandemic. There will be a parade Saturday morning and the festival will include a craft beer garden to showcase local breweries as well as … axe throwing activities.

I’ve been known to enjoy a beer or two, but I think I’ll stay away from the axes. I’d probably just put my eye out.

Anyway, I drove over to Hampshire County recently to catch up with Porte portrayer Don Teter. He was speaking—in character as Porte—at the Founder’s Day Festival in Capon Bridge.

Teter has been portraying Porte for about ten years and has more knowledge about the man in his little finger than I do in the whole of my being.

The accompanying interview was recorded at a table in front of Farmer’s Daughter, the Capon Bridge butcher and grocer famous far and wide for serving up mouth-watering hamburgers to hungry locals and others who make the pilgrimage to experience one.

Farmer’s Daughter is on the historic Northwestern Turnpike, today’s Route 50 which bisects Capon Bridge. It’s the same road Porte and his buds traveled as they made their way toward immortality in Philip Pendleton Kennedy’s The Blackwater Chronicle and it remains well-traveled today, as you’ll hear.

I really should have picked a quieter place to chat with Don, but since I’ve yet to try a Farmer’s Daughter burger, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. As it turned out, though, the shop was closed on the day we sat down in front of it, so I’m going to have make another trip to Capon Bridge.

The prospect of a good burger is as good a reason as any to return. After all, Capon Bridge is known as “The Gateway to the Mountains.”

But more importantly, it’s simply a nice place to be.

If you’ve had a Farmer’s Daughter burger, tell me about it in the comments. Also, let me know what you think of the interview with Don and whether you’d like to hear more audio as part of the PCAS newsletter.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gilessnyder.substack.com

Interviewing is sort of like riding a bike - if you haven’t conducted one in a while, you’re sort of wobbly until you get the hang of it again.

That’s the situation I was in when I drove to Morgantown this week and sat down in Dr. Timothy Sweet’s office.

I was sweating.

Not just because it was hot outside and I was dumb enough to wear a blue blazer that day, but also because I was a little nervous.

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Sure, I’m a journalist - asking questions is what we do. But in my role as a radio newscaster, I have little reason to keep those old interviewing muscles in shape. The way our newsroom is organized, reporters and producers generally get the answers and then hand us the tape to use in newscasts.

In this case, though, I was getting my own tape. And I was sweatin’ it. My interviewing skills are a little wobbly these days.

Anyway, Dr. Sweet is an English professor at West Virginia University - has been for about 30 years. I wanted to talk to him because he wrote the preface to the 2002 WVU Press edition of The Blackwater Chronicle by Philip Pendleton Kennedy.

The Chronicle, of course, is a must read for anyone interested in the life of David Hunter Strother. It’s the first in the trilogy of mountain travelogues that includes Strother’s own The Virginian Canaan and DHS’s last major work, The Mountains.

Of course, Kennedy wrote the Chronicle, but the illustrations are Strother’s. The two were friends, after all. DHS also appears as a character in the book.

I tried to upload a better quality WAV file, but it kept getting hung up so I converted it to an MP3. Sounds a little muffled to me, but it’s the best I can do.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think about the inclusion of audio. I might make it a more regular thing.

By the way, if your interviewing skills are a little wobbly, I recommend talking to Dr. Sweet.

He made it easy.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gilessnyder.substack.com