Wayland, Kentucky Homecoming, August 31, 2024

 

Today, August 31, 2024, my wife Candice & I attended the Wayland, Kentucky Homecoming and had a wonderful time.  The photo above is from the 2002 Wayland Homecoming by the Wayland Historical Society.    I do not know the actual date of the most recent previous homecoming but it might have been this one in 2002 since it was on the cover of the Historical Society newsletter which announced the event.  We arrived about 11am, registered at the Historical Society, greeted a few people we knew, listened to some music being played on the Historical Society porch, and went inside to wait for two friends to arrive whom we knew were going to attend. As we registered, we received a small goodie bag with a nice Wayland mug and two Wayland coasters along with a thank you note to members of the Historical Society.  We  had previously visited the Kentucky Mountain Sports Hall of Fame and Museum on April 8, 2017, when a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian was at the museum.  I have also done some research at the Wayland Historical Society and written a couple of other blog posts about information I have found in their files, in particular the large collection of Elkhorn Coal Company employee records which they had the good fortune to locate in a company building which was donated to either the city or the Historical Society.  

Here is one photo of me and my two friends of over fifty years, Judy Tufts Combs and Genia DeCoursey Hall.  I also know that I need to get back into my hardcore exercise and diet routine.  I'm too heavy again and this photograph proves it. We were all among the first hippies in Eastern Kentucky in our young days and most of our views about life and world have not changed.  Judy and I are actually cousins since her mother was  Hicks who was descended from the same line of Hicks' from the Mousie, Kentucky area in Knott County. 

While we waited for our friends, a couple approached us and sat at our table who, as it so happened, were a distant cousin of mine, Earnest Keen, and his wife Jane who had traveled from their home in Ohio for the event.  Earnest and I had never met and, in the course of the conversation, realized that we were cousins.  His grandfather Timothy Hicks was the brother of my father Ballard Hicks and it turned out that I had actually probably known Uncle Tim better than Earnest had.  We exchanged stories about family, our lives, and exchanged small talk until my friends Eugenia "Genia" DeCoursey Hall and Judy Tufts Combs arrived.  Judy introduced me to a cousin and uncle of hers. The uncle was 98 years old and had traveled with his son from their home in Tennessee to be at the Wayland Homecoming.  The uncle was the son of David Tufts who had been a barber in Wayland for many years and whom I had known.  Judy and I are actually also cousins since her mother was a Hicks before she married Judy's father.  Genia and I have known each other about 55 years and over the last several years have reinvigorated our friendship.  She has been on a bad streak lately and her husband Jimmy "Hippy" Hall is currently hospitalized in Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia, after having severely burned himself while using gasoline to ignite a pile of brush.  He has also recently had multiple cardiac bypasses performed and could be said to still be in recovery from that surgery.  Judy was volunteering in the Fountain Room at the Historical Society and was in and out of our conversations during the day.  Genia had intended to meet us there for lunch before leaving for Huntington to visit Jimmy.  Genia, Earnest, and I walked from the Historical Society building to the local fire department parking lot to purchase pinto bean dinners for all of our group while Candice and Jane waited for us in the Fountain Room.  The pinto bean dinners were great eating, with the beans cooked in a large cast iron kettle over a wood fire in the fire department parking lot and were a fund raiser for charitable work the department does each year.  The photograph below is of me and my second cousin Earnest Keen. 

 

After we ate, Candice, Earnest, and I all went to the Wayland High School Gymnasium which has been recently restored and is a beautiful piece of work.  The one flaw in that project is that the Kentucky Mountain Sports Hall of Fame and Museum exhibits have been moved from a separate building which was wheelchair accessible to the upstairs seating area in the gymnasium which is totally inaccessible to anyone with a mobility impairment.  I will take that up with the management in the near future.  But the restoration project in the gymnasium has added new scoreboards and several banners which laud past achievements of a few of the best high school basketball teams in the days when Wayland was a high school and fielded basketball teams.   The teams on the banners include the only two teams Wayland High School ever sent to the Kentucky Sweet Sixteen tournament, in the 1950's when Kelly Coleman was a star and set many still current Kentucky High School records, and a second trip by a team nearly twenty years later.  Kelly Coleman also set several records in regular season play which still stand.  While a recent player who will be playing at UK is credited with breaking Kelly's career individual scoring record, Kelly set his records in four seasons without the shot clock or three point shot.  The more recent player who is now given credit as the individual points career record holder actually played at least two years of high school varsity basketball while he was still in grade school,  and had the benefit of both the shot clock and the three point shot.  After we spent some time in the gymnasium, a member of the Kentucky Mountain Sports Hall of Fame and Museum board of directors volunteered to take a photograph of Candice and I beside the Kelly Coleman statue outside the gymnasium.  After the photograph, we left for home.  Altogether, it was a great day and we both enjoyed it a great deal.  This photograph below is of my wife Candice and was shot in the parking area as Candice was listening to the music from the porch of the historical society building. 

This photograph below is one of myself and Candice with the statue of Kelly Coleman which stands outside the entrance to the renovated Wayland Gym.  It was graciously shot by a board member of the Kentucky Mountain Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. 

New Book, "True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia", From The Jesse Stuart Foundation

The Jesse Stuart Foundation has just released a new book entitled "True Christmas Stories From the Heart of Appalachia".  The book has 43 Christmas stories from 39 authors. It has stories from my friends, Edwina Pendarvis and Emily Steiner, as well as the well known authors Jesse Stuart, Thomas D. Clark, Cratis Williams, Bill Best, and Billy C. Clark. Including my story, "Christmas On Beaver Creek", there are three stories which are set in Knott County.  Two of those stories are set at Pippa Passes and the Caney Creek Community Center. This book is a wonderful addition to your collections of Christmas books or Appalachian books. It is also a wonderful Christmas gift for those who love to remember and work to preserve the Appalachia of their childhood.  It is well worth reading and will take nearly every reader back to some wonderful memory from your growing up years. I have a limited number of copies available with my autograph at the price of $25.00 plus $3.00 shipping (28.00 total) which is the price set by the publisher. The book will cost you the same amount of money without any autographs from the Jesse Stuart Foundation.   I will accept PayPal at rchicks@mrtc.com. I will also accept orders with a check or US Postal Money Order at:

Roger D. Hicks

65 Highway 1081

West Liberty, KY 41472

Send me an e-mail there with your name, address, and the name of the person to which you want each copy dedicated.

Here is an excerpt from my story: "Late in the evenings when the fire was warm and business slow, the older men would stop by the store to tell stories about old Christmas with the cattle kneeling in the fields...and how some old preacher talked about three men who rode on camels across a big desert following a star to take some fancy presents to a baby who was just like us, too poor to be born in a hospital." 

Clabe Mosley, Old Regular Baptist Preacher, Feb 1857-- May 1959

Clabe Mosley's Homemade Tombstone--Photo by Jim Spencer on Find A Grave

Although I was only eight years old when Clabe Mosley died in Knott County Kentucky, I will always remember the hundreds of stories I heard about him and his life as an Old Regular Baptist Preacher in the New Salem Association of Old Regular Baptists.  For most of the last years of his life, he lived in a small house behind the home of one of his relatives at Topmost on Right Beaver Creek.  But for many years before he died his handmade wooden keyhole casket and the cotton batting with which it was to be lined hung from the joists in the attic of my maternal grandfather, Woots Hicks, at Dema just below the Turner Cemetery where Clabe was eventually buried.  As I remember the story, at some point after he was past seventy or so, Clabe decided to prepare for his imminent death although he would live roughly thirty years longer.  But based on common life spans of the time, he decided it was time for him to put his affairs in order.  He was either friends with or related to the people who owned the house which my grandfather would later buy and live in until his own death. It is possible that those owners were Preston and Rachel Terry, who coincidentally were the paternal grandparents of five of my cousins which means that at different times all four of their grandparents lived in and owned the same house. So Clabe went to the best known local coffin maker and requested to have his coffin made in the older keyhole fashion.  By keyhole, we mean that the widest point of the coffin was roughly where the shoulders of the deceased would be located.  From that point, the sides of the coffin tapered in both directions toward the head and feet. These are a common type of coffin you still see sometimes in old western movies.  They were going out of favor by the time Clabe died but they were still in limited use at the time he chose to have his made.  So the story goes, when the coffin maker finished the job and sent word to Clabe that the coffin was complete, Clabe got someone to take him, since he never drove, and went to pay for and pick up the coffin.  I was always told that Clabe inspected the coffin in whatever building the maker had used as his wood working shop and said, "Well, it looks pretty good to me.  But I reckon I better check it out."  So he took off his shoes, climbed into the coffin, crossed his arms, closed his eyes, and after a short while said, "Yep, I reckon that's about right."  and payed the maker and had the coffin hauled to the house which my grandfather would eventually own where it was hung in the attic along with some cotton batting with which to line it.

Sometime after the coffin was placed there, the first owner of the house either died or decided to sell it and my grandfather bought it.  Since he also attended the Old Regular Baptist Church and knew Clabe well, my grandfather never asked Clabe to take the coffin elsewhere.   Eventually, Clabe did decide to move the coffin to the home of a family member but it hung in my grandfather's house quite a few years after he bought the home.  Fourteen of us first cousins grew up on Right Beaver Creek within five miles of our grandparents home and I grew up literally next door. Five more of those cousins lived within sight of our grandparents.  All of us grandchildren would frequently spend time at the house for family events or simple visits.  During all that time, I do not remember that any of our female cousins would ever go upstairs since the attic was entered via a small crawl door from the single finished room of the attic.  Most of the six male cousins, in a show of bravado, would still go upstairs despite whatever fears we were trying to hide.  

When Clabe died at the age of 102, he was buried in the Turner Cemetery which is located on the ridge right above the location of the no longer extant house in which the coffin hung.  He had also left explicit instructions about his tombstone which is pictured above.  As I recall, he told one of his sons, Crawford Mosley, to build it by constructing a wooden form in the shape seen above and to carve the elaborate epitaph into the rapidly drying concrete.  The rectangular depression seen in the tombstone above originally held a photo of Clabe Mosley which was covered with a piece of cut glass.  But, because it was not properly sealed, the photo did not last long and the glass was eventually broken by vandals and lost.  But the entire inscription reads: "B. Feb. 3 1857  D. May 1, 1959  Joined Caney F. C. (Caney Fork Church) 1884 of Reg. Baptist Was Ordained To Preach70 Year Ago And Have Preached Or Tried To Preach The Gospel".  I have known many people who have literally marveled at that inscription, the homemade tombstone, and the entire story of Clabe Mosley.  When he had Crawford Mosley inscribe the words "preached or have tried to preach the gospel", Clabe was taking what was a common position during his lifetime in the Old Regular Baptist Church that all men are imperfect and anyone can make a mistake.  I doubt that this position is quite that common today.  Clabe was also well known for being rather long winded at times in his sermons and is said to have preached for two or three hours on his last birthday.  The Old Regular Baptists frequently engaged in the practice of "singing down" a long winded preacher but I do not recall ever hearing that Clabe was "sung down".  For those of you who do not know that expression it means that when a preacher was considered to be preaching too long other preachers, deacons, or church members would begin a song in their typical lined out hymnody and sing until the preacher in question got the point and quit preaching.

In a rapid Internet search of the name "Clabe Mosley", I was able to find two significant pieces online about him.  One is an article in the Louisville Courier Journal of May 8, 1955, almost exactly 4 years prior to his death.  The article is entitled "70 Years In The Pulpit".  But since I am too stingy to pay for articles from newspaper morgues, I have to admit that I have not read it.  The other article is from the Kentucky Explorer website and can be found in its entirety at this link.  It is written by James G. Hall and contains several interesting anecdotes as well.  James G. Hall states that Clabe served for a lengthy period as moderator of the Caney Fork Church.  I have also seen his name in several of the annual Minutes which each Old Regular Baptist Association publishes once a year.  He is usually listed as having been a delegate to the Association meeting which published that particular edition of the Minutes.  Hall also states that he was amazed at the physical condition that Clabe maintained until much later than most people did in the early twentieth century. He also mentions that Clabe was well known for refusing to eat meat which had been bought at a store since it might have come from animals which were dead before they were butchered or otherwise unclean or unhealthy.  It is possible that such unique eating habits might have contributed to his long life at a time when almost no one refrained from eating anything which was available. Due to copy right restrictions, I will refrain from printing any long selections from the Kentucky Explorer website story.  But you can rest assured that it is well worth reading also.  Go to the link and scroll down until you find the title "Uncle Clabe".  I will also attempt to add some information in the near future from the Courier Journal story.  Clabe Mosley was one of the most interesting humans I can remember hearing about and remotely knowing in my childhood.  He is literally a legend among the Old Regular Baptist Church and all the residents of Beaver Creek and Knott County Kentucky.