The PC: Welcome to Nail City, Part One.

Photo credit: Wheeling National Heritage Area

For those just tuning in, this column used to appear at LouisvilleBeer.com, but henceforth will be published here each Monday. Previous columns at LouisvilleBeer.com are archived there.

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Ever wondered where the church pews in the Public House (formerly Rich O's) were procured?

Here's the story of an excellent weekend adventure in Wheeling, West Virginia in 2001. It is by no means intended as a complete portrait of Wheeling today, almost 13 years later, but merely a snippet from the past.

Welcome to Nail City.

Heavily laden with provisions, Syd and I exited the package store, where we had been directed to shop because it had the “best” selection in town.

It certainly wasn’t the best section of town, and when a raggedly dressed man approached us, a number of potential shakedown scenarios, none of them particularly savory, flashed through my mind.

“Excuse me, sir … ”

The possibilities loomed like the dreaded sub-sections on an income tax return. Did I have spare change? A cigarette, perhaps? Would I care to purchase a pharmaceutical from his vast selection, to self-medicate? Or was he a representative of Watchtowers-R-Us?

What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

“We Feature Gallo, Bartles & Jaymes, and Other Fine Wines.”

Fine wines? It must be true; hell, it was right there in the yellow pages for Wheeling, West Virginia, which was another five minutes east from our vantage point at a motel near St. Clairesville, Ohio. It was a late autumn weekend, deer season, and as soon as we were 50 miles east of Columbus, the interstate became littered with road kill and filled almost bumper to bumper with pickup trucks hauling uncovered carcasses.

Venison is fine by me, but I’m not a hunter, and although cigars are an important part of my life, this was no pilgrimage to the former home of Marsh-Wheeling (ironically, they’re now made in Indiana).

We had one, and only one, reason to drive from Louisville to Wheeling: The business of beer, or to be more specific, the business of capitalizing on the misfortune of certain elderly residents of the city.

Apparently, some of these old folks had died, even as others became too infirm to climb the double staircases leading to the second-floor sanctuary of their Pentecostal church. The church had relocated to smaller, street-level quarters elsewhere in Wheeling, and a local used furniture dealer was conducting a sale of fixtures prior to the building being put on the block.

Among the items to be sold were the church’s venerable oak pews, some six feet and other nine feet long, which were estimated by our intermediary to be more than 60 years old. Our mission in Wheeling was to relieve the congregation of a baker’s dozen of these pews, and make them holier.

On Sunday morning, we were slated to meet the broker at the church, load the liberated pews into a Ryder rental truck, and haul them back to New Albany for use in the Public House – another charismatic place where the patrons speak in tongues and gargle snake oil.

However, all this had yet to happen. It wasn’t even 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. We’d checked into our hotel and were searching the phonebook, not quite in the mood for fine wines, but wondering what the local beer scene was like in Wheeling.

We were about to learn that at the time, good beer in Wheeling was about as plentiful as strip clubs (or, for that matter, strip steaks) are in Pyongyang.

Act II, in which the outsider pauses to assist the eager natives.

“Excuse me, please, sir ... but can one of you read?”

The man waved a sheet of paper inches from my skull as I paused to reflect that it had been quite some time since such a question had been asked of me. But what was the catch?

Suspicious yet intrigued, wary but accommodating, I decided to acknowledge that yes, since at least the mid-1960s, during some point in the LBJ administration, I have been able to read – quite well when conscious, actually.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, “because if you can help me read this, maybe I can get this (expletive deleted, but referring to a procreative female dog) to shut up.”

He motioned to an indifferent and perfectly quiet female waiting in the shadows by the pay phone. She rolled her eyes toward the darkening firmament, seemingly less afraid of potential violence from her boyfriend than yet another worthless evening of futility and trash talk.

Seconds later, my friend Tom emerged from the store toting his evening’s refreshment. Right alongside him was my interloper's best buddy, a veritable Sancho Panza, who announced that he had invested in bottled water for himself and a 40-ouncer for my questioner, just as instructed … and here was the small change to prove it.

Examining the man’s sheet of paper, I saw immediately that it was a “VIP Club” circular for the dog track located down the street. He pointed at the bottom of the page, where there were three coupons, each for a complimentary slot machine pull. Visibly triumphant at his good fortune – he’d managed to find someone literate, pliant and reasonably sober this late in the afternoon, obviously a novel concept – he asked if the three coupons could be used, all at once, before midnight that same day.

“Well, it doesn’t say you can’t use them all tonight,” I said, studying the various expiration dates emblazoned on the coupons, “so good luck, and have a good life.”

We needed to start drinking, and badly.

If you will look on the map …

Wheeling is located between Ohio and Pennsylvania in that strange angular panhandle of West Virginia that points northward like a bony, outstretched middle finger. Much of the city lies on the left bank of the Ohio River, but the central district spills over onto an island in the river, where we were directed to buy beer and to counsel colorful locals.

Wooded hills define the physical character of the area. Towns are wedged into the flat bottomlands between the heights. To look at Wheeling on a map is to see an urban area seemingly one mile wide and twelve miles long, poured between the river to the west and a long ridge to the east.

At one time, Wheeling was the “Gateway to the West,” later an industrial powerhouse, producing steel, iron, nails, glass, cigars and even beer, the latter inspiring these words from a history of the area written in 1879:

To historically review the dawn or subsequent development of man's appreciation for ale and beer, would be no sinecure achievement, suffice it to say that since the arrival of the earliest pioneers in this section, brewing, in some shape, has ever held its own. But the nutritious and palatable blending of malt and hops found little difficulty in fascinating the popular taste, even our grand-fathers were free to extol the merits of "John Barleycorn."

Contrary to enduring stereotypes of West Virginia as a hillbilly type of place where squirrel brains and incest stubbornly remain on the collective dinner table, Wheeling has enjoyed a diverse cultural history engendered by the immigrants who came to work in the city’s numerous factories. The last names of three pro sports luminaries born just across the river in the state of Ohio, John Havlicek and brothers Phil and Joe Niekro, attest to this, as does the presence of Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish congregations to spice the backwoods fundamentalist broth.

But the pendulum never stops swinging. It was well into the 20th century before an expedience borne of economic decline compelled local movers and shakers to reconnect with Wheeling’s southern heritage, and with some of the cultural themes that West Virginia’s original secession from secessionist Virginia had been intended to forestall.

It’s been a few years now, but when I was there, the industrial landscape appeared suspiciously Rust Belt and quite northern to me.

Where were we, anyway?

Part Two will appear on Monday, May 12