Jay Rockefeller and I started our real careers in the same week and the same place – Charleston, W.Va. He was being inaugurated as governor and I was a new reporter for UPI.Both of us were native New Yorkers who ended up light years away from our origins in every sense but miles. He was an unlikely populist champion of the downtrodden in a state he had adopted after arriving as a VISTA volunteer in 1964. I was a beginner chasing news.And West Virginia was a very good state for news, beset by poverty and periodically afflicted by labor strife, mining accidents and calamitous floods. The ... Read More