The Bluegrass and Beyond

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.”

The old building doesn’t look like much, standing across East Third Street from a demolition site and the King Cobras motorcycle club. A small sign in a window behind a steel-bar security door says: LOT Parrish Rash.

Since early this year, it has been the Land of Tomorrow, an occasional gallery, and the workshop of Parrish Rash & van Dissel, a small company with big ambitions.

PR&vD hopes to encourage artists and industrial designers around the world to innovate by creating new and more profitable ways for them to produce and market their work.

At the company’s workshop last week, there were three projects under way: A high-design chaise being made of Styrofoam and urethane for a Vienna art museum; a stage set for The xx, a British rock band; and another UK professor’s project that involves creating a LED lighting system for a large model of a planned community in China that will be exhibited in Germany.

Upcoming work includes a piece for a show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and two pieces for a show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Later this month, LOT will bring collectors from across the country together with an international group of designers represented by the NOUS Gallery of London, England. The event will include a mixed-media show called Boys and Their Toys, which will be on display from Oct. 30 to Nov. 8. The opening reception Oct. 30 at 7 p.m. is open to the public.

Why would these collectors and designers travel thousands of miles for an event in Lexington?

“High-end collectors are looking for new places to discover work,” said LOT founder Drura Parrish. The event will include a dinner, an afternoon at Keeneland and plenty of bourbon. “You sell the destination, not the art.”

It also didn’t hurt that one of the British gallery’s principals, designer Melissa Woolford, is originally from Evansville, Ind., across the Ohio River from Parrish’s hometown of Henderson.

Good connections and a “why not?” attitude have enabled Parrish and his business partner, Rives Rash, to build an international reputation over the past six years by working with contemporary artists and architects to produce their designs. Their work has appeared at such venues as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s MAK Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Parrish and Rash are faculty members at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design. They’re also workshop wizards who never outgrew playing with sticks and glue.

“The reputation got out there that if you wanted to do something crazy, there’s these guys from Virginia and Kentucky who will help you do something crazy,” said Parrish, who, like Rash, earned a graduate degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

During the past 15 years, technology has revolutionized architecture and design. Parrish, 33, and Rash, 30, have created a niche by exploring the possibilities of new design geometries and materials.

The company’s newest partner, Bart van Dissel, 55, a former Harvard Business School professor and McKinsey & Co. consultant, sees an opportunity for PR&vD to change the economics of design by connecting designers, manufacturers and customers.

That means working with designers to build prototypes and figure out manufacturing processes and costs. PR&vD would do some manufacturing itself and outsource some work to other Kentucky manufacturers.

In addition to fine art, PR&vD is interested in making furniture and household items — really, any object that might be improved by innovative design.

“There needs to be a democratization of design,” Parrish said. “People used to not give a damn about design because they couldn’t afford it.” That is changing as high-design items show up on the shelves of such retailers as IKEA and Target.

Designers haven’t been well-served by traditional retail models, where mass production and big sales volume are necessary and retailers get as much as 60 percent of the price. It gives designers little incentive to innovate or take risks.

For that reason, PR&vD also is interested in exploring new retail models, from online sales to distribution through museum stores.

“The key point is to shift the way the designers do business,” Parrish said. “Our paradigm is simple: Put designers first, and they become the brand.”

PR&vD has begun making several products for sale on www.etsy.com, an arts and crafts site. They include flatware, lamps, chairs and decorative items made from a mix of urethane and tree limbs salvaged from last winter’s ice storm.

There are limits to what can be made in PR&vD’s rented workshop, which also must accommodate the building owner’s bass boat. It is moved around the room as space is needed.

“It adds soul to the workshop,” Parrish said of the bass boat.

“And it reminds us that we don’t go fishing enough,” van Dissel added.

Parrish thinks Kentucky is an ideal place for the kind of creative, specialized manufacturing that PR&vD has in mind. The state has a wealth of aluminum and plastics fabricators who located here for the auto industry but could use more work.

“Kentucky, more than any place I know, is tied to making and doing,” he said. “If we don’t do it as a profession, we often do it as a hobby. It’s just what we do.”

After all, look what PR&vD has done so far with limited equipment in an old building on East Third Street. In the land of tomorrow, what’s important are ideas — and people with the knowledge and connections to make them work.

Our plan was to ride Kentucky from top to bottom, but Mother Nature had other plans.

Storms on Friday forced organizers of the Governor’s Autumn Bicycle Ride Across Kentucky to cancel the first day’s journey — 60 miles from the Ohio River at Carrollton to Frankfort.

A few brave souls did it anyway. “We came to ride, so we rode,” said John O’Cull, a Vanceburg dentist. He and three buddies arrived in Frankfort soaking wet.

The other 65 of us started Saturday morning from the Grand Theatre in downtown Frankfort. The annual ride began in 2004 to raise money for the Grand’s restoration. This year, it became part of Gov. Steve Beshear’s “adventure tourism” initiative.

We spent Saturday night at a church camp near Campbellsville, where a truck had ferried our luggage. We left from there Sunday morning and finished the ride by dipping our wheels in Dale Hollow Lake on the Tennessee line.

Saturday’s ride was 90 miles or so; Sunday’s was 70 or so. I say “or so” because some of us missed a couple of the orange Gs that had been spray-painted on the road to mark turns, so we unintentionally enjoyed a few extra miles of Kentucky scenery.

We avoided big highways whenever possible. Many roads we traveled barely rated mention on a map.

The rain stopped early Saturday, but most of the weekend was cloudy, cold and breezy.

I never know how to dress when biking this time of year. I was burning up in a light fleece jacket as we climbed a big hill Sunday on Little Cake Road in Adair County, but I felt good a couple of miles later as we passed Bearwallow Cemetery. Then I was cold as we flew down a hill on Bull Run Lane.

Only two hills got me off my bike: One was Saturday, too soon after a delicious lunch of fried chicken, corn and apples that I wanted to keep. The other was a steep, milelong climb Sunday. I made it three-fourths of the way up, but I had to stop long enough to get my heart out of my throat so I could resume pedaling.

I enjoy the camaraderie of riding with old friends and making new ones. I also like the challenge of going from place to place under my own power. Bicycle touring is like hiking, only the scenery changes faster. By the end of a long ride, my legs are burning and my butt is getting numb, but I feel as if I’ve accomplished something.

Kentucky always seems more beautiful when viewed from a bicycle. There’s nothing between you and the passing landscape. The only noise is your own heavy breathing as you go uphill and the smooth spin of your freewheel as you go down.

After Sunday brunch at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, we saw a chapel designed by architect E. Fay Jones, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a piece of world-class modern architecture that you don’t expect to find in small-town Kentucky.

Most of the ride’s sights were more subtle, and 15 miles an hour was slow enough to study them.

Tire swings hung from front-yard trees, and wood stoves were getting back to work. There was a hint of smoke in the air, and long stacks of split logs waiting to be devoured.

Golden tobacco hung from barn rafters. Amish buggies sat parked in sheds. Pumpkins were arranged in yards, and Halloween ghosts made of white trash bags dangled from trees and porches.

Morning mist blanketed still-green pastures and fading fields of cornstalks. Red sumac and yellow walnut trees stood waiting for the rest of the forest to catch up.

Old farmers and children called out and waved. Dairy cows stood and stared. Dogs watched, too, or gave chase, depending on their age, temperament and how many cyclists they had already gone after.

Riding back roads makes you realize how much of this state is made up of small farms, modest rural homes and crossroads communities barely big enough to support a store or church.

As you roll quietly from one little town to the next, there’s so much to see. Then your burning legs remind you that there’s a hill coming up and, beyond it, another colorful piece in the patchwork that is Kentucky.

When Brian and Sara Turner finished their first concert poster in 2003, they wanted to sign it with the name of their studio.

Trouble was, the Lexington couple didn’t have a studio, although it was a dream beginning to form.

What they had was a small workspace in their damp basement, which was infested with crickets.

In a moment of whimsy, a word people sometimes use to describe their distinctive, colorful and eye-catching art, Cricket Press was born.

Now, you can see Cricket Press’ posters and other artwork all over Lexington — and across the country — promoting concerts, small music gigs, festivals, businesses and even weddings.

“Once our work got out there, other bands and venues started contacting us, and it took off from there,” Sara said. “Lexington has been very good to us.”

Cricket Press will be featured in a segment of Kentucky Educational Television’s Kentucky Life show Oct. 17-24. And The Morris Book Shop on Southland Drive will host an event 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Nov. 13 where the Turners will sign a book of their art.

Cricket Press is what can happen when two people combine their personal and artistic passions and figure out a way to make both a life and a living.

Sara, 32, a Lexington native, and Brian, 34, of Frankfort, met when they were fine-arts photography students at the University of Kentucky. After graduation and their marriage in 2000, they got good corporate jobs as graphic artists. “We were creating stuff, but we weren’t satisfied,” Brian said.

In addition to art, they loved music, especially indie rock, punk and jazz. They also loved riding bicycles, which are frequently a theme in Brian’s art. As music fans, the Turners came to admire gig poster art and figured out how to make prints using silk screens.

“They taught screen printing at UK, but we never took it,” she said.

The Turners usually begin a piece with a pen-and-ink sketch, which is then digitally scanned and refined. Each piece is hand printed, with a minimum order of 50 pieces. Job prices begin at about $300.

The Turners say they rarely collaborate on pieces. Each has his and her own style and interests, although they say their styles have become more similar.

“I’ve heard people say they can tell a Brian poster from a Sara poster,” he said.

Cricket Press is still a home-based business. In addition to the basement work space, the enterprise has taken over much of their home, with his and her computers in one bedroom, a printing press in another. Print-drying lines are strung across the upstairs hall, and a downstairs room is used for mailing, storage and cleaning screens.

So much work was coming in by 2005 that Brian quit his job to devote himself full time to Cricket Press. Sara works part-time as a graphic artist but doesn’t think it will be long before the business can fully support them both.

In addition to the orders for custom work, the bulk of their business, the Turners sell art prints and note cards through their Web site, www.cricket-press.com, and www.etsy.com, a site for art and craft sales.

Because their personal and artistic relationship is such an important part of Cricket Press, the Turners don’t want their business to get too big for the two of them.

Eventually, though, they would like to have their home back and move Cricket Press into a separate studio.

They want a studio with more room to print larger pieces, and a storefront that would be more convenient for local customers. But no crickets, thank you.

Earlier this year, there was a national celebration of the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the most famous of all Kentuckians.

But this is also a landmark year for perhaps the second-most famous Kentuckian — Daniel Boone, who was born 275 years ago this month.

Like many Kentuckians, I’ve always been fascinated by Daniel Boone.

When I got too old for Captain Kangaroo, my favorite TV show was Daniel Boone, where coonskin cap-wearing Fess Parker was always blazing trails and fighting Indians. I could only imagine how his Kentucky was so much different than mine. When I started first grade, I proudly carried a new Daniel Boone lunch box.

Of course, most of what we all think we know about Daniel Boone is wrong.

A celebration is planned next weekend at Fort Boonesborough State Park to mark Boone’s birth. Perhaps some of the reenactments, pioneer crafts, performances and talks by Boone authors will dispel the myths.

Unlike the tall, handsome TV actor, Boone was a rather ordinary-looking man who stood 5 feet, 8 inches. He hated coonskin caps and never wore one.

Boone fought Indians, but only when necessary. He once said he knew of only three Indians he killed, and he regretted that because Indians had often been nicer to him than white people, even though they killed his brother and two of his sons.

Some of Boone’s best friends were Indians. Once, while a prisoner of the Shawnee, Boone was adopted as the son of Chief Blackfish.

Boone was a hunter and explorer at heart. But at various times in his life, he also was a military leader, a surveyor, a tavern keeper, a land speculator, a farmer, a slave owner, a Virginia legislator and a Spanish government bureaucrat in Missouri. Unlike many frontiersmen, he could read and write. His favorite books were the Bible and Gulliver’s Travels.

Boone was also America’s first celebrity, thanks to John Filson, whose 1784 book, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, contained a long appendix said to be the autobiographical adventures of Daniel Boone.

Filson, who would have been a great choice for Kentucky’s first commissioner of tourism or economic development, was a colorful writer. His account of Boone’s exploits created a sensation across the young nation and throughout Europe.

“Boone became a legend in his own time because he had a good PR man,” state historian James Klotter, a history professor at Georgetown College, said of Filson. “But Boone was important in his own right, and his story is worth telling.”

Boone was born in Pennsylvania on Oct. 22 or Nov. 2 (calendars changed in 1752) and raised in North Carolina. He was a loner who also could be a leader when needed.

Boone first came to Kentucky in 1769 and, four years later, led his first group of settlers here. The next year, he was hired to blaze the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap for the Transylvania Co., which hoped to make a killing on Kentucky land speculation.

He built Fort Boonesborough from 1775-78 as a way station for settlers. He later moved several places in Kentucky — including Maysville and Fayette and Greenup counties — but lost all of his land in legal disputes and went into debt. He moved to Missouri in 1799 and died there in 1820, a month short of his 86th birthday.

Boone was a wanderer who, from his teenage years until well into his 80s, would disappear into the wilderness for monthslong hunting expeditions. “That wanderlust was part of him, just like it has been part of the American spirit,” Klotter said.

“In one sense, he represented the common people who settled Kentucky,” he said. “He’s an everyday man often thrust into difficult circumstances and responding in mostly honorable ways. He’s kind of what we want our heroes to be.”

While Boone has been the subject of endless fascination, Klotter would like to know more about his wife of 57 years, Rebecca Bryan Boone.

She had 10 children of her own, took in six more to raise and kept the family together despite her husband’s long absences. No images of her exist, and there are only a few written descriptions.

“She was a heroine in her own right,” Klotter said. “The story that hasn’t been told is the story of the women on the frontier.”

A good place to begin separating the real Daniel Boone from his myth is at Ft. Boonesborough State Park, where a generally accurate fort was built in 1974, up the hill from the flood-prone original site that historians hope someday to fully excavate.

About 40,000 people visit the fort each year to see costumed craftsmen make soap, pottery, fabric and firearms using authentic frontier tools.

Bill Farmer has been coming to work at the fort for a decade in homespun clothing and period steel-framed spectacles. Besides being the fort’s manager, he is an accomplished blacksmith.

“The truth about Boone is even better than the fiction … if people would take the time to find out the person he really was,” Farmer said.

Not far from the fort’s small museum is a surveyor’s office, where performer Scott New, 45, has portrayed Boone for a decade.

“This man is one of our founders, but his life is drowned in myth and fiction and nonsense,” said New, who will be performing next weekend along with Michael Fields as Chief Blackfish. “We need to make the road straight, as it were.”

Still, Daniel Boone can never fully escape his myth. Even in his own fort, the gift shop is well-stocked with coonskin caps.

“That’s one of those things that goes to the bottom line,” Farmer said with a sigh. “I couldn’t tell you how many hundreds of those we sell in a season.”

For a little boy in the early 1960s, a shopping trip in Lexington could be an adventure.

It was a world of big buildings filled with interesting things and friendly faces, from the elevator operator at Hymson’s Tots & Teens to the A&P manager who always took time to chat with me.

But nothing could top Howard Curry Shoes on Southland Drive.

Going to Howard Curry meant sitting in upholstered chairs that were just my size, peering in aquariums filled with colorful fish and visiting the Enchanted Forest, where mechanical elves made shoes and an owl popped out of his knot hole every so often to give a hoot.

The highlight was the Talking Tree. It had an expressive face and a cheerful but staticky voice that I eventually figured out came from a hidden clerk with a microphone.

Since 1958, the Talking Tree has been an icon of Lexington childhood. And, over the years, a lot of grown up kids have wandered into Howard Curry just to see if he was still there.

“Or they would bring in a spouse who couldn’t believe that such as thing existed,” said Ruby Stockwell, who has run the store with her daughter-in-law, Beverly, since her son, Todd, bought it from the Curry family in 1991.

Now, the Talking Tree is getting a facelift and new home.

Versailles artist Damon Farmer restored the Talking Tree. Photo by Tom Eblen

This summer, Howard Curry moved out of its Southland Drive store and took down the classic neon sign, which was attracting bird nests and needing repair.

While a new store was being built at the corner of Nicholasville Road and Moore Drive, Howard Curry set up shop in temporary space. The Talking Tree was sent off for restoration and the store posted a sign saying he was on summer vacation. “The kids seemed to understand that,” Beverly Stockwell said.

The Talking Tree and the rest of the Enchanted Forest were made by Corman & Associates, a Lexington fixture company that once did elaborate store displays for clients all over the country. The Talking Tree was fashioned from a big piece of red cedar driftwood that Dan Corman and Stanley Baugh hauled out of Herrington Lake.

The job of restoring the tree fell to Versailles artist Damon Farmer, who grew up in Berea seeing the tree in Howard Curry advertisements. He removed old varnish, repaired limbs, added leaves and new eyes and fixed the tree’s broken nose.

“Over 50 years, there had been so many attempts to repair it that it was something of a mess,” Farmer said of the tree. “The old nose was on a spring and kids were kind of rough with it.”

Howard Curry’s new store is smaller than the old one, so there wasn’t room for the Enchanted Forest and cobbler elves. They were sent back to Corman’s and put in storage. Vice President Dwight Kelley doesn’t know what he will do with them, but they have a special place in his heart.

Kelley said he helped make the elves as a young Corman’s employee, and his children got their shoes at Howard Curry. “That’s one of the few pieces of our work that people in Lexington are familiar with,” he said.

The aquariums left Howard Curry in the 1990s — Ruby Stockwell got tired of cleaning them. But the child-size benches have been recovered by David Hicks, whose father did the original upholstery. John Leininger, whose father built Howard Curry’s original cash register console, made cabinets for the new store.

At its new location, Howard Curry shares space with the Stockwells’ other store, Dance Biz. It sells children’s dance shoes and apparel and has some special design touches of its own. Interior designer Deborah Drury put together a shoe-fitting area that has a stage, dance bar, mirrors and curtains.

When I stopped by the new Howard Curry store last week, employees were racing around, trying to get it ready to open. Boxes were everywhere, Farmer was painting a mural and the Talking Tree was waiting patiently for a sly clerk to give him voice.

The Talking Tree may only be a dressed-up piece of driftwood. But I’ll bet I’m not the only big kid glad to see him still around, standing ready to make some child’s shopping trip an adventure.

Non basta una vita - Italian for “one life is not enough” - was the late John Regis Tuska’s motto to describe his artistic ambitions.

Now, his son is discovering that two lives may not be enough, either.

For the past dozen years, Seth Tuska has worked to preserve and publicize the legacy of his father, a prolific artist and University of Kentucky art professor who died in 1998 at age 67.

Seth Tuska, 51, turned the family home at the corner of Old Park and Central avenues into a museum of his father’s art. He engaged a filmmaker and curator to put together a documentary film about his father and catalog and traveling show of his work.

He sought commercial outlets for reproductions of Tuska pictures and sculptures, which depict the human form in motion. And he started a bronze foundry on Walton Avenue to support regional sculptors.

But last November, after a bronze-pouring at the foundry, Tuska said he went home with a ringing in his ears. Then, on Christmas morning, he awoke at 4 a.m. with an intense pain in his chest. Foolishly, he didn’t see a doctor for three weeks. When he did, he was taken straight in for quadruple heart bypass surgery.

But the worst was still to come.

Tuska said when he resumed normal physical activity in March, the ringing in his ears, which had never really gone away, got much worse. He now suffers from a severe case of tinnitus - a constant sound like cicadas in his head that makes it hard to sleep, read or concentrate.

Tuska said he now needs to deal with his medical crisis and entrust his father’s legacy to others. “I have to move on and figure out what’s ahead for the rest of my life,” he said.

The first public steps in that direction will come Friday. Mayor Jim Newberry is to issue a proclamation honoring John Tuska and his work, and he will accept the loan of a bronze figure, Energy Source, for display at city hall.

That evening, during Gallery Hop, the Kentucky Theatre Gallery will display 18 Tuska pieces. The theater will have two showings, at 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., of  Non Basta Una Vita, a 2008 documentary about John Tuska by Arthur Rouse and Kiley Lane.

Thanks to the event’s sponsors, attendees also will be given a film poster, popcorn and a drink. Tuska said he has worked with local arts educators to distribute many of the 600 tickets to students.

Where things go from there, Tuska said, depends on community interest - both artistic, and financial.

Tuska sold the foundary to artist Amanda Matthews Fields and enlisted a group of community leaders to advise him on how to proceed with setting up a non-profit Tuska Museum and Learning Center foundation to take over the family home and his collection of his father’s art.

Tuska lives upstairs in the home, but is in the process of moving out. He wants to keep the collection of his father’s work in Lexington.

His vision is to continue the home’s first floor museum. But, more importantly, he wants to use the upstairs apartment to house visiting artists and the 2,500-square-foot lower level for educational space.

Downtown developer Phil Holoubek, a member of the advisory group, said several strategies have been discussed. “Seth will have to decide what he feels most comfortable doing,” he said.

Holoubek said the Tuska collection includes outstanding art that could not only enrich the community culturally, but promote economic development.

LexArts President Jim Clark, who for six years directed the New York Public Art Fund, agreed. “If John Tuska had done this work in New York City he would have been a very prominent sculptor,” he said.

Clark sees a lot of potential for the Tuska Museum and Learning Center, if it gets the right leadership that can attract the necessary money.

“Having a house museum is perfect for Lexington,” Clark said. “It is intimate in scale. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood. Anybody flying into Lexington for the (horse) sales, that would be a perfectly lovely discovery. Part of that is just working with what they’ve got and marketing it.”

With more regular museum hours, more advertising and an experienced curator, Clark thinks the Tuska museum could become an important cultural destination. And he thinks Seth Tuska has the right idea about using his father’s legacy to encourage arts education.

In addition to the high quality of John Tuska’s work, Clark said, what made him special was his dedication to teaching. Great artists who also are great arts educators, like Tuska and Centre College’s Stephen Rolfe Powell, are rare.

A learning center that promoted arts education - and honored arts educators with a “Tuska prize” and residency - could put Lexington on the arts map. “That would be a very big deal in this country,” Clark said.

What’s needed now is for people to step up and help Seth Tuska make it happen.

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FRANKFORT — Margaret Robinson Robertson lived in the Old Governor’s Mansion in the early 1840s, when son-in-law Robert Letcher was the governor. Legend has it that her ghost appears whenever evil befalls the house.

The way the place looks now, don’t expect to see her any time soon.

The 211-year-old mansion has just undergone a privately financed $1.5 million face lift so it can take on a new role as the state’s guest house and official entertainment space for the governor.

The magnificent renovation was a statewide, all-volunteer effort involving more than 300 people, including designers, decorators, contractors and donors who each adopted small parts of the mansion.

The renovation will be unveiled later this month with a series of big-ticket events, proceeds from which will benefit the Kentucky Executive Mansions Foundation and Kentucky Equine Humane Center. The home will then be open for $10 public tours Sept. 19 to Oct. 3.

“We wanted the house to be a welcoming spot for people who come to Kentucky,” said David Buchta, state curator and director of the Division of Historic Properties. His office oversaw the renovation with the mansions foundation and Kentucky Historic Properties Advisory Commission.

“It’s a great shrine to Kentucky’s history,” said Steve Collins, chairman of the commission and son of former Gov. Martha Layne Collins.

The home was first occupied in 1798, two years before the White House. For many years, it was the nation’s oldest executive residence.

The mansion housed 33 Kentucky governors until 1914, when the current governor’s mansion was built beside the “new” Capitol. From 1956 to 2002, the old mansion housed 10 lieutenant governors.

Eight U.S. presidents have visited the mansion, from James Monroe to Bill Clinton, as well as such notables as Henry Clay, Aaron Burr and William Jennings Bryan.

“There’s no other house in Kentucky that has been used like this one — that has the stories and history and reputation,” said Collins, a Shelbyville lawyer and funeral director.

The General Assembly put up money to build the governor’s mansion in 1795 after the state’s first governor, Isaac Shelby, convinced lawmakers that a rented log cabin just wouldn’t do. It was completed in 1798.

Although the mansion’s federal-style exterior was rather plain, it was called the Palace when Shelby’s successor, James Garrard, became its first occupant. It was the first home in Frankfort with carpet. A crowd gathered when the city’s first piano was delivered to its parlor.

Two men who helped build the house later lived there: Thomas Metcalfe, a stonemason who helped lay the foundation, was governor from 1828 to 1832; and Letcher, who helped lay the Flemish-bond brick, was governor from 1840 to 1844.

The house hasn’t been occupied since 2002, when then-Lt. Gov. Steve Henry moved out to make way for a renovation. Last year, the idea emerged to turn the home into a state guest house, like Blair House in Washington.

(Francis Preston Blair, by the way, was a Frankfort journalist who moved to the nation’s capital in 1830. Seven years later, he took up residence in the Pennsylvania Avenue house that now bears his name.)

First lady Jane Beshear, former first lady Phyllis George and Meg Jewett, owner of the L.V. Harkness & Co. gift shop in Lexington, led the renovation effort. They and others recruited volunteers and donors from all over.

Longwood Antique Woods of Lexington donated flooring for the downstairs powder room. The wood came from the Lexington barn of 1937 Triple Crown winner War Admiral.

Louisville artist Sandy Kimura donated nine weeks of her time to paint a mural around the main hall in the style of early 19th-century Zuber wallpaper. It incorporates Kentucky scenes, such as Daniel Boone looking across the Cumberland Gap and the gentlemen on the state seal shaking hands, for which Buchta and Collins posed in period wigs.

“I’m going to get it out and wear it to some of the events,” Collins joked.

The house now contains a treasure trove of Kentucky furniture and art. There’s a rare 1815 cherry Sheraton sideboard in the dining room, thought to be the work of a Maysville cabinetmaker. Other items include chairs from Henry Clay’s law office, and modern Appalachian furniture and crafts that furnish a third-floor bedroom.

Other furniture and art has been donated or is on loan from the state, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Speed Museum, the Filson Club, the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, the Rebecca and Jay Rayburn Collection and several individuals.

Recognizable to many Kentuckians will be four original paintings by Paul Sawyier, whose Kentucky landscapes from a century ago remain popular as prints.

“Every room has something significant,” Buchta said. “Without the generosity of a lot of people, this project wouldn’t have been nearly as successful.”

As a former resident of the mansion, Collins said he is especially appreciative of all of the people who have made it a showplace.

Collins was a student at Georgetown College when his mother was elected lieutenant governor in 1979. He lived in a third-floor bedroom and remembers the mansion as a busy place that was used for many public functions.

Collins said he encountered many people in the mansion, but not the ghost of Margaret Robinson Robertson.

“We never saw her,” he said. “But we felt very safe when we lived here.”

• If you go

  Kentucky Mansion Celebration

  ■ First Ladies’ Luncheon, noon, Sept. 15, $110.

  ■ Brunch in the Garden with Jon Carloftis, 11 a.m. Sept. 16, $110.

  ■ Governor’s Barbecue & Unbridled Spirits, 7 p.m. Sept. 17, $210.

  ■ Preview Gala, 7 p.m. Sept. 18, $300.

  ■ Public tours, Sept. 19-Oct. 3. $10.

  For tickets and more information, go to www.kymansioncelebration.org or call (502) 226-6440.

  Click on each thumbnail to view complete photo:

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  

  
  
  

Lexington was born and grew up around the Town Branch of South Elkhorn Creek, but over the past century we’ve done our best to pollute it, bury it and forget about it.

Water finds its way, though, even if it sometimes needs help.

Town Branch Trail Inc. has been working for a decade to develop a greenway along the creek west of downtown. The first fruits of those labors will be on display next weekend, when the initial two-mile section of the trail is opened with a benefit concert and bicycle rally.

The Freedom Concert, with music by Cora Lee and the Townies and Fifth on the Floor, is at 8 p.m. Friday at the new Buster’s in the restored Old Tarr Distillery, which backs up to the creek on Manchester Street. Admission is $10, with all proceeds going to the trail project.

The next morning at 8:15, the public is invited to meet at Cheapside for a police-escorted 10-mile bicycle ride out and back on roads to the completed trail section off Leestown Road and Alexandria Drive. There will be a hospitality tent at Lewis Manor, a circa 1800 home beside the trail in Marehaven subdivision.

When I walked the trail last week, people were already using it.

Workers had just installed stone-cutter Richard McAlister’s beautiful sandstone benches and furlong posts made of finely crafted “Kentucky marble” limestone. And there were several new signs along the trail explaining Central Kentucky’s landscape, geology and ecology.

Van Meter Pettit, the Lexington architect who put together the trail project, sees it as more than a place to exercise; it’s a way to learn about Lexington’s history and environment. It’s also a way to rehabilitate and protect the watershed and help deal with runoff and pollution problems that have grown with the city.

“There is a compelling story to why we are the way we are that even many natives don’t understand,” he said. For example: Lexington’s downtown is long and narrow because it was built along Town Branch, which now flows beneath Vine Street.

Town Branch runs along the west side of the finished section of trail, just beyond tracks that were part of Kentucky’s first railroad line.

In one section, the trail goes around a giant, centuries-old tree, surrounded by a stand of native cane. When the first pioneers came here 250 years ago, much of the Bluegrass was covered with cane. Now, it’s hard to find.

“This is about as good a snapshot of authentic Kentucky as you can get,” Pettit said.

On the east side of the trail is Central Kentucky’s modern landscape: several new subdivisions.

Efforts to build trails in established neighborhoods often are met with “not in my backyard” opposition. But these subdivisions are new, and many homeowners are building decks and landscaping their yards to take advantage of trail access.

Indeed, subdivision developer Dennis Anderson was key to the Town Branch Trail’s success. That’s because he realized the trail would not only be an amenity for his development, but would help with drainage and be a financially attractive way to use undevelopable land.

“Without him,” Pettit said, “this trail would have been a nice idea that never would have happened.”

With this section of trail finished, Pettit is now turning his attention to another one-mile section that has funding. The remaining five miles is under feasibility study while trail organizers seek money, easements and rights of way.

So far, Town Branch Trail has received about $2 million in grants and other funding and $1 million worth of donated land, Pettit said.

Plans call for the trail to eventually be at least eight miles long, going from this first finished section to downtown. It will end along Manchester Street near Rupp Arena, where developers of the Distillery District plan to rehabilitate the stream and incorporate the trail into their multi-use project.

Eventually, Pettit would like Town Branch Trail to connect with the nine-mile Legacy Trail being built from downtown to the Kentucky Horse Park, as well as other walking and bike paths.

Even further in the future, there is talk of developing a trail beside the railroad line from Lexington to Versailles and eventually Frankfort.

So come out and see this first piece of Town Branch Trail. You’ll get some exercise, learn about Lexington and see how creative people are harnessing our rich heritage to literally pave the way to a better future.

With Second Sunday a little more than a month away, 100 of Kentucky’s 120 counties have plans to participate.

Each county plans to close a street or highway for a few hours Sunday afternoon, Oct. 11, and invite residents to come out to walk, bike, run or jog — and to think about how regular exercise could make them healthier and happier.

That was the basic idea used to launch Second Sunday last year, when 70 counties were involved. This year, though, many communities have more ambitious plans.

“It’s becoming a platform for all kinds of health-related events,” said Diana Doggett, a county extension agent in Lexington who is coordinating the statewide effort.

Dogget said many counties are planning health fairs, “fastest kid in town” races and even arts events.

Lexington will close a mile-long loop downtown — Main to Mill to Short to Deweese streets — from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Related events include bike polo demonstrations, health screenings and martial arts and yoga classes. A bike valet service will be available for cyclists to check their bikes while participating in other activities.

Jessamine County plans similar events downtown, plus a 6k run between West Jessamine and East Jessamine high schools to memorialize a popular coach and student athlete who recently died, Dogget said.

Elliott County’s events include speeches by House Majority Floor Leader Rocky Adkins, a cancer survivor, and a local man who lost 140 pounds without surgery. Festivities end with a concert by bluegrass star Don Rigsby.

Allen County citizens are building a two-mile bike and walking trail on property surrounding a Civil War site, Dumont Hill. Second Sunday activities there will include canon ball bowling.

Newport plans to close Monmouth Street between Fifth and 10th streets. Taylor County will include canoeing on the Green River. Franklin, Scott, Green and Adair counties all have big festivals planned around Second Sunday events.

UK’s Cooperative Extension Service is coordinating Second Sunday plans across the state, and some counties haven’t gotten involved because of vacancies in their extension offices, Dogget said. But anyone can step up and organize local events in those counties — and she hopes people will.

But the point of Second Sunday isn’t to get people outside exercising one day each October; it is to inspire them to start a regular exercise habit.

“What we need to do is change people’s lifestyles,” said Jay McChord, a Lexington councilman who helped create Second Sunday.

McChord also wants Second Sunday to attract national attention — and money — to Kentucky’s effort to shed its ranking as one of the nation’s least-healthy states.

He hopes exposure will attract millions in grant and foundation money to build a trail system throughout Kentucky so communities large and small won’t have to close streets for their citizens to have safe places to walk, run or bike.

Dr. Rick Lofgren, a physician at the University of Kentucky Hospital, appeared with McChord, Legacy Trail organizer Steve Austin and UK Agriculture Dean Scott Smith at the Lexington Forum’s monthly meeting Thursday to talk about trails, better health and Second Sunday.

Lofgren said he practiced in academic hospitals in many parts of the country before coming to UK five years ago. He noted that Kentucky ranks high nationally in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes and lung cancer — all of the health problems nobody wants.

“This is the sickest group of patients I’ve ever taken care of,” Lofgren said. “Much of what I see is preventable. It has to do with the lifestyles we have around here.”

Lofgren said regular exercise would help a lot — on Second Sunday, and every other day of the year.

Here’s a piece of my interview with bourbon industry legends Elmer T. Lee, Jimmy Russell and Parker Beam that I didn’t have room for in today’s column:

Considering their combined 150-plus years of experience in bourbon distilling and tasting, I wanted to know how they judged one bourbon to be better than another.

They said individual taste plays a big role, so the question of whether one bourbon is better than another is often subjective. Russell said it’s like how some people prefer Coca-Cola and others like Pepsi. “If they all tasted the same, we’d just need one (distillery),” he said.

Beam said his tastes were shaped by the tastes of his father, who was Heaven Hill’s master distiller before him. “But Elmer and Jimmy are going to have a little different palate than what I’ve got,” he said.

All three agreed that one of the most important characteristics of a fine bourbon is a good “finish.”

“It just kind of lingers on the palate and gets better the longer it lays there,” Beam said. “I like that.”

“What he’s telling you,” Russell said, “is that it’s so good he wants another one.”

FRANKFORT—These guys don’t look like rock stars at first glance.

Or second glance. Or third.

Yet, they travel the world making public appearances, posing for photographs and signing autographs, usually on bottles of Kentucky’s best bourbon, some of which have their picture on the label.

This is officially Bourbon Heritage Month in Kentucky. The 18th annual Bourbon Festival is Sept. 15-20 in Bardstown. The eight-distillery Kentucky Bourbon Trail is expecting a record number of tourists.

So I figured this was a good time to sit down with three of bourbon’s elder statesmen: Elmer T. Lee, 90, former plant manager at Buffalo Trace; and master distillers Jimmy Russell, 74, who has been at Wild Turkey in Lawrenceburg for 55 years, and Parker Beam, 67, who is celebrating 50 years at Heaven Hill in Bardstown.

Bourbon sales have been growing steadily for 25 years, especially in international markets such as Japan, Australia and Europe. Distillery production is up 50 percent since 1999.

Much of the credit is given to Lee, who introduced Blanton’s Single Barrel in 1984, launching the premium bourbon market that has been the industry’s growth engine. Single barrel and small batch recipes have transformed bourbon’s image from a commodity into a craft product, like fine wine.

You also can’t discount the marketing genius of Bill Samuels at Maker’s Mark in Loretto, who taught a conservative industry how to be folksy and hip at the same time.

More than 95 percent of all bourbon is made in Kentucky, creating a $3 billion industry with 3,200 direct jobs. Although some distilleries are now owned by international conglomerates, they’re almost all run and staffed by Kentuckians with old bourbon family trees.

Russell and Beam are third-generation distillers, and their sons are distillers, too. Beam’s grandfather, for whom he was named, was master distiller at the operation owned by his grandfather’s brother, Jim Beam.

I visited with Russell, Beam and Lee around a table at Stony Point, the hilltop home where Col. Albert Blanton once commanded the 110-acre distillery now called Buffalo Trace. These three friends and rivals have known each other for decades. They can, and often do, give each other a hard time—and finish each other’s sentences.

The first thing I wanted to know was how these experts drink their bourbon.

Russell sips his “neat”— or straight—from a brandy snifter so he can enjoy the aroma. In summertime, he might drink it over ice, or chill the bottle in the refrigerator. Beam also is a straight-bourbon man, although he sometimes chases it with a little water. Lee prefers his bourbon mixed with 7Up or Sprite.

Russell, whose personal brand is Russell’s Reserve, and Beam, who developed Evan Williams Single Barrel, have a drink most days, but not every day. Lee is a daily drinker, but, like the others, in moderation.

“I don’t try to drink it all every night,” Lee said. “Just one good highball.”

Does Lee, the namesake of Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel, give bourbon any credit for his living to be 90? “I give it a whole lot of credit,” he said. “It ain’t hurt a damn thing.”

Beam jumps in: “Booker Noe, my cousin (and former master distiller at Jim Beam in Clermont) always said, there’s too much living proof bourbon won’t hurt you. Look at all us old-timers.”

Decades of practice have taught these men what good bourbon tastes like, but they have a hard time describing it — and sometimes chuckle when others try. They talked of hearing bourbon aficionados wax poetically about hints of caramel, vanilla and spice — and even tree leaves, leather and tobacco.

“I’ve always said when you’ve got some of those kind of tastes in your bourbon, you’ve probably got problems,” Beam said with a laugh.

Lee then had to tell one on Russell. One time, at a tasting in Missouri, someone began equating a particular bourbon’s taste to exotic fruits and vegetables. Russell leaned over to another distiller and whispered: “I don’t know about y’all, but we don’t put any of that crap in our bourbon.”

These three seem to enjoy being international bourbon ambassadors almost as much as being distillers. They have a lot of funny stories, such as the time Lee called down to the front desk of a hotel in Japan to ask for a bucket of ice. The bellman delivered a bucket of rice.

Lee, Beam and Russell were born and raised within a few miles of the distilleries where they have spent their lives, and their most common travel stories involve how people sometimes react to their folksy charm.

“One time, at a tasting in California, I introduced myself and after I poured the product this guy kept kind of staring at me,” Beam said. “Then he pointed his finger and said, ‘You’re a real person! … I thought you were just some fictitious character they had come up with in marketing.”

Beam, Russell and Lee are real, all right. But they’re characters, too.

Click on each thumbnail to see complete photo:

A followup to my Friday column:

Pedal Power bike shop’s sale Saturday to benefit Shifting Gears didn’t last long. All 200 used bikes were sold well before noon.

“We were able to put money into an account to keep the program going and still write Kentucky Refugee Ministries a check for $3,000, which will provide for two households until self-sufficiency,” said Brad Flowers, who started Shifting Gears.

Shifting Gears provides restored, used bikes to newly arrived foreign refugees to give them some basic transportation. The bikes come from donations and trade-ins taken by Pedal Power.

Kentucky Refugee Ministries works with the U.S. State Department to resettle officially designated refugees who legally immigrate to Kentucky. It tries to provide them with furniture and other necessities until they can get settled and find work.

Response to Shifting Gears has been so strong that Pedal Power had many more bikes than it could restore, and it needed to clear out about 200 to free up space and raise money for spare parts.

Restoration labor is donated by Pedal Power employees and volunteers from the local cycling community. Last year, about 80 bikes were donated to refugees, with some children’s bikes going to The Nest, a social service agency on North Limestone.

The extra adult bikes were sold for $25, $50 or $75 each, and spare parts were sold for $1 each, “whether it was a wheel or a cable,” Flowers said.

“There was one guy that bought two bikes and 10 or so parts to fix up for people in his neighborhood who didn’t have bikes,” he said. “There were several international students from UK.”

A half-dozen volunteers from the bicycle group LexRides helped work the sale.

“As the number of (refugee) arrivals increases (from an average of 100 a year recently to about 200 a year currently) and as funding stays flat it is creative partnerships like this that will allow them to continue to provide basic services for these folks as they become oriented,” Flowers said.

Louisville may be the state’s largest city, but for 11 days each August it becomes the center of rural Kentucky at its best.

Sure, city people enjoy the Kentucky State Fair, too. Just ask Farm Bureau Freddie, the giant talking statue who has been welcoming visitors to the fair for 52 years.

The fair has midway rides, concerts, corn dogs, vendors and booths promoting just about every organization in the Commonwealth.

You can buy picture frames, porch swings and storm windows, get a mammogram or prostate screening and learn a tractor-trailer load about Abraham Lincoln at the Kentucky Historical Society’s history mobile.

Huge exhibit halls show average Kentuckians’ art and crafts, from quilts to paintings, baskets, Christmas trees, homemade beer and intentionally ugly lamps.

But to truly appreciate rural Kentucky and the people who live there, turn left after you say hello to Freddie, cut through Freedom Hall and wander through the vast livestock pavilions and into Broadbent Arena.

Here you will find farm families from across the state, showing off the bounty of their hard work, rich land and considerable ingenuity.

“There’s so much pride in Kentucky, and this is where it all comes together,” said Miss Kentucky Mallory Ervin, a Union County farm girl. “I’ve been coming here since I was little, but they treat you a little better when you have a crown on your head.”

Ervin was enjoying her celebrity role at this year’s fair, even if she was afraid to eat any funnel cakes. The Miss America pageant is only five months away.

Besides, the “Kentucky Proud” food she was promoting is more nutritious. The Great Kentucky Cookout Tent is the place to eat. I got a country ham sandwich, but the barbecue, pork chops, steak, catfish and trout looked tempting, too.

Inside the air-conditioned pavilions, one room held prize-winning hay and honey. Another was filled with caged rabbits, pigeons, chickens and dairy goats. They will move out Monday to make room for sheep and swine.

As I walked by, I watched big, strong men carefully cradling their fluffy bunnies on the way to the judges’ tables.

“It’s a fabulous hobby; they don’t bark, but they will bite,” said Michael Wiley of Stamping Ground, the secretary-treasurer of the American English Spot Rabbit Club. “I started out in 4H when I was 10 years old. Now I’m 62.”

This week’s schedule includes the World Championship Horse Show, plus shows for morgan, quarter and miniature horses.

Last week, dairy cows were the stars. Bathed and freshly clipped, they lounged in fresh hay as they awaited their turn in the show ring. Some stalls were quite fancy: framed photos of cattle, white picket fences and chairs embroidered with the farm’s name or logo.

“I’ve been coming up here for 37 years,” said The Rev. Sammy Adkins of Somerset, who was watching over his son’s prize cattle. “It’s a good family vacation. You know where your kids are and what they’re doing.”

In fact, the next generation of Kentucky farmers was everywhere. Many proudly wore their blue corduroy Future Farmers of America jackets, even when they went outside in the heat.

These kids know food doesn’t come from a grocery. They know state fair competitions lead to better-quality food, and that farming isn’t a way to make a living so much as a way of life.

Dan Shearer’s Jessamine County family has been showing prize-winning Ayrshire cattle at the Kentucky State Fair for three decades. This year, his four grandchildren, ages 12 to 21, were carrying on the tradition.

“There’s a whole lot of work involved, but it’s good for the kids,” said Shearer’s son, Danny. “When kids grow up on a farm, it teaches them about animals. It also teaches them responsibility. ”

I stood beside the ring in Broadbent Arena for more than an hour, watching and photographing impressive kids with fine-looking cattle.

My favorite may have been Taylor Graves, 10, of Perryville. Her father, dairy farmer Ray Graves, said she started showing goats almost as soon as she could walk. This was her second year in the ring with the family’s Brown Swiss cattle.

The cows were at least 10-times bigger than Taylor, but she was a young woman in control. She skillfully paraded them around the ring, petting and rubbing each one when they followed her lead and stood still at the appropriate times. When they tried to pull away, she just as confidently got their attention with a hard smack.

What does Taylor like best about being a farm girl?

“Getting to play with the animals,” she said with a shy voice — and a pocket full of blue ribbons.

• If you go

  Kentucky State Fair

  Gates open daily at 7 a.m. through Aug. 30

  Exhibit Buildings open 9 a.m. - 10 p.m.

  Admission: $8, $4 for seniors and children 3-12

  More information: kystatefair.org

Click on each thumbnail to see entire photo

I went to opening day of the Kentucky State Fair in Louisville on Thursday. I had a great time, and everyone I saw seemed to be having fun, too.

Click on the arrow below to see a slide show of some of my photos. Some of the photos will be in Friday’s Herald-Leader, on the City|Region section front.

Also, watch for my column about the state fair here and in the Herald-Leader on Sunday.

If you want to join in the fun yourself, the state fair is open until Aug. 30. Go to the fair’s Web site for more information.

It was an exhausting two-day trip from her home in Chendu, China, to Lexington, where Tianjiao Yang will become a nursing student at the University of Kentucky.

But when she arrived Sunday at Blue Grass Airport, Judy Phillips was there to greet her and take her to her dormitory. And Yang didn’t need to worry about dinner.

That’s because Phillips and other volunteers from UK’s International Hospitality Program, along with the Lexington Rotary Club, had put on a huge picnic spread to welcome Yang and more than 100 other new international students.

A long table on one side of the E.S. Good Barn, where UK’s College of Agriculture has its offices, was loaded with hamburgers, brats, side dishes and all of the trimmings. Outside, for the few who dared brave the heat and humidity, there were corn hole boards and written instructions on how to play.

Mostly, though, there were a lot of smiling faces to welcome Yang and her fellow students from 24 nations to their new Kentucky home.

“I was a little nervous, but American people are very friendly,” Yang said only a few hours into her first day on this side of the world. “Judy is very kind. She helped me a lot.”

The program has been making the transition to American life a little easier for UK’s new international students for more than four decades.

Later this week, as they did last week, volunteers will take students shopping for everyday necessities they couldn’t bring with them. Later this fall, a square dance is planned to introduce them to traditional Kentucky culture.

And for students who want one, there is a host family or person who has agreed to spend some time with them off campus once a month — invite them to their home for dinner, or take them on a family outing.

Hosts also are only a phone call away for seemingly simple questions that can baffle someone fresh from another culture, such as how to open a bank account, get a driver’s license or figure out what size sheets to buy for their unfamiliar American bed.

The transition usually isn’t difficult for students from Australia, Western Europe and other places with cultures similar to the United States. But it can be daunting for some students from Africa, Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

Yang was one of several students getting airport pickup service this year from Phillips, who is in her 19th year as an IHP volunteer and host.

“It’s really a great program in that you can have a relationship with an exchange student, but they don’t live in your home and you don’t have a financial commitment,” said Phillips, who over the years has traveled to Poland, Egypt and Dubai to visit exchange students she once hosted. “They become like your own kids. I have thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Stephanie Hong, executive director of the city’s Partners for Youth program, has served for many years as an IHP board member and host because she remembers how important it was for someone to show her around when she arrived from Taiwan to become an undergraduate at Eastern Kentucky University.

She often takes students to a pumpkin patch before Halloween, to a Thanksgiving dinner and to see Christmas lights to help explain American culture. “It’s a one-year commitment for the host family, but it often becomes a lifelong friendship,” said Hong, who once traveled to India to attend a former exchange student’s wedding.

“We’re always looking for more host families,” said Karen Slaymaker, assistant director of UK’s international affairs office, who oversees the program. People interested in becoming hosts or volunteers may call her for more information at (859) 257-4067, ext. 237, or go to the Web site, www.uky.edu/intlaffairs.

UK usually has about 300 international students from as many as 100 nations at any given time, from teenage undergrads to post-doctoral students.

“They’re all somebody’s children,” said Pat Bond, assistant dean of UK’s graduate school and chair of the International Hospitality Program. “They’re courageous to be doing this in the first place, coming to a new country and culture. Just little acts of kindness mean so much to these kids.”

FANCY FARM — The governor was vacationing in Florida. Members of Congress were working in Washington. The audience was smaller and less rowdy than usual. Even the traditionally oppressive heat stayed away from this year’s Fancy Farm Picnic.

With no statewide elections this year, the best reason to make the long drive to Graves County on Saturday was the barbecue, fresh vegetables and homemade pies prepared by the families of St. Jerome parish.

The focus of this year’s political speaking was the 2010 U.S. Senate race, which turned into a wide-open contest last week, when Republican incumbent Jim Bunning, 77, became the last person in Kentucky to realize it was time for him to retire.

Three Republicans and four Democrats who are seeking their parties’ nominations for the seat next May spoke to the crowd. I found them all disappointing. Click here to hear the speeches.

Democrat supporter Thomas Kirby of Clinton was among those at the 129th annual Fancy Farm Picnic. Photo by Tom Eblen

When they weren’t beating up on each other, the Democrats were blaming eight years of Republican government for the nation’s economic problems. The Republicans were stoking fear about what might happen as a result of Democrats’ efforts to solve those problems.

The sharpest words came from the two Democratic frontrunners, Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo and Attorney General Jack Conway.

Mongiardo, a Hazard physician and coal industry advocate, tried to portray himself as the candidate of the common man. He attacked Conway, of Louisville, for his Duke University education and alleged “silver spoon” background.

Then Mongiardo tried to link Conway to President Barack Obama’s “cap-and-trade” legislation, which is designed to reduce pollution from burning coal. It was a stretch. Besides, Fancy Farm seemed like an odd place to argue, in essence, that concerns about man-made climate change are unfounded.

Western Kentucky’s trees remain bent and broken from last fall’s bizarre hurricane winds and last winter’s crippling ice storm. It’s usually about 100 degrees at the Fancy Farm Picnic. This year, temperatures never left the low 80s, while, across the country, usually balmy Seattle is gripped by a heat wave.

Conway, whose supporters held up signs that said “Mongiardo doesn’t know Jack,” took a few verbal swipes at the doctor and showed he knows how to cuss. The attorney general talked about how much he has worked on consumer-protection issues.

Secretary of State Trey Grayson’s speech was straight from the conservative playbook, complete with sneering references to Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reed and House Speaker Nancy Pelonsi.

Grayson needed to play to the GOP’s conservative base. His main challenger is Bowling Green eye doctor Rand Paul, son of Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, the darling of libertarians.

Paul attacked Republicans and Democrats alike. He talked about balanced budgets and held up a thick stack of paper, saying senators shouldn’t vote on any bill they haven’t fully read. At one point, somebody in the GOP cheering section behind me yelled, “You’re boring!”

Three virtual unknowns cast themselves as alternatives to politics as usual: Democrats Darlene Fitzgerald Price, a former U.S. Customs agent from McCreary County, and Maurice Sweeney, a businessman from Jefferson County; and Republican Bill Johnson, a Todd County businessman.

The Fancy Farm crowd is always more interested in heckling than listening, so it’s hard to tell which candidates’ messages might resonate with average voters. For me, the most relevant words came from State Auditor Crit Luallen, once you filtered out her obligatory Democratic partisanship.

Crit Luallen

As citizens have seen jobs disappear, Luallen said, “they have watched banking scandals unfold, the meltdown on Wall Street, the disclosure of extravagant corporate perks and irresponsible spending of their tax dollars by public leaders. The American people have had it up to here. They’ve said enough is enough.”

What voters want is accountability, and she said it is not a partisan issue.

“These are times that demand leaders with integrity to restore trust, leaders with principles to act responsibly, leaders with the courage to take on powerful interests and leaders who will insure accountability for your hard-earned money,” she said.

“It’s time to honor the public’s demands for greater accountability. Every public leader is a guardian of the taxpayer’s trust. And we must all recommit ourselves to honor and hold sacred that trust.”

It was a good speech. But I couldn’t help but think Luallen should have delivered it facing the stage rather than the audience.

BARDSTOWN — Gerald Smith, a Lexington native and University of Kentucky history professor, had never visited My Old Kentucky Home State Park before last summer.

Smith arrived early for a speaking engagement at the Nelson County Public Library and had a couple of hours to kill. So he and a student decided to take the park’s tour of Federal Hill, the Rowan family mansion where, legend has it, Stephen Collins Foster was inspired to write Kentucky’s state song.

“The people were very nice,” Smith said. But he noticed that the tour guide, dressed in a hoop skirt, kept referring to the “servants.”

“I finally said, ‘You mean the slaves?’” Smith recalled.

The tour didn’t include the mansion’s attic or basement, where slaves lived, or small rooms beside the kitchen, where they worked.

Finally, Smith asked where the slaves were buried. In the cemetery beside the garden? No, the guide said. Out back. Way out back.

Smith and student A.J. Hartsfield walked across a field to a stand of old trees. Underneath, inside a split-rail fence, were 22 small, unmarked stones and a plaque dedicated in 1945 to Judge John Rowan’s “faithful retainers.”

“As we approached the entrance to the little wooden fence, this guy was looking for his golf ball,” Smith said. The cemetery is in the bend of the 13th hole of the park’s golf course. Balls frequently land there.

“There was nothing sacred about it,” Smith said of the slave cemetery. “It was painful. It was sad.”

Smith went home and shared his experience with two other prominent African-Americans, Lexington writer Frank X Walker and Everett McCorvey, the UK Opera Theatre director who has sung My Old Kentucky Home many times in concerts here and overseas.

They decided to approach state officials with a simple message: We must do better. And, with the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games about to focus the world’s attention on Kentucky, we must do it quickly.

“Folks sing the song; it stirs up such emotion,” Smith said. “It celebrates the state’s history and culture and hospitality and traditions. But this is the way we remember the people who built and lived and worked at this symbol, this monument, this shrine to Kentucky. The African-American presence here has been erased.”

Smith, McCorvey and Walker were hardly the first to complain. But their message seems to have been heard — loud and clear.

“We have already taken a number of steps to interpret things better,” said Gerry Van der Meer, the state parks commissioner. “There’s a bit of uncomfortableness, naturally, about slavery. But it’s a fact. It’s a part of history. We’re embracing this.”

Several changes are planned for My Old Kentucky Home. And Van der Meer has ordered a review of how African-American history is interpreted at all state-run parks and historic sites.

Historically, a raw nerve

My Old Kentucky Home, the place and the song, hold special significance, both for Kentucky’s international image and its complex history of race relations.

The mansion is one of Kentucky’s most recognizable landmarks, depicted on both the state’s postage stamp and quarter. It is the state’s most-visited historic site, with more than 55,000 people touring the mansion each year.

My Old Kentucky Home is the most famous song about the state, sung for an international television audience by more than 100,000 people in the Churchill Downs grandstand before the Kentucky Derby each May. But it wasn’t until 1986 that the word “darkies” in the song’s lyrics was officially changed to “people.”

Foster published the song in 1853, as Kentucky was in the cross-hairs of the national debate over slavery that would lead to the Civil War.

While many people love the song for its romanticized view of Kentucky, they rarely sing past the first verse. The complete song, which Foster originally called Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night, is actually about a slave being “sold down the river.”

While researching My Old Kentucky Home, Smith came across a journal article by the late Thomas Clark, Kentucky’s most eminent historian, published in 1936. It discussed parallels between the song and the controversial, anti-slavery novel of Foster’s time, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Many whites have always tried to portray slavery in Kentucky as somehow more humane than in the Deep South, but abolitionists of the 1850s argued just the opposite, Clark wrote. That’s because slavery in Kentucky was more personal.

Plantations were smaller, and Kentucky slaves had more interaction with their owners than in many Southern states. Whippings and runaways were common, and tens of thousands of Kentucky slaves were separated from their families each year and sold in the South for profit as the cotton, sugar and rice industries grew.

“It is significant,” Clark wrote more than 70 years ago, “that the author’s use of a title obscured his context sufficiently to cause Kentuckians, to whom Uncle Tom’s Cabin was anathema, to take the song to their hearts and claim it as their very own.”

For years after state officials opened Federal Hill to tourists in 1923, black men were hired to walk around portraying Foster’s song characters “Old Black Joe” and “Old Uncle Ned.”

“They fit that standard stereotype of the happy servant who was there to welcome the white guests to the mansion,” Smith said.

He sees the 1945 cemetery plaque honoring Rowan’s “faithful retainers” as part of the effort to soften Kentucky’s collective memory.

“If we allow the site to exist the way it is now, then we perpetuate the myth that slavery was a benign institution in Kentucky,” said Smith, who has been working for years on the Kentucky African-American Encyclopedia project. “This is not about compensatory history. It’s just about history.”

Park changes planned

Officials are working on several modifications at My Old Kentucky Home State Park, where the mansion has been meticulously restored and chimes broadcast Foster tunes across the grounds.

Tour guide scripts are being revised to reflect research on slaves at Federal Hill, who numbered from two to 100 at any given time between the 1790s and 1865. Interpretive displays are planned as money becomes available.

Eventually, the park would like to have audio tour equipment to supplement its small guide staff.

Park Director Alice Willett Heaton is seeking an archaeological survey to find cabin foundations and other evidence of where slaves lived and worked. It is thought the cabins were located near the amphitheater where a Stephen Foster musical has been performed since 1958.

Safety and accessibility issues may keep the attic and basement closed to visitors, Heaton said. But there are discussions about converting one of the rooms beside the kitchen into a place to explain slavery at Federal Hill.

Van der Meer said trees will be planted to screen the slave cemetery from the state park system’s most popular golf course.

“Somebody’s family is buried there,” Van der Meer said. “We want that to be treated more respectfully.”

Heaton is looking for money to build a path from the house to the cemetery. The park master plan she developed in 1987 called for the path, as well as moving the 1930s golf course further away from the cemetery.

She got money a few years ago to move a fairway that went between the house and cemetery. But she hasn’t been able to move the other hole, or build the path.

“It’s always been a money issue,” Heaton said. “But I’m thrilled with Dr. Smith’s interest. This could be a real opportunity for us.”

Smith said he has been pleased by the response from state officials. He plans to work with them to make sure changes are made.

Smith said he wants Kentucky’s international image to be positive — but historically accurate. “For me, it’s about telling the rest of the story,” he said. “So far, we’ve only been telling half of it.”

Perhaps enough time has passed, enough progress has been made, that both black and white Kentuckians can begin coming to grips with slavery and a racist past.

“I’m excited about the future,” Smith said. “I’m excited about the cemetery, about the possibilities and ways of including African-American history in that story of My Old Kentucky Home.”

As a historian, Smith acknowledges the difficulty of accurately interpreting African-American history at My Old Kentucky Home. Little physical evidence remains. Records are sketchy, and much is based on oral tradition.

But, he notes, Federal Hill’s very association with Stephen Foster is based on oral tradition among the Rowans, who were the songwriter’s cousins. There’s no written evidence that Foster ever visited the mansion, much less set his song there.

“We know the slaves were there,” Smith said. “But that other fellow, the one they’ve got the statue to out in the garden, we’re not sure about him.”

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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.”

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There seems to be a fund-raising walk, run or bicycle ride for just about every cause, charity and disease.

So when Ed Stodola was looking for a way to raise money to restore the Grand Theatre in downtown Frankfort, the avid cyclist decided to organize a ride.

But what a ride.

The Grand Autumn Bicycle Ride Across Kentucky is a three-day trek that covers 11 counties and more than 200 miles, from the Ohio River at Carrollton to the Tennessee line at Dale Hollow Lake. Dip your wheels at each end.

In each of the past five years, the ride has attracted no more than 35 riders, but Stodola is hoping for the maximum 60 this year. For more information, go to www.gabraky.com.

So far, the GABRAKY has raised more than $68,000 for the Grand Theatre’s $5 million renovation. It has not been a lot of money in the Grand scheme, Stodola admits. But it has provided cash flow at critical times during the seven-year effort.

“The ride also helped keep the Grand efforts in the public eye,” he said, explaining that the first ride, in 2004, came when other fund-raising efforts had plateaued.

Organizers are planning the sixth ride for Oct. 9-11, with a couple of differences.

Instead of “Grand,” it’s now the “Governor’s” ride, reflecting its designation as the Beshear administration’s first Kentucky Adventure Tourism bike tour. Also, the theater’s renovation is almost finished. An open house is planned Aug. 7.

The Grand on St. Clair Mall was built about 1910 as a small vaudeville house and enlarged as a movie theater in the 1940s. It closed in 1966, and the building was put to other uses, from a dollar store to an auction house.

There was an effort to restore the Grand in 1983, but it failed. Then, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a group of Frankfort citizens began looking for a project to build community spirit. They remembered the Grand.

Since then, several other restoration projects have begun in downtown Frankfort, which has many beautiful old buildings. “I think it’s going to have a transformational effect,” Stodola said.

The renovated Grand will show movies, host concerts and be a venue for small stage shows. None of its 420 seats is more than 50 feet from the stage.

“We’re going to market it as Kentucky’s most intimate performance venue,” said Bill Cull, chairman of the non-profit Save the Grand Inc., which owns the building and is managing the restoration.

Cull and Stodola gave me a tour of the theater last week as workmen were installing seats and putting on other finishing touches. Sections of original plaster from the 1910 vaudeville house and 1940s theater have been preserved as part of a beautiful, modern theater that includes a small art gallery upstairs.

A mid-1800s house that shared a wall with the theater also has been restored. It will be used for administrative offices and performers’ dressing rooms.

The project was put together with a patchwork of government money, grants, corporate and private donations, volunteer labor and, of course, money raised from the bicycle ride.

A concert by R&B groups The Platters and The Coasters is planned for the theater’s grand opening on Sept. 25. Other bookings so far include the New York Theatre Ballet’s production of Sleeping Beauty.

Singer John Sebastian will perform at the theater during the Alltech Fortnight Festival on the first night of this year’s GABRAKY. And when the cyclists ride south the next morning, they can take a little pride in having helped the Grand’s marquee light up the Frankfort sky again.