Pinto Bean Politics!

When I was growing up in a country store on Beaver Creek in Knott County Kentucky, we sold pinto beans by the pound, weighed from a galvanized barrel that sat under the main counter in the store. We bought the beans in 100 pound bags, dumped them in the barrel which also held a pretty nice blackjack carved from a piece of wood to a shape just like a miniature baseball bat, about a foot long with a nice handgrip and about a 3-4 inch circumference on the head which was drilled to about three inches down the handle to include a nice round cylinder of lead. To my knowledge the blackjack was never used in the long period my parents operated the store. Our customers came in, usually talked small talk for a short while, bought whatever they needed, maybe even a pound or two of pinto beans, and left without ever needing to be knocked out with the blackjack in the bean barrel. I no longer own that blackjack but in today's world of the most corrupt politics in the history of the nation, and the worst living example of a human being working on a daily basis from the White House to destroy the entire nation and our democracy, we sure need a good metaphorical political blackjack. On a recent check of the price of pinto beans, I found that WalMart is charging $14.94 for a 20 pound bag of pinto beans. That boils down to about 74.7cents a pound for bulk pinto beans. WalMart is now selling the one pound bag of pinto beans for a dollar. When I was often helping my parents behind the bean barrel, I don't think we ever charged more than 10cents a pound and we were making a decent profit in those days. The point to this focus on pinto beans is important because there are millions of Americans of all stripes and cultures who are eating pinto beans on a daily basis. Several different cultures are highly dependent on pinto beans as a staple source of protein. Most people of moderate to poor means in the American south depend on pinto beans as a major portion of their diet. That includes both Caucasian and African American citizens of the deep south. Most members of the various Hispanic cultures in America are also largely dependent on pinto beans. Frijoles, in many forms, are a common sight on Hispanic dinner tables. Nearly every person who ever grew up in Central and Southern Appalachia grew up, in large part, on pinto beans. We even had pinto beans once a week in the high school lunch room at Knott County High School at Pippa Passes, Kentucky, when I was a student there. Pinto beans may well be the answer to help us solve our ongoing attempted tyranny by TRAITOR Trump and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican party.

One of my favorite memories about pinto beans goes back to about 1992 when I was working for a short while, between human services jobs, at a horse farm in Central Kentucky. I was salesprepping several brood mares which were headed toward a November Breeding Stock Sale at Keeneland. The mares were actuallly owned by a man who was contracting for the sales prepping with the owner of a farm I was working on at the time. I was sent to the owner's farm to do the work. One day, the owner who was born and raised in Quito Ecuador, a Mexican immigrant blacksmith, and I were standing in front of a barn in a conversation and found ourselves talking about how we had grown up in three very different locations and cultures. We suddenly discovered that all three of us had grown up eating pinto beans, one in Mexico, one in Ecuador, and one in Eastern Kentucky. It was an educational moment for me for sure. What is the point to all this and politics? What the Democratic party needs to do to win all the next upcoming elections in this country is to locate, educate, register, and guarantee the turnout to vote of the great majority of the pinto bean cultures in America. If we do that we will be back in control of our country, our Democracy, and our future. We will no longer be facing the horrible situation in which we finid ourselves today. We can begin the next 25 to 50 years of necessary work in order to save our country after all the political, moral, and ethical damage which has been done over the last ten years by TRAITOR Trump and the other TRAITORS who facilitate most of his crimes against the government, the country, the world, and the planet. The answer is all about pinto beans.

"Aylesford Place: The Second Year" by Steve Demaree

On July 8, 2025, I wrote a blog post about the first book in this series by Steve Demaree, "Pink Flamingoed". My wife and I just finished book two in the series, "Aylesford Place: The Second Year". These books are self-published by Steve Demaree and he sells them on most of the available internet book sellers including Amazon. Aylesford Place is a mythical neighborhood on a single street in a town somewhere in Central Kentucky. The real Aylesford Place is located just north and east of the University of Kentucky campus right off Euclid Avenue. Physically, the mythical street in the books bears little resemblance to the real Aylesford Place. The neighborhood in the book is peopled by a collection of eight or ten different households ranging in age from late twenties (perhaps) to somewhere near the late seventies or eighties. Most of the characters have lived on Aylesford Place most, if not all, of their lives. However, the characters whom I consider to be the primary protagonists of the book are a young couple, Brad Forester and Amy Carmichael, a male mystery author and his female photographer girlfriend, who are married by the end of this book. Their best friends are Allison Davenport and her boyfriend Chuck Madden who are also married by the end of the book. As this novel begins, Chuck lives elsewhere in the mythical town and Allison owns her own home on Aylesford Place. After the wedding, they are both residents of Aylesford Place. Brad and Amy, after their marriage, decide to remodel the two adjoining Aylesford Place homes in which they were already living to make a connector between the two and turn Brad's house into a Bed and Breakfast. Allison is in a wheelchair and runs some kind of never quite fully described business from her home. Her inclusion as a character in the novel, actually a major character, is the best part of the book for me since my wife Candice has been in a wheelchair for almost thirty years. I commend Steve Demaree for creating this character and dealing with her appropriately. Few novelists in today's world have the strengthy of character to create such a character in their books. I suspect that Steve Demaree has, or has had, someone in his life in a wheelchair. He has Allison take part in the life of the neighborhood just as fully and functionally as any other character. She tackles life head on and usually wins. Nothing seriously dangerous of deadly ever happens on Aylesford Place. Everyone in the novel is generally always happy. They might have brief periods of being less than content but the causes are never earth shattering and they always come to a happy ending. For me, two of the major aspects of good fiction writing are the creation of an element known as Conflict and the Resolution of Conflict. Not much of that happens in Steve Demaree's books. No one ever develops cancer, hepatitis, insanity, or much more than an occasional headache or hangnail. The books lack sufficient of the reality of life to be the kind of writing that makes one wish to see the next book in a series. My wife Candice likes these books considerably more than I. I doubt that I would have read the second book if she had not wanted us to read it together as we always do with one book at a time, spending about 30 to 45 minutes a day with Candice washing our breakfast dishes while read from our ongoing book aloud. It works for us, keeps us close, and interested in the same topics most of the time. Our habit can be a good one for other couples to try, especially if you both love literature. I'm simply saying I love a higher class of literature.

"Mountain People, Mountain Crafts" by Elinor Lander Horwitz

Lately for a variety of reasons, I have been reading a lot of books about Appalachian Folk Art which is one of my favorite types of art and, in my opinion, some of the best art in America. Elinor Horwitz was a very prolific writer who published about a dozen books including at least three on Appalachian Folk Art and/or Appalachian Crafts. This particular book was published in 1974 and I actually learned about Horwitz and her work while reading a classic book on Appalachian Folk Art, "The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and The Genesis of Twentieth Century Folk Art" by Julia Ardery, a Kentucky writer. I will write about that book in a day or two. This particular book has one chapter on woodcarving and that chapter focuses heavily on Edgar Tolson and his work wiht several excellent photographs of Tolson and his work. I never knew Edgar Tolson but have heard numerous stories about him and his work from his son Donny Tolson who is also now dead. Interestingly, the photographs in this book, or at least most of them, were taken by Horwitz's two teenage sons who had traveled with her to visit various folk artists and crafters all over the region of Central and Southern Appalachian. One of her sons also took most of the photographs for another of her books which I will also write about in the upcoming days. This book is directed toward a general audience and makes no attempt to go into great detail about many aspects of Appalachian Fok Art and crafts. But Horwitz and her sons did visit most of the subjects of the book and I am also led to believe that she was a major collector of Appalachian arts and crafts. Some of the photographs are stunning and as good as one could expect to see from truly professional photographers. I haven't yet done enough research to learn if either of her sons pursued photography as a career, but I would not be surprised if they did. She broke the book down into three major chapters plus a short epilogue entitled "Today And Tomorrow" which reflects on the potential future of Appalachian Folk Art. It is a shame that the book was published with all the photographs in black and white. Many of the subjects of those photographs such as quilts, paintings, and other works would have been much more attractive and informative if they had been shot and published in full color. For several types of the work featured in the book, Horwitz discusses at length the process the creators used to produce the work, and her sons provided excellent photographs of several phases of the creative process when they were able to do so with the cooperation of the artists. It is also a good review of quite a few Appalachian Folk Artists and crafters who are now dead. But the book is well worth reading if you can find a copy since it is now more than fifty years old. I found my copy on a used book website and it is actually a former library book which I often avoid buying. But it was apparently not the most read book in that particular library and is in good shape. If you are interested in Folk Art or crafting, the book is worth digging up a copy.