WWHS ALUMNI PAGE
Marilyn Guffy ('85)
Hometown grass turned out to be greener by far
This article appeared in the Register-Herald on Dec. 26, 2003.
By NEALE R. CLARK
As a high school teen-ager, Marilyn Guffy had a clear view of what she wanted to do after high school: Leave the area.
"I wanted to get out as fast as I could because at the time I graduated, Beckley wasn't doing anything," she said.
That was in 1985, and although the grass looked greener in other pastures, Guffy is now back in Beckley with her husband Joe.
After getting her diploma from Woodrow Wilson High School, she viewed her hometown as being locked into the past.
"There weren't any new businesses coming in, everything was closing, the mall was about the only thing that had anything going for it," she recalled. "I thought, well, let me try something different."
The summer between her junior and senior years, Guffy had worked at Six Flags Over Texas, staying with an older sister, and really enjoyed the experience.
"Somehow, along the way, I decided I wanted to go to college there," Guffy said. Her sister said she could put up with her younger sibling, and their father agreed to it.
"So as soon as I graduated from high school, I pretty much headed straight out there."
She stayed with her sister in Grapevine, Texas, and went to school in Denton.
She started out in a business program, but decided that wasn't really her thing, so she went into home furnishings merchandising, "which is like interior decorating, only it's more the display rather than working with the houses."
She stayed in decorating for a couple of years, but the field got somewhat cutthroat, so she decided to try something different.
"I always enjoyed working with animals," she said. "A job kind of fell in my lap at about the time I decided I didn't want to be into decorating anymore. So I started working with animals, and now I'm a veterinary technician."
Guffy spent more than 12 years in Texas, during which time she met her husband, Joe, who was a native Texan working for an oil and gas company.
Although the couple moved around a lot, she never gave much thought to coming back to West Virginia to live. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.
"When I was out there, I never even thought about coming back," she said. "I came back here to visit and then I was always anxious to get back to Texas."
Obviously, something changed somewhere along the line, although she doesn't recall just when.
"I would come here for Christmas and all that, and each time I wanted to go back to Texas. Then in one of the trips here, I know it sounds kind of corny, but it just hit me, I don't want to go back to Texas. I woke up one morning and said, I want to sell the house, I want to move back to West Virginia."
Nothing in particular sticks out in terms of motivation, other than the fact that over the years she had lost a number of relatives while she was gone.
"I decided I wanted to spend as much time as possible with the ones I still had here. I didn't want to come back when everyone was sick."
Easy for Marilyn to say. But what about Joe?
"At first I wasn't too excited about it because I was leaving my family," he said. "I think it's pretty common for people to come back, to follow spouses home because of a job or because they want to come back to where they used to live."
For Marilyn, things had started to look up on the local scene.
"Each year, I had noticed how Beckley had started to pick up and I thought, well, there's bound to be businesses and jobs at that point," she said. "Each year Beckley managed to keep adding new businesses and doing a little bit better."
She feels the area is cleaner and that Mountain State University has added a lot to the mix in town.
"I have a lot more hope for Beckley than I did," she said, citing only one downside.
"One thing I noticed when I first came back was customer service is terrible. Any store you went into, nobody asked, can I help you. So I still feel like customer service needs a big help here."
Joe, who is information and Web site coordinator for the Beckley-Raleigh County Chamber of Commerce, sees a lot of positive indicators.
"From what I've seen in my three-plus years with the chamber its nothing but going up," he said. "This area has made drastic improvements in economic development, roads, industrial parks, looking at bringing businesses in."
To him, it is developing to scale of what would be found in a larger metroplex area like Dallas.
Marilyn, meanwhile, said she has no regrets about her career path.
"I wouldn't change anything, I wouldn't do anything differently," she said. "If I had the chance to be back in high school and graduate, I'd go back out to Texas again and do it all over again because I really enjoyed being out there."
But now she has developed a sense of roots.
"I feel more relaxed here. I wanted to see what the big cities were like and do all of that, and I feel like I've done that," she said.
"I'm just comfortable now. I like having four seasons."
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