John D. Rockefeller IV, the junior Senator from West Virginia is quoted as saying that Byrd knew, “before you can make life better, you have to have a road to get in there, and you have to have a sewerage system.”
The obituary uses the word "rural" only once, to refer to how he "played the fiddle at one rural stop after another," campaigning for public office in the 1940s and 1950s. But it provides this information about Byrd's indisputably rural, hardscrabble upbringing:
As a boy, living on a small farm, he helped slaughter hogs, learned to play the fiddle and became a prize-winning Sunday school student after the manager of the local coal company store gave him two pairs of socks so that he could attend without embarrassment.Byrd was the valedictorian of his high school class but unable to attend college. Later, in his 30s and 40s, he took college courses. He ultimately earned a law degree, cum laude from American University in 1963, after 10 years of taking night courses.
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