Herrell’s Drug Store in Martinsburg, 1930s

This 1930s photo of Herrell’s Drug Store in Martinsburg, shared by Bill Moore in the Remembering Martinsburg, WV group on Facebook, shows a smiling Berkeley Clay Fulk standing third from right. On the far left is his wife Etta Herrell Fulk.

Among the others pictured are Etta’s brother Raymond and his wife Mary.

At the time, Berkeley and Etta Fulk were in their mid-20s and had been married about four or five years. But they didn’t yet have children. Their only child — at least, the only to survive — Rodney, wasn’t born until 1939, nearly eight years into their marriage.

Berkeley and Etta had both suffered tragedy early in life.

Berkeley, the only child of a rural mail carrier in Darkesville, was 11 when his mother Gussie died. She was found drowned in one inch of water early one February morning in 1923 at Meadow Creek, near the family home. A newspaper article said she had wandered there, weak and disoriented from three weeks of excruciating headaches. She was 35.

One year later, Berkeley’s dad Earl remarried to a local 24-year-old woman. Berkeley’s new stepmother, Maria Lamon, had something in common with the young boy. She had also lost a parent when she was 11, in her case her father, former deputy sheriff William Lamon of Bunker Hill, who was only in his mid-50s.

Berkeley’s wife Etta, the youngest of eight siblings from Mill Creek, was 16 when her father died at the Weston State Hospital.