Trealy Vinton Pennington Sr. (1898-1981)

From the Bluefield Daily Telegram, May 2, 1948.

   Following on the heels of West Virginia state senator Leoma Ord Curtis, another oddly named Mountain State native gets accorded his due...Trealy Vinton Pennington Sr. of McDowell County. A former U.S. Postmaster at Powhatan, West Virginia, Pennington was also a two-time Democratic candidate for the West Virginia House of Delegates. 

   The son of James Abraham and Celia (Hagey) Pennington, Trealy Vinton "T.V." Pennington's birth occurred in either Ashe County, North Carolina or Marion, West Virginia on April 22, 1898. Removing to McDowell County during his youth, Pennington would work in the coal mines as a young man and later was employed in the offices of the Powhatan Coal Company. He married to Wilma Rachel Lowe (1910-1963) in the early 1930s and later had two sons, Trealy Vinton Jr. (1932-2002) and Wallace Lee. 

   Following his marriage T.V. Pennington was appointed as U.S. Postmaster at Powhatan, West Virginia in 1937, continuing in that post for over twenty-five years. He would also operate a grocery store in that town and made the jump into politics in early 1948 when he announced his candidacy for the West Virginia House of Delegates in that year's Republican primary. A substantial write-up on his campaign platform was published in the Bluefield Telegram in May of that year, in which Pennington stated

"I am going into this race to wage an active, honest, clean campaign for the nomination and if nominated and elected I pledge myself to conduct the office in an efficient and business-like manner and with complete fairness to all the people of McDowell County."

   Pennington would go on to be one of five Republican McDowell County legislative candidates that year but would lose the general election that November. In August 1954 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the McDowell County Board of Education and in 1956 made another run for the state house of delegates but lost out in the vote count that November.  
  After his two losing legislative candidacies, Pennington continued to be active in McDowell County business circles, operating his grocery store and serving as a member of the board of directors of the First National Bank of Northfork. Widowed in 1963, Pennington remarried to Tennessee Odell Eastep (1900-1983), to whom he was wed until his death. T.V. Pennington died at age 82 on February 22, 1981, in Welch, West Virginia. He was later interred at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Bluewell.