Chuck Yeager’s Parents & His Childhood Church

There were two Methodists churches in Hamlin. One was the Southern Methodist Church all Democrats, the other congregation was Northern Methodist Church the hardcore Republicans of Lincoln County, where we belonged.

On election day, Dad traveled the hollers armed with two-dollar bills and whiskey trying to buy GOP votes.

Dad, Albert Hal Yeager, had Dutch and German background and was stubborn and opinionated about what he believed and didn’t care who knew it. He stood only about 5’8” and weighed 200lbs, about half that weight was in each of his powerful arms. Dad’s word was his binding contract; if he said he would do something and shook hands on it, that was his unbreakable commitment. Dad’s family name was originally “Jager” later changed phonetically to Yeager, meaning hunter in German.

Mom, Susie Mae Yeager, was two inches taller than Dad, a big boned, no nonsense churchgoer who lowered the boom on any of us if we got out of line. Mom was half Dutch with some French ancestry in her family. Like the Yeagers, her family was West Virginia country people, small farmers planted in the hollers of the Appalachians since the early nineteenth century.

My parents were in their mid-twenties when I was born on February 13, 1923, the second of their five children, in Myra, West Virginia. My brother Roy, a year and a half older, born up the holler in Myra, was in every way my big brother; he would grow up to be 6’ and weight 250 lbs. My first wife, Glennis, called him the “gentle giant” but as a kid, I gladly trailed behind a brother twice my size. Nobody picked on me.

c. GCYI