Here is another image from my past. I hope it rekindles a few memories? I would hate to think that I was the only one in this group that ever went "skinny dippin." STAN Charlotte Stewart married Carl Stafford and her older sister, Dora, married George Stafford. Both families lived on the original Rice Stewart property, which was situated on the banks of the Laurel Fork River near Matheny, West Virginia. There was a deep hole of water between their houses and State Route 10, which paralleled the river at that point. We called the hole of water the Rice Stewart Hole, for obvious reasons. It was a favorite swimming hole for my generation growing up in Matheny during the forties. The underbrush all along the big hole was the hiding place for many cut-off jeans and shorts, which had been left there by former swimmers for possible future use or for the convenience of any other swimmers who needed a swimming suit . The original owners had long ago been forgotten. When we decided we wanted to go swimming, we simply searched through the brush until we found a decent pair of shorts and we were in business. But on one particular hot summer night, a group of my friends and I saw no need for such formality, and decided to go swimming in the suits mother nature had provided us. We were walking home from the movies at Oceana, and we arrived at the Rice Stewart Hole about midnight. We shed our clothes, hung them on the willows and ran helter-skelter, stark naked down the bank into the refreshing water. Now Carl and George Stafford worked the night shift at the Kopperston mine and were still at work. Furthermore, on this night, of all nights, Charlotte and Dora had elected to invite a few of their girl friends over to Charlotte’s home for cards, gossip, or whatever it was that young women did while they waited for their husbands to come home from work. The final bit of trivia essential to this tale is that Carl had mounted two powerful floodlights on his front porch and had conveniently aimed them across the middle of our swimming hole. There was no place to hide when the lights came on; we were trapped in the water. It was shameful how those women behaved as they made mirth over our predicament. They were not in the least sympathetic to our plight. They taunted us and made all kinds of unsavory remarks concerning our privates. They wondered how long each of us could stay under water in our vain attempts to not be recognized. “Were we getting cold yet?” You can guess the rest of the story. Just before the onset of hypothermia, a company of a half dozen shivering teenagers finally recognized they had been bested, and bravely marched up the bank to their clothes accompanied by cheers from the audience. Mercifully, at that moment headlights appeared in the driveway to the Stafford house and the floodlights were turned off. Carl and George were home. There was no encore for their benefit.