_____________________________________________________________________________ _ _ __ __ _ ___ \\\\\___| |_| | \ \ / / / \ | __|___\"-._ /////~~~| _ | \ / / _ \ __ ~~~/.-' |_| |_| \/\/ /_/ \_\ |___| _____________________________________________________________________________ THE HANK WILLIAMS APPRECIATION SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL 1978 _____________________________________________________________________________ "James 'Bob' Lilly" 1922 R.I.P 2007 _____________________________________________________________________________ He graduated with the first class at the new State Police Academy in Institute. In fact, he helped finish the place. He drove the state’s first blue and gold cruiser. In Oak Hill, he investigated the death of Hank Williams. During duty on the West Virginia Turnpike, he handled one accident so tragic that the details haunt him still. After half a century in uniform - first as a state trooper and later as security chief at Coonskin Park - James Robert Lilly (Bob to his friends) could fill a library with tales of his encounters. Retiring to part-time status at Coonskin last summer, he still lives in the brown house on the park grounds, enjoying more time for golf, woodworking and photography. He’s 79. I WAS BORN in Hinton in 1922. When the Depression came along, my dad lost his job. He was a fireman on the C&O. We had to move out to a little place called Jumping Branch between Hinton and Beckley. My granddaddy had a farm there and gave us a piece of land, and dad and one of my uncles built a little Jenny Lind house. We lived there three or four years, until things settled down and my dad got his railroad job back and we moved back to Hinton. I got married at 18. The State Police used to come to the street corner right above our home and use the two-way radio there. It was a high point and they could communicate with the Beckley detachment. I admired all that very much. And the man who was the trooper there, I thought he was great. I made up my mind that I wanted to be a state policeman. During the war, I flew B-51 Mustangs. When I got out of the service, I went to the police academy, the first class to attend in Institute. They sent us in the field for a while until the academy could be completed. Part of our calisthenics consisted of napping rock and digging ditches and installing water lines for the school. That hadn’t been done because there was a builders strike in the valley that year. My first station was in Montgomery. Fayette County was pretty rough then. We had murders quite often. I had an opportunity to learn a lot because there was so much going on. In 1952, they moved our office to Oak Hill. In the early morning of Jan. 1 [1953], I got a call from a city policeman wanting to know if I’d give him a hand. He said he had a dead man there. I asked who it was. He said it was Hank Williams. Hank and his driver were en route to Canton, and the driver couldn’t get him awake, so he took him to the Oak Hill Hospital. He drove to the back of the emergency room and the doctor pronounced him dead right there in the car, and they took him straight across the street to the Tyree Funeral Home. I went right on up and took notes and interviewed people. We contacted a doctor in Virginia where they’d stopped. Evidently, the doctor gave Hank some medicine to sober him up, and it didn’t work, and he died. They parked Hank’s Cadillac convertible behind the Pure Oil station. His wife came up the next day, and the first question she had when she walked into the funeral home was, ‘Where’s my car?’ Years later, my wife and I went back to Oak Hill. I couldn’t find a copy of that investigation report anywhere. I went to the courthouse, state police headquarters, everywhere. That copy just disappeared. In 1958, I transferred to Wellsburg. I had a heart attack up there in 1961 and was off work for five months. I’d gotten into it with a drunk driver. When I put him in the cruiser, he came out of that seat with his head down. He had a metal plate in his head and it got me right in the chest. I had two broken ribs, and the doctor thought the blow to my chest and breaking the ribs caused a clot that caused my heart attack. My parents came up from Hinton. When my dad parked the car outside the hospital, something on the ground caught his eye. He saw this crucifix and rosary beads lying there in the dirt. The cross was face-up. In 1965, my dad had a heart attack. They called me in Princeton and said I’d better get to Hinton as soon as I could if I wanted to see my father. I stopped at a newsstand to pick up a Gazette to read in the waiting room, and I saw this crucifix on the ground. The cross was facedown. Chills went all over me. When I had my heart attack, my father found a cross face-up, and I lived. On the way to see him in the hospital, I found a crucifix facedown. He passed away that night. After my heart attack, I requested a transfer to the Turnpike. The State Police is a good fraternity, and it was a good job, but everything wasn’t peaches and cream. Some of it was pretty tough. My saddest experience occurred on the Turnpike on the Fourth of July. This young couple had been in Cleveland where things hadn’t worked out for them. They had to move back to McDowell County. He was driving this old car and his wife was in a different car ahead of him. She had a baby and two small children in her car and he had his son and an old dog in his car. Everything they owned was in those two cars. He noticed smoke coming from behind her car and kept blowing the horn. She finally pulled over, and just as she stopped, the whole rear of the car ignited. The back seat was full of flames instantly. She jumped out with the newborn. The other babies were in the back seat. She couldn’t get them out. I got there in what seemed like seconds. Truck drivers were running around like crazy, carrying fire extinguishers, trying to get the fire out. None of us could get it out. We couldn’t even get close to the fire. Those two children burned to death in that back seat. For months, I could smell burnt flesh. It gets in your nostrils, in your clothes, on your body. You can bathe and change clothes a dozen times a day and that odor is there, the sickening sweet odor of burnt human flesh. I retired the last day of May 1974, and got a job on the construction site at the Haynes Mall west of Winston-Salem, N.C. Then I found out about the vacancy here as chief of police at the park. I started here May 21, 1975. When we first came here, this park was wild. It was nothing to have two or three fights a weekend. The tennis center used to be the basketball courts, and we’d have two or three fights there every weekend. We’ve had a couple of suicides out here, three or four airplane crashes and a few breaking and enterings at the clubhouse - minor trouble compared to my job in the State Police. Kids drink too much beer and get in a fight and you have to arrest two or three of them. And we have our share of necking out here. It comes with the territory. We just tell them to move on. We suggest a Holiday Inn. One of the suicides was strange. A lady made a reservation for one of the shelters for a family outing on Father’s Day. The evening before, she went to that shelter, sat down with her back against a pillar and took a gun and killed herself. The investigation indicated she had terminal cancer. I retired the last day of July, 2001. Now I’m working part time for the park commission, four days a week and filling in. I play golf. I have a little woodworking shop. And my wife, Maria, and I are avid photographers. We’ve taken pictures of about everything that exists in the park - birds, ducks, geese, turkeys, rabbits, squirrels. We had a bear in our yard about five years ago. Maria went out and took pictures of him, not very close pictures. Then the DNR came out and set a trap. They baited it with doughnuts. Bears love doughnuts. Lots of people have said, ‘Boy, you’ve lived an interesting life.’ Perhaps to most people it would be kind of interesting, what all I’ve done. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s been a busy life, and I’ve had a lot of fun in it." To contact staff writer Sandy Wells, call 348-5173 or e-mail: _____________________________________________________________________________ sandyw@wvgazette.com. _____________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright 2003 The Charleston Gazette _____________________________________________________________________________ Copy and paste the following URLs into your browser's location box: Photo #1: James "Bob" Lilly with his graduating class at the State Police Academy in 1949 http://www.angelfire.com/sd/webmonitor/jamesrlilly.jpg Photo #2: J.R. Lilly in his army air force uniform in 1943 http://www.angelfire.com/sd/webmonitor/jamesrlilly2.jpg ____________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html Doctrine of International Copyright Law ____________________________________________________________________________ Note: Join Robert Ackerman's Hank Fan Mailing list. _____________________________________________________________________________ Email: Hank1@mtaonline.net _____________________________________________________________________________