I updated my biography for the website. The short bio on the Home page is the same, but I thought I needed to go a little deeper for the About page. I struggled with finding the right words. Eventually, I settled on using a poem (of sorts) I wrote a while back. The following is titled “I Live Here”. Although the song is much different, this is the source material for “Hell on The Potomac”. The song will be released sometime in the summer of 2024.
My mother’s great great grandfather founded a bakery here in 1906.
My father’s grandfather carried home spare pieces of lumber from his job on the railroad in 1924 and built a home on that mountainside just across the river.
I was born in a hospital that was on that hill right over there. 20 years later my dad died of alcoholism in that same hospital.
My father's father built tires in a now empty factory upstream along that river for 39 years. He never missed a single day of work.
I went to high school and played football for the Frankfort Falcons. I wasn't very good, but I was on the team. Several of the guys I was on the team with now coach that team. I married a cheerleader from that high school. We've been married for 32 years.
My furnace broke the other day. I called a high school friend I haven't seen or spoken to in 7 years. He showed up within 2 hours and fixed the furnace.
I ate a cooked apple every way a cooked apple could be ate. My grandmother grew up dirt poor just outside of town on an apple orchard. Three years ago, I carried her from her bed to the car that took her to the nursing home where she died 2 days later at the age of 91.
I grew up in that house my great grandfather built with that railroad lumber. I own that land today.
I rode bikes with boys in the neighborhood. We fought with each other, laughed with each other, got in trouble with each other, and grew up with each other. They are all still to this day the closest friends a man could ever dream of having.
As a young boy, I learned who Jesus is in a church just down the road. I still have questions. And I'm still defining my own faith.
My cousin Dave now runs that same bakery that our great great great grandfather started. The business' name has not changed in 118 years. It is Dave Caporale's Bakery.
Both of my children know this area.
I am from here. I live here.
People from here know the other people from here. We've attended weddings, births, graduations, concerts, games, festivals, parties, surgeries, and funerals together. We have shared our lives.
In 1986, Todd Shipley and Jason Schaeffer drowned in that river right there…the Potomac River…right under that trestle. They were 13 years old.
All of us in the 8th grade that year at Ridgeley Middle School cried together in every classroom for days and weeks on end. It still hurts almost 40 years later.