New email address for Harold Spragg

Harold Spragg, Class of 1950, who grew up in East Monongah and lives in Inwood, West Virginia, has a new email address. It’s kishv@frontier.com

I received this email from Harold:

Dear John,

     Thanks so much for keeping all of us up on the happenings among Monongah alumni.  Our only change is our email address, which nowadays is kishv@frontier.com .  We aren't able to travel much.  Karen has had some problems. We love hearing from you and also would like to have the 2015 Class of 1950 Booklet.  Thanks again. 

Sincerely, Harold Spragg

The booklet that Harold refers to is the one that I will put together on the Class of 1950, with photos and biographies submitted by my 1950 classmates, and that I will distribute after our 2015 reunion at the Three Ways Inn Restaurant at 7 p.m. Friday, May 22, 2015 (a joint dinner with the Class of 1955, who will be rounded up by Monongah High Alumni Association president Dolores Edwards, a 1955 graduate) and the all-classes reunion on Saturday, May 23, 2015 at Knights of Columbus on Mary Lou Retton Drive in Fairmont.

Those who attend the 2015 reunion will get the free booklets in person. Those who do not attend, but submit their biographies, will have the booklets mailed to them. It’s my gift to my classmates, thanks to my 43 years of newspaper experience that help me do this blog and put together the Class of 1950 booklets (in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015).

As for Harold, after Monongah High he went from working in a Ravenna, Ohio toy balloon factory to 24 years as a Fairmont Times pressman to Mountaineer Electric as a motor mechanic and winder to Winchester, Virginia Electric Service till his 2000 retirement.

Harold and wife Karon Eddy Spragg of Fairmont – married since 1955 -- have two daughters – Rosemary of Princeton, New Jersey and Holly Jo of Columbus, Ohio – and three grandchildren.

Harold missed the 2000 Monongah High Alumni Reunion because he had knee surgery, which most of the Class of 1950 are familiar with (my current right knee was not there when I was born; it’s store-bought).

When the 2010 MHS Reunion came along, Harold was absence because Karen hurt her back in a fall.

And Karen’s health situation means Harold probably will be waving at his 1950 classmates from 177 miles away in Inwood, which has 2,954 residents in Berkeley County and is south by southwest of Hagerstown, Maryland. It’s on U.S. 21 and east of I-81.

The Cumberland Valley Railroad to Inwood Park in the late 1880s started it all. Railroads ran lines to resorts in those days, to help the railroads and the resorts both make money on tourists.

The town first was named Gerard but, when town leaders sought a post office, the government said the name was too confusing with Gerrardstown four miles to the west, so they went with Inwood, to match the park name. That's one explanation.

Jonathan Newton Thatcher, the first Inwood postmaster, had a cousin who lived in Inwood, California, so some say that’s why the town is called Inwood. 

Take your pick.

In 1920, the C.H. Musselman Company of Biglerville, Pennsylvania, opened an apple processing plant at Inwood, which by then had a thriving apple orchards cooperative. Starting in 1929, Musselman produced canned apple sauce in the first apple processing plant of its kind.

Today, Inwood is one of many bedroom communities for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

aHH