The Bluegrass and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click on photos below to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder has an excellent piece on the discussion about Barrack Obama’s “Appalachian problem.” It offers statistics showing that race is no more an issue in Appalachia than many other parts of the country, including New York. Bishop argues that Obama would get a lot more support in the mountains if he would simply show up and try. It worked for Jesse Jackson two decades ago.

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In the last Kentucky Notebook, I mentioned “retiree” blogs. Another interesting idea comes from Marty Solomon, a retired University of Kentucky education professor. Like many people, Solomon says he is frustrated that some stories he thinks are important don’t get much coverage by major new organizations. So he has created The Watchdog Post blog to draw attention to them.