By Megan Greco and Morgan Young, WV Uncovered

At 10 a.m. trucks overflowing with everything from crushed cars to rusty washing machines begin the slow trek onto the industrial scale at Coffman Metals in Birch River, W.Va. Customers from all over central West Virginia come to Coffman’s to cash in on their finds at 50 cents a pound for mixed aluminum. The loud clanging of unsecured scrap is not enough to drown out idling engines and ringing phones.

“Everyday we have 100 to 150 customers,” said Tony Coffman, owner of the recycling center.

Coffman’s career path was already set in stone at 14-years-old. As a high school sophomore he began his education in the family recycling and trading business. A common love for the outdoors made a job working in his grandfather’s establishment ideal.

“Then kids mowed lawns. I worked for my grandfather,” Coffman said. “I just liked hanging out with my granddad; he was a pretty cool dude.”

In 1928, Tony’s grandfather, Guy Coffman, started trading fur and natural roots, such as ginseng,  with community locals in Nicholas County. It wasn’t until after Guy’s death in 1987 that the recycling aspect of the business took hold. A year after his high school graduation, Tony was the logical choice to carry on his grandfather’s legacy.

“I’m the only guy who showed any interest in my grandfather’s business,” he said. “That was the whole idea I think, from his point of view, someone to carry on. He had nine children, and none of them were in the business. My dad was in insurance, [he] owned an insurance agency, and my brothers they were all in insurance.”

By helping to clean up his hometown, Coffman began his own 30-year tradition. He says it wasn’t long ago that discarded bed frames and tossed beer cans were fixtures of the Birch River landscape.

“I used to walk quite a bit, and it was all over the hills,” he said. “You go for a nature walk and any where along a gravel road or a wide spot they were throwing garbage over the hill, old refrigerators and washers and dryers.”

In 2007, the state exported approximately 440,359 tons of solid waste according to the West Virginia Solid Waste Management Plan.

“In more rural areas, if people are paid to recycle it really gives them the incentive to clean up their properties,” said Laura Stiller, Recycling Coordinator for the Monongalia County Solid Waste Authority.

According to Stiller, because West Virginia is so rural, recycling can be kind of tricky. The location of recycling centers pose an obstacle for many residents, but the reward of monetary gain is great motivator.

“Recycling really helps the community develop. No one wants to put a business next to a rundown piece of property. If it takes a couple of cents to get people to clean up West Virginia then it is worth it,” said Stiller.

With the invention of the shredder, what was once useless became valuable, creating a market for resourceful customer.

“West Virginians aren’t lazy,” Coffman said. “You take your can and pitch it out along the road – someone is going to pick it up and bring it [here] because it has a value on it.”

Coffman’s pays 70 to 80 cents a pound for aluminum cans, a common sale. Approximately 50,000 pounds of cans come through the recycling center every month.

While recycling is the bulk of the business now, Coffman has not forgotten his roots in trading. Though ginseng digging and fur trading are on the decline because of government regulation, the old practices still bring in business throughout the season.

Coffman’s relationship with ginseng began where his career did, with his grandfather and the surrounding community.

As a child, Coffman was always around ginseng but it wasn’t until he and his friends saw a way to make some extra cash that he became interested in the root.

“I remember the year that [ginseng] went from $20 to $50 a pound and in the ’70s that was a lot of money,” he said. “It was always just for fun.”

In the recent economic climate, what was once “money for boys” in Coffman’s childhood is now an additional source of income for some. Last year, the recycling center paid out $13 million into the hands of West Virginia residents.

“We give a lot of people jobs and we hand a lot money out to the economy,” Coffman said. “And we cleaned the place up and I’m kind of proud of that, I wish my grandfather was there to see it.”

Photo gallery of The Family Business. 

Over the past academic year, Frank and I have been attending monthly class sessions at the Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

The West Virginia Uncovered Project at WVU was created to cultivate online innovation and storytelling among the Mountain State’s community papers. Supported by grants from private foundations, the project is about helping small papers adapt their product to reach an online audience.

Several times each semester, the project staff conducts workshops for the community papers on subjects ranging from video and audio production to digital photography to web design and creating and selling online advertisements.

Weather permitting, once a month, Frank and I traveled to Morgantown to spend an entire day (or two) in the classroom, learning about – and playing with – new media tools and equipment. We have learned so much. I don’t know if it’s our age, the length of time since we’ve been in a classroom, or the speed at which technology advances – we were seriously overwhelmed. Learning to take a good photo, edit it in a photo editing program, turning it into a slide show in another program, adding music to it, and getting it online – all in one day – is more information than one can process at one time I think. Still, we absorbed as much as we could in class, and came home to play with the new concepts we learned.

Some things, like photography and video-making, interested Frank more than I. Other topics, like web design and social media, interested me more than Frank. Between the two of us, we have been spent evenings making a photo slide show of a turkey gobbler showing his fan tail to a flock of hens, and have uploaded a video of Daisy barking at him to YouTube.

I feel rather embarrassed knowing that the other participants in the class are providing sports and news coverage with their education.  But, we are very thankful to be included in the program, and do have plans to put our education to good use for all of you.

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The easiest efforts to put forth from our new media education was in the social media arena. Two-Lane Livin’ now has a facebook page, currently standing at 922 members. If you have a facebook account, and become a fan of our page, you will receive notices when our web site is updated, can post on our page wall, can upload your photos to share with other fans, and more. Simply type, “Two-Lane Livin’ Magazine” in your Facebook search bar to find us.  We have readers from all over check in at our fan page, even one from Singapore!

We also post web updates and photos and blog entries via Twitter. You can find us at Twitter.com by searching for 2LaneTweet.

Although I haven’t actually made it a habit yet, we also have a blog, www.twolanebloggin.com, where I am prone to sporadically post photos from the garden, share behind the scenes thoughts and events, and present informal topics not really fit for any “formal” edition of the magazine. Photos and videos will be soon become regular additions.

Also, as I mentioned last month, we now offer E-subscriptions, which we call our “Green Subscriptions.” For $12 a year, you can have online access to the actual print edition PDF sent to your e-mail box every month. This is a great alternative to print subscriptions for readers who live outside our distribution region.

You can purchase a Green Subscription or a Mailed Subscription  by following the directions in the tall box on the left of this page, or purchase them online through Paypal at our new web site.

*   *   *   *   *   *

Ah, the new web site. When I say it that way, it makes it sound as though it became a fresh, new creature overnight. Actually, it took me about ten months. I had to learn a new design program, learn extra add-ins and plug-ins, learn how to integrate it with Facebook and Twitter and Paypal. Obviously, the change-over didn’t happen as quickly as I had hoped, but I am glad to announce that the redesign is complete.

You see, the “Web Edition” is actually a different creature than the “Print Edition.” The Web Edition only includes featured articles from the Print Edition,  but it also presents links to our columnist’s blogs, and includes their recent blog posts. The site already includes recent posts from Two-Lane Bloggin’.

And, the Web Edition is now set (knock on wood) to present our slide shows and videos and tweets.

Whew! Are you confused yet? Now you have a taste of how Frank and I felt in that classroom!

Here’s a List of our Media Outlets and an explanation of what they are:
* The Print Edition – If you’re actually holding something paper in your hands to read this, that’s what you’ve got. It is available free in 16 West Virginia Counties, and by purchased mailed subscription.

* The Green Edition – This is an online PDF file, the actual digital file that is sent to the printer each month. PDF is a type of file that anyone can open on any computer, anywhere. Readers can purchase a subscription to the Green Edition to get monthly e-mails with the access link.

* The Web Edition – This is our web site at www.twolanelivin.com. Featured articles from the current and past editions, select photos and videos are available free online.

* The RSS Feed – Real Simple Syndication is a web term that basically lets people sign up for a bookmark that lists the recent posts or headlines from a specific web page. Our main RSS feed is synchronized with  the Web Edition.

* The Facebook Fan Page – Get notified, discuss, comment, share photos and stories. In addition to our Fan Page, I also have a personal account that really gets behind the scenes here at Two-Lane Livin’. Feel free to “friend” me.

* 2LaneTweet on Twitter – Get notices when the Web Edition is updated, the fan page is updated, when all videos are uploaded and when Two-Lane Bloggin’ is updated.

* Two-Lane Shoppin’ – Seems like everyone on the internet has a cafepress.com store. So do we. Magazine logos, themes, and cover shots of past issues are presented on T-shirts, bags, mousepads and more. The Hillbilly T-shirt is our best seller at twolaneshoppin.com.

* Two-Lane Bloggin’ – Our informal blog that catches all the photos, thoughts, stories we don’t know what else to do with. Two-Lane Bloggin’ also feeds to our Twitter posts (called “Tweets”), and has its own RSS feed.

*Two-Lane Livin’ on YouTube – YouTube is one of the most popular online outlets for sharing video on the Internet. This is where all our online videos will be stored online. These videos will also be shared or announced on the Web Edition, Twitter, Two-Lane Bloggin’ and our facebook page.

* Two-Lane Livin’ on DotPhoto – There are literally hundreds of online outlets for sharing photographs. Some folks prefer cafepress.com or smugmug.com, or lulu.com. Frank and I chose dotphoto.com as the main outlet for our professional photography because their site makes it easy to create photo slideshows, share them on other sites like facebook and youtube, and make the best of our photos available for sale online.
We only have a few photo album slide shows up right now (the turkey gobbler, the winter storm, spring flowers), but we have years of photos from our travels and want to put our recent photography refresher course to work. If you want to check out the gobbler slide show in the mean time, you can visit our dotphoto web site at 2lane4life.dotphoto.com.

Hmmmm. I think that’s all of our new media outlets.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed (I know I am), visiting our site, www.twolanelivin.com, or becoming a facebook fan are good ways to start. The new media options available in the world are amazing, and we hope to take advantage of as many as we can handle.
Obviously, the WVUncovered program has taken us headfirst into the “New Media Age.” Much of it is still a blur, but we are working our way through it. During our last class session, they showed us the things an iPad can do, and I thought, “Some day, Two-Lane Livin’ is going to be on iPad.” If I start learning about it now, I might have it together in a year – or two.

*   *   *   *   *

Of course, the iPad will just have to wait. I’ve got a garden to plant, new hens and a new coop to tend to, laundry on the line and trays of vegetable sprouts that need misting.

I’ve got four years of travel photos to sort through for dotphoto, a web site to update, a cafepress store to update, tweets to make, posts to blog, and fan page updates to share, and Frank is making more and more videos every day.

We feel blessed to be a part of the WVUncovered Program, and feel blessed to be able to accept opportunities that teach us more about the things we enjoy.
In many ways, all this new media seems contradictory to the Two-Lane Livin’ lifestyle, but at the same time, it allows us to reach out and share our cares, our culture, our lives and the lives of our columnists with the “outside” world. Two-Lane Livin’ isn’t just a magazine, it’s a mind-set — one that grows more and more popular every day.

Frank and I may not feel the need for some of these electronic devices in our lives (we can’t even get a decent cell phone signal) but this new media allows those who can and do enjoy a faster paced life to… Live vicariously through the messages of our magazine. We welcome them all.

~  Lisa

Online videos and slide show presentations really make sense for a newspaper, but what about us? Video of me running the rototiller? Feeding the hens? Harvesting the garden? Who’d want to see that?

Two-Lane Livin’ Magazine was one of the fortunate publications in W.Va. to be selected to participate this year in the WVUncovered Program at West Virginia University. The program is led by the university’s School of Journalism, designed to introduce papers to new media.
Our first workshop session was this past week; two days spent learning about [...]