Five Dollars for a Possum

What's a live possum worth? The President of the United States had a number in mind. Herbert Hoover built himself a fishing camp on the Rapidan, below this ridge, with Marines to guard it. His doctor rode the trails up there, a fellow named Joel Boone, no kin of mine that I can prove. One day the doctor got to talking with a mountain boy, Ray Buraker, from a cabin nearby. When the President heard, he told the doctor to promise that boy five dollars for a live possum, if he'd bring it in person. On Hoover's birthday, in came Ray with a small possum. He got his five dollars, and he got introduced to the weekend guests, Charles Lindbergh among them. And it turned out the boy had never heard of Lindbergh's flight. The President and the aviator stood there astounded. The papers got hold of it, and you'll hear yet that he slipped past the Marine guard to hand over a birthday present. That's embroidery. It was a paid errand. What wasn't embroidery was that the children up there had no school nearby. So the Hoovers built one, and Mrs. Hoover hired the teacher herself, Christine Vest, just out of Berea College. It opened in February of nineteen thirty with seventeen children, Ray and five of his brothers and sisters among them. A girl named Rosie Hurt, Rosie Hoffner in later years, had been walking ten miles a day to the old school in Richard Hollow. Miss Vest taught them cities and money and how to order from the Sears catalog. She took them to lunch at the White House, and for most of them that was about their first ride in an automobile. Evenings their parents came in to study reading and geography, and there were grown people on this mountain who met the electric light in that room. Rosie stayed over at the camp a couple of times. "I had real long blonde hair then and Mrs. Hoover used to braid my hair." She met a Marine up there. So did Miss Vest, and they both married theirs. "First man I went with and the last," Rosie said. Five years, that school ran. Then the state condemned the land for the park, and the Burakers and all their neighbors were moved, most of them not far, and with no students the door closed. The President's own school, emptied by the park. Elzie Cave, who never went to school a day, had it on tape. "As much money as they spent building that building, tearing that building down. I could never see that." Ray went to the war. The boy who'd never heard of Lindbergh served in the Army Air Forces and made sergeant. Forty years on, down in Wolftown, Rosie told a woman with a tape recorder that the school had been moved. "I often wondered what went with it." It went up the mountain to Big Meadows, Rosie. A ranger moved in, and kept the lights on.