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The first Elkins history talk at Kump Center was an amazing success last Wednesday thanks to Dr. Van Gundy and The Inter-Mountain staff. We are so fortunate in Elkins to have retired faculty members from our local Davis & Elkins College and dedicated reporters for our local daily newspaper.
No matter how good such events may be, they will not be well-attended unless the public is aware of what is happening. Newspapers are going out of business all over the world, but we still have one in Elkins that serves our city and seven local counties. People who like to read depend on people who are willing to write, and unbiased local reporting is essential for local politics as well as local entertainment.
In the last month I have seen several journal articles on the idea that the "Age of Literacy" is dead, but it will not be true in Elkins if people like Brad Johnson and Taylor McKinney are here to help get the word out before events like Dr. Van Gundy's geological history talk. There was a large photo of Dr. Van Gundy on the front page of The Inter-Mountain Wednesday, and we had a large and enthusiastic crowd for his speech.
Human communication develops at a faster pace than the natural evolution of life on earth, but there were distinct periods that divided human history, according to the tools for spreading information. Moses used tablets at Mt. Sinai, medieval priests used church bells, early town criers yelled in the streets, soldiers sent letters from the battlefield, and all this communication was done before the printing press.
Now in the "Information Age" I am reading that the "Age of Literacy" is over, but I refuse to believe it.
We may need to read online and stop using so much paper, but we still like to read the news and to hear knowledgeable people talk and write about.
The fact is that Dr. Van Gundy's geological knowledge exceeds what his audience knows about the history of our earth. We all crowded into the Kump Learning Lab to learn some of what Dr. Van Gundy has learned by reading books about rocks and going into caves and other locations where geological history is recorded in natural rock formations.
Dr. Van Gundy not only has great knowledge of geological history, but he organized his slide presentation to help his audience understand the position of Elkins in each stage of earth's evolution. For each period of geological history, he had a map of the shifting continents marked with one red dot giving the location of Elkins at that period. Sometimes Elkins was under the ocean, and other times Elkins was on a tropical beach.
There were charts showing how each period fitted into the rocky record of history that lies beneath the surface of our earth now. Beautiful slides with drawings and photographs showed the way things may have looked when large amphibians, dinosaurs and marsupials may have walked where Elkins is now. The story of our earth is so dynamic that we can only imagine how it will change in the future.
Since he retired, Dr. Van Gundy has traveled and served as a guide on ocean cruises in many parts of the world. Also, he published a second edition of " The Nature and Scenery of the West Virginia Highlands."