The Bluegrass and Beyond

At the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center’s conference last month, people talked about how much more economic progress this state could make if cities and their surrounding counties worked together.

Jim Host thinks they’re right — but that they’re thinking too small. That’s no surprise; few Kentuckians think as big as Host.

The Ashland native turned college sports marketing into a business empire and headed the Commerce Cabinet and state parks system. Host, 71, was the first chairman of the Alltech FEI 2010 World Equestrian Games before stepping down to focus on building a new sports arena in downtown Louisville.

Host is a longtime Lexington resident who spends much of his time in Louisville. He said his experience has convinced him Kentucky will never achieve its full potential until its two biggest cities get beyond their rivalries and develop a close economic partnership with each other and the counties between them.

“Kentucky’s (economic) capital is between Lexington and Louisville,” Host said. “The limited resources of this state can’t afford for there not to be cooperation.”

America’s economy is experiencing fundamental change, with such longtime engines as California and Florida losing their luster. Host thinks that could be an opportunity for Kentucky.

Kentucky’s central location makes it ideal for companies such as Amazon.com, which has huge warehouses in Lexington and Campbellsville, and United Parcel Service, whose air freight hub is in Louisville.

Other industries — including Toyota, at Georgetown — have grown up between the two largest cities. Harley Davidson is considering Shelby County as the site for a 1,000-employee plant.

Many people whose jobs give them the flexibility to live anywhere have come to or stayed in Kentucky because it has a mix of city amenities, picturesque small towns and rural areas with natural beauty and recreation opportunities.

“How many people do you know who could afford to live anywhere, but they choose to live here?” Host asked.

States such as North Carolina, California and Minnesota have spurred economic development by forging close ties among their cities and universities.

Kentucky is catching on.

Commerce Lexington and Greater Louisville Inc. will make their first joint city visit in May, to Pittsburgh. Officials have said they see the trip as a step toward closer economic cooperation.

The 2010 World Equestrian Games are a great opportunity for Lexington to work with Louisville to showcase the larger region’s assets and potential. “Many top CEOs will come to the Games, and we won’t even know they’re here,” Host said.

Universities have huge potential to spur economic development, and Kentucky can no longer afford for the universities of Kentucky and Louisville to not be joined at the hip, Host said.

“There’s a lot more going on than people realize,” University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. said when asked about that. A UK spokesman said there are 54 joint research projects, worth $24.4 million, between UK and U of L faculty.

But Host thinks there could be much more coordination and sharing of resources. He noted the two universities’ boards of trustees have never met together — at least not in anyone’s memory.

Part of the challenge, Host said, will be for Lexington and Louisville to convince the rest of the state that what’s good for them is good for everyone. That’s because infrastructure investment and economic development in the cities benefits the entire state through commuter jobs, spinoff industries and shared tax revenues.

“This is not to be in competition with the rest of the state, but to provide revenue for the rest of the state,” Host said.

Fayette and Jefferson counties together accounted for 22.5 percent of state real and tangible personal property tax receipts during fiscal 2009, according to the Revenue Cabinet, which doesn’t track sales tax collections by county.

The cultural and psychological distance between Lexington and Louisville has always been much greater than the 75 miles that separate them. A lot of that comes down to Wildcat blue and Cardinal red.

“It’s part of what we grew up with here — we don’t mess with U of L because they’re our arch-enemy,” said Host, a huge sports fan who once played baseball for UK and admits to bleeding blue. “That can be the case in athletics, but it can’t be the case any longer in academics.”

The bottom line is that Lexington and Louisville must become partners instead of rivals, and the rest of Kentucky must realize that as the economies of those cities go, so goes the rest of the state.

“Sometimes a bad economy causes things to be thought through better,” Host said. “Kentucky is a state with limited resources; we have to focus on how we can make one plus one equal four.”

There was a remarkable public forum at the University of Kentucky on Thursday. The moderator began by saying it reminded him of the old song Which Side Are You On?

Florence Reece, a miner’s wife, wrote that song about the economic controversies surrounding coal in Harlan County in the 1930s. Thursday’s forum, sponsored by UK’s College of Engineering, focused on the global controversies surrounding coal today.

What made the forum remarkable was that it might have been the first time that so many coal executives, environmentalists and community activists sat together in the same room and discussed those controversies openly and, for the most part, honestly.

Some speakers on both sides fell into the old traps — misrepresentations, oversimplifications and emotional appeals. But most stuck to facts. Things are different when you’re addressing your biggest critics, rather than preaching to your choir.

Historian Ron Bryant noted that coal’s effects on human health and the environment have been controversial since mining began in Kentucky in the 1820s. “But the need for coal stopped all arguments,” he said.

Coal powered the industrial revolution, and it fuels our modern lifestyle. But the global debate over climate change is making people realize that the future will be much different than the past.

Most of the world’s scientists and policy makers agree that climate change is real and that burning coal poses a threat to civilization. Meanwhile, there’s increased public opposition to surface and mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia and the environmental damage it causes.

“We can no longer in this state maintain the status quo,” said Joe Blackburn, a regulator for more than three decades who heads the Lexington field office of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining.

“Dealing with change is never easy,” he said. “But change is a normal part of life.”

Some coal executives seemed surprised when economists outlined their industry’s declining influence in Kentucky.

Coal employment has fallen sharply since its peak in 1980 as mining has become more mechanized. Coal accounts for only 1 percent of statewide employment — and only 3.5 percent when spin-off jobs are included.

Mining creates some good-paying jobs, but it also crowds out other economic opportunities in coal-producing counties, some of which are among the nation’s poorest.

Coal production accounts for only 1.45 percent of gross state product — and it’s falling. Kentucky coal production peaked in 1988, and the market has shifted to cheaper coal from Western states.

Coal has kept Kentucky’s electricity rates among the cheapest in the nation. But those rates are rising and will continue to rise in a carbon-conscious world that will require coal to bear more of its true cost.

And here’s the rub: Coal now provides about half the nation’s electricity — and 92 percent in Kentucky. Renewable energy sources aren’t commercially advanced enough to replace coal, and they won’t be for years, if not decades.

Renewable energy and perhaps nuclear power must be developed soon, because we’re running out of coal. Kentucky might have only 20 years of coal left — or maybe 100 years, with improved mining technology and the right market conditions. But everyone agrees that coal is a finite resource whose end is in sight.

The forum wasn’t all doom and gloom; there was encouraging news. UK researchers talked about what they’re doing to develop renewable energy and lessen the environmental damage of mining and burning coal, and to reforest and reclaim mined land.

The unmistakable takeaway from this daylong “fair and balanced” discussion of coal’s future was that the solutions aren’t simple and the trade-offs won’t be painless, either for the coal industry or for the energy-consuming public.

But Kentucky is at a crossroads.

The coal industry can continue to deny climate change, fight regulation and use scare tactics to delay the inevitable. Or it can work with scientists and its critics to find more responsible ways to mine and use the coal we have left.

Kentucky’s political and business leaders can try to preserve the status quo, as they did for years with tobacco. Or they can focus on energy conservation. They can support research. And they can develop the energy technologies and industries that must eventually replace coal.

If last week’s public forum showed one thing, it’s that there’s only one logical path, no matter which side you’re on.

Kentucky doesn’t just produce writers; it celebrates them.

The biggest annual celebration is Saturday, when about 200 writers — 150 of whom are Kentuckians — will gather at the Frankfort Convention Center for the 28th annual Kentucky Book Fair.

Authors will sit behind long rows of tables so thousands of readers can stop by, meet them, buy their books and get their autographs.

This year’s lineup includes pop ular Kentucky writers Silas House, Erik Reece, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, Thomas Parrish, Richard Taylor and David Dick.

Also there will be retired Courier-Journal columnist Byron Crawford, who has put together a 30-year collection of his work in Kentucky Footnotes, and journalist Leslie Guttman of Lexington, who writes about a year in the life of a race horse hospital in Equine ER.

Coach Rich Brooks and co-author Tom Leach will sign their book, Rich Tradition: How Rich Brooks Revived the Football Fortunes of the Kentucky Wildcats.

And retired Keeneland chairman Ted Bassett will autograph his memoir.

National authors at the fair will include George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, who has written a book about Abraham Lincoln.

“I’m always so proud to live in a state that supports literature the way Kentucky does, and the Kentucky Book Fair is real proof of that,” said House, who will sign his new novel, Eli the Good.

“Everywhere I go, all over the country, people assume that Kentuckians are illiterate,” House said. “And I always take that as an opportunity to correct them and tell them about our long literary history and how great the support for writers is in our state.”

When you think about that tradition and support, it makes perfect sense. Writing is about telling stories, and there are few things Kentuckians love more than a good story — and storyteller.

Jesse Stuart and me at his home, summer 1963. Photo by Marion Eblen

I’m the son of a school librarian and a bookstore manager. Writers, especially Kentucky writers, enjoyed celebrity status in our home. My first memorable encounter with that celebrity came the summer I turned 5, when my mother’s parents came up from far Western Kentucky for a visit.

My grandparents were Jesse Stuart fans and wanted to see the Greenup County he wrote about. While my father was at work one day, my mother took us to Greenup, thinking we could drive past Stuart’s home. What she didn’t know was that the narrow gravel road ended at his home.

It didn’t look as if anyone was home, so before she turned the car around, my grandparents urged her to look in the window beside the front door. When she did, Stuart looked back. Then he opened the door and invited us in to visit.

I had just learned to do somersaults, and, much to my mother’s horror, Stuart encouraged me to practice on the braided rug in his living room. I was barefoot, so when he took us to see the cabin where he wrote, he carried me out there, giving my mother a Kodak moment.

Writers such as Stuart and James Still found rich material in the people and places of Eastern Kentucky, just as Mason has explored the land and psyche of her native Jackson Purchase region, in far Western Kentucky.

I asked Mason last week about the importance of Kentucky writers, past and future. As you might expect, her response was well worth reading:

“Kentuckians have been confused about our identity, who we are and how others see us, what we have here and what there is in the larger world. Sometimes we feel smugly superior, sometimes inferior. Kentucky writers have always walked a tightrope between Kentucky and the Outside.

“Now even though the boundary lines are easing, and Kentucky is part of the wider mainstream, our writers can continue to lead the way on the most critical issues of our time, because we can write firsthand with passion and with historical perspective about what is happening to the land and its people. Our land of contrasts is an example and a warning to the rest of the world.”

HINDMAN — This is the season for family reunions in Appalachia, when people come home to celebrate kinship, community and the mountain culture that shaped their lives.

There’s a big reunion in Knott County this week. Many of the 100 people there have been attending for years, if not decades. Few are related by blood, but they’re family just the same, bound together by Appalachia’s storytelling tradition and the magic of words.

Ask participants at the 32nd Appalachian Writers Workshop what it’s like, and they use the word “family” a lot. They come for inspiration and advice on the craft from some of the best writers these mountains have produced.

The workshop was started by two Knott County writers, novelist and folklorist James Still, and poet Albert Stewart. Others associated with the annual gathering have included poet Jim Wayne Miller and novelists Wilma Dykeman and Harriette Arnow, author of the 1954 classic The Dollmaker.

“It’s a central part of my year that I never want to miss,” said novelist Silas House, who was a participant from 1996 to 2001 and has been on staff ever since.

Participants apply and submit writing samples in May. There are always more applicants than spaces; the 102-year-old Hindman Settlement School’s cabins can hold only so many people.

Each morning, participants gather in small groups according to interest: poetry, novels, short stories, nonfiction, memoir and children’s literature.

When I visited the workshop Tuesday, poet and writer George Ella Lyon was in one room talking about the challenges of publishing books for children. In another room, novelist Karen McElmurray discussed using memoir to explore universal themes. In another, novelists Ann Pancake and Laura Benedict explained storytelling techniques.

Afternoons are for group readings and individual coaching from the staff of published writers. Everyone eats together, then washes dishes. There’s writing time throughout the day, and bull sessions late into the night.

“It’s an intense week,” said journalist Jason Howard, who is here for a fifth year. “There’s a great sense of family, and a lot of spiritual detective work going on.”

Mike Mullins helped start the workshop in 1978, soon after he became director of the historic settlement school that now provides literacy and cultural enrichment programs. He marvels at the workshop’s success.

“I think there’s always a crying need for all of us to express ourselves, to tell our story, or a story we’ve made up,” said Mullins.

A few of this year’s participants are college students, but most are much older — academics and blue-collar workers, business people, housewives and retirees. Some are beginners; others have published several books.

Mountain life has always been a popular subject in Appalachian literature. But many now write about the mountains themselves and what has been happening to them over the past half-century. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been leveled by mountaintop-removal coal mining or scarred by strip-miners.

“What we do to the land, we do to the people,” said Don Askins of Clintwood, Va., whose poetry focuses on the coal industry’s environmental destruction.

House and Howard, who both come from coal-mining families, recently wrote the book Something’s Rising about opposition to mountaintop-removal within the region. Howard also edited a collection of essays, poems and songs called We All Live Downstream.

Many writers here are women who have raised families or had careers. “They come with this full lifetime of experience and a passion to write about it,” McElmurray said.

Benedict first came to the workshop 20 years ago. “I had only been writing for a year or so and I was looking for a cheap vacation,” she said. What she found was a calling – and a husband, Pinckney Benedict, who was on the workshop staff. “We didn’t start dating until after the conference, but I gather we scandalized a few people,” she said with a smile.

The Benedicts were back this week as staff members. He is a novelist and short story writer who teaches at the University of Southern Illinois and at writing workshops across the country. She recently published her second novel.

“There’s a sense of community, a spirit of cooperation here,” she said. “They read a lot, and they all take their work very seriously.”

But unlike some other workshops, Benedict and McElmurray said, the writers here don’t take themselves too seriously. There’s no “staff table” at meals, no caste system based on publishing success.

But Benedict has discovered one advantage to being on staff: “I don’t have to do dishes.”

Click on each photo to enlarge.

HAZARD — The keynote speaker at the 22nd annual East Kentucky Leadership Conference was Ron Eller, a leading authority on the history of modern Appalachia.

The University of Kentucky history professor also was given the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation’s annual “private individual” award, which comes with a beautiful, handmade wooden chair.

By the time Eller finished speaking Thursday evening, I suspect many in the audience of 250 were ready to break the chair over his head.

Eller, an eighth-generation Appalachian who was the first member of his family to go to college, said the region will never catch up with the rest of the nation economically as long as it is defined by industries that abusively extract natural resources, especially the dwindling supply of coal.

“We must begin, I think, by abolishing surface mining, including the radically destructive practice of mountaintop removal,” Eller said. “Mountaintop removal isn’t necessary to the region or to the national economy. It’s just cheaper.

“We can continue to mine coal, gas and other mineral resources. But the impact of extraction on the land, on our water resources, on our forest resources and other sensitive ecosystems must be strictly regulated and enforced. In the long run, we will have to move away from an extractive economy, especially one based upon coal.”

The final speaker of the two-day conference at Hazard Community and Technical College was House Speaker Greg Stumbo, a Prestonsburg Democrat who serves on the board of a coal company. He revised his planned remarks to respond to Eller.

Some of what Stumbo said was defensive: Why do people who no longer live in the mountains think they know what’s best for them? Subdivisions built on Lexington farmland are just as bad for the environment as surface mining in the mountains.

Some of it was matter of fact: We must move beyond coal, which will eventually be gone. We also must understand that coal produces half the nation’s electricity — and more than 90 percent of Kentucky’s electricity — and nothing can change that anytime soon.

And some of what Stumbo said was new and interesting: Rather than abolish surface mining, which he said isn’t economically practical, leaders in Eastern Kentucky must become more creative and demanding about how mined land is reclaimed and reused.

Stumbo cited several examples where mined land has been turned into airports, subdivisions, parks, golf courses and commercial development. But he also acknowledge that much other mined land has been poorly reclaimed as useless “pasture.”

Stumbo said he has begun talking with Gov. Steve Beshear about creating a state master plan for engaging landowners, regulators and community leaders to require better plans for post-mining use before land can be mined. If done properly, he said, more mined land could become an asset for the region instead of a liability.

I’ve been attending the East Kentucky Leadership Conference off and on since 1998, and it gets more interesting every year. That’s because the people who come seem more willing to discuss controversial subjects, question the way things have always been done and embrace new ideas.

A growing theme of the conference has been entrepreneurship and how digital technology could be harnessed to reduce the region’s economic isolation. More leaders in Eastern Kentucky now understand that their economy won’t be fixed by attracting big, outside employers so much as by educating and enabling creative, hard-working locals.

Jerry Rickett of the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., one of the oldest and most successful organizations working to develop home-grown businesses, noted that there are more than 82,000 “micro enterprises” in Kentucky’s Appalachian counties. Imagine, he said, how many jobs could be created if some of those businesses could grow enough to hire just one more person?

Entrepreneurship and a more diverse economy are vital to Eastern Kentucky’s future. But another key will be the willingness of the region’s people to better manage their bittersweet, century-old relationship with the coal industry.

Kentuckians must find ways to make the coal industry a better environmental steward, community partner and contributor to the quality of life in the mountains — either by Eller’s way, Stumbo’s way or intelligent combinations of both.

A couple hundred leaders from academia, politics and business gathered Thursday in Lexington to talk about energy and Kentucky — where we are, where we need to be and how we might get there.

It was the third Energizing Kentucky conference, organized by the universities of Kentucky and Louisville and Centre and Berea colleges. The keynote speaker was Carol Browner, President Obama’s assistant for energy and climate change.

First, some bad news:

Coal provides 92 percent of Kentucky’s electricity, at some of the nation’s cheapest rates. But dealing with coal’s environmental problems could raise those costs dramatically, turning a big asset into a big liability.

Rising power rates will hurt Kentucky, the nation’s fourth-poorest state. Kentucky ranks 6th nationally in gross state product from manufacturing, much of which depends on cheap power. We’re the nation’s third-largest automaker. We produce 40 percent of the nation’s aluminum and 30 percent of its stainless steel.

Kentuckians waste a lot of electricity. We have the nation’s fifth-lowest power rates, but 20 other states have lower average monthly bills.

Since America first became alarmed about its dependence on foreign oil in the 1970s, that dependence has nearly doubled. Gasoline prices will shoot back up as the global economy recovers and demand increases.

Now, some good news:

Everyone at the conference seemed to be singing from the same songbook, more or less. Nobody was saying the solution to our energy challenges is “drill baby, drill” — or “dig Bubba, dig.” That’s a significant change.

Recent announcements about the state’s new role in developing high-tech automobile batteries had everyone in a hopeful mood.

Both Rocky Adkins, a legislative leader who works for a coal company, and Tom Fitzgerald, one of Kentucky’s most ardent environmental activists, had mostly good things to say about how state leaders are now approaching energy issues.

Gov. Steve Beshear’s state energy plan, announced last November, is a progressive document. The first three of its seven points note the need for more conservation and renewable energy. The next three deal with developing more environmentally friendly ways to use coal.

The last point in the state plan suggests reconsideration of Kentucky’s ban on nuclear energy, which remains controversial. (To read the energy plan, go to: www.governor.ky.gov and click on the Energy Independence tab.)

“It is, on balance, a sound and thoughtful plan,” said Fitzgerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council. “But we have our work cut out for us.”

The reality is that Kentucky must continue to rely on coal for many years to come. While the state is investing heavily in research for commercial carbon capture and “clean coal” technologies, they are now more dream than reality.

Interesting work is being done by Alltech and other Kentucky companies on bio-fuels. And there’s a lot of potential for small-scale solar power, especially for such things as home water heating. Kentucky’s rivers could produce a lot more hydro power.

Browner said the keys to energy independence will be developing new technologies and using energy more wisely to create both a strong economy and a clean environment.

“If you look at our history, you can see that we can have both,” said Browner, whose previous federal job was heading the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton Administration.

One creative approach is a new public-private partnership called Kentucky’s Clean Energy Corps, which state Treasurer Jonathan Miller described as “weatherization on steroids.”

The program will use federal stimulus money to create jobs and improve energy efficiency in the homes of 10,000 modest-income Kentuckians. It also will try to engage young people in energy efficiency and conservation efforts.

In a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency, where the conference was held, there were a couple of dozen exhibits of energy-related projects by Kentucky students.

On one side of the room were displays of high-tech research by university students. On the other side were school science projects. Students from Russell High School in Greenup County showed photos of their school’s solar collectors. Excited first graders from Hannah McClure Elementary in Winchester told about their recycling campaign.

My favorite was a project from Chenoweth Elementary in Louisville. It was a box lined with aluminum foil and covered with plastic wrap. On a sunny day, the solar-powered oven can cook a s’more in about 15 minutes.

OK, so a solar-powered s’more oven won’t do much to solve Kentucky’s energy challenges. But the kind of creativity those two fifth-grade girls put into it just might.

The “AU” in AU Associates stands for “Adaptive Use.”

But if you remember the periodic table of elements from science class, Au also is the symbol for gold.

Holly Wiedemann has created gold for her Lexington development company — and golden opportunities for several Kentucky communities — through a complex alchemy of historic preservation, architectural innovation and creative finance.

AU Associates specializes in restoring once-beautiful old buildings by adapting them for new, economically sustainable uses. Most were once schools, rich in architecture and memories, and are now affordable apartments that put abandoned buildings to good use — and onto the tax rolls.

Wiedemann is working with First Presbyterian Church and Central Bank in downtown Lexington to restore a run-down Market Street apartment building from the 1800s into 10 attractive apartments that will rent for $300 to $600 a month. Old woodwork and fireplaces are being reused, architectural details restored.

“The proportions are comfortable to be in, and out each window you can see church steeples and gardens” of neighboring historic homes, she said.

That project is one of several now under way, Wiedemann said, representing $8.6 million in investment and providing 150 jobs.

“They have the right angle on the historic-preservation argument: It is first and foremost an urban-redevelopment argument,” Michael Speaks, dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, which includes the architecture school, said of Wiedemann’s company.

“Her firm is one of the few that is taking historic properties and using creative financing to give them new life and make communities better,” Speaks said.

Wiedemann, 53, comes naturally to her love of history and old buildings.

A great-great grandfather, George Wiedemann, started Wiedemann brewery in Newport. A great-grandfather, J.D. Purcell, started Purcell Department Store, which was in a grand old building on Lexington’s Main Street that was demolished in 1978 to make way for the Radisson hotel. “Boy, that would be a great building to have now,” she said.

Wiedemann grew up on the family farm in Scott County called The Hollys, for which she was named. The farmhouse, built in 1789, gave her an appreciation for the beauty and durability of old buildings.

After earning a degree in landscape architecture and urban planning at the University of Georgia, she worked for a major developer in Tulsa, Okla. She realized she would need to learn more about real estate finance to do the kinds of projects she wanted to do.

That led her to Duke University in North Carolina, where she earned a master’s in business administration and met her husband, Bart van Dissel, then a doctoral student. They moved to Boston, where he taught at Harvard Business School and she worked for Winn Development, a pioneer in adaptive reuse of historic buildings.

“That, for me, was the Ph.D. level education” in historic tax credits and unconventional finance, she said. It also sparked her interest in building affordable housing.

Through consulting work, Wiedemann raised the money to start AU Associates after she and her husband moved to Lexington in 1992. The firm’s first major project was remodeling the old Midway School into 24 apartments for seniors.

The Irvine mayor’s wife saw the project and got Wiedemann to do a similar one in the Estill County town. Since then, AU Associates has done other school-to-apartment renovations, with more planned in Glasgow, Winchester, Beattyville and Buffalo in LaRue County.

“These old schools are often beautiful buildings that were built to last and are located in lovely residential areas,” Wiedemann said. “Many of the people who live there now taught or went to school there and have wonderful memories.”

The firm converted an ornate former YMCA built in 1913 in downtown Louisville into 58 market-priced apartments and St. Francis High School. And it is turning a former tuberculosis hospital in Ashland into 34 apartments for domestic abuse victims.

AU Associates’ projects often are complex because they use historic tax credits, partnerships and creative financial arrangements. “We cobble together multiple funding sources to make these projects work,” Wiedemann said. “That’s why a lot of people don’t do this work.”

But the projects work, and there’s a lot of demand for them.

“The growth potential is amazing,” said Johan Graham, who along with Martha Dryden makes up Wiedemann’s core staff. “We really have as much work as we can handle just from the business coming through the door.”

The firm’s offices are on Georgetown Street in a formerly derelict pre-1800 house that AU Associates restored with a contemporary addition. Behind it is the firm’s first start-from-scratch project — ARTEK lofts, which was developed in partnership with neighbors in the Western Suburb Historic District on a formerly blighted lot.

Wiedemann and her husband live at ARTEK, which has impressive views of the downtown skyline and the Henry Clay monument in Lexington Cemetery. Unfortunately, ARTEK came on the market during the recent downtown condo boom and right before the current economic bust. Wiedemann said about half of the 38 units, priced from the low $170,000s to the low $280,000s, remain unsold.

The project’s unique contemporary architecture by Christopher Fuller of K. Norman Berry & Associates in Louisville uses a lot of concrete, steel and brick. Like the historic structures Wiedemann’s firm usually works with, it is built to last.

“In 50 years, it will be qualifying for historic-preservation restoration grants,” Wiedemann said with a smile. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Click on each photo below to enlarge it.

This seems to be Kentucky month on the small screen. If you didn’t like Diane Sawyer’s view, KET has something completely different.

Our Kentucky, an hour-long video valentine to the state’s scenic beauty, debuts on KET1 Saturday at 8 p.m. as part of the network’s annual on-air fundraiser. In tone and content, it couldn’t be more different from Sawyer’s report on systemic poverty in Appalachia for ABC’s news magazine 20/20.

It’s coincidence that these TV programs came out within two weeks of each other. In many ways, they represent the two sides of Kentucky’s coin — both begging us to scratch below the surface.

In Our Kentucky, KET’s videographers visited Kentucky’s most beautiful places, bathed in golden sunlight and rendered in high-definition splendor. We see panorama after panorama, set to majestic music and evocative narration by Nick Clooney.

There are fawns grazing in mountain meadows at sunrise, geese flying in formation framed by the setting sun, egrets swimming in misty cypress swamps. The camera lingers on such places as Chained Rock in Bell County, Natural Bridge in Powell County and Pennyrile State Forest in Christian County.

We see historic homes, foals romping across manicured Bluegrass pastures and the awe-inspiring cathedrals of Covington. There’s the 21st century skyline of Louisville, the 19th century skyline of Augusta and distilleries as noted for their quaint charm as for their fine bourbon.

It’s an idyllic view of Kentucky — true, as far as it goes.

Sawyer’s documentary, A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains, follows the lives of several poor children and young people in Eastern Kentucky. They’re shown trying to survive in a seemingly hopeless environment of poverty, drug abuse and a lack of enough good food, healthcare, education and economic opportunity. The report is true, as far as it goes.

The documentary attracted 10.9 million viewers nationwide when it aired Feb. 13 — the biggest 20/20 audience in more than four years. As expected, it drew fire from some Kentuckians who saw it as nothing more than a rehash of old stereotypes. After all, Sawyer could have found plenty of poor people on the cab ride out of New York to catch her plane.

Some complained that the program and a brief ABC News followup didn’t do enough to highlight progress and the efforts Kentuckians have made to help their less-fortunate neighbors.

Others, however, have responded with introspection, asking what more Kentuckians could do. Some of the most thoughtful reaction I have seen has been on WYMT-TV in Hazard, which could teach many big-city stations a thing or two about public-service broadcasting.

Appalachian scholar Ron Eller of the University of Kentucky, who appeared briefly in the documentary, wishes Sawyer, a Kentucky native, had focused more on the root causes of Eastern Kentucky’s problems and why so many efforts to solve them have failed.

“On the other hand, I think the program was quite successful at drawing attention to the persistence of poverty and social inequity in the Commonwealth,” he said.

National attention is helpful, Eller said. Ultimately, though, Kentuckians must create the modern economy, honest government and adequate infrastructure needed to lift Appalachia.

I missed Sawyer’s documentary when it first aired, so I watched it online Monday evening, immediately after viewing a preview DVD of Our Kentucky. In an odd way, watching them together made both more thought-provoking.

You won’t see any strip mines in Our Kentucky, no scalped mountaintops, factory hog farms or polluted streams. The Bluegrass meadows aren’t bordered by strip malls, big-box stores, McMansion cul-de-sacs or sprawling developments of cookie-cutter homes.

“The aspects of pride we have in who we are and where we live are often at odds with the way of life we have chosen for ourselves,” Eller noted. “But out of that strong sense of place could come actions to protect that land and the quality of life.”

Neither Sawyer’s documentary nor Our Kentucky tell the whole story. It would be asking too much to expect them to. But they’re both worth watching, because together they show Kentuckians what needs fixing — and why it’s worth the effort.

BYBEE — You can buy more elegant dishes, more perfectly shaped dishes and certainly more expensive dishes. But only here can you buy stoneware that has been made by the same family in the same log shed and in about the same way since 1809.

Bybee Pottery is the last of perhaps 50 small potteries that sprang up during Kentucky’s pioneer days near the rich clay deposits of southern Madison County. Yet, as the Cornelison family celebrates its business’s bicentennial, family members fight persistent rumors that it is closing — and they wonder how much longer it can survive.

“All my life, there has been the annual going-out-of-business rumor,” said Buzz Cornelison, 60, who with his brother and sister represent the sixth or seventh generation to run the business, depending on who’s counting. “All my life, we have laughed about it. But in the last few years it has become more acute.”

Bybee Pottery faced its first big threat during the Civil War, when Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s raiders burned many potteries in the area because of their owners’ Union sympathies. Cornelison family legend has it that Bybee was spared because it employed an immigrant potter known for his outspoken support of the South.

In the early 1900s, as demand for utilitarian crocks and churns diminished, most of the remaining potteries went under. But the Cornelisons adapted, shifting their production to tableware glazed with bright, custom-made colors that are now a company trademark.

Most Cornelisons over the years weren’t potters; they hired potters. That was until Buzz’s father, Walter Lee Cornelison, took over the business and spent decades at the wheel, producing hundreds of thousands of pieces now prized for their quality.

“My great-grandfather made a kick wheel for my father when he was a little boy, and he said he had his own corner … his own clay,” Buzz Cornelison said. “Every once in a while, somebody would walk by and say, ‘Try it this way’ and show him something. That’s the way he learned to throw.”

Business got a boost when Phyllis George, a sportscaster and former Miss America from Texas who married John Y. Brown Jr., became Kentucky’s first lady in 1979. She made the international promotion of Kentucky crafts her personal mission. She even persuaded Bloomingdale’s department store in New York to set up a boutique to sell them.

Bybee was a big beneficiary of her efforts. For the next two decades, people would line up outside Bybee’s rustic workshop off Ky. 52 at 8 a.m. each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, waiting for a new batch to be pulled from the big kiln.

Business has slowed with the economy, and Kentucky crafts aren’t as popular as they once were. Perhaps Bybee Pottery’s biggest blow came in November 2007, when Walter Cornelison suffered a stroke. Although he recovered, Cornelison, who turned 80 this month, can no longer make pottery that meets his exacting standards.

Now the wheel is manned by Buzz Cornelison’s brother, Jim, who also works as Madison County’s coroner; and by Harvey Conner, who started working here 44 years ago when he graduated from high school. The Cornelisons’ sister, Paula Gabbard, and two longtime employees, Brenda Cole and Rick Hall, help with other chores.

“We have had generations of families work here, and not just ourselves,” Buzz Cornelison said. “Most of the people we have hired over the years are neighbors.”

A Cornelison cousin, Ron Stambaugh, owns Little Bit of Bybee, which sells the pottery and some of his own pieces at a shop in the Louisville suburb of Middletown.

Without Walter Cornelison’s prolific work, the shop has cut back from three kiln-loads a week to two. On a recent Wednesday, the Cornelison brothers and Conner finished the hourlong process of unloading the kiln as the sun rose and the bells of Bybee United Methodist Church chimed 8 o’clock. The shop door was unlocked, but nobody was waiting outside.

Still, business isn’t bad. A handful of customers wanders in each day from all over the country to see the pottery being made and to stock up on colorful pitchers, pie plates, mugs and bowls.

“I have a cousin who put me on to Bybee Pottery; she has a whole kitchen full of it,” said Paula Dodd of Crane Hill, Ala., who stopped by while driving through Kentucky with her husband, Ed. The Dodds bought two big boxes full of pieces for their 36-year-old twin daughters. “The whole family has a lot of this stuff,” he said.

Visitors walk through the shop, past the kiln and groaning shelves of cups and bowls waiting to be fired, until they get back to the log workshop, where Conner is at the wheel. Everything is covered with a thick layer of yellow clay dust, including the floor, which has gained a few inches over the past two centuries. Tall people must frequently duck to avoid hitting the log beams that hold up the ceiling.

Conner, a skilled potter, seems to enjoy explaining the process as much as doing it. “I’d like to have a dime for every piece I’ve made since I’ve been here,” he tells a visiting couple from Louisville. “I’d retire.”

An electric motor turns the potter’s wheel, and the kiln is fired by natural gas. Clay is dug from a nearby farm with a bulldozer and backhoe. After removal of the 100 tons of clay that the pottery will use in a year, the hole is filled in and marked for the next year’s dig.

Otherwise, Bybee Pottery’s methods have changed little.

Fresh clay is run through a pug mill, which is like a big sausage grinder, to remove any pebbles or impurities. It is then formed into “logs” and stacked in burlap in a stone cellar. The only thing ever added to the clay is a little water.

After each piece is formed on the potter’s wheel, it is dried, painted with colorful glaze and fired for 16 hours in the kiln, which reaches 2,200 degrees. After cooling for 24 hours, pieces are unloaded from the kiln onto the shop’s shelves. Prices here are lower than at other Kentucky shops that sell Bybee Pottery.

Buzz Cornelison doesn’t know what the future holds for his family’s business. “There is no next generation for us to take over, unless things change,” he said.

But then, Cornelison wouldn’t necessarily have seen himself here a few years ago. An accomplished musician, he was a keyboard player with the local rock band Exile, which scored a No. 1 hit in 1978 with Kiss You All Over.

After 18 years on the road with Exile, he returned to the pottery shop where he had worked as a boy, and in his spare time, he earned a master’s degree in English literature from nearby Eastern Kentucky University. He remains active in local theater.

“There is a next gener ation,” Cornelison said. “One’s a lawyer in Chicago, and she’s not about to come back. And the other two are girls who are in high school now. They haven’t focused on what they’re going to do, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of interest from them (in running the pottery). And I don’t blame them.”

But don’t say bye-bye to Bybee Pottery just yet. The Cornelisons beat the normal odds of family business survival several generations ago. Their little shop seems to have luck — or at least inertia — on its side.

“As it stands right now, at this point in time, we have no plans to close,” Buzz Cornelison said. “I hope that doesn’t change.”

As I drove to Frankfort early Tuesday, punching the buttons on my car radio, I came across one of those feel-good spots from the Kentucky coal industry. It ended with this line: “Never underestimate the power of coal.”

That’s been good advice in this state for more than a century. And never more true than inside the marble walls of the building where I was headed.

I came to the state Capitol on this sunny day to witness a different kind of power — the growing public sentiment against coal-mining methods that blast away mountains and fill headwater streams with the debris.

More than 500 Kentuckians — from toddlers on their parents’ shoulders to seniors in their 80s — marched up Capitol Avenue and gathered on the Capitol steps for the annual I Love Mountains Rally. The citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized the rally to push for legislation that would ban the burying of headwater streams with mining waste.

The marchers carried signs proclaiming “topless mountains are obscene” and urging “not one more mile” of streams be destroyed. They lacked the coal industry’s economic or political power. Instead, they sought to harness moral power.

Ashley Judd added glamour to the event. The Kentucky actress, famous for reciting other people’s words in movies, gave a 20-minute speech of her own that was passionate and eloquent. It was no celebrity puff piece, but a sharp critique of mountaintop-removal mining, the coal industry and the endless cycle of poverty she said coal has brought to Appalachia.

“There is no doubt that there is a crisis in Eastern Kentucky,” Judd said. “The crises are systemic, and the system at the root of our 100-year-long crisis is the unchecked power of the coal companies.

“They assured us that each reform … would be the end, the death of the coal industry,” Judd said. “Well, by golly, what do you know. Here the coal companies still are — bigger, and badder and richer than ever. … Make no mistake about it: The coal companies are thriving. Even in this bleak economy, they are thriving. What is dying is our mountains. And they are dying so fast, my friends, so shockingly fast.”

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville pledged to fight mountaintop-removal mining through federal clean-water legislation. That may be necessary. The state “stream saver” bill, sponsored by Sen. Kathy Stein of Lexington and Rep. Don Pasley of Winchester, is getting the usual cold shoulder from legislative leaders with close ties to the coal industry.

Silas House, a best-selling author from Eastern Kentucky, said he was disappointed Gov. Steve Beshear declined to attend the rally, even though it was just a few steps from his office.

“I think Gov. Beshear is a good man and I don’t understand why he won’t come out and listen to us,” House said, noting that many of his neighbors also are afraid to cross King Coal. “We’ve had a hundred years of being told not to speak out against the coal industry. It’s hard to break out of that culture. We’ve been taught to feel powerless.”

Mickey McCoy, a high school teacher from Inez in coal-rich Martin County, agreed: “It’s a terrible thing when you can’t get a single senator or representative from the coalfield counties to represent anything but the coal industry.”

Beshear’s spokesman, Jay Blanton, said the governor was in an important economic development meeting that had been scheduled weeks earlier, but left it to meet with Judd and a small group of KFTC members after the rally. Blanton said Judd spent Monday night at the governor’s mansion where she and Beshear “talked at some length about these issues.”

KFTC said nearly 500 Kentucky mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining. It cited figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that more than 1,400 miles of headwater streams in the state have been buried or damaged by mining since 1981.

The coal industry, which says it provides 17,000 jobs in Kentucky, argues that the “stream saver” legislation would virtually halt surface mining in Eastern Kentucky. And it notes that coal provides more than 90 percent of Kentucky’s electricity at some of the nation’s cheapest prices.

There’s no doubt Kentucky needs coal — at least until we can develop alternative energy sources, hopefully before all of the coal runs out. But that doesn’t mean coal must be mined by the most environmentally destructive methods. Electricity is cheap only if you don’t include all of the hidden costs to Kentucky’s land, water and people.

In the short run, economic arguments always seem to trump moral arguments, even when people know in their hearts what is right. In the long run, though, moral arguments usually prevail.

A few decades ago, it was blasphemy to speak out against the health dangers of smoking, because tobacco was so important to Kentucky’s economy. A century and a half ago, many people argued that the economy couldn’t survive without slavery.

“The environment is not a place where we go hiking; it’s a place where we live,” said Sam Avery, who came to the rally from Hart County, where he lives in a solar-powered home.

“When you grind up a mountain just for the coal, you destroy the trees, the animals, the insects, the water supply. The living world is that much smaller,” Avery said. “From a Biblical perspective, it’s an abomination to the creator.”

Click on photos below to enlarge

Kentucky has no shortage of organizations trying to lift the state up from the bottom of various national rankings of social and economic progress.

So I thought I would report on one of the first and most successful of these groups, the Committee for Kentucky, and what today’s do-gooders — and public officials — might learn from it.

I hadn’t heard of the Committee for Kentucky until last month, when I was rummaging through the shelves of the used-book store in the basement of Lexington’s Central Library.

I came across a tattered copy of Kentucky on the March, which was published in 1949 to tout the committee’s work. The book had endorsement blurbs from Vice President Alben Barkley and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The cover illustration cracked me up: A Kentucky colonel, lit cigar in hand, purposely striding toward “progress.”

The Committee for Kentucky was formed in 1944 and headed by Harry Schacter, the book’s author and president of the now-defunct Louisville department store Kaufman-Straus. Even without the sanctimonious tone of writing so popular in that era, the book makes clear why the committee was formed: Kentucky was a mess.

One in four native Kentuckians had left the state in the early 1940s for jobs elsewhere. One in three Kentucky children received no education; seven of eight never graduated from high school. Kentucky had the nation’s second-highest rate of illiteracy. Poverty and ill-health were rampant.

The committee’s founders, hardened by the Great Depression and energized by World War II, began by engaging the state’s academic community in studying how Kentucky had gotten in such sorry shape.

The conclusion was that Kentucky in the early 1900s hadn’t invested in education or in developing a modern economy and infrastructure. Like most other Southern states except North Carolina, Kentucky had looked backward rather than forward. There was a “clannish family society” and a lack of diversity in the work force.

The committee concluded that among the biggest issues facing Kentucky were these: Health, education, economic development, the use of natural resources, a hopelessly outdated constitution and a visceral aversion to taxes.

And there was this observation: “Somehow Kentuckians diverted to politics the social energy which should have gone into improving business, developing industry, and extending educational and welfare services. Because of our tremendous preoccupation with politics, we seem to have earned the slogan that ‘politics are the damndest in Kentucky.’”

Sixty years later, does any of this sound familiar?

The committee then set out to create what it called a “moral climate” for change, using weekly newspaper columns, radio programs, school essay contests and community meetings and projects.

Schacter wrote that some powerful business interests didn’t support the committee’s work. “Those who were the beneficiaries of the status quo were not at all interested in any change,” he wrote. “Those who were victims of the status quo were too apathetic to be much concerned about change.”

The committee also faced opposition because it included representatives of organized labor and the African American community, an especially radical move in the 1940s.

Still, the committee sparked civic engagement across the state, contributed to the creation of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and spearheaded a bipartisan effort that led to tax increases for better roads, schools and social services. The committee’s efforts lay the groundwork for several progressive governors who followed. (But we’re still stuck with that hopelessly outdated constitution.)

In the book, Schacter cites several keys to the committee’s success:

It didn’t sugar-coat Kentucky’s problems. Evidence was gathered and problems publicized. Real, practical solutions were proposed and fought for.

The committee avoided taking sides politically, always emphasizing that its only agenda was improving the lives of Kentuckians. “This was important because the people of Kentucky take their politics so seriously that they have a tendency to read political bias into every important public activity,” Schacter wrote.

The committee operated on little money and refused state appropriations to maintain its independence.

After almost six years of work and accomplishment, the committee voted itself out of existence in 1950. It wanted to avoid the temptation to become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

Kentucky has made a lot of progress since the 1940s, but other states have made more. We remain near the bottom of many national rankings of social and economic progress, despite six decades of good work of many public-interest groups.

At the moment, we seem to have our hands full trying to survive the current economic slump. But once this crisis has passed, what’s the next step, and the next?

What will it take to create the “moral climate” in Kentucky to really invest for success in the 21st Century and beyond?

The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the grandest experiments of the New Deal.

It was conceived as a federal corporation that could use the power of government and the flexibility of business to improve life in a seven-state region that included parts of Kentucky. TVA also was to be a “living laboratory” for progress.

Soon after its creation in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked how he would describe TVA to skeptics. “I’ll tell them it is neither fish nor fowl,” he replied. “But whatever it is will taste awful good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”

That was often true. But many times, when TVA ignored its original mission and focused only on providing cheap electricity, the taste could be quite bitter.

Kingston plant ash pond spill. TVA photo

The most recent example is last month’s failure of a huge coal ash holding pond at the Kingston power plant, 50 miles west of Knoxville. More than a billion gallons of toxic sludge destroyed homes, covered hundreds of acres and fouled the Emory River.

Last week, members of Congress grilled TVA officials about the environmental disaster, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up. But it is hardly the first, or worst, time TVA has gone astray.

I spent much of the 1980s covering TVA as a Knoxville-based reporter for The Associated Press and, later, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It is a fascinating agency. Over the past 75 years, it has shown government at both its worst and best.

TVA demonstrates fertilizers, 1930s. TVA photo

“People have forgotten all the things TVA taught the rest of the nation in the early years,” former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman told me last week. “We taught the rest of the nation about flood plain management. We had a civil service system before the (rest of the) federal government had one. TVA was the fertilizer research center for the whole world, and we developed all kinds of fertilizers. We taught soil conservation to the farmers.

“The power part of the system was the tail,” Freeman said. “I think what happened over the years was the tail became the dog.”

It started in the early 1950s, when TVA built seven of the world’s biggest coal-burning power plants because its hydroelectric dams were no longer enough to supply the region’s electricity. TVA dominated the eastern coal market and demanded low prices. The result was strip-mining that devastated Appalachia’s land and water.

In the 1960s, TVA began building the nation’s largest system of nuclear power plants. It still operates four of them; several others were started, then scrapped in the 1980s at huge expense. Some reactors were hastily built, then idled for years for costly repairs because TVA couldn’t prove they were safe.

S. David Freeman

President Jimmy Carter appointed Freeman as TVA’s chairman in 1977 with a mandate for change. The agency that had replenished the Tennessee Valley’s crop-worn land during the 1930s had become an environmental outlaw.

“I tried real hard to make TVA more environmentally sensitive,” said Freeman, who wasn’t reappointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. “But I’ll be frank with you: I felt like I was a heart transplant that got rejected about the time I left. The organization itself never got over its low-cost power mission as the overriding mission.”

Freeman has had a long career as a public utility executive and advocate for “green” power. He is the author of two books, Energy: The New Era (1974) and Winning Our Energy Independence (2007). At 82, he remains active as president of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners.

Freeman recalled that one of his first jobs as a young TVA civil engineer was to design the basement floor and turbine foundation at the Kingston plant. Last year, he testified against TVA in a lawsuit brought by the state of North Carolina, which was trying to force the federal utility to obey federal air pollution laws. Freeman told the court that the Kingston plant should have been replaced with newer technology long ago.

Kingston plant under construction. TVA photo

“The truth of the matter is that nobody dreamed when we designed that plant in 1950 that the sucker would still be running in 2009,” Freeman said last week. “I’m reasonably certain that that holding pond was designed for maybe a 30-year life, 35, maybe 40. Nobody dreamed they would be piling up that crap for 58 years.”

Since the mid-1980s, under pressure from conservatives in the White House and Congress, TVA has given up most of its non-power duties. “TVA had a good 50-year run and then it became just another utility,” Freeman said.

We now find ourselves with the worst economy since the one that led to TVA’s creation. President-elect Barack Obama talks about the need for bold, creative government action to tackle big problems the way TVA and Roosevelt’s other “alphabet soup” agencies did in the 1930s.

Rather than creating new bureaucracies, maybe Obama and Congress should give existing agencies such as TVA new missions. What if TVA were tasked with developing renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, or demonstrating new technologies to solve environmental problems? If such a thing as “clean coal” technology really exists, why not have TVA show how it could work?

After all, Freeman said, “There’s no excuse for the federal government owning the power system in the Tennessee Valley if it’s not going to provide some other benefits, not just to the local people but to the nation.”

A public memorial service is planned at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Hindman Funeral Home for Verna Mae Slone, the well-known Knott County author, quilter and dollmaker who died Monday at age 94.

Mike Mullins, director of the Hindman Settlement School and a close friend of Mrs. Slone, said the program will include music, remembrances and time for people in the community to share their memories of her. The service also will include a message from her longtime pastor and friend, Lawrence Baldridge. Visitation begins at 5 p.m.

The funeral is planned Thursday at 11 a.m. at the funeral home chapel, with Old Regular Baptist ministers officiating, Mullins said. Burial will take place in the Slone Cemetery at Garner. Following the burial, a meal will be provided for the family and friends at the Hindman Settlement School’s May Stone Building.

Despite steady rain, more than 200 people attended a family service for Mrs. Slone on Tuesday night, Mullins said. She is survived by five sons, 17 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and 9 great-great grandchildren.  Slone was photographed (above) in 1993 by Barbara Beirne.

At a point in life when most people slow down, Verna Mae Slone found her voice.

She was a quilter, a dollmaker and the mother of five sons. But after Slone found her voice, she also became the author of six books, the best known of which was her first, What My Heart Wants to Tell.

In simple language, Slone wrote about life and the importance of family, community and the fast-disappearing culture of her beloved Eastern Kentucky mountains.

On Monday, her voice fell silent. She was 94 and had lived almost all of her life in the Knott County community of Pippa Passes.

“I often referred to her as the Grandma Moses of the mountains,” said Mike Mullins, longtime director of the Hindman Settlement School. “She loved to expound on the virtues and values of people from the hills in a very positive light.”

“She had a great sense of tradition and family … and a natural, wonderful way of expressing herself,” said Loyal Jones, retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College.

“Verna Mae Slone was a gracious, dignified, intelligent woman,” said New Jersey photographer Barbara Beirne, whose 1993 portrait of Slone became the centerpiece of her exhibit Women of Appalachia at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

“What I especially remember about Verna Mae is her pride in being Appalachian,” Beirne said Monday. “Everyone who views her photograph seems aware that they have been introduced to a very special person.”

Slone was born Oct. 9, 1914, in Knott County. Her mother died when she was 6 weeks old and she was raised by her father, Isom “Kitten Eye” Slone.

She married Willie Slone and had five sons, whom she cared for alone during the week while her husband was off supporting the family. He drove a bulldozer all over Appalachia, carving roads through the mountains to lay natural gas pipelines. He died in 1989.

Their oldest son, Milburn, said his mother completed eighth grade but didn’t move on to high school until he was old enough to go. They were in the same class until she became pregnant with his youngest brother, who was 13 years behind the other four.

Slone, 71, said his mother had a photographic memory and a lifelong love of reading she passed on to her children. Her hands were always busy, making thousands of cloth dolls she gave away and more than 1,800 quilts, many of her own design. Fifteen of those quilts decorate the walls of the main hall at Hindman Settlement School.

“Making a quilt is a lot like living,” Slone once wrote. “When we are born we are given a bundle of scraps; the way we put them together is left up to us.”

Mullins said he met Slone in 1972 when he was directing an oral history project at Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes. “It seemed like every time we had a topic, she would give us an unbelievable interview,” he said.

As the interviews were transcribed, Mullins gave Slone copies. Those interviews sparked her interest in writing, and she wove them into a book about her father and the joys and hardships of old-time mountain life. She had 100 copies printed to give away to family members.

Somehow, Mullins said, a copy of the book found its way to a writer, who read excerpts on National Public Radio. New Republic Books published the book in 1979 under the title What My Heart Wants to Tell, and it has sold widely ever since.

Milburn Slone said his mother received fan letters from around the world about that book, but the one that meant the most to her came from a leper colony on an island off the coast of Africa. A copy of the book had made it there. “They said that book, second to the Bible, gave them a reason to live,” he said. “It told how you could survive under any circumstances.”

Slone went on to write five other books, including the novel Rennie’s Way and a book about Appalachian language called How We Talked. For many years, she wrote a column called Now and Then for a local newspaper, the Troublesome Creek Times.

Mullins said Slone’s home was a regular stop for visitors seeking to learn about mountain culture: “There were literally thousands of people who sat at the feet of Verna Mae and listened to her talk about life in these hills.”

Slone’s health began declining after a fall six months ago, but she was alert until 15 minutes before she died, her son said.

Mullins last visited Slone on Dec. 23. She was in bed, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank, but she recited a long poem she had written.

“She encompassed love of family, love of the hills, love of the values and traditions, and she had the ability to translate that through her crafts and her writing,” Mullins said. “Just to look into her eyes and have her look at you with that smile on her face was one of the most inspiring things.”

I had eight vacation days to use or lose, so I was off for the past two weeks.  I had great Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with my family, ate too much, took a cold bike ride, hiked at Raven Run nature preserve and made a start on the big stack of books I bought at the Kentucky Book Fair in November.

The best thing I read during my break was Uneven Ground, by Ron Eller, a University of Kentucky history professor.

Eller has been researching and writing about his native Appalachia for three decades, and Uneven Ground is an outstanding analysis of the region’s history since 1945.  Eller covers a lot in 260 pages of well-chosen words. It is highly readable and often profound.

Appalachia’s lack of progress has sometimes been blamed on its inhabitants’ cultural differences or fear of change. But Eller thinks it has a lot more to do with money and power. For most of the past century, Appalachia has been run like a colony, with outside interests owning most of the wealth, reaping most of the profits and leaving behind an impoverished population and a wasted landscape.

This paragraph on page 223 offers a concise summary of why a half-century of focus on improving Appalachia has made limited progress:

The Appalachian economy, for example, had always been tied to national markets, despite popular images of the region as isolated and underdeveloped. The postwar effort to modernize the mountains came at a time of rapid transition in the national economy, but politics and misperceptions of the region’s history limited the actions of planners and policy makers to playing games of economic catch-up rather than to designing a sustainable, place-based economy for a changing world. During the 1970s and 1980s, as promoters of Appalachian development were building industrial parks, supporting the expansion of coal mining and chasing runaway branch plants, the United States was undergoing a fundamental change from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. At a time when Appalachian leaders were struggling to recruit labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing plants to an underdeveloped region, technology and globalization were moving these older forms of industrial growth abroad. Traditional industrial recruitment strategies not only perpetuated the long pattern of wealth flowing out of the mountains, but failed to provide a sustainable economic foundation or to protect the region’s sensitive environmental resources. Branch plant economies provided jobs but created little permanent wealth in the communities where they operated. As the rest of the nation invested in expanding higher education, improving environmental quality, and ecouraging creativity for a higher-tech and more service-based world, the core communities of Appalachia remained tied to the old, extractive economy.

Uneven Ground should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the region that includes so much of Kentucky. 

Former state Sen. Georgia Powers of Louisville was interviewed last week. Photo by Tom Eblen

In a darkened former courtroom on ground where slaves were once bought and sold, Georgia Powers sat in front of a video camera and told her story.

Born in the “Jim Crow Town” section of Springfield, she grew up in Louisville. Powers first realized African Americans were being treated as second-class citizens when she and a white friend had to attend different schools.

Powers grew up to be a community organizer and civil rights activist. When a state senator she was trying to lobby blew smoke in her face, she decided she needed a seat beside him. Powers became the first woman and first African American elected to the Kentucky Senate. There, she sponsored and fought for passage of the South’s first laws guaranteeing blacks equal rights to home ownership and public accommodations.

“I saw a need for someone to speak out for women, for African Americans, for children,” said Powers, now 85. She described a time that seems so long ago, but wasn’t, and the skillful political maneuvering it took to secure rights and freedoms Kentuckians now take for granted.

Powers’ story says a lot about the Kentucky experience — and the American experience. It is one of many stories that will be featured in a documentary film being made by five University of Kentucky professors, Academy Award-winning director and producer Paul Wagner and composer Kinny Landrum. The film will be narrated by the Kentucky-born actress Ashley Judd.

Filming for Kentucky — An American Story began last week with Daniel Blake Smith, a UK historian and the film’s executive producer, taping several interviews on UK’s campus and at the Lexington History Museum in the former Fayette County courthouse.

In addition to Powers and fellow civil rights activist J. Blaine Hudson, Smith interviewed journalists Al Smith and Maryjean Wall and historians Ron Eller, Tracy Campbell, Stephen Aron and John Mack Faragher.

Full-scale filming will begin in the spring, and Smith expects the documentary to be finished by mid-2010. The film will be either one or two hours, depending on how much more money the filmmakers’ non-profit corporation can raise. And it will be only one piece of a project that will include a companion book and a Web site with supplemental content that schools can use to teach Kentucky history.

Smith said the filmmakers want Kentuckians to learn more about their history — and take pride in it.

“We think Kentucky’s history is very revealing of the American experience,” he said. “So many people think that American history only happened in places like Washington and Philadelphia and Boston. But a lot of it happened in Kentucky. We want viewers to be surprised about what has happened in Kentucky and feel connected to it.”

Kentucky — An American Story won’t cover everything, and it won’t be a dry history lesson. Both Smith and Wagner, also a Kentucky native, have significant filmmaking experience. Their collaborators include two historians and authors, Campbell and Eller, who know how to tell a good story.

The film will focus on Kentucky people, land and politics, telling stories both familiar and surprising. Those stories include Kentucky’s pioneer settlement and early prosperity; how racial and religious conflict gave way to pioneering civil rights progress; the blessing and curse of coal and tobacco; the planning and marketing that created the thoroughbred horse industry; and even the rich history of girls’ basketball.

In his interview for the film, journalist Al Smith, the founding host of KET’s weekly public affairs program Comment on Kentucky, discussed the state’s many contradictions and challenges.

Kentuckians have long been stereotyped by outsiders as feuding mountaineers and poor hillbillies. Yet, Kentucky has produced some of America’s most acclaimed authors and intellectuals, people such as Robert Penn Warren, Harry Caudill, Harriett Arnow, Wendell Berry and Elizabeth Hardwick.

Many Kentuckians once rejected the science that shows tobacco causes cancer just as they now reject the science that shows burning coal causes global warming, Smith noted. And not far from one of the nation’s most remarkable collections of prehistoric fossils, fundamentalist Christians recently built the Creation Museum.

The Kentucky of 1784 was described by pioneer author John Filson as the “New Eden,” yet many parts of the state have since been despoiled by strip mining, excessive logging and overdevelopment.

For two and a half centuries, Kentucky has always seemed to be at the center of America — not only its geography, but its people’s successes and failures, challenges, hopes, dreams and cultural conflicts. Author Jesse Stuart described it this way: “If these United States can be called a body, Kentucky can be called its heart.”

For more information

For more information about Kentucky — An American Story and to see video clips of sample segments narrated by actress Ashley Judd, go to the film’s Web site: www.kentuckyanamericanstory.org

LONDON — Rex McDonald was born and raised in Corbin, went to Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Tennessee, worked for the U.S. State Department and lived for a time in the former Soviet Union.

But when it was time to settle down, McDonald wanted to come home. He started a company that provided a comfortable living for his family. But Bob Wilson, an entrepreneurship coach for Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., thought the company could be more than it was.

McDonald and his partner, Hank Gevedon, moved their operation into Kentucky Highlands’ business incubator, took business-development classes and got hands-on coaching from Wilson and others. Kentucky Highlands also provided equity and debt financing to the company, PD3 Inc., which helps inventors bring their products to market.

Rex McDonald of PD3 Inc. shows U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, this company's emergency underground mine rescue chamber. At right is his entrepreneur coach, Bob Wilson. Photo by Tom Eblen

Now, 14 months later, PD3 has its own plant in nearby Rockcastle County. It has grown from six employees to 26. Thanks in part to a new product the company has designed and will soon manufacture — a portable emergency shelter for underground miners — McDonald expects to hire an additional 29 workers early next year.

PD3 is performing at a level McDonald never thought possible. It pays employees better-than-average wages and provides insurance benefits and a retirement plan. “We’ve built the foundation for a sustainable company that will survive beyond the founders,” he said.

PD3 is the latest success story to come out of Kentucky Highlands, a non-profit agency set up in 1968 to create badly needed jobs in southern and Eastern Kentucky by training and investing in local entrepreneurs. Over the past 40 years, Kentucky Highlands says it has created more than 10,000 jobs in its 22-county service area.

Business incubation is one of Kentucky Highlands’ many ventures, and the agency announced plans last week to expand that role by building a 9,600-square-foot center next to its London headquarters to mentor start-up companies.

Kentucky Highlands has created for-profit subsidiaries to supplement the private and government grants it receives. It has started two venture capital funds, a tax-credit program, and an agriculture loan fund. It has formed partnerships with a variety of schools and other organizations. It also has worked with local companies to build affordable housing in the region.

“We’re a catalyst,” said Jerry Rickett, a Corbin native who has been president of Kentucky Highlands since 1989. “We’re trying to find ways to facilitate the creation and retention of jobs.”

Economic development has always been a challenge in Appalachia. The region has a history of failed efforts and squandered resources, from empty industrial parks to millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives given to companies that came to the region for a few years, then left when cheaper labor could be found elsewhere.

Kentucky Highlands has succeeded by doing things differently and by playing to its region’s strengths. The agency invests relatively small amounts of money in local people and businesses that can gradually create sustainable jobs.

Rickett points to census data that show there are 40,000 “micro-enterprises” in the 22-county region, which has a population of about 550,000. Nearly 87 percent of those enterprises have no employees except the owner.

“If over the next few years we could get 10 percent of them to hire only one employee — through training or micro-lending — that would be 4,000 additional jobs,” Rickett said. “And if one of those companies goes out of business, a community loses a job or two, not 200 jobs.”

Kentucky Highlands focuses on home-grown companies that can bring new revenue into the region. One example, Rickett said, is an electrical engineer in Harlan who likes to fly airplanes. His small business installs runway lights at airports around the country.

“His pickup truck is a twin-engine aircraft, and each week he loads up a bunch of Harlan County electricians and they go wherever it is in the United States they’re putting in runway lights,” Rickett said. “Then, on Friday night, they come back to Harlan. It’s not a big employer; maybe 12 people. But that money comes back to Harlan.”

For generations, Appalachia’s best and brightest have often had to leave to find work and opportunity. A theme of Harriette Arnow’s classic novel The Dollmaker was the anguish people felt when they had to leave the mountains after World War II to find work in Northern factories.

Thanks to digital technology and high-speed communication, a lot of work can now come to the workers, wherever they are. Rickett knows a mechanical engineer who designs heating and cooling systems for big retail developments. He lives in Eastern Kentucky, but does work all over the country via the Internet.

“He’s getting to raise his children in a rural community that has the values he wants his family to have,” he said.

“The best thing we have to market here is the creativity of our people,” Rickett said. “Appalachian people have always been resourceful.”

It’s a strength Kentucky could exploit in the 21st-century economy, along with a low cost of living, improving schools and strong vocational training programs.

“If we could just add a little bit of entrepreneurship to that curriculum,” Rickett said. “If you’re going to be an electrician, why not start your own business and hire the three best guys in your class to work for you?”

But success will require some culture change. Generations of Appalachians have grown up with a mind-set that work means working for someone else. “There is a lot of latent entrepreneurial capacity in Eastern Kentucky, but there are not many role models,” Rickett said. “We need to get kids in grade school thinking about being an employer rather than an employee.”

I love looking at old photos of Kentucky. They offer a vivid picture of the progress — and mistakes — we’ve made in the past couple of centuries.  Two new books of old photos are especially intriguing.

The first is Lexington Then and Now, by Fiona Young-Brown, an Englishwoman who moved to Lexington in 2001.  Young-Brown tapped into several local archives to find great 19th century photos of Lexington’s landmark buildings and prominent locations. She juxtaposed them with her own photos of what those places look like now. It’s a great technique, which the Herald-Leader did for several years in the Communities section. It allows you to see what that familiar spot or neighborhood looked like long ago and how it has changed.

Although I noticed a few small errors in captions — one referred to Historic Pleasant “Grove” rather than “Green” Baptist Church, and another said Old Morrison at Transylvania University was built in 1933 instead of 1834 — Young-Brown provides a lot of interesting historical context to her photo pairs. I learned several things reading through the book. She’ll be signing copies Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. at Morris Book Shop on Southland Drive and Oct. 25 at 1 p.m. at Barnes & Noble in Hamburg.

The small, $19.99 softbound book is a product of Arcadia Publishing of Mount Pleasant, S.C.  I didn’t use to be a fan of Arcadia books, which all work from the same template and offer little more than photos and captions.  But I’ve changed my mind over the years. Arcadia provides an economic publishing model that has allowed hundreds of American towns to showcase their history and heritage, and we’re all richer for that. Without that cookie-cutter model, most of these sorts of books would never make it into print.

Another good, new book is a collection of Eastern Kentucky photos being published by the Herald-Leader.  The book, Life in Eastern Kentucky, was put together by Bill Adams of Pediment Publishing and written by Herald-Leader reporter Andy Mead.  It follows two similar Life in the Bluegrass books that the Herald-Leader published of old Central Kentucky photos.

The 128-page, $29.95, hardcover book will be out by the end of November.  Advance orders are being taken through advertisements in the Herald-Leader and online by clicking here.   After advance orders are taken, a limited number of books will be available in selected bookstores in Central and Eastern Kentucky.

I’ve seen the final proof of the book, and it has a great collection of old Eastern Kentucky photos. Some were gathered from regional archive collections. But what makes this book special are that many of the photos were offered for scanning by citizens. I contributed a 1920 photo of my great-grandfather in his barbershop in Jackson. Like my photo, many of these images have never been seen before outside of family albums.

I’ve always thought that fall didn’t officially begin in Kentucky until Keeneland opened its racing meet on the first Friday of October. But I know fall is coming. In my front yard this morning, I noticed the first leaves on my maple tree had turned red.

Fall is a great time to travel around Kentucky, enjoy activities, do things outdoors and see the colorful leaves.The Herald-Leader today published its annual Fall Festival Guide in the Weekender section. You also can see it, and keep up with updated information, on Lexgo.com.

The Kentucky Department of Travel will soon be relaunching its fall colors Web site, which tracks the fall colors and highlights activites around the state you can enjoy.

Ask a Kentuckian where he is from and, unless it is one of the state’s few cities, he’s likely to tell you the name of his home county rather than his hometown.

I was thinking about that this week after I read Jillian Ogawa’s story in the Herald-Leader’s Communities section about a recent gathering of Breathitt County residents and “expatriates” in Frankfort.

My grandmother was from Breathitt County. She always thought it was the best place in the universe, with the possible exception of Lexington. Her father, William Haddix, had a barbershop in Jackson, the county seat. He’s the one with the mustache in this photo from the early 1900s.

I’m always surprised by how many people have roots in Breathitt County. Last week, I met Lexington artist Theo Edmonds, who describes his work as “Hillbilly Chic.”  He’s from Breathitt County and his father, state Rep. Teddy Edmonds, was mentioned at the top of Jillian’s story.

A few months ago, I was talking to Luther Deaton, the president of Central Bank in Lexington, who mentioned he was from Breathitt County. I asked where, and he said the Haddix community.

“My grandmother was a Haddix from Breathitt County,” I said.

“So was mine,” he replied.

I’ve always heard that when Kentucky was divided into 120 counties in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea was that nobody should be more than a day’s horse ride from the county seat.

All of the experts say Kentucky has too many small counties for modern government efficiency. Every few years, some group will do a study to prove it, hold hearings and urge that counties be consolidated.

Will it ever happen?  Sure. About the same time the General Assembly declares orange the state color.

Jim Klotter, the state historian and a history professor at Georgetown College, notes that while most counties are small, the towns in them are even smaller. So others are more likely to know the location of a county than a town.

“My home county of Owsley has fewer than 5,000 people and the biggest town is probably under 200,” he said.

Also, rural school consolidation over the past two or three generations has resulted in more countywide schools and, thus, a stronger county identity, Klotter noted.

What do you think?