With Norman Rockwell's portraits of Americana often gracing the front cover, The Saturday Evening Post adorned living room coffee tables from Savannah to Seattle for decades. The time came, however, when the Post genuinely aggravated many West Virginians.

A Feb. 6, 1960 article written by Roul Tunley triggered the ire of the Mountain State by putting the region's poverty issues again into the national spotlight. After traveling across the state, Tunley described to Post readers "The Strange Case of West Virginia." As one headline noted, "Although rich in natural resources and natural beauty, the Mountain State suffers from chronic, grinding poverty -- A report on an American paradox."

The "Poverty Amid Splendor" theme was also reflected in the accompanying photographs, with shots depicting the luxuries of The Greenbrier alternating with those of West Virginians experiencing tough times.

The story raised the wrath of Jim Comstock, editor of the Richwood-based West Virginia Hillbilly. Writing in a 1976 bicentennial edition of the paper, Comstock noted that many state residents had been motivated to send nasty letters to the Post editors complaining about the article.

Tunley's story contained multiple quotes from nameless contacts, including a former state resident writing to his hometown newspaper from Akron, Ohio, a city to which thousands of West Virginians fled in search of work following World War II.

"Pointing to his native state's unemployment -- consistently the highest in the nation -- its second-rate roads, its ugly auto dumps, its polluted streams and its dearth of good restaurants and hotels, he called West Virginia 'remote, backward and dangerously provincial.'"

"West Virginia," Tunley wrote, "rocks on a sagging front porch while her neighbors drive by in shiny new cars."

Tunley shared a few "unpleasant but unassailable facts" about the Mountain State circa 1960 with his national audience of readers.

• Although it was the fourth richest state in natural resources production, it had the highest unemployment in the country.
• Its illiteracy rate was enormous, and its schools ranked among the lowest in the nation.
• Its annual farm income was at the bottom of the heap.
• Its young people, the hope of any state, were deserting the ship in alarming numbers. While most states had seen their populations zoom in the 1950s, West Virginia found itself with an actual population loss of almost 3 percent -- the highest in the nation.

To his credit, Tunley also included some positives from his West Virginia experience.

"With statistics like this, it would be easy for any outsider to get the impression that West Virginia is all poverty, ignorance and hopelessness. Or that it is not only sick but ready for the coup de grace. But after spending several weeks there recently and covering 2,500 miles of its roller-coaster roads that took me to almost every corner of the state, I have come away convinced that West Virginia is far from moribund. It is merely suffering from an acute case of schizophrenia."

He alluded to positives such as the "bustling" capital city of Charleston with its factories and gleaming office buildings, and attempts to diversify the coal-based economy such as the massive new aluminum plant along the Ohio River in Jackson County.

Some might believe that Tunley's concluding remarks in the 1960 story parallel Scarlett Ohara's "tomorrow is another day" thoughts from the closing scene of "Gone With the Wind."

"There is still plenty of ingenuity in the West Virginia hills, in communities with such fine, blunt names as Cyclone, Cucumber, Shock, Frozen, Left Hand, Gip, Pinch, Quick and Red Jacket," he wrote. "But the ingenuity is hampered by what might be best described as a bit of coal dust in the eyes. When all the dust has settled, the going should be clearer."