February 2023 | Kentucky Monthly Magazine

36 The Gift of Literacy Cora Wilson Stewart’s Moonlight School concept opened the world of reading to thousands of Kentuckians

40 Mr. Western After more than six decades, Lee Robertson remains a beloved and valued supporter of Western Kentucky University

United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón; Lucas Marquardt photo

This issue is dedicated to the memory of the Thomas L. Hall (1944-2023), founding boardmember of Kentucky Monthly and an editor for BloodHorse.

kentucky kwiz

Test your knowledge of our beloved Commonwealth. To find out how you fared, see the bottom of Vested Interest.

1. In 2002, Nicholas Countians William B. and Claudia Lillian Jackson Ritchie were recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest living married couple. The 83-year, 231-day marriage ended November 22 of that year for what reason?

A. A nasty and bitter divorce

B. William’s passing

C. Claudia’s passing

2. While Dean and Carl Burton of Hartford have 11 years to tie the Ritchies’ record, Mrs. Burton said the secret to a long marriage is “making sure to love each other” and …

A. “a little hug and a little kiss helps it along”

B. “don’t threaten to throw away his baseball cards”

C. “don’t invite your four elderly aunts to move in indefinitely”

3. This best-selling romance writer’s career began in 1973, when she received $100 for a funny anecdote she submitted to Reader’s Digest. Name her.

A. Karen Robards

B. Tina D.C. Hayes

C. Mysti Parker

4. The 2017 Hallmark movie Runaway Romance was filmed in which cities?

A. Owensboro, Philpot and Utica

B. Hartford, Beaver Dam and Dundee

C. Glasgow, Horse Cave, Cave City and Munfordville

5. The unincorporated community of Love is located in which county?

A. Fulton

B. Butler

C. McLean

6. There is no waiting period for marriages in Kentucky, but you must pay a $50 fee for the license, and it expires in how many days?

A. 7

B. 30

C. 365

7. While a 50-guest wedding reception at the Embassy Suites by Hilton in Lexington will cost $10,066, the least expensive— other than your own backyard— can be found where?

A. Smothers Park in Owensboro

B. The Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville

C. Lost River Cave in Bowling Green

8. How many times can you marry the same man in Kentucky?

A. Two

B. Three

C. Four

9. What are Kentucky Sweethearts?

A. A toffee and caramel covered cherry

B. A Bluegrass band from Prestonsburg

C. The University of Kentucky’s majorette squad

10. Few things are more comforting than a hug. Which bourbon maker recently unrolled a line of clothing to capitalize on that feeling?

A. Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont

B. Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort

Celebrating the best of our Commonwealth

© 2023, Vested Interest Publications

Volume Twenty-Six, Issue 1, Febuary 2023

Stephen M. Vest

Publisher + Editor-in-Chief

Editorial

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Readers Write

Another Notable Thespian

Thanks for this great magazine, as I love Kentucky history. Just ask Jack Brammer.

I would like to add another name to Kentucky native actors (November 2022 issue, page 58). Henry Wadsworth was born on June 18, 1903, in Maysville. He was an actor, known for The Thin Man (1934), Applause (1929) and The Show-Off (1934). He died on Dec. 5, 1974, in New York City.

A stage and screen actor, Wadsworth was educated at the University of Kentucky and Carnegie Tech Drama School. He began in vaudeville and touring stock companies. Wadsworth appeared on Broadway in the late 1920s and in films for Paramount beginning in 1929.

Wadsworth served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and subsequently joined the USO in Japan, entertaining the armed forces stationed there. After he quit acting, he became a

union administrator and president of the AFL’s Film Council.

Ron Bailey, Maysville

Changes of Heart

When the December 2022/ January 2023 issue hit my mailbox, I turned to Bill Ellis’ article immediately (page 56). Since we are about the same age and had similar boyhood experiences, I never fail to enjoy and appreciate his musings.

This article was especially resonant for me. I recently published a memoir of my teenage years at a nowdefunct military school in Tennessee, 1957-1961. My parents chose that school rather than Kentucky Military Institute or Millersburg Military Institute because it was closer to our home.

In reflecting on life in that era, I was reminded of the racial injustices and personal degradations that my peers and I perpetuated, mainly because that was

“the way it has always been.” As I noted in the book, a number of my fellow cadets (all white males) were there because of the nascent federal efforts at integration of public schools in the Deep South. Their parents were horrified at the prospect of their boys going to school with the “colored” kids. There is a generation (Mr. Ellis’ and mine) of white youth who found a way to overcome our segregationist past and work a sea change in our attitude toward our Black brothers and sisters. It was not easy, and it did not occur quickly—in some cases, the task is incomplete—but the changes are remarkable. Sometimes, I feel that our generation of white kids deserve a little more credit than we have been given for embracing the changes that have made us better people.

I enjoyed Mr. Ellis’ article and look forward to more of them.

Bill Harris, Franklin

The Kentucky Gift Guide Drink Local

This handy guide to sipping in the Bluegrass State spotlights local breweries, wineries and, of course, distilleries. Discover unique ways to drink in Kentucky, creative cocktail recipes and more.

Kentucky Monthly’s annual gift guide highlights some of the finest handcrafted gifts and treats our Commonwealth has to offer.

Even when you’re far away, you can take the spirit of your Kentucky home with you. And when you do, we want to see it!

European Travels

SWITZERLAND, ITALY + FRANCE

Greg, Irene and Morgan Longtine of Calhoun traveled around the three countries during a trip to attend a friend’s wedding. They are pictured in Switzerland, top, and Italy, above.

Island Time

SOUTH CAROLINA

The John D. Brock Sr. family of Pineville enjoyed a great week on glorious

Outdoor Adventures

CANADA

Kent Curtsinger of Fancy Farm traveled to a remote hunting camp in Newfoundland/Labrador Canada.

Stay 20 minutes from Louisville and enjoy award-winning horse farm B&Bs, bourbon & mead tours, quaint historic “Trains on Main” shopping & dining by the tracks, and fine farm-to-table dining in a racehorse barn. This Winter Escape can be found in ONE place in Kentucky. Only in Oldham

Governor’s Awards in the Arts

The latest recipients of the Commonwealth’s most prestigious arts awards include a bluegrass legend, a folklorist, a high school band director and a sculptor, to name a few.

In all, nine artists, businesses and organizations have been named as recipients of the 2022 Governor’s Awards in the Arts. The winners are chosen from a list of nominations submitted to the Kentucky Arts Council on behalf of the Governor. They include Kentucky Gateway Museum benefactor Kaye Savage Browning of Maysville (Milner Award), Lexington’s Amanda Matthews (Artist Award), Independence Bank (Business Award), Murray Art Guild (Community Arts Award), Nan Moore (Education Award), Maxine Ray of Bowling Green (Folk Heritage Award), Kentucky Native American Heritage Commission (Government Award), Louisville’s Morgan Cook Atkinson (Media Award) and Leslie County’s Bobby Osborne (National Award).

All nine were honored at a ceremony in Frankfort in January. Each recipient was given a handcrafted, playable Navajo flute made by Mercer County artist Fred Nez-Keams. A 10th award is placed in the Arts Council’s permanent collection.

“The arts are transformational, and these Kentucky artists and organizations have used their talents to tell the stories of our Commonwealth,” Gov. Andy Beshear said. “I want to congratulate the nine honorees and thank them for their commitment to our Commonwealth and our people.”

KENTUCKY HIGH SCHOOL Teacher of the Year

Woodford County High School teacher

Amber Sergent may have been named the 2023 Kentucky High School Teacher of the Year, but she doesn’t like to brag. “I will be honest; I have struggled at times with the accolades that have been given to me,” she said. “There are so many others in our building and in this profession who deserve such awards. I have done my best to walk humbly with the attention. I do what I do not because of what I receive, but who I am.”

The social studies teacher was selected from hundreds of nominations submitted to the Kentucky Department of Education last year.

Sergeant has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Morehead State University and the University of Kentucky. She initially wanted to pursue law school but fell in love with the classroom.

“Kids these days may forget the content of my history courses, but they will never forget how we make them feel,” she said. “If I have achieved any success as an effective educator, it’s because my inspiration and my love come from those resilient and compassionate kids these days, who embrace vulnerability and practice courage every day.”

1 Arturo Alonzo Sandoval (1942), noted fiber artist and University of Kentucky art professor

5 Gary P. West (1943), Bowling Greenbased author and columnist

6 Tinashe (1993), R&B singer and actress from Lexington

10 John Calipari (1959), University of Kentucky’s Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach

12 Ed Hamilton (1947), renowned sculptor from Louisville

15 Chris T. Sullivan (1948), UK graduate who founded Outback Steakhouse

18 Mark Melloan (1981), folksinger/songwriter from Elizabethtown

20 Brian Littrell (1975), Christian singer/ songwriter from Lexington

20 Mitch McConnell (1942), U.S. Senate Minority Leader from Louisville

21 John Clay (1959), sports columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader

24 Beth Broderick (1959), Falmouth-born television actress

26 Alexandria Mills (1992), Shepherdsville fashion model and Miss World 2010

27 Jared Champion (1983), Bowling Greenborn drummer for the band Cage the Elephant

27 Benny Snell Jr. (1998), running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers

Explore infinite possibilities.

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Just a Few Good Eats

Known primarily for her central Kentucky eateries, including the elegant Holly Hill Inn flagship restaurant in Midway, Chef Ouita Michel shared recipes for many of her delicious dishes in her cookbook

Just a Few Miles South: Timeless Recipes from Our Favorite Places , published in April 2021. Later that year, Chef Ouita launched the lifestyle brand Holly Hill and Co., celebrating local farmers, agriculture and culinary traditions, with a strong emphasis on community. Visitors to hollyhillandco.com will find stories, videos, merchandise, restaurant information and recipes, including those featured here.

Shady Lane Chicken Salad

Chef Ouita named her signature Wallace Station Deli chicken salad after Shady Lane, a scenic stretch of Old Frankfort Pike. The staff makes it in house every day with freshly prepared chicken, crisp celery, toasted almonds and sweet/tart dried cranberries.

YIELDS ALMOST 2 QUARTS

2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Salt and pepper for seasoning

½ cup finely chopped celery

½ cup toasted slivered almonds

½ cup dried cranberries

½ teaspoon kosher salt

¼ teaspoon dry mustard

¼ teaspoon white pepper

¼ teaspoon black pepper

1½ tablespoons Dijon mustard

1 cup mayonnaise

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Spread chicken in a single layer on a baking pan and lightly season with salt and pepper. Cover with foil and bake until done (40 minutes or longer, depending on size).

3. Cool in the pan juice to retain moisture until the chicken is cool to handle. Cut into a small dice, discarding gristle and fat. Reserve pan juices for soup or another use.

4. Place chopped chicken, celery, almonds and cranberries in a large bowl. Set aside.

5. In another bowl, whisk together remaining ingredients and fold into chicken. Mix well. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper if needed. Remember that the chicken will absorb the dressing when refrigerated, so you might have to add a couple extra tablespoons of mayonnaise.

6. Chill at least 1 hour before serving.

Happy Jack’s Corn Salad

SERVES 4 TO 6

5-6 ears fresh sweet corn in the husk

Lime aioli (ingredients follow)

Crumbled feta cheese, for garnish

Thinly sliced scallions, for garnish

Chopped cilantro, for garnish

Chipotle chili powder, for garnish

LIME AIOLI:

6 tablespoons mayonnaise

2 tablespoons sour cream

Zest of ½ lime

1 teaspoon fresh lime juice

¼ teaspoon chipotle chili powder

2 teaspoons chopped cilantro

½ teaspoon kosher salt

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Benedictine

Holly Hill and Co.’s Benedictine recipe comes from former sous chef Lisa Laufer. This version of the cream cheese-based spread, named for legendary Louisville caterer Jennie C. Benedict, appeared in the preface of the updated version of Benedict’s The Blue Ribbon Cook Book, which originally was published in 1904. Benedictine spread is a staple at Kentucky Derby parties but delicious anytime. Aside from being a great sandwich spread, Benedictine is perfect for stuffing cherry tomatoes or topping hoecakes, especially with a sliver or two of Kentucky smoked trout.

1. For the lime aioli, mix together all ingredients with a whisk in a small bowl. Chill.

2. Cook the corn—still in the husk—by roasting in the oven, boiling in salted water or grilling. Cooking the corn in the husk makes removing the silk and husk much easier.

3. While still warm but cool enough to handle, cut the corn kernels from the cob and place in a large bowl.

4. Toss with the lime aioli and garnish with feta cheese, scallions and chopped cilantro, then dust with chipotle powder.

2 large cucumbers

12 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

½ teaspoon onion juice or more to taste*

½ teaspoon kosher salt

3-4 dashes hot sauce

1. Peel and seed cucumbers, retaining a bit of skin for color. Purée in a food processor.

2. Squeeze purée in a cheesecloth or a clean tea towel, removing as much liquid as possible. This keeps the spread from being too runny and can be added back in if you want the mixture to be a bit looser.

3. Combine cucumber purée with the remaining ingredients in a mixer or a food processor and mix until smooth. Taste for seasoning.

Recipes provided by Holly Hill and Co. and prepared at Sullivan University by Ann Currie Photos by Jesse Hendrix-Inman.

*For onion juice, grate ¼ of a peeled sweet onion on a cheese grater and squeeze out the juice using cheese cloth.

Damn Good Sugar Cookie

As written by Ouita Peyton , Ouita Michel’s maternal grandmother and namesake, and mom Pam Sexton , this is a generation-spanning recipe that has earned the title of being “Damn Good!”

FOR THE DOUGH:

1 cup softened butter

2 cups granulated sugar

4 eggs, beating in between each egg

½ cup sour cream

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

A pinch (¼ teaspoon) of salt

A dash of vanilla—about 1 scant teaspoon

Roughly 4 cups all-purpose flour

1. Cream together butter and sugar.

2. Add egg, sour cream, baking powder, baking soda, salt and vanilla.

3. Add enough flour to make a soft dough, starting with about 4 cups flour. May need a bit more.

Beaten Biscuits

John Egerton’s recipe, adapted by Chef Ouita

3 cups all-purpose flour (unbleached all-purpose from Weisenberger Mill recommended)

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking powder

2 tablespoons sugar

½ cup butter, chilled and cut into small pieces

¾ cup buttermilk

4. Chill for at least one hour.

5. Roll out dough, cut into shapes, and bake at 375 degrees until lightly browned.

FOR THE ICING:

2-pound bag powdered sugar

1 cup butter

1 cup sour cream

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla

1. Melt the butter and transfer to a mixing bowl. Beat in the powdered sugar.

2. Add the sour cream and vanilla, then beat at high speed until creamy and fluffy.

3. Divide into bowls and color with food coloring.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Sift together all the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter. Add the milk and make a stiff dough. Roll, baby, roll, until smooth and cracking. If you don’t have a biscuit brake, this can be done with a rolling pin.

3. After a few passes with a rolling pin or on a biscuit brake, fold dough back over on itself. Cut with a small biscuit cutter (the radius of a champagne flute). Prick the surface of each biscuit three times with a fork.

4. Bake for 20-25 minutes, turn the oven off, and let sit for a few minutes. Do not let them brown. Test doneness by either pinching sides or breaking one open.

POET FOR THE PEOPLE

Ada Limón of Lexington wants to connect through her writing, her podcast and her post as the U.S. Poet Laureate

By Tom Eblen

Photos by Lucas Marquardt

Twenty-four men and women have served as Poet Laureate of the United States since the post was created in 1936. It is the nation’s highest honor for a poet, and it comes with a beautiful office in the Library of Congress that has a view of the Capitol.

Three poets laureate have been Kentuckians. The first two, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, were white men who were born in Kentucky but moved away to advance their literary careers. The third, and current, poet laureate from Kentucky has a much different story.

Ada Limón, 46, was born and raised in Sonoma, California, and is of Mexican ancestry. She graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she was a theater major. Limón planned to study acting in graduate school, too, until she took an advanced poetry class her senior year from Colleen McElroy, who suggested she pursue writing instead.

After graduation, Limón took a year to write enough poems to get into the master of fine arts program at New York University, where she studied under poets Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Mark Doty and Agha Shahid Ali. During a dozen years in New York, Limón also worked for several magazines and published her first three poetry collections: Lucky Wreck (2006), This Big Fake World (2006) and Sharks in the Rivers (2010).

Then Limón moved to Kentucky, and her literary career blossomed.

At first, Limón didn’t want to live in Kentucky. She even wrote a poem about it that was published in The New Yorker. But she followed her boyfriend (now husband) Lucas Marquardt to Lexington in 2011. A former award-winning journalist for the Thoroughbred Daily News, Marquardt was starting his own company, ThoroStride, which makes inspection videos of Thoroughbred racehorses going to auction.

“His business brought us here, and it’s been a really wonderful place for me to explore my art,” Limón said in one of two interviews I have done with her for WEKUFM’s weekly program Eastern Standard. “I was surprised that Kentucky gave me two of the things I didn’t know I needed to flourish as an artist … time and space.”

It didn’t take long for Limón to fall in love with Kentucky, especially the landscape and slower pace of life. She has a passion for the natural world, which often is reflected in her poetry. She was mesmerized by Kentucky’s fireflies, which she had never seen before. She wrote a poem about them titled “Field Bling.”

“Kentucky is gorgeous!” Limón said while taking questions after a reading last November at Transylvania University. “I don’t think people talk about that enough. I always take my family out to the Red River Gorge when they come to visit, and they’re blown away by it.”

Then she added: “I think the other thing that surprised me, and has sustained me, is the incredible community of writers and artists that live in this city. There are just so many amazing writers here and artmakers, and I don’t think that is talked about enough.”

Three of Limón’s six poetry collections were written after she moved to Kentucky: Bright Dead Things (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; The

Carrying (2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award; and The Hurting Kind (2022), which The New York Times and NPR included on their lists of best poetry books of the year.

Also last year, Limón produced Shelter: A Love Letter to Trees, an e-book and audiobook she narrated, published by Scribd. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Her next book will be Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems, a collection of work from major poets. “I am obsessed about animals,” she said. “My dog is snoring at my feet as I say this.”

If poet laureate is the most visible job an American poet can have, perhaps the second-most visible is as host of The Slowdown, a daily podcast produced by American Public Media and the Poetry Foundation. Tracy K. Smith started the show in 2019 when she was the U.S. poet laureate. When Smith decided to step down as host, the producers reached out to Limón, who took over in September 2021.

The Slowdown is a 5- to 7-minute podcast in which Limón reads a brief essay she has written, then reads a poem by another poet that she and the producers have chosen. The podcast’s goal is to give poetry a more visible and influential place in American culture. Limón said her essays aren’t intended to describe each day’s poem but rather to put listeners in a frame of mind to absorb it.

The Slowdown has turned out to be the perfect forum for Limón, a trained actor with a mesmerizing voice. Her essays, like her poetry, are beautiful and often deeply personal. She has revealed her struggles with scoliosis and infertility, and sometimes mentions her beloved pug, Lily Bean. She occasionally refers to her life in Kentucky and places where she likes to be with nature, such as the Red River Gorge and McConnell Springs.

“I was surprised, to be honest, how much I enjoyed writing those brief essays,” she said. “What I’d love is for the podcast to reach people who aren’t necessarily thinking about poetry on a daily basis ... but can be welcomed into the world of poetry and the sound of poetry and have a moment when they’re not just sort of reflecting on their own life but feel connected to the lives of other people.”

Limón announced in January that, after 250 episodes and the poet laureate appointment, she was turning The Slowdown’s hosting duties over to poet Major Jackson.

Our relationships with nature and community are at the core of Limón’s poetry, and she finds writing to be therapeutic.

“I think it’s very easy to get bogged down by the sorrow and trauma and real issues of today,” she said. “And at the same time, if we don’t recommit to the world and we just give up, oh what a horrible consequence. So, I want my poems to help me recommit to the world. And I hope—I really hope—that they will help others do the same. To sign up again, to sign up to life.”

It’s not surprising that Limón attracted the attention of the Librarian of Congress, who appoints the poet laureate. But Limón was surprised. Flabbergasted, actually.

She said Vaughan Ashlie Fielder, a close friend who represents her and several other major poets through her Lexington-based agency The Field Office, told her she needed to take a mysterious Zoom call on June 1, 2022, at exactly 9:35 a.m.

“She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but she said, ‘You might want to get dressed up for this one,’ ” Limón recalled. “I logged on, and there, in the center of the Zoom call, in the grid of Zoom, was Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. She was with her team, and she just said, ‘I would like to invite you to be the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.’ The shock of the news sort of sent me out of my body.”

Poet laureate is a public job that is privately funded through an endowment left by the late scholar and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington. Poets laureate are

appointed annually but often serve two terms. The last poet laureate, Joy Harjo, got a rare third year.

“Ada Limón is a poet who connects,” Hayden said in announcing the appointment. “Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.”

While the poet laureate has a few official speaking duties, most of the work involves promoting poetry to a wider audience. Limón has eagerly embraced the role, saying she believes poetry can help heal us after tumultuous years of pandemic, political division and culture wars.

“I think one of the ways that poetry helps people reclaim their humanity is through deep attention,” she said. “Poetry is that way of spending a moment remembering that you are a thinking, feeling, alive human being living in the world.” Q

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Kentucky Writers 2023

Hall of fame.

LEARN MORE AT CARNEGIECENTERLEX.ORG

Suzan-Lori Parks was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. More than two decades later, she dominates this year’s New York theater season with a 20th anniversary revival of her prize-winning play plus three new works, including one in which she performs.

Another Kentucky-born playwright, Marsha Norman , is a legend of stage and screen. She has won a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards and dozens of other major honors.

Former state poet laureate Richard Taylor stayed in Kentucky and made its rich history and landscape the material for his awardwinning poetry, novels and nonfiction books.

These three living writers will be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame on March 23 in a ceremony at the historic Kentucky Theatre in Lexington. Joining them will be two deceased poets, Madison Cawein and Blanche Taylor Dickinson , who have largely been forgotten since they achieved fame more than a century ago.

Learn more about these Kentucky literary icons in this special section, written by Tom Eblen , a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is now the literary arts liaison at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning.

. SUZAN-LORI PARKS .

five years ago, The New York Times’ theater critics declared Topdog/Underdog, by Kentucky-born playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the best American play of the previous quarter century—the best since Tony Kushner’s Angels in America rocked the theater world in 1993.

The play won Parks the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in drama, making her the first African American woman to receive the award. A critically acclaimed 20th anniversary revival of Topdog/Underdog opened at New York’s John Golden Theatre last fall, starring Corey Hawkins and Yahya AbdulMateen II and directed by Kenny Leon

But Parks, 59, has never been one to rest on accolades— or even pause long to take a deep breath. A creative dynamo, she seems to spin faster with age.

Her dramatic works have been in production for an astounding 35 years. She has written literally hundreds of plays, including more than two dozen stage plays, radio plays and screenplays that have been produced for major venues. She decided in 2002 to write a play a day for an entire year. Then, 18 years later, she launched another play-writing marathon during the pandemic.

Parks has published one novel and is writing a second. She is an accomplished essayist and a songwriter who plays guitar in a band with her husband, Christian Konopka, when they’re not busy raising their 11-year-old son. She teaches at New York University and the Public Theater in New York, where she is the writer in residence.

Topdog/Underdog is one of four Suzan-Lori Parks plays running in New York this season. The other three are new works. Sally & Tom, about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, premiered at the Guthrie Theater last fall. The Public Theater is presenting the other two plays this winter and spring: Plays for the Plague Year, in which Parks performs, and The Harder They Come, an adaptation of a 1972 movie for which she wrote the book and three new songs.

“I’m having fun,” she said in a telephone interview from her NYU campus apartment. “The work itself is this beautiful thing that life has afforded us.”

Parks was born at Fort Knox on May 10, 1963, to a career Army officer and an educator. When she was a toddler, the family was transferred. But they moved back to Kentucky when she was in elementary school, and Parks has fond memories of growing up here. Those

Kentucky years influenced her future work, including her most famous play.

Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic story about sibling rivalry and family relationships, features two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth. You can guess how the play ends. Parks, who has always been fascinated by history, remembers childhood trips to Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace near Hodgenville. “And my birthday’s on John Wilkes Booth’s birthday,” she said.

“I loved Mammoth Cave especially,” she said. “The landscape was very meaningful to me and is to this day. For years, I had a rock collection, which started in Kentucky as a kid in second grade.”

The first of Parks’ plays to be produced in New York also had a Kentucky angle. Betting on the Dust Commander (1987) is a humorous look at the endless repetition of daily life, and its action centers around the Kentucky Derby.

The Army kept Parks’ father, who eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel, on the move. In addition to Kentucky, she grew up in West Germany, California, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Maryland. While in high school, she fell in love with playing guitar.

“I started out as a musician but then sort of moved into writing because it felt like a safer profession,” she said. “The music scene is kind of dicey, fraught with intense energy, which is less safe than the library. I had an early love for the library. I would sit in the library wherever we lived. Those were some of my favorite places, sitting among the books.”

Parks earned a B.A. in English and German literature (Phi Beta Kappa) from Mount Holyoke College. She studied with James Baldwin, who encouraged her to pursue dramatic writing. She resisted at first but soon realized he was right.

“It’s not the imitation of life; it is actually life,” she said of drama. “Once you get to the moment of the curtain up at 7 o’clock at the Golden Theatre on Broadway, those people in the show, they’re alive. And the people in the seats are alive. And at the end of the day, literally, when they take their bows, it’s about what it means to be alive, what it means to be a community. I love action and activity. I love all the things about theater. It’s not just action. It’s not just dialogue. It’s not just description. It’s not just narrative arc. Often, it includes song. It includes interacting with living people.”

About her novel writing, Parks said, “It’s also a joyous experience but very different because the interaction with the audience is not as momentby-moment. Drama and theater just have so much to offer, so many challenges, and you have to be good at so many things. And at the end, you have to get along with people enough so that they’ll do your play. You can’t just be that writer in the ivory tower saying, ‘Aren’t I brilliant? Publish this!’ You have to actually be in there with folks and be responsive to the needs of the community while also keeping your eye on the needs of the spirit.”

Parks’ plays have been winning awards since 1990, when she received an Obie for the best new American play (Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom). She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, the same year she was a Pulitzer finalist for In the Blood. She was a finalist again in 2015 for Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. (When she won the Pulitzer for Topdog/Underdog, the original production was directed by Frankfort native George C. Wolfe, who had directed Angels in America in 1993.)

When the MacArthur Foundation awarded Parks one of its lucrative “genius” grants in 2001, it noted that her “risk-taking, dramatic presentations reflect and refract social imagery from American culture and history. By creating compelling stories and characters that dramatize the complex influences that form both individual and collective identity, her explorations challenge us to reconsider our perceptions of others and ourselves.” The foundation added that her plays “are characterized by her signature use of provocative stagecraft, gritty colloquialisms and wordplay inspired by the looped and spiraling forms of jazz.”

For any writer to be so productive, so creative and so successful for so long, it begs the question: How does she do it?

“It’s just showing up,” she said. “One of the first awards I ever got—I still have it on my bookshelf. I’m looking at it now. My dad was in Vietnam. We were in Texas with my mom’s family. I went to St. Mary’s School, and I was in kindergarten or first grade. Perfect attendance. That was my first award. And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ You just keep showing up!”

A schedule also helps. “Am I organized?” she replied with a laugh when asked. “I’m the daughter of an Army colonel! I was born at Fort Knox, baby! My mother, who has a master’s degree and was an educator, just retired last year. So, we are a family of … well, we can get stuff done!”

Parks rises early each morning, writes in her notebook, and gets her son off to school. (She says parenting is often a tagteam effort with her husband, a night-owl musician.) She then does yoga and gets to work, measuring intensely focused writing stints with a kitchen timer.

“You’re not waiting for inspiration; you’ve just got to do it,” she said. “I write sometimes really awful first drafts. Sometimes, you have to, because sometimes, that’s all you got. Sometimes, you gotta just like slop it out there to see what you’ve got, and then you gotta make it better. Often, it’s all in the rewrite. And that takes a certain organization of the mind, organization of the spirit.”

She frequently offers this advice in a free writing class she hosts most Monday afternoons called Watch Me Work. Held in the Public Theater’s lobby until the pandemic forced it online, the class is open to writers of any level. They write along with her in silence for 20 minutes—there’s a kitchen timer—and afterward ask her questions and discuss the creative process.

“It’s a passion project,” she said. “It’s an opportunity for me to share freely ... just to be there for people who are at any stage or level of their creative process. You don’t have to have gotten into a grad school; you don’t have to have afforded tuition or gotten a grant. You just show up, and I’ll talk to you about your writing. And it really means something to people. It says, ‘You matter. I see you trying to do your thing.’ ”

Parks’ success also has come from taking advantage of opportunities, which at times were cleverly disguised as roadblocks. Plays for the Plague Year, which opens April 5 at the Public Theater venue Joe’s Pub, chronicles a year that shook American society to its core. With guitar in hand, she and seven actors perform three hours’ worth of short plays.

“I thought I might write 14 of these; it would be cute, a little thing for me to do during a brief hiatus,” she said. “And then the hiatus turned into a pandemic, and I kept writing. I had no idea that the year was going to be the year that it was—what with the pandemic, what with the vaccine coming, what with the mask troubles, what with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the election and all the strife and the interesting times. It suddenly exploded into a very interesting year. I had no idea about that. But I did just keep showing up.” Q

kentucky writers hall of fame

MARSHA NORMAN .

kentucky writers hall of fame

marsha Norman is a prolific playwright, screenwriter and novelist who since the early 1980s has been one of the best-known writers in American drama. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards and a long list of other major honors.

Norman was born Sept. 21, 1947, in Louisville and grew up near Audubon Park, the oldest of two daughters and two sons of an insurance salesman and a homemaker. She has described her childhood as isolated, which she said turned out to be good for a future writer. Many of her plays are about family dynamics and relationships.

Norman was asked in a 1993 interview with Kentucky writer Elizabeth Beattie what was the most important thing she felt she was doing with her work.

“Dramatizing these moments of courage,” she replied, “moments of courage belonging to people you would not expect were equipped to deal with it.”

Norman graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and earned a master’s degree from the University of Louisville. She wrote for the Louisville Times and Kentucky Educational Television and worked as an educator in Jefferson County.

The first of Norman’s 14 stage plays, Getting Out, was produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and then Off Broadway in New York in 1979. The play is about a young woman paroled after an eight-year prison sentence for robbery, kidnapping and manslaughter. It was inspired by Norman’s experiences working with disturbed adolescents at Central State Hospital in Louisville.

Norman became famous after the New York production of her play ’night, Mother about a divorced woman, Jessie Cates, who lives with her mother, Thelma Cates. Over the course of an evening, Jessie calmly explains to Thelma that she plans to commit suicide and why. The play won Norman the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in drama, a Drama Desk

Award and a Tony Award nomination.

Norman’s first love was music; she began playing piano at age 5. For years after her success with ’night, Mother, Norman longed to write for a Broadway musical. “I felt very trapped in the world of the tragic drama, and I wanted out of there,” she told Beattie.

Norman finally got her chance by adapting Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden into a musical, and it won her Tony and Drama Desk awards in 1992. She went on to write the book for the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, winning a Tony nomination for the original 2005 production and a Tony Award for the 2016 revival. Her five musical adaptations for theater also have included The Trumpet of the Swan, The Bridges of Madison County and The Red Shoes

Norman has been a prolific writer for television and film, with credits on a dozen projects. She won a 2009 Peabody Award for her work on the HBO series In Treatment. She also has written a novel, The Fortune Teller (1989), which explores parent-child relationships.

Norman’s other awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Academy of Arts & Letters and the William Inge Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Theater. She is a member of the Theater Hall of Fame. Norman has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, along with 18 honorary degrees from American colleges and universities.

She was co-chair of playwriting at The Juilliard School for 25 years until her retirement in 2020. She lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Q

RICHARD TAYLOR .

kentucky writers hall of fame

after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, Richard Taylor couldn’t decide on a career. His father, a trial attorney, suggested law school, so that occupied the next three years of his life.

“I practiced in his law firm about four or five months,” Taylor said in an interview. “Then I got out in the public interest. I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, and I wanted to write.”

Taylor took brief jobs at two Mississippi junior colleges to make sure he liked teaching. Then, he went back to the University of Kentucky and earned a Ph.D. in English, studying under Hall of Fame writer Guy Davenport. Taylor joined the faculty at Kentucky State University and began a prolific career as a Kentucky-focused poet, essayist, novelist, nonfiction writer and teacher.

Taylor may be best known as a poet, having served as Kentucky’s poet laureate from 1999-2001. The first of his 12 poetry collections, Bluegrass, was published in 1975 as one of the first books printed by Gray Zeitz at his legendary Larkspur Press in Owen County. Last year, as Taylor turned 81, he published his two most recent poetry collections: Bull’s Hell (Larkspur) and Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems (Accents Publishing).

“I was drawn to poetry because poetry could be written on the run, so to speak,” Taylor said. “Working on a poem has gotten me through more than one faculty meeting.”

Taylor found that he loved teaching almost as much as writing. While at Kentucky State, he regularly taught high school students in the summer Governor’s Scholars program. After retiring, he moved to Transylvania University as the Kenan Visiting Writer. He stepped down from that role last year. “I like working with young people,” he said. “I like constantly being confronted with ideas. I like an academic environment—if they would just drop the meetings and some of the protocols. I liked having time in the summer to write. Time over the holidays to write. I would not have had that practicing law.”

In addition to his dozen poetry books, Taylor has written two novels—Girty (1990) and Sue Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War (2006)—and four books of nonfiction: Three Kentucky Tragedies (1991), aimed at adults learning to read as part of a statewide literacy program; The Palisades of the Kentucky River (1997); The Great Crossing: A Historic Journey to Buffalo Trace (2002); and Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape (2018).

Taylor’s work has focused on Kentucky’s colorful history and beautiful landscape. He was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in the Crescent Hill area of Louisville. “The Taylors have been around here a long time,” the sixthgeneration Kentuckian said. “Some people say too long.”

Taylor’s earliest ancestor to set foot in Kentucky was Reuben Taylor, who came in the 1770s as a teenaged

surveyor from Virginia and settled near Louisville on land that is now part of Norton Commons. Reuben Taylor’s log cabin still stands, and Taylor and his brother are trying to preserve it.

Taylor has always been fascinated by the violent misfits of Kentucky history, such as the subjects of his two novels, Simon Girty and Sue Mundy. Girty fought with Indians and the British against white settlers in Kentucky. Mundy was the fictional name a Louisville newspaper editor gave to Confederate Capt. Marcellus Jerome Clarke, a young raider who had long hair and a baby face. Union soldiers captured Clarke in March 1865 and hanged him at the age of 20 in Louisville.

Three of Taylor’s poetry books have been episodic, narrative biographies of famous Kentuckians—Rail Splitter: Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (2009); Rare Bird: Sonnets on the Life of John James Audubon (2011); and the recently published Bull’s Hell: Poems on the Life of Cassius M. Clay. “It’s such a durable and pliable form,” Taylor said. “And they were a lot of fun to do.”

Taylor’s book Elkhorn, winner of the 2018 Thomas D. Clark Medallion for the best book about Kentucky’s history or culture, chronicles an 8-mile stretch of Elkhorn Creek near Frankfort, where he lives in a rambling, book-filled house built in 1859.

Like Girty, Elkhorn is a mix of prose, poetry and imagined monologues. Taylor loves to play with language and doesn’t like to be tied down to one form of writing—or creativity. He is an avid watercolorist and sketch artist, making his own ink from black walnut hulls. The daily journals he has kept since 1984—he is now on volume 258—are filled with drawings and paintings as well as words.

“I think the best writing—fiction writing, poetry—relies on images,” he said. “I’m very much attracted to the visible world. So, the two kind of feed on one another.”

Taylor is finishing a book of essays about father figures. There are recollections of his own father, Joe Howard Taylor, the lawyer who wanted to be a landscape architect until he discovered he couldn’t draw. Another essay is about an uncle who lived with Taylor’s family when he was growing up. Louis F. Dey was an artist and photographer who helped inspire Taylor’s love of language and history.

Taylor has no grand plan for choosing writing projects. “I just go where whim leads me,” he said. “A lot of what I get interested in is something I hear or read and then think, ‘I’d like to know more about this.’ I have amassed such a library that I can do a lot of research right here.”

Part of that library owes to the fact Taylor is co-owner of Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort, run since 1978 by wife Lizz Taylor, from whom he is separated. “Lizz is a first-rate businesswoman,” he said. “I joke that the place tends to prosper to the extent I’m not connected with it.” Q

BLANCHE TAYLOR DICKINSON .

Blanche Taylor Dickinson was a poet, short story writer and journalist whose work was published in several magazines and newspapers in the 1920s. Her poetry has been widely anthologized with the work of other Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

Dickinson was born in Franklin (Simpson County) on April 15, 1896, to farmers Thomas and Laura Taylor . She attended segregated schools in Simpson County, Bowling Green Academy and Simmons College in Louisville and taught in public schools.

One of her earliest published poems appeared in the local newspaper, The Franklin Favorite, in July 1925. Dickinson and her husband, truck driver Verdell Dickinson, lived in his hometown of Trenton in Todd County.

Two years later, the couple lived in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and she was among several Black writers and artists featured in the magazine Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The magazine awarded her a Buckner Prize that year for “conspicuous promise” and for her poem “A Sonnet and a Rondeau.”

“As far back as I can remember I have had the urge to write poetry and stories,” Dickinson told the magazine. “My mother says that her youthful dreams were based on the same idea and perhaps she gave it to me as a prenatal gift. I do write a salable story once in a while and an acceptable poem a little oftener. The American Anthology [Unicorn Press], just released, contains three of my poems. I am intensely interested in all the younger Negro writers and try to keep in touch with them through the Negro press.”

Over the next three years, Dickinson’s poetry would be published in numerous magazines, including Opportunity, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis and Caroling Dusk. Her work also appeared in newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the

Louisville Leader, the Longview (Texas) News Journal and the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1929, two white-owned poetry magazines, The American Poet and Bozart, published her work. She and her work have been featured in several books about the Harlem Renaissance poets.

In the late 1920s, Dickinson wrote regularly for the Pittsburgh Courier, publishing short fiction, including a four-part romantic serial “Nellie Marie from Tennessee.” She also wrote news notes columns for the Courier called “Smoky City’s Streets” and “Valley Echoes.” She interviewed aviator Amelia Earhart in 1929 for the Baltimore Afro-American.

Much of Dickinson’s poetry reflected upon the difficulty of Black women’s lives in the 1920s. It commented on racism, class, patriarchy and standards of beauty determined by white culture. “In her poem ‘Fortitude,’ Dickinson portrays the woman of the silent scream, the denial of her person, and her acceptance with a countenance of pride and a broken spirit,” Helen R. Houston wrote in the book Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Dickinson’s literary output stopped around 1930. The 1940 census showed her back home in Kentucky, living with her father and a widowed aunt and working as a schoolteacher. That census listed her as a widow. But according to other records, her husband, who was two years younger, didn’t die until 1978, in Pittsburgh. In later years, she went by the name Patty Blanche Taylor, which is how her tombstone reads.

She died in January 1972 at age 75 at Western State Hospital in Hopkinsville. Records after her death show that she had little money. Earl Burrus, a Black community leader and funeral director in Franklin, established a fund for her benefit. She is buried in Pleasant View Cemetery in Simpson County. Q

kentucky writers hall of fame

MADISON CAWEIN .

kentucky writers hall of fame

madison Julius Cawein was an internationally known romantic poet in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. Most of his poetry was about nature, extolling the beauty of the countryside around Louisville. Comparisons to the British poets Percy Shelley and John Keats earned Cawein the nickname “the Keats of Kentucky.”

Cawein was born in Louisville on March 23, 1865, to William Cawein—a confectioner, chef and herbal doctor—and Christina Stelsley Cawein, a spiritualist. The couple had four sons, one daughter and little money.

When Cawein was 9, the family moved to rural Oldham County, where his father managed the Rock Springs Hotel for nearly two years. They later lived on a 20-acre hilltop farm near New Albany, Indiana, for three years. “Here I formed my great love for nature,” he wrote.

The family returned to Louisville in 1879. Cawein graduated from Male High School in 1886 and was selected “class poet.” Unable to afford college, he worked as a cashier at the Newmarket pool room, a center for horse race gambling, and read classic literature when things weren’t busy.

In 1887, at age 22, Cawein used his savings to publish Blooms of the Berry, his first collection of poems. It caught the attention of novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who gave it a favorable review in Harper’s magazine. They became lifelong friends.

After working at the Newmarket for nearly eight years, Cawein had earned enough money through savings and investments to quit and devote himself to writing. Cawein spent much of his free time roaming the woods around Louisville. He also made country rambles with his father, who was looking for medicinal plants to make the patent medicines he sold.

“Poetry I define as the metrical or rhythmical expression of the emotions, occasioned by the sight or the knowledge of the beautiful and the noble in ourselves,” Cawein wrote in a 1905 letter to Lexington author John Wilson Townsend.

Cawein lived for many years with his parents in a house at 19th and Market streets, where he wrote 19 books. That house is now Legacy Funeral Center –Schoppenhorst Chapel. Cawein married Gertrude McKelvey in 1903, and they had a son, Preston Hamilton Cawein, the next year. In 1917, the son’s name was changed to Madison Cawein II.

The Poetry Review of London wrote in 1912 that Cawein “appears quite the biggest figure among American poets.” His many fans included President Theodore Roosevelt and Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. Cawein was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Authors Club of London.

Over three prolific decades, Cawein wrote more than 1,500 poems and published 36 books. He told a CourierJournal reporter in 1901 that his income from publishing poetry in magazines the year before amounted to about $100 a month, now the equivalent of about $3,500. He was a successful investor until the last two years of his life, when he suffered serious financial troubles, which forced him to rent out his beloved home on St. James Court and move with his family to an apartment across the street.

Cawein died in that apartment on Dec. 8, 1914, from an apparent stroke, several days after falling and hitting his head on the bathtub. He was 49. He is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery.

“He saw and felt the poetry of nature,” the CourierJournal editorialized upon his death, “and it was his unswerving purpose to give it voice.”

Cawein’s romantic style of poetry was falling out of fashion toward the end of his life, but he made a contribution to what would come next. In 1913, Cawein published a poem titled “Waste Land” in a Chicago magazine whose editors included Ezra Pound. Scholars have identified this poem as an inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” published in 1922 and considered an early example of modernism in poetry. Q

kentucky monthly ’s annual

P E N N E D

writers’ showcase

2023 WINNING SUBMISSIONS

John E. Campbell Roger Guffey

Marie Mitchell

Bruce Bishop

J.M. Helm

Kaitlyn McCracken

Courtney Music

Robert L. Penick

Amy Le Ann Richardson

Rosemarie Wurth-Grice

2023 Penned winners AND the finalists listed below also are published online. Scan

FINALISTS

FICTION

Katie Hughbanks Louisville

Brook West Lexington

NONFICTION

Marlayna Kitchen Ashland

Susan Willmot King City, Ontario

Eric Nance Woehler

Madisonville

POETRY

Sylvia Ahrens Lexington

Libby Falk Jones Berea

Patrick Johnson

Morehead

Samar Johnson

Lexington

McKenna Revel

Mount Sterling

Hailey Small Wilmore

fiction For I Was Hungry …

ROGER GUFFEY, LEXINGTON

Fathers and sons have striven mightily since the dawn of time, often over trivial disagreements that escalate into hot-blooded animus long after the roots of their conflicts are lost. The feud sometimes becomes the raison d’être that sustains estrangement of people who once truly loved each other.

Clayton Kelly had not spoken to his son Isaac for five years over some long-forgotten peccadillo or slight, unintentional or otherwise. Isaac was understandably perplexed when, following his parents’ unexpected deaths during the COVID-19 epidemic—before the vaccines that may have spared their lives were available—he discovered that they had named him executor of their estate.

Isaac’s twin brother Paul had died in the War in Afghanistan, and a drunk driver had killed his brother Shane in a car wreck when Shane was just 18. Then, his sister Betty succumbed to a flareup of lupus, and Isaac became the last survivor of a lineage that traced itself all the way back to the verdant highlands of Ireland.

Clayton and his wife, Abigail, had worked at a Ford plant after Clayton returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam, where he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star Medal. When the industrial economy collapsed in the Rust Belt states, the couple weathered that storm like most had, through stubborn force of will and ornery contrariness to dying. After Isaac and Paul were born, Clayton moved his family to a 10-acre farm that clung to the side of a mountain, where he built a house perched on a steep knoll.

Thunderstorms often washed the loose gravel down the driveway, leaving the surface open to erosion unless it was not laboriously carried back up to the level top to await the next washout. Clayton exercised his patriarchal authority to assign Isaac, Paul and Shane the task of restoring order to the driveway while he was at work driving a bulldozer to clear logging roads through the forests and dig farm ponds and basements. At first, the boys felt important because they were contributing to their family’s needs. The physical labor gave them lanky athletic physiques. During their teen years, however, Isaac grew to resent his indentured servitude. He particularly hated to do what was a Sisyphean task of carrying the rock up a hill only to see it tumble down again.

When Paul was killed in Afghanistan, Isaac came home to bury his brother and comfort his parents and siblings. Isaac had begun to see the chore of hauling gravel up the hill as a metaphor for both the Vietnam War and the War in Afghanistan, wars that could not be won, only abandoned. After Paul’s burial, Isaac and Clayton’s fiery disagreement ended only when Isaac fumed out of the house, vowing never to return.

Still, blood is blood, and Isaac worried about his parents when the grim reaper of the COVID pandemic began to harvest its mostly elderly victims. He knew Clayton’s intransigence would keep him from reconciliation, but by the time he had decided to visit to

make amends, Clayton and Abigail had died a day apart. When he returned home to close out the affairs of the estate, Isaac saw that Clayton had poured a concrete driveway over the gravel road. At the top of the driveway the initials “WD” were etched into the concrete. After the funeral, he met with his dad’s lawyer to settle the accounts. They set up an estate sale on Sept. 21.

The crowd gathered at 9 to bid on and buy the household chattel. Isaac was taken aback when he saw a handsome young Black man purchase the entire contents of Abigail’s kitchen. Curious at the stranger’s offer, Isaac introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Isaac, the Kellys’ son,” he said. “Mom cooked lots of great meals using those pots and pans.”

The man replied, “You’re just the man I need to talk to. I’m Joe, Willie Duncan’s son. I have something to give you from my dad.”

He pulled a crumpled, yellowed envelope with Clayton’s name on it from his jacket pocket. “Let me tell you the backstory,” Joe said. “My dad owned a concrete business. About four years ago, your dad called him about pouring this concrete driveway for him. Dad, my brother Josh, and I drove down and began to build the forms and pour the first sections. We worked until noon, and your dad came out and invited us to dinner. Dad was oldfashioned and had never been invited to break bread with a white family, so he respectfully declined. I saw your dad’s face darken. Then he said, ‘Look, my wife has spent all morning cooking a big dinner to feed you fellers. Now get in there and eat, like I said.’ ”

Joe smiled. “We saw there was no need to argue,” he said. “Your mother cooked us a great dinner of pork chops, mashed potatoes, green beans and coconut cream pie with black coffee. Finest meal I ever had. When I heard about this estate sale, I was determined to buy all the pots and pans your mom used to fix that dinner for us because it meant so much to us to be treated like people.

“Clayton paid us after we finished the driveway. Dad drew his initials—‘WD’—into the concrete, and we went home. All my dad could talk about was how a white man had invited us to dinner for the best meal he ever had. My mother told him that he had to write a thank-you note. He was supposed to mail this letter, but I guess he forgot where he put it. I found it last week stuck in his Bible and decided ‘better late than never,’ so here it is.”

“That’s very kind of you to remember,” Isaac said. “I’m sure Dad would appreciate it.”

Joe blushed. “Well, I actually wrote the letter,” he confessed. “Dad couldn’t read or write anything other than his name. I hope you understand.”

Isaac smiled and clasped Joe’s right hand in his and softly squeezed his left shoulder. “I understand,” he said. “My dad couldn’t read or write anything but his name either, but that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, words just get in the way, don’t they?”

Letter From Fallujah

JOHN E. CAMPBELL, LEXINGTON

Mama is showing me the latest letter from my brother, the way she always does. As she reads it a second or maybe third time, it quivers in her hand. Post-stroke palsy.

I can see Carbrook Manor personnel in pastel scrub suits buzzing around in the background. There is the occasional flash of a white lab coat. Residents lean on aluminum walkers or slump in wheelchairs.

Since COVID arrived, these Zoom sessions are the only means of face-to-face interaction for us: Mama in Florida, me in Louisville.

“Your brother wrote to me again,” Mama says, pride and concern in her tone. “He wrote from Fala… Falu…”

“Fallujah,” I say for her.

“Why is he still there?” she asks. “The TV says all our boys came home from Iraq.”

“He is part of the peacekeeping group,” I remind her.

“I want him to come home,” she says, a little peevish now. I am losing her. “He should be here for Christmas.”

I do not remind her that Christmas was three weeks ago.

Her mood shifts, and she looks away from the screen. “I don’t think I have much time left, and sometimes I can’t remember his face.”

“Oh, Mama, you’ll never forget Adam’s face.”

She pauses, looks at the letter, and then says, “Your brother wrote to me again. He wrote from Faloo… Fallojj…”

“Fallujah, Mama,” I say gently.

“Why is he still there?”

After 20 minutes and another read-through of the letter, the Zoom session ends, and we blow kisses to each other.

I exit Zoom, open a Word document and begin typing:

“Dear Mama, it is 105 degrees in Fallujah today, and my squad and I just got back from patrol.”

The Quick Brown Fox That Catapulted Me to Typing Superstar

MARIE MITCHELL, RICHMOND

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Do you recognize that sentence? It’s taught in Typing 101 because it uses every letter of the alphabet.

I grudgingly took typing my junior year of high school (1970-71) because my teachers didn’t consider me college material. I was smart enough. Just not motivated. So, without consulting me about my future, I was placed on the secretarial track.

My typing teacher was built like a linebacker, barked instructions like a drill sergeant, and sounded like Julia Child. Intimidating. I decided to humor her.

Each desk had a manual typewriter. You had to firmly punch the keys for a letter to strike the paper. Quite a workout. The keys operated separately, so if you pressed too many too quickly, they’d jam up. You’d have to stop to untangle them. And end up with inky fingers.

We weren’t allowed to peek at the keyboard. So, we memorized where all the vowels, consonants, numbers and punctuation marks were located.

This was back when we used all of our fingers—not just our thumbs.

In our low-tech world, when we came to the end of a line, we reached over and pumped the carriage return lever to advance to the next line. Type. Zing. Type. Zing— in a crazy rhythm.

We were expected to type fast. And flawlessly. Long fingernails were forbidden. They could sabotage our efficiency. No problem. I was a compulsive nail biter.

If we did make a mistake, we started over with a clean sheet of paper, unless it was a minor “oops.” Then, we could apply “Wite-Out” to make it disappear. It was messy but mostly effective.

Our spell checker was a thick Webster’s Dictionary.

I practiced my brown fox sentence tirelessly and secretly wished the lazy dog would nip the fox’s nimble toes as it jumped over him, just for some variety.

My perseverance eventually was rewarded by my scoring the best speed record in class—65 words per minute. The average was 40, not that I’m bragging. Still, this impressive feat seemed futile, since I didn’t want to work in a 9-to-5 office.

Shockingly, after some twists and turns in my life, I went to college, earned two degrees in communication, and became a broadcast journalist. Guess what skill has been invaluable throughout that journey?

Typing.

Typing assignments. Term papers. And newscasts.

In my career, my agile fingers flew over the keyboard as I banged out stories on impossible deadlines. Fortunately, I didn’t have to spell every word correctly—just phonetically, so the newscaster could recognize it.

My early newsrooms in Kentucky provided only manual typewriters. No problem for a veteran like me whose dexterous fingers could still pound away on those keys with Herculean strength and endurance.

Later, we added Selectrics, which responded to a gentler touch. Out of habit, I continued to press down hard on the keys, like I was whacking a mole with my bare hands. The letters were on a single rotating ball, which avoided those annoying key jams. The Selectrics also had an automatic carriage return and built-in correction tape. They spoiled us.

Next up: computers. My hero. And my nemesis. They simplified—and complicated—my life with their impressive time-saving features and exasperating glitches at the most inconvenient times. Still, we forged a working relationship that got the job done.

If my typing teacher were still around, I’d salute her. I should also thank that quick brown fox and its legendary jump that made me such a typing superstar.

On Returning Home

What can I tell you?

The Scottish landscape changes with the rain and sun and mist Clouds gather in white and grey melancholy moods

filling the taller than this Kentucky sky

The names of villages are not easy on the tongue like the landscape, vowels and consonants wind through mist and merge in unfamiliar realms

On the River Clyde, gulls cackle like crones drunk on too much ale “A pint is never enough!” one shouts and cackles again while grey feathers float to the cobblestone below.

Come, sit with me by the window

We’ll watch the rabbits fat and round, gather on the old Abbey grounds and wander into the monk’s graveyard to quietly nibble the velvet green moss on Brother Ignatius’ grave

Beyond the graves

The waters of Loch Ness are cold and black stained from rain-washed peat rolling off mountains separated an ice age ago

Both Scottish Highlands and Appalachians exist here in slip fault fashion

and genetic memory swims deep

Mr. Weaver

J.M. HELM CAMPBELLSVILLE

There’s a spider in my window

We visit every day

He always seems so busy

He has no time for play

I call him Mr. Weaver

He seems to like that name

He lives within my window

And I’m so glad he came

He can tell when I am happy

And he knows when I feel sad

I tell him all my troubles

He helps me if he can

I think he has no family

Guess I’m his only friend

He’s too busy to be lonely

As he weaves and spins again

I often bring a present

A tasty cricket or a fly

He never fails to thank me

When it’s time to say goodbye

Some might think it’s strange

To have a spider for a friend

But he’s always there for me

Though he has his web to tend

He doesn’t know how old he is

Spider years don’t count

He’s always working on his designs

He loves it there’s no doubt

I like to get real close

And look into his eyes

There’s so much there to see

A wonder old and wise

He wears a timepiece upon his back

It doesn’t keep the time

Others fear his hourglass

But he’s a friend of mine

He weaves and spins

And spins and weaves

A web of grand design

Perhaps someday I can weave

A life just half so fine

ROSEMARIE WURTH-GRICE BOWLING GREEN

poetry

Culling

ROBERT L. PENICK LOUISVILLE

The sunflower stalks lie in the backyard lake carnage, like old beliefs. Syrup oozes from the rotten blossoms. Longer than a man, they waste in the sunlight, they atrophy, they burn.

Above them, the gnats hover. Each drawn to the sugar of death, sucking vitality from the sweetness of the flowers’ failure. They feast on cellulose, banqueting on what the sparrows and jaybirds disdain.

What is left of these stalks will be shredded and spread upon November ground. Time feeds on itself the way next year’s sunflowers will gather strength from these. The way darkness births twilight, and twilight, dawn.

black mold

KAITLYN MCCRACKEN WILMORE

it’s the scent of saturday cartoons and sunday sonatas and basement barred from little hands and little feet.

mahogany mildew lined walls of one-story ranch. the bones of faded jewel upholstery, torn seams, and piano keys, chipped and churning.

early weekend mornings to spilled and spoiled milk solidified to grainy carpet on little toes cringe with the creak of carpeted rot.

I

AMY LE ANN RICHARDSON OLIVE HILL

sunlight coating kitchen tiles coffee corroded china and shallow sliced countertops.

black speckled corners per vading and potent. sweet ambrosial incense emitting from walls absorbing through my skin like osmosis embracing my lungs like grandfather hugs tight and unyielding.

grime and gold stick and stone driveway rubbing eyes raw as we pull away.

As

Age I say my gray hairs are the light leaking out where I opened myself up to the world and allowed my mind to experience new ideas, so I radiate hope.

Whirly-gigs

on old route 40 where the road winds up the hills and curves kiss the rocky creek beds

a house sat in the nook an old wealthy valley of Oil Springs

two stories

hand carved wooden shutters a broad concrete porch with iron columns

I remember the tacky windchimes

Swinging and twisting in the wind wild colors and shells become a blur they were odd and out of place swaying about

he told me he got them from a woman who he called a peddler she sold for a sandwich

Pall Malls and gas for the road

he always felt the need to bring home whatever odds and ends were offered he’d say “they belong to someone they just needed to get where they are going maybe to find their person or waiting to be found”

I think he hung them there on his porch in case she ever came back around she’d feel like she was finding her way home

we called them whirly-gigs I wonder where she is now

COURTNEY MUSIC  MOREHEAD

SPRING PREVIEW

Our Three Cows

Patsy was our business cow

Took her job seriously She gave her milk, and kept her place And never noticed me

Kitty was our hateful cow The meanest of the three She seemed to hate her job, her life And clearly hated me

Spuddy was our friendly cow She did her job with glee She gave her milk, and ate her grass Was very fond of me

One day when I was three years old I had a great idear I thought I’d milk old Spuddy, so I crept up to her rear

But when I grabbed her by the teat She kicked and sent me flying I was out cold, so I was told They thought that I was dying

I learned a lesson on that day I barely dodged a killing You never want to touch a girl Unless you know she’s willing

* Bishop grew up on a farm near Centertown (Ohio County).

BRUCE BISHOP SAN ANGELO, TEXAS*

The Gift of Literacy

BY JACK BRAMMER

University, who in 2006 wrote the definitive book about Stewart and Kentucky’s Moonlight Schools.

Their superintendent, Cora Wilson Stewart, expected about 100 illiterate adults to traipse through the rugged hills and countryside that late summer night—most on foot, some on horseback—to the 52 one-room schoolhouses in the county to learn how to read and write.

The teachers had underestimated that number. More than 1,200 men and women enrolled on the first evening of classes. They ranged in age from 18 to 86.

Volunteer teachers who had taught the children of these men and women during the day were eager to teach the adults how to write their names and then advance to reading and writing. They didn’t know there would be so many interested in the classes and that their efforts eventually would garner international attention.

On that Tuesday night of Sept. 5, 1911—Labor Day—in Rowan County, adult literacy education was born.

At the end of the two six-week courses, the students could write their names and simple sentences and read on an elementary level. They were rewarded with a diploma, a Bible and a lifelong skill of communicating.

The one-room, wooden schoolhouses were called “Moonlight Schools” because the students attending them would use the light of the moon to see the footpaths and wagon trails to follow paths to the schools.

The program spread to nearby counties. In 1914, the state created a commission to extend Moonlight Schools to all Kentucky counties. In the following two years, 40,000 Kentuckians were taught to read and write. Similar programs were started in 18 states, including literacy classes for Native Americans.

The concept soon spread to other nations in what Appalachian Heritage magazine has described as one of the greatest social movements ever from eastern Kentucky.

“I would agree with that,” said Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin, a retired history professor at Morehead State

“At the time, there were a few literacy programs in this country’s big cities to teach immigrants how to read and write but no community programs to bring people together to fight illiteracy,” Baldwin said. “Cora Wilson Stewart came up with an innovative, effective, wellorganized program to get people to read and write—all in a rural county in eastern Kentucky. It was a powerful social movement.”

RECOGNITION FOR MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS

In May 2022, Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman unveiled the new Kentucky Adult Education logo during a ceremony in Morehead to honor Stewart and the Moonlight Schools. “The need for lifelong learning is just as important today as it was in the 1900s,” Coleman said.

Kentucky Adult Education provides free adult education services in all 120 Kentucky counties to help people obtain a GED—the equivalent of a high school diploma.

With the GED, Kentuckians can gain reading, math and communication skills that place them on a path to higher education and training and to earn certifications to advance in their careers. The agency is funded by federal and state dollars and overseen by the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet.

At the ceremony last year to present the state’s new literacy logo, Kentucky Adult Education also unveiled a photo of a decorative bench that it donated to the Moonlight School site in Morehead.

Cora Wilson Stewart was remembered again.

CORA WILSON’S TRIUMPH OVER ILLITERACY

Cora Wilson was born on Jan. 17, 1875, in rural Montgomery County. Her father, Jeremiah Wilson, was a physician. Her mother, Annie Eliza (Hally) Wilson, was a schoolteacher. The family lived fairly modestly in Rowan

The teachers were amazed, if not overwhelmed.

Cora Wilson Stewart’s Moonlight School concept opened the world of reading to thousands of Kentuckians

County. Cora’s parents taught their children “to be somebody.”

At age 4, Cora declared her intention to become a teacher. A devout and spiritual person all her life, she believed that God had a mission for her. At 15 and with no formal education, she started teaching in a one-room school in Rowan County. She was one year older than the school’s oldest student.

She later attended Morehead Normal School, an institution for training teachers. The school became Morehead State College in 1948 and Morehead State University in 1966.

Cora returned to teaching at age 20 in 1895, the same year she married Ulysses Grant Carey. Little is known about him. The two divorced after only three years of marriage and no children.

Cora enrolled at the Commercial College of Kentucky University in Lexington to land a more profitable job as a typist or stenographer. She became the school’s first female instructor.

In August 1900, Cora was called home to Morehead to take care of her dying mother. A year later, she became a successful candidate for school superintendent of Rowan County—the first woman to hold the position. She oversaw 52 one-room schools (50 white and two Black) and 58 teachers (33 male and 25 female). She became a frequent speaker at civic, church and professional meetings.

In 1902, Cora married Alexander Thomas Stewart, a schoolteacher several years her junior who drank heavily. The couple divorced in 1904 but remarried three months later. In 1907, they had their only child, William Holley Stewart, who died in 1908. Cora and Alexander divorced again on June 8, 1910, and Cora remained single the rest of her life.

As superintendent, Cora visited each of the one-room schoolhouses in Rowan County. She condemned the poverty and lack of educational opportunity.

Some in Morehead criticized her for being a “working woman outside the home,” and she did not seek reelection as county superintendent in 1905. But she did not give up her work. She accepted frequent speaking engagements and organized teacher training institutes throughout the state. She won reelection as superintendent in 1909 and progressed to become the first female president of the Kentucky Education Association.

As superintendent, Cora asked the teachers of the county to help “those whom the schools of the past had left behind.” She thought of evening

Above, a Moonlight School class in Rowan County; right, Cora Wilson Stewart

UK Special Collections and Archives

instruction for adults who could not read or write

The almanac promised a full moon on Sept. 5, 1911. Cora selected that date for opening night of adult literacy education.

Volunteers tried to visit each home in the district to drum up support for the evening classes. Teachers told day school pupils to encourage their parents to attend. From the pulpits, ministers proclaimed the values of reading and writing and urged adults to take advantage of the free evening classes.

The result: Almost one-third of the county turned up on opening night.

Baldwin described the scene in her book: “They sat on small benches in the little school houses, confronted marks on the tablets in front of them, and examined chalked images on the blackboards. They sang songs and visited with neighbors, and took home that first night a vision of what it would mean to be able to read and write.”

Women’s organizations and churches donated money and supplies to keep the Moonlight Schools going. Volunteer teachers from as far away as Louisville came to help. The Moonlight Schools convinced Cora that hers was an idea whose time had come.

The movement spread to other Kentucky counties and then to other states. Some European countries adopted the program. Cora was named director of the National Illiteracy Crusade and the chairwoman of President Herbert Hoover’s Commission on Education.

As a delegate to the 1920 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, Cora was recognized for her literacy work by her fellow Kentucky delegates, who nominated her for president of the United States. She appreciated the gesture but knew well that women had not yet been given the right to vote; the 19th Amendment would be ratified later that summer.

As the work of the Moonlight Schools grew, Cora developed a series of adult literacy books and

For a deeper dive into the life and accomplishments of Cora Wilson Stewart, check out Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky’s Moonlight Schools: Fighting for Literacy in America by Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin.

materials, including a reading primer, The Soldier’s First Book, to teach military recruits to read.

In the 1930s, Cora’s adult-literacy teaching methods gradually were bypassed as educators relegated her oncepopular Country Life Readers to the back shelves in favor of more modern programs.

Cora turned to photography. Many of her photos are of Rowan County.

In her later years, she did not consider her life a success. She wondered if she should have devoted her life to ministry instead of education. She became blind due to glaucoma and lived for a while near a relative in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She later moved to North Carolina to live with relatives.

Cora died of a heart attack in a nursing home in Columbus, North Carolina, on Dec. 2, 1958. She was 83 and poor. A brother-in-law paid for her burial in North Carolina.

Fifteen years after Cora’s death, Morehead State University acquired the original Little Brushy School building about 8 miles from Morehead, restored it and placed it on the college’s campus. Situated on Little Brushy Creek, it was one of the original Moonlight Schools.

About 15 years ago, the building was moved to East First Street in downtown Morehead. The university still owns it, but it is managed by the nearby Morehead Railroad & Historical Museum. Tours are available through the museum on Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Steve Young, a director of the museum, often gives tours of the school. As he recently sat inside the school with its wooden desks, he said, “This place doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Just think of the lives it changed. It opened up the world to many people.

“As the historical marker out front says, it was established ‘to emancipate from illiteracy those enslaved in its bondage.’ ” Q

Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman, left, and Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet Deputy Secretary Mary Pat Regan unveiled the new Kentucky Adult Education logo.

Courtesy of Education and Workforce Development Cabinet

Courtesy of Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin

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Mr. Western

After more than six decades, Lee Robertson remains a beloved and valued supporter of Western Kentucky University

By Gary P. West

If they call you “Mr. Western,” you must be a special person.

Lee Robertson, who is known by that moniker, is a walking inspiration to the thousands who know him and the thousands who have heard about him. When he turned 100 years old on June 16, 2022, Western Kentucky University hosted a huge celebration for his milestone birthday at its Alumni Center. Hundreds of friends were there, with many traveling from several states. Each of the guests was given an opportunity to have a photo taken with Robertson.

Robertson has achieved about every recognition his alma mater can bestow. After more than six decades of employment at WKU, he continues to show up for work five days a week at the school’s College Heights Foundation office at the edge of campus. “I feel like I’m still productive … have something valuable to say,” Robertson said. “I’m still helping people. When I’m not, I’ll get out of here.”

Prior to working at the foundation, Robertson served as the WKU Alumni Affairs director from 1960-

1985. How has he done it day after day, year after year, and decade after decade? “It’s been life in moderation and always being positive inward and outward,” he said.

It doesn’t hurt that good genes run in Robertson’s family. His mother lived to 96, sister Clara passed away at 95, and brother Sam lived to 97. “Dad died in his 70s. He was sick the last four years of his life,” Robertson said.

Donald Smith, president of the College Heights Foundation, sees Robertson on a regular basis. “He has an uncanny ability to remember names, hometowns and stories about each and every person he meets,” Smith said. “There is no doubt that WKU is a better place because of his extraordinary service.”

Robertson grew up in McLean County, and after his family lost their farm, his dad moved them to Calhoun to find work. “We owed $5,000—a lot of money—and couldn’t pay it,” Robertson said. “Back then, even like families today, we did what we had to do to make it.”

As a youngster, Robertson went

by his given first name, June. It wasn’t until high school that he became Lee. “My parents named me June Lee Robertson,” he said. “I was born in June, so they were creative with the name.”

In the late 1930s, basketball was Robertson’s favorite sport, but the high school coach at Calhoun took one look at Robertson and cut him from the team. All these years later, Robertson is quick to say, “He never gave me a chance. Never saw me play. He took one look and said, ‘Robertson, you’re too little.’ ”

He didn’t let his lack of size keep him from becoming a good baseball player.

After graduating in 1941, Robertson didn’t know what his future would be, but Uncle Sam decided for him. “I was drafted in August 1942 and put on a bus to Evansville,” he said. “I saw my first crap game … didn’t know what I was doing … lost $12. I didn’t know anybody, but, before long, I knew everybody.”

As a new inductee in the United States Army, he had stopovers at several posts before boarding a troop ship for combat in World War II. “I

was trained as a tank driver with a five-man crew,” Robertson said. “We were headed for New Guinea and then the Philippines. I think it took us about a month on that ship to get there.”

Robertson’s tank battalion fought in the Philippines for two months before liberating the country. “I actually saw Gen. [Douglas] MacArthur wade ashore on his famous return.”

To this day, details of Robertson’s involvement in WWII are deeply etched in his memories, and his ability to recount them in chronological order is spellbinding. “In August 1945, when we dropped the bombs on Japan, it ended much of the war,” he said. “I know it was horrible and killed a lot of people, but had it not happened, we would have lost even more Americans. It was war.”

Four months later, on Dec. 1, 1945, Robertson headed back to the United States. “You got points to come home early based on your age, marriage and kids,” he said. “My age didn’t help, and I wasn’t married or had any kids, so I was one of the last.”

A two-week ship ride landed him

in San Diego. From there, it was a troop train to Fort Knox, where on Dec. 23, he was discharged from the Army. Robertson recalled, “As I was completing everything, signing my final papers, they ask me if I wanted to sign up for the reserves. ‘No, thank you. I’ve had enough,’ I said.”

Robertson was going home. He had experienced and seen things any other young man from Calhoun might never have imagined. For several hours, his thoughts were on just getting home again. He traveled by train from Fort Knox to Owensboro, where he boarded a bus for Calhoun, 21 miles away. It was 5 a.m. on Christmas morning when, for Robertson, the war finally was over and he was home. His parents; older brother Sam, who recently had returned from the war; and younger sister Clara were all there. “You could say we had a special Christmas,” he said.

Robertson was spinning his wheels, not knowing what he was going to do after the war, when “a buddy of mine came by and said, ‘Lee, let’s go to college,’ ” he recalled. “College, when I graduated high school, was only for the elite. We had 32 in our class, and

only one went to college. So, when he said ‘college,’ I thought he was crazy. But he said there was this thing called the GI Bill. I figured I could do that and get paid $70 a month. We headed to Bowling Green for college.” • •

It was the summer of 1946.

By that time, Robertson had become a pretty good left-handed baseball pitcher—good enough to catch the eye of Ed Diddle, who coached both basketball and baseball at WKU. “I was playing for Morgantown in the old Sunday League back then, and Coach Diddle saw me and said he’d like for me to join the Western baseball team.”

Robertson lettered for three years, but—better than that—he got to know Coach Diddle. “He was a psychologist,” Robertson said. “No, he wasn’t trained, but he had a way with words that made you believe you were better than you really were. You wanted to play for him.”

By the fall of 1950, Robertson was a college graduate with a major in physical education and minors in biology and English.

WKU and mascot Big Red celebrated Robertson’s 100th birthday in June 2022. [Photo courtesy of Clinton Lewis]

Robertson’s first teaching and coaching job landed him at Park City High School east of Bowling Green. His star basketball player was Van Vance, who went by the nickname of Hawkeye. Vance went on to sportscasting fame in Louisville and was the play-by-play guy for the Kentucky Colonels of the old American Basketball Association.

Two years after Robertson’s stint at Park City, he was at Livermore High School in McLean County. That’s where he became reacquainted with Joyce Bennett, a young lady whose family he had known while he was in high school. They were married in early April 1953 in Calhoun.

Robertson was offered the assistant superintendent position at Barren County Schools in 1957. A year later, he became superintendent and served in that position until 1960.

In 1960, WKU President Kelly Thompson wanted Robertson to fill a position that would later become the director of Alumni Affairs. It was a pay cut for Robertson, but a desire to work at WKU was motivation enough for him to accept the new job. “I always thought my main purpose was to raise friends for the university,”

Robertson has said many times. His immediate efforts led to the establishment of alumni chapters throughout the nation, with the first outside of Kentucky being in Atlanta. Louisville’s WKU alumni chapter has emerged as the largest. An annual golf scramble sponsored by the chapter carries Robertson’s name, along with that of fellow alum Gary Sundmacker. The event draws numerous golfers, some of whom didn’t attend WKU but have become friends. “I turned 100 on June 16, and on June 27, I played in our Louisville golf tournament,” Robertson said.

As Robertson’s Alumni Affairs role became more important and expanded, newsletters, annual giving funds and magazines followed.

When he retired in 1985, Robertson had become better known at WKU than anyone, including the Big Red mascot, and his absence left a void among thousands of graduates who had come to know him. “Where’s Lee? How’s Lee?” they would ask.

Two years later, he was back. For a short time, he served as the director of WKU’s Glasgow campus, and then for six years, he was the men’s golf coach. WKU President Gary Ransdell then asked Robertson to assist in some major capital fundraising projects.

A life-size bronze statue of Robertson, unveiled in late 2013, welcomes visitors into the Eva and Jim Martens Alumni Center. It was a crowning career moment for Robertson. “I don’t know that I deserve it, but I’ll appreciate it,” he said. “Everything that’s happened to me at Western has been a highlight.”

For the most part, good health for Robertson has been the norm. There was, however, a brief setback when he broke his hip. “I think it was about 15 years ago,” he remembered. “Joyce and I were leaving a wedding reception at Lost River Cave. A friend grabbed me and asked me to dance one more. Well, we both fell, and I broke my hip. I was sidelined for a while.”

His wife of 69 years, Joyce, has been there waving the red towel right by his side. “We’d go on trips and, rather than go sightseeing, Lee enjoyed just sitting and talking to people,” she said. “Talking to people about Western has been his life.”

“Being here, being active and being around young people keeps me going,” he said. “My spirit for my school makes my life meaningful. It makes me proud.” Q

Kentucky’s Most Visible Alums

By Deborah Kohl Kremer

Every college and university has a list of its most notable alumni— those who have achieved greatness in their field or have attained a certain level of celebrity. A couple of examples are University of Kentucky alum, basketball fan and actress Ashley Judd and Western Kentucky University alum and entrepreneur Duncan Hines.

Walk around any college campus and there is a good chance you will see a building named for an alumnus who made a large financial contribution. But what about the most visible alumnus? The one who attends all the events, supports the school as its biggest fan, and dons the school colors on a daily basis? We asked Kentucky colleges and universities to help us shine a light on those graduates, and they recognized the following individuals.

MIDWAY UNIVERSITY DONNA MOORE CAMPBELL

After receiving her associate’s degree in education in 1962 from what then was an all-women’s school known as Midway Junior College, Donna Moore Campbell worked in the president’s office for two years and then returned a decade later to teach at Midway. She went on to have a 30-year career with Kentucky Educational Television. During that time, she served on the Alumni Association Board, including serving as chair. In 1999, Campbell became a member of the Board of Trustees, and in 2013, she became chair of the board, the second woman—and first alumna—to hold that position.

class of 1993

class of 1964

SPALDING UNIVERSITY KJ ABRAMS

Everywhere KJ Abrams goes, he makes it his mission to put Spalding University, where he graduated in 2018, on the map. He lives out the Spalding mission through his service to the community and alma mater and currently serves as chair of the Alumni Leadership Council.

KENTUCKY WESLEYAN COLLEGE GREG RISCH

As a member of the Board of Trustees, Greg Risch, pictured with wife Jamie chairs the Advancement Committee. He is president and CEO of Gibbs Die Casting Aluminum, which gives him opportunities to speak with members of the business community as well as prospective students in the Henderson area. He usually is seen sporting a KWC Panther hat, whether he is competing in marathons or enjoying a vacation.

TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY

BILL WATSON

Bill Watson serves on the Transylvania Alumni Board and as a mentor with the 100 Doors to Success Mentoring Program, which matches a successful alum with current Transy students. He’s regularly on campus offering students and employees free sessions of Reiki, a Japanese energy-based healing technique.

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class of 1986

MURRAY STATE UNIVERSITY

DR. BOB JACKSON & KAREN MILLER JACKSON

Prior to becoming the 14th president of Murray State University, Dr. Bob Jackson served as the president and chief executive officer of the Murray State University Foundation and as senior adviser to the university for state and federal governmental relations. In the four years since Jackson became president, he and his wife, Karen, have led the university through the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic. A registered nurse, Karen helped coordinate between Murray State nursing students and regional vaccine clinics, plus she personally volunteered at the campus clinic every day that it was open.

In 2022, Murray State celebrated its centennial, marking 100 years since the founding of the Murray State Normal School and Teachers College in 1922. The Jacksons, avid history buffs, led the university’s efforts to recognize the milestone throughout the year. President Jackson commemorated the occasion by co-authoring The Finest Place We Know: A Centennial History of Murray State University, 1922-2022, published by the University Press of Kentucky.

“Karen and I arrived on campus as freshmen more than 40 years ago. Murray State University provided us with a worldclass education and many campus involvement opportunities, which allowed us to be successful personally and professionally,” Bob Jackson said. “Murray State is a special place, and our alumni hold the memories of their time here very fondly.”

KENTUCKY STATE UNIVERSITY

JOANN JAMES

JoAnn James, who is present at almost every school event, is known to give her time, talent and treasures to Kentucky State. She can be found raising funds for scholarships, donating clothes to the school’s Career Closet, or donating food to the student pantry, the BRED Basket.

HAZARD COMMUNITY +TECHNICAL COLLEGE

DR. SCOTTIE DAY

Dr. Scottie Day started his education at Hazard Community and Technical College and went on to graduate from the University of Kentucky in 1998. He is physician in chief at UK Kentucky Children’s Hospital in Lexington and supports HCTC by participating in fundraising and speaking publicly about how much he values the education he received.

FRONTIER NURSING UNIVERSITY

DR. SUSAN STONE

Dr. Susan Stone graduated from Frontier Nursing with her post-master’s certificate in nurse-midwifery, and she has served as president of the school for the past 20 years. During that time, the institution grew from a community-based school of nurse-midwifery with an enrollment of 200 to an accredited university with an enrollment of more than 2,500 students, offering master’s and doctoral degrees to nurses.

class of 1972 and 1975 class of 1967

LINDSEY WILSON COLLEGE

CARRIE LUKER FARRIS

As a devoted member of the Lindsey Wilson National Alumni Association, Carrie Luker Farris has been instrumental in the Alumni & Friends Walkway Scholarship program. She has served on committees such as Academic Affairs and Student Services, Building and Grounds, and Development in her many years as a member of the LWC Board of Trustees.

EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY

JAN BARNES

Jan Barnes, pictured with husband Jim, a former Eastern Kentucky University Alumni Board vice president, regularly can be seen in the stands for ballgames, helping students on move-in day, and bringing friends to EKU events.

Kentucky Explorer

Letters to the Kentucky Explorer

The Hunt for Tombstones

When I receive stories submitted for the “I Remember” section, I can’t wait to read all about what you, our readers, remember. Even if I’m not familiar with the town or the era, reading someone else’s memories usually sparks one that I’ve long forgotten.

It is hard to put a price on an old photo. Although they are all intriguing, I really love those that show the inside of a store. It is fascinating to see how the shelves are stocked and the assortment of items available for purchase. The photo below is a good example. It shows Emmet Stout Sr. in his New Castle hardware store with clerk Eoda Long (at right). Unfortunately, the photo is not dated.

With the start of 2023 comes a blank slate of Kentucky Explorer pages. Since this section is filled with reader submissions, I invite you to send in your old photos, memories and historical expertise. Tell me about your hometown, the general store or what it was like in your classrooms. Of course, I’m happy to type your handwritten story.

You can reach me at deb@kentuckymonthly.com or mail items to Kentucky Monthly, Attn: Deb Kremer, P.O. Box 559, Frankfort, KY 40602-0559

— DEBORAH KOHL KREMER

I thought you’d like to know that I received an email from a subscriber regarding my “Woodmen of the World Tombstones” article (November 2022 issue, page 54).

As it turns out, the grandfather of the person who wrote me has a Woodmen of the World gravestone not far from our Cadiz home, in Dunning Cemetery, which is close to Crofton, about 32 miles from our house.

Bob Peak, Cadiz

Another Woodmen Tombstone Found

After reading Bob Peak’s story about the Woodmen of the World tombstones, I contacted him to let him know that my family cemetery on Taylorsville Road at the Jefferson/ Spencer County line had a tombstone with the WOW etching on it.

As an aside, I was an overweight offensive tackle when (Past Tense/Present Tense columnist) Bill Ellis was head football coach at Shelby County High School in the 1960s. He is still a great friend and mentor. Also, Editor-in-Chief Steve Vest and I had adjoining tables at a book festival in Shelbyville a few years ago.

Please send letters to Editor Deborah Kohl Kremer at deb@kentuckymonthly.com or mail to Deb Kremer, Kentucky Monthly, PO Box 559, Frankfort, KY 40602.

Jim Miller, Diamondhead, Mississippi

Photo used with permission of Ann Marie Scott and Henry County Historical Society. For more information, visit henryhistoricalsociety.com.

A Pig Named Boss

By Roger L. Guffey, Lexington

My childhood growing up in the 1960s in Wayne County was as unremarkable as that of any other young boy in rural Kentucky. In our family were five brothers, two sisters, and a father and mother cut from the same fabric as any of the mountain folks scratching out a livelihood from the stingy hillsides. Dad worked a yeoman’s job in the logging woods, and Mom cooked our meals, kept house, and tended the children and the vegetable gardens. Seven years separated my four oldest siblings from us three younger ones—an arrangement I liked because it spared us from the more arduous labors of a small subsistence farm.

When I was about 5, Dad sought to improve his financial lot in life by operating bulldozers and other equipment to build the new interstate highway system implemented by President Dwight Eisenhower. The higher pay scale improved our standard of living, but it came with a tradeoff: Dad had to live away from home during the week, returning home on Friday night and leaving on Sunday afternoon. By the time my oldest sister married and my three older brothers were drafted, I inherited many of their chores.

At first, Dad was not particularly fond of spending so much of his time away from home, but as he entered into his midlife crisis, he fell victim to the temptation of trying to regain lost youth by improving his image. For most of the people in the poverty-stricken area, the only dental care available to them was a strong piece of twine and a doorknob. Both he and Mom had lost most of their teeth, but dentures were not in the budget. He determined that the proceeds from selling a couple of Hampshire sows and their piglets could pay for dentures for both of them and leave a little for a down payment on a new truck.

He bought two sows and a boar from a farmer and paid our neighbor, Shelby Roberts, to install electricity in the barn. Newborn piglets may freeze to death since their peach-fuzz hair cannot keep them warm. Ordinarily, their mother’s body heat will suffice, but in the enclosed stalls, the sow may crush her piglets. The solution was to cordon off a corner of the stall with boards and suspend a highwattage heat lamp over the corner. After nursing, the piglets returned to the warm safety of the corner.

Any swineherd can see the imminent farrowing of piglets by observing the behavior of pregnant sows. One cold November morning, Mom noticed that both of our sows were gathering mouthfuls of grass to build their nests. Ever the worrier, Mom checked to see that the electricity in the barn was working, only to find that something was amiss.

We met her hurrying down the driveway to fetch Shelby to come fix the problem when we got off the school bus. Fifty-five years later, I can still see my mother wrapped up

in a long brown raincoat and a headscarf, her swollen jaws set in resolute determination and her eyes flashing urgency as she motioned for us to get in the house while she was gone. She had had all of her few remaining teeth pulled that day to prepare for her new false teeth. I still shudder at the pain she was enduring in the cold air. Mercifully, Shelby drove her back home and quickly fixed the problem just in time for both sows to deliver their litters that night.

Farm children delight in the innocent beauty of baby animals of all kinds, but little pigs are especially endearing. Dad had used a red Duroc boar to breed the sows, and the piglets ran the gamut of colors from black, white and red. Both of the sows were gentle souls, so we could pet and play with the piglets safely. A piglet will choose one teat to nurse and will jostle others away from its dinner plate. The sight of the little piglets’ rear ends writhing as they nurse is a joy to behold, and we spent a lot of time watching them.

Despite all of the safeguards, a sow can accidentally crush or suffocate a piglet when she lies down to nurse her litter. With Dad working away, Mom assumed the role of checking on the litters several times a day. One morning, she rushed into the kitchen carrying the limp body of a little red-and-black spotted piglet that had suffocated when his mother laid on him. Mom was frantically blowing into his mouth and massaging the lifeless body until after several minutes, he wriggled back into the world of the living with a soft whimper and short breaths. Mom held him close to her bosom to warm him up and continued to coo and pet him until he had calmed down. She grasped him under his front legs and held him up to show all of us three kids. Her eyes twinkled as she proclaimed, “I am going to name him Boss because he is so bossy. He reminds me of a little pig I had as a girl.”

Every morning, Mom would fetch Boss to the house so we could pet him before catching the school bus. Her eyes twinkled and she giggled like a young girl, and Boss relished the attention. We took Polaroid photos of Mom holding Boss to show the neighbors. When he was 8 weeks old, Boss weighed about 30 pounds, and Dad loaded both sows and their piglets into his truck to take to the stockyards. Mom choked back tears of grief as she waved goodbye to her pet, but she kept one of the Polaroids in a small cheap frame on her dresser.

Mom got her share of the money from Dad, who drove her to the dentist to be fitted for her dentures. She had earned more money by taking in ironing, so she paid for them in cash. Perhaps she was ashamed because we seldom saw her near-toothless smile, but now her face glowed with new vitality that poverty had suppressed. After supper, I saw her sitting at her dresser mirror, caressing the small portrait of her precious little piggy, Boss.

All these years later, when I think about her wiping the tears from her face, I wonder what price I am willing to pay for happiness.

December 1811 and February 1812, with the initial quake measuring 7.2–8.2 on the moment magnitude scale.

This adorable piglet isn’t Boss but a reminder of how cute a baby pig can be.

“I Remember” By Our Readers

When Electricity Saved Us

By Martha Jane Napier Rankin, Warsaw

Although electricity was discovered in the 18th century, it took the better part of two centuries before it came to southeast Kentucky. In Leslie County, we were slow to get the benefits of modern technology. By the time we got it, it was no longer modern. For two centuries, we had been hidden among the creases of the hills, speaking our Elizabethan English, and keeping to our old ways. Then came the rails and the highways. Our men went to war. Then our men went to Detroit and Cincinnati.

Electricity came on poles and lines, linking us closer to modern times. It was 1934 when the Kentucky-West Virginia Power Company sent electricity to Hyden. In the 1940s, the Rural Electrification Administration ran lines to the Red Bird River. And finally, KY/WV Power extended its lines up and down the Middle Fork, and power reached all of Leslie County. By 1947, when I was born, we all had “the electric,” as we called it, but we hadn’t had it so long that we didn’t keep our coal oil lamps in reserve for light and our coal fireplaces for heat and food.

My maternal grandparents lived in a large two-story house near Rockhouse Creek, which bisected the businesses and the residences of Hyden. The family congregated there. We grandchildren often spent our nights there. It was a wonderful playground with Rockhouse Creek joining the Middle Fork right behind the house, which had a porch that ran around two sides. Mounted under the eaves on each porch side was what the adults called a “flood light.” When I first heard the term, I thought the lights must be meant to help in the frequent floods that we experienced in the spring.

Winter in My Community

During the winter, everything was shut down after Christmas. School was out, and church on Sunday was closed for three months. There wasn’t much work to do on the farm until spring, so we had a little time for loafing, or, the men and children did. I don’t believe the women ever had any time for loafing.

Our family was always a great game-playing family. We played checkers, and if we didn’t have a checkerboard, one of my brothers would make one. He would take a plank about 18 inches square; take a 1-inch tap from a bolt (you most likely call them a nut now) and heat the tap red hot;

During the 1930s and ’40s, unions came in and tried to organize the coal miners. Times were violent. The county to our south became known as “Bloody Harlan.” My Uncle Elmer owned shares in coal mines, so our family became targets for union-hired enforcers. One of their tactics was to sneak in during the night and shoot up our houses.

I recall my Grandma Mary Jane pushing me under the bed in the front bedroom and telling me not to move or make a sound until she came back. I held my hands over my ears as I lay flat on the cool wood floor. Light flooded the big central hall and the front windows when Grandma turned on the floodlights. They lit up the whole yard and the lands surrounding it. I don’t think they meant to kill anyone, but my grandparents returned fire. I wouldn’t have put it past Grandma to fill their butts with buckshot as they retreated. That’s how I learned what floodlights were for.

The first documented mining of coal in the United States was 50 tons dug in 1748 in Pennsylvania. Even though coal powered electricity for half the nation, it took many generations before the mines became electrified and mechanized. Clear up to the middle of the 20th century, my daddy wore a carbide light in his metal hat to light his way through the tunnels, and they still used mine ponies to pull out the loaded carts.

The United Mine Workers eventually unionized much of the mining industry, bringing higher wages, safer conditions, and the requirement for mines to replenish the land they destroy. Long before that, my uncle was out of the mine business and into politics, and I had grown up and moved away from the hills of Kentucky. Now, we take lightning-speed electronics for granted, but for the little girl hiding under her grandma’s bed, electricity was a miracle that flooded the night with the safety of light.

place it on the board, leaving it until it was burned black; then repeat until you had a black-and white-checkerboard. We played all kinds of cards, too. Some people thought it was a sin to play cards. My mother didn’t. She said she would rather have her children home playing cards than off somewhere else. There were so many of us that we could have two or three games going at the same time. We also played marbles in the middle of the living room floor. Some of our quieter games were Clubfist, My Bird Is a Pretty Bird and Solomon Said. We would sit around the fire and whistle tunes and guess what they were. I couldn’t whistle, but I could guess.

We always had a few chores to do. Mother would make

Lest We Forget is a book written in 1974 by Lynnie Davis White of Steubenville in Wayne County. She assembled memories and typed (or had them typed) and copied them to create a 70-page book that she dedicated to her grandchildren. It does not give her birth year, but it appears she was born around the turn of the 20th century. This woman, the youngest of 13 children, wanted to share with her family what it was like growing up without electricity, running water, a telephone, or heat. Here is an excerpt from her collection.

us piece one quilt square a day, tack a few carpet strings, and pick out the seeds from a tin cup of cotton (she raised her own cotton for quilts). After that, we were free to play.

The boys had to milk and feed the animals, keep plenty of wood to build the fire, and carry out the ashes. It took a tub and three boys to carry the ashes out to the ash hopper.

We read a lot. We always had plenty of books and magazines at our house. They were good books, too. Ivanhoe, Vanity Fair, Kenilworth, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The House of the Seven Gables and more. How we got them, I don’t know.

Mother, like all women, was always busy. She always had a quilt hanging from the ceiling, and at night, it was rolled up to the ceiling out of the way. Mother corded the cotton and wool into balls for the quilt. I can remember her spinning yard and knitting gloves and stockings. She made clothes for her children.

We always had gravy for breakfast with hot biscuits and

Chess Pie

By Candy Wafford, Lexington

My fork slides through the crackly surface. The velvetlike custard surrenders, and flakes of piecrust scatter across the plate. I bring the bite to my mouth; comforting smells of sweet sugar and rich butter tickle my nose. The rich filling melts on my tongue, and my taste buds tingle from the copious amounts of sugar. My eyes roll back with intense pleasure. A smile spreads across my face. Taking a bite of chess pie is a sensory experience. For me, it’s also an emotional one.

Chess pie is an old-fashioned Southern dessert. The ingredients are staples in most kitchens—flour, butter, sugar and eggs. Cornmeal may be added for a little texture. A treat thrown together using what was on-hand. Simplicity at its finest.

I wish I had a stained and tattered family recipe for my favorite treat. I fell in love with chess pie at Blue Boar Cafeteria, a chain restaurant with locations sprinkled throughout the Midwest. When I was growing up in Lexington in the 1970s, my family often visited the Blue Boar at Turfland Mall. My mother loved eating there after shopping at Tots and Teens and McAlpin’s, also in the mall. “C’mon girls, let’s go to Blue Boar. You can get a piece of pie, Candy,” she’d say as she held my younger sister Dawn’s hand. Blue Boar was a popular spot to eat after church. Kentucky’s Blue Law restricted most businesses from being open on Sundays, so the rest of the mall was quiet. Everyone wore their Sunday best. Men adjusted their ties seeking comfort. Little girls twirled in their dresses. Once through the long line, diners took a damp tray and slid it along. Ladies who seemed too old to work wore hairnets that resembled panty hose and dusty blue uniforms. Much of the food was unappealing to a picky eater like me. Carrot and raisin salad? No, thank you. Moving down the line, servers plopped sauce-laden meats and overcooked vegetables on plates before handing them to diners.

Last on the line were the desserts. Puddings of brown and white magically held their round shape. Jell-O cubes in rainbow shades of green, red and orange shimmered and shook, a party in a bowl. A variety of cakes and pies were available, including my beloved chess pie.

ham or sausage. We also had a big dinner. We didn’t have much for supper, just what was left from dinner and plenty of milk.

Winter may have been a dull time, but we really didn’t know it. There was no one around to tell us how unlucky we were and what an underprivileged life we were living. We knew our house was never too warm. Ice froze on our water pails in the kitchen. We had to wrap our canned fruit in quilts to keep the jars from freezing. We just put on our flannel gowns, jumped in the feather bed, pulled about a dozen quilts and blankets over us, and slept until morning. We thought we were lucky to have plenty of food, warm clothes, and plenty of brothers and sisters to play with.

My parents divorced when I was 8. Daddy often took my sister and me to Blue Boar for dinner. It was fast and cheap. The children’s special included a meat, vegetable and dessert for kids 12 and under. At 12, I shot up and out and looked older than I was but still ate “like a bird.” One night, we made our way through the dim hallway to the stainless-steel shelves stacked with pre-plated salads. I looked out from under my thick bangs and whispered, “I’ll have a kid’s plate.”

The white-haired lady behind the counter pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up on her nose and growled, “She’s too old for the kid’s special.”

“She’s only 12. She just looks older,” Daddy replied, turning on a charm he reserved for women of a certain age.

The grouch behind the counter wasn’t swayed by his flirting. “I don’t think she’s 12,” she said pursing her lips as if she had sucked on a lemon. Her eyes shifted back to me. I felt my cheeks flame.

Daddy, usually cool, snapped, “Next time, I’ll bring her birth certificate!” He nudged me down the line, fuming.

Embarrassed by Daddy’s anger, I didn’t look up as I ordered Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. When I got to the desserts, I scanned the rows of chocolate cake and apple pie. Most kids chose gelatinous pudding or brightly colored Jell-O topped with a kiss of fake whipped cream. Not me. I eagerly grabbed a slice of nondescript chess pie. Daddy smiled, his anger evaporating like the steam coming off the chafing dishes.

While Daddy pulled cash out of his front pocket to pay for our dinner, I leaned into him and rested my head on his arm. A silent thank-you for defending me. The discomfort I had felt a moment before transformed into a moment of feeling loved and protected.

My love of chess pie, in all its simple pleasure, came from time spent with my fractured family at Blue Boar. Now, when I sit down with a slice, I close my eyes and am transported to my youth. I hear the clank of dishes being cleared from tables, Mama chatting with a waitress, or Daddy laughing as he tells a joke. I take a bite, savoring the sugary sweetness as the pie dissolves on my tongue. I smile and miss them a tiny bit less.

Candy Wafford shares stories at whereivebeentravel.com.

“I loved being outside. We’d hold lightning bugs in our fingers and pretend they were diamond rings.” Loretta Lynn

This quilt rack likely was similar to the one Lynnie grew up with.

Why Both Sides Wanted Kentucky in the Civil War

Dr. Marshall Myers, Richmond

Any study of Kentucky and the Civil War usually includes President Abraham Lincoln’s explaining why he thought keeping Kentucky in the Union was an absolute necessity: “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, and we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”

President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy thought that having Kentucky in the new Confederate States of America was important to the South’s cause, too. In an impassioned letter to Kentucky Gov. Beriah Magoffin, Davis assured the governor that the Confederacy intended to keep its hands off the Commonwealth and respect Kentucky’s neutrality in the early days of the war, hoping that such restraint later would steer Kentucky toward the Confederate cause. In the same letter, Davis vigorously objected to the occupation of Union forces at Camp Dick Robinson in Garrard County and to the distribution of “Lincoln guns,” designed to aid Union supporters in the central portion of the state.

Kentucky worked hard to achieve neutrality and strived to mediate between the North and South to avoid the internecine war, but neutrality was short-lived when the Confederates occupied Columbus in far western Kentucky and angered the state legislature, which quickly aligned itself with the Union.

The South saw the stationing of troops at Camp Dick Robinson as a clear violation of the neutrality that most Kentuckians sought at the time and a justifiable reason to seize Columbus, which was vital, they thought, to controlling the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Yet as clear as these Northern and Southern violations were, the North and South still truly wanted Kentucky to fight for their respective causes. Why? What was there about the state that was so alluring to both the North and South?

Union supporters and others pointed out the most obvious reason the Union and Confederate governments wanted the Bluegrass State: the natural defensive border the 700 miles of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers formed. It was a natural line that Confederate forces could occupy in defense of any Yankee incursion into the lower South.

But Kentucky sided with the North, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were not the natural defense line the Confederates wanted. As a result, the state was not the scene of numerous battles and rampant destruction. With the exception of the Battle of Perryville, the battles within the state were few and limited. Instead, skirmishes were the rule rather than large pitched battles with seas of blue and gray. Most battles of real consequence in the geographical area occurred south of Kentucky in Tennessee.

Lowell Harrison’s book The Civil War in Kentucky lists a number of political and economic factors that made the

Bluegrass State so inviting to the North and the South. For example, Kentucky was ninth in population in the country. With that many people, Kentucky was an economic power to deal with.

In a largely agricultural nation, Kentucky harvested a variety of crops, including hemp, flax, corn and wheat. Some of the grains were ingredients in bourbon—then, as now, identified with the Commonwealth. Kentucky also produced tobacco, which often was shipped by river to destinations north and south. Kentucky ranked seventh in the nation in the value of farms and fifth in the value of its livestock. Kentucky was already well known for its horses and mules. Sen. Henry Clay’s attempts at raising excellent horse flesh helped to plant the seed for the development of the horse farms that are an important part of the horse industry.

Vastly important in the minds of mid-19th century Kentuckians was the question of slavery. All the states that seceded from the Union were slave states. Seceded states such as Arkansas and Texas had fewer slaves than Kentucky, so many Kentuckians saw the existence of slavery as central to the question of secession and concluded that the state should join their Southern brothers in what Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens called a “slavocracy.” Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech was then a clear indication that he meant to end slavery in the entire nation, including Kentucky.

Curiously, though, a vast majority were willing to stay in the Union if Lincoln would allow slavery to exist. The issue of slavery in Kentucky is a complicated one involving matters of kin and other gentle relationships.

There are more familial, sentimental reasons that both sides wanted Kentucky in its fold: Its citizens had strong ties to the North and the South. Many Kentuckians had been early settlers in both areas.

Much of the deep South was settled by Kentuckians who became the early founders of Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas. Thus, the culture was similar to that of the Bluegrass State. Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky and proud of his Kentucky roots.

The dialects of many Southerners, even today, reflect their roots in the dialects of those in Kentucky. “Speaking my language” meant much to these early settlers of much of the South. While many patricians spoke in a different dialect, the vast majority of white citizens—the so-called “common people”—reflected the broad and deep influences of their Kentucky ancestors.

At the same time, many early pioneers of Kentucky later left the state for the lower quarters of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois—some to escape the horrors and competition of slavery, others such as the president’s father, Thomas Lincoln, to get a “clear title.” Even Daniel Boone, known for opening up Kentucky to settlement, had trouble getting a clear title to his land, with many land companies granting ownership to the same land. The land itself above the Ohio

and Mississippi rivers was rich in soil and the economic opportunities for advancement in states where upward mobility was possible without the stain of slavery. For whatever reason, many settlers of these states in the lower Midwest had Kentucky roots in culture and heritage. While they generally were not ardent abolitionists, the pull to remain in the Union was strong from these Midwest neighbors.

The dialects of those parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois also shared similar speech. While the patricians of the Deep South were not a part of this dialect, the “common people” of Kentucky were well represented.

Prior to the opening of railroads, the two rivers were the main arteries of commerce in the region for much of the South and the Midwest. Flatboats filled with produce from the East and much of the Midwest and South became familiar sights on the rivers.

Because of the falls at Louisville, the city became important for commerce on the Ohio River. The river town became the meeting place of traders from the North and the South. Louisville also became a center of trade in slaves who had been sold on their way to plantations in the cotton-growing lower South. Those arguing for secession made their case that the market for selling excess numbers of slaves would close if Kentucky backed the North.

Sometimes, runaway slaves used the Ohio River as a “Jordan,” where they could cross over to freedom in Indiana on their way, many times, to become integrated into Canadian society.

Quite alluring was that Kentucky during those early days of the Republic was important for its political leaders. The most famous for his attempts to avoid the

specter of war was Clay, whose Compromises of 1820 and 1850 at least delayed the Civil War. After Clay’s death, in the years before the war, Sen. John J. Crittenden assumed Clay’s mantle of compromise and proposed his own valiant attempt at avoiding the war. Although he worked tirelessly to prevent the “irrepressible conflict,” both sides summarily rejected his proposal, in spite of his political persuasion.

Kentucky’s political power still was firmly felt in the election of 1860, with candidates John C. Breckinridge, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis all born in the state. In the presidential election of 1860, Kentucky residents often were confused and pulled in different directions, unable to unite around one candidate. In the end, the Constitutional Union party of John C. Bell, who proposed compromise, slavery and staying in the Union, won the state. And for the duration of the war, Kentucky did align itself, sometimes reluctantly, with the Union, but residents in the Commonwealth kept their slaves. Neutrality had not worked, and violence tore at the fabric of the Commonwealth as it settled into an uneasy peace with some residents supporting the Confederacy, others the Union.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Thomas Merton

This sketch by H. Mosler, titled “Landing of Ohio Troops at Louisville, Kentucky,” appeared in the Jan. 11, 1862, issue of Harper’s Weekly.

Dr. Marshall Myers is a historian and professor emeritus at Eastern Kentucky University. He has written hundreds of articles and several books. His latest book, Enslavement in Kentucky, was published in June 2022.

Remembering William H. Townsend: Collector of All Things Lincoln

By John W. McCauley, Lexington

William H. “Bill”

Townsend was an author, historian, lawyer and a nationally known Abraham Lincoln authority and collector. He owned the largest privately held collection of Lincoln memorabilia in the United States. His collection, with more 2,500 items, included books, paintings, papers, law books, signatures of the former president, a shawl worn by Mary Todd Lincoln, and Lincoln’s prized pocket watch. The collection even included a check written and signed by Lincoln to his third son, Willie, who lay ill in the White House, which was to be cashed by Willie upon his return to health. Unfortunately, Willie died on Feb. 20, 1862, of typhoid fever, and the check was never cashed.

Our Commonwealth has seen several gifted and colorful storytellers through its history but perhaps none like Bill Townsend. In 1890, Simon Bolivar Buckner was governor of Kentucky, hemp and tobacco were set in the fields, and a country doctor and his wife had a baby boy. William Henry Townsend was born on May 31 in Glensboro in Anderson County. This was a time in our Commonwealth when Civil War veterans and Lincoln kinsmen alike were telling stories, and residents of the Salt River Valley were no exception. This was a rural area that had limited rail service from Lexington and Louisville.

Bill, as he was known, was a curious lad and was fascinated by the Civil War. His parents, Oliver L. and Susan Mary Brown Townsend, were important influences on Bill, particularly his father. As a youngster, Bill made the rounds with his physician father in a horse-drawn buggy, while Dr. Townsend made house calls. The time spent with his father was an invaluable part of his development and education. In between stops, they discussed agriculture, history, literature and politics. One day, Dr. Townsend stopped to visit with a farmer friend who had just dug up a Civil War cannonball. The farmer had no interest in his find, but Bill was intrigued and offered to purchase the cannonball for a dime. The deal was done, and a collector was born.

Townsend, like many boys in those days, romanticized the Confederacy, and his hero at the time was Gen. Robert E. Lee. Townsend grew up listening to family, friends and

neighbors—mostly Confederate veterans—tell stories about the war. He also loved to hunt, trap and search for arrowheads.

Much like Lincoln, Townsend began his education in a one-room school in rural Kentucky. His first teacher was Professor Ezra L. Gillis, who later became the first registrar at the University of Kentucky. After graduating from high school, Townsend eventually made his way to Lexington to attend State College (now the University of Kentucky). Upon graduation, he attended law school at UK, eventually earning an bachelor of laws degree. He graduated in 1912.

While in college, Townsend met Genevieve Johnson from Missouri. Johnson graduated in early June 1915, and on the 16th of that month, she became Mrs. William H. Townsend.

Bill was devoted to Genevieve. Shortly after the birth of their only child, Mary Genevieve, the young mother became ill with typhoid fever, and her recovery took several years. Per doctor’s orders, it was decided that she should live in a climate that would be more conducive to fostering her back to health. While Bill remained in Lexington, Genevieve, Mary and Genevieve’s mother relocated to a cottage near the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. Bill had joined the law firm of Stoll and Bush, where he was doing well as a young lawyer, and he traveled by train every weekend to Asheville to visit Genevieve and Mary. This routine continued until Genevieve’s recovery and return home to 28 Mentelle Park in Lexington.

In 1919, during one of Townsend’s trips to Asheville, he visited an old bookstore and purchased Portrait Life of Lincoln by Francis T. Miller. He later purchased The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln by Dr. William E. Barton, a congregational minister from Chicago. The book purchases became the start of the largest privately held Lincoln collection in the U.S.

Townsend was so impressed with The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln that he mailed his copy to Barton requesting a personal inscription. This opened the door to a friendship and many miles of Lincoln research together.

Townsend and Barton were close, even to the extent that in 1930, when Barton became serously ill, he asked Townsend to complete his book President Lincoln should he

Townsend in his Lexington law office.

Courtesy of University of Kentucky

not regain health and be able to finish the project. Barton died on Dec. 7 of that year, and Townsend fulfilled his promise to complete the book. Townsend received excellent reviews for his contribution.

In 1921, Barton introduced Townsend to Emilie “Emily” Todd Helm, who was in her mid-80s at the time. Mrs. Helm was the younger sister of Mary Todd Lincoln and lived about 6 miles southwest of Lexington on Bowman Mill Road in a Greek Revival mansion purchased by her son, Benjamin Hardin Helm Jr., in 1912. It was the beginning of a great friendship among Emily, Bill and their families.

Emily was the widow of Benjamin Hardin Helm, a Confederate brigadier general who was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga leading the Kentucky volunteers known as the Orphan Brigade. Helm was the son of Kentucky Gov. John LaRue Helm of Elizabethtown. Though a daughter of the South, Emily became an outspoken proponent of reconciliation in the years following the war.

Townsend made frequent trips to Helm Place to visit with Emily and her family. It was during these visits that Emily became more comfortable with Bill and let him read from the diary that she had kept during the war. The diary revealed details about the war and her time in the White House following her husband’s death. Bill was able to obtain a great deal of Lincoln and Civil War history from the diary. Unfortunately, Emily made good on a promise that she would burn the diary before her death because it had too much bitterness. The once dark-haired, dark-eyed pretty young girl whom Lincoln affectionately nicknamed “Little Sister” died on Feb. 20, 1930, at the age of 93. Her funeral at Helm Place was attended by family, the Townsends and staff. She was laid to rest in the Todd family plot in the Lexington Cemetery.

Prior to her mother’s passing and with the assistance of Townsend, Emily’s daughter Katherine published her only book, The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln. Katherine was a wellknown artist who painted the portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln that hangs in the White House today. Katherine died in 1937 and was laid to rest next to her mother at the Lexington Cemetery.

Following the death of Ben Jr. in 1946, Townsend purchased Helm Place and its contents but with no intent of leaving his home at 28 Mentelle Park. Helm Place became the residence of his daughter Mary Genevieve, her first husband Tom and their daughter Elodie. An attorney by

profession and lifelong Democrat, Townsend was better known and recognized as a leading expert on Lincoln. In 1953, Townsend founded the Kentucky Civil War Roundtable and served as the group’s president until his death 11 years later. His books included Abraham Lincoln, Defendant: Lincoln’s Most Interesting Lawsuit (1923), Lincoln the Litigant (1925), Lincoln and His Wife’s Home Town (1929), Lincoln and Liquor (1934), Famous Speeches of Abraham Lincoln (1935), The Boarding School of M.T. Lincoln (1941), Lincoln’s Rebel Niece, Katherine Helm: Artist and Author (1945), Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky (1955), Hundred Proof, Salt River Sketches & Memoirs of the Bluegrass (1964) and The Lion of Whitehall: Cassius Clay (1967).

During this period, Bill and Genevieve continued to frequent Helm Place, where Bill enjoyed having his fellow writers and Civil War Roundtable colleagues visit the mansion to talk history and sip Kentucky bourbon. Some of the more famous visitors included Carl Sandburg, J. Winston Coleman and Dr. Thomas D. Clark.

In the Townsend collection, the Lincoln pocket watch was the most prized item. This rare timepiece was passed to Robert Todd Lincoln upon his father’s death on April 15, 1865. When Robert passed on July 26, 1926, he willed the watch to his first cousin, Benjamin Hardin Helm Jr. On May 31, 1943, Helm gave the Lincoln pocket watch to Townsend as a birthday gift. Today, the watch is on display at the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort.

On July 25, 1964, Townsend passed at the age of 74. He received tributes from The New York Times and many other publications. The headline of a Lexington Herald editorial read, “Townsend, Man of Great Talents.” The article stated, Kentucky has produced many notable men, but few were blessed with many abilities that were combined in William H. Townsend … Kentucky has lost its outstanding citizen, a writer and speaker of great ability, and the nation perhaps the greatest authority on Abraham Lincoln in the passing of William H. Townsend. He became not only a successful corporation and trial attorney by avocation, but one of the nation’s authorities on Abraham Lincoln and collectors of Lincolniana, an author whose works are respected for sound historical content and literary style and a public speaker and raconteur of rare talent.

Townsend was laid to rest in the Lexington Cemetery.

In closing, it is notable to mention that Townsend’s home at 28 Mentelle Park, in Lexington, was once the site of Madame Charlotte LeClerc Mentelle’s Mentelle’s for Young Ladies, a finishing school attended by Mary and Emily Todd.

Above, birthday greeting from Ben Hardin Helm Jr. to Bill Townsend; top, Lincoln’s pocket watch, which Helm gave to Townsend. … can be seen in front of the Louisville Slugger Museum in Louisville.

Courtesy of University of Kentucky

Courtesy of Kentucky Historical Society

The Hand-Illustrated Covers of Leonard J. Turley

Founder of the Art Cover Exchange

By Allan Weiss, Louisville

Leonard J. Turley was to philately what Norman Rockwell was to magazines. The Louisville native founded the Art Cover Exchange (A.C.E.) in 1934. Turley (Jan. 27, 1893-June 14, 1980) formed the group for the purpose of using covers to exchange artwork along with the letters and combined Turley’s interest in philately, art and communication.

The earliest known Turley cover is postmarked Oct. 7, 1934. The first-known Art Cover Exchange cover is postmarked Nov. 23, 1934. The club was founded in October 1934. Turley was elected the first president of the A.C.E. in late 1934.

Each A.C.E. member had a number. Turley was A.C.E. No. 1 and Victor H. Horn was A.C.E. No. 2. The group grew to more than 600 by the end of World War II and had members from around the world.

The collection includes portraits, caricatures, the first election of A.C.E. officers, landscapes, special greetings and travel. It also has patriotic, holiday and political cartoons.

Turley’s work introduced postal history collectors and the public to the folk expression of handillustrated covers, which are different from cachets on First Day or Event Covers issued as an adjunct to the postage stamp or cancellations.

All of Turley’s covers are hand drawn and one of a kind. The cover art is done in pen and ink, watercolor and pencil. He used various artistic styles of the time. It is impossible to determine how many covers Turley created over the years. He is not known to have created covers commercially.

In more than 20 years of searching, I have seen fewer than 50 covers created by Turley. It is reported

A high school for young women, Bethel College in Hopkinsville was established in 1854 and closed in 1964.

that the family does not have many Turley covers done but rather most of the covers are the ones he received.

Each cover has a unique message. The addressee, the postman who delivered the mail, the postal history collector, the art world and the general public each would view and interpret the covers from their own unique perspectives.

Rarely do letters survive with the covers. However, based on my research over the years, it is fair to conclude that the cover art had something to do with the contents of the letter or previous correspondence. Longdistance telephone calls were expensive when these covers were created, so letters were the principal form of communication among family and friends.

Turley’s work represents the Golden Age of hand-illustrated covers in the United States and documents an important era in the history of the our country. His light-hearted caricatures, humorous cachets and pleasant landscapes must have brought some pleasure to the otherwise tedious times of the Great Depression and WWII.

In addition to starting the Art Cover Exchange, Turley was an authority on the postal history of Kentucky. He was known for sharing his knowledge with other collectors and helping them pursue their interest in philately.

Turley attended the Military Institute of Kentucky (later Kentucky Military Institute), a private school for grades 7-12. His collection of KMI postal history included every postmark from that institution, and at that time, KMI had its own post office on the premises.

CLASSIFIED ADS

by Bill Ellis

What Do You Read?

You might think that, because I am a retired historian and the author of more than 30 articles and six books of history, I might spend my waning years reading only history books.

WRONG! I read a few books of history a year, but mostly, I read novels and short stories. I love mysteries.

I have not given up on American authors. I have read most of Tony Hillerman’s works and continue to read those written by his daughter, Anne. I have read most of Margaret Truman’s mysteries.

For laughs, I don’t think you can beat Carl Hiaasen and the kooky folks he writes about in Florida. Being a fan of the movie A Christmas Story, I have a collection of books by Jean Shepherd Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry, James Lee Burke and Walter Moseley novels line my bookshelves. Among the older American writers of fiction, no one surpasses Edgar Allan Poe.

To be perfectly frank, I enjoy books about foreign climes. A Polish-American friend suggested Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times. I did not understand it completely and reread entire paragraphs, sometimes over and over. Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness’ novel Independent People turned out to be about the most depressing novel I have ever read, outranking even The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The COVID-19 pandemic changed my reading habits. Being cooped up indoors, I turned to the internet and ordered used books—mostly mysteries. Now, my bookshelves are overflowing.

I began ordering books by Agatha Christie, whose Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot adventures are always top notch. I have read a few books by Shamini Flint about Singapore Detective Singh, who travels away from his usual haunts to solve crimes.

Donna Leon, an American who now lives in Venice, Italy, has developed a large following with her series of novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, a sophisticated policeman. In southernmost Italy, Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Inspector Montalbano overcomes his vices and separation from his longtime female friend to solve interesting crimes. The former mystery series are cerebral in many ways, while

the latter might turn you off with foul language. Don’t miss a Donna Leon mystery.

Some of you may be Nordic Noir fans. I have read three Jo Nesbø novels about Harry Hole and have become a bit turned off. Perhaps some Kentucky Monthly readers think more highly of this genre than I do.

Besides Christie, there are many other interesting English masters of mystery, including Edith Pargeter, aka Ellis Peters, who wrote a long series of Brother Cadfael books as well as Inspector Felse mysteries. The early 1990s British TV/PBS series of Cadfael mysteries starring Derek Jacobi as a sleuthing Medieval monk led me to reading the novels.

Another great British writer, Dorothy L. Sayers, created masterful sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, an English playboy. In the 15 Wimsey novels and several of the Harriet Vane series I have read, Sayers proved to be a fine writer. She also wrote essays and an interesting book, The Whimsical Christian (1987), that I particularly enjoyed.

I think the greatest mystery writer is P.D. James. With the character of Adam Dalgliesh, she created in 14 mystery novels the most interesting detective of all time. This is just my opinion, but I think that David Suchet’s rendition of Detective Hercule Poirot outshines Christie’s wording, while the TV series version of Dalgliesh pales in comparison to the words of James. Among James’ other works is the dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992).

After a brief trip to South Africa years ago, I began reading some writers from that nation, including Nadine Gordimer. She was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and her novels and essays are truly outstanding.

I caught a 26-inch rainbow trout in the Cumberland River last May. I think I will reread Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It.

As you can see, my reading is not entirely systematic. I am 83 years old and read pretty much what I want.

Finally, being a born-again Baptist, I read the Bible. Each month, I read the book of James, which always helps me refocus on what kind of person I should be. “Blessed is the one who perseveres.”

Readers may contact Bill Ellis at editor@kentuckymonthly.com

Three Old Ginger Dogs: When he isn’t reading, Historian Bill relaxes at thrift stores with canine friends.

Nefarious Act or Accident?

Kentucky’s iconic Trappist monk Thomas Merton was one of the most influential religious writers of the 20th century. From his humble place of contemplative seclusion at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, he gained an international following inspired by his spiritual teachings.

“Father Louis,” as Merton often was called, died in 1968 in Bangkok, Thailand, while attending a monastic conference. It was reported that he expired from an electrical accident. Some believe that the reporting was inaccurate, and instead, his death a nefarious act—murder—perpetrated by the United States government for political purposes. John Smelcer, author of the book, Enacting Love: How Thomas Merton Died for Peace, is one who takes that view as a strong possibility.

Smelcer writes that he received information from a “fellow monk and a nun who had been Merton’s friend and acolyte,” this coming after the author acquired Merton’s worldly possessions, then later donated them to organizations for public viewing.

The author provides a wellresearched accounting of why he and others believe Merton knew of his approaching execution and the motivation for it.

By Steve Flairty

Enacting Love: How Thomas Merton Died for Peace, by John Smelcer, Naciketas Press, $17.95 (P)

Life Lessons from Gardening

Author and master gardener

Doris Dearen Settles has translated her love of nature into a charming gift for children with the picture book, Leira Clara’s Flowers. It is beautifully illustrated with vibrant watercolors by Dana McCall.

The 34-page paperback works as a read-aloud book or one for children to read independently. In the story, a young girl learns about and is inspired to see the benefits of gardening from her beloved grandmother. The girl uses her newfound passion for flowers to encourage others, in particular a surly neighbor, fittingly called Mr. Thorney. The result is powerful.

According to Settles, the book “demonstrates the ability of a child to understand that loneliness can lead to unhappiness and grumpiness and that gardening and flower-sharing have the power to open one’s heart to kindness, sharing and happiness.”

Settles also published Prohibition in Bardstown: Bourbon, Bootlegging & Saloons and two other books. She lives in Lexington. Book illustrator McCall resides in nearby Winchester.

By Steve Flairty

Leira Clara’s Flowers, Doris Dearen Settles, illustrated by Dana McCall, Shadelandhouse Modern Press, $12.50 (P)

Get ready for gardening season with down-home collection of practical advice and personal anecdotes from Kentucky Monthly’s gardening columnist, Walt Reichert. Organized by the seasons, each chapter offers color photography and straightforward tips for everything from combating critters to pairing plants. The Bluegrass State’s green thumbs have proliferated, thanks to Walt’s encouraging and down-to-earth morsels of gardening wisdom.

by Gary Garth

February Blues

February. Ask around and you’ll find it is a least favorite month, especially among those of us who like to prowl around in the woods and on the water. Not the least favorite, perhaps, but few outdoor types have a deep fondness for February.

This can be unfair, especially if you like to trout fish in Kentucky.

While trout fishing around the Commonwealth isn’t necessarily more productive in February than, say, May, June, September or October, there are more places to fish for trout right now.

Let me explain.

Kentucky’s trout program is hatchery supported. And while a few waters, including the Cumberland River tailwater below Wolf Creek Dam (the state’s largest and most productive trout water) and a handful of Appalachian creeks, experience some natural trout reproduction, the statewide program is supported by regular stockings. State fishery officials have identified numerous creeks and streams that have the water quality to support trout yearround. These waters get trout most months of the year, and some are managed under special regulations.

During the winter season, however, trout stocking is expanded to what the state fishery folks sometimes refer to as “seasonal” waters or “p-t” fisheries, which generally are lakes and ponds and a few streams that will support trout during the colder months but not during the summer. Trout are coldwater critters. When water temperatures creep into the 70s, trout

stress. Warmer water temperatures are fatal. The “p-t” is shorthand for put-and-take. These waters are stocked for wintertime fishing fun. Get out and catch some.

While the winter trout stocking bloom usually starts in November, February can be a particularly fun time to go. The weather is often surprisingly moderate. Trout that were stocked in the first round of winter stockings (and survived) have become somewhat acclimated to their surroundings. Fishing pressure will be light.

The Fishing in Neighborhoods (FINs) program particularly benefits from winter trout stockings. FINs lakes and ponds are found in urban settings across the state. More than 40 FINs waters get trout from October/ November though February/March. By late winter (February), fishing pressure often is surprisingly light, but the fish often are very cooperative.

Winter-season waters get rainbow trout from the Wolf Creek National Fish Hatchery. Stocking-size trout are generally 9-11 inches. Statewide daily and possession limits are generous, and there is no minimum size limit. Special regulations apply to some waters.

FINs lake aren’t the only waters that get winter trout. Morton’s Lake on the Higginson/Henry Wildlife Management Area (Union County), for example, usually gets a February stocking; so do Paintsville Lake (February and March) and a few others, including three waters on the Peabody Wildlife Management Area.

That is not a misprint, although Jeremy Shiflet, the state’s Northwestern Fishery District biologist, would understand if you thought it might be. The Peabody WMA is scattered across more than 41,000 acres in Ohio, Hopkins and Muhlenberg counties. It’s largely reclaimed strip mine property, and while it is dotted with hundreds of lakes and ponds—many of which harbor bass, panfish and other fish—only a handful have the temperature and water quality to support trout, and that’s only during cold-weather months.

“[Peabody] does get trout [stocked] in three lakes,” Shiflet said. “Rob’s Lake, Flycatcher Lake and Access Lake get trout.”

These are not managed as catchand-release fisheries. By late spring, the waters likely will be too warm for trout to survive.

“We want anglers to catch them and enjoy them,” Shiflet added.

Unless license exempt, anglers need both a fishing license and a trout stamp to possess trout from any waters. Anglers on the Peabody property also need a Peabody user permit, which is available where licenses are sold.

Trout stocking dates and times can vary during the winter due to weather and road conditions. For information about the trout stocking program, including the location of most stocked waters, visit fw.ky.gov or contact the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources at 1-800-858-1549.

February, of course, has other positive attributes. It’s Black History Month. It’s American Heart Month. It’s National Bird Feeding Month. And four United States presidents were born in February: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and William Henry Harrison

Only one, Washington, was a fisherman.

Readers may contact Gary Garth at editor@kentuckymonthly.com

Ongoing Gathering of Eagles, Kentucky Dam Village State Resort Park, Calvert City, through March 12, 270.362.4271

First Sunday Nature Stroll Bernheim

Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, 502.955.8512

Ongoing Kentucky

Women: Helen LaFrance, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, through April 29, 502.634.2700

27

Pride and Prejudice Preston Arts Center, Henderson, 270.826.5916

Ongoing Olde England on the Ohio: Louisville’s Tudor Revival, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, through March 3, 502.635.5083

1

21

Alice in Wonderland

EKU Center for the Arts, Richmond, 859.622.7469

10

Lorrie Morgan in Concert, RiverPark Center, Owensboro, 270.687.2770

17 No Limits Monster Trucks Appalachian Wireless Arena, Pikeville, through Feb. 18, 606.444.5500

24 Peter and the Starcatcher, Leeds Center for the Arts, Winchester, through Feb. 26, 859.744.6437

Ongoing Crazy Quilt Mania, Kentucky Museum, Bowling Green, through June 30, 270.745.2592

Ongoing West of Ninth: Race, Reckoning and Reconciliation, Frazier History Museum, Louisville through Sept. 1, 502.753.5663

“Olde England on the Ohio: Louisville's Tudor Revival"

vested interest

To “E” or Not to “e”

While not as historic as the 14-year, 158-letter exchange between Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that continued until both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the Deaton-Vest letters may carry more import than I realize.

I am reminded of a debate with Allen Anthony, a subscriber from Texas, who is an expert on the Fulton County exclave known as the Kentucky Bend, New Madrid Bend or Bessie Bend. The 26.9-square-mile piece of Kentucky is encircled on three sides by the Mississippi River and the fourth side by Tennessee. It is reachable only by boat or Tennessee State Route 22.

In Kentucky Monthly’s early days, the maps we used often omitted the speck. I would receive either a call or a letter from Mr. Anthony each time. Eventually, we learned to pay closer attention because the “Bend” is Kentucky’s beauty mark.

Now to our current debate: Several years ago, Gayle Deaton, a Breathitt County native who invited me to speak to the Jackson Women’s Club, mentioned at the Kentucky Book Fair that we should capitalize Eastern Kentucky, a suggestion I quickly forgot. She, however did not, and reminded me in a 2022 email exchange.

Deaton Letter No. 1 (abbreviated)

Now, about this email, kind sir. I noticed again in my e-newsletter (gotta get myself resubscribed! I miss it!) the E in Eastern Kentucky was once again mistyped by somebody as a lowercase e. That error keeps occurring, and the proofreader (surely not you?) passed it through by mistake!

I’m such a proud Eastern Kentuckian! We are deserving of the uppercase E, Steve! Just as folks in, oh, say, Southern California are worthy of their uppercase S! And how about Yankees (and other folks) who live in the area of NYC, known as the Upper East Side, which most only know about from movies like You’ve Got Mail, bless their hearts.

So, my friend—and I count you as a friend—how’s about rethinking your stance on that all-important E?

I guess I’m more sensitive about it all nowadays. My beloved hometown, Jackson, was nearly washed away in the July flood. My precious older sister’s beautiful home filled with floodwaters, and she and her husband barely made it out by wading in fast-rising thigh-high water. They’re resettled near me in the Louisville area (their younger daughter is an attorney in Shepherdsville). They have their sweet, cleaned, gutted brick home—overlooking the river—on the market.

Anyway, please consider rethinking your interpretation of whatever stylebook, or rule, you’re applying to your otherwise perfect and so beautiful publication. You’re

doing us Kentuckians proud, but we Eastern Kentuckians would be just a tad prouder IF …!

Blessings to you all, Gayle

My Response

Dear Gayle,

STEPHEN M. VEST Publisher + Editor-in-Chief

The reasoning behind why we haven’t uppercased northern, western, and eastern Kentucky is two-fold. First, we thought it might be confusing, especially since neither Eastern Kentucky University nor Western Kentucky University is in eastern or western Kentucky, and because there is no defined list of counties in these regions. Most people would consider Whitley County to be in eastern Kentucky, but Boyd, which is 200-plus miles east (and northeast) of Whitley, is not.

I used to think everything west of Interstate 65 was Western Kentucky and everything east of Interstate 75 was Eastern Kentucky, but that’s not true. Mount Sterling doesn’t consider itself in Eastern Kentucky, but Morehead (20 miles away) does.

Again, thanks for bringing me to Jackson.

Steve

P.S. Are you related to Jerry?

Deaton Letter No. 2 (also abbreviated)

Thanks so much for your kind response. As an Eastern Kentuckian, however, it makes absolutely no sense.

More than 50 years ago, when I was a student at Lees Junior College in Jackson, my English teacher hooked me up with a friend of hers, Larry Davis of the University of Chicago, who hired me to conduct tape-recorded interviews. I chose subjects in and around Jackson of different socioeconomic backgrounds and went to their homes or offices to do the sessions. Then I’d mail the cassette tapes to Larry, who was working on a fascinating study on the area of Chicago known as Uptown, which was inhabited by many transplanted Eastern Kentuckians who’d moved there for jobs. Even second- and thirdgeneration family members talked like folks back home instead of Chicagoans.

I truly hope you’ll decide to do as newspapers in Eastern Kentucky do—and some other media, too—and let us have that uppercase E; that would help some, after all we’ve been through this year.

Gayle

Before I respond, I’m asking your opinion. Please visit kentuckymonthly.com and vote “E” or “e” or send me a letter about something you’d liked changed. I pledge to consider it.

I’m guessing Gayle’s not related to Jerry.

Kwiz Answers: 1. B. when 105-year-old W.B. Ritchie died, he was survived by his wife, a sister, two daughters, eight grandchildren, 23 greatgrandchildren, 19 great-great-grandchildren and a great-great-great-grandchild; 2. A. XOXO. 3. A. Robards has penned more than 50 best-selling novels, beginning with Island Flame, which came from an English assignment she wrote at the University of Kentucky; 4. C. Several scenes take place in the well-known caves; 5. B. Love can be found at 37 degrees 16’ 59” North, 86 degrees 31’ 38” West; 6. B. You must tie the knot within a month; 7. B. “The Greatest” wedding begins at $171, according to Wedding-Spot.com; 8. B. Three strikes and you’re out. If you divorced the same man three times, you cannot marry him again; 9. C. Established in the 1960s, the UK Sweetheart Majorettes have been featured with the UK Marching Band since 1968; 10. A. Jim Beam’s limited-edition pajamas come with a built-in “hug simulator.”

DR. VIKTORIYA KASHIN, FNP, DNP FNU Alumna