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In 1952 I was a student at the University of Maryland at College Park and we had a group of spelunkers who came out about one weekend a month. I remember well the first trip that we took girls. It was a Friday evening, and we were outside of Schoolhouse Cave West Virginia. We were preparing to enter this cave not really knowing what we were in for. We met Bob Lutz from Philadelphia, and Bob chastised us on how dangerous and ill-conceived the trip was. He indicated that they were going to nearby Mystic Cave. He neglected to tell us it was a water cave. I've always sort of hated Bob because he took these girls into Mystic Cave. We waded upstream up to our arm pits. He never suggested that we should take things out of our pockets that might get wet. He had the girls sitting around ten to fifteen minutes at a time in soaking wet clothes while he and a friend went up ahead. I think it was all a big joke.
Nevertheless, we continued to cave. We made Schoolhouse our home. This was about the time that I joined the Pittsburgh Grotto. They were in the process of making an underground movie of Schoolhouse Cave , going back as far as Jacob's Ladder. It was done in black and white. It was an interesting experience. We used electric generators outside, and almost a half mile of electrical wire to get the power to where we needed it. I wasn't there every weekend of course, but I would say it took maybe six months to complete the film. I had a lot of good friends in the Grotto. One was Dick Hofmaster, who is still actively caving in West Virginia.
My name appears in these caves because; well, when we were young, this was the thing to do. Everyone did it, and it became sort of a game to put your name in the more obvious places or the most difficult. Therefore, when we spent considerable time and effort crawling and wriggling down into the lower part of Grind Canyon in Schoolhouse Cave, or in whatever room or passageway we were crawling at the end, when no further penetration could be made, we always put our names there as sort of a reward to those who followed in the years to come. I can imagine that it is very exasperating to spend your time crawling down a passageway, all the time feeling like you're the first human being who has ever done so, and you get to the end only to find "J. Houck" written on the wall. It's like "Kilroy was here" during World War II.
We slept in Schoolhouse usually on all of our trips, the first room to the left of the Big Room; and we would go in there for two to three days at a time. I think we covered every inch of school--house more than once. Of course, we'd been down Hell Hole, Mott Hole ; you name it we were down it and to Cumberland Caverns when they first opened in 1955; there was an NSS meeting there.
Railroad bridge near Buena Vista, VA was visited by Jay Houck. Photo by R. E. Whitemore. |
During the last twenty years there has been a considerable effort towards cave conservation. I'm sure you don't find my name as prolific as it once was.
I hope you won't degrade me too much because this was 20 to 23 years ago. Some people of course hate me after they went to great effort to open up a new area, and find my name at the back end of it; this is quite upsetting. We have been in some places in Cass Cave that I don't think anyone else has ever been. If they do get there, they're going to find "J. Houck", I can tell you.
If you know of the cave Whiting's Neck, near the Potomac River, you'll find my name of course, but I proposed to my wife to be and was accepted in the back of that cave. When we came out and told the rest of the group, there was quite a bit of shok, surprise, and disbelief. Almost twenty years later our marriage was still going strong. Earlier, we went to a nearby quarry, called Jones' Quarry; John Thayer was with me. He investigated passage and asked if I'd been down there. I said, "Yes, it doesn't go anywhere." He said, "Yes, it goes up to the roof." We crawled up to the roof, and backtracked down a passageway. We found a small room in which the ceiling may have caved in at one time, and we found human bones. We picked up a skull and knee caps and took them back to the University of Maryland. I wrote Dick Hofmaster what had happened and he called me the very same week at the dormitory. He 'wanted directions on how to find that room, I gave him the best directions I could and he was able to find it the following Saturday. Well, for the next year there were cavers from D.C. and Pittsburgh camped on the floor of that quarry. They ran carbon datings on the bones; they were supposedly some of the oldest bones found in this area.
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In January 1955, a party of sixteen from the Pittsburgh Grotto including members of the staff of the Carnegie Museum uncovered and removed human bones from Jones' Quarry Cave, WV. The present entrance of the cave was opened during quarrying in the 1920'.. The first discovery of the bones was noted in the NSS NEWSLETTER in December 1947, by John Meenehan who found a section of a human jawbone and other fragments and donated them to the Smithsonian Institution. Because the Museum expressed interest in the site, grotto members returned in March, and worked to blast open a new entrance to better extract the fragile bones. Beyond the remains which had previously been uncovered, a nearly complete skull, a shell pendant and a bone gouge were also uncovered. It is believed from studying excavations that an Indian community which was once located on the Potomac River used the nearby cave as a convenient place to dispose of their dead, Because the bones of at least seven individuals were found scattered at random, it is thought that the bodies were allowed to decompose above ground before deposition into the cave.-- Letter dated 1976.
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