Jim Comstock

James Franklin Comstock (25 February 1911, Richwood, West Virginia - 22 May 1996, Huntington, West Virginia) — known as Jim Comstock — was a West Virginia writer, newspaper publisher and humorist. He founded the weekly West Virginia Hillbilly (1957-1980) and compiled a definitive 51-volume encyclopedia of West Virginia history and culture.

Biography

After completing high school locally, Comstock graduated from Marshall College (now University) (B.A., English) in 1934. An aspiring journalist, he found himself teaching high school English in his home town from 1938 to 1942. With the outbreak of war, he sought employment in the military industry. Finding the manufacture of gun barrels boring, however, he joined the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant and was assigned to decoding messages on Guam (1944-1946). Returning to civilian life, he worked for a time as a correspondent for the Clarksburg [West Virginia] Exponent Telegram before starting his own weekly newspaper. In 1946 he co-founded The [Richwood] News Leader with Bronson McClung (a former pupil).

Comstock devoted 20 years (1957-1977) to compiling the West Virginia Heritage Encyclopedia which included original content as well as reprinting long out-of-print material by and about West Virginians. He led a campaign to preserve the house in Hillsboro, West Virginia, where Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, was born. Comstock assisted with the financing of the rescue of the historic Cass Scenic Railroad. He also started the Mountain State Press to publish books of West Virginia interest.

The West Virginia Hillbilly

In 1957 Comstock and McClung established The West Virginia Hillbilly, which became a celebrated repository of Appalachian folklore, heritage and humor. Comstock characterized his publication as “A newspaper for people who can't read, edited by an editor who can't write”. Comstock’s regular column was christened “The Comstock Lode”. Circulation for the weekly peaked around 30,000 in the 1960s and ‘70s, with many readers subscribing from outside West Virginia. A 2016 tribute published in The Paris Review, asserted that “The Hillbilly wasn’t just a paper—it was an art project, a platform for historic preservation, a conservative wailing wall, and, above all, an exploration of the West Virginian id.” The paper's run ended in 1980.

Comstock died at St. Mary's Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia at age 85.

Works

• Pa and Ma and Mister Kennedy (1965)
• Pa and Ma and Fiddlin' Clyde (1965)
• Best of "Hillbilly": A Prize Collection of 100-Proof writing from Jim Comstock's "West Virginia Hillbilly" (1969), edited by Otto Whittaker.
• West Virginia Heritage Encyclopedia; 51 vol. [Exclusive run of 3,000 sets; never reprinted] (1974).
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  • Volume 3 – Black, Louis to Bruce, Barton
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  • Volume 11 – Haythe, Ray to Iron Furnace
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  • Supplemental series:
    • Volume 7 - Hardesty's Gilmer, Ritchie, Lincoln, Wayne Counties
    • Volume 9 – West Virginia military veterans
    • Volume 14 – 'Ritin' and Railin' (A collection of articles on diverse topics, from Civil War Gen. Rosecranz to West Virginia theater)
    • Volume 22 - West Virginia People and Places
    • Volume 25 – West Virginia Women
    • Volume 51 – West Virginia Picture Book
• Stories and Verse of West Virginia; 2 vol. (1974) by Ella May Turner, edited by Jim Comstock.
• 7 Decades: An Autobiography of a Kind (1982)

Humor

• In 1947, Comstock founded the “University of Hard Knocks”, an honorary society with a mission to recognize people who have made a success of their life without the benefit of higher education. Alderson Broaddus College in Philippi, West Virginia sponsored the organization, which moved its offices to the A-B campus in 1976. The society was dissolved in 2014.
• In 1957, Comstock perpetrated an elaborate hoax involving the use of a captive mountain lion, to convince rival editor Calvin Price of neighboring Pocahontas County that these animals still existed in West Virginia. (After the expose, he arranged for it to live out its retirement at the French Creek Game Farm, a state-run zoo.)
• In a notorious episode of pranksterism, Comstock once printed an issue of The News Leader using ink admixed with the juice of the ramp, the storied wild onion that abounds in the state in the spring. The intolerable stench at the local post office prompted the postmaster to extract a promise that he would never do it again.
• Comstock embarked upon a facetious political campaign in 1964, running for U.S. Congress as the Republican candidate from the Third District in West Virginia, then an impossibly Democratic stronghold. He opposed “motherhood” among other things, and lost to incumbent John M. Slack Jr., failing even to carry his home precinct.
• The masthead of The West Virginia Hillbilly announced its publication as ‘‘weakly’’.
• Comstock bragged that of Richwood’s 3,000 residents, only 19 maintained Hillbilly subscriptions.
• When a “slick” New York magazine referred to the Hillbilly as a “sophisticated” newspaper, Comstock demanded a retraction.