Martha, Kentucky, WPA School and Downtown Martha

Martha, KY WPA School--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Today, June 29, 2019, my wife and I took a drive in the country to buy produce from one of our Mennonite friends in Keeton, Kentucky, on the Johnson and Lawrence County line.  A few months ago, I had driven further in that area without  a camera and had made a mental note to return with a camera and shoot some photos of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) school in Martha, Kentucky, which is one of those wonderful cut stone schools which the WPA built all across the country during the Great Depression as Franklin D. Roosevelt, our greatest president, fought to save the nation from the economic disaster of the Hoover Administration.  Between 1938 and 1943, as the nation recovered slowly, the WPA built thousands of projects from sea to shining sea and many of the older schools in Kentucky are WPA schools although most of them are no longer in use, at least not as schools.  Their stonework is phenomenal and worthy of preservation for all time both from a craftsmanship and a historical perspective.  I have written earlier on this blog about the former Morgan County High School in my hometown of West Liberty which has been remodeled, survived a disastrous tornado which demolished much of the town around it, and now functions as our Court House Annex and houses several county offices and a gymnasium.

Ricky Skaggs--Photo by Ricky Skaggs Official Website

The Martha Kentucky WPA school is now privately owned, seriously dilapidated, and in desperate need of restoration and preservation. Many of the windows are broken and the building is being used for hay storage.  I did not enter the building but suspect that the interior is probably not much better than the exterior. I am glad I shot these photos before it can succumb to even worse fates.  It sits on a slight rise above the north side of Kentucky Highway 32 at the junction of Kentucky 32 and Kentucky 469.  The school also has a somewhat interesting place in the history of Bluegrass and Country music since it was the grade school which Ricky Skaggs attended as a child.  I have been told by the current owners of the school that Ricky himself has also shot photographs of the school.  During my visit today I suggested to the current owner, who insists they will never sell the building, that they consider renovating it and turning it into a bed and breakfast.  She seemed only mildly interested in that idea.  But the school is located only 20 miles from Yatesville Lake State Park; 18 miles from Paintsville Lake State Park, the Kentucky Mountain Homeplace, and the US 23 Country Music Highway Museum, all of which are in Paintsville, Kentucky; 40 miles from Jenny Wiley State Park, Dewey Lake, and the Mountain Arts Center, all of which are in Prestonsburg, Kentucky; 50 miles from the Paramount Arts Center in Ashland, Kentucky; and about 50 miles from Greenbo Lake State Park as well.  The school is also only about 25 miles away from US23 which is otherwise known as the Country Music Highway.  This wonderful old WPA school is also only about 25 miles from Van Lear, Kentucky, which is the home of the birthplace of Loretta Lynn.  With this kind of central location to so much country music history, fishing, hunting, and artistic showcases, the school would draw fans of several different forms of entertainment to the bucolic crossroads of Martha. If you ever take a drive to Martha, stop at the combination country store, sporting goods store, and emporium across the highway from the school and reinforce for the owners, who also now own the school, that it would make a wonderful and profitable bed and breakfast.

Abandoned Building At The Intersection of KY 32 and KY 469--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Martha, Kentucky, and the intersection of Kentucky 32 and Kentucky 469 are not only bucolic.  Martha is tiny.  The store, the school, an abandoned old home or one room store building across the road, and what appears to be an equally abandoned Holiness Church beside the store are all there is in Martha.  It is a quiet, dusty crossroad in the heart of Lawrence County farming land with hay, cattle, and corn cropping up all the way around.  The US post office is located about a half mile south of the intersection on the east side of the road.  If the school were a bed and breakfast, it would be a wonderful place for people seeking country solitude for a weekend or a week within driving distance of entertainment.  I do apologize for the poor quality of my photographs from this particular day.  The sun was beaming down on a cloudless 90% day and I had no sunglasses and could not see the viewfinder.  I will try at some time to return and shoot better photos to update this post.

Abandoned Holiness Church, Martha, Kentucky--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

The abandoned old building at the intersection would be a blast to explore but I chose to not take any chances on vermin or an angry owner.  Judging by the sign nailed to the porch post, I am guessing it was probably the first country store in Martha although it could have been a home.  I love abandoned buildings and this is a fine example of such things in the South and Midwest.

Beside the actual operating store sits what appears to be an equally abandoned Holiness Church.  It does not have a sign with any particular church name but the sign above the door quotes Isaiah 35:8 and reads "And It Shall Be Called The Way Of Holiness".  That is a partial quotation of the verse from the King James Version of The Holy Bible.  The complete verse reads: "And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein."  In my opinion, the best, most quotable section from that verse for a sign at the Martha intersection would be "It Shall Be For Those, The Wayfaring Men (AND WOMEN)!".  Now wouldn't that be a great quotation to use to advertise a bed and breakfast in the Martha Kentucky WPA School?

Sign On Abandoned Martha Kentucky Holiness Church--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Hewie Hicks, My Brother--1909-1968

Hewie Hicks and Family--Photo by the Hicks Family

I am about a week late relatively speaking in writing and posting this blog post since the anniversary of the death of my brother Hewie Hicks is June 20.  In other terms, I suppose I am about eight years late since I could have written it anytime since I began this blog in 2011. And in some other terms, I should have written something about him fifty years ago not long after he died. Hewie Hicks was the eldest child of my father, Ballard Hicks, and his first wife, Ora Wicker Hicks.  Hewie was born in 1909 and was killed in a coal mine accident in 1968, the year I graduated from high school.  He was approaching retirement age after raising all of his family to adulthood with the exception of his youngest son, Jeff Hicks.  I was a student at Alice Lloyd College when Hewie was killed and still remember being called by my mother, Mellie Hicks, and told that someone would be coming to pick me up to bring me home for the funeral proceedings.  The funeral was conducted by Hall Brothers Funeral Home in Martin, Kentucky, which generally handled all the funerals in our extended family at the time. 

Hewie Hicks and Ballard Hicks, Our Father--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Although we were more than forty years apart in age and Hewie had children older than me, we had a positive relationship as I did with my other two brothers who were just a bit younger than Hewie.  He often came to our house to visit and he had a positive relationship with my mother who was actually five years younger than he. They both loved to garden and raise flowers and often exchanged cuttings, clippings, root stock, and plants with each other.  Hewie Hicks, his life, and death are, in many ways, a typical story of a coal miner's life in Eastern Kentucky.  When he was killed, he was working in a small, privately owned punch mine in Floyd County.  He was 59 years old and near the end of his working career without union membership. Therefore he was forced to work where any small operator was willing to hire him and with more than thirty years experience older men like Hewie Hicks could always find a dangerous job for the last years of their mining lives. He was killed by a kettle bottom which one online mining glossary from the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy defines as "(a) smooth, rounded piece of rock, cylindrical in shape, which may drop out of the roof of a mine without warning, sometimes causing serious injuries to miners." You will sometimes see large kettle bottoms used as entrance markers for driveways in the Appalachian states.  They look like upside down mushrooms of one to many tons. Hewie's obituary in the Floyd County Times of June 27, 1968 states that "No other workers were in the part of the mine where the tragedy occurred."  This kind of situation with single miners working in isolated portions of a mine was common with small punch mines along with bad top, bad bottom, water, and gas.  The large companies almost never attempted to mine their holdings with these kinds of problems.  But they were always willing to lease those sites to ambitious small operators and either sell or lease the operators used equipment to work those situations.  That in a nutshell describes the situation where Hewie Hicks died.   In many ways, Hewie Hicks is just one more statistic in the world of coal mining in Appalachia.  He worked for thirty or forty years in the coal industry, devoted his life to working and raising a family, and upon his untimely death was just one more forgotten fatality by everyone involved except his immediate family.  There have been thousands of other sad statistics just like this in the coal business in Appalachia.  

Hewie Hicks--Photo by the Hicks Family

The obituary which I wrote for Hewie on Find A Grave contains the following brief personal account of one common link we had.  Hewie had graduated from the Hindman Settlement School and he and I had one teacher in common, the famous Appalachian Poet and Social Activist Don West. The first time I ever met Don West in about 1972 in Beckley, WV, at the Southern Appalachian Circuit of Antioch College he immediately remembered Hewie even though it had been many years since he had taught him. Don spoke fondly of Hewie, his intelligence, work ethic, and high potential.  I also always think of a major project Hewie had made in his high school woodworking class which my parents owned at the time of their deaths and which has since been lost, sold, or destroyed.  It was a three piece oak bedroom suite with a dresser, night stand, and chest of drawers which weighed a ton, was solid as rock, and had excellent craftsmanship.  I would love to own it today and I am certain it has been lost for all eternity. 

Curtis Hicks, Ballard Hicks, Hewie Hicks--Photo by the Hicks Family

"Images Of America Floyd County" by Lisa Perry and the Wheelwright Historical Society--Book Review

Perry, Lisa and the Wheelwright Historical Society: Images of America Floyd County (Charleston, SC, Arcadia Publishing, 2010)

While this book is wonderful in many ways for the person who is researching the history of Floyd County Kentucky or its coal camp towns, it falls short in being a comprehensive photographic history of the county.  I tend to believe that since it is a product of the Wheelwright Historical Society it was focused primarily on Wheelwright, coal mining, Left Beaver Creek, and the other coal camp towns in the county.  There are some wonderful photographs in this book and the best of those came from the collections of the National Archives, Alice Lloyd College, the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society, and the Wayland Historical Society where I have also done extensive research and written about in this blog on at least three occasions.  The photos from the National Archives are from the wonderful body of work by Russell Lee which are a part of the permanent collection at the archives in Washington, DC.  Lee shot most of his photographs which appear in this book over several days in the fall of 1946.  His work alone is well worth the price of the book.  His photographs in the book include shots of the major buildings in Wheelwright at the time, in the mine during work hours, and in the homes, churches, and recreation sites of the Wheelwright miners.  I do not laud Lee's work so heavily because I believe his work is the only above average work in the book.  I laud his work because it is generally exceptional by any professional photography standards.  The compilers of this book did a wonderful job of selecting most of the photographs.  But they also failed to include anywhere near enough photos from the northern section of the county in a book intended to bear the name of the entire county.  Perhaps such photos were just not available although I suspect the archives of the Floyd County Times could have produced a wide selection.  After having said all this about this book, I realize that the superficial reader of this blog post might jump to the mistaken conclusion that I don't like the book.  That is the farthest thing from the truth.

Like most other readers of the book who have any connection to Wheelwright, Floyd County, or coal camps in Eastern Kentucky, I found one or two connections to my own past in the handful of photographs taken at the Wheelwright public swimming pool.  When I was in my second summer of the Upward Bound Program at Alice Lloyd College, we students would be taken once a week by bus from Pippa Passes to Wheelwright for an afternoon of swimming in that pool which was the closest pool to the Alice Lloyd Campus large enough for the entire group.  I still have fond memories of that pool.  There are also a few good photos from Wayland in the period between 1920 and about 1950 which also stirred memories for me.

This book is well worth the price of admission if you are a former coal camp kid, former or current coal miner, or just someone who has become fascinated by the company towns which are widely spread across the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Western Virginia, and East Tennessee.  Buy it!  Read those two or three paragraph introductions to the individual chapters!  Bask in whatever memories you have of the coal camp towns on both Left Beaver and Right Beaver in Floyd County. 

The Anti-Vaccine Movement In Appalachia

According to the Centers For Disease Control, there have been 1044 individual cases of measles confirmed in 28 states between January 1, 2019, and April 19, 2019.  They say that this is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000. far exceeding the 667 cases reported during all of 2014. The outbreak has covered nearly the entire continent with cases reported in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.. Four of these states are in Central and Southern Appalachia, the most culturally Appalachian area within the greater Appalachian region as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission.  According to the World Health Organization, "measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases, with the potential to be extremely severe. In 2017, the most recent year for which estimates are available, it caused close to 110 000 deaths" worldwide.So the real question is this: why in 2019 is the USA which is generally considered to be the most medically advanced country in the world suffering from any measles outbreak nearly twenty years after our health organizations considered the disease to have been eradicated in our country.  There is absolute, empirical scientific proof that measles vaccine prevents and, if used universally, can totally eradicate the disease.  

There are several reasons for this outbreak but the answer is simple.  The great majority of people who have contracted measles were unvaccinated and when measles reaches a community with a significant number of unvaccinated people it can spread rapidly, infect high numbers of unvaccinated people, cost our nation and its drastically and deliberately underfunded health care system millions of dollars, and kill significant numbers of the medically fragile including the young, elderly, medically fragile, and those with problems of the immune system.  This has been proven unequivocally in Rockland County New York where at least 225 people have contracted the disease.  Public officials in both New York state and Rockland County have acted professionally and courageously in the face of this epidemic and have taken strong actions in attempting to protect their citizens.  The New York legislature took the medically necessary step of removing the religious exemption for vaccinations.  This action should become federal law since 45 other states are still allowing such religious exemptions; the number of people who are endangering the entire citizenry is increasing; and their deliberate misinformation campaign is causing the gullible, uneducated, and paranoid members of society to fall prey to their tactics. Thankfully, legislators in several of those 45 states are now considering legislation similar to the New York law in order to protect the general population and begin work to once again eradicate this disease which had essentially been eliminated in America before this ignorance based epidemic struck. Sadly, all of the states in the Central and Southern Appalachian region with the single exception of West Virginia allow religious exemptions to vaccinations.  Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina all allow such exemptions.

In the research process for this blog post I have just discovered that one of the major anti-vaccine organizations constructed their website in a design which consciously copies the design and overall appearance of the websites of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.   I am deliberately refusing to name or provide a link to that anti-vaccine organization in order to avoid assisting them in their efforts to endanger the entire human race.

Several other areas of the country have taken similar steps to those taken in New York in the face of the epidemic.  But the greatest problem in the entire epidemic has been the fact that most of the people infected have either deliberately and consciously refused to be vaccinated or, in the cases of many children, they have been denied this potentially lifesaving vaccination by parents who claim either religious exemptions to vaccinations or, in some cases, have simply expressed anti-science or anti-government beliefs to justify their refusals.  Sadly, in most of these cases, the anti-vaccine elements have been passively allowed to continue with their actions, or inaction, which has greatly increased the threat of infections in the general public, especially among the medically fragile who sometimes cannot be vaccinated.  

In Rockland County, most of the unvaccinated victims of the disease have been Orthodox Jews.  But in other areas of the country, including Central and Southern Appalachia, these unvaccinated victims have claimed nebulous opposition to the vaccine which are frequently based on completely unscientific and non-religious reasons.  These reasons are often rooted in propaganda from anti-government, anti-vaccine Right Wing Radical individuals and groups who rant and rave without one iota of empirical scientific evidence or actual law to support their rantings which greatly endangers the general public and most especially endangers the medically fragile, young, and old who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate personal medical reasons.  The likelihood is considerable that the next epidemic in this country could be for a far more virulent and life-threatening disease which would originate in one of these ill informed, uneducated, and irrational groups.  Communities ranging in size from a single incorporated community to the entire country must legislate laws to force these groups and individuals to be vaccinated.   Parents must be held responsible under existing child welfare laws for the preventable diseases which cause harm to their children due to deliberate refusals to vaccinate those children.  The voluntary refusal to vaccinate a child against such a disease is undeniably child abuse.  While I am a firm advocate of free speech, I also firmly believe that the greater good must always override any single person or small group's desire to practice some form of insanity which endangers the health and lives of others.

This is a problem which could be adequately and efficiently addressed by the US Congress in a matter of only a few days.  Federal law requiring vaccinations against all communicable and virulent diseases for which vaccines exist would save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives over the next decades.  Such law would also save billions of dollars of medical expenses which are now being unnecessarily expended to treat and cure these victims of their parents' ignorance.  The overall harm to society and the economy in general of a disease outbreak such as this is stupendous and stupendously ignorant.  As a society, we must put a stop to such deliberate harm to the larger population. 

"A Guide To Historic Coal Towns of the Big Sandy River Valley" by George D. Torok--Book Review

While the author only refers to this book as "a guide" both in the title and a few times in the text, it is quite a bit more than a simple guide book.  It is a wonderful and useful piece of work, especially for those who are interested in the coal camp towns along the length of the Big Sandy River and its tributaries.  The author even extended himself a bit beyond his stated geographic region and discusses coal camp towns all the way to Bluefield Virginia/West Virginia and to the towns in Harlan County on the  headwaters of the Cumberland River.  I have no idea how George D. Torok latched onto his decision to write about these coal camp towns but I am very glad he did.  Mr. Torok is a native of Buffalo, New York, and teaches history at El Paso Community College.  But his biography on the cover of this book states that he has "published assorted works on Kentucky history".  I had passed through El Paso twice in October of 2017 but did not know of Mr. Torok or this book at that time.  I would have loved to be able to meet him and discuss this book and his extensive research to produce it.

The book is broken into six chapters, documented with an extensive and well researched bibliography, and supplemented with photographs, documents, and other information from both Mr. Torok himself and several historical sources including  the Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Alice Lloyd College, Elkhorn City Railroad Museum, and Pikeville College Special Collections which I have often used myself for other purposes unconnected to the Big Sandy River or coal camp towns.  It is readily apparent to the experienced researcher that Mr. Torok did a massive amount of work to complete this book including extensive travel in the region which is well documented in the large number of photographs which he personally shot.  He is also able to intelligently write about numerous structures, union locals, individuals, and equipment throughout the course of the book.  

If you consider yourself to be an aficionado of coal camp towns, coal mining or UMWA history, or the geography of the border counties along the West Virginia/Kentucky line, you should read this book.  The bibliography alone is worth buying the book for and will lead the avid reader on a long search for the supporting books, movies, interviews, company documents, and other corroborating information.  This is flatly one of the best pieces of research I have ever seen.  Buy it!  Read it!  Learn from it and use it as the basis for several day trips if you love coal camp towns and their history.  

My Personal Aversion To Cremation!

I learned last night, June 18, 2019, of the death of a friend I have known for fifty years.  He was seventy, had never married, and was found unresponsive in his apartment on Sunday, June 16, 2019.  He was the third friend I had known since 1968 who has died in the last eight years.  All three had never married, had productive work lives, and were cremated, given quiet memorial services by their closest relatives, and slipped from the world with little to no fanfare. All three were cremated and their ashes disposed of in some manner which was acceptable either to themselves or their families.  All three had siblings who were more than capable of having paid for a more customary funeral.  Two of the three had been raised in Eastern Kentucky under some level of influence  from the conservative Old Regular Baptist Church.  The third had spent two or three years in Eastern Kentucky as a college student and still maintained numerous serious relationships with native Eastern Kentuckians.  Two of the three were native Appalachians.  The third had been influenced by the time he had spent in one of the most traditionally Appalachian counties in Kentucky.  I must admit that I do not know that any of them had or had not expressed a desire to be cremated.  But I do know that all of them had grown up in families where traditional earthen burials were the norm.  In fact, one of these three had a sibling die within this week who was buried in a traditional manner in the same cemetery which their parents and another sibling are buried. 

 I realize that cremation and some wide range of options for disposal of ashes has become very prevalent all across Appalachia.  But I was about forty years old before any of my relatives were ever cremated.  I have been deeply influenced by the mores, traditions, and spiritual beliefs of the dominant Appalachian Culture in which I have spent most of my life.  I admit that I am not particularly religious although I do claim a degree of spirituality.  My personal aversion to cremation lies quite simply in my personal belief that it is barbaric.  I can think of no more appropriate word to use to describe cremation than barbarism.  I have no belief in particular that anyone will be resurrected from the grave prepared to use the earthly body which they occupied during their lifetime.   I have personally participated in the funeral arrangements for my mother-in-law whom I dearly love and will always miss.  She had expressed a desire to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered into the Sheboygan River at Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, at a riverside park where she often took my wife and her siblings on the weekends.  The memorial service was conducted in a funeral home where several members of my wife's extended family have been served in their passing from the world.  At my mother-in-law's memorial service a sizeable crowd was present and the immediate family then left the funeral home with her ashes for a private family ceremony at that park.  We took the ashes in their cardboard box and the several dozen yellow roses which had been provided at the memorial service to the park.  After a minimal number of small, indistinguishable remarks, we passed the ashes in their box from hand to hand and each of us scattered a few ashes and a rose or two into the river and watched the ashes sink out of sight as the roses floated down the stream out of sight.  While a few of you readers will probably say something such as "what a lovely ceremony", I am still of the same opinion with which I grew up: "Cremation is barbaric!"

 

Requiem For A Friend--Dewey Lee Rogers--1942-2019

Dewey Lee Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

Sometime in August of 2011, at Banner, Kentucky, I met one of the most unique and interesting people I ever knew.  He was my friend, my auction ring man, and one of the best overall people I ever knew.  I had just opened my weekly consignment auction at Banner which I continued to operate for several years before closing it due to my wife's increasing health problems.  I knew very few people in the area although I had grown up about 25 miles away.  I had not lived or worked in that area in several years.  A slim, neatly dressed man in a white shirt and khaki pants walked into the auction house a few minutes before the sale was scheduled to begin and struck up a conversation.  He never mentioned his name and I never asked for some unknown reason.  But it was obvious that he knew a lot about the auction business. Since most compliance officers with the Kentucky Board Of Auctioneers have always been retired Kentucky State Police detectives and this man was neatly dressed, old enough to be retired, and well versed in the business, I immediately thought he was probably a compliance officer checking out a newly advertised weekly auction.  So I said, "If you work for the board, my license is right over there on the wall.  Go check it out."  Dewey just laughed and said, "No, I don't work for the board."  

Dewey and Lorene Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

At the time, I did not have an established auction crew other than my wife Candice who was cashiering, a clerk whose full time job was as  a librarian at the local community college, and a general flunky who had walked in just a day or two after I rented the building and claimed he was a ring man.  I knew fairly soon after I hired him that he was not a ring man and shortly after that I figured out that he was also a thief.  After I started the auction, things were going about as well as could be expected with a green crew and a bad ring man.  Just as it was  becoming apparent that my so-called ring man was incompetent, Dewey just stood up and started working.  Since I had no idea who he was, my first reaction was to tell him to sit down and we would run the sale.  But after about the second item he helped me sell, I realized this old man knows what he is doing.  So I let him work the entire sale and it went much better than it would have otherwise.  After the sale ended, I walked over to him and asked how much I owed him.  He just grinned and said, "You don't owe me nothing."  Then I asked "Are you  coming back next week?"  He just grinned again and said, "I don't know if I am or not," and walked out of the building to his vehicle. About fifteen minutes before the sale was scheduled to start the next week, Dewey came walking in the door.  I walked up to him and said, "Are you going to work tonight?"   He gave me that same grin and asked, "Do you think you need me?"  "I said, "I do but I don't like for people I don't know to work for me.  Who are you?"  He said, "I'm Dewey Lee Rogers."  We shook hands.  He worked that sale and nearly every other sale I ever had in Floyd County Kentucky and we quickly became fast friends until the day he died on May 23, 2019.

Dewey & Lorene Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

Our relationship quickly bloomed into a wonderful professional relationship between an auctioneer and a ring man and an even better friendship between two Appalachian men with a lot of common interests.  He had worked as a coal miner and an auction ring man most of his life and lived his entire life on Mud Creek in Floyd County.  He loved auctions and the auction business and he would have been a wonderful auctioneer if he had ever chosen to get a license.  I still don't understand why he never did.  I offered several times to let him serve his apprenticeship under me and he always just said he wasn't interested in having his license.  When we worked auctions, he was absolutely in tune to me and my style of working.  We were a great team and he made me look better and funnier.  He was a very funny man himself and when we were both on top of our game we could have given Laurel and Hardy a run for their money and still run a smooth, fast paced, professional auction at the same time.  It was a tremendous pleasure to work with him.  He made an auction tick like a clock, kept the crowd honest, and did a hundred different things which made him irreplaceable. He knew the great majority of the locals who became our regular customers and passed on valuable personal information about every one of them.  He knew who was honest, who was not, who wrote bad checks, who stole, and who you could trust. In a short time, I realized that if I ever had a million dollars in a cardboard suitcase and needed a place to park it, I could hand it to Dewey and say "I'll pick this up in a week or two."  It would have been there untouched when I went back to get it. I always make a practice of introducing my crew at the start of each auction for two reasons.  The customers need to know who is working the auction and what their job is and the staff need to be recognized instead of ignored and treated like burger flippers or temps in what should be a full time job.  I quickly developed a stock introduction for Dewey.  At the start of every sale, I would introduce him to the crowd by saying, "This is Dewey Rogers.  He has worked for every auctioneer since Adam had to sell Abel's personal property."  It might have been an exaggeration but it was simultaneously close to the truth.  Dewey had been attending auctions since he was old enough to travel anywhere alone and he had worked as a ring man for somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years. He knew a lot about people and a lot about most kinds of merchandise and how to get an honest dollar out of anything.  He understood, just like me, that at every auction someone is in control.  It is either the auctioneer or the crowd and it should always be the auctioneer.  We worked together to the point that we were both proud to tell anybody who asked what each of us thought about the other.  To me, Dewey was the best ring man alive.  To Dewey, as he often said, I ran the best country auction anywhere around. 

Dewey Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

Dewey also had a lot of similar interests to my own.  Despite having a minimal amount of formal education, he was very intelligent, loved books and history.  He also loved to meet people and was literally the definition of gregarious.  He never saw a stranger and if he met one he knew them before they parted ways.  He absolutely loved his wife of fifty years, Lorene Hamilton Rogers, and he made it clear to anyone who asked. The last photo above is my favorite photo of Dewey and Lorene.  I don't believe it is possible to see that photo of a man and a woman, both well past their prime, staring into each other's faces without knowing that they were in love even if you do not know another thing about them.  Lorene passed away on September 11, 2018, a few months before Dewey and he was lost in many ways after that.  His health deteriorated and his daughter, Nonie Justice, and her husband moved into his home and took care of him until his death.  With medication and effort, Dewey managed to return to doing some of the things he loved until the day of his death.  He was able to visit some family and friends, to drive on his own, and to enjoy some aspects of his life until his final day.

I have lost a wonderful friend and professional associate.  Dewey's family has lost a father and a hero in many ways.  The community has lost someone to admire.    

Two More Kinds Of Sorghum/Molasses You Shouldn't Bother To Buy!

Spring Valley Farms Sorghum--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

On March 10, 2019, I wrote my first blog post about sorghum, or molasses, whichever  you prefer and it quickly became a favorite post of some of my readers both because some of them love sorghum and because some of them knew little or nothing about sorghum and were willing to try to take on a new culinary experience, especially one that was historical in Appalachia.  I eat sorghum nearly every morning in my oatmeal which I have eaten nearly every day for more than a year following a drastic change in my diet by which I nearly totally eliminated pork, beef, eggs, and milk.  I have benefited greatly from the change in terms of weight loss, lowered blood pressure, lowered cholesterol, and other improvements in nearly every metric used to assess health care.  I should also add that I have adhered strictly to a daily exercise program for more than sixteen months.  In that first post,  I compared three brands of sorghum, one made in my home county in Eastern Kentucky, another concocted in Western Kentucky, and a third from Tennessee.  While all three of those were acceptable, I made it clear that my own personal choice was Holbrook Brothers Sorghum from my hometown of West Liberty, Kentucky. They have consistently made the best sorghum I know for more than twenty years and in a bow to modern technology even have a Facebook page.    

But I suppose I am repeating myself about my favorite sorghum which I admit I am likely to do again until someone can show me a better brand.  If you happen to believe you make the best sorghum in the world, send me a jar and I will try it, write about it no matter what my opinion is, and gladly tell the world if yours is actually as good as you believe.  But now let's get to the two most recent brands I have tried and I will tell you why I believe I am doing you, dear reader, a favor by telling you to never buy or try either of them.  I have to admit that I had to toss a coin to decide which photo to post first and which sorghum to discuss first.  I do not look forward to talking about either or them.  But I spent my money for a jar of each, ate the contents despite my misgivings and my immediate desire to go out and find a better brand.  I also must admit that I regretted the fact that I do not own hogs so I could have poured the contents of both jars in a slop bucket and further remind the porkers of their low state in a short existence.  

The first brand we will discuss is Spring Valley Farms 100% Pure Sorghum which I bought in a 22 ounce jar.  At least they sell theirs in a jar which can be reused, with a new lid, to can something better to eat.  Spring Valley Farms sorghum is made in Caneyville, KY, which is located in Grayson County Kentucky which is located in West Central Kentucky.  Grayson County Kentucky is about 200 miles to the west of my area and, as we say around here, it is in the flat land.  First and foremost, I have to admit that I did not expect great results when I bought the sorghum in my local Save A Lot store which is one of a chain of about 1300 stores in 36 states.    No chain that large usually buys any product from a small, family owned local producer.  Those kinds of producers just cannot handle the volume a chain grocer would demand.  And the best sorghum almost always comes from a small, local, family owned operation where the owner is seen stirring syrup over a hot fire in early fall.  But I bought it.  I ate it.  Now I have to say what I found and that was a typical mass produced sorghum which was not cooked down long enough to be thick, dark, rich, and sweet.  Mass producers do not ever want to see their employees burn an overly large batch of syrup.  But Spring Valley Farms insist on their pre-printed label that it is "A Habegger Family Tradition".  I am willing to concede that this is an honest statement and the operation is owned by one family.  But I am also willing to bet that the operation is large enough that nobody named Habegger is cutting cane, stirring syrup, or capping jars.  Spring Valley Farms is selling more than two dozen different products in mass produced jars and you can bet your bippie that work of that magnitude is not being done by members of a family.  Don't bother buying their products unless you are firmly convinced that mass production is a great thing. 

Grandma's Molasses--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

The other brand of sorghum, excuse me--molasses, I bought was Grandma's Molasses Unsulphured Original in a 12 ounce glass jar.  It is a darker color than most mass produced sorghum or molasses and is actually produced or sold by B & G Foods in Parsippany, New Jersey.  Oh My God, Did I Say New Jersey???  Sadly, I did.  More than 25 years ago, I used to do pre-release home visits all over New Jersey with juveniles in institutional placements.  I have driven thousands of miles across New Jersey and I remember how surprised I was one day somewhere in Northern New Jersey when I actually saw a cow.  I can assure you that New Jersey is no longer "The Garden State".  That perpetually questionable source of all information for people in a hurry, Wikipedia, says that:

"B&G Foods is a holding company for branded foods. It was founded in 1889 to sell pickles, relish and condiments. The B&G name is from the Bloch and Guggenheimer families, sellers of pickles in Manhattan. It is based in Parsippany, New Jersey and has about 2,500 employees."  (Wikipedia, accessed on June 8, 2019, at 3: 37pm.)

What B & G Foods says about themselves on their website is:

"Today, our family of brands includes more than 50 well-known and loved brands that we offer throughout the United States, Canada and internationally and our commitment to food safety and quality remains our number one priority." (B & G Foods, https://www.bgfoods.com/about  Accessed on June 8, 2019, at 3:39pm)

Based on that glorious, self-aggrandizing description, you can clearly understand that B & G Foods does not manufacture foods.  They buy products by the tractor trailer or rail car load and, at most, run bottling and canning factories where those mass produced products are blended, bottled, canned, shipped, and sold to the world.  The taste of their "Grandma's Molasses Unsulphured Original" is heavy, crude, dark, undesirable, and should never cross my lips again.  I suspect if you have a constipated baby you could put a spoon full of this concoction in the little whipper snapper's bottle and expect results before the night is out.  But whatever you do, don't inflict this stuff on yourself.  Go to a county fair, farmer's market, or road side stand and buy a nice mellow, dark, sweet, wonderful jar of homemade sorghum from somebody whose name has been scrawled on a glue backed label and pasted to a jar, carried down the lane from the sorghum mill, and placed on a table beside an old state highway with a three or four digit number.  Dip your finger in that jar, listen to the bluebirds sing, and lick it slowly off your fingers before you drive home knowing those big fluffy cat head biscuits you will be baking will be a wonderful dessert at the end of a big country breakfast tomorrow!   

"Memoir" by Robert Hicks--Book/Manuscript Review

Robert Hicks, Photo by UMWA Local 5895

For those of you who ever actually read the list of "Books I Have Read Lately" which has been located at the bottom of the page on this blog ever since I have been blogging, you might have noticed lately that I had added "Memoir" by Robert Hicks to that list of books.  I used the term "book" somewhat expansively in reference to that particular work as I sometimes to do documents, manuscripts, and other unpublished sources of information which I believe could be useful to another student of Appalachian Studies or of some particular subject covered by some writing I have read.  I have always hoped that at least a few of my readers might choose from time to time to read some of these listings.  This particular manuscript can only be found in one place on earth so far as I know and that is the Wayland Historical Society in Wayland, Kentucky, where I have been doing some research recently.  If you decide to try to locate and read this manuscript, you will need to travel to Wayland to see it.  But the bright side is that the Historical Society has a relatively broad policy about access to their holdings and the copying of those holdings.  

I had two different reasons for choosing to read this 50 page manuscript: 1) my ongoing research involves the town of Wayland and the Elkhorn Coal Company which built the town and owned it until about 1970; 2) Robert Hicks was a distant cousin of mine and was raised in a holler called Bruce near Mousie, Kentucky, where my father was also raised.  Robert Hicks served as the fifth president of UMWA Local 5895 in Wayland, KY, and his son, Bobby Ray Hicks, still serves as president of Local 1741 which was merged with Local 5895 sometime after coal mining ended in Wayland and the number of active UMWA members dwindled. As his biography in "Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" states: "Robert Hicks started work in the mines...in 1919" and served his local union, the town of Wayland, and the greater community in a variety of ways as Financial Secretary and President of Local 5895 and as Police Judge of the City of Wayland.  

When I read this memoir, I was able to learn some previously unknown information about my extended family and the area in Mousie where they lived and many of them are buried.  I also learned more about a man named John "Bud" Wicker who had been a school teacher and elected official in the area around the turn of the twentieth century.  This was particularly important to me since a treasured family member who developed dementia late in life had fixated on John "Bud" Wicker at times during the severe deterioration of their dementia.  As a well known and well loved caretaker would walk through the house this person would often say, "There comes that SOB John "Bud" Wicker".  Their caretakers knew nothing of John "Bud" Wicker but I had at least heard of him during my childhood and knew that he had been well respected in the county.  His photo and a warm remembrance of him is included in the memoir and I immediately copied that page and mailed it to the caretaker of my family member.  It seems that the family member, in their dementia, had fixated on their old grade school teacher after they could no longer recognize their caretaker and we all found it quite humorous as some of these dementia stories can be.  Secondly, I was able to learn the original source of one bit of information about my paternal grandfather, Charlie Hicks, which I had found repeated in another more questionable source.  Robert Hicks had also included in the memoir other somewhat more lengthy information about my grandparents: 

"I remember on several occasions, Joe and I would go up to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betty's to stay all night.  Uncle Charlie was somewhat of a rhyme maker.  He was all the time making a rhyme on someone and we just loved to hear him.  Aunt Betty was always working with her loom weaving cloth to make her children clothes, or she would be spinning wool on her old spinning wheel to make wool thread to knit their stockings.  She was also one of the old midwives who caught babies from under persimmon trees, or got them out from among Uncle Charlie's bee gum stands.  Uncle Charlie was always talking about his "honey money" and his old woman.  He must have had at least seventy five bee gums and an old mule called Jim.  He would start out on Old Jim and say, "Come on Jim, we're going to Lackey or maybe Garrett."  He would start out singing "Tell Mother I'll Be There".  That's an old Baptist song.  At breakfast he would have a big bowl of honey and we boys didn't care too much for honey.  All we wanted was that big bowl of gravy.  I think that gravy was the greatest thing the old people ever learned to fix.  It it hadn't been for gravy, many folks would have starved to death.  We would eat every bit of it and even scrape the skillet clean.  That was a big skillet too."  (Robert Hicks, "Memoir" page 7)

It was wonderful for me to read that somewhat lengthy remembrance of the paternal grandparents I had never known personally or heard hat story in its entirety.  I had known that Grandma Betty was a midwife until she was about seventy-five and I had also known that  Grandpa Charlie kept seventy-five or a hundred stands of bees until he was about eighty and peddled honey among the coal camps by mule back even at that advanced age.  It also reminded me of a story my father Ballard Hicks used to tell about going to Jackson in his childhood with Grandpa Charlie and at least one of his brothers.  It was the first time they had seen cement sidewalks and Daddy always said that his brother kept looking at the poured concrete sections of the sidewalk until he finally said, "I sure wish I knowed where they got these big flat rocks.  Pap could sure use some of them to set his bee gums on."  

Elizabeth "Betty" & Charlie Hicks

Robert Hicks also made one short reference to my maternal great-grandfather Hence Hicks, who was murdered in 1935, by saying that he had been an oxen driver in a local logging or farming operation.  But he only made one short reference to the United Mine Workers of America to which he apparently had devoted several years of his life and had obviously inculcated union thinking into his son to the point that Bobby Ray Hicks also became a UMWA official.  That failure to discuss the UMWA left the readers of his memoir without many key elements of his life's work I am certain.  But this book is well written with only minimal linguistic errors considering it was written by a relatively uneducated man.  That skillful writing is also one more testament to the fact that the Hicks genes seem to carry some propensity for producing people who like to write or "make a rhyme" as my grandfather, father, and myself have done along with Robert Hicks.  If you are a descendant of some of the Hicks family living around Mousie Kentucky, you will benefit from making a trip to the Wayland Historical Society and reading the "Memoir" of Robert Hicks. 

"The Nick Adams Stories" by Ernest Hemingway--Book Review

Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. (New York, NY, Bantam Books, 1972)

This has always been one of my favorite books and this is the second or third time I have read it from cover to cover.  I have probably read a few of the individual short stories in this collection such as "Indian Camp", "Big Two-Hearted River", and "The Last Good Country" a dozen times or more.  This book shows a side of Hemingway that is not the commonly understood man and writer in many ways.  The 24  stories are divided into five sections and arranged in something close to the chronological order in which they were written.  The sections, in order, are called "The Northern Woods", "On His Own", "War", "A Soldier Home", and "Company Of Two".  These sections are intended to present the stories as they fit into the key segments of Hemingway's life and also correspond fairly closely to the order in which they were written.  

The stories in "The Northern Woods" are all set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the character Nick Adams after whom they are entitled is generally conceded to be primarily an autobiographical presentation of a youthful Hemingway in the home of his father.  "Indian Camp" has always been one of my favorite stories by any writer.  It is direct, brutal but realistic, and shows Hemingway approaching the issue of suicide which was a major family issue with his father, brother, and several other family members either attempting suicide or succeeding in ending their own lives.  The short story tells the story of the doctor, his son, and an uncle attending the birth of a child in the home of a Native American couple in the Upper Peninsula.  The woman's husband is bound to his bed by a recent injury and they  are actually in a set of bunk beds during the childbirth.  At the end of the procedure, the doctor discovers that the father has quietly committed suicide in the upper bunk as his child is being born immediately below him.  The dialogue at the end of the story is some of the most linguistically simple and yet brutally powerful you will ever find by an writer anywhere.  The boy asks, 

"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"  

"Not very many, Nick."

"Do many women?"

"Hardly ever."

"Don't they ever?"

"Oh yes. They do sometimes."

"Daddy?"

"Yes."

"Where did Uncle George go?"

"He'll turn up alright."

"Is dying hard, Daddy?"

"No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick.  It all depends." 

When we consider the fact that both Ernest and Clarence Hemingway died by suicide by gunshot, we can almost visualize Ernest Hemingway, in Ketchum, Idaho, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, replaying that very dialogue in his mind as he loaded his shotgun to end his life.  I have always suspected that this section of dialogue from "Indian Camp" may well be the most purely autobiographical words Hemingway ever wrote.  But the stories are not all that dark and Nick Adams and his fictional father are not overly dark characters.  Nick Adams love to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve.  Some of the hunting and fishing language in these stories is pure poetry.  the sexual language is totally devoid of all those socially unacceptable locker room words so often found in the work of lesser writers.  But when Hemingway wrote about sex, he did not leave  his readers to wonder what he was talking about.  His meanings are crystal clear.  His language is admirable and accurate.  When he writes about any of these three topics, you know you are reading the work of an individual who has done sufficient homework on his topics to be considered an expert and a connoisseur.

"The Last Good Country" is a fascinating story about Nick Adams on the run from two local game wardens as a teenager in the company of his younger sister who is going with him to protect him from himself and his dangerous tendencies.  They are hiding in the "...last good country..." in the Upper Peninsula with streams full of hungry trout, berries to pick, warm beds of vegetation in which to sleep safely, and far too much country for two fat, liquor loving game wardens to ever find them.  The relationship between the siblings borders on things which most readers would not appreciate and Hemingway never crosses any of the lines which would make the difference for reader.  But he walks directly up to those lines, stares across at his doubting readers, and leaves answers hanging in the air to be considered, doubted, appreciated, and never found in the open.  It is also a wonderful story.  

 "Big Two-Hearted River" is, perhaps, the best known story in this collection but I would not go so far as to declare it flatly the best.  It is a wonderful story and is also one of my favorite stories both from Hemingway and from the greater body of American literature.  It is, on the surface, a fishing story about an isolated section of river which Nick Adams loves to fish in the Upper Peninsula but it also about a soldier returning home from war and remembering his friends in the war.  The fishing sections of the story are some of the best written descriptions of fishing from any writer, anytime, anywhere.  Isaak Walton would have been proud to know this version of Hemingway.  It is also a great story about a solitary person in a very solitary situation in a wilderness.  This story is one of those which no person should ever say they are a well read aficionado of either Ernest Hemingway or American Literature without having read. 

While the Nick Adams stories are not always the first of Hemingway's writing we hear mentioned, they are well crafted, introspective, autobiographical stories by and, at least in part, about a very complicated man.  They are well worth reading and rereading.