ALERT (03/07/2024): Due to a lightning strike, WVPB TV will be off the air in the Bethany/Wheeling area until new parts arrive. Thank you for your patience.
Harpers Ferry is a historic West Virginia city and international tourist hub. But four years ago the national park and surrounding town were devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Donald Franklin Duncan was born in Rome, Ohio, on June 8, 1893, but spent his childhood in Huntington.
He left Huntington in his mid-teens and became a successful salesman for the Brock Candy Company in Chicago during World War I. In 1920, he introduced Good Humor ice cream to the world.
While in San Francisco in the late 1920s, Duncan saw a common Filipino toy known as a yo-yo, which means “come-come” in the Tagalog language. He bought out the toy’s manufacturer, modified the top, substituted a slip-string of Egyptian fiber, and hired Filipino natives to demonstrate the toy across the country. Duncan’s yo-yo became wildly popular. In 1962, its peak sales year, the Duncan Yo-Yo Company sold 18 million yo-yos and spinning tops. He owned the trademark on the word yo-yo from 1930 to 1965, when a federal appeals court ruled that the word was part of the common language.
With his profits, he founded the Duncan Parking Meter Corporation, which at one point made 80 percent of all meters sold in the world.
Donald Duncan died in Los Angeles in 1971 at age 77.
This year every county in West Virginia, except Cabell County, is set to begin receiving opioid settlement funds, totalling over 400 million dollars from a nearly statewide lawsuit that was won in 2022.
Cabell County, and its largest city, Huntington, decided to bring their own joint lawsuit. They lost that suit in 2022, despite suing with the same claim that was used in successful state and nationwide lawsuits that the pharmaceutical companies had created a “public nuisance.”
On this West Virginia Morning, many schools in rural areas of West Virginia have closed – leaving vacant buildings. When a community in eastern Boone County lost its elementary school, it became a community center. Briana Heaney has the story.
Flags at the Capitol and in Cabell County are at half-staff Thursday, honoring the life of longtime legislator Chuck Romine who passed away this week at age 87. Romine’s life combined politics and music - tied together with a passion for service.