This article was published in the Martinsburg Journal on May 22, 2001, and is used here with permission.

Now, some words about heroes -- and Ken Hechler.

We live in an era of fallen televangelists, unsavory athletes, disgraced presidencies.

America once had a corner on the hero market. Not anymore.

Of course, there are heroes among us, but we seldom take the time to thank them. The driver who pilots the school bus down icy Shepherd Grade Road is a hero. So, too, are the life-saving paramedic in Hedgesville and the night nurse at Martinsburg’s City Hospital.

Whatever we pay these people, it isn’t enough.

Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to Ken Hechler.

West Virginia’s erstwhile, 86-year-old Secretary of State left office in January after 16 years at the post. It caused scarcely a ripple in Eastern Panhandle news. News from our state capital rarely does.

Ken Hechler arrived in West Virginia as a New York transplant – one of those "newcomers" some in the Eastern Panhandle seem eager to brand with the scarlet letter "N" (conveniently forgetting that our state’s two senators -- Jay Rockefeller and our beloved Robert Byrd – were both born elsewhere, too.)

Hechler carried a resume of which any "renaissance man" would be proud – instructor at Columbia and Barnard, editor of Franklin Roosevelt’s papers, World War II combat historian, interrogator of Nazi war criminals Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Princeton professor, advisor to Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, lecturer and author of The Bridge at Remagen.

From his post as political science professor at Marshall College, he went on to earn nine terms in Congress as Huntington’s representative.

Ken Hechler is about as close as West Virginians have come to having another Jefferson in our midst.

He wasn’t your typical West Virginia congressman. West Virginia voters – when they do vote – seem to prefer "status quo" legislators, some of whom historically have enjoyed cozy relation- ships with the state’s extractive industries.

Ken Hechler was never a "status quo" politician. In a state where clean politics and environmental protection haven’t emerged as "core values," Hechler demanded better health care for miners, winning passage in 1969 of the Mine Health and Safety Act. He called for an end to strip mining, and witnessed the first legislation (weak as it was) in 1977 to regulate surface mining.

"New Yorker" Hechler and two North Carolina legislators – Steve Neal and Sam Ervin – won "national scenic river" status for West Virginia’s New River Gorge. The Otter Creek, Dolly Sods, and Cranberry Glades wilderness areas are there largely because of Ken Hechler’s agitation.

I recall that when we in North Carolina in the early 1970's sought to spare our state the ravages of strip mining that West Virginia had endured, it was to Kentucky mountain author and lawyer Harry Caudill and Ken Hechler whom we looked for moral leadership.

Of course, Hechler had his detractors. His flamboyance and skill at publicity set some West Virginians on edge. One coal company president

lambasted Hechler as "a lying, lame-duck crackpot carpetbagger – an educated fool with no common sense. West Virginia needs you like the human body needs cancer."

It was probably because Hechler had the nerve, simultaneously, to battle the coal companies and to take on the crooks who then were running the United Mine Workers. Such audacity earned one insurgent union activist and his wife and daughter a death sentence in 1969. FBI records later revealed that Hechler was high on the labor goons’ hit list, too.

Though he never seemed to lose his vitality and zest for public service, I have an idea Ken Hechler was, at times, a very lonely man. "Change agents" in West Virginia walk a rough road. He’s still at it, currently battling against the scourge of "mountaintop removal," at age 86.

"I don't have as many friends around here as I used to," Hechler once admitted. "I was meek and quiet for a long time, but you have to choose at some point if you want to be a good, popular guy or be an SOB to accomplish something."

I doubt there are very many Eastern Panhandle residents under the age of 40 who now remember Ken Hechler. Little matter.

That Hechler made West Virginia a tangibly better and more humane place for them is legacy enough for any public servant. I wish we had a latter-day John Kennedy to tell the next generation of this good and honest man’s "profile in courage."

If you see Ken Hechler anytime soon, stop and tell him thanks. Because genuine heroes are too rare around these parts anymore.