Shribman: Jay Rockefeller aimed to fit in with West Virginia
EMMONS, W.Va. — He was a gangly, strapping youth, fired with idealism and ambition, hampered by a last name that was a synonym both for great wealth and grand theft. His breeding showed; he noticed an antique table here or a crocheted bedspread there. But his instincts showed too; he was drawn to poverty and the challenge of defeating it. At the start he lived with Betty and Ned Chilton, the state’s royalty by virtue of their control of the Charleston Gazette newspaper, and in their four-poster king bed, just off their living room, he contemplated his future as a 27-year old VISTA poverty worker in this alien land, where he played racquetball and tennis at the Edgewood Country Club but also ventured into mountain fastnesses where progress and economic growth were slow. “He was astonished by it — the towns, the mines — and he was taken by the people’s goodness and by their bad lot,’’ Mrs. Chilton told me more than a third of a century ago. “He found something worthwhile here.’’ John D. Rockefeller IV — poverty worker, governor, senator, regular guy with a formidable, forbidding surname — died last week at age 89. He left behind
