"The Autobiography Of John E. Buckingham Appalachian Financier" by John E. Buckingham, et. al---Book Review

John E. Buckingham was born in Paintsville, Kentucky, in 1874 and rose to power as a former student and loyal assistant to John C. C. Mayo, the individual who is generally given most credit for arranging the purchase, development, and eventual decline of the coal fields and the coal industry in the entire Big Sandy River Valley.  Buckingham served loyally as the most obvious right hand man to Mayo beginning shortly after Mayo began buying and selling thousands of acres of mineral rights in Kentucky under the notorious broad form deeds.  Buckingham was eventually listed as the president, CEO, or chief operating officer of a half dozen or so small banks in the coal towns, including Wayland, Blackey, Hi Hat, Paintsville, and other coal camp towns in the eastern region of Kentucky.  During the Great Depression, all of those banks except the one in Paintsville went bankrupt and were liquidated under the National Recovery Act.  Yet, amazingly, Buckingham was elected to both the presidency of the Kentucky Bankers Association and the office of State Treasurer of Kentucky.  He had a street named after him in the coal town of Van Lear, Kentucky, which is most famous for having been the hometown of both Loretta Lynn and her sister, Crystal Gale.  Buckingham Mountain, which is located on the ridge which separates Right Beaver Creek from Left Beaver Creek, is also named for John E. Buckingham.

Buckingham wrote an autobiography which is entitled “The Autobiography of John E. Buckingham, Appalachian Financier,”  and was originally published under the auspices of a vanity press during Buckingham’s lifetime and was eventually republished with a second vanity press, Gateway Press, Incorporated, in 2008.  The book was rereleased in 2008 from Gateway Press with the names of Robert M. Conley as editor and John Buckingham Browning as “consultant”.  Browning is the grandson and namesake of John E. Buckingham.  The book does give some first-person insight into the life and accomplishments of John C. C. Mayo and John E. Buckingham.  But any reader should approach it with a jaundiced eye.  Other than the Paintsville bank, which survived the depression by being merged into another institution, Buckingham did not mention by name a single one of the other banks which collapsed during the depression.  He also only used the term “depression” only once in the book and always referred to that horrible period in American history by the somewhat bleached out misnomer of “the panic of 1929”.  Buckingham also discusses several other economic failures in coal mining, lumbering, oil, and gas in terms which are clearly intended to portray both himself and John C. C. Mayo in charitable terms regardless of the topic. The book was obviously a major attempt to self-aggrandize in an apparent attempt to leave a lasting favorable impression of the author on his readership.  The book was also only very superficially edited and is replete with errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax.