Ralph Hall
Ralph Hall was born in 1936 in a two room house in the village of Melvin, Kentucky. Melvin was a village that sets in a deep valley in the Appalachian mountain chain about 30 miles from Jenkins, Pikeville and Hazard, Kentucky.
Ralph was the oldest of six children. He had three brothers and two sisters. At the end of the Great Depression, Hall’s father worked for a government program called the W.P.A. for just 10 cents per hour while his mother was a homemaker and took care of the family.
In 1941, Ralph Hall started school in Melvin. The school was a three room building without plumbing. Two outhouses set at the foot of the hill behind the schoolhouse. There was a hand pump out in the schoolyard at which he recalls. He made cups from his writing tablet and drank many cups of water from that old well. At times he could see ink that dad settled in the bottom of this make-do cup.
It was during his fourth grade that Hall began school in the Coal Camp at Weeksbury, Kentucky. The school was new and it had inside plumbing. In 1950, a new school was built and Hall graduated from the 8th grade there in 1950. He began high school in the coal camp in Wheelwright, Kentucky. He dropped out of school in 1954, joined the Air Force and took basic training at Sampson Air Force Base in Geneva, New York. Hall stayed one year in the Air Force when his father had the Congressman to bring his son home so that he could finish school. Ralph Hall graduated high school in 1956 and worked many jobs in Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia and Ohio.
Ralph Hall went back to school at the age of forty and graduated from Prestonsburg Community College receiving a A.B. Degree. He then enrolled in Pikeville College where he received a degree in Psychology. For 22 years he taught at Wheelwright High School and South Floyd High School. He worked 11 years as a substitute teacher and 11 years as a Special Education teacher. Hall did graduate work through Morehead State University and decided to retire in 1997, never finishing the graduate program.
In 2004, Hall started writing stories about his life as a child. He has written poetry for most of his life. He wrote a poem about England and sent it to the Queen Elizabeth. She had her Lady In Waiting return a letter to him. This letter is a treasure to him. Writing has taken Hall to places that he never thought he would go. To him, life is a journey and one never knows where life will take you. He thanks God for the gift of writing.
Hall has been married to Claudette Hayes for fifty years. They have three children, seven grandchildren and nine great grandchildren. He is a Bishop in The Church of God of Prophecy with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee. A pastor for 42 years, he now pastors a small church in Ligon, Kentucky.