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.
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