She found her purpose here after all

West Virginia is frequently the butt of wisecracks, but it has a champion in Marsha Timpson. She is particularly fond of the people of McDowell County, where she lives, though she couldn’t wait to get away when she was young. Other places, she thought, were bound to be more exciting.

It would take her time to realize the potential and beauty of the place.

Timpson, 59, who grew up in the tiny community of WarriorMine in a family full of coal miners, does not romanticize her state. She calls the southern part of West Virginia, where McDowell County is located, the state’s neglected “backyard.”

She knows all too well the poverty, joblessness, illiteracy and prescription drug abuse that wear West Virginians down because she works with hard-up families every day.

Timpson is the driving force behind the grass-roots community service outfit Big Creek People in Action and runs its biggest program, housing rehabilitation. Last year she determined the most urgent requirements of 41 families, lined up the building materials and arranged for more than 500 college students and church members, most from other states, to make the improvements.

Negative comments about Timpson’s home ground get her riled, her close friend Carolyn Owens says. “She will defend McDowell County to the very last breath,” says Owens, and is “really proud” of her coal mining heritage.

For all its social problems, no other place has the sense of community, family and friendship of southern West Virginia, says Timpson, who has also lived in the Carolinas and Georgia. “It’s unparalleled,” she says.

She couldn’t see that when she was 18 and the outside world beckoned. She married her fiance and headed to South Carolina, where he was working. They returned to McDowell County three years later when his employer went out of business. Her husband was alcoholic and later turned violent, and Timpson, now a mother, found herself trapped.

Awful as her situation was, “I was afraid to leave,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m not smart enough and I have no skills. How could I take care of my child?’”

She finally did flee to South Carolina with her sister-in-law’s family.

For a while, the six of them had to sleep on the floor and bathe from a well. But Timpson wound up finding three jobs — at a diner, at a bakery and cleaning houses and offices.

She was the only one of them working. She marveled, “Not only am I taking care of my daughter, I’m taking care of all of us.”

She remarried, but in time things fell apart, and in 1995 she returned to McDowell County again, this time a single mother with two young children. The only work she could find was cleaning houses.

Then she volunteered to coach children in reading at the library. She proved so popular that AmeriCorps, housed at Big Creek People in Action, offered her a position doing the same thing at a school. When she left AmeriCorps two years later, she recalls, all 117 schoolchildren and their parents gave her a standing ovation.

“I couldn’t tell you what that meant for me,” she says. “I can tell you I never had received a standing ovation for cleaning someone’s toilet.”

Timpson went on to become the Big Creek group’s housing director and last year its co-director, helping to manage a staff of eight with a budget of about $320,000. The ovation, she believes, made it all possible. Otherwise, “I would never have felt I was smart enough or good enough,” she says. “That moment … changed my world.”

When she took over housing rehabilitation, she started taking volunteers around to see the community — a coal mine, bluegrass concerts, author Homer Hickam’s hometown. The volunteers also hung out with a family at their cabin. Timpson prizes the volunteers’ “cultural immersion.” It’s crucial, she says, “for them to know the place and people.”

Something happened during their immersion: Timpson began to see McDowell County through the volunteers’ eyes and to appreciate her roots for the first time.

“I fell in love … with my place showing it to others,” she says. “And I’ll die here.”

nation@latimes.com