The Bluegrass and Beyond

Before the sun is up, horses are on the track.

Riders in thick jackets and leather chaps ease them up the stretch and gallop them back down, around the turn.

Hooves pound. Steam puffs from big nostrils. The grandstand casts a giant shadow holding winter’s last chill.

Behind the rail, rows of green benches wait to be straightened. Their only occupants are the last fat drops of an overnight rain.

Men and women with rags carefully wipe each grandstand seat. Mop the floor. Hang the bunting. Above them, birds dart in and out, looking for a perch.

Down by the racing office, people stand with steaming cups of coffee. Many wear caps embroidered with the names of famous farms and recent champions. Three Chimneys. Big Brown.

Conversations are spiced with accents from down the road — and New York, and Ireland. Warming up yet, John? How have you been? Two exercise riders chat in French. Hot walkers speak Spanish. Between two owners, whispers in Japanese.

Some stare off into the distance, closely watching one of a dozen horses breezing by. Others pace with cell phones, telling someone far off that their horse looks good, is exercising well, will be ready to race. You should be here. Man, it is so pretty!

The rising sun casts a soft glow on flowering white trees and limestone walls. Freshly mown grass rolls out like an emerald carpet, rippled with the shadows of fences and trees. The track’s edge is a patchwork of budding green, flowering pink, forsythia yellow.

The stone-framed tote board and video screen forms a dark wall in the infield, waiting for a big jolt of electricity to bring it to life. Soon, it will chronicle the rise and fall of afternoon fortunes.

Out back, crunchy fine gravel leads to white block stables beneath severely trimmed trees. The remaining limbs reach skyward like arthritic fingers, waiting for leaves to hide their ice-inflicted wounds.

Outside the stables, grooms with white buckets of warm water carefully wash each tired horse. Steam rises from silky coats of chestnut brown and dappled gray. Ankles are carefully felt.

Many cars and pickup trucks are parked outside the stables, New York and Florida plates scattered among the Kentuckys. Old bicycles that were pedaled out Versailles Road in the dark stand propped against trees.

The track kitchen is alive with clattering plates and conversation. I’ll take the special. Sausage or bacon? Apples or grits? Coffee in a thick stone mug. That’ll be $5.26. Customers gaze at framed photographs of champions on the walls — and dream.

By mid-morning, sunshine reaches into the paddock and touches the big, white sycamore tree. Raindrops begin to dry off neatly trimmed boxwoods along the rail. A man with a leaf blower sweeps grass clippings from soft pavers.

A beer truck and an ice truck release their cargo. Kegs are stacked by concession stands and boxes beside rows of betting windows in the dim underneath of General Admission. Men with yellow ladders move from one rafter-mounted TV screen to another, pulling off fabric covers.

White metal tables, each with five chairs, stand beside pansies freshly planted in green washtubs. The sound of a sweeping broom echoes from a stone corridor that leads to the clubhouse. In a gift shop window, colorful Derby hats wait for just the right pretty head.

Soon there will be people; lots of people. Colorful dresses, navy blazers, khakis and bright ties. White parasols along the grandstand balcony. A sea of sunglasses and sunburns below.

Burgoo and beer. Crab cakes, fried green tomatoes and bread pudding bathed in sweet bourbon sauce.

It must be spring. It must be Keeneland.

Click here to watch a video of the sights and sounds of Keeneland by Herald-Leader photojournalist David Stephenson

Click on photos below to enlarge.

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. 

DANVILLE — It’s a long way from the Italian island of Murano — the center of Venetian glassblowing for 1,000 years — to the converted railroad shed beside the tracks at the edge of Centre College’s campus.

But that shed has been producing some fine art glass for two decades — and especially for the past week.

That’s because this month, Lino Tagliapietra, one of the world’s greatest glassblowers, is making his fourth trip to Danville to pass along six decades of expertise to art students at Centre.

If you want to watch, he will have public demonstrations Monday and Tuesday.

It was cold and rainy outside last Tuesday, but it was toasty in the glass studio of Centre’s Jones Visual Arts Center — better known as the Art Barn. The glass furnaces were glowing 2,200-degree orange as students watched Tagliapietra turn rods of colored glass into intricately patterned vessels.

With a calm demeanor and a deft touch, the 74-year-old master made a blob of molten glass almost dance at the end of his hollow steel rod. The glass was blown, rolled, pinched, twisted and snipped as Tagliapietra padded around the studio in Venetian slippers. All the while, he and his assistants kept the glass pliable with quick dips into the furnace or a skillfully applied blowtorch.

“Glass is an all-natural material … fire, sand and water combined together,” Tagliapietra said during an interview between classes. “I feel it is a very big medium. I think it is probably one of the most beautiful mediums in our life.”

Tagliapietra was born on Murano, near Venice, and apprenticed to a famous glass studio when he was 11. By 21, he had achieved the rank of maestro. He worked as a master glassblower and designer for some of Italy’s best studios. But he wanted more.

In the 1960s, he began adding his own concepts to the centuries-old methods of Venetian glassmaking. By the 1970s, he was collaborating with other artists, creating techniques, patterns and designs, and passing his knowledge on to students around the world.

One of them was Stephen Rolfe Powell, a 1974 Centre alum who discovered hot glass as a graduate student in ceramics. Powell returned to Centre to teach in 1983 and built the hot-glass studio two years later with help from Corning Glass in Harrodsburg and Philips Lighting in Danville. Powell has since become one of Kentucky’s most-honored teachers — and artists. His large, colorful glass vessels have earned him an international reputation.

Tagliapietra and Powell became close friends, and they have worked together all over the world. Powell persuaded the master to visit Danville for the first time in 2000 by promising to take him to the Kentucky Derby. “I pulled out every stop I knew to get good seats,” Powell said.

Tagliapietra returned to Centre in 2004, when he received an honorary degree along with then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “He started working in a factory at 11 and never studied, never got his degrees,” Powell said. “So him getting the doctoral degree was really cool. It was a pretty touching moment.”

The master returned to Danville in 2006, and he is spending nine days here this month. Powell planned Saturday to take him to his first American football game: Kentucky vs. Vanderbilt.

“I feel very grateful to Centre College,” Tagliapietra said. “For me it is very important to come back here to spend time with Stephen and the kids. I respect Stephen as a teacher and a man. I feel he is a true gentleman.”

Sitting on temporary bleachers in the small studio, Centre students watched closely as Tagliapietra and his assistants worked. A few advanced students helped here and there.

“I don’t think I could have imagined when I came to Centre that the best glassblower in the world would be here,” said Michael Garton, a junior art major from Louisville, who took careful notes.

Garton is primarily a painter, but he’s attracted to hot glass. “There’s so much you can do with color and transparency that you can’t do with any other medium,” he said. What is he learning by watching the master? “Mostly that there’s a long way to go,” he said, smiling.

Tagliapietra lives on Murano but works at a studio near Seattle for three months each year. He has a dozen assistants there — each an accomplished artist in his or her own right.

One of the four assistants who accompanied him to Danville was 2002 Centre graduate D.H. McNabb, 28. He met Tagliapietra during his first visit here. Working for the master for the past five years has been “absolutely amazing,” McNabb said.

“Lino understands the history of where he came from … all of the tradition of glass,” McNabb said. “Then he came over here and was able to see the innovative approach of the Americans … and that opened him up to more exploration. That stopped him from being restrained by his techniques and helped him to invent new ones.”

When Tagliapietra is working in Seattle, he goes at it hard, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. “It’s hard work, but a lot of love,” McNabb said. “I’m just in awe of him.”

After 63 years of glassblowing, Tagliapietra said he is still learning, experimenting and growing as an artist.

“Every time I do one piece, or one series, I try to test myself,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you did yesterday. It’s important what you do today and tomorrow.”

If you go

Lino Tagliapietra glass-blowing demonstrations

The master artist will blow glass at Centre College’s Jones Visual Arts Center on Beatty Avenue in Danville at the following times: 8-11 a.m. and noon-3 p.m. Nov. 17 and 8 a.m.-noon Nov. 18.

The observation gallery is small, so space is limited.

For more information, and to see examples of Tagliapietra’s work, go to www.linotagliapietra.com. For more info about Centre’s glass program, go to www.centre.edu.

Here’s a piece Lino Tagliapietra made last Tuesday morning, from start to finish. Click on each photo to enlarge it:

There’s a lot more to Lexington history than Henry Clay, Mary Todd Lincoln and Man o’ War.

Take, for example, the contributions African-Americans have made to the city’s growth and development since the very beginning.

This is a good weekend to learn some of that history, as the east end will be alive with the 20th annual Roots and Heritage Festival.

For a good introduction, consider walking, biking or driving the African American Heritage Trail in downtown Lexington, which includes 10 sites that have been touchstones in the community since the days of slavery.

The Heritage Trail was developed by Doris Wilkinson, a Lexington native who in 1958 became the first African-American woman to earn an undergraduate degree from the University of Kentucky and in 1967 became the first to be hired as a full-time faculty member.

Wilkinson, a sociologist, got the idea for the trail after spending several summers at Harvard University.

“What made Boston and Cambridge stand out was that they had incorporated ethnic diversity and history into their city’s public face,” Wilkinson said. “I thought, what is here that would link the growth and history of Lexington to African-Americans? How can we further facilitate the image of Lexington as a progressive city with a rich ethnic heritage?”

Wilkinson developed the trail and put together a pamphlet in 2000 that was quickly embraced by the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau. Copies can be downloaded from the bureau’s Web site. Wilkinson hopes to add sites to the trail and encourage its use in education.

African-Americans make up only 13.8 percent of Lexington’s population, according to census figures. But before the Civil War, it was twice that. In 1860, one in four Lexington residents was a slave, and Fayette was one of Kentucky’s largest slave-holding counties.

Lexington also was one of the South’s largest slave markets. Thousands of African-Americans were sold on the block at Cheapside, near the old Fayette County Courthouse. And a whipping post was erected there in 1847, where slaves could be punished for such infractions as disobeying their masters or violating the 7 p.m. curfew.

That history wasn’t acknowledged with a state historical marker until five years ago. Cheapside is one stop on the Heritage Trail. Want to learn more? The 1955 book Lincoln and the Bluegrass by Lexington lawyer William Townsend includes a vivid and well-documented account of the ugliest chapter in Lexington’s history.

Like at Cheapside, nothing but markers remain at some other sites on the trail — the offices of pioneering black physicians on North Broadway, the long-gone pond off Bolivar Street where baptisms were held, and the home of Isaac Murphy, a jockey who won the Kentucky Derby three times.

The same is true of two more sites Wilkinson plans to add to the trail: the Mammoth Insurance Co. on De weese Street, and the former home of Consolidated Baptist Church. The old church on South Upper was recently demolished to make way for a fast-food restaurant.

A marker about the Mammoth Insurance Co. was placed across the street from its former offices at the site of another stop on the trail, the Polk-Dalton Infirmary, where several African-American doctors practiced when Deweese Street was the hub of segregated Lexington’s black community. The infirmary building now houses offices of the Urban League.

The other sites on the Heritage Trail are old African-American churches scattered throughout downtown. They give a sense of the importance of religion in the community, as well as the close proximity in which Lexington’s black and white residents lived and worshiped in the 19th century despite their separate social structures.

“The churches were sort of havens, a refuge from segregation,” Wilkinson said. “That’s why they dominate the trail. They were the major institutions.”

The oldest congregation is Historic Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church, which was organized in 1790 by slave Peter Duerett. The church has been at its West Maxwell Street site since 1822.

St. Paul AME church on North Upper was built in 1826, right behind fashionable Gratz Park. The current building is the result of a 1906 remodeling.

Main Street Baptist Church was built in 1870 next door to the house where Mary Todd lived for seven years before she married Abraham Lincoln in 1839. The original church’s cornerstone is part of a wall beside the current sanctuary.

The beautiful East Second Street Christian Church building has stood on Constitution Street since 1880. Another handsome 19th-century building on the trail is the old First Baptist Church sanctuary at the corner of Short and Deweese streets.

Of course, there’s a lot more African-American history beyond downtown.

There are more than a dozen rural black communities in Fayette County such Jimtown, Uttingertown and Bracktown.

There were other notable figures, such as the Chilesburg-born Jimmy Winkfield, one of the early 20th century’s greatest jockeys. He rode for the czar in Russia and retired in France. His fascinating life story was told in the 2006 book Black Maestro, by New York Times racing writer Joe Drape.

If you have a couple of hours free this weekend, the African American Heritage Trail is a good place to start.

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?

This week offers a couple of good opportunities to learn more about plans for improving Lexington and to have your say about them.

The Urban County Council panel that is studying tax increment financing (TIF) for downtown improvements related to Dudley Webb’s proposed CentrePointe development will have a public hearing Tuesday at 6 p.m. in council chambers at Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

I’m skeptical about a CentrePointe TIF project for several reasons, but I’m keeping an open mind. I’m glad city officials are studying the issue closely. I’m also glad they have hired their own TIF expert for advice, rather than relying only on The Webb Companies’ consultant.

Another good opportunity for civic engagement is a series of public meetings tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday on the future of Lexington’s excellent system of public parks. It’s an opportunity to have your say as city officials put together a parks master plan for the next decade. Click here or here for more details.

I wasn’t surprised by the public’s negative reaction to three out-of-the-box designs dreamed up over the weekend as alternatives to Dudley Webb’s proposed CentrePointe tower.

A story in Tuesday’s Herald-Leader included renderings of the concepts developed during a marathon 48-hour workshop. The designs were done by three teams of students from the University of Kentucky’s College of Design working under prominent architects from UK, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The designs were unconventional. A couple of them were almost bizarre. They were nothing like traditional Lexington architecture. And they were nothing like Webb’s 1980s-style glass tower that has been criticized as too massive and bland to put in the middle of Lexington for the next century or so.

Readers posted dozens of comments about the designs on Kentucky.com — and most of them were scathing.

I understood the reaction. It was my first reaction, too.

Then I took a deep breath and thought again.

These weren’t finished plans, or even real ­proposals. They weren’t meant to be. They were creative ideas, developed quickly and offered up to spark other ideas that might lead to something special. That’s the way innovation works.

Like Webb, I was out of town Monday and couldn’t attend the students’ presentation. So I went over to UK on Tuesday to get a briefing from Michael Speaks, the college’s dean, who organized the workshop.

”It’s a lot of stuff to do in a couple of days,“ Speaks said before walking me through each concept. ”These are not final designs by any stretch of the imagination. But they show what can be done.“

Each team was told to confine itself to the block and try to stay true to the ­CentrePointe proposal — a hotel, luxury condos, a restaurant and retail space.

”These architects approached this in very different ways,“ Speaks said. But he noted that there were many things all of the designs had in common.

All three teams wanted to keep some of the historic buildings that have been a big part of the CentrePointe controversy and weave them into contemporary new construction. The most valued buildings were the Joe Rosenberg building, which dates to 1826, and the century-old building that housed The Dame music club.

All of the teams wanted to keep the Farmers Market on the block, and some added an amphitheater, a small park and other public space. Indeed, perhaps the most appealing part of all of the concepts was how they offered open, inviting pedestrian space at street level.

All three teams thought the project could be more effectively developed in phases, rather than all at once. And they all thought Webb was trying to cram too much square-footage onto the 1.7-acre block.

All chose to have several towers, rather than the one monolith Webb has proposed.

Speaks noted that in all of the designs, the towers were the wildest and least-finished part of the concepts — and the part that elicited the most negative public reaction.

”You look at these project concepts and think how crazy they are,“ Speaks said. ”Then watch the Olympics, look at what they’ve recently built in Beijing, and think again. They won’t look so crazy a month from now.“

By late afternoon Tuesday, more than 1,500 people had voted for their favorite design in the Kentucky.com poll. Webb’s design was leading the closest alternative 2-to-1.

”We’d be surprised if CentrePointe wasn’t winning, in a way,“ Speaks said. ”A lot of people want to support what’s easy, what they’re used to seeing, what’s being done elsewhere.“

Of course, the workshop process was all backward. This type of brainstorming session should have been done at the beginning, as has been done by developers of the proposed Lexington Distillery District project on Manchester Street.

Architecture workshops like this are intended to look at the location, the surrounding areas, and the needs a building is trying to satisfy, and to explore ways to meet those needs.

The goal is to produce a design that solves all of the development’s ”problems“ and adds something more: Value for an entire area, or even a city.

CentrePointe, on the other hand, was developed in secret and unveiled as a done deal. Webb has wanted no creative or public input. So it looks like we’re stuck with a piece of recycled architecture two decades out of date.

CentrePointe seems to be a done deal, and Webb might continue to thumb his nose at critics.

But public discussion surrounding CentrePointe and the awareness of downtown development it has created might pay off in the future.

”I don’t care how many people laugh and make fun of these projects,“ Speaks said as he paged through the three workshop concepts on his desktop computer.

Then he clicked on ­Kentucky.com to check the latest online poll results.

”If we can get 1,500 people to look at these ideas and think about design, then we’ve accomplished something.“

It helped to be Chinese. It helped even more to have a friend who is an earthquake damage inspector for the Chinese government.

As the two men traveled through central China for 10 days last month, Zhenming Wang, who heads the ­Kentucky Geological Survey’s ­Geological Hazards Section at the University of Kentucky, tried to blend in and let his friend do the talking.

As a result, Wang got a rare ­insider’s look at the devastation wrought by the magnitude 8.0 earthquake that struck China on May 12, killing nearly 70,000 people and displacing tens of thousands more.

Wang also was able to gather ­valuable data to help Western ­Kentucky prepare for an inevitable repeat of similar quakes that hit along the New Madrid Fault near the Mississippi River in 1811 and 1812. The good news: It might not be as bad as we’ve always thought.

Photos Wang took during his trip vividly show the destruction in China: A collapsed bridge span. A new luxury hotel so cracked it must now be torn down. Schools reduced to rubble. A family eating lunch in the ruins of their home, which no longer has a roof or walls. A huge boulder that rolled off a mountain, crushing a car on the road below. Along the fault line, rows of corn are rearranged and a waterfall has appeared in a river.

Still, the ground-shaking that occurred for perhaps two minutes during the quake wasn’t as severe as Wang expected.

Some buildings were destroyed, but others next to them were hardly damaged. That was especially true near the fault line, where structures on one side were often more damaged than on the other.

In some cases, damaged or ­destroyed buildings were not ­properly designed to withstand as much ground-shaking as they received. In many more cases, though, the ­damage was the result of shoddy construction, he said.

That was often true in schools, which is why so many of the dead were children crushed in their classrooms. Wang has one photo of a bulletin board in a destroyed school’s main hall. It is filled with students’ portraits. “I don’t know how many of them survived,” he said. “It was very, very sad.”

Wang said he talked with a woman whose young son had died when his school collapsed, and now she faced having to demolish her recently built but damaged home. The boy’s friend lived nearby; he escaped because he was able to run quickly out of the school when the quake began.

“Everywhere I went, if they put just a little design and construction attention to it, it was fine,” said Wang, who is from southeast China, far from the earthquake zone. “If people had just spent a little more money. Economically, they could have afforded to do it. This was both a natural and a man-made disaster.”

While China did too little to prepare for this earthquake, Western Kentucky might have done too much. Wang said his research ­estimates that ground-shaking around Paducah during a worst-case New Madrid quake would likely be only half as strong as previous estimates.

“Previously, in Paducah, builders had to do more than in San Francisco and L.A., and that just didn’t make sense,” he said. “I can now see several federal agencies revising certain things.”

Wang said there are ­differences in geology between China and Western Kentucky and Tennessee, and many more differences in ­topography. For example, many people in China died in huge landslides. “We certainly wouldn’t have this landslide issue, because our land is flat,” he said.

But there is danger from so-called “liquefaction,” where the ground basically turns to soup and ­buildings sink. That’s of special ­concern in Memphis.

Based on his research, and other new science, Wang thinks some building codes for bridges and public ­buildings in Western ­Kentucky could be further eased, which would save money and help the area’s battered economy. Residential building codes already have been revised in recent years.

“Clearly, the estimate for ground motion in Paducah is too high,” Wang said. “The methodology they used is flawed. It was based on what we knew in the 1960s and 1970s. We know more now than then.”

Wang said he hopes his research will be useful in finding the right balance in earthquake construction standards – protecting public safety without unnecessarily driving up costs.

“My job is to look at the science, and let the policy-makers make those ­decisions,” he said.

Lexington in July could be a boring place for a kid in the 1960s — except during the Lions Bluegrass Fair.

I always looked forward to the fair. There were rides with all the thrills that gravity, motion and speed could produce.

State Troopers in crisp uniforms manned an elaborate miniature village with little electric cars for kids to drive. Obey all the traffic rules and you went home with a Junior Trooper badge.

My brothers and I went home with a lot more, too: Super balls, stuffed animals, squirt guns and a bag of trinkets from Lexington businesses. We always hoped the souvenir yardsticks would be gone by the time we got there; otherwise, they would eventually become our parents’ disciplinary tool of last resort. I’m sure at least one Perry Lumber Co. yardstick met its end by breaking across mine.

There’s something magical about colored lights from a spinning Ferris wheel and laughter from a midway. I didn’t understand it at the time, but the whole reason for the Lions Bluegrass Fair was to help kids less fortunate than me — kids who couldn’t see those lights or hear that laughter.

The fair began its annual run Thursday at Masterson Station Park. The Lexington Lions Club is proud that, in addition to becoming a fixture of Bluegrass life, the fair has raised more than $1.4 million to support its charitable work.

The Lions Club was the brainchild of Melvin Jones, a Chicago businessman who thought community service was as important as making money. He started the first club in 1917. The organization has since grown to 1.3 million members in 202 countries.

The Lexington Lions Club was started in 1921, four years before Helen Keller spoke to the organization’s national convention and inspired its mission. She urged Lions to become ”knights of the blind in the crusade against darkness.“

Since then, much Lions Club work has focused on helping people — especially poor people and children — who have sight or hearing problems or suffer from diabetes. A key effort is stopping preventable blindness.

The Lexington Lions provide more than 800 pair of new eyeglasses each year to people in Fayette County, and they collect more than 6,000 used eyeglass frames for reuse. The club conducts more than 100 eye exams and pays for several eye surgeries, usually to remove cataracts. It pays for more than 50 hearing aids and sponsors camps and day programs for blind, deaf and diabetic children.

”We are often the resource of last resort,“ said club president Bill Moody, a retired University of Kentucky professor. ”We’ve helped many people correct vision and hearing problems, enabling them to get jobs and become taxpayers.“

Last year, the Lexington Lions’ work was funded by $100,000 in Bluegrass Fair proceeds and $40,000 in earnings from a $1 million endowment fund made possible by the fair.

The Lions Club had several early fund-raisers – including a turtle derby and a radio auction – before it started the Bluegrass Fair in 1961, according to longtime club secretary Sue Alexander. That first fair at The Red Mile cleared $800.

Some early fairs netted the club as much as $61,000. Others lost as much as $58,000. A lot depended on the weather and other forces the Lions couldn’t control.

For instance, one evening in July 1969 the fair was all but deserted. Lexingtonians were at home, glued to their television sets, watching Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon.

The fair moved to Masterson Station Park in 1976, and the Lions Club contracted with professional management in 1996. Since then, the event has been far more successful.

Club members sell tickets, manage parking and do a thousand other chores needed to accommodate the more than 75,000 visitors who will attend the fair before it closes July 20.

”We have a great group of volunteers; some are out here every night,“ said Ron Mossotti, a club member now in his 12th year as fair manager. ”I grew up a mile from the New York State Fair, and I used to sneak under the fence and go every day. So my thing is running the fair.“

On Wednesday evening, club members turned out in their gold satin vests with purple trim for a cookout to dedicate the first permanent building on the fairgrounds. The 66-by-100-foot building with a large shelter at one end will house exhibits and events during the fair – as well as provide facilities for the Lions to give free vision and hearing screenings.

The club paid for the building and gave it to the city, which owns the park, including the 24-acre fairgrounds that the club maintains. The city will rent out the building other times of the year, splitting proceeds with the Lions Club.

That building, plus another new structure paid for by the city and several agriculture groups, will allow the Bluegrass Fair to restore the livestock- and produce-judging events that stopped when the fair left The Red Mile three decades ago.

So come out to the Lions Bluegrass Fair. If livestock judging isn’t your thing, maybe you’ll like the rides, the carnival games, the horse and dog shows or the beauty pageants.

Admission is only $5, and children 6 and younger get in free. Parking is free, too, as are the magical lights of the Ferris wheel, the laughter of the midway and the satisfaction of knowing you are helping the Lions Club help people less fortunate than you.

What’s a catfish worth? The one Dale Flener just caught earned him $50,000.

For 28 years, the Morgantown Butler County Chamber of Commerce has sponsored the Green River Catfish Festival over the Independence Day weekend. After all, the western Kentucky town calls itself the Catfish Capital of the World.

The festival includes an antique tractor show, a livestock show, carnival rides and a “star search” contest. But the main event is a fishing tournament where people try to catch one of the tagged-and-numbered catfish sponsored by local businesses and released into the Green River before the festival.

People who catch one of 55 tagged fish during the three-day tournament earn prizes of between $100 and $1,000. Nineteen of those were caught this year; all were worth $100, except for one that paid $250.

There also is one grand prize fish. The last time anyone caught it, back in 1992, it was worth $10,000. In more recent years, it has been worth $50,000. But nobody caught it. Until last Thursday evening.

That’s when Flener, who has fished in the contest for all of its 28 years but never caught a tagged fish, hooked into the biggest payday of his life.

“I was born and raised here, and I’ve been fishing Green River all my life,” said Flener, 67, who lives in the Butler County community of Aberdeen and retired after 37 years of working at the Holley Carburetor plant in nearby Bowling Green.

The $50,000 prize money came from an insurance policy that local businesses and the chamber paid $5,000 for, said Amanda Hatcher, the chamber’s executive director.

When reached on his cell phone Monday morning, Flener was at the insurance agent’s office filling out papers to collect his winnings. He still seemed a little stunned, as he was Saturday evening when the nearly 500 competing fishermen gathered at Charles Black City Park to find out which tagged fish had earned which prizes.

What does Flener plan to do with his winnings? He hasn’t figured that out yet.

“My wife has a whole lot to say about that,” Flener said. One thing he’s thinking about: A trip to Disney World with his granddaughters, who are 5, 9 and 21.

And what will he do with the pound-and-a-half catfish that brought him Butler County fame and fortune? “I’m going to mount it if I can,” he said.

Photo: Dale Flener, in red-striped shirt, reacts to the announcement of his $50,000 win. Listen to the scene by clicking the arrow below. Photo and audio provided by Morgantown Butler County Chamber of Commerce.  Thanks to Butler County native Sherri Phelps for the tip.

Click here to listen to a short audio clip of Flener being announced as the winner.

Google, I wish you had warned me you were coming.

I would have cut up that brush pile and stuffed it in the Lenny — as my wife probably told me to do — instead of leaving it at the curb for your roving camera to find.

Now, a color photo of my house and brush pile is there for all the world to see on Google Maps’ Street View.

Lexington and 36 other cities were added earlier this month to Street View, a year-old service that allows Internet users to type in an address or click on a map and get a panoramic view as if they were standing in the street.

It’s a big advancement from online satellite images, where you can zoom in and perhaps make out the shape of your driveway. With Street View, you can count the panes on the windows.

For Realtors, it’s a dream come true. For the rest of us, it’s fascinating technology — and more than a little creepy.

So how did they do this?

Google sent cars out on public streets equipped with special digital video cameras. The cameras filmed everything around them, including the lady walking her dog outside my neighbor’s house and the truck filled with pallets driving past City Hall. The images look as if they were taken last summer.

The video was reduced to stop-action images, embedded with global-positioning coordinates, matched with street addresses and posted online.

To find your house, go to Google, click “Maps” and type in your address. If Google’s video car went down your street, you’ll be shown a picture of your house. (Or, perhaps, a neighbor’s house. Addresses are approximate.) You can see where the video car went, because the maps shows those streets in blue.

Once you have an image on your screen, you can move up and down the street by clicking on computer-generated arrows. You also can zoom in and out, and spin the view around. Way cool.

Of course, not everyone is happy about it.

Communities in other states with private streets have banned Google’s video car. Others have asked Google to remove images of their homes, and the company has generally agreed. The Pentagon has banned images of military bases.

Despite technology that blurs the faces of most people caught in the Google lens, the European Union is concerned that future filming there might violate some countries’ privacy laws.

Taking pictures on a public street isn’t illegal in this country. Already, people with too much time on their hands have found Street View images more embarrassing than a front-yard brush pile. There’s a burning car, a man walking out of a strip club, a boy falling off his bike and a man urinating in an alley. None of those images seem to be from Lexington — yet.

I spent a couple of hours looking at Lexington through the eyes of Google.

The first thing I noticed was that some big streets were missed, while the camera car made a few odd detours — such as Von Alley, between 5th Street and Fayette Park, and the occasional dead-end rural road. The camera car went down every lane in Lexington Cemetery where, predictably, there was little activity. You can check your family plot to make sure.

I didn’t see anyone coming out of a strip club or doing anything risque. But, then, Lexington isn’t a very risque place in the middle of a summer day.

When you were little, your Sunday school teacher told you to behave as if someone were always watching. George Orwell warned us long ago about Big Brother.

But who would have thought Big Brother would have a goofy name like Google?