Live Breaking News & Updates on Lincoln County Poor Farm

FRED MILLER
Scratch an Adkins from around East Liverpool (and there are quite a few) and you’ll probably find at least a second-hand connection to Chuck Yeager, legendary pilot, World War II ace and first man to fly faster than sound.
Brigadier Gen. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, a favorite son of West Virginia and a native of Hamlin, the county seat of Lincoln County, died Dec. 7 at the age of 97.
My mother Lucille was an Adkins from Hamlin. She was born in 1918, so was four and a half years older than Yeager.
Her younger brother Louis Sweetland Adkins, however, the same age as Yeager and was in his graduating class at Hamlin High School. I never met Chuck Yeager, but I think he and my Uncle Lou were a lot alike: direct can-do men, born storytellers, with a sardonic sense of humor and always active, never still. Lou’s siblings called him Sweetland, and I used that name for him when I wrote about him in this column back in the ’90s. Retired, long divorced and ....

Lincoln County , West Virginia , United States , West Bengal , Mud River , East Liverpool , Millard Fillmore Adkins , Tom Wolfe , Louis Sweetland Adkins , Chuck Yeager , Fred Miller , Charlese Chuck Yeager , Hamlin High School , Museum Of Ceramics , Army Bg Johnc Doc Bahnsen , World War , Hamlin High , Uncle Lou , Tsol Food , Wright Patterson Air Base , President Truman , Northern Methodist , Southern Methodist , Lincoln County Poor Farm , Right Stuff , Under Honey ,