JUDGE MITCHELL BURNS:
MARCH 25, 1900-DECEMBER 26, 1946

My father was born in Pineville, the son of John Burns (1865-1924) and Mahala (‘Haley’) Garrett (1873-1924). H.H. Fuson’s History of Bell County (Vol. 1) says ‘the first man who settled on the level ground at the mouth of Mill Creek (above Kettle Island) was James Burns. He had two sons: William Burns and James Burns Jr. Bill Burns had a son, Davis Burns. He built two sawmills and gristmills on Straight Creek, near Burns’ Spring and at Murphy Ward’s place. He went to the Big Sandy River and built mills there. He sawed the lumber on Straight Creek that went into the old Court House in old Pineville in the Narrows. This was Bell County’s first court house.’ Bell County death records of 1878 note the death at age 75 from ‘fever’ of William Burns. The record says that William was born (1803) in Bell County, and that his parents were James and Elizabeth Burns. Josie and Rose told me they thought the Burns clan came west from North Carolina.

William may have been the grandfather of John Burns (1865-1924). T.R. Ware’s history of Cumberland Ford in The Bell County Story (1967) says that ‘John Burns [possibly the father of John Burns, born 1865] was a member of the first Josh Bell County Fiscal Court, which met in 1867 in the home of C.C. Brittain, with Lewis F. Payne, county judge; James H. Lee, county clerk; and C.B. Brittain, deputy clerk.’ Mr. Ware cites M.G. Jones’ survey and plat of 1867. This shows old Pineville extending ‘from a point near where the old residence of John Burns now stands . . .’ on or near Cumberland Avenue, toward the Narrows. Bell County Marriage Books A and C note that ‘John Burns, justice of the peace,’ performed marriage ceremonies in 1868 and 1870. These may be references to ‘Johnny’ Burns (18??-18??) who married Rose Anne ‘Annie’ Lefevers (18??-19??). They had five children: Nan, William, Betsy, Bob, and John. In old age, Annie Lefevers Burns made her home with her son, my grandfather John. She lived to be 90, and her granddaughter, Josie, remembers her sitting on the porch, tatting beautiful lace, which she sold. Nancy Knuckles Garrett, the mother of John Burns’ wife Mahala, also made her home with her daughter and son-in-law, in her old age.

My grandfather John Burns could not read or write, though friends told his daughter, Josie, that he was ‘the smartest man in town. If had had an education, he might have owned half of Bell County.’ Mahala handled the paperwork connected with his business, which was buying and selling horses and mules (at one time he owned 44), and real estate, including rental property. He kept all his records in his head. No one could ever fool him about numbers. He had no need to write the figures down; he calculated in his head. He handled most of Pineville’s drayage work, employing gangs of men to drive his wagons: an illiterate ‘hillbilly’ had managed to become a prosperous horse-and-wagon wrangler and ‘A Man of Property’, despite a total lack of book ‘larnin’.

But after his death, two of his sons, budding alcoholics, the third a definite ne’er-do-well, soon dissipated his estate. Inman, the youngest, was a con man that managed to bilk many people, including his three wives, out of anything he could get. He also forged checks, for which he served time in the Ohio penitentiary. Louise and Judge were always apprehensive when Inman came around, which, since we had nothing of value, was, thankfully, seldom.

My grandfather John was five feet six inches in height, his wife almost five feet eleven. He had a small ‘corporation’ belly and an imposing, if ragged, mustache. He usually wore a black suit and white shirt, no tie. He always kept candy in his pockets, which he gave to children, who nicknamed him ‘Candy John.’ John and Mahala are buried in Pineville’s Odd Fellows cemetery.

I don’t know why my father was named ‘Judge’ or ‘Mitchell.’ Louise told me the Judge part was the name of a physician his mother had heard of. He began work with the Adams (later, Railway) Express Agency in 1917. He was just seventeen and not yet graduated from High School; so many men had volunteered for the Army there was a labor shortage. He was hired because of his excellent penmanship, which was expected, even demanded, then, but is little valued today. He was hired especially for his math skills, a talent he shared with his father, his brother Jim and his sister Rose. Excellent arithmetic was essential before calculators. [Information about John Burns’ children, James, Rose, Josie, Judge, Rob and Inman, can be found in Bell County Kentucky History and Families, Bell County Historical Society, Middlesborough, 1994.]

Jim’s son explained this family talent: ‘Dad could add, in his head, a full page of five digit figures and simply write the total, from left to right, at the bottom of the column. He did it without hesitation or much apparent effort. He could add three digit columns, several pages in length, the same way.’ I never observed my father quite as closely, probably because by the age at which I might have paid attention to such matters, he was no longer a Clerk and no longer in Pineville. But from what I do remember, and thanks to tiny fragments from Louise’s ‘archive,’ I know that Judge was as gifted in math as his siblings.

I especially remember his bold handwriting. He usually wrote with a pencil, as he had to press through to make carbons of shipping and billing notices; he sharpened the pencil with a pocketknife. He also used ink, but always with a steel quill and an open pot, never a fountain pen, which the Express Agency did not provide and he could not afford. At work, Judge usually wore a white shirt and a four-in-hand necktie, though I don’t think this was required. His fellow-employees also did not wear uniforms. But the truck drivers, like Alec Kellems, wore a cap with a lacquered bill, the crest of the cap embellished with the red diamond logo, ‘Railway Express.’ A few years ago in Washington’s Union Station, at a store selling memorabilia of The Age of Steam, I spotted an enameled-tin red diamond logo, ‘Railway Express.’ Of course, I HAD to have it and it’s now on the wall of our kitchen.

The Railway Express Office was located underneath the two Waiting Rooms, one for ‘White,’ one for ‘Colored,’ of the Passenger Terminal of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. The tracks snaked along the north bank of the Cumberland. To get to the Terminal one had to cross the river via a rickety steel bridge, a continuation of the town’s main street, Kentucky Avenue.

Bell County was formed in 1867 and named for Joshua Fry Bell, the great-grandson of Dr. Thomas Walker. He was named for Walker's neighbor and fellow-surveyor, Joshua Fry, whose map was the definitive resource for Virginians who sought land (that is, ALL Virginians). Bell was a lawyer in Danville, elected to Congress and the Kentucky Legislature. He died three years later.

Cumberland Ford changed its post-office name to Pineville the same year, and was incorporated as a city in 1880. The most significant event of that decade -- perhaps the most important event since The Wilderness Road -- was the extension of the L&N line from Corbin to Pineville and Wasioto in 1888. Because of the boom hyped by Alexander Arthur and British investors who thought the basin just below Cumberland Gap would become another Pittsburgh, the line then turned south to Middlesborough [often spelled today as ‘Middlesboro’], and from there to Norton in Virginia.

It took thirty more years before the line reached the rich timber and coal deposits of the upper Cumberland Valley in Harlan County.The coming of railroads meant eastern Kentucky coal could be mined and sold. When the railroad came, some thought Pineville would become a boomtown. A land-development company purchased the J.J. Gibson flood-plain property and platted and auctioned building lots. The book Bell County Tim Cornett is full of fascinating photographs of "a place steeped in history and imbued with a pioneering spirit." It captures the flavor of small-town life and is as cheerful as a Norman Rockwell painting.

Rapid industrialization after The Civil War required prodigious quantities of iron and steel -- for steam engines, skyscrapers, and rails to link a vast continent. To make steel you need coal that can be converted into hot-burning coke -- and there was no better place to obtain coking coal cheaply than Appalachia. In Night Comes To The Cumberlands, Harry Caudill shows how and why uneducated mountain landowners sold minerals worth billions for a pittance. Having sold their most valuable resource, many abandoned hardscrabble subsistence farms and moved to mining 'camps' to work in underground mines. Some were killed in explosions or roof-falls; some died coughing and gasping.

The mineral wealth that lay under the timbered hills was of little value until it could be hauled to the coking ovens and blast furnaces. Other companies were also snaking rails up remote hollers, and eventually every place with a thick coal seam also had a railroad line and spurs snaked outward as new coal camps sprang up, sometimes several in a single month, across the Cumberland Plateau. Steel rails soon linked every creek and holler in Bell County, and decades later in Harlan County -- at least every holler that had a coalmine.

The economy of Pineville, like all towns in eastern Kentucky, depended entirely on mines, and money in the pockets of miners. When the mines were working and miners could afford to buy things, merchants prospered. When the mines were closed and miners were laid off, there was little business. Eastern Kentucky coal mining peaked during World War I and for a few years afterward, and again in World War II and into the mid-50's. The 1930's Depression hit Appalachia hard; in fact, it never went away entirely. When John F. and Robert Kennedy wanted to attract attention to poverty, they went to Appalachian mining camps. Television and the Internet have ended remoteness and isolation. Schools are better and roads are incomparably better. People in eastern Kentucky are hard workers. But they need jobs, right now.

Bell County, like most of Appalachia, was endowed with rich resources of timber and coal. Yet after a century of exploitation of these resources, many people, perhaps a majority, remain trapped in persist-ent poverty. Why? What is the cause? Can we discern a tragic sequence? These questions were asked in a violent and dark melodrama, 'The Kentucky Cycle,' a powerful epic -- more about America than Kentucky – is marred by negative stereotypes.

A more nuanced analysis of endemic poverty is found in Scientific American's Special Issue, "Crossroad for Planet Earth" (September 2005): "Is poverty the result of exploitation of the poor by the rich? Affluent nations have repeatedly plundered and exploited poor countries through slavery, colonial rule and unfair trade practices. Yet it is perhaps more accurate to say that exploitation is the result of poverty (which leaves impoverished countries [and people] vulnerable to abuse) rather than the cause of it. Poverty is generally the result of low productivity per worker, which reflects poor health, lack of job-market skills, patchiness of infrastructure [roads, power plants, utility lines, shipping ports], chronic malnutrition and the like. Exploitation has played a role in producing some of these conditions, but deeper factors (geographic isolation, endemic diseases, ecological destruction, challenging conditions for food production) have tended to be more important and difficult to overcome without external help." The Ecologist, a British publication, issue of July/August 2005, has an article by Vandana Shiva who says, "The poor are not those who have been 'left behind'; they are the one who have been robbed."

Even as a toddler with my Mom by my side, I went often to visit my father at the Railway Express office. The L&N Terminal was by far the most interesting place in town. For several decades, say 1915-1955, for our little town, and for most other towns across America, the railroad station was the source of never-ending and free entertainment. For a child, and I think also for adults, it was a wonderful pageant. I enjoyed every single bit of it, even mundane things like the telegrapher, with his hand key and Morse code, and the Ticket Office.

I particularly admired the engine drivers, dressed in their special black-and-white striped overalls, red bandana at the neck, on their head a soft cap adorned with their impressive job title and the L&N logo. The fireman’s job, of course, was to shovel coal into the fire-bed from the tender in back of the engine and ‘keep up a head of steam’ in the boiler. The engineer and fireman, perched high up in the windows of the engine cab, would lean out first one side then the other, peering in the distance up the track, then back toward the cars of their train. They appeared to be lolling, seemingly nonchalant, though THEY were the ones in charge; THEY were the ones who made this giant machine GO!

A very rare, very special, treat, was riding in the locomotive cab from the Passenger Depot up North two miles, to the switching tracks at Wallsend. In my child’s-mind I remember it as a frequent occurrence, but in fact I think it happened only a few times, as it was strenuously discouraged by the L&N, though the engineers and firemen got a big kick out of it.

Conductors and Signalmen, even the Ticket-Seller and the Telegrapher, were attired in natty blue serge suits, the L&N logo embroidered on the lapels, vests adorned with gold watch chains and fobs, totems of membership in The Masons, The Elks, The Odd Fellows. They consulted their large, ponderous with an air of grave importance. [Their pocket watches, special Railroad Models made by Hamilton and Waltham, were kept in good repair by Mr. Rector, his bench in front of his shop window on Kentucky Avenue, looking like Cyclops with his eye-loupe, impossibly tiny tools making intricate adjustments to complicated mechanisms; the window gave him good light, but it was also effective advertising.] The railroad men were well aware of the drama, which they relished. ‘Working on the railroad’ was A GOOD JOB!

The long coal trains awed me then, and still do. Some comprised well over a hundred gondolas and stretched more than a mile in length. There were also maintenance trains with steam shovels, cranes, and gangs of rough workmen, manhandling heavy rails and sledgehammering thick spikes. I enjoyed walking along the rail tops, or skipping along the oak crossties, kicking the gravel track bed. I was once taken for a joy ride, and WHAT JOY!, on a handcart, ‘rowed’ along by two men pushing down, pulling up, on a huge lever.

Of course, the real SPECTACLE, almost a sound-and-light show, was provided by the giant locomotive engines, ponderous and imposing black iron cylinders studded with mysterious and almost-certainly-dangerous pipes and valves [who KNEW what they did!?], pistons bleeding white steam, the smokestack throwing a long plume of black smoke and sparks, the fire-bed glowing red in the night or in the dark before dawn. The railroad was a thrilling fantasy-world.

People in Pineville, young or old, could instantly decipher the low, sustained whistles, the sounds flowing for MILES up and down our valley. ‘That’s the morning six-forty-five; it left last night from Louisville. That’s the seven-oh-ten, up from Norton.’ The whistles were a public time system. Whistles announced the arrival and departure of the two morning passenger trains, and warned us kids that we would soon be roused from bed. The whistles even told us how much time we had left to get dressed for school. Toward the close of the day, we knew it was getting on toward suppertime when we heard the whistle of the two late-afternoon passenger trains, one going north to Louisville or Cincinnati, the other east toward Harlan or Norton.

Even after the passenger trains were through for the day, and as I lay in bed, I heard the whistles of coal trains, chugging through the night, the sound evoking a child’s half wake/half dream image of smoke and steam. If it was VERY late, and if the house was quiet enough, I also heard, very faintly, a rhythmic Clack! Clack! . . . the sound carrying perhaps a full mile across the valley from where I lay, as steel wheels rattled over the rail-joints.

I often walked to The Terminal with my Mom even before I was old enough to go to school. When I was older, after school was over, I went almost every day by myself. As long as I did nothing dangerous, my Dad was happy to let me hang out with him. I watched everything and I loved it all, the arrival and departure of the trains, the noisy, complicated coupling and uncoupling of passenger and freight cars, engines and cabooses, the bustle of the Express Office.

I remember many happy times, times when Judge was sober, times when the day was warm and sunny. I remember us heading back home together, me on roller skates, going backward (so proud of myself, skating BACKWARD!) down the sidewalk of Kentucky Avenue. When we lived in Wallsend, Judge and I rode home a few times in the caboose of a coal train. The trains always stopped there two miles north of the Passenger Terminal, to take on water before heading off toward Crab Orchard and The Bluegrass. This stop was where Judge and I got off and walked the quarter-mile to our house.

Churches were, and still are, the center of all social life in our town. There was the big, thriving Baptist church, whose pastor, L.C. Kelly, inspired by the mountaineer’s fervor of faith but appalled at the ignorance and illiteracy which made it impossible for those who had been ‘called’ to read The Bible, had started The Mountain Preacher’s Bible School at Clear Creek. Others were The Methodist Church, The Disciples of Christ [Christian Church], Presbyterians, the Nazarenes, and a tiny Catholic church. The ‘colored’ worshipped at an A.M.E. [African Methodist Episcopal] church on Tennessee Avenue. You never saw any ‘colored’ in the ‘white’ churches on Sunday mornings. Church socials, Church picnics, festivals of ‘Faith in Song,’ baptisms, especially the public ones in the river, the many ‘revivals,’ these events punctuated the year. The churches served as our grapevine, a never-ending source of gossip, some of it accurate.

Churches were only a part of the religious fervor that was part of daily life in Pineville. You could find a preacher ‘testifying’ on the Courthouse lawn almost every day, and on Saturday there might be half-a-dozen competing for attention. About once a year you might see a ‘snake-handler’ bring in a box of rattlesnakes or copperheads, but you usually found this only back of beyond, behind the most remote ridge. The preachers aimed for volume, and all had a strained rhythmic cadence, their utterances punctuated by gasping intakes of breath. “I’m an old man.” Gasp. “My eyes are dim.” Gasp. “But I can SEE!” Gasp. “The Good Lord Almighty! Say Amen somebody!” Gasp. Cough. “And I aim to GIT up thar!” Gasp. “An’ see the ivory palaces and walk in golden shoes.” Gasp. “An’ won’t that be a GLORIOUS DAY?!” Gasp, Hack. “I’m on my way to Heaven!” Coughing-fit. Spit tobacco juice.

Itinerant musicians, usually just a singing guitarist, could be found on street-corners on Saturdays. One black fellow, blind and thick and powerful, sang in a strong voice, and punctuated with offbeat rattles of the pennies in the tin can wired to the tuning pegs of his guitar. The songs were mostly gospel hymns. One I recall went like this: “Go down Moses” Huh! Rattle. Stomp. “Way Down in Egypt Lan’” Rattle. Huh! Huh! Rattle.

And we had plenty of ‘folk’ musicians, jaw harp [which we called “Jews harp”] harmonica [called “mouth organ”], and some guitars with a chrome steel sounding board. The mountain people all sang with the keening, piercing ‘high lonesome’ wail, which was and is, characteristic of Appalachian music. I heard something called “Bluegrass” (completely wrong name, since the Bluegrass area is the flat part of Kentucky, and this music was born and bred in the hills), was in The Terminal Lunch, and the recording was by Bill Monroe, competing with Bob Wills and the Texas Cowboys. We heard more of this year by year, and one troupe sponsored by radio station WHAS in Louisville, toured stops along the L&N line from Corbin to Harlan. And I somehow got to meet them and saw my name in The Courier-Journal the next week.

Sunday school was expected, and I enjoyed it. I can still remember the words to the song “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam. . .I’ll Be A Sunbeam For Him.” Paul’s sister Laura Greene was a kindly Sunday School teacher, and I thank her for the Bible stories I remember still, and memorization of some Bible verses. (The King James Bible is as fine a model of prose as Strunk and White). Our First Christian church was more properly named Disciples of Christ group, first known as “Campbellites” after their leader, Alexander Campbell, (1788-1866). It was basically a return to primitive Christianity, and believed in the universality of atonement. It sprang out of the frenzy of nineteenth-century frontier revivalism, which stamped the evangelical style on much of Southern religion. Campbellites discarded denominational labels as signs of division within the one church, preferring to call themselves simply "Christians." But over time they grew into an indigenous U.S. denomination, known usually as The Christian Church.

Pineville had, when I was a boy, a surprisingly literate weekly, The Sun & Cumberland Courier. The Editor, Herndon Evans, was so sharp he concluded his journalistic career as Editor of The Lexington Herald-Leader, and his name adorns The Lodge at Pine Mountain State Resort Park. I thought the linotype machine at The Sun was the most complicated mechanism I had ever seen, and I was totally fascinated. I edged up as close as the operator would allow, his fingers dancing across an arcane keyboard. After a line of molds for type had fallen into place, he would tip the bubbling pot of lead into the molds. This produced a line of type. He then bundled the lines and locked them into forms, ready to be inked and printed. I was once given ‘a line’ as a souvenir. Of course the words were BACKWARDS, but the linotype operators could decipher them instantly. Headlines, and ‘job printing’ for posters and flyers, letterheads and calling cards, and programs for school events, were set by hand, picking type letter-by-lettea flatr from the font cases, filling up the hand-case. The paper was printed on a flat-bed press; I especially liked to watch the inking-up of the type. The process was little changed from Ben Franklin’s day.

(The first and most SERIOUS! instruction I received on my first day as a copy boy at The Evening Star in Washington, was, ‘Don’t even THINK! of touching a piece of type; don’t LOOK at it! The type belongs to the ‘factory’ guys that run the machines. You are Editorial. If you so much as TOUCH a piece of type, the Union guys will Walk Off The Job, and we’ll have no paper at all!’)

I also tagged along when Judge went to pay money, or, more often, borrow money, from Joe Johnson, who had an office above The Coffee Pot Lunch and charged ‘only ten per cent’ [ten per cent a week!]. We also went to the imposing mansion occupied by Pineville’s other lender-of-last-resort, Bill Mayes, whose terms were identical to Liford’s, except that Mayes required Louise, or, better yet, Judge’s well-heeled brother Jim, who had risen from Clerk to Superintendent of the imposing International Harvester coal operation at Benham, to co-sign a Note. Judge hit his brother Jim so often that we really became unwelcome. This attitude toward us rubbed off to his son, who could not imagine, I suppose, that Judge’s son wanted nothing from him but just a bit of acquaintance between cousins.

Mountain people who had never enjoyed store-bought food from the coal mine commissaries, probably made out better during the worst of the Depression. They were certainly poor and ragged, but they had not forgotten frontier survival skills. They still knew where to find wild greens and berries, and how to dry them for winter. Many had some kind of corn patch and a hand-cranked quoirn for grinding, and they were not too proud to stew up squirrel meat. It was different in the coal camps, which is where the Depression hit hardest. Here you would find girls in dresses cut from feed sacks, everybody sick. Store owners in towns like Pineville thought up the idea of “The Santa Claus Train,” a guy dressed in red throwing cheap toys from the back of a train as it made its way through the coal camps.

We had something like this in our school one year. A teacher, motivated I am certain by Christian charity, thought we kids ought to take toys and gifts to those in our school who were so poor they would get nothing at all. I was part of a Second Grade “delegation” that knocked on the door of the hovel on the other side of the tracks in Wallsend occupied by our classmate, Ford Hinkle. No heat. Light only from a kerosene lantern. No rug. No furniture except a bed and a chair. Walls pasted with newspapers in a vain effort to keep out the wind. Our classmate was horribly embarrassed. We were horribly embarrassed. This was not a good idea.

During the worst years of The Depression, one of my household tasks was to operate a little machine to roll cigarettes for Judge, using of course the cheapest tobacco available, not really leaf at all, just stalks and auction-floor sweepings in tiny cotton bags which sold for a few cents. Judge was also addicted [perhaps a more precise term would be ‘dependent on’] caffeine. He would drink as many as twelve cups of coffee a day, and given his jumpy nervous tension, I cannot see how this could have been a good idea. I thought of him when I saw ads in the comic strips of the 1930’s for Sanka, just then coming on the market; the central feature of the ad was the jangly twitchy ‘Mr. Coffee Nerves.’

Judge also had one affliction which I have never heard of since: when he was drunk, which was at least once every two weeks, he would often begin to yawn uncontrollably, enormous yawns, his mouth so agape his jaws would snap!, locked wide-open. This caused immediate and severe pain, but there was simply no way he could get his jaws closed again. Fifty years later, I asked ‘young’ Doctor Wilson (who was by this time well past eighty!) about this. He said, ‘I treated Judge several times. His jaws were so painful I had to give him a little chloroform to get them closed.’ [The Merck Manual suggests this is an ‘internal tempomandibular derangement’; ‘lockjaw without infection’ sounds simpler.]

Judge suffered for years with nausea, stomach pain, and other intestinal problems, dosing himself with bicarbonate of soda, AlkaSeltzer, SalHepatica, Bisodol, Scalf’s Indian River Tonic, and many other patent medicines. The only effect, so far as I could tell, was a series of noisy burps. (Today, almost seventy years since his death, I feel fairly confident that his nausea and abdominal pain were symptoms of chronic pancreatitis, a common result of alcoholism, and almost certainly the precursor of his fatal cancer of the pancreas.)

Judge was as addicted to debt as he was to alcohol. The two fed off each other. He often didn’t have a cent when re-payment was due, and his creditors regularly attached or garnisheed his wage. This, of course, meant a ‘payless pay-day,’ no money for rent or food, and required him to borrow from somebody else, if he could FIND somebody else. Most often, he moved out his family just as rent was due and before the Sheriff showed up and our furniture was ‘set out in the street.’

For Louise, it was a kind of race, and she always lost. She was never fast enough to get to Judge before he had taken his cash and stopped off at one of the many “dives” at the end of the Terminal bridge. She was too proud and proper to set foot into one of these joints. I remember many occasions, so terribly humiliating for me, when she would send me up and down Pine Street, into all the dives. She herself, a respectable woman, would not dare enter, but since I was just a kid, she thought it was maybe okay. So it was left to me to poke my head in and ask in my timid boy-soprano “Is my Daddy here? Please, is my Daddy here? Has my Daddy been here? If you see my Daddy, PLEASE, please tell him to Come Home!” The outcome of this drama was always the same: Judge would stagger home late at night, drunk out of his mind, and with little if any cash left. This would be tough at any time, but it was impossible during the Depression.

We were poor, though Judge had a job!, and we were certainly nowhere near as poor as most in Appalachia in The Depression. Some of the MANY houses we lived in were pretty rough, but we were never without some kind of home, and I don’t remember ever going to bed hungry. But money was a constant worry. “Worry” is an entirely inadequate word for perennial terror. What I mean is deep fear, unending fear; fear of no home, no food. Of course, I was expected to do what I could, at least help out, and I was happy to do it. I was never asked to give my wages to Louise, and she let me buy malted milk-shakes which supplemented her normal tasty, but spartan, fare. I had so many little jobs I can’t remember them all: I made six a.m. fires for an old woman who lived a block away; I shoveled coal and emptied wastebaskets in Dr. Wilson’s office. One summer I hoed weeds in a corn patch near the Odd Fellow’s Cemetery. Mrs. Lucian Hodges hired me to wash dishes when she ran the dining room at The Continental Hotel. I worked beside my Mom when she went out picking blackberries, and when she made jelly and jam. She canned everything in-season and cheap; we lived on that all winter.

I once tried to make an inventory of the places we lived in from 1928 to 1943: the first I remember was the little house on Cumberland Avenue (I think it had been owned, and perhaps had been left to him, by Judge’s father). Then, the house owned by ‘old Dr. Wilson,’ where the A&P was later located. I remember that house particularly; I was about two, and we had just moved in; there were mothballs in some of the woolen things, and I thought they gave off the most interesting smell I had yet encountered. I started sniffing, kept on SNIFFING! and soon had the ball lodged up high inside my nostril. This required a trip to Dr. Wilson. I can’t quite remember how, but he got it out.

This was also the house we were living in when I heard excited talk about the river ‘in flood.’ I was not yet four, and had no idea what that meant, but it seemed interesting and I thought I ought to go down and check it out. Louise was sick with worry and sent out a General Alarm. I walked three blocks down Pine Street to the bridge, and was heading toward the water, when somebody saw me and hauled me back. I didn’t get far from Louise’s sight after that!

A year or so later, we lived in an apartment in what had been The Pineville Hotel, built about 1900 when there was hope that the little town might become prosperous, the center of a coal boom; but the old Hotel had fallen into disrepair. There was only one bathroom per floor, so we had to use a slop jar at night, which was humiliating then, and a little humiliating even in the recollection of it. Judge was drinking hard in those days, and the slop jar reeked with the piercing acrid smell of alcoholic urine.

We lived in a stucco house next to the Presbyterian Church and across the street from T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Asher’s white-columned mansion; his grandkids tried to drown me, or at least I thought they were trying to drown me!, in the goldfish pond in their backyard. The stucco house was torn down many years ago and the lot is now used for the Annual Breakfast offered by the Pineville Community Hospital to kick off the Saturday parade and pageant of the Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival.

That was Pineville’s biggest parade. But the one I remember best was on November 11, 1938, the 20th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I. There were many veterans of World War I marching with flags and rifles, some veterans of the Spanish-American War (I was so young I don't think I knew what or when that was), and two or three in their nineties, pushed in wheel chairs, survivors of the Civil War. They sure looked old enough!

Annie Walker Burns was married to Hargis, Judge's cousin. She spent her early married life in Wallins Creek. She was interested in her ancestors, and later became a professional genealogist. She wondered if her Walker line might be related to Dr. Thomas Walker, and was dismayed that all the historic glory went to Boone, with little or no recognition of Walker's earlier discoveries.

She worked for Flem Sampson of Barbourville [site of Walker's cabin], Governor of Kentucky, 1927-1931. She persuaded him that the State should honor its first European explorer. What better place than at The Narrows and Cumberland Ford? And what better time than when the hills were covered with blooming mountain laurel? With Sampson's enthusiastic endorsement, the 'Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival' was first held in 1931 at Clear Creek. It moved the next year to its permanent site, Laurel Cove, a natural amphitheater in Pine Mountain State Resort Park. The Cove has also been used for plays , such as 'Job,' and concerts by the Lexington Philharmonic. The Festival is Kentucky's longest-running event of its type. The Festival began as a celebration to honor Dr. Thomas Walker, a significant figure in Kentucky history. The event quickly evolved, however, into a beauty pageant of coeds from colleges across the State -- Princesses and a Queen -- even a 'pillow bearer' in white satin to carry the Queen's crown, and other panoply of a fairy-tale Court. The Bell County Historical Society has suggested that The Festival reconsider its original purpose, perhaps including historical re-enactors in the pageant. But there is resistance to changing a 75-year tradition.

We lived in a little apartment in the I.L. Hopkins Building on Virginia Avenue; and later, across the street in an apartment above Dr. Edward Wilson’s office, that is, ‘young Doctor Wilson.’ This one had only a kerosene stove; I cannot imagine how Louise could possibly have cooked on such a contraption. A flood brought water halfway up to the second floor where we lived; there were rowboats in the streets.

We also lived in a frame house in Wallsend, across a shaky bolted-iron bridge. This house was a regular stop when the trucks came up in June and July with watermelons or peaches from Georgia. And of course we had the usual Depression-era door-to-door salesmen – Bibles, encyclopedias, kitchenware, Fuller Brushes, or the vans hawking Watkins or Jewel T. products. The house was a hundred yards from the river. Louise cooked on a cast-iron stove, and managed to turn out good meals; my job was to haul in the coal, and keep the fire going. Her refrigerator was, like most in the early 1930s, an icebox: the ice company supplied a square, the corners of which said 25, 50, 75, or 100, indicating the number of pounds you wanted. We kids would follow the ice wagon, enjoying the slivers as the big block was chipped into the correct size. I liked that house maybe most of all.

Like everyone in The Depression, Louise haunted the Church rummage sales, scrounging for anything useful, such as clothing that might fit Dick or me. If someone had more apples or blackberries or black walnuts than they could use, or if someone had gathered more dandelions or wild greens than they could cook up, and offered some, Louise would gladly accept, though she was far too proud to ASK.

I remember the walnuts fondly. We were living in The Pineville Hotel, and there were many bushels of FREE nuts. Only trouble was, you had to get the green husks off, which meant your hands and clothing were stained brown for weeks. But I didn’t mind. It was a warm summer night, just getting dark, and fireflies were EVERYWHERE! blinking a code only they understood. I did not understand the code, but I sure enjoyed the twinkling glimmer of fireflies, and still do.

Louise was not selective in her frugality: she simply saved EVERYTHING!, a pack-rat trait that made her sister Rachel furious. Rachel would drive down from Black Mountain in their current-year (!) Buick sedan, which seemed to me the ritziest car in the world, a totem of their wealth. And Rachel would simply TEAR into Louise’s house, throwing out this, chucking that, burning stuff in the back yard, ranting a mile-a-minute about Louise’s pack rat ways, which Louise was, of course, unable to stop. I believe Rachel sincerely believed she was HELPING Louise by disposing of mountains of JUNK.

But Louise was offended, humiliated.

I confess I did the same thing sixty years later. My only excuse: a small apartment can only HOLD so much! Louise never lost that Depression-era survival skill. When I helped her move from her first Washington apartment, and from her second apartment to an assisted-living home, I discovered STUFF . . . mountains of STUFF! . . all neatly stacked, box after box, every one tied with ribbons. I feel sure Louise had no clear idea WHY she laboriously saved empty boxes and empty jars.

And was she ever a FANATIC about clean! She would wash the dishes, but if they had been ‘out’ for a couple of hours, would wash them all over again. The Germ Theory of Disease was BIG NEWS as Louise was growing up; was that the cause of her obsessive compulsion to clean? Or perhaps she had, as the psychiatrists delicately put it, a tendency toward the ‘anal-retentive’? Her obsession with cleanliness and fear of germs might have started when her father died of blood poisoning from an infected bite. Louise, only two years old, must have heard lots of talk about how “the germs killed him.”

She scrimped on herself so she could provide for her kids. I was pretty much spoiled rotten. I think I was treated like Duke Ellington, who said ‘my Mother never allowed my feet to touch the floor.’ Louise dressed me in neat corduroy knickers and Buster Brown shoes. Once I got a BRAND-NEW (not second-hand, not from a rummage sale, but NEW!) navy blue, wool jacket. I am deeply ashamed, more than SEVENTY YEARS LATER!, that on my way to second grade, while watching, completely fascinated, as WPA workmen applied roofing to the new Post Office, I brushed up against the hot tar-pot and got black tar on my BRAND-NEW coat! I cried so hard I thought my lungs and eyes would crack. Louise was heart-broken; there is simply no way, in the worst depths of The Depression, a Mother can afford to buy a SECOND, new, good-looking, warm wool jacket!

She cooked fudge and divinity candy; she made wonderful cornbread and pinto bean soup. I still have no idea how this poverty-stricken family managed it, but I found under our Christmas trees things like a Tom Mix pistol (rather amazingly assembled from wooden parts), an electric train, a chemistry set, Lincoln logs. I spent hours with straight pins and Testor’s glue, trying to fabricate model airplanes out of balsa wood kits (some actually flew, but never more than a few feet). I made a soap-box-derby car out of skate wheels. I tinkered with crystal radios and constructed breadboard radios (which ALMOST worked; at least I heard static), and studied Morse Code and the complicated schematic diagrams inside the annual AARRL yearbook (American Amateur Radio Relay League). I made and flew kites. I made a pinhole camera, but never got a single image from it. I had a puppy, ‘Pep,’ who licked my face and liked to sleep next to me, which I loved. But he got loose from our I.L. Hopkins apartment and was run over in the street.

Louise also wangled me a part in the Mountain Laurel Festival, started by Annie Walker Burns, married to Judge’s cousin Hargis. Annie Walker Burns had proposed that Dr. Thomas Walker [whose Journal was the first written record of Kentucky exploration] be honored by an annual event at Pineville. She was an indefatigable genealogist, and hoped she might be descended from Dr. Walker, but was never able to make a clear connection. She did, however, compile several books, including an exhaustive record of Walker’s descendants, published as Doctor Thomas Walker, First White Man of Any Distinction to Explore Kentucky.

Because of her determination (and her access to Governor Flem Sampson, for whom she worked as clerk-typist), she was able to get things going. Shouldn’t the State Honor its first explorer? Shouldn’t these beautiful mountains be the venue for the Celebration? The first two Festivals, in 1931 and 1932, were held at Clear Creek Baptist Bible College, an appropriate site, since Walker had camped on ‘Clover Creek’ [today, Clear Creek], which he followed to its confluence with a river, which he named ‘The Cumberland.’ In 1933 the event was moved to, a natural amphitheater in Pine Mountain State Resort Park. The Park had just opened, thanks to T.J. Asher’s gift of land, and hard work by CCC crews of unemployed young men. At age two and again at three, I was a ‘pillow bearer,’ dressed in white satin shorts, in the pageant that crowned The Queen of The Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival.

Pine Mountain State Resort Park, a place of surpassing natural beauty, lies along the southwestern slope of Pine Mountain. The idea of a park was pushed in the late 1920's by Herndon Evans, editor of The Pineville Sun [later, editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, and Kentucky Parks Commissioner]. T.J. Asher got the ball rolling with a gift of timbered land, and the C.C.C. built roads and cabins. The Park has been improved continuously for seven decades, and is a popular Kentucky destination. Wasioto Winds has been called America's most beautiful mountain golf course, suitable for golf champions. One green is on the very spot where Walker camped in 1750. The Park has miles of trails and a staff naturalist to help identify the profusion of plants and animals. Visitors are impressed by the sandstone outcrops along the crest of Pine Mountain, particularly Chained Rock, from which one can get a fine view of The Narrows and Cumberland Ford.

Our Boy Scout Troop would picnic under the enormous tilted sandstone rock known as 'Turtleback Rock,' used as a shelter by prehistoric Woodlands Indians. Then we’d wander down to Chained Rock and watch the trains as they chugged slowly around the curves of The Narrows. Jack Foley, strong and a wild dare-devil, walked across the Chain hand-over-hand. This was truly scary; he could easily have fallen, smashed down hundreds of feet. It seems somehow significant that as an adult, and suffering deep depression, he commited suicide by jumping out of a window at Pineville Hospital.

An Indian effigy of a human figure, carved of yellow pine, was found on a cliff there in 1869. The artifact is significant and rare, because little ancient wooden statuary survived fires and termites. The effigy was featured prominently at the Museum of the American Indian in New York, but the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington does not exhibit it.

I was two when My Mom began to take me with her to Gragg’s Rexall Drugstore, where someone would lift me onto the marble soda fountain or a tabletop, where I would sing in a little-boy soprano. The customers rewarded me with coins, at first a penny or two per song, later upped to a nickel each . . . quite a thrill then, and maybe a little thrill even now, remembering it.

The tunes I recall are ‘My Buddy,’ always requested by grizzled veterans of Chateau-Thierry, ‘There’s A Gold Mine In The Sky,’ ‘The Umbrella Song,’ ‘M.O.T.H.E.R’ and ‘My Mom.’ These last two invariably caused every mother within hearing to tear up. I also sang solos in The First Christian Church, egged on by our long-time choirmaster (and the town’s Assistant Postmaster), Paul Greene. He was a tenor, and sang quite well; I was flattered that he thought I could sing, too.

The singing TOOK, and I’m still at it. But I’m afraid that as far as church is concerned, I’m a total failure, not only a ‘back-slider’ and sinner, but what is far, far worse, a Secular Humanist! [Which reminds me of a line Claude Pepper used to great effect when he was, yet again, running for re-election to the Senate: ‘Folks, I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but my opponent is a flagrant THESPIAN!’ Pepper won, of course. Florida voters were not about to have any thespian represent them! (A Secular Humanist would be far, far worse.)]

Our classrooms were not identical, but most had a lithograph of George Washington and of Abraham Lincoln. They all had an American flag, and we began every “home room” session by saluting the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I liked all of my teachers, especially Paul Greene’s sisters Mollye and Laura. Others I remember fondly are two I didn’t have until 8th and 9th grades: Effie Arnett, an effective teacher of English, and Alva Tandy, a legendary teacher of algebra and geometry: strict, but respected, even LOVED!, by every child she ever taught. She wore her hair in a tight bun, and my mental image of her is like an early-20s black-and-white film, and I’m pretty sure that here dresses, plain and neat, all dated from about 1914. [The next time you see a Marx Brothers comedy of, say, 1931-38, note the society dame, who is their perfect foil, a female straight-man. That is Margaret Dumont, a great comedienne; slim Margaret down about fifty pounds, and you would have “Miss Tandy.” Every day she would extract a book of “aphorisms” from her desk, write one across the top of the blackboard and ask us to copy it into our workbooks. Can’t remember a single one today.

There was another teacher; I wish I could remember her name, who came to class fairly often wearing a thin silk blouse and NO BRA. Her ‘mams’ bounced appropriately, which was of course utterly FASCINATING for every boy in the class. I will never know whether she did this on purpose, whether it was a hot day and she wanted to wear as little as possible, or if she just was late, and had no time to put on all her clothing. I strongly suspect she enjoyed ‘teasing’ pubescent boys.

The town had a swimming pool located between the football end zone, and the river; I loved to swim, but I was too chicken to attempt the daredevil jackknifes and twirls the athletic kids displayed. But of course I ogled the girls, trying to figure out basic anatomy. At that age, I still couldn’t make it out. If I had grown up on a farm, there would have been no uncertainty! When we were living above the office of ‘young Dr. Wilson’ and I had been hired to sweep the floors and dust his office, I peeked into a copy of Gray’s Anatomy; there was no one around to stop me. But it was too much for me to absorb; I remained naïve.

Our three-story school had one feature I don’t recall seeing elsewhere: the fire escape looked like a silo; it held a slick metal slide, the purpose of which was, presumably, to get more kids out of the building faster and safer. We kids loved the slide just for the whirly sensation of it. Since we enjoyed it, the principal naturally locked the doors to the escape. I have no idea what would have happened if there been an actual FIRE!

I read constantly, even while eating, and thought I would invent some kind of clear plastic tray so the text of a book could be projected right onto your ‘plate’; that way you wouldn’t have to avert your eyes from the page for even a second. I also read while walking down the street, and it’s a miracle I never fell into an open manhole. I read anything and everything: all the type on the cereal boxes, train tickets, it didn’t much matter. Anything in print.

I’d go to J.J. Newberry Five-and-Dime and read all the Big Little Books. When finished with this assignment, I’d make the rounds of the three drug stores, reading every magazine (I particularly loved LIFE and The Reader’s Digest) and comic books (Terry and The Pirates, Smilin’ Jack, and Dick Tracy were favorites) and not buy a thing. If a school chum had a nickel we’d bump and shove the machine to make the chrome balls roll this way or that to flip the bumpers and trigger the lights. If the guy behind the fountain was friendly, I’d ask for “a pine float” – a glass of fizzy soda water, bubbles tickling the nose, a toothpick suspended on the surface.

I once set a goal: I would read EVERY book in our town’s little Library, housed next to the City Jail. With encouragement from our able Librarian, Clo Era Sewell, I very nearly made it. I read The Swiss Family Robinson at least five times straight through, Poe, O. Henry, deMaupassant, and other short stories. I liked Booth Tarkington, and Twain. I loved Richard Halliburton’s Royal Road to Romance, and every one of his other glorious travel stories. I suspect this may have put a life-long groove in my brain, persuading me that the only worthwhile life was one of adventure and travel.

My teachers were impressed with my incessant reading. This was not an option for me. I was definitely compulsive. In the fifth grade, I decided for some reason, maybe just the challenge of it, that I would read The World Book Encyclopedia in our school’s library. I started at the upper left-hand corner of Page One, and finished the entire thing before the end of the school year.

I was ‘double-promoted’ twice, a practice which was fairly common then, but which today inspires in me considerable doubt. The promotions gave me an exaggerated, and doubtless completely unwarranted, opinion of my intelligence. [It was simply ARROGANT, even for a child’s limited understanding, to imagine that at age nine, or eleven, or thirteen, or fifteen, I could run away from home, which I did!, and somehow ‘make it’ on determination alone. Arrogance later got me into some serious trouble].

Skipping ahead put me in classes with kids a year or two older than I was, and bigger and stronger to boot. Timid and skinny, I didn’t have the brawn or toughness to hold my own against bullying and teasing, common then and now, on grade-school playgrounds. The worst teasings I remember, and they happened fairly often (I don’t know why the teachers never intervened), was being held down and tickled until I became completely hysterical. This was cruel. The tickling by the bullyboys had me so nerve-shaken and out of control I should have been hospitalized. It took me hours to calm down.

It was impossible for my classmates to refrain from laughing when I stammered, which of course caused me to turn red and stammer even MORE. I don’t blame them; I would have laughed myself; it must have been a real hoot! to see me struggling, my body tense with effort and my face contorted into a hideous knot, trying, trying to speak, to say something, ANYTHING! There were months at a time when I could not utter one single word without stuttering badly, and there were many times I could not be understood at all. BUT I COULD SING! . . and I never EVER stammered when I sang! One teacher said, ‘David, why don’t you just SING your recitation?’

It’s hardly surprising that I retreated to books. And reading led, of course, to aspirations. Maybe I could become A WRITER! [Perhaps I am still ‘retreating’ today?]

Louise, ALWAYS A WORLD-CLASS WORRIER!, was terribly upset about my stuttering; she read everything she could find, but she never had any idea what, if anything, to do. She thought talking with marbles in my mouth might help; but that idea had died with Demosthenes. She suggested that I singsong my phrases, or speak more slowly, or e-nun-ci-ate. She sent me off to W.P. Slusher, a Pineville ‘personality’ who had made it big as ‘Preston, Magician and Hypnotist.’ ‘Preston’ gave it his best shot, in the hope that a post-hypnotic suggestion might cure my stammering. But he wasn’t able to hypnotize me AT ALL, I suspect because of my sheer childish willfulness: ‘I am stronger! He can’t ‘command’ ME!’

Nothing Louise tried or others suggested ever worked, and I continued to stammer, and still do. We still have little or no idea of the cause of stammering nor any effective way to correct it. My own theory, with no evidence at all, is that speech is simply a difficult exercise in coordination between the brain and a whole myriad of muscles. It's not surprising that there might be a little spasticity.

BUT I COULD SING! . . and I never EVER stammered when I sang! One teacher said, ‘David, why don’t you just SING your recitation?’

I enjoyed music a lot, particularly under the tutelage of our school’s music teacher, the beautiful and vivacious redhead, Miss Flossie Minter. I think she liked me; I sure liked her! She gave me a big part in the kiddies’ musical ‘Hansel and Gretel’ by Englebert Humperdinck, a name later adopted by a British rock star. I was minutely investigating the machinery for opening and closing the curtains and for dimming the lights; Miss Arnett, exasperated, scolded me: ‘David, you are A NUISANCE!’ I replied, ‘No, Miss Arnett, I am A WOOD SPRITE!’

But what should have been a source of pride, caused enormous humiliation. There were no dressing rooms in our school’s auditorium, used mainly for Lyceum events. So, during the operetta, the boys were to put on their costumes on one side of the stage, the girls on the other. Okay. Understood. But when I went offstage, I somehow made a wrong turn and ended up where the girls were dressing! and I SAW SOME OF THEM IN THEIR UNDERWEAR! How awful! What a sneak! A Peeping Tom! I knew I had messed up BIG TIME, and burst out crying: ‘I made a mistake! I made a mistake! I didn’t do it on purpose! NOT ON PURPOSE!’ I cried a lot.

After Daddy left, Louise was desperate and pleaded for work. Mr. Swafford at The Modern Bakery, like everyone in town, had heard about the embezzlement and firing, and knew Louise had two kids to support. He took pity and hired her to wrap cakes at ten cents an hour. This was a fair wage for Pineville in 1940.

The bakery made bread at another site, just over the Pine Street Bridge. Louise's bakery, on Kentucky Avenue, four hundred yards from the Depot Bridge, made cakes. It was filled with great sacks of flour and sugar, and steel barrels of shortening. Add flavoring and food color, and the result is moon pies, big bears, honey buns, sugar gems, cream fingers, Minnies (tiny sponge cakes), and Zingers, spiced with cinnamon zingers. Miner’s lunch-pails varied, but most contained pork chops if work was steady, or a baloney sandwich if part-time; a Baby Ruth or O Henry candy bar; and Copenhagen Snuff or a twist of Red Man. The Modern Bakery satisfied miner’s wives’ need for something cheap and sweet (and easy to eat inside a mine), Food went under the lunch-pail lid, water in a section beneath. A tight-fitting lid was essential; mine rats could work off loose lids and sometimes the miner found his food gone.

Louise stood at one end of a rubberized belt. She removed a cake from the wooden cooling tray, placed it on a sheet of cellophane, wrapped the cake, and sealed the cellophane on a hot plate before shoving it onto the belt. Once you got the rhythm, you could wrap a cake every two seconds. At the end, another lady packed cakes into boxes. Before dawn the next morning, the boxes were loaded into vans for delivery to commissaries and little convenience stores at mining camps all over Bell and Harlan counties.

After school, I hung out at the bakery, getting my eyes as close as possible to flour and sugar, the mixing, the pour into trays. The man who slid trays into the ovens was fat and smiled a lot. He was also a chain smoker and I’m sure a lot of cakes were spiced with tobacco ash. After the Bakery, my next favorite hangout was the Nehi bottling plant next door. It produced grape, orange, root beer, peach, King Kola, and blue Hawaiian Punch, all in longneck bottles. Like the Bakery, the bottling plant also had big sacks of sugar, the main ingredient. Empty bottles were ferried along a metal conveyor and filled with brightly colored liquids. The capping machine was the best part, with occasional excitement when a bottle exploded. This didn’t happen often enough to suit me.

I wandered the town’s nooks and crannies until Louise got off work. I learned the names of tools and parts at two hardware stores, Brandenburg and Gibson and Western Auto. I enjoyed the general creepiness of the Durham and Arnett funeral parlors. For "class," or what our little town thought was class, there was Miss Mabel Osborne’s Fashions for Ladies. The grocery stores included J.L. Saunder’s U-Tote-‘Em, the A&P, Piggly Wiggly, and an I.G.A. store. Steady sellers included canning supplies such as pectin for jam, lard (and its equivalent, the ‘oleomargarine’ which was white, with a little packet of coloring so you could make it look vaguely like butter). The three drugstores, Gragg’s Rexall, Bingham’s opposite the First State Bank, and Flocoe, all had comic books and cheap pulp magazines -- mainly detective, cowboy and science-fiction by H.P. Lovecraft. I preferred Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post, though could never afford to buy one. The latter magazine often had a humorous and well-written piece about Alexander Botts, a tractor salesman for the Eartworm [i.e., Caterpillar] tractor company.

My favorite was LIFE. Year after year, the Luce flagship showed us China and its suffering under the Japanese, and the necessity of providing lend-lease help to the embattled Brits. This message was reinforced by the movies – Fox Movietone and other newsreels. From 1937 onward this message was repeated by Hollywood, where villains were mainly Germans with heavy accents, or Japanese, always barbaric. Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu taught us about The Yellow Peril. Two years before Pearl Harbor we had already been taught to hate ‘those damn Japs.’ And Spike Jones taught us to laugh in “Der Fuehrer’s Face.”

I checked out the restaurants (families of Greek origin seemed to own the franchise): the New York Café decorated in linoleum and chrome, run by George Karloftis; the Kentucky Restaurant, operated by Nick Sideris, whose son Tony was a classmate and friend in Sunday School and Cub Scouts, and whose daughters Koula and Athena had a classical Greek beauty; and Harry Counides, who operated the Coffee Pot lunch, opposite the Court House. There was a fourth family we called “Reda” (it would not surprise me if the name were actually “Redopoulos”); they opened the Reda Theatre, a cinema competing with our first one, The Gaines operated by Handley Gaddie, and the Bell Theatre,built about 1939, filling in the vacant lot which was the usual venue for Medicine Shows, complete with an imported Cherokee, hawking various herbal tonics, the effective ingredient of which was always alcohol.

There was also something happening, at least the clacking of the teletype, at the Western Union office, fairly important in towns like Pineville, as desperate families waited for money to be wired from a relative employed somewhere up North. Movies offered the cheapest product they could find – shoot-em-up cowboy films with Hoot Gibson, and serials like “Flash Gordon” with Buster Crabbe. Nobody had money; movie admission had to be no more than a dime or two.

The Reda family also owned the corner building opposite J.J. Newberry five-and-dime; this ostensibly housed a restaurant, but its main reason-for-being was “billiards” (that is, pool), which is where I learned Nine Ball and its variations. I also learned to enjoy “Cincinnati Five-Way Chili.” Over time, and thanks to some people in Pineville who had been up to Cincinnati, we learned that this improbable dish was invented by a Greek immigrant, Tom [Athanas] Kiradjieff, who opened a Chili Parlor next to the Empress Burlesque on Vine Street in 1922. He began with the Coney Dog (after Coney Island), but kept adding stuff, including Macedonian flavors like allspice, cinnamon, bay leaves, and vinegar. Then he started serving the chili in a bowl without a hot dog – first one-way (with oyster crackers); then two-way (on a bed of spaghetti, crackers on the side); three-way (grated cheddar on top); four-way (chopped onions underneath cheese on top of chili over spaghetti, oyster crackers on the side); and five-way (spaghetti, chili, onions, kidney beans and grated cheese, oyster crackers on the side).

I hung around the Delaware Powder Company, which supplied dynamite, blasting caps and fuses to the mines. It was eerily quiet, which in retrospect seems desirable: not good to have loud noises around dynamite storage! Other crannies included the ‘dry-goods’ stores, all operated by Jews with roots in Cincinnati. Like the Greeks restaurant owners, these immigrant families wanted to get in on the coal boom in eastern Kentucky. It was basic economics to follow the green: just hop on the L&N and head south to the mountains. The families included Lazarus, Scott (doesn’t sound right, but they were Jewish), and Abe Euster, respected and elected to the City Council.

I once encountered an elderly relative of one of the Jewish families at the fertilizer-and-seed store at the end of the Terminal Bridge. He was dressed entirely in black, not so unusual for Pineville, and wore a black skullcap, which was unusual, and had a white beard, also fairly ordinary, as a few of the ‘Court House preachers’ also had beards, usually stained brown with tobacco-spit. But this elderly gentleman, who apparently spoke no English or at least Pineville English, was reading a newspaper with incomprehensible black lettering, deeply exotic. Today, thinking back, I feel sure the newspaper was Forward, and the language was Yiddish.

I also walked everywhere with my nose in a book. I wonder now why I never felt down a hole or broke my leg. The Library was one cramped room next to the Jail, and I read, or at least I thought I read, everything it had.

Rachel and Ralph were twins. Ralph, an eighth-grade dropout, roared off in 1929 to ‘DEE-troit’ on his Indian motorcycle. He got a job with Chevrolet Gear and Axle, where he worked for the next 30 years, retiring as soon as he could. He married Anne Turek, whose parents immigrated from Slovakia and did not speak English at home. Anne and her family introduced me to pickled cabbages and beets, and kielbasa and other sausages available at “Polish” delicatessens in Hamtramack. (Many a car was built by “Polacks” just off the boat.) Immigrants could also be found at a few eastern Kentucky coal mines – mainly at the huge U.S. Steel operation at Lynch.

Ralph was a fervent supporter of the United Auto Workers, and saw the Union as ‘the little guy’s only defense’ against the power and greed of Big Business. He yelled against Sloan of GM, and hated Henry Ford just as much. He was not part of the 44-day sit-down strike in 1937 at the GM plant in Flint, but he told me all about it. He was proud to be one of 150,000 who rallied in Detroit’s Cadillac Square to show support. Even so, Ralph had bad words for the union, as he had for most things. But Walter and Victor Reuther who led UAW had come from West Virginia in 1927, and because of their origin Ralph felt some connection.

What was happening to auto workers in in Detroit – half of them laid off, the other half reduced from $40 to $20 a week, and liable to be fired by any foreman anytime – was also happening to coal miners in Kentucky. In both places there was a struggle between armed thugs hired by the corporation (supported by National Guard troops called out by governors). Both groups of workers felt they had no choice. Both groups did, however, get plenty of support from guards, cleaners, news gatherers and food handlers. Strikers played cards, and union songs were sung with gusto.

In the late 1930s and increasingly during the War, Detroit was where blacks and whites, both groups mainly from the South and both groups barely educated, confronted each other. The result was ugly race riots. Ralph railed against ‘niggers,’ and his tone was full of venom and hatred. This was in character for him, as he had a crabbed view of most things. He relished the misfortune of others, but otherwise got little enjoyment from life. As I remember him and his view of the world and all people and things in it, the picture that comes to mind is of a vulgar oaf, both stupid and mean. He didn’t think highly of me, either

Anne had almost no education (an attraction as far as Ralph was concerned, as he resented people who knew more than he did, that is, just about everybody). Anne was sweet and motherly and spoke English with a heavy accent. In the summer of 1940 they drove down to Kentucky (Ralph worked for General Motors and got a good price on a car; but Ralph continued to curse the bosses bitterly and sincerely.) Rachel convinced them that Louise, though struggling hard and doing the best she possibly could, was simply not able to provide for herself OR her kids. After they came back through Pineville, I listened through the open door as they spoke -- Louise’s usual tears, and anxious muffled conversation. Louise bundled me into their car, we drove off, and I lived with them for two semesters.

Ralph and Anne had a one-bedroom apartment on Clairmont Street, and I slept in what had been a pantry. I rode the streetcar to seventh grade at Cass Junior High, which I remember as a total drag and, so far as I am aware, didn’t learn a single thing. What was not a drag was the Branch Library next to the high school at the corner of Clairmont and Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main drag. This Library had a collection of books so far beyond the pitiful resources of Pineville that I thought I was in heaven. I worked my way through shelf after shelf, most of the books way over my head. The Library let you check out as many as you wanted, and I staggered out with armloads

Through Ralph’s intercession with the owner of a cigar store on the corner of Clairmont and Woodward, I began selling The Detroit Free Press during the afternoon rush hour, mainly to drivers that stopped there for red lights. Competing paperboys punched and pushed me, but they never drove off my corner, maybe because the owner of the store stood up for me. Paper money paid for Saturday movies at the Alhambra a few doors farther north on Woodward.

In June at the end of the school year, Ralph and Ann drove me back to Pineville. Louise was still at the Bakery. She had been promoted to bookkeeper, but still made very little money. She worked long hours, and this worried her. She had no way to monitor the whereabouts of a restless boy (“I don’t know WHERE he is half the time!”). I wasn’t a ‘delinquent’ or a troublemaker. But I was thirteen, gangly and pimply, and insatiably curious. Louise, who worried all her life about EVERYTHING, feared that my curiosity, desirable as it might otherwise be, would surely get me in trouble. She had to work; no choice there. But who would know Where I was, Who I was with, and what Trouble I might be getting into. Who would Know if I got hurt? What could she do? It was tough to provide clothing, harder still to keep provide enough food to keep up with a teen-ager’s hollow-leg appetite. She had to do SOMEthing.

She had an idea. Sam Roark lived next door to the Nehi bottling plant, two doors down from the Bakery, and this was how Louise made the connection. He was the contractor for Rural Free Delivery. Thirty years earlier he started out carrying mail on horseback, but now used a noisy pickup. His route ran from the post office in Pineville to the post office at Red Bird on the Clay County line. Louise talked with him and with the Frontier Nurses.

The nurses served a huge area, 10,000 people without a single physician and no paved road for 50 miles in any direction. They were employees of the U.S. Public Health Service and were the first to bring modern medicine to remote hollers. We often saw them around Courthouse Square, their horses loaded with heavy saddlebags of medicine and supplies. They were a mobile clinic, and, since mountain wives bore an average of nine children, the Nurses were often midwives. They held immunization clinics at one-room schools and advised sanitization of wells and outhouses. The nurses came to Pineville to buy supplies for their work at Red Bird. They tethered their mules at the corner of Pine Street and Virginia Avenue, in front of the First State Bank (the one with a big clock-face on the corner, chiming the time with the same sequence of bells used by Big Ben.

A nurse told Louise about the “free boarding school” at Red Bird. The school and mission were part of the Nurses’ regular route, and they told Louise all about it. This sounded much better than sending me back to ‘DEE-troit’ which I hated. Red Bird had the enormous advantage of being a boarding school; Louise knew that at least I would get supervision and regular food. Best of all, it was FREE! -- ‘A Mission to the Mountains’ of The Evangelical Brethren, a ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ sect which later merged with The Methodists; the Principal’s name was Bergstresser, and there were many other ‘Deutsch’ names.

And that is how I happened in 1941-41 to spend one tough semester in the Kentucky backwoods at “The Mission.” Red Bird Settlement School -- located in the most remote part of northern Bell County, accessible then only by horse or mule, located just over the Bell County line. Clay County was infamous for its ‘Wars’ in which about 150 people were murdered or hanged; it is still one of the poorest counties in the United States.

Sam Roark agreed to take me up there. He went past Kettle Island and turned up the left fork of Straight Creek. As the truck went upstream the creek became increasingly narrow. His small pick-up, a Chevrolet, was the first motor vehicle to make it. I’m still amazed. No road, just a horse-trail, but he somehow negotiated the steep and increasingly narrow creek-bed up Stoney Fork to the crest of the mountain. It was no more than a trickle when his truck reached the Ritter Lumber Company’s tracks and the rusting engine of its narrow-gauge railroad. The rails had been removed years earlier, but Sam followed the track-bed. The track-bed doubled back, got steeper, and followed the flow from a spring.

There was no water at all at the crest. After a few yards of rock and mud, we started twisting downward, north toward Clay County. On one side of the mountain, water flowed south toward the Cumberland; just over the ridge, water flowed north toward the Kentucky River. No railroad track beds on this side, so we bounced down beside another tiny creek. The creek widened as more water flowed in from springs along the mountain. At the bottom of a long hill, the Red Bird Creek (for this is what it was) was joined by Cow Fork.

Here in a tiny hollow was a General Store, which was also of course the Red Bird Post Office, and Mr. Roark’s destination. In the clearing was the clapboard school and the dormitory and barns of the Settlement School, all subsidized by the Evangelical United Brethren. Uncle Millard and Aunt Myrtle Knuckles had roots that ran deep in Red Bird. They wanted a school for their children and grandchildren, and donated land for the mission. Millard ran the general store.

It is obligatory in Bell County, and for that matter everywhere in Appalachia, when first meeting someone, to enquire if you and the stranger might be related, and if so, how? That happened my first day. The minute Millard spotted me, he began an earnest and prolong inquisition to determine if he might be related to this new boy. He finally concluded that we were “cousins” through my great grandmother Nancy Knuckles, the wife of John Burns, who died several years before I was born. And from that moment on, I was called ‘Cousin.’

The store had the requisite pot-belly stove, surrounded even in warm weather by local gents, who, when not busy whittling and spitting, filled up their days telling lies. A new kid from town was a fresh set of ears for their tales, and a new butt for tricks and fun. They taught me words like poontang and rang-dang-doo. Cousin or not, that first encounter scared me to death.

Millard kept an orange-haired chow-chow dog, a breed so exotic it was positively weird to find one so far back in the woods. I had been in the store no more than ten minutes before his dog imagined I did some fool thing that deeply offended his canine sensibilities, and he lunged, biting a sizeable hunk out of my leg. He would have made it all the way to bone if Uncle Millard hadn’t beat him off. This prompted general hilarity, and seemed to be the high point of the day. I continued to patronize the little General Store, but today, I cross the street if I see a Chow coming down the sidewalk.

The Red Bird students were all backwoods kids, tough as hickory. I was completely out of place and had no business at all being there, a scrawny, timid nerd, my nose constantly in a book, totally bereft of farming or mountain skills. Mountain kids could get an education, free if they were willing to work for it. At other schools like Red Bird – Hindman, Pine Mountain, and of course the college at Berea. At Red Bird, every student had a job. The girls prepared the food and served it, and washed dishes and cleaned; they also repaired clothing, and were helpers at the clinic and school. The boys grew food and forage crops, and fed and milked the cows, slopped the hogs, cleaned the barns and chopped wood.

The hardest job was busting up rocks. A gang of us boys were given heavy sledgehammers and sent up the path leading from the store south toward Pineville. Our assignment was to crack boulders and lay down a course of smaller stones to transform the horse-trail into the semblance of a road, and especially to eliminate the mud patch where Sam’s truck always got stuck, and prevent further erosion. We did two hours of this every afternoon after class and before supper. It was the hardest physical work I had ever done.

We also maintained the buildings. Our dormitory had a busted window and may job was to remove the broken glass so a new pane could be installed. I pulled down on the broken piece at the top of the frame; it came loose suddenly, and I gashed my hand on broken glass sticking up from the bottom of the frame. I got a big gash in my thumb, there was a lot of blood, and somebody took me to the clinic, where a doctor sewed the wound. I guess Red Bird boys were expected to be tough, because the doctor did not offer any Novocain, and I just gritted it out. The scar still hurts if I accidentally bang it on something.

The worst job was helping to slaughter a hog. Thank God it was not me who had to shoot the hog! But I did help to lift it up and suspend it head down from a log tripod. We hacked off the head and split the carcass down the middle. We used knives to loosen the organs and guts, which we scooped out with shovels. Skinning was the hardest part, and some boys got cut. Then came the disgusting reek as skin and offal were boiled to ‘render’ the fat into lard. This was boiled further and then mixed with lye to make coarse brown soap. These chores were easy and familiar to the other boys, all of whom had grown up on little mountain farms and knew all about cold-frost hog slaughter. But for a kid from town like me, it was pretty close to hell.

I enjoyed music a lot, particularly under the tutelage of our school’s music teacher, the beautiful and vivacious redhead, Miss Flossie Minter. I think she liked me; I sure liked her! She gave me a big part in the kiddies’ musical ‘Hansel and Gretel’ by Englebert Humperdinck, a name later adopted by a British rock star. I was minutely investigating the machinery for opening and closing the curtains and for dimming the lights; Miss Arnett, exasperated, scolded me: ‘David, you are A NUISANCE!’ I replied, ‘No, Miss Arnett, I am A WOOD SPRITE!’

But what should have been a source of pride, caused enormous humiliation. There were no dressing rooms in our school’s auditorium, used mainly for Lyceum events. So, during the operetta, the boys were to put on their costumes on one side of the stage, the girls on the other. Okay. Understood. But when I went offstage, I somehow made a wrong turn and ended up where the girls were dressing! and I SAW SOME OF THEM IN THEIR UNDERWEAR! How awful! What a sneak! A Peeping Tom! I knew I had messed up BIG TIME, and burst out crying: ‘I made a mistake! I made a mistake! I didn’t do it on purpose! NOT ON PURPOSE!’ I think I cried for a full half-hour. [An odd fact, possibly interesting but NOT germane, is that one of the girls was named ‘George’; she later served with The Waves.]

I joined a Boy Scout troop led by Harrywood Gray, pastor of The Christian Church, and struggled to learn knots and fulfill the requirements for various merit badges. One summer I spent a week – or was it two? -- at a Boy Scout Camp which I think was Camp Blanton in Harlan County. I learned to make a fire, and got better at swimming. I had so much trouble getting up in the morning that my bunk-mates adopted a popular song by Harry James’ band, and I became known as “Sleepy Lagoon.” This song, and others like it, were the tunes we heard on the bubble-up Wurlitzer phonograph at Brookings’ Confectionary, the hang-out for the high school bunch, and semi-hostile territory for kids as young as me. This is where teen-agers tried to learn to jitterbug, which they had seen in the movies. The boys would hung out on the street in front, usually tinkering with their old cars, adjusting carburetors or magneto, wearing themselves out cranking an old jalpopy.

Using Reverend Gray’s knowledge of carpentry, our Troop built a cabin in the woods above Clear Creek, about a quarter-mile above the L&N line to Chenoa. I wish it had been a LOG cabin. In fact, it was simply rough-sawn boards, which I suspect had been donated by a local sawmill. We went on hikes to the sandstone ridge atop Pine Mountain, which looked directly down on our town. From there, we climbed out onto Chained Rock for a dramatic view of the deep gorge of The Narrows.

In 1931, a bunch of ‘the boys,’ including some from The Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs, salvaged a giant chain from a dredge on the Tennessee River. It was hauled by mule-team up the mountain, where it was ‘spiked’ into a boulder that looked as though it might come tumbling down into The Narrows. The other end of the chain was anchored into the rock of the mountainside. That chain would no more have held that enormous rock than would a cotton thread! ‘Chained Rock’ was nothing more than a joke, something to draw tourists. Which is precisely what local folks had in mind.

We also climbed the mountain on our own. We were there alone when Jack Foley, a classmate and in my Troop, managed to get his body across the chain by holding on, first by one hand, then by the other. The chain was more than a hundred feet long, and he would have been dashed against the rocks far below had he fallen. Fifty years later, severely depressed, he committed suicide by leaping out the third-floor window of Pineville Hospital. Is it possible his life-long propensity for doing the most dangerous thing he could think of, was somehow connected to his tragic death?

From our high vantage point, cars appeared as small as ants; coal trains made long sinuous curves snaking ‘round the bends of the river. We were up so high (or at least we thought we were) and everything looked so small and distant, the view seemed as unreal as a movie. We slept under Turtleback Rock, which I later learned had been used by ancient Woodlands Indians as a Rock Hotel.

This was wonderful Boy Scout territory: trails wandered through ravines choked with old-growth hemlock, oak, tulip poplar, fern gardens, waterfalls, and lichen-covered sandstone boulders. There were snakes, mostly harmless garter snakes and black snakes; there were salamanders, shrews, skunks, and ‘possums. We saw no deer then, but they are today so common as to be a nuisance; turkey and bear have also returned. Spring and summer brought blossoms of Catawba and Great rhododendron, red azalea, mountain laurel [known to the first settlers as ‘mountain ivy’], pink lady slipper, wild blueberries, huckleberries, serviceberry and flowering dogwood.

A perk of my Dad’s job was a few free passes to ride the train. He and I made a couple of trips to Louisville to visit his sister Josie and brother Rob. I begged him to let us ride in the last car so I could stand on the open-air platform and watch the tracks as they receded into the distance. I also loved the sudden blackouts when we went through tunnels. I even enjoyed the soot and cinders from the engine that sometimes rained down.

Once, the two of us went to Cincinnati, arriving at the new Union Station there, the chief feature of which was a giant barrel arch like the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. We went up to take in a baseball game. Judge never played any kind of sport, but baseball was popular in the mountains and every mining-camp had a team. He followed baseball over the radio and was proud he could point out for me PeeWee Reese, star of The Cincinnati Reds.

My Dad’s co-workers included Alec Kellems, Joe and Kenneth Shufflebarger and their sister, Dorothy, who I think worked only part-time, and their father Martin, the boss, always known as ‘Old Man Shufflebarger.’

Judge had pale blue eyes and thick brown hair, with a nervous tic of running his hand through his hair, using his fingers as a coarse comb. He stood a bit under five-foot-nine, halfway in height between his somewhat pudgy father and his tall, gangly mother. He was stooped over, his back curved with ‘a widow’s hump’; the stoop was so severe it would today be called scoliosis, curvature of the spine. (Louise also had a severely curved spine even as a young woman, and to the end of her days kept hoping a physician would ‘fit’ her with ‘a garment’ or brace to straighten her up; she was well aware that her posture put pressure on her innards.)

Judge was slightly built, his body comprised far more of nerves than of muscle. This was unfortunate, since, although technically a Clerk, he was expected to load and unload the Express cars on the trains. Many of the boxes were of enormous size, and some wooden crates weighed hundreds of pounds.

His first task was to manhandle these monsters off the Express car and onto the high, steel-wheeled platform wagons. Then he had to maneuver the wagons from the platform down a steep grade to the Express Office under the Passenger Terminal. Many times I felt sure the wagon was going to get away from him and perhaps crush us both. In the office, he would inspect the cartons and crates, noting day and hour of arrival and so on, verifying Manifests and Invoices. He would then help Alec or others get the crates up onto the truck and send the shipments off for delivery. He also drove the truck and made deliveries when other men were sick or off on vacation.

Judge’s feet caused him frequent pain; he hobbled like a guy with bad feet: he had a mal-formed arch, plus multiple corns and bunions. He and Louise speculated that the concrete of the train platform and the concrete floor of the Express office caused his foot trouble. Whatever the cause, his feet always hurt and I never saw him walk with ease. He was a steady patron of Dr. Scholl’s this-and-that.

Bad teeth were common throughout the South and extremely common in Appalachia, perhaps the result of poor diet, or, more likely, ignorance and poverty. A good set of teeth was such a rare sight as to be noticeable. Judge’s bad teeth might have been exacerbated by his passion for candy or anything sweet, a craving perhaps inherited from his father, ‘Candy John.’ A few of Judge’s teeth were missing entirely, rotted to the gum-line, those remaining pocked with black decay. His teeth caused him frequent pain, sometimes severe. I do not know why he never did anything about this. Perhaps, like most in Appalachia, he thought he could not afford to pay the dentist. I think it’s more likely he was terrified of even worse pain in getting them repaired. (Louise also had terrible teeth, and by 1947 had none that could be saved; she summoned up her courage and had them all extracted, though her dentures bothered her for the remainder of her life.)

During the worst years of the Depression, the Express office, like the coal mines and every other enterprise in Appalachia, had only part-time work, a few hours a day, a few days a week. Like many other breadwinners across the country, Judge simply HAD to find a way to bring in more income. He opened a newsstand in the storefront on Kentucky Avenue later occupied by Joe The Tailor, selling cigarettes, candy, chewing gum, magazines, and novelties. His biggest moneymaker was a game of chance, where you push a pin through thick cardboard, extract a tightly rolled paper with a number on it; if the paper has the right digits, you win a prize. Today, it would be Power Ball or Lotto. I think he knew he could not make any money. All he had was time, and he was desperate.

It seems contrary to logic, but I feel sure that many of the out-of-work bread-winners believed that their fate was entirely their own fault. They, personally and individually, had FAILED. The magazines were full of self-help advice and ads on How to Get Ahead. Dale Carnegie was a runaway best seller. His main message was, ‘you can do it.’ The corollary of is, of course, ‘if you don’t, it’s your fault.’

Judge certainly felt that he had failed, and I find it hard to say that he did not. To call alcoholism an illness, which it almost certainly is, does not remove the stigma. He lost his job; he left town in disgrace; he didn’t ‘provide’ for his wife and kids; he in fact left them with a pile of debts which Louise, in what seems in retrospect an almost superhuman effort to regain self-respect, continued to pay on those loans for years, even when she had almost no money.

H.D. Arterberry sold insurance with a Pineville partner, and they had an office in the cut-stone edifice of the Bell County Bank. This one went bust early in the Depression; the First State Bank survived. I particularly remember the cut-stone facade, because parked in front of it was the first streamlined car, the 1934 Chrysler Airflow, with an aerodynamic body and a waterfall grill. This car looked like it was flying in the air even when perfectly immobile.

Judge borrowed H.D. Arterberry’s car (NOT an Airflow) and tried hard, very hard, to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door in areas of Bell County that, thanks to the Rural Electrification Administration, had just received electric service. I went with him on a couple of those trips, the car bouncing up and down creek beds, as there was no road whatsoever, dirt OR paved. We also walked across remote creeks, on bridges whose footpath was suspended from cables. So far as I can remember, Judge never sold a single machine. The problem was simple, fundamental: most people had no money AT ALL. I had the same no-sale no-luck experience in 1949 at Princeton when I tried to sell WebCor wire recorders, a device just then coming on the market, magnetic tape being several years in the future.

Judge also rented a vacant lot, about a quarter-acre, near a house we lived in across from the Feed and Grain store where Cumberland and Park Avenues join. The garden was one of his more successful Depression Era efforts. He hired a man to plow the field, but did everything else himself, planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, with me ‘helping’ as only a five-year-old can. Louise sweated through steamy summer nights, cutting up vegetables and canning them in Mason and Ball jars. To prevent spoilage, the process required precise temperatures and sterilization by boiling [Louise, with her cleanliness obsession, was A DEMON! on sterilization], and rubber-ring seals. That food kept us going another year. But Judge never planted anything again.

The most dramatic, even terrifying, incident that summer was when Judge, staggering, roaring . . . so drunk he was completely out of his mind, banged open the front door, and the minute he reached the kitchen, began to beat Louise as hard as he could. She was heavily pregnant with Dick, and unable to dodge his blows. I was barely six; I don’t know what I thought a child could do, but I was not about to let him beat her up . . . yet again! I grabbed a butcher knife off the counter and put myself between them. ‘Stop it! Don’t you hit my Mother!’ Judge was startled, reeled drunkenly, stumbled, and fell into bed, passed out cold.

A similar incident occurred when we lived in Wallsend. At the time, I thought it might be the scene of a double murder . . . Judge, in a crazy drunken rage, beating Louise to death . . . me killing Judge in revenge. Fortunately, this time I did not grab a butcher knife. Instead, I ran out of the house screaming. Neighbors called the police, and Pearl Osborne, Sheriff of our little town, showed up . . . sporting his trademark pearl-handled revolver. Judge was so drunk he could offer no resistance. The Sheriff escorted him to The Jail downtown to sleep it off. Judge was never charged with any crime, though it might have had a salutary effect on him if he had been.

A “colored” family lived across the (unpaved) street from us in Wallsend. The most interesting thing about them was that they kept guinea fowl, exotic and noisy. Louise was friendly with the mother and they would borrow ingredients from each other if they were cooking and ran out. Louise and her neighbor took turns in making sandwiches for the ‘hobos’ who would show up every few weeks. Hobos were mostly youngish men who drifted around the country by sneaking illegal rides on trains. Some laid boards across brake rods under passenger railway cars. Most rode inside and on top of freight train box cars. They set up makeshift camps near areas where trains slowed down before stopping at stations, and in the camps fashioned a distinct culture of Depression camaraderie. The worst thing you could say to a hobo was to call him a tramp because tramps would steal rather than work. This was a problem for hobos because when they appeared at your back door offering to work for food you couldn't be sure they were'nt about to hit you in the head and rob you.

We stood in lines to see double features of, say, a western starring Roy Rogers, followed by Abbot and Costello in a comedy. "Naughty Marietta" starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy [I think I rememvber MacDonald singt "Ship Ahoy, Ship Ahoy, Who will marry a sailor boy?" There was no television. Radios were ubiquitous, we played cards, checkers and Monopoly, there were hundreds of magazines, newspapers and comic books, spectator sports were extremely popular, and we were all music lovers, but nothing took us outside of ourselves and our reality as did movies.

The Virginia model of plantation slavery was transplanted into the Bluegrass and the other flat parts of Kentucky. But Appalachia was not suitable for plantation agriculture and had little need of slaves. But even the mountain areas of Kentucky went along with the misbegotten practices of segregation in schools and trains and so on. But we had heart for Jim Crow. We had few black people, and mountain people were never emotionally invested in slavery. Our little hospital in Pineville was instantly desegregated following an explosion at Belva No. 1 coal mine at Four Mile in December 1946. Twenty-five men were killed, and the hospital was filled with horribly mangled survivors. When they learned that the man who had rescued many of them was in the “colored” ward, they wouldn’t stand for it. “He saved our lives! Bring him here! He’s a hero. We want him here with us!” That was the instant end of segregation in the hospital, though it continued in Pineville schools until the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision kicked in.

Four Mile also had a big flat cow-pasture owned by County Sheriff Martin Green. Every summer one or two open-cockpit biplanes would buzz over Pineville. [I suspect they were pilots laid off from early airmail routes.] The fly-over was the signal for everyone to flock to Four Mile, where the plane would offer, to those brave enough or wealthy enough, ten-minute joyrides for a few bucks each. The price was entirely beyond me of course, but I got a thrill just being up close to the plane, watching it take off and land, and hearing the excited squeals of the girl who had thought she was a goner when the pilot did aerobatic loops and rolls.

Hobos were a disheveled army in America in those years. The WPA (“We Piddle Around”) workers built a new City Hall, a Post Office and a high school gym in Pineville. And the Civilian Conservation Corps went to work on Pine Mountain State Park. The CCC was modeled on the military. Young recruits lived in tents, later in barracks, in residential camps, ate in mess halls, and were issued uniforms -- oversized, as experience had shown that hard work and adequate food would enlarge their bodies. The aim was to make them employable citizens by learning to use tools, take orders, respect their supervisors and do an honest days work. In Kentucky’s forested areas, the first task, often, was felling blighted chestnut trees or sawing dead chestnut trees into lumber for framing and flooring. Horses pulled the logs from the forest to prevent the soil from being compacted by tractors. Park structures and facilities were built using the rustic style characteristic of National Park Service buildings, and used native stone and logs. Several hundred workers ran the sawmill and reclaimed old logging roads.

An open field at the north end of Wallsend was also the site of the yearly traveling carnival, usually sponsored by Kiwanis or Rotary. It was mainly carnivals, dangerous rides and scams like knock-down-the-milk-bottles – everything cheap and fake -- though one summer a tacky and broken-down “C-unit” of the Sells-Floto Circus showed up.

Judge patronized the barbershop on Kentucky Avenue. I remember it mostly because of the shoe-shiner, a broken-backed ‘colored’ man (surnamed Gibson, after the farmer who had once owned a few slaves) with a wry sense of humor and a cracked treble laugh. After Judge was fired and left town, Louise could no longer afford to send me there. I was sent instead to a ‘colored’ barber who had a little shack at the end of Pine Street just before the bridge; he charged ten cents. Judge also introduced me to Blind George, who lived in a room above the pool hall at the corner of Kentucky Avenue and Pine Street, and who sold hotdogs on the street corner and at football and basketball games.

Judge liked music and could beat out good rhythm on the spoons. His favorite tune was ‘Oh! How I Wish I Was in Peoria,’ which he whistled through his teeth, not with puckered lips. He read the Cape Cod novels of Joseph Lincoln and a few by Zane Grey, and magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Liberty. I don’t remember that we got a daily newspaper, but I do remember the Sunday comics of The Cincinnati Enquirer . . Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and The Pirates, Mutt and Jeff, The Katzenjammer Kids, Maggie and Jiggs (‘Bringing Up Father’).

We enjoyed listening to the radio, after we received The Philco, a 1935 Christmas gift from Louise’s sister Rachel and her husband Bill. The set was shaped like the window of a Gothic cathedral, and functioned much like TV sets today, a surrogate family hearth. Our favorite station was WHAS out of Louisville, but we also listened to WLW in Cincinnati. I remember ‘Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,’ ‘Amos and Andy,’ ‘Lum and Abner,’ ‘One Man’s Family,’ ‘Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons’ and others, like Bing Crosby, Eddie Cantor, and Kate Smith. I enjoyed a Saturday morning children’s program, ‘Coast To Coast On A Bus.’

I went to Saturday matinees at The Gaines Movie Theatre. Given my penchant for singing, I particularly enjoyed the glorious musicals of the 1930s, and remember many of them vividly, especially the sophistication of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I identified with the child singer Bobby Breen. And I wished I had Jane Withers’ effervescence. I admired the singing of Bing Crosby and Dick Powell, and tried to capture in my mind their sound, what they did, so I could copy it. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, but I think I was able to remember both words and music from movie songs after a single hearing.

The most solemn moment in Judge’s workweek, and also a Big Moment for me, was the bundling and dispatch of Railway Express documents and payments. The money was placed in a heavy kraft envelope, which Judge sealed, signing his name across both top and bottom flaps. The papers were of Shipments Received, Shipments Delivered, Hours Worked, Salaries Paid, and Payments and Cash Received. The package of documents was given to the senior Railway Express employee on the train, who signed a receipt book, and would deliver the package to the central Express office when the train arrived in Louisville. The envelope was solemnly sealed, its flaps fastened by red wax, the wax indented while still molten with ‘THE SEAL’ of the Pineville Railway Express Agency. Judge held the big kitchen match, but allowed me to melt the wax and push in The Seal. Wow! It still seems quite A Big Deal . . . even as I recollect across six decades.

But this memory also brings sadness and dismay. The Envelope With The Big Red-Wax Seal was the cause of Judge’s downfall.

No, that’s not right. The Envelope was The Means of Judge’s downfall. The Cause was Terrible Judgment caused by drunken befuddlement. No, that’s not quite right either.

Seven decades later, we may be a bit more enlightened, or, in my case, a bit more PERSONALLY SINGED, about drinking. Today we prefer a less pejorative term . . . It seems more ‘correct’ and is indeed more accurate, to say that Judge’s downfall was caused by the disease of alcoholism.

When sober, which was perhaps ninety per cent of the time, he was an intelligent and kindly man, and a fine father. Booze changed him from a pleasant Dr. Jekyll, into a hideous beast, Mr. Hyde. Alcohol has the same effect on many today. I didn’t hate him them, and I don’t hate him now. But he would have been happier, and his wife and kids would have lived normal lives, even though dirt-poor in the middle of the Depression, had he been able to stop drinking.

Judge was with The Railway Express Agency from 1917 until 1941. He wanted to be a good husband and a good father. He searched for A Way, but genetic predisposition, or our Mountain Moonshine environment, or both, caused him to fail in his quest. In a small town EVERYBODY knew within hours what had happened, and there was no possibility whatsoever of Judge finding work in Pineville. He fled to Louisville, hoping to find work, and promising to send for us when he had a job and place for us to live. But he never sent Louise any money after he left; she depended on Rachel and Bill for rent and food until she herself got a job. . . at ten, then twenty, cents an hour!

In Louisville, Judge lived with, and to a large extent off of, his sister Josie, who was at the time also boarding her alcoholic brother Rob, while trying to hold down a job and care for her husband, deathly ill with tuberculosis, complicated, as it so often is, by alcoholism.

My brother Dick and I went up to Louisville by train in 1942 to visit him. We slept on the floor, as their apartment, was full up with three Arterberrys (Aunt Josie, her invalid husband H.D., and her precocious book-worm daughter Mary Jo, later a lawyer and Judge), plus Josie’s brothers Rob and Judge. We all crowded into a little apartment in ‘The Project,’ a WPA housing development for people below the poverty line, which at that time was just about everybody, even though The War was beginning, slowly, to lift The Depression. I remember that Josie sent me to The White Tower to tote back a big bag of so-called ‘hamburgers’ [‘buy ‘em by the bag!’]. That was supper.

Judge was at that time working as an attendant at a roller-skating rink. He took me there, and I saw him on his hands and knees, fitting skates and tightening them for a nickel a pair. He certainly didn’t verbalize it, nor did I, but I sensed that he felt ashamed. He had lost a good, steady job, and in every way that mattered, had lost his family as well. He was now pretty much at the bottom of the heap, essentially unemployable. He was weak, hung-over, his hands trembling. This condition was normal for him in those days. I had no way of knowing. . .but he had only a few years left to live.

I wish I had asked more questions. But understanding does not cure alcoholism; Louise tried for years to ‘understand.’ By the time I saw him again, he was yellow with jaundice and only a few days away from death, with cancer of the pancreas (even today a diagnosis of doom). He was so dopey with morphine that conversation was impossible. He is buried in Resthaven Cemetery in Louisville. I wish we had talked more when we had the chance!

The simple sad truth is, Judge was utterly helpless around booze. He was an alcoholic of the intermittent, or ‘binge,’ variety. When he received his pay, I feel certain he left the Express office headed straight for home. He crossed the bridge, determined that ‘this time’ he would get there with his money intact.

But the folding bills in his pocket began to ‘talk’ to him. His feet hurt, his back hurt, his teeth hurt. He was angry that a man of his intelligence and education had to wrestle heavy crates for a living, and a poor living at that! When he got to the end of the bridge and saw the Blind Pig bootleg joints, his brain ‘talked’ to him loudly, and much more insistently. ‘Just one. I can have Just One. Don’t I deserve Just One? I work hard. Just one.’

A day later, sometimes three days later, he would stagger home, eyes bloodshot, clothing filthy. He was weak and trembling, sick as a dog . . . not one red cent left.

Louise read in the newspaper about some ‘special medicine’ [I’m pretty sure it was Antabuse, just then beginning to be used]. The ad said you could put this stuff in someone’s coffee, and if they subsequently took a drink of alcohol it would make them so sick they acquired an immediate aversion to booze and would never drink again. Louise thought long and hard about this. She even asked me: ‘but suppose it makes him too sick to work? Suppose it kills him? I couldn’t live with myself!’

In 1935, in Akron, Ohio, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, had hit bottom and were desperate to save themselves. They stumbled onto a mutual-help system that is today ubiquitous. AA and its many offshoots have allowed millions to recover and live normal lives . . . not just the addicts themselves, but also those who love them and depend on them. It is sad that AA never reached our little town.

It might have saved Judge Burns.

In the mid-1920’s King Coal went downhill fast. Operators reduced expenses by laying off workers (typical sign: “no work today”) and cut the wage of those that still had a job; miners began to gather and talk. Coal production did not drop, even though thousands were laid off (operators had to amortize their machinery so they wanted to keep going somehow). Miners had enjoyed the good wages and were reluctant to leave. Most thought things would get better. Those who were unemployed began to join unions, but were immediately blacklisted (and thus unemployable by any mine). Their families suffered when they were cut off at commissaries and evicted from company homes. Miners were helpless, not making enough money to feed their families. There was no prospect of aid from any direction.

The breaking point came May 5, 1931, in Harlan County. Carloads of heavily armed deputies and other company men drove from Black Mountain to Evarts. (My Uncle Bill was a bookkeeper and thus “a company man” at the Peabody Coal operation at Black Mountain). There was a confrontation with disgruntled miners, many similarly armed. No one knows who fired first, but when it was over, two deputies, a commissary clerk, and one miner were dead, with many wounded. The next day troops rode into Harlan. Governor Flem Sampson made a speech saying that the Communists from outside, people who did not belong in Kentucky, were behind the disorder. [A few days later, however, a National Guard Commandant reported "no trace of Communist workers" in the eastern Kentucky coalfields.]

Evarts became a rallying ground for unemployed, blacklisted and poor and hungry miners; the town grew from 1,800 to 5,000 in just one month. In January 1932, the communist-led National Miners Union called a general strike in Harlan and Bell counties: 1,500 miners marched in Pineville protesting the arrest of six women and three men for "strike activities" [they were making speeches.] The union organized a meeting for J

J anuary 16th at Harlan, immortalized in the labor song "Which Side Are You On?" The mayor of Harlan swore the meeting wouldn't be held, and it was not. He was happy to report: "The Red revolt in Harlan County has been crushed!"

Ruby Laffon took over as Governor of Kentucky. He said “There exists a virtual reign of terror, financed by a group of coal mine operators in collusion with certain public officials: the victims of this terror are the coal miners and their families…We found a monsterlike reign of oppression whose tentacles reached into the very foundation of the social structure and even into the Church of god…There is no doubt that the Sher

In the mid-1920’s King Coal went downhill fast. Operators reduced expenses by laying off workers (typical sign: “no work today”) and cut the wage of those that still had a job; miners began to gather and talk. Coal production did not drop, even though thousands were laid off (operators had to amortize their machinery so they wanted to keep going somehow). Miners had enjoyed the good wages and were reluctant to leave. Most thought things would get better. Those who were unemployed began to join unions, but were immediately blacklisted (and thus unemployable by any mine). Their families suffered when they were cut off at commissaries and evicted from company homes. Miners were helpless, not making enough money to feed their families. There was no prospect of aid from any direction.

The breaking point came May 5, 1931, in Harlan County. Carloads of heavily armed deputies and other company men drove from Black Mountain to Evarts. (My Uncle Bill was a bookkeeper and thus “a company man” at the Peabody Coal operation at Black Mountain). There was a confrontation with disgruntled miners, many similarly armed. No one knows who fired first, but when it was over, two deputies, a commissary clerk, and one miner were dead, with many wounded. The next day troops rode into Harlan. Governor Flem Sampson made a speech saying that the Communists from outside, people who did not belong in Kentucky, were behind the disorder. [A few days later, however, a National Guard Commandant reported "no trace of Communist workers" in the eastern Kentucky coalfields.]

Evarts became a rallying ground for unemployed, blacklisted and poor and hungry miners; the town grew from 1,800 to 5,000 in just one month. In January 1932, the communist-led National Miners Union called a general strike in Harlan and Bell counties: 1,500 miners marched in Pineville protesting the arrest of six women and three men for "strike activities" [they were making speeches.] The union organized a meeting for J

J anuary 16th at Harlan, immortalized in the labor song "Which Side Are You On?" The mayor of Harlan swore the meeting wouldn't be held, and it was not. He was happy to report: "The Red revolt in Harlan County has been crushed!"

Ruby Laffon took over as Governor of Kentucky. He said “There exists a virtual reign of terror, financed by a group of coal mine operators in collusion with certain public officials: the victims of this terror are the coal miners and their families…We found a monsterlike reign of oppression whose tentacles reached into the very foundation of the social structure and even into the Church of god…There is no doubt that the Sheriff of Harlan County is in league with the operators…The homes of union miners and organizers were dynamited and fired into…The principal cause...is the desire of the mine operators to amass for themselves fortunes through the oppression of their laborers, which they do through the sheriff's office.”

Harlan’s labor troubles continued through 1930s, lessened only late in the decade after a contract was hammered out through Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act. When that expired in 1941, conflict returned in full force. Even as a child I knew that lawyers, engineers and surveyors, shopkeepers, and insurance and banking people in Pineville -- all economically dependent on the mining companies -- were furious in their denunciation of John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers. The general condemnation in Pineville was buttressed by angry talk from my Uncle Bill at Black Mountain, and from my Uncle Jim who was on the fast track at the International Harvester mine at Benham. When Uncle Bill and Aunt Rachel, and Uncle Jim told me about Evarts, they were as bitter toward the miners as Uncle Ralph in Detroit was toward General Motors. I was just a child, but even so, I had some experience of “labor unrest” in the 1930s Depression.

Six months after the Battle of Evarts, the "National Committee In Defense of Political Prisoners" came to investigate the "reign of terror" in Harlan and Bell Counties. The group was headed by the writer Theodore Dreiser, and included well known authors such as Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos. The committee inspected conditions in the coalfields and found them worse than expected, but there was nothing they could do. Coal operators and their supporters turned hostile. In Pineville, they framed Dreiser on a morals charge, but he left the state before the warrant was served so as to avoid negative publicity that would hurt the miners' cause. He was also indicted for “criminal syndicalism,” a phrase describe a use of violence or terrorism to bring about economic or political change.

I was much too young to have witnessed the 1931 Dreiser incident. They saw the strikes as class warfare, and part of the international class struggle. They said the mining communities were oppressed. [I think they are still oppressed. Today, mountaintops themselves are blasted away. Neither mountains nor mountaineers will be entirely safe so long as a single ton of recoverable coal remains underneath the eastern Kentucky hills.]

“Aunt” Molly Jackson spoke at a church in Bell County about the tragic living conditions of her fellow wives and workers. “The people in this country are destitute of anything that is really nourishing to the body. That is the truth. Even the babies have lost their lives, and we have buried from four to seven a week all along during the warm weather.” She performed her song, "Kentucky Miner's Wife (Ragged Hungry Blues)." Dreiser's group was so captivated they included the lyrics at the beginning of their report, Harlan Miners Speak. They also invited her to New York to sing and speak about the miners' plight. She was a compelling symbol of the struggle: an aging miner's wife, gaunt but fierce, who had lost many friends and family members in the mines, and who possessed the will and voice to tell about it. To the Dreiser committee, perhaps shamed by what their own bourgeois intellectual backgrounds, Jackson represented the real thing, the authentic character and voice of the people. Moreover, she had hundreds of songs and stories, some perhaps embellished or stolen from others, but authentic nonetheless. New York intellectuals embraced her, as they did an ex-Chain Gang singer, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, a decade later.

Miners welcomed the Dreiser Committee's interest in their plight, but lawyers and others who depended on the mining companies, in Pineville saw the group as Communist intruders, which in truth they were. A few citizens, kept a close watch on them, and noticed Dreiser's young secretary the writer’s room at the Continental Hotel one night during his visit. Perhaps as a practical joke, they balanced toothpicks against the bottom of his door; the toothpicks were found untouched the next morning. After a local prosecutor, the grandstanding Walter B. Smith (who, astride his Palomino stallion. led every Laurel Festival parade I saw as a boy) persuaded a judge to issue a warrant for adultery.

The committee confronted Herndon Evans, editor of the Pineville Sun. When Dreiser pointed out the disparity between the editor's salary and the miners' wages, Evans asked Dreiser how much of his own $35,000 salary he gave to charity. The writer answered that he gave none, though he contributed to organizations and had financed the Bell-Harlan investigation at his own expense. That week in his newspaper, Evans suggested that next time Dreiser "reach for a toothpick instead of a sweetie.” Dreiser left town quickly, stopping in Tennessee long enough to repudiate the charges of misconduct with the defense that he was "completely and finally impotent."

In the mid-1920’s King Coal went downhill fast. Operators reduced expenses by cutting wages to the bone; miners began to gather and talk. Production did not drop, even though thousands were laid off (operators had to amortize their machinery so they wanted to keep going somehow). Miners had enjoyed the good life, and were reluctant to leave, remembering when things were better. Most thought things would get better. Unemployed miners began to join unions, but were immediately blacklisted (made unemployable by any mine). Their families suffered when they were cut off at commissaries and evicted from company homes. Miners were helpless, not making enough money to feed their families; no aid from any direction.

The breaking point came May 5, 1931, in Harlan County. Carloads of heavily armed deputies and other company men drove from Black Mountain to Evarts. (My Uncle Bill was “a company man” at the Peabody Coal operation at Black Mountain). There was a confrontation with disgruntled miners, many also armed. No one knows who fired first, but when it was over two deputies, a commissary clerk, and one miner were dead, with many wounded. The next day troops rode into Harlan, and Governor Flem Sampson made a speech saying that the Communists from outside, people who did not belong in Kentucky, were behind the disorder. [A few days later, however, a National Guard Commandant reported "no trace of Communist workers" in the eastern Kentucky coalfields.]

Evarts became a rallying ground for unemployed, blacklisted and poor and hungry miners; the town grew from 1,800 to 5,000 in just one month. In January 1932, the NMU called a general strike in the Harlan-Bell field: 1,500 miners marched in Pineville protesting the arrest of six women and three men for "strike activities" [they were making speeches.] The union organized a meeting for January 16th at Harlan, immortalized in the labor song "Which Side Are You On?" The mayor of Harlan swore the meeting wouldn't be held, and it was not. He was happy to report: "The Red revolt in Harlan County has been crushed!"

Ruby Laffon took over as Governor of Kentucky. He said “There exists a virtual reign of terror, financed by a group of coal mine operators in collusion with certain public officials: the victims of this terror are the coal miners and their families…We found a monsterlike reign of oppression whose tentacles reached into the very foundation of the social structure and even into the Church of god…There is no doubt that the Sheriff of Harlan County is in league with the operators…The homes of union miners and organizers were dynamited and fired into…The principal cause...is the desire of the mine operators to amass for themselves fortunes through the oppression of their laborers, which they do through the sheriff's office.”

Harlan’s troubles continued through 1930s, lessened only late in the decade after Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act hammered out a contract. When that expired in 1941, conflict returned in full force. Even as a child I knew that the lawyers and engineers and insurance and banking people in Pineville, all economically dependent on mining companies, were furious in their denunciation of John L. Lewis. There was buttressed by angry talk from my Uncle Bill working for Peabody Coal at Black Mountain, and from my Uncle Jim working for International Harvester at Benham. When Uncle Bill and Aunt Rachel, and Uncle Jim told me about Evarts, they were as bitter toward the miners as Uncle Ralph was toward General Motors -- my experience of “labor unrest” in the 1930s Depression was one-sided.

Six months after the Battle of Evarts, the "National Committee In Defense of Political Prisoners" (NCDPP) came to investigate the "reign of terror" in Harlan and Bell Counties. The group was headed by the writer Theodore Dreiser, and included well known authors such as Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos. The committee inspected conditions in the coalfields and found them worse than they had expected, but there was nothing they could do. As the investigation went on, though, the operators and their supporters turned hostile towards the NCDPP. They framed Dreiser on a morals charge, but he left the state before the warrant was served so as to avoid negative publicity that would hurt the miners' cause. He was also indicted for criminal syndicalism, which is a legal term used to describe an individual or group's use of violence or terrorism, or their advocacy of, as a means of bringing about economic or political change.

I was much too young to have witnessed the 1931 Dreiser incident.

strikes. They had not one scintilla of doubt as to blame for “Bloody Harlan.”

The novelist Theodore Dreiser led a group of left-wing writers, “the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners,” including Lewis Mumford, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson. In November 1931 they came to Harlan and Pineville to witness the situation of striking Kentucky miners as the Communist-led National Miners Union rivaled the United Mine Workers of America for a dominant union role. They said the mining communities were oppressed. [They are still oppressed; today the mountaintops themselves are blasted away; mountains nor mountaineers will be entirely safe so long as a single ton of recoverable coal remains underneath the eastern Kentucky hills.]

Dreiser’s group saw the strikes as a vivid example of class warfare, and part of the international class struggle. “Aunt Molly” Jackson spoke at a church in Bell County about the tragic living conditions of her fellow wives and workers. “The people in this country are destitute of anything that is really nourishing to the body. That is the truth. Even the babies have lost their lives, and we have buried from four to seven a week all along during the warm weather.” She performed her song, "Kentucky Miner's Wife (Ragged Hungry Blues)." Dreiser's group was so captivated they included the lyrics at the beginning of their report, Harlan Miners Speak. They also invited her to New York to sing and speak about the miners' plight. She was a compelling symbol of the struggle: an aging miner's wife, gaunt but fierce, who had lost many friends and family members in the mines, and who possessed the will and voice to tell about it. To the Dreiser committee, perhaps shamed by what their own bourgeois intellectual backgrounds, Jackson represented the real thing, the authentic character and voice of the people. Moreover, she had hundreds of songs and stories, some perhaps embellished or stolen from others, but authentic nonetheless. New York intellectuals embraced her, as they did an ex-Chain Gang singer, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, a decade later.

Miners welcomed the Dreiser Committee's interest in their plight, but lawyers and others who depended on the mining companies, in Pineville saw the group as Communist intruders. A few citizens, keeping a close watch on the outsiders, noticed Dreiser's young secretary, Marie Pergain, enter Dreiser’s room at the Continental Hotel one night during his visit. As a practical joke, the onlookers balanced toothpicks against the bottom of his door; the toothpicks were found untouched the next morning. After a local prosecutor, the grandstanding Walter B. Smith (who astride his Palomino stallion led every Laurel Festival parade) and a judge ordered an investigation and a warrant for adultery. The committee held a confrontational interview with Herndon J. Evans, editor of the Pineville Sun. When Dreiser pointed out the disparity between the editor's salary and the miners' wages, Evans asked Dreiser how much of his $35,000 salary he gave to charity. The writer answered that he gave none, though he contributed to organizations and had financed the present investigation at his own expense. That week, Evans suggested that next time Dreiser "reach for a toothpick instead of a sweetie.” Dreiser left town quickly, stopping in Tennessee long enough to repudiate the charges of misconduct with the defense that he was "completely and finally impotent.”

Neither rain nor snow nor sleet could stay this paperboy from the completion of his appointed rounds. But sleep! That was another matter!

December 1, 1943

Quilts

Highway Dept.

World War II Senate

Newspapers

Air Force

Princeton

Intellectual

General Motors Assembly Line

The Cold War

Climate Change

Golden Pond

Howard U.: E. Franklin Frazier (d. 1962), Sterling Brown, Rayford Logan

Lynch also imported blacks from Alabama. And there were other ‘furriners’ at Stonega Mine in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

Many of my generation grew up in small towns or city neighborhoods that felt like small towns, and those that did not wish they had, which is perhaps the impetus for suburban sprawl.

The route was first trod by Ice Age animals including mastodons and the giant sloth (whose Latin name includes a reference to Thomas Jefferson, fascinated by the mysterious remains of giant animals found at Big Bone Lick in northern Kentucky, just south of where the glaciers stopped). Later trails were made by modern-era bison, elk, and deer, and by the Shawnee and Cherokee who hunted them; then by Long Hunters, lost in the deep forest who-knows-where, gone a year or more, competing with Indians for game, returning with horse-loads of buffalo and beaver pelts and deer and elk hides, tanned in creek bottoms with animal brains, and with chestnut, oak, and hickory bark . . . carcasses left to rot in places which still bear names like Greasy Creek and Stinking Creek.

Pineville is cradled by the Cumberland, its street grid laid out on the flat floodplain. The town was flooded repeatedly and the flood of 1977 was so disastrous few thought the town could recover. But with cooperation between city, county, state, and national officials, the Corps of Engineers rebuilt US 25-E atop an earthen berm which doubles as a floodwall. Unfortunately, this obliterated all traces of The Wilderness Road. Nothing remains but The Narrows and The Ford, the geography that made the Triple Gateway possible. This geography was so important in U.S. history, Pineville now plans to call attention to it.

Cumberland Gap is a "saddle'" about a thousand feet up Cumberland Mountain. The Narrows, however, is a water gap similar to the Delaware Water Gap, and just as impressive. Kentucky's late Historian-Laureate. Dr. Thomas Clark, ranked The Narrows and Cumberland Gap at the top of his list of Kentucky’s most significant sites. The Narrows began when Pine Mountain Fault exposed more easily eroded rock. But it still took millions of years for the River to slice through 1,500 feet of mountain. At some places the gorge is so narrow one might seemingly touch either side. The Narrows is one of the most dramatic features of Kentucky geography, but speeding motorists are hardly aware of it.

People in Virginia knew there was plenty of game and timber and farmland in the western backwoods. But steep ridges deterred settlement. Nobody knew how to get through. Cumberland Gap was the critical first natural passage and The Narrows was the second natural break.

Pine Mountain Gap began to be widened about 1887 as crews blasted rock along the northern bank to create a track-bed for the Louisville and Nashville railroad. The Narrows was widened further about 1925 by more blasting along the southern bank to create US 25-E, now a busy but scenic four-lane highway.

Between 1780 and 1810, some 300,000 pioneer settlers passed through The Narrows. In 1797 the Kentucky Legislature appropriated 500 pounds sterling to repair The Wilderness Road and authorized a tollgate to raise money for maintenance. The tollgate was first located at the south entrance to The Narrows, where Clear Creek flows into the river. A village grew up beside the Gate, houses clinging precariously to the riverbank -- cabins, stores, and stables strung out a mile from The Narrows to a place where the river runs wide and the water becomes so shallow people and horses can wade across. The fording-place gave the village its earliest name, ‘Cumberland Ford.’

Does the guilt she led me to assume, even though she did not intend it, underlie the free-floating guilt I still harbor?

Of course, my father caused Louise heartache and agony. But so did I. Perhaps my feeling of guilt was and is justified.

An intelligent, energetic Bell County entrepreneur, T.J. Asher (1849-1935) saw his chance, worked ceaselessly, and made a fortune. He built a sawmill at Wasioto, precisely where the L&N line could move his sawn lumber to markets. He used every penny of profit from log and timber sales to upgrade his sawmill -- but mainly to buy more and more land, eventually owning thousands of acres outright, plus mineral rights on many more thousands of acres. In 1908 to build the Wasioto and Black Mountain railroad to gain access to prime virgin stands. Fortunately for him, the railroad also provided access to the coal seams of Harlan County. A few years later he sold the line to L&N. In his later years he was content to rock on the porch of his Greek-columned mansion in Pineville and collect royalty checks. Let others worry about mines and unions.

Working the graveyard shift -- nine hours a day, six days a week -- at Chevrolet Gear and Axle Plant Number Eight, was dangerous, difficult, and boring. My hands were cut to ribbons the first day because I had no gloves. But I bandaged up, bought gloves, and showed up for work the next day.

Hoeing corn

Crypto Azores storms

Battle of Berlin

Monitoring USSR atom bom fallout dust at March AFB, California

Dick was often sick as a baby and throughout childhood. He was also very slightly built, though he played football, and was known affectionately to his teammates as ‘Bearcat.’ Like me, he was a bookworm, and after he completed college at Morehead State in the north of Kentucky, went on to obtain a Master’s in Library Science at the U. of Illinois. This was an intelligent choice of profession for him.

After graduation, he got a job at The Louisville Public Library, and married a fellow-Librarian there, Frances Forgione. They had two children, dark-haired Judge, who has a lovely daughter Hannah, and red-haired Nina, who has five wonderful children, Max, Frank, Joseph, and two daughters. Dick then got a much bigger job as Director of the thriving and exceptionally-fine Public Library in Falls Church, a well-to-do suburb of Washington. Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis, and, as a person in daily contact with the public, the City Fathers required him to treat it so he would not be infectious. This didn’t work, and he went to a sanitarium for six months or so, but the disease hung on. He finally opted to have the diseased lung removed by surgery.

The operation was a physical setback. A year or so later, while at a meeting of librarians in Los Angeles, a hemorrhaging ulcer required removal of part of his stomach, another severe health setback. Despite chronic ailments, Dick nonetheless enjoys life. He is partner in a business providing material to folklore specialists all over the world, and has written thousands of reviews of books and recordings in this field.

The Kentucky 'Wilderness' was a forbidding jungle of impenetrable cane-brakes, tangles of vines, huge trees, and thick brush. The pioneers saw it as a place of menace, full of wolves, poisonous snakes, and murderous Indians.

Migrants into Kentucky were not much interested in forest -- they wanted fertile flat land for a farm. Trees were just a nuisance. You can't farm land until it is clear, so they promptly felled and girdled as many trees as possible for 'a clearing' and a patch to grow corn. Many cords of timber

went up crude cabin chimneys as wood-smoke. Trees were plentiful and free for the taking, providing split-rail fencing, logs for cabins, and wood for heat and cooking.

It is not possible today to experience 'The Wilderness' that confronted the ambitious pioneers who braved

Boone's Trace.