WILLIAMSON – A famous person once said that age is a question of mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Whatever motivates well-known retired educator and athletic coach Bob Meade to keep spry and interested in the world around him, it’s working.

He shares a birth date with George Washington, first president of the United States, and celebrated his 90th birthday Sunday, Feb. 22, with a family get-together at his home on Persinger Drive in Fairview Addition of Williamson.

That family includes his wife of 64 years, the former Mary Evelyn “Betty” Hill; a son; James R. Meade of Williamson; three daughters, Daphne Slone of Williamson, Linda Hurley of Charleston and Deborah Nixon of Jacksonville, Fla.; nine grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

“Coach” Meade, as he is still known after years of retirement, had a great record as a teacher, principal and coach. He spent 36 and one-half years in two Mingo County schools – Lenore High and Chattaroy High – now consolidated with other schools.

During a recent interview with Meade, we learned even more about him than in previous talks through the years. We had long recognized that he was special, or different, and he admitted that some neighbor women who assisted his mother in delivering him, told him in later years that he was “different” from the time he made his debut into the family circle (1919) at the Meade homeplace in Oldfield Branch at Maher.

“When I asked the women why I was different, they said I had a big, round, bald head and weighed 12 pounds. Along with that went an irresistible set of blue eyes,” he reported.

Another reason he was special is that his dad, G.W. Meade, used a switch to chastise his five brothers but never laid a switch on young Bob. His mother was Virginia Burgess Meade and there were three sisters in the family besides the boys, he observed.

He said his oldest brother entered Glenville College but eventually flunked out, “so my father sent me to college. He told me if I made one ‘F’ on one class, to come on home, it was over.

“I really wasn’t interested much in going to college but I went and I found out what college was all about – there were a lot of pretty girls there,” Meade reminisced.

“I took three hours of classes and found the work wasn’t hard,” he recalled. “I made C’s in everything and didn’t want to come home. After three years of college, my father wasn’t about to send me there any more.”

During World War II (1942-1945), Meade went to Roanoke, Va., to work in a defense plant, receiving $1 an hour. The mines and the railroad company were only paying a dollar a day. Then he traveled to Chattanooga, Tenn., where he took a maintenance job with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The draft caught up with him and he entered the U.S. Army. In doing so, he passed up an opportunity to go to South America, preferring to be drafted into military service. He spent two months taking basic training in military equipment at the Maryland Proving Grounds, and then was shipped out to California’s desert area, Death Valley.

While at Death Valley, Meade said the soldiers received passes to Los Angeles, Hollywood and “Dance With the Stars.” His next military move was of a more serious nature for he was in the first group that went directly from the states to a landing of tanks at LeHavre, France.

He participated in the Battle of the Bulge and was in the second crossing of the Rhine River at Bonn as his division fought its way through the heart of Germany. “I slept in the home of the Grimm Brothers, who wrote about the “Mother in the Shoe.’”

He said he was at Hersbach when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945, and was 35 miles from Berlin when Adolph Hitler committed suicide. “My division was ordered to turn South and that was the hardest part of the road.

“We were in Munich, Germany, three days after Hitler’s death and I was able to take as souvenirs his alarm clock and a knife which bore his picture. I brought them home with me.”

Upon returning to the States, Meade found himself again in California because this nation was still at war with Japan. He returned home after Japan surrendered.

An important event had occurred in his life during the last year of World War II. He and “Betty” Hill were married on Nov. 8, 1944. Upon returning to civilian life in the Williamson area, he went to Athens, W.Va., with “Betty” and their baby, Daphne, and entered Concord College (now a university), where he later obtained his teaching degree. Daughter Daphne also is a teacher now.

Meade has A.B. and B.S. degrees in English and Social Science and a master’s degree from Western University. He recalled that he maintained a 3.7 average in college and was inducted into a fraternity, Kappa Delta Pi, while at the college.

For more than 36 years, he taught and coached until his retirement. He was both coach and assistant principal at Lenore High and was principal at Chattaroy High. After the high school was consolidated with William-son High, Meade continued as principal of Chattaroy Junior High.

A gunner on a tank, he was wounded when his tank and another collided. This put him in a hospital for six months for treatment of a crushed chest. He said another soldier was killed in the mishap, which occurred when he was stationed in Pennsylvania.

Meade is proud of his heritage and likes to talk about his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Patrick Lowe, a North Carolinian who settled in Williamson after having earlier served in the Revolutionary War under Commander-in-Chief George Washington.

Lowe, whose mother was a Cherokee Indian, received a land grant from the Virginia governor when the Williamson area was a part of Augusta County, Va. The grant gave him land in the area of Williamson and the mouth of Pond Creek, said Meade.

William Tecumseh Mea-de, brother of Bob Meade’s grandfather, Wayne Meade, was the first police chief of Williamson.

Bob Meade’s great-granddaughter, Amanda Hurley of Charleston, is named for Amanda Lowe, the first white child born in Williamson.

With regard to Meade’s approach to another decade of life and his continuing zest for life, (he still is proud to be called “Coach,”) we can only ask, “How old would he be if we didn’t know how old he is?” and wish him a happy birthday.