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From Lind Street to a Point of Light: Remembering James “Jimmy” Paige III

Writer: Terrill Gosa
Terrill Gosa
Sep 22
8 min read

An East Wheeling legend whose life joined athletic achievement, academic excellence, public service, and an enduring commitment to young people.


Some people leave their hometown and spend the rest of their lives looking forward. Others travel far, achieve extraordinary things, and still keep one eye on the street where their journey began.


James H. “Jimmy” Paige III belonged to the second group.


Jimmy’s life carried him from East Wheeling to college basketball stardom, graduate and law school, banking, state government, and national recognition. Yet one of his proudest and most lasting accomplishments stood on Lind Street—within sight of the neighborhood that helped shape him.


For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, remembering Jimmy Paige is both historical and deeply personal. He was not simply an accomplished person whose name appeared in newspapers. He was part of the East Wheeling community that raised us. He was someone our family knew, someone we watched, and someone whose example made achievement appear possible.


A Son of Lind Street

I grew up on Lind Street in East Wheeling, the same street where Jimmy grew up and where his parents continued to live during my childhood.


East Wheeling has too often been described by outsiders according to what it supposedly lacked. Those of us who knew it understood what it possessed: families who watched over one another, churches and civic organizations that held the community together, playgrounds filled with competition and laughter, and elders who expected young people to become something.


Jimmy Paige represented the possibilities within that neighborhood.


The namesakes of our Foundation, Eugene and Beverly Stradwick, also lived in this community. They knew Jimmy, and they knew his parents especially well. That connection matters because history is not composed only of official titles and public honors. It is also made from relationships among families, neighbors, mentors, and friends.


Before Jimmy became a public official or nationally recognized civic leader, he was a child of East Wheeling.


Excellence in the Classroom and on the Court

Jimmy attended Wheeling Country Day School before continuing to Wheeling Park High School. He graduated from Wheeling Park with honors in 1979 and became one of West Virginia’s finest high school basketball players. During his senior year, he was named to West Virginia’s All-State basketball team.


Ten years later, in 1989, I graduated from the same high school.


That shared connection to Wheeling Park adds another personal dimension to Jimmy’s story. Although we belonged to different graduating classes and different moments in the school’s history, we were both Patriots whose journeys began in East Wheeling.


Years later, in 2010, I was honored and humbled to return to Wheeling Park as the commencement speaker. As I stood before that graduating class, with my grandparents Eugene and Beverly Stradwick and other members of my family in attendance, I was keenly aware that none of us arrives at such a moment alone.


We walk through doors opened by our families, our communities, and the examples of people who came before us.


Jimmy was one of those examples.


At Bethany College, he continued to excel. He scored 1,141 points during his four years with the Bison and was selected as the Presidents’ Athletic Conference Player of the Year in 1982. 1992 Bethany College Athletic Hall of Fame inductee, Paige helped lead the Bison to a PAC title in 1982, unseating three-time champion Allegheny. Paige was named the PAC Player of the Year and earned Second Team All-Great Lakes Region honors for his efforts in 1982 and he was also a First Team All-PAC player as a junior in 1981. A four-year letter winner with the Bison, he helped Bethany reach its second NCAA national tournament in school history. Paige is currently 17th on Bethany’s all-time scoring list with 1,142 career points. He also ranks fourth in career steals (178) and 10th in career rebounds (592).


Those statistics establish that he was a remarkable player. But for young people in East Wheeling, Jimmy’s basketball career meant something more personal.


For many years, I watched him play in the annual Elks Basketball Tournament at the Elks Playground in East Wheeling, located near Clay School. Clay School is part of my own childhood story, but it was not one of Jimmy’s schools. His documented educational journey took him from Wheeling Country Day School to Wheeling Park High School.


Jimmy played in the tournament on teams remembered as the “Legends” and the “Wheeling All-Stars.” The names were appropriate. To those of us watching from the sidelines, he truly was a living legend.


The tournament was exciting, competitive, and entertaining, but it was also a fundraiser and a gathering place for the community. Jimmy and the late Perry Galloway helped establish it to show young people that sports could become a path toward discipline, education, and a better life.


Jimmy did not merely tell children what was possible. He allowed them to watch possibility in motion.


Beyond Basketball

Athletic talent was only one part of Jimmy’s story.


He earned a degree in social work from Bethany College and then completed a master’s degree in public administration at the University of Pittsburgh. He continued his education at the West Virginia University College of Law, earning his law degree in 1987.


That educational journey reflected the message he would later bring back to young people: talent may open a door, but education helps a person walk through it and remain there.


Jimmy worked as a trust officer with Pittsburgh National Bank before West Virginia Governor Gaston Caperton selected him to serve as the state’s banking commissioner. Jimmy was only 28 years old and was reported to be the youngest person in the nation holding such a position.


He later served as West Virginia’s tax commissioner and practiced law with Steptoe & Johnson. His career placed him at an exceptionally high level of professional and governmental service. For Black children in Wheeling and throughout West Virginia, his presence in those offices carried a significance extending beyond the duties of the positions themselves.


He demonstrated that a young Black man from Lind Street could enter rooms of statewide authority—and belong there.


Bringing Opportunity Home

Jimmy’s achievements could have carried him permanently away from Wheeling. Instead, he continued looking homeward.


The James Paige Learning Center was created in a formerly neglected building on Lind Street. Through a broad community effort, the building became a place where children could study, learn after school, receive encouragement, and imagine futures larger than their immediate circumstances.


The location could not have been more meaningful.


The center stood across the street from the house where I grew up. By the time it opened, I had already left Wheeling for college. But Jimmy later invited me to return and give a motivational speech to the young people attending the center.


That invitation remains a treasured memory.


There was something deeply moving about returning to Lind Street—not simply to remember my own childhood, but to speak to another generation inside a center created by someone who had traveled his own extraordinary journey from the same neighborhood.


The moment connected several chapters of our shared community story: two young men from Lind Street, two graduates of Wheeling Park High School a decade apart, and a new generation of East Wheeling children being encouraged to imagine where education might take them.


Jimmy understood that success is not complete when it lifts only one person. Its greater purpose is realized when it creates a ladder for someone else.


He would extend that vision beyond Wheeling, developing learning opportunities in other West Virginia communities, including Charleston and Martinsburg. The work that began on Lind Street became a model of service reaching across the state.


A National Point of Light

Jimmy’s commitment did not go unnoticed.


In 1992, President George H. W. Bush honored him as one of the President’s “Points of Light,” recognizing Americans whose volunteer service strengthened their communities. In 1996, Jimmy received a National Service Award for community activities that helped strengthen families.


Those honors were impressive, but the phrase “Point of Light” seems especially appropriate for Jimmy.


A point of light does not demand that everyone look at it. It helps others see.


Jimmy helped young people see that athletic ability and academic achievement could reinforce one another. He helped them see that professional success and community responsibility were not competing obligations. He helped them see that a person could serve at the highest levels of state government without forgetting childhood friends, familiar streets, or the neighborhood playground.


He showed that it was possible to leave East Wheeling without leaving East Wheeling behind.


More Than a Résumé

When Jimmy died in August 2021 at only 60 years old, the public accounts rightly described him as a trailblazer, athlete, lawyer, public official, mentor, father, and community leader.


Yet those who knew him also remembered something that no list of offices or awards could fully convey: his personality.


He was remembered for his smile, his easygoing manner, his thoughtfulness, and the genuine interest he showed in other people. Former colleagues described him as gracious, helpful, personable, and immediately likable. Those qualities help explain why his accomplishments inspired admiration while his presence inspired affection.


Jimmy Paige did not need to diminish others in order to stand tall.


His greatest legacy may be found in the connections among the different chapters of his life. Basketball led toward education. Education led toward professional achievement. Professional achievement created a platform for public service. Public service eventually circled back to the children of Lind Street and East Wheeling as a whole


The circle always returned home.


An East Wheeling Legend

Our Foundation exists to preserve stories that might otherwise be reduced to a name, a headline, or a fading memory. Jimmy Paige’s story deserves to be preserved because it illustrates what East Wheeling has contributed to the city, the state, and the nation.


He was a basketball legend who valued books.


He was a public official who remembered the playground.


He was a lawyer and administrator who understood the power of mentorship.


He was nationally honored, yet remained rooted in his neighborhood.


For me, Jimmy will always be connected to the sights and sounds of East Wheeling: Lind Street, the Elks Playground, the basketball tournament, familiar families in familiar homes, and a learning center that transformed a neglected building into a place of possibility.


He will also be connected to Wheeling Park High School: Jimmy as a member of the class of 1979, me as a member of the class of 1989, and my return in 2010 to address another graduating class of Patriots.


These moments remind us that a community’s history does not travel in a straight line. It moves from one generation to the next, gathering new voices while carrying forward the examples of those who came before.


For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, Jimmy’s story is also part of our family history. Eugene and Beverly knew Jimmy and his parents. They shared the same neighborhood, the same community relationships, and the same belief that young people deserved encouragement, education, and opportunity.


James “Jimmy” Paige III rose from Lind Street to become an athlete, scholar, lawyer, public servant, and nationally recognized community leader. But perhaps his greatest achievement was ensuring that the road he traveled did not end with him.


He marked it for those who would come next.


And that is why East Wheeling will always remember Jimmy Paige—not only as someone who succeeded, but as someone who returned, served, built, and believed.


An East Wheeling legend. A Wheeling Park Patriot. A West Virginia trailblazer. A Point of Light whose example still shines.


-T


Sources and further reading

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