The Bluegrass and Beyond

More than 2,500 people filled Courthouse Plaza downtown Monday for Bike Lexington, the culmination of a month of bicycle-related events and activities.  Bike Lexington included a 10-mile family fun ride, races, trick riding demonstrations, vendors and bike raffles by prime sponsor Pedal Power Bike Shop.

At Bike Lexington, officials announced the results of the Commuter Bike Challenge, a competition in which employees at local companies and organizations logged commuting miles to and from work. Nearly 500 rider participants logged a total of about 12,000 miles. The employers with the most miles included Bullhorn marketing, Awesome Inc., the University of Kentucky Libraries and UK Chemistry Department.

On Saturday and Sunday, nearly 2,000 cyclists from around the country were in the area to participate in the Bluegrass Cycling Club’s 33rd annual Horse Hundred ride through Scott, Fayette, Bourbon and Woodford Counties. That event was based at Georgetown College and included rides each day of between 26 and 102 miles.

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What is a more pervasive threat to national security than al-Qaida? Military leaders say it is the double cheeseburger and large fries, and the sedentary lifestyle of many American young people.

In a recent report called “Too Fat to Fight,” the non-partisan group Mission: Readiness, made up of senior retired military officers, said 27 percent of Americans 17 to 24 years old aren’t fit enough to serve in the military. The number of inductees who flunk their physicals has jumped nearly 70 percent since 1995.

“Obesity rates threaten the overall health of America and the future strength of our military,” Gens. John Shalikashvili and Hugh Shelton, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a recent commentary in the Washington Post.

Lexington fitness trainer Steve Mansfield is helping the Marine Corps fight back.

Mansfield, who owns Legion Training Center off Reynolds Road, has begun teaching Marine recruiters across the region a no-frills fitness program that they can use to help get recruits in shape. Many recruits have about six months between when they enlist and when they report for duty.

Since April, two classes of Marine recruiters have graduated from Mansfield’s Legion Warrior PT program. It is an intense three days of classroom instruction and workouts with dozens of strength and endurance exercises that use body weight for resistance.

Mansfield hopes that if the recruiters find the program useful, the Marines will hire him to expand it nationally. So far, the results are promising, said Sgt. John Jackson, public affairs officer for the 4th Marine Corps District, based in Louisville.

“They were very positive about it,” Jackson said of recruiters who have completed the program. “It was very demanding.”

It certainly was. I spent a couple of hours watching Mansfield and his instructors put more than a dozen fit Marine recruiters through a workout that included every variation of push-up, sit-up, jumping jack, squat and kicking exercise you can imagine — and then some.

“They’re going to be able to take kids they couldn’t take before,” Mansfield said as he walked around the gym critiquing the recruiters’ workouts. “They’ll get more kids in good enough shape to serve and, if they’re in shape, get them better able to excel at basic training.”

Mansfield, 52, never served in the military. Until the Bath County native opened his gym nearly three years ago, he said, he worked in business and technology. In his spare time, though, his passion was martial arts, rock climbing, mountaineering and other endurance sports. “I finally decided to make my hobby my career,” he said.

Unlike many sport-specific exercise programs, Mansfield’s workouts are geared toward creating overall, high-endurance fitness. Legion Warrior PT is a combination of military and law enforcement exercise techniques, plus those used in extreme sports.

The idea is to teach recruiters a variety of exercises to help every kind of recruit — and to keep workouts interesting. The exercises require little or no special equipment. Mansfield teaches similar workouts to civilian clients at his gym.

“There’s no new exercise under the sun,” he said. “It’s finding the exercises that work for you and doing them with the intensity needed to get fit. You can’t do the same thing every day, or it will get stale, and then you won’t do it.”

The program also includes four hours of nutrition instruction. “For recruits, nutrition is half the battle,” Mansfield said.

“It will definitely help the people we recruit get in shape for boot camp,” said Sgt. David Harvey, a Marine recruiter based in Cincinnati.

Many high school athletes enlist in the Marines, but even they often don’t have the stamina and endurance needed to succeed. “We also get a lot of smart (video) gamers who can’t do a pull-up,” said Sgt. Robert Pugh, a recruiter in Bowling Green.

“It’s one of the most physically challenging things I’ve ever done,” Staff Sgt. Brandon Rosser, a Louisville-based recruiter, said as he caught his breath during a break. He says the program will help him help Marine recruits. “I never knew there were so many versions of push-ups.”

The old First African Baptist Church building at the corner of Short and Deweese streets is much more than a Lexington landmark with an uncertain future.

It is an impressive structure with an amazing story. It is an opportunity for many people to figure out how to do the right thing. And it is one more example of why Lexington needs better ways to preserve its heritage.

The Italianate-style church was built in 1856 by the oldest congregation of slaves and free blacks west of the Allegheny Mountains.

It was, in many ways, a monument to the Rev. London Ferrill, who built First African Baptist into Kentucky’s largest church. He became a hero in 1833 when a cholera epidemic killed 500 of Lexington’s 7,000 residents. Ferrill was one of three ministers who stayed in town to bury the dead and minister to survivors of both races.

First African Baptist moved to a new facility on Price Road in 1987, took its stained-glass windows and sold the historic building to nearby Central Christian Church, which has used it for a subsidized child-care center.

Central Christian, needing money for other things, recently agreed to sell the building to jeweler Joe Rosenberg, although the deal still must be approved by a congregational vote.

Rosenberg says he has no intention of tearing down the building. He wants it renovated to house a non-profit organization or for some other use.

The Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation is trying to convince Rosenberg and Central Christian to legally protect the building with a preservation easement. That would not restrict the building’s use; only prohibit demolition. So far, neither Rosenberg nor the church have agreed, and that worries preservationists.

After all, Rosenberg partnered with developer Dudley Webb in the ill-conceived CentrePointe project, which destroyed an entire block of downtown buildings in 2008 and left behind an empty pasture. Several of those buildings had historic or architectural significance.

Rosenberg has done a lot of good work in Lexington over the years, and he has a reputation for being a man of his word. I believe him when he says he has no intention of demolishing this building.

But Rosenberg also had no intention of demolishing the old Woolworth building he owned on Main Street. He worked for 14 years to find ways to restore and reuse it. But things didn’t work out for a variety of reasons, many of which were beyond Rosenberg’s control. The art deco gem was demolished in 2004.

This situation presents some important opportunities for Lexington. It is an opportunity to preserve one of the most significant structures built here by African Americans before the Civil War. And it is an opportunity to learn from CentrePointe and other preservation failures.

Lexington’s civic, business, preservation and African American communities must help Joe Rosenberg keep his word. A project like this will require more than one man’s energy, creativity and expertise. And it is more than one man’s responsibility.

The only way to really save the old First African Baptist building is to find a new use for it. While historic tax credits can help pay renovation costs, long-term preservation will depend on the building having a purpose that makes economic sense.

But even if that can be done, it will not solve Lexington’s larger problem. Historic preservation cannot remain an endless series of building-by-building battles.

Adaptive reuse of fine, old buildings is as much about creating a vibrant economy for the future as it is about preserving history and memories. Lexington needs a broader, more flexible set of preservation tools than the current system of historic neighborhood overlays. That could include local landmark designations and laws that make it harder to demolish any historic building without a compelling reason.

Lexington has lost so much of its bricks-and-mortar heritage over the past few decades. If we want to build on our cultural identity to create a more prosperous future, we simply cannot afford to lose much more.

The Idea Festival, which began in Lexington in 2000 and is now held in Louisville each September, has announced this year’s lineup. There aren’t as many famous names as in some years past, but I’m sure it will be a fascinating few days; it always is.  Click here for details and ticket information.

A famous African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” For many African-Americans in Lexington, that village was the Oakwood subdivision.

Some Oakwood children are now in their 40s and 50s, and they will return this weekend to the subdivision off Georgetown Road that they credit with helping to shape their lives and success.

The reunion begins at 5:30 p.m. Friday with a tour of Bryan Station High School, where three years ago a new building replaced the one where many of them excelled in athletics and academics. On Saturday, a block party is planned from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. A memorial service, dinner and party begins at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Lexington Hilton Downtown.

“I always thought Oakwood was a special place,” said Angela Duerson Tuck, an editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who helped organize the reunion with a Facebook page. “All of the adults looked after all of the children. Everybody knew each other. Everybody helped each other.”

Oakwood was special from the beginning. When the 106-home subdivision opened in 1964, it was only the second development in Lexington where African-Americans could buy a new house. The first, St. Martins Village, had opened a few years earlier, about a mile down Georgetown Road.

Oakwood opened the same year that Congress passed landmark civil rights legislation that prohibited housing discrimination. Before that, such discrimination was not only legal but widely practiced.

The subdivision was carved from farmland near the factories of IBM, Square D and Trane. Those employers were willing to hire African-Americans and pay them enough so they could afford an Oakwood home, which then sold for about $20,000.

The 1960s were the heyday of suburbia, and Oakwood was a place where African-Americans could live the suburban dream. The neighborhood’s popularity led to the development five years later of the adjacent Oakwood Estates, with 139 homes.

Many Oakwood homeowners had grown up together in Lexington’s East End or were classmates at the old, all-black Dunbar High School. Some worked together and many went to church together.

“We became very good neighbors,” said Julian Jackson Jr., 78, the first black director of the Kentucky Cabinet for Human Resources.

“It always seemed like an extended family,” Tuck said of Oakwood, where her parents moved in 1965 from Winchester. “We used to joke that if you did something you weren’t supposed to and one of the parents saw you, they’d correct you and then call your parents, so more discipline would be waiting for you when you arrived home.”

The 1964 marketing brochure for Oakwood subdivision

The Jacksons were the third family to buy a home in Oakwood, in August 1964. Jackson and his late wife were in a hurry to enroll their son, Jarold — now supervisor of field operations for Kentucky American Water — in first grade at Linlee Elementary School.

Lexington’s schools were being peacefully integrated, but Linlee’s principal made a point of calling several Oakwood parents to tell them their children would be welcome.

Those former Oakwood children remember how their parents emphasized education and hard work. “There was just no tolerance for not achieving,” Tuck, who began her career at the Herald-Leader, said with a laugh.

Others returning for the reunion include Randall Johnson, a Chicago attorney who graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, and Greg Fields, a former WKYT-TV meteorologist who works for WFAA-TV in Dallas.

But some of their friends won’t have to come far — they still live in Oakwood.

Most of the homes belong to their original owners or their heirs. Jarold Jackson and his brother, Jonathan, have homes in the neighborhood. And Jarold’s son, Brian, 27, lives in the Oakwood home that once belonged to his great-grandmother.

The neighborhood now includes several white families.

As I photographed Julian, Jarold and Brian Jackson at the Oakwood entrance Sunday evening, the occupants of every passing car waved to them. Julian Jackson’s dentist stopped and rolled down his window so he could tease him.

“This,” Julian Jackson said as his dentist drove away, “has been a pleasant place to live.”

Three generations of Oakwood homeowners: Jarold, Brian and Julian Jackson.

Here’s a trivia question for you: Who was Lexington’s first business tycoon?

The answer is William Morton, who was known around town two centuries ago as “Lord” Morton. No image of Morton is known to exist, but he was described by contemporaries as tall, stately and dignified, which explains his noble nickname.

Morton is remembered today for two reasons: Morton Middle School is named for him, because of his early support for public education; and because he built one of Lexington’s first grand mansions, whose bicentennial will be celebrated Thursday at 10 a.m. with a ceremony and tour.

Morton came to Lexington from Philadelphia around 1787. He was one of a handful of entrepreneurs who transformed a pioneer blockhouse into the most important trading city on America’s young western frontier.

As early Lexington prospered, primarily through manufacturing and the cultivation of hemp and tobacco, its citizens craved the finer things in life. Morton provided them, opening a store in 1787 at the corner of Main and Upper streets.

By the early 1800s, Morton owned a tannery where the Lexington Convention Center now stands and a row of commercial buildings along Upper Street between Main and Vine streets. The last of “Morton’s Row” was demolished in 2008 to make way for CentrePasture.

In 1803, Morton became the first president of the Kentucky Insurance Co. It was created to insure commercial shipments, but its cleverly worded charter also allowed it to become the city’s first bank. People then were suspicious of banks, because they printed their own money and often went bust, leaving customers with worthless paper.

Morton was active in civic affairs, serving as a city trustee and an officer in the local militia. He made a lot of money, and he did some good things with it. He and Walter Warfield purchased a lot on Market Street in 1804 where Christ Church was built, and he became one of the Episcopal congregation’s first vestrymen.

He was an early trustee of Transylvania University. Upon his death in 1836 at age 84, Morton left about one-third of his estate — the then-enormous sum of $12,000 — to start one of Lexington’s first public schools. At the time, wealthy children went to private schools. Poor children went to work.

Morton’s other legacy was a 20-acre estate he bought in 1795 at what was then the northern edge of town. He built a Federal-style mansion, with a tall front door flanked by Palladian windows, that many people regarded as the finest in town.

Two years after Morton’s death, the property was bought by Cassius Clay, who became famous and unpopular for campaigning against slavery with his newspaper, The True American. He lived in the house until 1850.

Clay sold the property to Dr. Lloyd Warfield, who subdivided three-fourths of it. In 1873, Warfield sold the home and surrounding five acres — bounded by Limestone, Fifth, Sixth streets and what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard — to Henry T. Duncan. He started the Lexington Daily Press newspaper and served two terms as mayor.

Duncan’s family sold the property to the city in 1913, and it became Duncan Park. The much-altered mansion has had many renovations over the years, and it needs another one. As city property, it has had many uses. It now houses The Nest: The Center for Women Children and Families, a non-profit social service agency.

Many successful Lexington businessmen have been quickly forgotten after their deaths. Morton’s memory lives on because he invested some of his wealth in making Lexington a better place — and because he built a fine piece of architecture that is still worth celebrating.

This drawing, from Clay Lancaster’s Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1991) shows the Morton House as it originally looked in 1810. Below, the house as it looks today. It is bigger than it looks; the front door is 10 feet tall.

I understand why so many Americans are angry. I am angry, too.

The nation is mired in two costly wars. The economy tanked because of greedy bankers, investors, lenders and borrowers. Schools and other vital institutions are in crisis. Things our society used to take for granted — from affordable health care to jobs that can fund a middle-class lifestyle — are hard for many people to find.

The angry people getting most of the attention lately are the Tea Party screamers — mostly older, white, more affluent folks who preach a gospel of selfishness. They see the problem as “big government.”

But I encounter a larger, quieter, though still angry group of people every day. They don’t wave flags, wax nonsensically about the Constitution or seek to live in some idealized past.

These people, both Democrats and Republicans, think the Tea Partiers’ diagnosis of what is wrong with America is missing a couple of words and most of the point. They see the problem as “big business” and “irresponsible government”.

Free enterprise is what makes America great — the ability of individuals to work hard and succeed, to be both “free” and responsible members of society. But for that to work, it takes responsible government to provide infrastructure, keep the system honest and protect the vulnerable. Government is not “them,” it is “us”.

Responsible government has been hard to find lately. One reason is both Democrats and Republicans have been lavishly funded by big business, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority recently opened the floodgates for even more corporate influence.

Another problem is both Republicans and Democrats want to spend too much and tax too little. The nation’s social safety net and economic security are threatened by rising debt, but money keeps flowing to corporate giveaways, pork-barrel projects and unrealistic entitlement programs. Not to mention ill-conceived wars.

At the same time, irresponsible politicians have repeatedly cut taxes, especially for the wealthy. What the “taxed enough already” crowd will not acknowledge is federal taxes for almost everyone are their lowest in decades.

Republicans like to complain about health care reform being a “government takeover.” In reality, it is nothing like the government-run health care that works pretty well in most other western democracies. This reform was basically a sop to the health care industrial complex. While it expands coverage to more people, it does little to control costs and lacks a public option to private insurance.

“Socialist” President Barack Obama is the focus of much right-wing anger. But liberals — not to mention the nation’s few actual socialists — note that most of his policies would have made him a solid Republican only a few decades ago.

Tea Partiers love to rant against government regulation, as if markets were the product of magic rather than human nature. Anyone can find examples here and there of regulation that overreaches or is silly. But many of today’s biggest problems were caused by too little regulation, not too much.

The economic crisis was largely the result of deregulation and a lack of oversight of the financial industry under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The biggest problem with federal environmental laws has been that, until recently, they were barely enforced, despite what the “drill baby, drill” and “dig baby, dig” crowds like to claim.

As BP’s broken well gushes crude oil, destroying the environment and the livelihoods of thousands of people along the Gulf Coast, some Tea Party candidates want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Excuse me?

One of the most absurd examples of political theory trumping common sense occurred last week. In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Rand Paul, fresh from winning Kentucky’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, indicated he thought the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an example of government over-reaching.

Echoing comments he made last month to the Courier-Journal editorial board, Paul suggested restaurants, for example, shouldn’t be required by law to serve black or gay people if they didn’t want to. Only later, amid outrage even from within his own party, did Paul finally take a stand in favor of a half-century of settled civil rights law.

“I hope he can separate the theoretical and the interesting and the hypothetical questions that college students debate until 2 a.m. from the actual votes we have to cast based on real legislation here,” Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, told The New York Times.

Something tells me it is going to be a long six months until November.

New murals are being installed this week in the state Capitol in Frankfort in preparation for the building’s centennial celebration June 4-5.

I took this photo of the installation Wednesday from the balcony around the base of the dome, high above the rotunda. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)

Evergreene Architectural Arts in New York created the murals for the four pendentive corners between the rotunda and dome.  Murals were always intended for those corners, which have been blank since the Capitol opened in 1910. People just never got around to it — until now.

The murals were created and installed thanks to a gift of nearly $300,000 from Marion Forcht, an active member of the Kentucky Historic Properties Advisory Commission, and her husband, Corbin banker Terry Forcht.

The centennial celebration June 4-5 will include a Gala ball ($75 per person) on Friday night and family activities on the capitol grounds Saturday. For more information, go to: www.capitol.ky.gov. For Gala tickets, call (502) 564-5500.

I’ll be writing more about the Capitol’s centennial and murals in Communities section of the June 2 Herald-Leader. You can read it here, too. Click here to read a piece I wrote about the project in January.

I like Pearse Lyons’ beer, but I like his thinking even better.

This week, the founder and president of Alltech has attracted 1,500 people from 50 countries to Lexington Center for the 26th annual Alltech International Animal Health and Nutrition Symposium.

This fall, he hopes to attract more than 250,000 people from even more countries to the Kentucky Horse Park for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

Lyons is a successful entrepreneur because he recognizes opportunities — and acts on them. He and his wife, Deirdre, emigrated from Ireland and have spent 30 years building a global brand based in Central Kentucky that does business in 120 countries.

Until a few years ago, few Kentuckians had ever heard of Alltech. That’s because most of its business was creating and marketing all-natural animal nutrition supplements.

Public awareness of Alltech has grown with its range of consumer products, which now include Dippin’ Dots ice cream, Kentucky Ale, Bourbon Barrel Ale, the Alltech Angus brand of Kentucky-raised beef, and Kentucky Sundown, a bourbon-and-coffee drink. Alltech will be selling bourbon as soon as the first batch has aged enough.

Alltech’s biggest advertising vehicle is its title sponsorship of the World Equestrian Games. Lyons said that when he was approached about the sponsorship, he quickly realized the $10 million cost would be a smart investment. Since then, Lyons said, he has put an additional $12 million into leveraging that investment, and will spend yet another $10 million or so before the Games are over.

One thing I find interesting about Alltech is that Lyons doesn’t see himself as being just in the animal nutrition business, or even the food and drink business. He sees himself as being in the business of using scientific research, creative thinking, innovation and good marketing to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

Because Alltech is privately held and, according to Lyons, quite profitable, he has the resources to go after opportunities in a big way.

Much of the talk at this week’s Alltech symposium has been about using science and innovation to feed the world, make food supplies safer and agribusiness more environmentally sustainable. Lyons believes businesses that make people healthier and the environment cleaner will create long-term value.

Lyons announced Monday that Alltech will create the world’s second-largest algae factory in Kentucky, with the location and details to be revealed in August. He thinks pond scum, which can absorb twice its weight in carbon dioxide while producing bio fuels, could be a potent weapon for fighting climate change.

Another thing I find interesting about Alltech is Lyons’ belief in the potential of the “Kentucky” brand. He has gone to great lengths to partner with Kentucky’s world-class people and organizations. Sponsoring the World Equestrian Games was a logical step in that strategy.

At last year’s symposium, Lyons and Muhammad Ali announced a charitable and educational partnership. Alltech is a big supporter of the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre program, which under Everett McCorvey’s leadership has developed an international reputation.

This year’s Alltech symposium featured a talk on entrepreneurship by former Gov. John Y. Brown Jr., who franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken. Brown was followed by Joaquin Pelaez, an executive with Louisville-based Yum Brands who now oversees KFC’s huge presence in China.

Lyons noted that KFC is better known in China than any other American brand, and the Chinese refer to it simply as “Ken-touch-ee.” If name recognition is half the battle in marketing, that’s quite a head start for any Kentucky company hoping to do business in the world’s most populous country.

I suspect this fall’s Games will leave its international audience with a favorable impression of both Alltech and Kentucky — a beautiful state that is home to a innovative company.

We could, and have, done a lot worse when it comes to the Kentucky brand. While there is much to admire in Kentucky, this state has a stubborn legacy of poverty, ignorance and environmental degradation.

If this transplanted Irishman sees so much potential value in the Kentucky brand, maybe the rest of us should, too. If we were Pearse Lyons, we would be thinking: how can we act on this opportunity?

Lexington voters’ moods seemed as gloomy as the weather Tuesday, at least what few of them came out to the polls.

I spent much of the day driving around town, talking with voters about the candidates and issues that interested them.

The most excitement I detected was among supporters of incumbent Jim Newberry and Vice Mayor Jim Gray in the mayor’s race, and among Republicans voting for Rand Paul in the U.S. Senate race.

Paul was embraced by the conservative Tea Party movement, while his opponent, Secretary of State Trey Grayson, was the GOP establishment’s choice. The race was being watched nationally as a barometer of Tea Party power.

Many Paul supporters said they were ambivalent about the Tea Party, but said he struck them as a departure from politics as usual — and they were plenty tired of that.

“Rand Paul brought me out,” said Connie Cooper, who lives off Pasadena Drive. “He’s different. I like his issues.”

“I don’t like the way the Republican Party has been going,” said Micah Fielden, 20, a pre-medical student at the University of Kentucky who said he voted for Paul.

Nelva Fitzgerald, who lives in Palomar subdivision, also was unhappy with the Republican Party — so she changed her registration Tuesday to Democrat. What sent her over the edge, she said, was Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who voted to allow more corporate influence in politics, which she thinks is bad for the country.

Raleigh Deaton is a registered Democrat, but would have voted for Paul if he could have. He likes Paul’s fiscal conservatism.

“I’m tired of this doggone government giving money away like it’s growing on trees,” the utility engineer said. “That’s the worst thing we could be doing.”

As the results reflected, most people I talked to supported either Newberry, who finished first, or Gray, who finished second, in the mayor’s race. They will face each other in November.

A couple liked former Mayor Teresa Isaac, who finished third, but most people’s feelings were summed up by Fielden, who said he voted for Gray: “I think she had her shot and it’s time to move on.”

James Potter, an electrician who lives in Twin Oaks subdivision, said he came out to vote for Newberry. “With the World (Equestrian) Games and such, everything seems to be going pretty good,” he said.

Carrie Kennedy of Palomar agreed. “I think (Newberry) has done a good job,” she said.

But Gregory King, who lives in the Kenwick neighborhood east of downtown, disagreed. “I haven’t been much impressed with Mayor Newberry,” he said. “Jim (Gray) seems to have more creative ideas for Lexington.”

Josh Radner, a science teacher at Yates Elementary School, thought so, too. “He’s the more creative thinker,” he said of Gray. “He’s in touch with a wider group of constituents, including some who may not be the most powerful people.”

Allen and Zell Richards, a retired postal worker and teacher who live off Man ‘O War Boulevard in south Lexington, are Republicans and Paul supporters.

But the Richards split on the mayor’s race. He voted for Gray, because he didn’t like Newberry’s support of CentrePointe. She voted for Newberry, but agreed with her husband on that failed development.

“They jumped into that before they knew much about it,” she said. “I thought they should have renovated some of those old buildings. We have a beautiful city and we ought to keep older things around.”

“Yea,” her husband agreed. “Like us.”

Alltech President Pearse Lyons said Monday that his company will announce in August the creation of a large algae factory in Kentucky to make bio-fuel and research new approaches for mitigating climate change.

Lyons declined to give the location or other details of the facility because the deal is still being negotiated. He said it would be the nation’s second-largest algae factory, after one in South Carolina.

Lyons told about 1,500 people from 50 countries who came to Lexington Center for Alltech’s 26th annual International Animal Health and Nutrition Symposium that algae shows great promise for helping humans cope with two big problems: energy and climate change.

That’s because 1 acre of algae can produce 5,000 gallons of bio-fuel per year, and 1 ton of algae can absorb 2 tons of carbon dioxide, converting it to oxygen and carbohydrates, Lyons said.

Alltech, which primarily makes animal nutrition supplements using natural ingredients, uses the symposium to interact with its customers in 120 countries. Based in Lexington, the company is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

In the opening sessions, Lyons and Jim Pettigrew, a University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign professor who won this year’s Alltech Bioscience Medal of Excellence, also talked about how research, education and sustainable technology can be used to improve global food production.

Human health and environmental sustainability demand that agribusiness use fewer antibiotics and more natural supplements to improve animal nutrition and immune systems, Lyons said. “We are what our animals ate,” he said.

Symposium attendees also heard Monday from former Gov. John Y. Brown Jr., who talked about how he worked with Col. Harland Sanders to franchise Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then Joaquin Pelaez, a Mexico native who runs Louisville-based Yum Brands’ KFC operations in China, talked about how KFC has grown there.

Other sessions this week range from animal nutrition issues to global agri-business trends. Attendees also browse booths throughout the convention center where Alltech touts its products, which also include Kentucky Ale, Alltech Angus steaks and Dippin Dots ice cream. The company also has begun distilling bourbon.

On Monday night, attendees were to attend a dinner in the new indoor arena at the Kentucky Horse Park to hear about the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games there this fall.

Eric Roderick, who has been involved in tilapia fish farming in Wales since 1979 and is attending his first Alltech symposium, said the brand attracted him here. “The company has become such a big name in international aquaculture,” he said.

The title for this year’s symposium is “Bounce Back 2010,” which reflects both a desire for business to rebound from the global recession and the title of University of Kentucky Basketball Coach John Calipari’s book. Calipari will speak Wednesday.

Click on each thumbnail to see complete photo:

Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt isn’t a trained educator; his background is in public policy. His audience of Kentuckians last week consisted mostly of business people.

But his sobering message was as much about business and public policy as it was about education. He said the mediocrity of American public schools is a huge threat to the nation and its economic prosperity.

“It is incontrovertible that America is in decline,” Roosevelt said. “It is serious, and it is deeply rooted in education.”

The percentage of Americans who are college graduates has remained at about 30 percent for the past half-century, while it has doubled and tripled in some other countries, he said. More than half the engineering students at U.S. universities now are foreigners.

America’s anti-academic popular culture, where most children spend hours each day watching television and playing video games, is a big part of the problem. “We celebrate swagger over work,” Roosevelt said.

The focus on improving the achievement gap among poor and minority students, as important as it is, obscures the fact that good schools and students aren’t doing well enough compared with those in countries that are the emerging economic powers.

American school children’s curricula are less rigorous, and they spend less time in school than students in other countries. Striving, Roosevelt said, is no longer a core American characteristic as it is in countries such as China and India.

“It’s an odd form of arrogance to think we’re going to be internationally competitive with the old agriculture-based school calendar,” he said.

Other factors Roosevelt cited include the lack of national education standards, poor management of schools and teacher mediocrity, which is a result of low prestige, low pay and low standards. Teacher hiring and tenure policies are part of the problem. So are hidebound teachers’ unions, although non-union schools don’t seem to perform any better than unionized ones, he said.

Roosevelt said business and civic leaders must demand more from public schools, and they must be willing to provide the resources and leadership to improve them. School systems must become more willing to include non-traditional educators, such as retired professionals and new college graduates in such programs as Teach for America.

Excellent teachers are vital. “We need a national call to action to encourage the best and brightest to go into teaching,” he said.

Roosevelt has overseen significant reforms in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, which have launched a $250 million scholarship program called The Pittsburgh Promise. It guarantees that students who graduate with good grades beginning in 2012 will receive a four-year scholarship for higher education worth about $10,000 a year.

“We need to think about what we want in this country,” Roosevelt said. “More education is the key to improving economic growth and quality of life.”

Roosevelt followed another speaker with a powerful message about education. Bill Strickland is the founder and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corp., an after-school arts program that targets inner-city high school students and an industry-designed vocational training program for unemployed adults.

“It’s all in the way we treat people that shapes behavior,” said Strickland, who spoke in Lexington last month at the Creative Cities Summit. “You can take people who are on the liability side of society’s ledger and make them into assets. It’s called common sense, which is in very short supply in our country right now.”

Efforts are already underway to work with Manchester Bidwell to replicate its program in Lexington, perhaps as part of a new Fayette County Schools vocational education program in agriculture sciences.

Another key to economic prosperity will be getting Kentucky to adequately value and fund its research universities. As Pittsburgh has shown, research universities are key to creating the ideas, technologies and companies that will shape the future of regional economies.

During a panel discussion, University of Louisville President James Ramsey and University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. were critical of the General Assembly’s failure to adequately fund the research and education necessary for Kentucky’s economic future.

“Really important startups come out of deep wells of research,” said Tim McNulty of Carnegie Mellon University. “Innovation is very much a local sport.”

Will last week’s trip to Pittsburgh by Commerce Lexington and Greater Louisville Inc. be just another expensive junket? Or will it help Kentuckians overcome some self-defeating traits, such as complacency and a tendency to ignore the obvious?

Those traits, among others, have often held this state back, despite Kentucky’s central location, beautiful landscape and abundant natural resources. The Kentucky visitors were told that Pittsburgh’s transformation over the past three decades occurred because the city was forced out of complacency.

Generations of industrial pollution had made the coal-rich region’s air and rivers so dirty that they were simply unacceptable. When the steel industry collapsed, Pittsburgh was forced to reimagine and diversify its economy. Lexington and Louisville shouldn’t have to be in crisis to learn some lessons from that.

Pittsburgh reinvented itself by leveraging its assets — sometimes literally.

The city has $6 billion in philanthropic assets, thanks to old industrial families with names such as Heinz, Carnegie and Mellon.

While that money has been a huge help, several Pittsburgh leaders echoed the comments of Grant Oliphant, president of The Pittsburgh Foundation. “It’s really not about money,” he said. “It’s about leadership and imagination.”

At a time when many people thought Pittsburgh should be desperate enough to welcome any development, the philanthropic community urged civic leaders to be choosy. That led to downtown design standards, good architecture, environmentally friendly construction and an emphasis on making Pittsburgh more beautiful and pedestrian-friendly.

“Pittsburgh was a fabulous city (in which) to be a car,” Oliphant said. “For people, not so much.”

Changing that involved many battles with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, but the city usually prevailed. Some of the results are extraordinary, such as several beautiful iron bridges that were restored rather than being replaced with ugly concrete.

Investment in the arts sparked the revival of a critical downtown district, prompting people and businesses to want to move there.

When it came to rebuilding and diversifying Pittsburgh’s economy, leaders focused on the city’s core strengths — manufacturing, energy and finance — but looked for ways to reinvent them for the modern economy. Well-funded local research universities have helped Pittsburgh businesses focus on innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.

Pittsburgh’s public schools were such a mess that foundations cut off support to force change. Bold reforms led to Pittsburgh becoming one of three American public school systems to receive a major Gates Foundation grant — a $40 million award to explore better teaching methods.

Perhaps the boldest stroke of all is the $250 million Pittsburgh Promise — a guarantee that, beginning in 2012, each Pittsburgh Public Schools graduate with good grades will receive a four-year scholarship for higher education worth about $10,000 a year.

When thinking about the future, it is more important to focus on the “what” than the “how,” Oliphant said. “It is the appeal of a large, transformational idea. When the vision of ‘what’ is compelling, people will figure out the ‘how.’ ”

As I listened to the presentations, I kept thinking: What are Kentucky’s core strengths that could be reinvented for a modern economy? For example, how could the horse industry follow the bourbon industry’s lead in reinventing itself? How could more investment in research universities create Kentucky’s technology industries of the future? How could more school reform provide the workforce those new industries will require?

Most of all, I thought: What are the big, transformational ideas for Lexington and Louisville?

The theme of this trip was “today we partner, tomorrow we prosper.” But it could have been more simply expressed with Pittsburgh native Fred Rogers’ famous question: “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

While only 75 miles apart, Kentucky’s two largest cities have always been separated too much by culture, ego and college sports rivalries. While that has never been smart, it is now simply unacceptable.

Kentucky is too poor and too far behind other states by most measures of economic and social progress for Lexington and Louisville to not work more closely together, share resources and become a more powerful force in the rurally dominated General Assembly.

“It’s about time we realize that we have more in common with each other than what separates us,” Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson said. “Great things are happening in all 120 counties, but we are the economic engine of this commonwealth. Without us, it doesn’t work. And with us, it creates the opportunity for other communities, other counties to grow and expand.”

It also means that the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville must collaborate more, rather than competing for precious resources the way they compete in basketball and football.

Those are obvious things that Lexington and Louisville can no longer ignore; as obvious as the words that have been on the state seal since Kentucky became a state in 1792: United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner was in Woodford County tonight to help the Bluegrass Conservancy celebrate the milestone of putting 10,356 acres of the region’s land under conservation easements.

Turner, the founder of Cable News Network, attended a reception to honor the more than 50 landowners who have volunteered to permanently protect their farmland with conservation easements, and a dozen or so others who are thinking about it. The reception was at Woodburn Farm on Old Frankfort Pike near Midway, one of the Bluegrass’ grandest antebellum mansions.

Former Kentucky First Lady Libby Jones introduces Ted Turner on the steps of the Woodburn Farm mansion. Photos by Mick Jeffries/Bluegrass Conservancy

After a light dinner, the group gathered on the steps beneath the mansion’s majestic white columns to hear a few remarks from Turner, the nation’s largest individual landowner. Turner said he has 150,000 acres under conservation easements, and the rest of his holdings will be permanently protected upon his death.

“This is a very, very special place and it’s worth saving,” Turner said of the Inner Bluegrass region, which the World Monuments Fund has declared as one of the globe’s most endangered landscapes. “Ten thousand acres here is a lot of land, when you consider the average size of a farm. Thank goodness so much of it is protected, and I’m sure a lot more of it will be in the days to come.”

Turner said he visits the Lexington area several times a year. His daughter, Jennie Garlington, and her husband, Peek, own a horse farm in Bourbon County.

Helen Alexander, the chair of the Bluegrass Conservancy, and former Kentucky First Lady Libby Jones also talked movingly about the importance of land preservation to their family families. Jones’ family has  The Alexanders have owned Woodburn Farm for six generations. The farm, founded in 1790, helped create Kentucky’s thoroughbred industry and was home to the great sire Lexington. (Correction: Helen Alexander is not related to Alexanders of Woodburn Farm.)

The Bluegrass Conservancy, founded in 1995, is the region’s only private, nonprofit land trust working to use conservation easements to preserve agriculture viability, rural heritage, wildlife habitat, and scenic open space.

Turner also will appear Saturday evening at a reception at the Governor’s Mansion in Frankfort to raise money for permanent recycling bins at the Kentucky Horse Park and to plant native landscaping along Cane Run Creek, which runs through the park.

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PITTSBURGH — Unlike previous Commerce Lexington trips, this one had a purpose beyond simply networking and gathering ideas from another city that might be used to improve Lexington.

The 200 Lexingtonians who made the trip joined 100 Louisvillians who are members of that city’s chamber of commerce, Greater Louisville Inc. It was an effort to build relationships and foster cooperation between Kentucky’s two largest cities.

As part of that mission, attendees got together Wednesday, the last day of the three-day trip, and brainstormed ideas for how Lexington and Louisville could work together to improve Kentucky’s economy and quality of life.

Once the ideas were collected and posted on the meeting room walls, each person had six stick-on dots to choose their favorites. The top vote-getter was something I often hear discussed: Creation of a light rail line connecting Lexington and Louisville and, eventually, the Cincinnati suburbs of Northern Kentucky.

Other popular ideas included:

■ Joint lobbying of the General Assembly on issues important to both cities. One such issue is authority to ask city voters to approve a local-option sales tax to help address local needs.

■ Promoting and preserving the horse industry.

■ A joint economic development council, and a closer working relationship between Commerce Lexington and GLI.

■ Creation of organizations in both cities modeled after Pittsburgh’s Manchester Bidwell Corp. The Kentuckians this week heard a presentation from Manchester Bidwell founder Bill Strickland about the effectiveness of his after-school arts program to engage at-risk youth and business-specific job-training programs for unemployed people.

Efforts already are under way to create one in Lexington, and Fayette Schools Superintendent Stu Silberman is a strong supporter.

While those ideas got the most votes, there were some other good ones, too, including:

■ A closer working relationship between the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. Specific suggestions ranged from elimination of duplicative programs and services so limited state resources could be focused to an outright merger of the institutions to accomplish that goal.

■ A series of quarterly meetings and events to keep dialogue going between members of Commerce Lexington and GLI.

■ A regional job bank.

Valuing the arts

One of Wednesday’s speakers was Tom Sokolowski, the irreverent director of the Andy Warhol Museum, which the Kentucky group visited Monday evening. It is dedicated to the Pittsburgh-born artist who celebrated late 20th century popular culture by creating art from iconic visual images, including Campbell’s Soup cans and news photographs.

Sokolowski said cities need more risk management, but he didn’t mean the traditional definition of avoiding risk. “I mean putting risk into what we do,” he said, because outstanding results usually involve taking risks.

For example, Sokolowski said, his museum’s decision to present a show of old postcard images of lynchings in 2001 was controversial, but it led to a productive discussion about race relations in Pittsburgh.

Art, he said, can create civic engagement by giving people a way to discuss touchy issues that can lead to solving problems. “The arts are a barometer of our communities, and the arts are a leveler,” he said.

Leaders trying to create great cities should pay attention to art’s transformative effects. One example is Pittsburgh’s effort to salvage a downtown neighborhood that had become a red-light district by turning it into a Cultural District. It now houses art galleries, arts organizations and two restored old theaters and two new ones.

PITTSBURGH — Efforts to replicate Pittsburgh’s famous Manchester Bidwell training center in Lexington hit the fast track Tuesday after founder Bill Strickland spoke to visiting chamber of commerce delegations from Lexington and Louisville.

Fayette County Schools Superintendent Stu Silberman — who had not heard Strickland’s presentation at the Creative Cities Summit last month in Lexington — said Strickland’s program seemed like a perfect model for a $19 million facility the school system is planning on 82 acres of surplus federal property it is being given off Leestown Road.

“I’m really fired up,” Silberman said. “I think there’s some pretty phenomenal opportunities here for that to happen.”

Strickland met immediately with Silberman; Anthony Wright, Lexington’s economic development director; and developer Phil Holoubek, who has been among those interested in bringing such a center to Lexington.

Follow-up meetings have been scheduled to see if the Manchester Bidwell model is right for Fayette schools, or could come to Lexington in another form. “There is the energy we need to make it happen,” Wright said. “We just want to make sure we think it through and do it right.”

Strickland, 62, grew up in Pittsburgh’s poor Manchester neighborhood and, at age 16, had his life changed by a high-school ceramics teacher. The transformative power of art led him to start the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, an after-school arts program for youth, while he was still a student at the University of Pittsburgh. Success there led him to be asked in 1971 to run the Bidwell Training Center for displaced and unemployed workers.

Strickland, the winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, hopes to build 200 similar centers around the world, and he already has helped create more than a dozen, including one in Cincinnati.

His focus is on using art to inspire poor kids to develop their talents, as well as to help unemployed adults learn job skills that local employers need. Like Manchester Bidwell, Strickland’s spinoff facilities are distinguished by first-class architecture, equipment and instruction.

“Environment and the way we treat people shapes behavior,” Strickland said in his remarks to the Kentucky group. “If you build world-class buildings, you get world-class outcomes. If you build prisons you get prisoners.”

Silberman said he must meet with the school board to see whether this is the direction they want to take. But he said Manchester Bidwell’s proven model would seem like a perfect fit for their goals of helping at-risk kids and raising graduation rates by creating a vocational training center focused on agriculture science, equine and pre-veterinary studies.

“It’s definitely worth exploring,” said Becky Sagan, the school board chairman, who is also on the trip. “We’re definitely at the right point. We have the funding, the land, the focus. (Strickland) has the program. We’ll see how well they go together.”

Timing could be critical. Silberman said the school system “is poised to do it right now.”

But Strickland’s usual approach is more deliberate. His non-profit organization usually conducts a feasibility study with an interested community, identifies and recruits local leaders and business partners and acts as a consultant over five years.

All centers are locally owned and run, and each is adapted to the needs of local public schools and the workforce requirements of local employers. A key ingredient is passionate, local leadership — people in each community who believe, as Strickland does, that poor people can become productive members of society if given training and respect.

One point of discussion will be location — or locations — for a Lexington center’s programs. The school system is committed to the 82-acre rural property. But Wright said the city is interested in using such a center, or portions of it, to help revitalize urban areas where many of the students would likely live.

Strickland, when asked by Silberman and Wright about the location issue, said he is flexible. “The issue is what happens inside the building, not where it’s located,” he said. “My place is in an industrial park.”

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PITTSBURGH — It wasn’t too long ago that this Pennsylvania city at the confluence of three rivers was known for steel, ketchup, dirty water and even dirtier air.

A lot has changed, as 200 business and civic leaders from Lexington and 100 from Louisville discovered Monday when they arrived for a three-day visit organized by Commerce Lexington and Greater Louisville Inc.

“Pittsburgh is transforming itself,” Luke Ravenstahl, Pittsburgh’s 30-year-old mayor, told the visitors. “We’re reinventing ourselves as a clean city, a green city, a city of the future.”

After arriving on chartered jets, the Kentuckians took buses downtown and boarded a cruise boat to tour Pittsburgh’s revitalized riverfront. It would have been impressive even without the sparking blue sky of a sunny but cold spring day.

Old industrial buildings along the waterfront have been converted into offices and apartments. The skyline is a mix of renovated old buildings and unique contemporary architecture, such as the environmentally friendly Alcoa Center with its wave-form glass façade that hugs the North Shore.

Ornate iron bridges from early in the last century have been restored — and painted yellow — to dress up the riverfront. Pittsburgh claims to have more bridges than any city in the world except Venice.

After the tour, the Kentuckians went to Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, to listen to local leaders describe the transformation of their region’s environment and economy.

One key factor was regional cooperation and collaboration — something the leaders of Kentucky’s two largest cities hope to copy. As a symbol of that desire, trip organizers presented each speaker with a basketball dipped in both red and blue wax and signed by Maker’s Mark Distillery President Bill Samuels.

Founded in 1758, Pittsburgh rose to wealth and prominence on the strength of its strategic river location and rich coal deposits, which fostered steelmaking and other manufacturing.

But by the 1940s, said Bill Flanagan of The Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Pittsburgh “was living up to its name as a total pit.” The air was so filled with coal soot that businessmen came to work with an extra white shirt so they could change at midday, he said.

Regional leaders came together to clean up the air, rivers and abandoned industrial sites. Then, in the 1970s, the bottom fell out of the steel industry, and Pittsburgh lost tens of thousands of jobs and residents.

Since the steel industry’s nadir in 1983, when the unemployment rate hit 18 percent, metro Pittsburgh has created 180,000 new jobs. It now has 45,000 more jobs than during the steel industry’s peak years, Flanagan said.

“Where we are today took 30 years; it was not overnight,” said Dennis Yablonsky, the Allegheny Conference’s CEO. “I’m getting a lot of calls from Detroit these days.”

How did it happen? The Kentuckians were told that Pittsburgh’s public and private sectors came together to reinvent the local economy by creating new business sectors in the region’s core strengths: manufacturing, energy and finance. “We created a balanced, diversified economy,” Yablonsky said.

One key factor was long-term investment in higher education, especially the region’s major research universities: the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks largely to that research, the region now has 1,600 technology companies and advanced manufacturing plants.

Research universities could do much more to boost Kentucky’s economy if they were properly funded, rather than facing constant budget cuts, University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and University of Louisville President James Ramsey said during an afternoon panel discussion.

“We have got to figure out if we’re serious about investing in education,” Todd said.

Pittsburgh also has made a big investment in improving its environment and amenities. The city now ranks high in most surveys of the best U.S. cities in which to live and work.

Government and business also have invested in the arts, high-quality development and good architecture. Kevin McMahon, president of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, said arts facilities don’t pay for themselves, but they fuel the overall economy by making cities the kind of places where talented people want to live and work.

After the tour, speeches and panel discussions, the Kentuckians went for a night on the town, beginning with a reception at the Andy Warhol Museum, one of four Carnegie museums in Pittsburgh.

Commerce Lexington continues a 70-year tradition of annual “leadership visits” to other cities Monday, but this year’s three-day trip to Pittsburgh is different. In addition to about 200 people from Lexington, there will be more than 100 going from Greater Louisville Inc.

These visits are intended to gather ideas from other cities that might be used to improve Lexington. This trip also could help leaders from Kentucky’s two largest cities develop closer relationships and more cooperation. That’s long overdue after two centuries of rivalry based on little more than vanity and college basketball.

I’ll be traveling to Pittsburgh (below) with the groups and reporting on what they see, do and talk about. Check back here Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for periodic updates.  I’ll be posting more frequent updates via Twitter, so follow me at: www.twitter.com/tomeblen.  The trip’s Twitter hashtag is #lexlou if you want to follow everyone’s tweets.

Many of my blog posts, and perhaps some additional material, will be published daily in the Herald-Leader’s print edition.  And watch the Sunday paper for a column wrapping up the trip.

If you have any questions, you can post a comment here or email me at: tomeblen@gmail.com.

For more information, visit the websites of Commerce Lexington and Greater Louisville Inc.

During the first half of the 19th century, Congress was a lot like it is today: petty, partisan, ineffective and unpopular.

Perhaps that is why two good books have just been published about the man back then who was more successful than anyone else at getting Congress to work for the good of the country: Henry Clay.

Henry Clay: The Essential American is a full-length biography by historians David S. Heidler of Colorado State University-Pueblo and Jeanne T. Heidler of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union is by Robert V. Remini, historian of the U.S. House of Representatives. It is a look at Clay’s greatest achievement: the Compromise of 1850, which delayed the Civil War for a decade.

James Klotter, a history professor at Georgetown College and Kentucky’s state historian, agrees that renewed interest in Clay might have something to do with current events. Amid a bitter red-versus-blue political culture, many people long for statesmen who can forge constructive compromises for the good of the country.

We also are seeing a historical re-evaluation of Clay’s accomplishments and those of his archrival, Andrew Jackson, Klotter said. Clay is looking better when viewed through a modern lens, and Jackson is looking worse.

Klotter is working on his own book about Clay, the five-time presidential candidate who famously said he would “rather be right than president.” The book will be titled The Great Rejected: Henry Clay and the American Presidency.

The two Clay books published this month do what good general histories should: They put people and events into the context of their time and make them come alive in interesting, well-written narratives.

The Heidlers begin telling Clay’s life story by describing its end. When Clay died in 1852 at age 75, the magnitude of national mourning showed that he was one of the most revered men of his generation — presidency or no presidency.

Before being buried in Lexington, Clay’s funeral train made a long national tour, and he was the first person to ever lie in state in the U.S. Capitol. There were ceremonies memorializing Clay in countless towns around the country. At the one in Springfield, Ill., the keynote speaker was a young lawyer who always considered Clay his idol: Abraham Lincoln.

Clay was born in Hanover County, Va., to humble circumstances — although not nearly as humble as his campaign propaganda implied. He had only a modest formal education, but thanks to good penmanship, he became secretary to George Wythe, one of Virginia’s most important judges. That apprenticeship was a springboard to Clay’s legal career, and it gave him an opportunity to watch some of young America’s best lawyers in action, including Patrick Henry and John Marshall.

In 1797, Clay moved to Kentucky, where his mother and stepfather had come a few years earlier to run a tavern in Versailles. He quickly became one of Lexington’s most successful lawyers, thanks to an abundance of land disputes and debt-collection cases. He took on enough criminal cases to develop a reputation as the common man’s champion.

Socially and politically ambitious, Clay married Lucretia Hart, daughter of one of Lexington’s wealthiest men. She was a plain woman who hated celebrity and society as much as her husband loved it. But their marriage lasted 53 years and produced 11 children — six daughters, all of whom died before age 29, and five sons.

Clay rose quickly through Kentucky’s political ranks. After serving in the state General Assembly (where he tried unsuccessfully to move the capital from Frankfort to Lexington), he was twice appointed to fill unexpired terms in the U.S. Senate. He was then elected repeatedly to the U.S. House, where he transformed the speakership into a powerful position, and then to the Senate.

The secret to Clay’s success was his talent as an orator; he had a beautiful baritone voice. He also could be an arrogant braggart, which sometimes earned him enemies. He loved to party, and there are many stories about his drinking and gambling.

After leading the nation into the War of 1812, he was instrumental in negotiating its end — something a modern political opponent would probably attack as a “flip-flop.”

But Clay was enormously influential because of his ability to get things done by forging political compromises that allowed each side to give some and get some. Three times — in 1820, 1833 and 1850 — those compromises over slavery and taxes held the nation together. Without them, civil war surely would have come before Northern states had enough industrial might to prevent Southern secession.

Today, Republicans claim Clay and Democrats claim Jackson. But the party politics and issues of their day provide a good argument for reversing those roles. Clay generally favored supremacy of the national government over states’ rights. He argued for a national bank and federal investment in infrastructure, such as roads and ports. He believed in taxing imported goods to help build American industry.

Like many Americans of his wealth and station, he claimed to dislike slavery yet owned slaves. He favored gradual emancipation, with resettlement of former slaves in Africa. But he was willing to continue slavery if it would preserve what he considered most important: the union.

Despite his failings, Clay’s career serves as an example of how politicians can and should at times put aside ideology and political gamesmanship for the good of the country. These books tell that story quite well, and they make the reader wish today’s Congress had a Henry Clay or two among its members.