Yesterday, October 12, 2024, I attended Appalachia Day Homecoming at Alice Lloyd College with my wife Candice, our friend Eugenia "Genia" DeCoursey Hall, and her friend Sharon White who is the wife of John White with whom I worked nearly fifty years ago as cooks at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Genia, Sharon, and I had all attended ALC many years ago and Genia and I have been friends for over fifty years. My wife Candice is actually an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, in Platteville, Wisconsin. But over the last 32 years, she has become a lover of Appalachia and Appalachian Culture. Candice and I left our home at about 8:30am in an attempt to arrive by no later than 10am since it is about a 70 mile drive from our house and somewhere near 30 miles of the trip is over two lane roads including US 460 from our house to Salyersville, Kentucky, Kentucky 7 from Garrett, Kentucky to the Floyd/Knott county line, and Kentucky 899 from there to Pippa Passes where the college is located. Amazingly, we got there in time to get the last handicapped parking space on the highway on campus instead of having to park half a mile away. Most of the various vendors were already set up selling a large variety of arts, crafts, food, and books. The crowd was comfortably large but not overwhelming. The main highway or street through campus was shut down totally and vendors were actually set up in parts of the road where visitors wandered around or stopped to listen to local musicians and the Alice Lloyd College Choir, The Voices of Appalachia.
Candice and I had driven together, naturally, and Genia and Sharon had driven in Genia's car but arrived a couple of hours after us. Candice and I had naturally worn our Kamala Harris shirts and, since it was a fairly cool early fall morning, we had chosen to wear Harris/Walz shirts on the outside and Harris/Walz tee shirts underneath so we could change our outer layer when the sun warmed up to about 75 or 80 degrees. The photo above is of my Harris tee shirt which my regular readers have seen before. I had not been on the property very long when I encountered a man who approached me and said he liked my shirt. We had a fairly long conversation about politics on which we agreed fully, learned that we hadfew friends in common from the ALC days. Then to my surprise, he asked me to take a selfie with me and actually used both our phones to get the photo below. I told him of the death of a good friend of both of us a few years ago due primarily to a tragic accident in which our friend had been asleep in a recliner in the living room of his ground level apartment and was hit when an impaired driver literally drove into his living room. Then we parted ways. The photo below is of the two of us at Appalachia Day.
Then Candice and I wandered around, sometimes together, sometimes separately, looking at the things which interested us, talking to a few people here and there, getting registered, etc. Candice also decided she wanted to order a sweatshirt which ALC was selling which is Appalachian in nature. The people who were selling the shirts for the college could only provide a few tee shirts on the spot, could not take credit or debit cards, and Candice had to pay in advance for the shirt with cash, fill out an order card, and wait some undetermined time to receive the shirt. I am certain that more of the shirts would have been bought if all those issues had not been part of the deal. The photo below is of Candice's Harris/Walz tee shirt.
I saw an older Mennonite woman selling books at a table next to some male author whom I did not immediately recognize. Since I have numerous Mennonite friends in our home county and also have known a few members of the Mennonite congregation in Knott County where Alice Lloyd College is located, I moved over to her table and struck up a conversation with her. It turned out that we did have a few friends in common and I bought a copy of one of her books, "Flooded...Yet Not Alone" by Miriam Moyer, which is an oral history type book about survivors of the 2022 Eastern Kentucky Flood in Knott County which is the county of my birth and childhood.
While I was talking to Miriam Moyer, the man next to her approached us and said, "You are Roger Hicks aren't you?" At that point, I recognized him as Dr. Dennis Campbell, a psychiatrist from Campton, Kentucky, with whom I had worked for about three years in my other career as a mental health and substance abuse therapist. We had a fairly long talk and I did not immediately buy any of his books, of which he has written about a half dozen since he retired a few years ago. Eventually, I did return and buy two of his books after I was assured that Candice didn't want to buy anything else from other vendors. I knew and told Dennis that since he lives not far from me that I could always get in touch with him and buy his books later. The books I bought from Dennis are "Tales From The Red River Gorge" which was actually published under the pseudonym Maribeth Wagner, and "To Conquer Eternal Summer" which was published under the pseudonym B. Camp. "Tales From The Red River Gorge" contains two fairly long stories, one of which is described as "A Romantic Suspense Thriller". The other is described as "A Tale Of Wilderness Survival". I always enjoyed working with Dennis and trusted his skills absolutely as a psychiatrist when we were working together in an environment where most of our clients were dually diagnosed and suffering from serious mental health issues in one of the poorest counties in Kentucky.
I knew that my friend Genia had also been a nurse in the medical practice where Dennis worked for several years as a general practice medical doctor before returning to the University of Kentucky to complete training as a psychiatrist because, as he puts it, "I realized that a very high percentage of the clients I was treating as an M. D. were also suffering from mental health problems." I can't wait to read his books. When Genia and Sharon arrived, Genia and I returned to Dennis' table to have another conversation with him together since he knew us both but had never known that we are nearly lifelong friends. I also introduced him to Candice. The second of his books, "To Conquer Eternal Summer", is described as "A Cultivation Trilogy" which is within the field of Fantasy Literature. Dennis' books are all available from Amazon.
During the course of the day, I was approached at various times by two more couples who also gave me compliments about my shirt(s) and briefly talked politics with all of them. One couple was a retired high school history teacher and his wife from Carter County Kentucky who described TRAITOR Trump as "very dangerous". I gave him the titles of a few books which also describe that same trait of TRAITOR Trump the same way in more lengthy and accurate words. Another couple were ALC students, a male senior communications major and his girl friend who also felt very strongly that America and American Democracy are in danger from TRAITOR Trump. Another couple, perhaps in their thirties, were from Marion County Kentucky and approached about the shirt and expressed their fears about the upcoming election and the dire possibility that TRAITOR Trump could actually be elected for the first time in his life. Candice and I ate lunch from a food trailer specializing in some Anglicized "Mexican food". Candice didn't eat much there and I had a steak fajita which was bland but fairly good. Then we checked in again with Genia who had somehow gotten separated from Sharon White, tried to help her locate her, and eventually gave up to leave in time to get back home at a reasonable hour. It was good day and wonderful to spend time with friends, both old and new, and to receive some new reading material.
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