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NEWELL, W.Va. – Loyal Glenn Jordan was a poor hoopie from Ritchie County, W.Va. Born in 1901, he came to the East Liverpool area in 1936 to find work. Later he moved a number of families up the river valley in his truck, a Chevy flatbed with wood sides and a tarp.
The story of one hoopie helping other hoopies to leave Hoopie to find work in our area is far from unique. It is worth telling because it is so typical, and a part of this region's history.
As his son "Pappy Ed" pointed out, "Half the people up here come from down there."
As a janitor for Newell schools, Loyal Glenn Jordan was known and is remembered by his nickname "Rowdy" by those generations who attended high and junior high in the Wells High School building from 1949 to 1968.
Cecil Edgar "Pappy Ed" Jordan, said his father "was a happy-go-lucky man. He was one of a kind. If you ever met him you liked him. Everybody called him 'Rowdy.' Half the people didn't know his name."
Rowdy Jordan met a girl from adjacent Tyler County named Lilly Wells. When they married she was 15, he was 19. Rowdy helped build a railroad trestle and took whatever work he could find. Mostly he farmed, growing corn and cutting hay. His parents had a farm of 85 acres, and he also farmed three others in the Middle Island Creek vicinity that belonged to his and his wife's families.
Coming upriver in 1936 for work, he found it at Cecil Statler's general trucking company. "They did moving, hauled coal, garbage, everything," Ed said.
It was not one of Statler's trucks but his own that Rowdy used to move people from Tyler County upriver to seek jobs in the potteries and busy steel mills in those post-war years.
Ed said his dad "had a '46 Chevy flatbed with wooden sideboards, covered with a tarpaulin over the top. I remember seeing it. A family down there would call wanting to come up and my dad would go down to bring them. The wife and if they had a little baby would ride in the cab, and the rest would ride in the bed with whatever they had to bring. Sometimes he would go back and get the furniture if they had any. He hauled a number of families up from '46 up to '49."
In 1949 Rowdy was hired as a janitor for Wells High School in Newell. After Chester, Newell and New Cumberland were consolidated into Oak Glen High School in 1963, the building was a junior high until middle school consolidation in 1992.
Ten years after Rowdy took the janitor job he lost his wife and Ed lost his mother. Lilly Wells Jordan "died when I was only 14 years old, in '59. She was 54 or 55," Ed said.
Though he worked and raised his family in Newell, Rowdy Jordan's heart remained in Tyler County. Like so many others, he and his descendants often went "down home" to visit the farms and old homeplaces they often still owned. In the summer after his retirement in 1968 Rowdy went home to Tyler County and moved onto a farm owned by a brother-in-law, living gratis in the old farmhouse in return for helping keep it up.
"My wife and I ran down with our son and daughter at least once a month to see Grandpap," said Pappy Ed. Years ago he took an old trailer down there for a deer hunting cabin, which they later remodeled and enlarged it to make a nice house. "My boy and son-in-law and I would go down to hunt deer," Ed said. It is on a farm he still owns of "one hundred acres, more or less," situated a mile and a half from Middle Island Creek, which he proudly calls the "biggest and longest creek in the U.S."
An unrelated Chester man, Ricky Barnhart, son of the late Shirley and Dick Barnhart, bought one of the family farms and moved there 50 years ago at age 17. When Rowdy Jordan came down, Ricky was already like family and looked out for him. Barnhart lives there still, working part-time as a welder while running a beef cattle feeder operation.
Infirmities of old age finally caught up with Loyal Glenn "Rowdy" Jordan. "We brought him home in '81. He died in '86," his son said.
Edgar Cecil "Pappy Ed" Jordan earned his living as a steelworker in the Weirton Steel blooming mill, where ingots were heated then rolled into slabs. A long-time firefighter for the Newell Volunteer Fire Department, he got the "Pappy" nickname from young recruits he was given to train. Ironically, as an NVFD trustee he accepted title from the president of Homer Laughlin China to the old school his dad took care of for so many years. The price was one dollar.
He and his wife Linda Maude Ward Jordan make their home on Washington Street in Newell. A daughter, Connie Bernice Hicks, lives adjacent. They lost their son, Cecil Edgar Jordan Jr., to cancer in 2020 at age 49.
Both Pappy Ed and I have youngsters on the Oak Glen High School soccer team: his great-grandson Mason and my grandson Lamppost Head. Each is a freshman and starter. Meeting Ed at a team fundraiser, I found that his description of his likeable father applies equally to him.
(The term "hoopie" refers to the people in downriver towns, cricks and hollers who in the late 19th century cut saplings as hoops for barrels used by East Liverpool potteries for shipping ware. When hoop-polers themselves came upriver they were called hoopies.)