The Bluegrass and Beyond

Many people go through school hating history. All of those dates to remember! Besides, people from the past are usually portrayed as one-dimensional heroes or villains, their claims to fame reduced to a sound bite.

A good example is John Bradford, who published the state’s first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette. That’s all I remember about him from Kentucky History class.

Then my daughter, Mollie, and I wrote a chapter for the book Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852. We told the story of Transylvania University’s dramatic rise and fall in the 1820s under President Horace Holley. In our research, we discovered that the man behind the scenes of that “rise” was Bradford, the longtime chairman of Transy’s Board of Trustees.

John Bradford portrait in the collection of the Bodley-Bullock House, Lexington Junior League. Image courtesy of University of Kentucky Special Collections.

I learned much more when the Cardome Center in Georgetown asked me to research and write an essay about Bradford for a symposium last month. The symposium, which featured a dozen prominent Kentucky journalists, was about the history and future of the news media.

The city of Georgetown owns Cardome, a former Catholic girls’ school. A non-profit association has a long-term lease and ambitious plans to create the Center for the Written Word, a writers’ retreat and museum.

The symposium, Words in a Changing World: From Bradford to Bloggers, opened the museum’s first exhibit, a display of original and facsimile copies of the Kentucky Gazette, which Bradford published off and on from 1787 until his death in 1830. The free exhibit runs through July 5.

The old Gazette copies make for some interesting reading. But they reveal little about their publisher, who was a Renaissance man of the Kentucky frontier. Bradford’s legacy continues to shape Lexington in ways that might surprise you.

Bradford was born in 1749 near Warrenton, Va. A surveyor like his father, he came to Kentucky to seek his fortune. In the 1780s he and his brother, Fielding, laid claim to 6,000 acres, mostly along Cane Run Creek between Lexington and Georgetown.

Kentucky leaders who wanted to break away from Virginia and form a new state decided they needed a newspaper to publicize their cause, but they were unable to attract a printer from back East. So, on the promise of future state printing work, Bradford and his brother bought a press in Pennsylvania and brought it down the Ohio River on a flatboat and overland from Maysville on pack horses.

During its early years, the Gazette was the only newspaper within 500 miles of Lexington. It published weeks-old reports of national and international news and a smattering of local happenings. There was special emphasis on reports of Indian attacks on settlers. Bradford himself participated in attacks on Native American settlements in what is now Ohio.

Like most small-town publishers, Bradford became involved in many aspects of civic and business life. He chaired the town trustees for many years and was a legislator and sheriff. But he was more businessman than politician.

In addition to running newspapers in Lexington and Frankfort, Bradford was the state’s first book publisher and owner of an early bookstore. In 1796, he was a founder of the Lexington Public Library. He started the first mail service between Central Kentucky towns as part of newspaper delivery.

Bradford promoted emigration to Kentucky and helped start the Kentucky Vineyard Society to try to develop a local wine industry. He owned a tavern, a warehouse and a steam-powered flour mill and cotton factory on Vine Street. A mechanic and mathematician, he designed much of the machinery.

Bradford lived at the corner of Second and Mill streets in a house he bought from Henry Clay’s father-in-law, Thomas Hart. The house was torn down in 1955, 125 years after Bradford’s death, to create a parking lot. Public outrage over the demolition led to creation of the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.

To read the full essay on Bradford, click here.

If you go

John Bradford’s Kentucky Gazette

Where: Cardome Center, 800 Cincinnati Rd., Georgetown

When: 9 a.m. — 5 p.m., Tues.— Sat. through July 5.

Admission: Free

More information: (502) 863-1575, Cardomecenter.com.

The University of Kentucky honored Gray Zeitz, center, last Friday on the 40th anniversary of his Larkspur Press in Monterey, which publishes hand-crafted books by  Kentucky writers. Before the ceremony at Margaret I. King Library, Zeitz, center, talked with Gay Reading, left, whose aunt, Carolyn Reading Hammer, taught Zeitz the art of printing at the King Library Press at UK. At right is Zeitz’s wife, Jean.  Photos by Tom Eblen 

Richard Taylor recalled that when Gray Zeitz was establishing his Larkspur Press in the mid-1970s, he received a printing commission from the Kentucky Arts Council. Anxious state officials asked for a deadline, but Zeitz would not be rushed.

He replied to them with a metaphor drawn from his love for Kentucky’s native plants: “Who knows when the phlox will flower?”

Taylor, a former Kentucky poet laureate, told that story last Friday evening as more than 130 writers, artists, friends and fans gathered at the University of Kentucky’s Margaret I. King Library to honor Zeitz for four decades of continuous flowering.

Zeitz was lauded by Taylor and eight other writers and artists whose work the small press in rural Owen County has published over the years: Wesley Bates, Gabrielle Fox, Nana Lampton, Ed McClanahan, Maurice Manning, Maureen Morehead, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall and Jeff Worley.

The ceremony opened an exhibit of pieces produced by Larkspur Press, which has published more than 100 handmade books and countless broadsides since 1974. The free exhibit will be up through August. The library at 179 Funkhouser Dr. is open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday.

Larkspur Press, on Sawdridge Creek Road near Monterey, has a public open house each November, on the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Last Saturday, Zeitz led a letterpress printing workshop at the King Library Press on UK’s campus. That was where he learned his art and trade, first as a student and then as an apprentice to director Carolyn Reading Hammer.

In the 1950s, Hammer and her husband, Austrian artist Victor Hammer, began a Kentucky tradition of fine letterpress printing using hand-operated presses, hand-set type and woodblock engravings.

Zeitz, 63, is one of their most successful protégés. Using century-old presses and thick, creamy paper, he prints elegant books that are hand-stitched and bound, in both fancy collector’s editions and affordable paperbacks.

“Gray is stubbornly and endearingly independent,” Taylor explained in his remarks. “He has steadfastly refused to become ensnared by the Internet. One of his friends designed a web page (larkspurpress.com) that Gray has no means or desire to see.”

But, as the writers and artists explained, Zeitz is much more than a printer. A poet himself, he carefully selects the writers, artists and works he wants to publish. Most are from Kentucky.

In addition to those who spoke Friday, they have included Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Silas House, Erik Reece, Gurney Norman, Frederick Smock and the late Guy Davenport and James Baker Hall.

Bates, a Canadian wood engraver, said he first encountered Larkspur Press nearly two decades ago and was impressed by the quality of the printing, the large volume of books produced and Zeitz’s curatorial skill in choosing work to publish.

“It was above and beyond the idea of book as art,” Bates said. “It was book as communication, as preservation of culture.”

As for Zeitz, a burly man with a long beard who always wears blue jeans and suspenders, Bates said, “I thought he looked like he was part of the band ZZ Top.”

Taylor-Hall talked about how Zeitz consults with writers about how their books should look, down to such things as the color of ink. Worley joked that even if readers hate his poetry, they won’t throw away his Larkspur Press editions because the books themselves are too beautiful.

Several others remarked on Zeitz’s craftsmanship, exacting standards and placid demeanor. “Every time I see him, he seems filled with joy,” Manning said.

When it finally came time for Zeitz to speak Friday, he was, as always, a man of few words. He introduced two longtime collaborators, Carolyn Whitesel and Leslie Shane, and thanked audience members for writing and illustrating his books, buying and reading his books and even helping him on occasion move heavy, iron presses.

Then, Zeitz read a poem he had written, which the King Library Press printed as a broadside to give those in attendance:

Printer’s Note

Sweet rain yesterday.

We have put your book on the press.

My hands do not tremble

because I’m unsure,

but shake in the finalizing of page

as a foal, newborn,

begins to stand.

It should be said

there will be absolutely no deadline.

Who knows when the phlox will flower? 

Jonathan Bush built this 4-level grist mill in the early 1800s along Lower Howard’s Creek to produce flour for export, likely to New Orleans.  The dry-laid stone mill has fallen to ruins in recent years. “Every spring I come down here I see more stones that have fallen,” said Clare Sipple, manager of the Lower Howard’s Creek preserve. Photos by Tom Eblen

WINCHESTER — A trip to the Lower Howard’s Creek Nature and Heritage Preserve is more than a hike in the woods; it is a journey back into Kentucky business history.

This was, after all, Kentucky’s first industrial park.

I would never have guessed it as I began walking down the hill with Clare Sipple, who manages the 350-acre preserve, and her husband, Harry Enoch, a retired biochemist who chronicled the creek’s commercial history in his 2009 book, Col. John Holder: BoonesboroughDefender and Kentucky Entrepreneur.

The first sign of that history was when we reached a large millstone, thought to have quarried on Pilot Knob in Powell County, hauled here and finished with wrought-iron fitting. It would have been used on one of 15 mills that once operated along the creek to produce wheat flour and corn meal for export down the Kentucky, Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans.

In addition to grain mills there were sawmills, distilleries, cooperages to make barrels, leather tanneries, a warehouse, a woolen factory, blacksmith shops, a boat yard, a ferry, a tavern and a store. The largest businesses were housed in buildings of dry-laid limestone quarried along the creek.

Most of the valley’s two dozen businesses were along the creek or the Salt Springs Trace, a road built in 1775 from Fort Boonesborough to the salt deposits at Blue Licks in Robertson County. It was one of Kentucky’s first heavily-traveled roads.

This area is now a remote corner of the rural Bluegrass on Athens Boonesboro Road behind Hall’s on the River restaurant. But from the 1780s until the Civil War, it and neighboring Boone Creek comprised one of the largest manufacturing centers west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Much of the development of Lower Howard’s Creek was the work of Holder, a land speculator and businessman who had been a leader during Fort Boonesborough’s heyday in the 1770s.

“He had a lot of business contacts in New Orleans,” Enoch said. “He must have been quite a wheeler dealer.”

Lower Howard’s Creek reached its commercial zenith as the Civil War began. But the war cut it off from its main customers in Southern markets. After the war, railroads started replacing river navigation. Steam engines replaced unreliable water power. The last industries on Lower Howard’s Creek were gone by the dawn of the 20th century.

Mother Nature has slowly reclaimed this valley, now covered with second-growth forest after extensive logging in the 1800s. The preserve has more than 800 species of plants, including many rare and endangered ones.

River otter and beaver now ply the rushing creek that once powered Kentucky’s first manufacturers. The trees shelter a wide range of birds, including warblers, tanagers and cedar waxwings.

“It’s unusual to see some of these birds in Kentucky,” said Sipple, 62, who grew up in the area and first explored the creek on horseback as a child.

Lower Howard’s Creek is dotted with ruins of the old stone buildings, as well as the stone fences, earthworks and remnants of the Salt Springs Trace. The Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund purchased much of the preserve’s land, which is now owned by Clark County Fiscal Court. A 228-acre tract was dedicated as a state nature preserve in 2001.

Some of the most significant stone ruins are Jonathan Bush’s mill, which had four levels and a 20-foot mill wheel, and his home. Both have been ravaged by time and vandals, who a few years ago smashed the detailed inscription on the 1855 tomb of Diana Bush, his second wife of 35 years, who he obviously loved very much.

The preserve’s John Holder Trail, which begins at Hall’s on the River, is open during daylight hours. Sipple leads periodic hikes through the rest of the preserve. For more information, go to Lowerhowardscreek.org.

Sipple recently secured a $600,000 grant to restore some of the Salt Springs Trace road and its fences. A shelter was built over Bush’s house in 2004 to limit deterioration until money can be raised to restore it. But 200-year-old Bush’s mill is rapidly falling apart.

“Every spring I come down here I see more stones that have fallen,” she said, estimating that it would take $1 million to restore the huge mill.

“There are stone buildings all over this valley,” Sipple said. “It’s a really significant site. But we’ve always been limited by funding.”

Click on each thumbnail to see larger photo and read caption:

Eric Sutherland, founder of the monthly Holler Poets series, poses outside Al’s Bar at the corner of North Limestone and East Sixth Streets. The series will celebrate its fifth year, and 60th session, on May 29. Photo by Tom Eblen 

As the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War approached in March 2008, Eric Scott Sutherland was frustrated and angry. So he fought back the best way he knew how: with poetry.

The writer organized Poets for Peace, a protest reading in the newly reopened Al’s Bar at the corner of North Limestone and East Sixth Street. The event featured an all-star lineup of local literary talent, including Jane Gentry Vance, who was then serving as Kentucky’s poet laureate. Nearly 100 listeners packed the house.

“It was just electric,” Sutherland recalled. “You could sense it.”

Sutherland had tapped into more than public outrage over a tragic, costly and unnecessary war. People seemed hungry for poetry and a venue for self-expression.

“There was pent-up demand for what this guy was doing,” said Josh Miller, one of the bar’s owners. So Miller’s brother, Lester, asked Sutherland if he would organize an event like that at their bar every month.

The Holler Poets Series was born.

The series celebrates its five-year anniversary, and 60th session, on Wednesday. The free event will begin, as always, with an open microphone for any writer wanting to share his or her work.

Then there will be the featured writers. This month’s are Frank X Walker, Kentucky’s current poet laureate, and his fellow Affrilachian poet, Mitchell Douglas. The evening concludes with a musical act. This month’s is Christian hip hop artist Justin Long, who performs under the name JustMe.

Holler’s format has changed little since the series began in 2008 with the award-winning poet Maurice Manning, who now teaches at Transylvania University. Since the beginning, events have been promoted with unique posters created by artist John Lackey, whose Homegrown Press Studio is a couple of doors down from the bar.

About 80 writers have been featured at Holler, including other well-known Kentucky names such as Nikky Finney, Silas House, Richard Taylor, Erik Reece, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, Crystal Wilkinson, George Ella Lyon, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Bianca Spriggs and Leatha Kendrick.

Lexington’s poetry scene has flourished in recent years. Holler Poets — some of whom were born in mountain “hollers” or like to speak loudly — is a big reason why.

Since the beginning, Holler’s goal has been to both raise the profile of experienced poets and encourage the development of new ones. “The open mic has inspired a lot of people to develop their craft, given them something to work toward every month,” Sutherland said.

“Holler Poets has been extremely important in encouraging new voices to emerge, to go from writing for themselves to writing for an audience,” said Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, a Bulgarian-born poet, WRFL radio host, and owner of the Lexington poetry book press Accents Publishing.

“I thought I would go and mingle with like-minded people,” said Tina Andry, who had written poetry all her life but mostly kept it to herself. “Everyone was so welcoming, and the next thing I knew I was publishing a book.”

The Poets for Peace event on March 30, 2008 was followed a year later by Peace in the Mountains, where writers decried what environmentally destructive methods of surface mining for coal is doing to Kentucky’s land, water and air. Holler readers frequently critique an American society that values money more than people. Several of the events have been fundraisers for peace and environmental groups.

“For me, everything is political,” said Sutherland, 41, a Shelbyville native who studied natural resource conservation at the University of Kentucky and has earned his living as a baker and arborist. “It has been rewarding to use art as a way to inform people about what’s going on.”

Sutherland has been surprised by Holler’s popularity. He can’t remember an event where Al’s Bar wasn’t filled with people.

“I knew that our literary heritage would support it and that it was needed,” he said. “But I didn’t know it would catch on. I think the time was just right.”

Sutherland knew he had arrived when, at Holler’s three-year anniversary, Lester Miller surprised him on stage with a fancy certificate proclaiming him as the poet laureate of Al’s Bar.

Accents Publishing will soon publish Sutherland’s fourth poetry collection, Pendulum, inspired by his experiences working at the lobby café of Lexington’s downtown Central Library. Books are important, but Sutherland thinks Holler shows that performance can make poetry a more powerful artistic medium.

“When you hear people up on stage baring their soul, which takes a lot of courage, it ignites something in the listener,” he said. “I think people yearn to feel connected to other people. Poetry is really the last vestige of a direct expression of humanity.”

If you go

Holler Poets 60: Five-year anniversary

When: 8 p.m., May 29

Where: Al’s Bar, 601 N. Limestone

Who: Affrilachian poets Frank X Walker and Mitchell Douglas, hip hop performer JustMe. Open microphone for other poets, with sign-up beginning at 7 p.m.

Cost: Free.

More information: EricScottSutherland.com

Click on each thumbnail to see larger photo and read caption: 

In their new book, “The Embattled Wilderness,” Erik Reece and James Krupa write this: “To look out over the forest’s steep ridges — slopes that novelist James Still called ‘a river of earth’ — is to understand that Robinson Forest is simultaneously one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America and one of the most threatened.” Photos by Tom Eblen  

JACKSON — As we hike uphill through beech and yellow poplar trees, a wild turkey flies out of the woods and across the trail in front of us. A few hundred yards higher, Erik Reece stops suddenly and points at a scarlet tanager foraging among the oaks.

At the crest of the ridge, we climb an old fire tower and are rewarded with a spectacular view of Robinson Forest. On this clear, spring morning, the forest looks like a rolling “river of earth,” as James Still described the natural landscape of Eastern Kentucky in his classic 1940 novel, River of Earth.

The green waves roll out in every direction until they suddenly stop at Robinson Forest’s boundary. Beyond the boundary are huge, gray scars from surface mining and the flattened, denuded remnants of “reclaimed” coal-mine land, now struggling to support foreign grasses and scrubby trees.

“We hope more people will go to Robinson Forest, but a lot of Kentuckians won’t, so we wanted them to experience it vicariously,” said Reece, co-author with James J. Krupa of the new book,The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of Robinson Forest and the Fight for Its Future (University of Georgia Press, $24.95).

Reece will sign copies of the book from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Friday at The Morris Book Shop, 882 E. High St.

Erik Reece on Lewis Fork creek in Robinson Forest.

Reece is a UK English professor best known for his award-winning 2006 book, Lost Mountain: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia. Like Lost Mountain, this book has a forward by renowned Kentucky author Wendell Berry.

Krupa is a UK biology professor who over decades of study has explored every ridge and valley of the main 10,000-acre block of the 14,786-acre forest, which contains some of the state’s cleanest streams.

“It is one of the last and largest examples of the oldest, most biologically diverse ecosystem in North America — the mixed mesophytic,” the authors write in their introduction.

“Unfortunately, industrial development has churned under the mountains surrounding these 14,000 acres, turning Robinson Forest into an island of biological diversity surrounded by an ever-expanding desert,” they write, adding that there is every reason to believe that coal and timber interests want to plunder this land, too.

Reece and Krupa are both fine writers. In this small, engaging book, they alternate chapters, explaining the natural and human history of this unique corner of Breathitt, Perry and Knott counties and making a case to preserve it.

Krupa describes the geological history of Robinson Forest and the surrounding Cumberland Plateau, which was formed before there were dinosaurs, mammals or even flowering plants. These mountains were once covered by a shallow inland sea and then swamps. Dead ferns and trees sank to the bottom for thousands of years, forming peat and eventually bituminous coal.

Krupa also discusses his research into the ecological diversity of the current forest. Who knew lichens and wood rats could be so fascinating?

Reece’s chapters describe the forest’s human history, from settlement to the early 20th century, when Cincinnati business partners F.W. Mobray and E.O. Robinson bought the forest and cut virtually all of its timber.

In 1923, Robinson gave the wasted land to the University of Kentucky for research to “tend to the betterment of the people of the mountain region of Kentucky.” Under UK’s stewardship, most of the land has regenerated over the past 90 years into a second-growth version of the biologically diverse, native forest.

But coal operators, who wield considerable clout, have periodically pressured UK to allow mining in the forest. Reece said he and Krupa decided to write this book after the UK Board of Trustees’ controversial 2007 decision to clear-cut 800 acres of the main forest.

Although the forest recovered from clear-cutting a century ago, critics doubt that can happen again because of the extensive surface mining on surrounding land and the planting of invasive species as part of mine “reclamation.”

Reece said he and Krupa hope their book will prompt UK officials to rethink their management strategy for Robinson Forest and embrace a broader ecological research mission. A part of such a mission could be helping Kentucky adapt to climate change.

Specifically, the authors urge broader input into decision-making about the forest. Currently, Robinson Forest is managed by UK’s Forestry Department. Also, they want UK to separate research and revenue goals, so that there is not periodic temptation to log or mine Robinson Forest to make money for the university.

Reece is up for tenure this year, and he acknowledges this book won’t be popular in some corners of the university. But he thinks Robinson Forest is worth fighting to preserve.

He said the book was inspired by The Unforeseen Wilderness, which UK commissioned Berry to write in 1971. It advocated for preservation of the Red River Gorge at a time when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to destroy it with a flood-control dam.

“We want to give readers a sense of why Robinson Forest is worth saving,” Reece said. “If you can convince people to love something, they won’t destroy it.”

Click on each thumbnail to see larger photo and read caption:

Excerpts from the final chapter of The Embattled Wilderness

“Robinson Forest is many things: it is one of the most important eco-systems in Appalachia, it is a laboratory for crucial research and teaching, and it is a gift held in trust for future generations of Kentuckians. But it is also a model for how we must proceed in our habitation of the natural world. In fact, Robinson Forest represents a model for an entirely new definition of “economy,” whereby our American systems of exchange, both of wealth and energy, are brought in line with the most important and inescapable economy of nature.”

“What we as 21st century Americans must finally come to understand is that the economy of consumption operates in direct opposition to, and at the peril of, the economy of nature. … Kentucky should look to Robinson Forest as a model for a sustainable, post-coal economy. We must replace the industrial logic of the strip mine with the much more ancient wisdom of the forest.”

“To abandon wilderness places like Robinson Forest would be to abandon ourselves. To ignore the natural laws of its watersheds for the logic of our own industrial imagination would be to abandon our better selves — to abandon a sustainable future for the sake of short-term avarice and indulgence. But to preserve the world will mean learning the lessons of Robinson Forest, and in doing so learning to preserve that embattled wilderness.”

Rosetta Lucas Quisenberry just published her fifth black history book. Photo by Tom Eblen

Not all entrepreneurs are in it for the money. As two very different entrepreneurs from Lexington show, business can be a good way to achieve personal and social goals as well as financial ones.

Rosetta Lucas Quisenberry, a retired Fayette County Public Schools teacher, just published the fifth book in her Black Saga series: Things, People and Places We Must Always Remember.

Like her first four books, this one has a fascinating collection of images of racist postcards, advertisements, coin banks and other ephemera from the 1890s to the 1940s, followed by images from that period that show a more positive reality of black Americans.

Quisenberry was a 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Kentucky in 1975 when she went to Turfland Mall to look at a visiting antique show. She noticed a couple of white women giggling at old postcards.

After they moved on, she walked over to see what was so funny. What she found shocked her: depictions of black people eating watermelon, picking cotton, posing as “alligator bait” and otherwise being made objects of ridicule.

“Nobody had ever told me this material even existed,” she said, adding that she bought every one of the postcards “to take them off the market. I was ashamed of it.”

Collecting such artifacts became an obsession with Quisenberry, who went to antique shows all over the country and accumulated more than 1,000 of them.

After a few years, though, she realized that rather than being hidden and forgotten, these racist relics should be seen and remembered. Only then, she thought, would black and white people understand the depth of past racism and how it continues to affect society in subtle ways.

Quisenberry photographed a sampling of her collection of negative and positive images and published her first book, A Saga of the Black Man, in 2003. Over the years, she came out with three more similar books, focusing on black women, children and families. The new book ties them all together.

The former teacher would like to see her books used in public school history classes, but she doubts it will happen.

Modern parents might be offended by what were once commonplace examples of racist humor, she said, and school systems themselves were once complicit. For example, the new book’s images include the program from a black-face “minstrel show” put on by students of Lexington’s all-white Picadome Elementary in 1947.

Quisenberry’s books cost $15 each and are available in many Central Kentucky bookstores or directly from her: (859) 299-7258.

Kids for Kids

Logan Gardner, a senior at Henry Clay High School’s Liberal Arts Academy, has known since he was little that he wanted to go into business. He figured one good way to learn about business would be to start one.

Gardner realized that few adults might be willing to do business with a kid. But he saw an opportunity in the charity projects many of his friends were involved with. He created Kids for Kids Youth Social Ventures, a nonprofit organization that would teach him business skills and help his friends jump-start their fundraising efforts.

“Running a charity is similar to running a business,” he said. “It’s a lot of the same skills.”

Gardner, 18, wrote a business plan, filled out the voluminous paperwork to seek nonprofit tax status, created a website (Kidsforkidsysv.org) and set up a presence on social media. Then he partnered with the crowd-funding site Rockethub.com.

Gardner got mentoring along the way from his father, John Gardner, a financial advisor for Wells Fargo Advisors, and Erin Budde, who leads Wells Fargo’s national charity efforts and will soon become executive director of stl250, the group planning St. Louis’ 250th anniversary celebration in 2014.

Kids for Kids’ first project raised $2,000 to help Ellen Hardcastle, 17, a family friend in Nashville, produce a CD of her piano solos. The CDs will be sold to raise almost $5,800 to build a new well for Ulongwe Model School in Malawi.

Kids for Kids’ current project on Rockethub.com is halfway toward its goal of raising $900 by April 17 for Lusi Lukova, a Henry Clay junior, to help the Lexington-based International Book Project ship textbooks to schools in Uganda.

Gardner soon will be turning over Kids for Kids to his brother, Austin, 17, as he heads this fall to the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been accepted into the prestigious Wharton School of Business. Did starting Kids for Kids give him an edge?

“Absolutely,” Gardner said. “I think that’s what got me into Penn.”

Craig Whitney spent much of his long career with The New York Times as a reporter in Europe, where he got the same question over and over.

“People would often ask me in a baffled way, ‘What is it about you Americans and guns?’ especially after things like Columbine happened,” he said. “I would give the best answer I could, but then I realized I didn’t really know myself.”

After retiring as an assistant managing editor in 2009, Whitney decided to find out. The result of his research was the book, Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment (Public Affairs Books, $28.99). It was published last November, a month before the school massacre in Newtown, Conn.

Whitney will be in Lexington this week to talk about his findings, some of which surprised him. His book offers a path to finding sensible middle ground in the gun-control debate, balancing Second Amendment rights with public safety.

Whitney’s lecture is at 7 p.m. March 28 in the University of Kentucky’s Taylor Education Building, 597 South Upper Street. It is sponsored by UK’s College of Communication and Information, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

In an interview last week, Whitney said he began his research by looking at Colonial history to find out what the nation’s founders intended when they wrote the Constitution’s Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Many gun-control advocates argue that the Second Amendment is an anachronism, or that it was never meant to guarantee the right of individual gun ownership outside military service. But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected that argument twice recently, in 5-4 rulings in 2008 and 2010 that struck down handgun bans in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

“I found myself surprisingly agreeing with the conservative justices,” Whitney said. “That it is an individual right, not tied to militia service, and that the Second Amendment recognized a common-law right the colonists had had from the very beginning.”

Whitney said gun-control advocates must accept the Second Amendment, as well as the reality that gun ownership is a deeply ingrained aspect of American culture that isn’t going away. His book notes that more than 60 million Americans own more than 300 million firearms.

By the same token, gun-rights advocates should quit stoking fear that the federal government will somehow find a way to confiscate the weapons of law-abiding citizens. That would be clearly unconstitutional, Whitney said, and such paranoia stymies much-needed public safety measures like universal background checks.

The National Rifle Association has promoted gun-seizure fears since the 1970s. Whitney noted that it has been an effective fundraising strategy for the NRA and has dramatically increased gun sales.

Whitney doesn’t own guns, although he carried one while serving in the Navy in Vietnam. Legal gun ownership is difficult where he lives in New York City. But he is an NRA member.

“I joke in the book that I would never have believed half the things that the media report the NRA says if I hadn’t read them in the NRA’s monthly magazine,” he said.

Whitney is critical of the NRA, but he is just as critical of extreme gun-control advocates such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Violent crime has declined dramatically in America during the past two decades, but Whitney disputes NRA propaganda crediting that to more people carrying guns for self-defense.

“I also don’t buy Mayor Bloomberg’s argument that keeping people like me from buying guns or having them in New York City keeps crime down in New York City,” he said.

Whitney noted that more than half the nation’s 30,000 annual gun deaths are suicides — and half of those are done with rifles and shotguns. While so-called assault weapons have been used in high-profile massacres, most gun crimes are committed with handguns.

“Common sense is what we need to apply to the gun-control debate,” Whitney said.

“Not ideology, which on the one hand says that all regulations are unconstitutional and on the other hand says all guns should be illegal.”

Whitney’s book makes several sensible policy recommendations. History shows that guns have been regulated since the nation’s earliest days, and the Supreme Court has clearly stated that reasonable gun regulations are perfectly constitutional.

One of the most effective strategies, Whitney believes, would be state licensing of gun owners after they receive safety training and pass a proficiency test. Who should do the training and testing? Whitney suggests the NRA.

“Politically, they’ve gone off the deep end,” Whitney said of the NRA. “But I think they do excellent work in the firearms training and safety courses they have.”

Improving the public’s proficiency with firearms was the main reason the NRA was founded in 1871, Whitney noted in his book. And one of the two founders, William C. Church, was a former reporter for The New York Times.

“I was born in Lexington, Ky.”

That is the first sentence of the first chapter of the first manuscript published by William Wells Brown, the first and most prolific black writer published in the 19th century. And it appears to be wrong.

Rather than being born in Lexington — as Brown might have believed when he wrote the 1847 narrative of his life in and escape from slavery — he was born on a Montgomery County farm near Mount Sterling.

That is one of several discoveries Ezra Greenspan, an English professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas, has made as he has researched and written the first comprehensive biography of Brown.

Greenspan is now finishing the book, which he said W.W. Norton & Co. will publish in 2014. Also next year, The Library of America will publish the second volume of Brown’s writings that Greenspan has edited. William Wells Brown: A Reader was published by The University of Georgia Press in 2008.

“He is one of the great lives in American history,” Greenspan said of Brown. “He is being recognized now, and it’s long overdue, as being the leading force in 19th-century African-American culture.”

After escaping from slavery in 1834, Brown helped other fugitive slaves get to Canada. He taught himself to read and write, became a leading anti-slavery speaker and then launched into an impressive literary career.

Brown wrote the first published black novel, play, travelogue and song book. He wrote three major volumes of black history, including the first examining black service in the Civil War. He later traveled widely to advocate for temperance, education and social improvement of the black community.

Brown’s most famous book was his novel, Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter, which created a sensation when published in London in 1853. The title character is the daughter of a slave and President Thomas Jefferson. The book’s inspiration was the rumors that had long swirled about Jefferson’s now-proven relationship with his mixed-race slave, Sally Hemings.

Greenspan’s research included visiting places across America and Britain where Brown lived and worked. He came to Lexington last fall looking for evidence of Brown’s birth and owner, physician John Young. He found none.

Then, in an old copy of the Kentucky Gazette, he found a notice Young had placed telling of a smallpox epidemic in Mount Sterling. So he went to search Montgomery County court records “and Dr. John Young was all over the place.”

Greenspan also found records about the man Brown identified in his 1847 narrative as his biological father, Young’s cousin George W. Higgins, who married soon afterward and moved to Alabama.

Brown left Kentucky about age 3, when Young moved West to Missouri, settling on a large farm 60 miles west of St. Louis.

Greenspan found a lot of information about the white side of Brown’s family, but his slave ancestry remains sketchy — both in where his mother’s people came from and where they ended up. Brown’s beloved sister was sold South as a teenager, likely as part of the sex trade. His mother also was sold South, after a 17-year-old Brown persuaded her to make an unsuccessful escape attempt with him.

“Brown certainly had a sense of himself as a Kentuckian, even though the connections were loose,” Greenspan said.

He said his book would add a lot of information to what has been known about Brown and his work. But many aspects of Brown’s tumultuous private life, which included two wives and several daughters, will remain a mystery. Brown died in 1884 in Chelsea, Mass.

“Even though Brown was the most prolific black writer of the century, there are no private letters that have survived of Brown and his own family,” he said. “But the family was explosive.”

For Brown to rise from slavery, educate himself and accomplish so much is truly remarkable, Greenspan said.

“He was a person of extraordinary intelligence and perception,” he said. “Basically, it’s a story of native qualities and astounding life experience.”

Because next year will be the bicentennial of Brown’s birth, Greenspan hopes states and cities where he lived will organize commemorations. He hopes to return to speak next year in Lexington, where last fall he happened upon the new William Wells Brown Elementary School in the East End.

“I was so impressed by the way they set up the community center and the school together,” he said. “It’s exactly in the mold of Brown’s reform activities: education and community reform go hand-in-hand.”

Alex Brooks left Lexington for two years of graduate school in England, where he studied book conservation. He has returned and started what may be Kentucky’s only company that conserves old books for individuals and libraries. Photo by Tom Eblen

Work is more rewarding when you find a way to turn your passion into a business opportunity. Kentuckians Alex Brooks and Debra Koerner are doing just that, at different points in their lives and with technology from different centuries.

Brooks, 31, grew up in Louisville and discovered creative writing in high school. He made his first book for poems he wrote. As a Gaines Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, he earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.

While at UK, Brooks discovered the King Library Press and learned letterpress printing, which led to him creating block-print art. He also worked in UK Special Collections, which interested him in book conservation.

After college, Brooks acquired some antique printing equipment and operated Press 817, a one-man company that produced everything from wedding invitations to his own block prints. His career took another turn when he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England. While there, he earned a master’s degree in book conservation at West Dean College.

Brooks returned to Lexington in October and started Alex Brooks Conservation to restore and conserve old books, from rare library specimens to family Bibles.

“The idea in my work is to keep as much of the original as possible,” Brooks said as he showed me a leather-bound volume from the 1830s about horse care that he is repairing for the Keeneland Library.

What he doesn’t try to do is make old books look new, by bleaching pages or replacing old bindings that still have a lot of original fabric. That might make them look good for a few years, but their historical value would be diminished.

“I’m not trying to make a book look like it was never damaged in the first place,” he said, “but to prevent it from further damage and make it usable.”

There is a lot of need for book conservation in Kentucky, yet there are few conservators.

“That’s one of the reasons I chose to move back to Lexington,” Brooks said. “I know the need is out there, but I’m not sure that the finances for that need will be out there.”

Brooks charges about $300 to refurbish a family Bible. Other work is $30 an hour, plus materials. (For more information, email Brooks at alexbrooks@gmail.com.)

In addition to doing work for institutions and collectors, Brooks hopes to build a client base from industries such as Thoroughbred horses and bourbon that realize heritage is important to their brands.

Brooks will be sharing his skills at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, where he will teach bookbinding classes March 2 and 16. Learn more at Carnegiecenterlex.org.

Debra Koerner has started a mid-career television production company to make a health and wellness series for Public Broadcasting called “Journey Into Wellbeing.” Photo provided

Koerner, 45, had written a book about success, been executive director of a spa organization and started a wellness education company. But she had always dreamed of a television career.

“That got me to thinking: if I was going to have a TV show, what am I most passionate about?” she said. “Where can I make a difference?”

Koerner describes herself as a “pudgy insomniac” and former stressed-out working mother. So she decided to borrow from her own experiences to show viewers how they could use local resources to make themselves healthier and happier.

She started a production company and created a self-funded pilot episode of Journey into Wellbeing. The show is planned as a state-by-state series, focusing on creative local wellness initiatives and resources. She gives viewers tips for healthy eating, exercise, natural health care and sustainable living.

The pilot episode focused on Kentucky and will air Tuesday on KET2 and 10 more times through March 21 on Kentucky Educational Television.

In the pilot episode, shot in October, Koerner interviews several Kentucky health experts and travels around the state. She visits an organic farm in Oldham County and Frontier Nursing University in Leslie County. She consults with a doctor and a fitness expert from Lexington and gets advice from a Louisville chef about how to prepare healthier versions of two Kentucky favorites, the hot Brown and corn pudding.

“Every state has great health initiatives, but they are not getting the focus they deserve,” Koerner said. “I also hope my story impresses (viewers) to attempt something they’ve been thinking about and wanting to do. It can happen.”

With his own debt of freedom repaid, Lewis Hayden could focus on helping others become free. The escaped slave from Lexington already had accomplished a lot by this time, as I wrote in last Wednesday’s column.

By the late 1840s, Hayden was a leader in Boston’s black community. His boarding house and clothing store were important stops on the Underground Railroad, which helped escaped slaves start new lives in the North.

The American Anti-Slavery Society hired Hayden in 1847 as an “agent” to travel throughout the North and speak about his experiences as a slave. He was sorely disappointed when the organization’s white leaders let him go after about six months, according to Lewis Hayden and the War Against Slavery, a 1999 book by Joel Strangis, a former administrator at Sayre School in Lexington.

Apparently, Hayden was not as effective a speaker as some of the society’s other agents, who included Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, another former Lexington slave, who would become America’s first successful black novelist.

The break might have been for the best. Hayden was growing impatient with the Anti-Slavery Society and pacifist leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator newspaper. They seemed to be all talk and no action. Circumstances would soon force Hayden into action.

The Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay’s attempt to avoid the inevitable Civil War, included a fugitive slave law. Among other things, the law made it a crime to help an escaped slave, and it forced federal officials to become slave-catchers.

The law sent shock waves through Boston’s black population. Hayden and most of the city’s 2,000 black residents were now in personal jeopardy, and they were determined to fight back.

After federal marshals arrested an escaped slave named Shadrach at a coffee house where he worked, Hayden and others snatched him from the courthouse and smuggled him out of Boston. President Millard Fillmore was outraged, and Clay denounced the incident on the floor of the Senate, asking “whether we shall have a government of white men or black men in the cities of this country.”

Hayden continued to help dozens of fugitive slaves, sometimes by force, and his fame grew.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the 1852 best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, interviewed Hayden and included his harrowing account of childhood slavery in Lexington in her 1853 follow-up book,The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Read the excerpt here.)

In 1858, Hayden met abolitionist John Brown, who spoke of his plans to incite an armed slave revolt. Hayden raised money for what would become Brown’s unsuccessful raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859.

When the Civil War finally came, Hayden had a friend in Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew. They had known each other for years, and Hayden had helped the lawyer get elected to the legislature in 1857.

Still, many eyebrows were raised when the Pilgrim State’s governor accepted an invitation to dine at Lewis and Harriet Hayden’s home on Thanksgiving 1862. It wasn’t just a social occasion: Hayden took the opportunity to urge Andrew to persuade President Abraham Lincoln to allow blacks to fight for the Union.

Once Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect a few weeks later, Andrew formed the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Hayden was too old to serve, but he recruited troops for the unit, which had black enlisted men but white officers. The regiment’s story was told in the 1989 Academy Award-winning movie Glory, starring Denzel Washington, Matthew Broderick and Morgan Freeman.

After the war, Hayden promoted Freemasonry as a way for black men to help one another advance. And, in 1873, he was elected to a term in the Massachusetts legislature. (He was one of Massachusetts’ first state employees in 1858, when he got a job as a messenger in the secretary of state’s office.)

Hayden spent his last years on a goal he had worked 30 years to achieve. He wanted a monument on the Boston Common honoring Crispus Attucks, the only mixed-race man killed by British troops in the “Boston Massacre” of March 5, 1770, which helped spark the American Revolution.

Hayden had to settle for a monument honoring all five “massacre” victims. But he was on the platform when it was dedicated in 1888, with Attucks’ name at the top of the list. Hayden died the following year and is buried in Everett, Mass.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, created a sensation when it was published in 1852. It also brought complaints from Southerners that her depictions of slavery were fabrications. So, the next year, she published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to bolster her case. The book included her interview with Lewis Hayden. Here is that excerpt:

The following account was given to the writer by Lewis Hayden. Hayden was a fugitive slave, who escaped from Kentucky by the assistance of a young lady named Delia Webster, and a man named Calvin Fairbanks. Both were imprisoned. Lewis Hayden has earned his own character as a free citizen of Boston, where he can find an abundance of vouchers for his character.

I belonged to the Rev. Adam Rankin, a Presbyterian minister in Lexington, Kentucky.

My mother was of mixed blood—white and Indian. She married my father when he was working in a bagging factory near by. After a while my father’s owner moved off and took my father with him, which broke up the marriage. She was a very handsome woman. My master kept a large dairy, and she was the milk-woman. Lexington was a small town in those days, and the dairy was in the town. Back of the college was the masonic lodge. A man who belonged to the lodge saw my mother when she was about her work. He made proposals of a base nature to her. When she would have nothing to say to him, he told her that she need not be so independent, for if money could buy her, he would have her. My mother told old mistress, and begged that master might not sell her. But he did sell her. My mother had a high spirit, being part Indian. She would not consent to live with this man, as he wished; and he sent her to prison, and had her flogged, and punished her in various ways, so that at last she began to have crazy turns.

When I read in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” about Cassy, it put me in mind of my mother, and I wanted to tell Mrs. S—about her. She tried to kill herself several times, once with a knife and once by hanging. She had long, straight black hair, but after this it all turned white, like an old person’s. When she had her raving turns, she always talked about her children. The jailer told the owner that if he would let her go to her children, perhaps she would get quiet. They let her out one time, and she came to the place where we were. I might have been seven or eight years old—don’t know my age exactly. I was not at home when she came. I came in and found her in one of the cabins near the kitchen. She sprung and caught my arms, and seemed going to break them, and then said, “I’ll fix you so they’ll never get you!” I screamed, for I thought she was going to kill me; they came in and took me away. They tied her, and carried her off. Sometimes, when she was in her right mind, she used to tell me what things they had done to her. At last her owner sold her, for a small sum, to a man named Lackey. While with him she had another husband and several children. After a while this husband either died or was sold, I do not remember which. The man then sold her to another person, named Bryant. My own father’s owner now came and lived in the neighbourhood of this man, and brought my mother with him. He had had another wife and family of children where he had been living. He and my mother came together again, and finished their days together. My mother almost recovered her mind in her last days.

I never saw anything in Kentucky which made me suppose that ministers or professors of religion considered it any more wrong to separate the families of slaves by sale than to separate any domestic animals.

There may be ministers and professors of religion who think it is wrong, but I never met with them. My master was a minister, and yet he sold my mother, as I have related.

When he was going to leave Kentucky for Pennsylvania, he sold all my brothers and sisters at auction. I stood by and saw them sold. When I was just going up on to the block, he swapped me off for a pair of carriage-horses. I looked at those horses with strange feelings. I had indulged hopes that master would take me into Pennsylvania with him, and I should get free. How I looked at those horses, and walked round them, and thought for them I was sold!

It was commonly reported that my master had said in the pulpit that there was no more harm in separating a family of slaves than a litter of pigs. I did not hear him say it, and so cannot say whether this is true or not.

It may seem strange, but it is a fact. I had more sympathy and kind advice, in my efforts to get my freedom, from gamblers and no doubt the other, and such sort of men, than Christians.

Some of the gamblers were very kind to me.

I never knew a slave-trader that did not seem to think, in his heart, that the trade was a bad one. I knew a great many of them, such as Neal, McAnn, Cobb, Stone, Pulliam, and Davis, &c. They were like Haley—they meant to repent when they got through.

Intelligent coloured people in my circle of acquaintance, as a general thing, felt no security whatever for their family ties. Some, it is true, who belonged to rich families, felt some security; but those of us who looked deeper, and knew how many were not rich that seemed so, and saw how fast money slipped away, were always miserable. The trader was all around, the slave-pen at hand, and we did not know what time any of us might be in it. Then there were the rice-swamps, and the sugar and cotton plantations; we had had them held before us as terrors, by our masters and mistresses, all our lives. We knew about them all; and when a friend was carried off, why, it was the same as death, for we could not write or hear, and never expected to see them again.

I have one child who is buried in Kentucky, and that grave is pleasant to think of. I’ve got another that is sold nobody knows where, and that I never can bear to think of.

— LEWIS HAYDEN.

When the Marquis de Lafayette visited Lexington in May 1825, during his celebrated national tour, a slave child of 13 slipped away from his chores long enough to try to catch a glimpse of the French hero of the American Revolution.

Lewis Hayden would later recall sitting alone on a fence as the parade passed through town. As Lafayette’s open carriage approached, the most famous man Hayden had ever heard of turned and bowed his head to acknowledge him.

“That act burnt his image upon my heart so that I shall never need a permit to recall it,” Hayden would later tell friends. “I date my hatred of slavery from that day.”

One of the things I love about reading history, especially black history, is discovering fascinating people of great accomplishment I previously knew nothing about.

I had never heard of Hayden until last year, when William Thomas gave me an old library copy of Joel Strangis’ 1999 book, Lewis Hayden and the War Against Slavery. That led me to other sources that also told the story of a Lexington man who escaped slavery, settled in Boston and led a remarkable life.

Thomas, a Lexington retiree, is the leader of a nonprofit foundation trying to raise money to buy and preserve the old First African Baptist Church building at Short and Deweese streets. Thomas dreams of turning this handsome old church, built around 1856 by a slave congregation, into a performance hall and arts academy.

Like Hayden, Thomas found success in Boston. After graduating from Lexington’s then-segregated schools, Thomas became an accomplished musician, built an outstanding orchestra during a 36-year career at Phillips Andover prep school and headed Project STEP, a classical music academy for gifted minority students run by the Boston Symphony and New England Conservatory of Music.

Thomas says the restored church building would be a fitting tribute to 19th-century Lexington blacks who accomplished great things against all odds. Coincidentally, he said, the church is at the site of a former clock and cabinet shop where Hayden worked for one of his masters, Elijah Warner.

Strangis’ book tells how Hayden was sold to Warner by his first master, the Rev. Adam Rankin, whose circa 1784 house is the oldest still standing in Lexington.

While Hayden belonged to Warner, he married another slave, Esther, and they had a son. But when Esther’s owner’s business failed, she and their son were purchased by Henry Clay. The statesman later sold them South, and Hayden never saw his family again. He married a second time, to Harriet Bell, a slave who had a young son.

Hayden was sold in 1840 to a man who whipped him, then two years later to two businessmen who leased him to the Phoenix Hotel, where he worked as a waiter.

Through his various jobs, Hayden learned more than most slaves did about the white world, including how to read. Inspired by Lafayette and angry with Clay, Hayden vowed that he and his second family would be free someday.

In the fall of 1844, Hayden planned his escape with help from two white abolitionists, Delia Webster, a Vermonter who ran a Lexington girls’ school, and Calvin Fairbank, a ministerial student at Oberlin College in Ohio who helped free several Kentucky slaves. They smuggled the Hayden family across the Ohio River, and the Underground Railroad helped them all the way to Canada.

Webster and Fairbank were not so fortunate. Convicted of helping the Haydens escape, Webster became one of the first women imprisoned in Kentucky, although she was pardoned two months into her two-year sentence. Fairbank spent five years in prison.

After a short time in Canada, Hayden felt called to return to this country and join the anti-slavery movement. His family settled in Boston, running a clothing store and boarding house, and assisting escaped slaves.

Hayden learned in 1849 that if he repaid his Lexington owner $650 as compensation for his loss, the man would petition Kentucky’s governor to free Fairbank. So Hayden bought the freedom of the man who had helped him secure his.

If Lewis Hayden’s story ended there, it would be remarkable. But he went on to do much, much more. Read about that in my column next Wednesday.

Writer Joseph Anthony. Photo by Tom Eblen 

What, exactly, is a Kentucky writer? Is it a writer from Kentucky? One who lives or has lived in Kentucky? Writes about Kentucky?

That idea has been discussed a lot since the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning began a project last year to celebrate Kentucky writers of the past and present, and to promote Lexington as the “literary capital of mid-America.” On Thursday, the center will name the first six inductees into its Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

With all of this in mind, I went to talk with a talented Kentucky writer who took a roundabout journey to get here.

Joseph G. Anthony was born in New Jersey and raised “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Camden, which seemed to him like a no-man’s land between New York and Philadelphia.

Anthony said he lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a dozen years, managing an off-track betting parlor and teaching English part-time at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University.

Then, at age 33, he was offered a teaching job at Hazard Community College in 1980.

“I knew nothing about Kentucky, except the Derby happened here,” he said with a laugh. “I found it to be a great adventure.”

After five years in Hazard, Anthony moved to the humanities faculty of Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington.

As he nears retirement, Anthony, 66, has had a burst of literary output in the past year: a novel,Pickering’s Mountain, set in Eastern Kentucky, and a short-story collection, Bluegrass Funeral, set in Central Kentucky.

With those two books and his first novel, Peril, Kentucky, published in 2005, Anthony considers himself a Kentucky writer. (He also published a short-story collection in 2009,Camden Blues, set in New Jersey and New York.)

“I’ve really bonded with Kentucky,” he said. “I get angry at it, like you only can at a relative. I really love so many things about it. We’re so lucky here in so many ways. Kentuckians understand their identity. I come from Jersey, where we didn’t.”

Anthony enjoys seeing Kentuckians meet for the first time and do what he calls “the county dance:” figuring out where each is from and what connections they might have. “We never did the county dance in New Jersey,” he said.

The states do have similarities, he said. People in both states tend to feel outside the American mainstream. And both are often stereotyped by outsiders.

Insiders and outsiders are a recurrent theme in Anthony’s fiction. He doesn’t avoid stereotypes, but he tries to play off them to show readers that things are always more complicated than they seem.

This is particularly true in Pickering’s Mountain, in which a young New Yorker comes to a small Eastern Kentucky town to take a job as a newspaper reporter.

Sam Weatherby and his family are thrown into complicated situations involving families, religion and coal mining. The outcomes are anything but predictable.

“Things get complicated, because there’s real people involved, real dilemmas,” he said. “Eastern Kentucky is a very complicated place. I wanted to write about the complexity of it.”

Anthony faced the same challenge for Bluegrass Funeral, whose stories are set in Lexington and a fictional Godard County. The stories include explorations of the region’s complicated history with race and class.

Anthony will be reading from and signing Bluegrass Funeral at 6 p.m. Friday at Wild Fig Bookstore, 1439 Leestown Road, and at noon Jan. 30 in the lobby of Bluegrass Community and Technical College, 470 Cooper Drive.

The Bluegrass Funeral stories led Anthony to his next project, which he says will be either a collection of short stories or a novel set in Lexington during the civil rights era, between the 1940s and the 1960s. He has been preparing to write by researching that era and listening to oral history interviews.

“I want it to be fiction,” he said. “I really feel fiction can tell a story in a way journalism can’t or essays can’t.”

After three Kentucky books, Anthony said, he sometimes feels as if he’s just getting started as a Kentucky writer. There is so much interesting material to explore.

“We’re called a border state,” he said. “I don’t think anybody else is like us. We’re not the border. We’re it.”

The new documentary, Wonder: The Lives of Anna and Harlan Hubbard, by Louisville filmmaker Morgan Atkinson and narrated by author Wendell Berry, will have its first Lexington showing at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 28, at the State Theatre, inside the Kentucky Theatre, 214 East Main St.

After the showing, I will moderate a panel discussion about the film and the Hubbards with Atkinson, Meg Shaw and Bill Caddell. Shaw is head of the Lucille Little Fine Arts Library at the University of Kentucky, where the Harlan Hubbard Image Collection is archived. Caddell was a longtime friend of the Hubbards.

Doors open at 6:45 p.m. The showing is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by Idea Festival University, a project of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corp.

The Hubbards were a talented couple who spent nearly 40 years living apart from the modern world, first on a shanty boat, floating down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and then in a cabin they built along the Ohio River in Trimble County.

I wrote about Atkinson’s film in November.  Click here to read my column. For more information about the film, go to: Annaandharlan.com. For more information about the Idea Festival, go to: Ideafestival.com.

“What Henry David Thoreau did for two years on Walden Pond, the Hubbard’s did for forty years in Kentucky,” Atkinson said. “I hope the film will inspire people to be open to adventure in their own lives, whatever that may be.”

Every place has a story. When residents of Lexington’s Fairway neighborhood began researching the story of their place, they got a lot more than they expected.

They chronicled some fascinating history. But they also grew closer as neighbors, and they created a model for other neighborhoods interested in doing the same thing.

The idea began when Robert Figg was president of the Fairway Neighborhood Association in the late 1990s. He moved to the subdivision off Richmond Road in 1965, thinking he had found his family a starter home. That was 48 years and three home renovations ago.

Figg had heard many colorful stories about the neighborhood and its history, and he wanted to record interviews with longtime residents before the memories faded.

In 2008, the neighbors discovered that the Kentucky Historical Society offers technical assistance grants to train oral history interviewers and loans recording equipment. After training, the interviewers gathered some great material, now archived at the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.

But some memories conflicted, and the more information interviewers gathered, the more they realized they needed to fill in gaps to complete the neighborhood’s story. That process turned into a book, Fairway, A Living History ($35 hard cover, $20 paperback. More information: Fairwayneighborhood.org.)

I have seen other neighborhood histories, but none that are as well-researched, well-written and well-illustrated. Even for readers with no ties to Fairway, it offers a fascinating glimpse into Lexington’s rich history.

The neighborhood historians had some good help: a five-member advisory board included four professional historians and archivists and one of the nation’s most respected journalists: Fairway resident John Carroll, retired editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times.

“In many ways, this little piece of land is a microcosm of more than two centuries of American history,” said Valerie Askren, a member of the five-person committee that researched and wrote the book.

In examining the neighborhood’s 118 acres, the book outlines the early history of much of southeast Lexington. The story begins with a 1779 Virginia land grant to John Todd, one of three brothers who were among Lexington’s first settlers. Their descendants included Mary Todd, wife of Abraham Lincoln.

The land changed hands several times during the 1800s, including one time that underscored Kentucky’s racial and gender politics before the Civil War.

John Todd’s daughter and heir, Polly, was forced to give title to her land to her second husband, Robert Wickliffe, to secure freedom for her mixed-race grandson, Alfred Russell. That was because, upon her marriage to Wickliffe, Russell had legally become his slave. Once freed, Russell left Kentucky for Africa, where he later became president of Liberia.

Wickliffe’s heirs eventually subdivided and sold the land for residential development, creating the neighborhoods of Mentelle Park, Kenwick and, beginning in 1926, Fairway.

Fairway’s mix of traditional-style homes, built in the 1920s to 1950s, range from modest apartments and ranch houses to mansions. Several were designed by three well-known Lexington architects who built their own homes in Fairway: War field Gratz, Hugh Meriwether and Robert McMeekin.

Fairway’s development included two Kenwick elementary schools, the second built in 1937 and renamed in 1963 for its longtime principal, Julia R. Ewan. It is now the Lexington Hearing and Speech Center.

One little-known chapter of Fairway’s history is the military base that once occupied 12 acres north of the school along Henry Clay Boulevard. The Army Remount Station bought and processed military horses from 1920 until the cavalry was mechanized during World War II. It was also home to Troop B of the 123rd Kentucky Cavalry, a National Guard unit.

The Fairway Neighborhood Association paid for the book’s printing by soliciting $250 and $100 sponsorships from residents and others and from businesses with ties to the neighborhood. More than 400 books have been sold, with proceeds generating several thousand dollars for the neighborhood association.

Figg, Askren and Sandra Ireland, the book’s three principal authors, said their effort was particularly successful because Fairway has many longtime residents, including several generations of some families. But they encouraged other neighborhoods to follow their example.

“While working on this project,” Askren said, “I got to know my neighbors so much better.”

Al Smith’s autobiography, Wordsmith: My Life in Journalism, was the top seller at last year’s Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort. But, as always, Smith had a lot more to say.

So, two months shy of his 86th birthday, Smith will be back at this year’s book fair on Nov. 10 with another memoir, Kentucky Cured: Fifty Years in Kentucky Journalism (History Press, 219 pp., $19.99.)

This book hits some highlights of the personal-transformation story Smith told in his autobiography — professional redemption after overcoming alcoholism and marrying the right woman — but it says a lot more about Kentucky than it does about Al Smith.

Kentucky Cured is a collection of new and updated essays, some of which first appeared in the Herald-Leader or The Courier-Journal of Louisville. Most are reflections on some of Kentucky’s most fascinating public figures of the second half of the 20th century.

Smith got to know them all, and many more, during his varied career. The Tennessee native published newspapers in Russellville, London and several smaller towns; was the founder and host for three decades of Kentucky Educational Television’s Comment on Kentucky show; ran the Appalachian Regional Commission under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; and, late in life, helped start the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.

Stories in this book involve many familiar names: Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, Bert Combs, Louie Nunn, Earl Clements, John Ed Pearce, Ed Prichard, Edward “Ned” Breathitt, Robert Penn Warren, Lyman Johnson, Georgia Powers, Larry Forgy, Gatewood Galbraith, Lucille Little, Mike Mullins, Leonard and Lillian Press, and the crafty politician/educators who transformed Kentucky’s state “teacher colleges” into dynamic regional universities.

Smith is a gifted writer of tight prose, a storyteller with a good ear for a quote or a telling anecdote. But more than that, he is a keen observer and analyst who understands the historical and cultural forces that make Kentucky tick.

Smith has been a friend and mentor for 35 years, since his stepdaughter and I were college classmates. He always has been my model of an engaged community journalist — a reporter of facts, yes, but also someone who seeks to help citizens understand and improve the place where they live.

In this regard, Smith has reminds me of the late historian Thomas D. Clark, another man of letters who adopted Kentucky as his beloved home but was always frustrated because so many of his fellow citizens were willing to settle for mediocrity or worse.

Consider the final paragraph of Smith’s essay Why Clements and Prichard Still Matter. It asks a question as relevant now as when it appeared in the Herald-Leader’s Opinions and Ideas section three years ago:

“In a state like Kentucky, leadership often falls to political hacks or fresh faces with painless promises, which fail. Clements and Prichard mattered because they knew the game before they got on the field and played it courageously, with a vision that had lasting, positive consequences. Where is the courage, where is the vision for Kentucky today?”

Smith’s passion and hope for his adopted state shine through in Kentucky Cured. Perhaps that is why, two decades after many other men of accomplishment would have retired to a life of leisure, Al Smith is still producing journalism that is well worth reading.

Mayor Jim Gray often talks about Lexington aspiring to be a “great American city.” But two centuries ago, that is exactly what it was. Many visitors hailed Lexington as the most vibrant and cultured city in what was then Western America.

The reality and myths surrounding Lexington’s so-called Athens of the West era are explored in a new book of essays published by the University Press of Kentucky, Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852.

The book is already in stores, but it will be formally launched at a signing party Sunday, Sept. 16, at 4 p.m. at the Hunt Morgan House, 253 Market Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Bluegrass Renaissance grew out of a series of lectures in 2007 organized by the University of Kentucky’s Gaines Center for the Humanities and others. Book editors James Klotter, Kentucky’s state historian, and Daniel Rowland, a UK history professor and former Gaines Center director, compiled essays by 15 historians and writers, including my older daughter, Mollie, and me.

The book begins with essays by Klotter and Stephen Aron that place Lexington in the national context of the time and discuss the city’s quick transition from frontier outpost to cultured metropolis.

Gerald Smith and the late Shearer Davis Bowman write about slavery, the “peculiar institution” that built the region’s wealth and would eventually play a big role in both economic and moral bankruptcy.

Randolph Hollingsworth writes about the role women played in early Kentucky, while Maryjean Wall looks at the origins of the signature horse industry. Mark Wetherington and Matthew Clarke profile several influential characters, while John Thelin explores the role higher education played in development and civic pride.

Nikos Pappas writes about musical culture, and Estill Curtis Pennington explains how outstanding portrait painters helped bring artistic culture to Central Kentucky and left what little visual evidence we have of that era’s key players.

Patrick Snadon writes about how Lexington’s leading citizens embraced early America’s most accomplished architect, Benjamin Latrobe. He was commissioned to design six Lexington buildings. Only one survives: Pope Villa, one of the most avant-garde pieces of architecture built during America’s Federalist period.

Mollie and I wrote about Horace Holley, a minister lured to Lexington from Boston, and his role in transforming Transylvania University into one of early America’s most highly regarded universities. Transylvania played a central role in Kentucky’s early education accomplishments and Lexington’s “Athens of the West” reputation.

The book’s dates are somewhat arbitrary: 1792 is the year Kentucky became a state, while 1852 is when Henry Clay, Lexington’s most famous citizen, died. In reality, Lexington’s heyday didn’t begin until after 1800, and its economic, if not cultural, fortunes started waning around 1815. By the end of the 1830s, Lexington had begun a long slide into mediocrity and provincialism.

Lexington’s early prosperity was the result of rich soil, slave labor and the city’s prime location as a hub for early Westward migration and trade. But the city began to struggle after the invention of steamboats allowed two-way commerce on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, which favored river cities such as Cincinnati and Louisville.

Slavery became a huge economic and social liability for Lexington beginning in the 1840s, limiting economic innovation and sparking increased social and racial strife. By clinging so long to slavery, a huge amount of Lexington’s economic capital was wiped out by the Civil War; racism and violence that followed stifled growth and new ideas.

Lexington had lost its economic edge and pioneer spirit. With a few notable exceptions, such as the creation and growth of the University of Kentucky, the city remained intellectually and economically stagnant for nearly a century.

In a short essay that ends the book, Gray makes the point that the past informs the present, and history provides valuable lessons for those who seek to shape the future.

Mollie and I certainly discovered that while researching and writing our chapter. The spectacular rise and fall of Holley at Transylvania in the 1820s reflected issues and attitudes that have shaped two centuries of Kentucky history.

Holley saw huge potential in Kentucky and its people, but was bedeviled by religious disputes, power struggles and petty politics. He finally gave up and left Kentucky, frustrated by an anti-intellectual governor who saw more political advantage in building roads than investing in education.

This book’s title is something of a misnomer: “renaissance” means “revival.” The Athens of the West era was actually Lexington’s “naissant” period. Achieving renaissance is our challenge, and we would be wise to learn lessons from the past.

Piedmont Airlines’ first passenger flight from Lexington, on a DC-3 bound for Cincinnati, was Feb. 20, 1948. In 1965, Piedmont flew the first passenger jet flight into Blue Grass Field. File photo

When “Lucky Lindy” made a surprise overnight visit to Lexington at the height of his fame, he had trouble even finding the municipal airport, Halley Field, a converted pasture off Leestown Road where Meadowthorpe subdivision now stands.

More than 2,000 people watched Lindbergh leave the next morning. His five-passenger Ryan monoplane — similar to the famous “Spirit of St. Louis” he flew on the first solo non-stop Atlantic crossing — almost crashed on takeoff.

“Lindy Plane Barely Misses Trees at Hop Off,” The Lexington Leader reported with a front-page banner headline. “Lindy Says Lexington’s Airport Too Small for Present Aviation Needs.” How embarrassing.

That is one of many colorful stories Fran Taylor has discovered while doing research for a book Blue Grass Airport has commissioned to chronicle the history of the airport and aviation in Central Kentucky. Taylor wants help finding more great stories.

Everyone is invited to bring pre-1980 photos and mementos to the airport terminal’s lobby from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. A videographer will record oral histories, and a photographer will take pictures of special items. Prizes will be given for the best story, memento and photo.

“It’s a really rich history,” Taylor said, adding that the Aviation Museum of Kentucky at the airport has been a great resource. “Blue Grass Field was like the Forrest Gump of airports. If it happened nationally, it happened here in a big way.”

Although airplanes might have used a grassy meadow off Richmond Road as early as 1917, the first real local airstrip was Dr. S.H. Halley’s field, which opened in 1921 and became the municipal airport in 1927. After Lindbergh’s close call, Cool Meadow Field was built in 1930 on Newtown Pike, where Fasig-Tipton’s Thoroughbred auction facility is now.

It was at Cool Meadow that Lexington Airways offered flying lessons and Irvin Air Chute Co. tested parachutes it manufactured here, according to research by Frank Peters, an aviation museum volunteer. Airmail service began in 1939. Blue Grass Airlines offered regional passenger service a couple of years later.

When World War II began, the Army built a flight training facility that became Blue Grass Field across from Keeneland Race Course. The Army turned it over to the city and county in 1946, and the first terminal was dedicated that fall by Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace and president of Eastern Airlines. Eastern and Delta Air Lines began passenger service with Douglas DC-3s.

Renamed Blue Grass Airport in 1984, the 1,000-acre facility now serves more than 1 million people — and several hundred horses — each year.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has made several trips through Blue Grass Airport, which also has been host to Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, and hundreds of movie stars and other celebrities. You know Keeneland sales are in session when Arab royalty’s Boeing 747s are parked nose-to-nose on the tarmac.

But did you know that the first air freight shipment from Lexington was a package of butter sent to President Harry Truman in 1945? Or that the supersonic Concorde made a stop in 1989? Or that the airport played a role in the nation’s most notorious hijacking?

Three hijackers with pistols and hand grenades took over a Southern Airways DC-9 with 31 people aboard in November 1972, demanding $10 million. They made stops in several cities, including Lexington, where the hijackers ordered a ground crewman to strip to his underwear while refueling the plane. After 30 hours and 4,000 miles, the plane landed in Cuba, where the hijackers were captured.

Everyone remembers Blue Grass Airport’s saddest day: Aug. 27, 2006, when Comair Flight 5191 crashed on takeoff, killing 49 of the 50 people aboard.

But aviation has shaped Lexington’s collective memory in more subtle ways, too.

I remember, as a child, getting dressed up to see my father off on an annual business trip. We would stand in the old terminal hall, surrounded by photographic murals of the bluegrass landscape, and wave as Dad boarded the plane and it disappeared into the clouds. It always left me wondering how such a big machine filled with people could possibly fly.

If you go

Blue Grass Airport history project

What: Public is asked to share stories, mementoes of airport

Where: Blue Grass Airport terminal lobby, 4000 Terminal Dr., Lexington

When: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Aug. 11

Information: (859) 425-3105, Bluegrassairport.com.

Jay McChord's drawing of a photo that inspired his proposed book, which will collect the love stories of military veterans.

Jennifer Bryant was 16 when her grandmother died in 1991. As she helped her grandfather choose family photographs for the funeral visitation, she noticed a stack of small pictures and letters on the top of his dresser.

Kenneth and Dale Johnson were married for 46 years and raised three children in Webster County, where he worked as an underground coal miner.

The small stack of correspondence represented much of their first two years of marriage, which they spent apart. He was an Army machine-gunner during World War II and fought on the front lines in Europe, including the Battle of the Bulge.

One picture caught Bryant’s eye. It showed her grandparents on their wedding day, kissing along a roadside. Two days later, he left for the Army.

“He told me to just put that picture back in the stack; we weren’t going to use any of those at the funeral home and I didn’t need to mess with them,” she said. “Then he turned around and walked out of the room, and I put that picture in the back pocket of my jeans.”

A couple of days after Dale Johnson’s funeral, her husband burned all of those letters and pictures. The war and separation had been painful for them, he told Bryant later, “and those memories don’t need to be in this house anymore.”

Johnson never knew that Bryant saved the one photo. For most of the two decades since then, it has stood framed in a curio cabinet that had belonged to her grandmother.

When Bryant showed the picture to her friend Jay McChord last year and told him the story behind it, he got an idea: why not collect veterans’ love stories and pictures from across the generations and publish them in an inspirational book?

McChord and Bryant have launched a fund-raising campaign at Kickstarter.com to publish A Veteran’s Legacy … in Love. Their goal is to raise $30,013 by July 19 on the crowd-funding Web site to create an online platform for people to submit their stories and photos, and to produce the book. Unless they reach the goal, they won’t receive any of the Kickstarter pledges.

“I think this project and book can preserve some powerful stories and offer encouragement for what sacrifice and commitment look like,” McChord said. He envisions the book as a combination of inspirational love stories and a place where veterans may record their love stories for posterity.

Bryant and McChord already have the art for their book’s cover: McChord, a former University of Kentucky art major, made a drawing of the picture of Bryant’s grandparents kissing on their wedding day.

Much of McChord’s artistic work in recent years has focused on veterans. Most pieces are drawings of snapshots that soldiers took of themselves and friends while in service.

McChord, who is stepping down this year after eight years as the 9th District representative on Lexington’s Urban County Council, wasn’t in the military, and his family doesn’t have a strong military tradition.

But McChord said he has always loved military history, and he is inspired by veterans’ service and stories, especially those who fought in World War II. He just returned from a “Victory in Europe” trip organized by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, which included tours of sites in London, Paris and the beaches of Normandy. An 86-year-old American who fought in Normandy was their guide there.

In 2010, McChord published a book, A Veteran’s Legacy: Field Kit Journal (Gracie Mae Publications, $15). Illustrated with his drawings, the book helps veterans record the stories of their military service based on questions McChord developed from the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.

McChord sees these book projects as a way to honor those who served, preserve their stories so future generations can learn from them and offer a measure of healing, he said.

Bryant said it would be a shame if more stories of love, commitment and persistence disappeared in time, as her grandparents’ story did.

“Our children are not going to know the true stories of these veterans unless we tell them,” she said. “These people are here now, and we need to capture these stories.”

Wendell Berry at his home near Port Royal, Ky., December 2011. Photo by Tom Eblen

I spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon in December talking with Wendell Berry at the kitchen table of his Henry County farmhouse. He told me he was hard at work on an essay. “I’m in need of a lecture,” he said.

America was in need of a lecture, too. On Monday, Berry gave it.

The National Endowment for the Humanities chose the Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, activist and philosopher to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It is the federal government’s highest honor for scholarly contributions to the humanities.

Berry’s selection had not been announced when we met, so he was vague about what he was up to. But I had the sense he was up to something big. As I listened last week to the recording of our interview, Berry’s answers to my questions were filled with themes and phrases that found their way into his lecture essay.

Berry, 77, delivered a searing indictment of corporate domination and the industrial economy, saying it has abused the land and people and threatens our survival. You can — and should — watch the video of Berry’s lecture and read the full text of his essay, titled “It All Turns on Affection.” Both are online (click here).

Among Berry’s touchstones in the essay are E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End, an early exploration of the effects of industrialization on society, and the story of his own tobacco-farming grandfather’s struggle against the monopolistic power of James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Co.

Ironically, Berry said, Duke is remembered now as a philanthropist, the benefactor of Duke University in North Carolina. “If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough small farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of ‘philanthropy,’” he said.

Quoting his former teacher, the late writer Wallace Stegner, Berry said Americans have always tended to fall into two camps: boomers and stickers. “The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property and therefore power,” Berry said. “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Boomer ideals dominate America’s economy and culture now, he said. Almost everything has been reduced to statistics. Like corporate ownership, as compared to individual ownership, big numbers distance us from the consequences of our actions.

“Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment,” Berry said. “At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.”

Even the term economy has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry, he said. Most economists now “never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage ‘to strengthen the economy.’”

Corporate industrialism, he said, “has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature.”

Industrialism’s effects are often defended as the “price of progress” or “creative destruction,” Berry noted.

“But land abuse cannot brighten the human prospect,” he said. “There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.”

Who is to blame? “We are all implicated,” Berry said. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we are all boomers.”

How can it be changed? By having more respect for our fellow humans and the land, Berry said. By focusing on long-term sustainability — things like local food, soil conservation and renewable energy. And by rediscovering the importance of affection.

“Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time,” he said. “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. … And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind and conserving economy. … We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.”

Since Berry began making these arguments in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, critics have dismissed him as unrealistic, nostalgic, even anachronistic. But more people are listening. Indeed, this seems to be Wendell Berry’s time.

As “local food” and “buy local” movements have sprung up everywhere in recent years, Berry’s books have attracted an international following. His lectures are packed, often by young people.

Can America change before it is too late? It can, Berry told me, if sustainability becomes a bigger part of the public conversation. “The only way to do that,” he said, “is to make as much sense as you possibly can.”