Beacon GREENUP
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Covering Life in Greenup County
Volume 5, No. 50
News To Use Beacon Video News Magazine This week’s Greenup Beacon Video News Magazine will stream live from the official home of the magazine: the McConnell House in Wurtland. Join host Brittnany Hoback and co-host Hank Bond at 1 p.m., on: greenupbeacon.com or greenupbeacon2.com Wednesdays. Shows are also archived on the websites. Join us on January 14 for Nicole Pennington, dean of Ohio University – Southern along with Executive Director of United Way of Northeast Kentucky Jerri Compton. Join us live as we enjoy another great show. Meeting Jan. 22 The Greenup County Genealogy & Historical Society will be meeting on Thursday, January 22 at 7 p.m. in the meeting room at the downtown Greenup Library. Everyone is welcome!
By Steve Flairty Special to The Greenup Beacon Editor’s Note: Flairty is a KyForward columnist: This story will be included in Steve Flairty’s book, “Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes #4, scheduled for release in 2015. Back in 1968, Joe Salyers was feeling pretty down. He had been involved in an accident involving his left hand where he worked, at the Armco Steel Mill, in Ashland. “I woke up from surgery, realizing the hand was gone… and I cried for quite a while,” he recalled. His brother was with him in the hospital and, ironically, had been working with Joe on the same machine at the time of the accident. The next day, the plant manager visited him and promised that the company would find and offer him a job–“one you could do.” That lifted Joe’s spirits. He remembered how his father always encouraged him, as a young person, to move ahead after his disappointments and tackle the problems by working through them. His father’s advice was actually given
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Phillip Wessell
Administrative Assistant
Martin “Gene” Myers
Mark A. Ratliff Funeral Director, Embalmer, CFSP
Russell/Flatwoods/Greenup, KY
Hand loss: Not such a big handicap
Home based seminar planned A Home based Microprocessor Workshop will be held on Thursday, March 26, 2015, from 9:30 a.m. -3:30 p.m. at the Greenup County Extension Office in Wurtland. Cost for the class is $50. For more information, or to register for the workshop, visit www.ca.uky. edu/agc/micro or contact Debbie Clouthier at (859) 257-1812 or debbie.clouthier@uky.edu . This videotaped HBM workshop is required to become a Home based Microprocessor in Kentucky. It is the first step in a series which includes recipe approval (at a cost of $5 per recipe), verification of an approved water source, and annual certification by the Kentucky Food Safety Branch (with a certification fee of $50 per year). To qualify, farmers must live and farm in Kentucky. The final product must contain a fruit, vegetable, nut or herb grown by the farmer. Products may be sold from the farm, registered farmers markets or certified roadside stands. Once certified, Home based Microprocessors may sell products such as canned tomatoes and tomato products, pickled fruits and vegetables, salsa, barbecue sauce, pepper or herb jellies, pressure-canned vegetables, and low- or no-sugar jams and jellies. Home based Processors in Kentucky may sell low-
Funeral Ambassador
January 13, 2015
through the example he set for his son. “He didn’t have to tell me that,” said Joe. “He always taught me that we are in charge of our own destiny.” Joe Salyers didn’t let the loss of a hand slow him down. Without question, Joe Salyers has embraced that way of thinking—and doing. Joe received a settlement from the accident of $8,600, and he was inactive for about six months. When he was healthy enough to return to work, he trained two months for his new job. With oldfashioned determination, he proved to again be a productive employee for Armco. He worked for about four years with an hourly wage position, then was offered a supervisor’s position and given a salary. He happily accepted it. “They were very good to me,” said Joe. In 1992, he retired after 30 years at Armco, and the last years there were spent as a safety enforcer. If anybody had a good resume for that position, it was Joe. “I was the example,” he said, with a grin. “I got the attention of those I needed to talk to about safety.” Joe’s life as a working
man was far from over, however. While at Armco, he had bought and worked a farm in nearby Greenup County for a while, then sold it and bought another one in Boyd County he worked. But because he itched to work again in the field of industrial safety, he accepted a position with a construction company, one that did business in the northern part of the United States and also Canada. He loved the new opportunity, but, he admits, the long periods away from home stressed his marriage, and his wife and he divorced. He later remarried, and also learned a valuable lesson. He would continue to do the work he loved, but this time, his wife would travel with him in his northern job travels. It was on an occasion after finishing a job in Canada, when Joe and his wife were “loafing around,” he said, that something occurred significantly influencing his life. “We attended the “International Plowing Match,” which is like the Kentucky State Fair,” he said, “and we saw a guy with a chainsaw making a Christmas tree.” His wife liked it a whole lot, and that gave Joe motivation to try it. “I told her I’d make her one when we got back home,” Joe said, grinning, “and I destroyed a piece of wood out in the front yard…about the third one stayed together.” Despite the loss of a hand in a 1968 accident, Joe Salyers eventually began to make Christmas trees out of cedar logs using a chainsaw. But with his usual grit, he continued working on mastering his technique with chainsaw carving, albeit with the use of his good hand and assisted by the steadying influence of his left “hand”–made up of a metal hook. He began to make beautiful Christmas trees out of cedar logs. The trees are symmetrical and have the smell of the woods, and are a winter holiday treat for decorating. Today, Joe has a wholesale business selling his chainsawmade artwork, appropriately called the “Kentucky Hardwood Christmas Tree.” Each piece is different. He always
Joe Salyers has plenty of orders for the unique product, selling to some state park gift shops and the like; however, being an officially retired person and in his early seventies, he’s in no hurry to expand his market. He has plenty of other activities he enjoys, mostly revolving around his devout religious faith. Joe has also learned to play the guitar using an adapted contraption—with foot pedals—that is built by another eastern Kentucky man. Music was a part of his early life and family, having two brothers who played, one with the iconic Bill Monroe, often called the “Father of Bluegrass.” Today, Joe likes to play and sing, along with three other men, in churches and nursing homes in the area. They also perform with what he calls “truck stop and campground ministries.” He believes that his early training prepared him for his sense of purpose he now demonstrates. “All that stuff (about music) I knew 40 years ago started coming back,” he said. “I’m busy, but I’m busy on purpose. I need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and God told me I should work for him.” Joe and his wife Mary
Lou live in a traditional style house in picturesque setting deep at the bottom of a ridge near Ashland. Joe built the house, which has a small lake in front that supplies a bountiful habitat for ducks. There are deer and occasionally turkeys, which he enjoys feeding. Here, it is peaceful, and Joe is at peace, too. Joe believes that he has always had a desire to be involved in things outside his regular job in an active way. “At different times in my life, I have farmed, sold and installed carpet, remodeled houses, demonstrated and taught hunter and bow hunter education,” he said. He also competed in archery contests and even participated in state championship events. He doubtlessly would change little in his life–even the interlude resulting in the loss of his hand–because he feels it brought him to where he is now. “God has blessed me with a good mind to help me work around the problems that come up,” he said. “I really don’t look at my hand loss as a handicap, and I’ve never been without a job. Not everyone can say that.” And for Joe Salyers, the blessings others feel from his life and work are pretty special, too.
Photo by LRC Public Information
On the House floor
Kentucky State Rep. Tanya Pullin, D-South Shore, speaks on the floor of the Kentucky House of Representatives about the Commonwealth’s military veterans. Pullin, who has left her role as Chair of the House Veterans, Military Affairs, and Public Safety Committee to serve as Vice Chair of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, has worked for passage of many veterans-related bills including 2010 House Bill 377. That legislation, sponsored by Pullin, established the Kentucky VET Connect program, which has helped to identify over 19,000 veterans and over 8,000 combat veterans and connect them to services that treat underlying service-related causes of problems that many veterans face.
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