My nephew Christopher, who works with computers at an insurance office in Charleston and has been after me about this for two years, came down in July and put this together on the machine in the front office while I watched and said "Is that legal?" every few minutes. It is. So here, for any former Bluestone Countians who have moved off to Ohio or Carolina or farther and miss us, and for anybody else who wanders in, is my weekly column, as it ran on page four. The newest one is below. The four before it are in the back issues.

The Ledger itself is still on paper, the way the Lord intended, and if you'd like it mailed to you anywhere in the country, write and I will tell you how much the post office is charging this week.

By the count of the Band Boosters, who know because they sold every pepperoni roll in Bluestone County by the end of the first quarter and had to send a man to the grocery for more, there were about 2,600 people at Riverside Field Friday night. The bleachers hold about 1,800. The rest stood along the fence, three deep, the way people used to stand there in the fifties, before there were bleachers on the visitors' side at all.

They came to see the Ansel Wildcats play Rock Creek, and they did see that, and I will get to it. But mostly they came to say goodbye to a football field.

For readers who have been away: next August, Ansel High and Pine Knob High close their doors and the new Bluestone County High School opens out on the four-lane, and both schools' teams, which have been playing together this fall as the Wildcats, will be one team in one building. The new stadium out there was finished first, and the Board of Education voted in July to move the rest of this season's home games out to it, starting with Homecoming on October 1. That made Friday the last game on the old field. The county has promised the field will stay, for the junior high and the Little League. But it won't be the same, and everybody there knew it.

Riverside Field was built by the WPA in 1938, on bottom land the Ensor family sold the county for a dollar, with stone walls along the river side that men laid by hand at a dollar a day. My father took me there to my first game in 1953. I played there from 1962 to 1964 as a second-string guard, and the only thing I ever did on that field that anyone remembers is fall down in front of the band. My son played there. So did about half of the men who were standing along the fence Friday night with their hands in their jacket pockets, looking at the grass like they were trying to remember where they'd left something.

Before the kickoff, Coach Daniel Sesco asked any former Ansel players in the crowd to come down on the field, and I'd estimate a hundred and fifty of us did, from a fellow who played in 1941 and came down on a cane to boys who graduated in June. We stood on the forty-yard line while the band played the alma mater. I'm not going to say who cried, because I'd have to put my own name in the paper.

Then they played football. Rock Creek went ahead 7-0 in the first quarter and 14-7 at the half, and for most of the third quarter it looked like the old field was going to go out on a sad note. But the Wildcats tied it early in the fourth on a long pass, and with 1:12 left, a sophomore from up Pine Knob way named James Stowers, who I'm told had never carried the ball in a varsity game before, took a pitch around the left end nine yards into the end zone. The extra point made it 21-14, and that is how it ended. I have been to a great many football games at Riverside Field, and I do not believe I have ever heard it louder.

Afterward nobody wanted to leave. The lights stayed on until almost eleven. People walked out on the field and stood around in little bunches and talked. Kids ran up and down the sidelines. One man I've known for forty years got down on one knee and dug up a little square of sod with his pocketknife and wrapped it in his handkerchief to take home, and I saw three more do the same before the night was out. The groundskeeper, who has kept that grass for twenty-two years, watched them do it and didn't say a word.

I will go out to the new stadium on the first of October, and I'll write it up, and I expect it will be very fine. It has a press box with a heater in it. It has lights you can read by. It has a parking lot, which is more than you could ever say for Riverside Field, where you parked in the Methodist church lot and walked across the swinging bridge, or you parked on the railroad tracks and prayed.

But Friday night, under those old lights, with the river going by in the dark behind the end zone the way it always has, it was good to be there one more time. Thank you, Wildcats. You did it right.