Goodbye Sibby Sible Rose Wheatley Weekley. On Jan, 15, 2007, she moved on to a place where there is no such thing as mountaintop removal.

OVEC board member Regina Hendrix recommends in lieu of flowers, those wishing to extend sympathy make a contribution to her husband Jimmy, to help defray funeral expenses. Send checks to Jimmy Weekley, Box 61, Blair, WV, 25022. 

Some of you may remember meeting Sibby Weekley during one of the Highlands Conservancy outings to Blair and the Weekleys home. Maybe you only know of Jimmy and Sibby from the multitude of stories about them and their crucial role in our 1998 Bragg  litigation that provided the impetus for the Mountaintop Removal Environmental Impact Statement and so many other groundbreaking actions in the pursuit of sanity in the coalfields now torn apart by the excesses of mountaintop removal.

  Jimmy may have been the firebrand in the news, but Sibby was always the supportive rock and anchor.  She will be missed by all especially Jimmy.

Z Z Z

My memories of Sibby are few but very pleasant and good. In the late summer of l998, not long after I became active in OVEC, a group of us, Janet, Dianne, Laura, and Sharon Roon, went down to the Weekley home on Pigeonroost Creek to simply sit on their front porch, have some prayer, and spend the summer afternoon watching the wretched and accursed Arch Coal drag line take down the mountain directly across from their home and the creek.

My main and overwhelming memory is of the purity and clarity of the creek and watching the numerous minnows and crawdads making their livings in it. The warm and welcoming ambience created by the Appalachian summer blend of warmth, sunlight, shifting shadows and clear moving water stands sharply out in my minds eye. The hostile towering presence of the drag line above the trees, and its harsh intrusive industrial noise make a particularly poignant memory. We mostly wanted to give Sibby and Jimmy whatever comfort our sympathetic presence could provide in a time of threat and danger to their homeplace.

The year 1999 was a tough one for the Weekleys as their lawsuit against the nearby mountaintop removal mine had been decided in their favor by Judge Haden, shutting down the Daltex mine. Throughout the tough times of the threatening phone calls and other insults hurled at James and her, Sibby hung in there. I know it wasnt easy, but Sibby kept making the big meals necessary to feed numerous friends and relatives who came to show support, and generally supporting James throughout. She was a stalwart on the 99 re-creation of the 1921 miners march to Blair Mountain in August-September of that year, braving the gauntlet of menacing miners who opposed the Weekleys principled stand protecting their home of many years in Pigeonroost Hollow.

Sibby was loved so much by James. I remember that more than once James told me the story of the first time he saw Sibby, perhaps 40 years before. He said she was walking down the hollow and he thought she was so pretty he whistled at her to say the least he was smitten.

Sibby was generous and loving and we shall miss her.