Harold W Sullivan

Harold W. Sullivan was a storyteller all his life. Oh, not the big fish kind, but stories he drew from his experiences growing up on a farm in rural West Virginia. Harold was born in 1930 in a small farming community in Jackson County on the cusp of the Great Depression. Times were hard for farmers, but he still graduated from West Virginia University with a master’s degree in agriculture. Much of his career was spent as a high school teacher of agriculture, before working for the WV Department of Vocational Education until his retirement. One of the things he was most proud to teach was adult education welding school: “Teaching men to weld is teaching them a vocation that gives them a livelihood.” He also wrote a column for the local newspaper called “A Sprig of Green” for many years. He played guitar in a country band for local events and continued to play his guitar every day until he died. He was a woodworker and hand-crafted Nativity stables and sold them at craft shows. He was a storyteller at heart and, in his retirement years, wrote the stories in this book to his grandchildren. In his later years, Harold loved to read aloud his stories to visitors. He usually read two for his audience, three if they were enthusiastic. Reading the stories brought everything to life once more for him. He was married to his beloved wife, Lucy, for sixty-six years and followed her in death in 2020.

His headstone is engraved, “Storyteller"