East End of Town - 65 years ago

Speaking of the East End of Maysville, it was a wonderful place in which to grow up. In the years between 1944 and 1964, there was little, if any, fear in the minds of parents who lived along that street, other than a child being hit by a car on the street. Growing up there during those years, it was as if the world was our oyster; nothing frightened us, other than Billy Dice, who lived in the next block up. From day 2, almost all of us walked to school everyday. It was three or four blocks from my house to the Sixth Ward school. I walked, rode my bicycle, and skated to school. I was a Patrol Boy in the fifth grade (high honor) and wore my belt and held my sign with pride. I will admit, however, that I usually stopped at Bill Kenton's house on the way to school because, first, they always had sweet rolls from Magee's Bakery and next, Mrs. Kenton always drove Bill (and me) to school in that great long dark blue Buick. Coming home was another story. We could walk down Second Street or we could walk down Williams Street. Bill Kenton's house was in the ten hundred block, so he would peel off there. I lived in the eight hundred block, which meant that I had to get through, you guessed it, the nine hundred block. Billy Dice lived on the river side of Second Street, but there was an open lot across the street from his house so he could see Williams Street plainly. I don't know what time that damned kid got home from school, but he was always waiting for me and for any other little kids who were walking with me. We were totally terrified of Billy and he did everything he could think of to amplify that fear. He would chase us, jump out from behind cars or bushes in front of us, threaten to cut our heads off with a knife. He always had a big hunting knife strapped on his belt. And you know, I never had sense enough to tell my parents what mortal danger I was in coming home from school. I don't know whether they could have done anything about it or not because Billy was a pretty bad kid, or at least we thought so. Anyway, the afternoons we got by that point in our journey without any encounter of the dreaded Billy was simply a great, great day, no matter what the weather. He really never actually did anything to us, but I was scared to death of him. Otherwise, East Second Street was just like the Garden of Eden. Before the floodwall, the houses along the street had long, long back yards, stretching from the house down to the "first bank." When you got to the first bank, the land dropped off about eight to ten feet. When you got to the bottom of the first bank, you were in the garden area, the spot where people raised wonderful vegetables, flowers and what have you. This garden area was problaby about 200 to 300 feet wide and its soil was replenished every year by spring floods. The next bank was the actual river bank. River willow trees (wild, stumpy and not pretty) grew on this bank and kept the river from washing the bank away. The bank sloped very gently down, through the willows, to the river shore, which was sandy. And then, of course, the river. For many years after we moved to Second Street, there was no municipal trash service. Everyone was expected to take care of that problem by themselves. I remember my mother carefully separating the trash from the garbage. The garbage she would wrap in newspaper and place in a separate can. The trash went into another for burning in a large barrel with holes in the bottom so air could enter. The garbage, however, wouldn't burn, so everybody took their garbage and threw it over the first bank. If that situation was objectionable, I never knew it. Of course, this was long before the days of the EPA. One of the really fun neighborhood social events was usually held in the spring time when the weather was nice. Every year, the river flooded to some degree or another, but most years, it got up near the top of the first bank. Because of the garbage, there were some monumental rats on the riverbank. So, at cocktail time, we all gathered down there, the adults with their drinks and .22 calibre rifles; the men shot at rats that were swimming in the flood waters. This was a great celebration and a way to reduce the rat population on the riverbank. My father was a good shot, but the more he drank, the fewer rats he hit. That seemed to be true of all the men who had guns; and the more they missed, the funnier they thought it was. Memorable! All Second Street children were told all sorts of things about how dangerous the river was. The biggest danger were the step-offs. Such things do exist, but they aren't a significant danger to those who can swim well. Most of us couldn't! To re-inforce the fear factor, we were told that you could walk out into the river until the water was up to your knees and, without any warning, the next step would take you over the step-off, whereupon under water currents would suck you under and that would be the end of you. Occasionally, someone would drown or jump off the bridge and the police would be out in boats with grappling hooks trying to find the body. Sometimes they found them and sometimes they didn't. Whenever this happened, it was a learning experience and an opportunity to reinforce the danger we would be in if we went into the water. There was another reason we didn't go into the water much. About every three blocks along the street, a sewer emptied into the river. It was raw sewage; as fourth and fifth graders, we were most interested in the condoms that emerged, and would spend serious time speculating about whose house "that" came from. We all knew it didn't come from one of our houses, because our parents didn't do that stuff. Anyway, the sewers were a considerable deterrent to getting into the water. Those locations were, however, the prime fishing spots because the fish seemed to be attracted to the sewage. Parenthetically, we didn't catch many and we certainly didn't eat them. We sat on the river shore, prop up our poles on a forked stick, and wait for the end of the pole to quiver. That meant that a fish was interested in the bait. We used chopped pork liver (the older, the better) to fish for cat fish, worms to fish for other fish and some kids used wheatie balls, particularly for carp. I remember trying to make wheatie balls one time. I took what was left of the wheatie cereal to the river bank and mixed them with water and tried to roll the result into a ball. I got that far, but everytime I tried to put one on the hook, it disintegrated into a sloppy mess. No one ever told me that you had to make them a day or two before and let them dry before they would hold together on the hook. So, I never caught any carp. The fishing was a wonderful pastime. The catch was not so good, but looking back on it, we certainly didn't think we were wasting our time. In any event, the "river bank" was a magical place. We had our Army Club on the river bank, where eight to ten little boys would take their army guns, hide behind trees and stumps, and shoot at the enemy. We played cowboys and Indians some, but mostly cowboys chasing bad guys who were either cattle rustlers or bank robbers. If the garden plots had not been plowed in the spring, a plant called a horseweed would grow densely everywhere. Indeed, they grew to be ten feet tall and perhaps an inch to two inches thick. If you went into the horseweeds, they were so close together that there was no way anybody could find you, making it a perfect place for an ambush. The stalk of the weed was slightly prickly and they were hard to pull up. When the autumn came, though, these weeds turned to gray stalks of cellulose and the head of the weed just withered up! This was when they were really fun. After the first frost, they became much easier to pull up. By this time, they were very dry and would burn like tinder. Well, by this time, the floodwall was pretty much finished and we built fires on the river bank all the time. We used the horseweed to start the fire and would gather drift wood or fallen rotten limbs and would keep the fire going for hours. When the floodwall was completed, field fescue was planted on it. When this fescue dies with the oncoming cold weather, it turns brown and will burn. One day, our riverbank fire got out of control and set the floodwall on fire. It was a pretty good blaze. We tried to stamp it out, but we couldn't. So, what did we do? We vanished into the wilds of the riverbank, and traveled several blocks downstream before re-surfacing on Second Street. We heard the fire engine go by; fortunately nothing of consequence was burned, and we were not asked about the matter. Nor did we mention it. When I was in the sixth grade, almost all adults that I knew smoked cigarettes. My grandmothers didn't, but they were the only people I knew who refrained. Mr. Buck Atkinson lived a few door up the street from us and he and his wife were great friends with my parents. Mr. Atkinson worked for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and had scads of four-pack cigarettes. These four packs were paper, usually light cardboard, with the brand printed just as on full package, and contained four cigarettes. R. J. Reynolds made Camel, Winston, Salem and my mother's brand, Cavalier. Cavalier were king-size Camels and, if anything, they were stronger. Dad smoked Camels and Mr. Atkinson brought them carton after carton of these sample cigarettes. Sometime in the spring of my sixth grade year, I stole two sample packs of Cavalier and my friend, David, and I climbed the floodwall enroute to the river bank. We had matches and decided to build a fire so that should be smell of smoke when we got home, we could blame it on the bon fire. From that time on, until I was fifty years old, I was an ardent smoker and loved everyone of the cigarettes I smoked. Enough of this rambling. I will revisit this tale on a subject that is a little more serious, one of these days.

East End of Town

I notice that a lot of work is going on downtown relative to the "mall" and the parking lot behind the State National (now U S) Bank. I'm not exactly sure what is intended, but the City is to be commended about the work they sponsor and the projects undertaken in the downtown area. Without the City's intervention, the downtown story would be an entirely different tale.

But, downtown is not the whole town. Area neighborhoods everywhere are deserving of municipal attention. A lot of the blocks along Forest Avenue have deteriorated badly in the past twenty years. Some parts of Eastland are savaged by drug dealers. East Second Street is still in pretty good shape, but parts of Williams Street could be improved. Lower socio-economic neighborhoods certainly need attention.

Of course, there is little a muncipality can do about private property, unless it fails to meet code requirements and then, the options are limited. But there are some opportunities that might avail themselves if attention were paid to timely identifying blighted areas and addressing problems as they arise.

The "Renaissance Committee" of the City of Maysville has been an extraordinarily effective device for staying on top of downtown problems and bringing imaginative solutions to those problem. That program was a state-sponsored and, to a limited degree, state-funded effort to address deteriorating old-town commercial (downtown) areas in cities all over the Commonwealth.

Just because, however, the state was involved in Renaissance does not mean that the concept could not be used in connection with other neighborhoods. A committee or committees could be appointed, comprised of thoughtful residents of the affected part of town, who would draw boundary lines around the areas to be included for re-vitalization. Specific problems could be identified and the committee, with help from the City staff, could arrive at solutions. A lot of ideas would not necessarily involve a lot of money; nonetheless, with the stimulus funds looking for "shovel ready" projects, it is entirely conceivable that projects could be developed with dispatch and application made for their funding and implementation.

For example, there is a lot of vacant warehouse space in the 800 block of Forest Avenue between Union and Wood Streets, and also including the area of the old Southwestern warehouse on the north side of the railroad. Not all of those facilities are unused, but their current use is not nearly so profitable as it once was. If those buildings were demolished, the vacant ground would, with work, make attractive neighborhoods or, perhaps an up-town park. What if Parker Tobacco Co. was converted to loft apartments. Whatever the possibilities, it makes most sense to let the people who live there make the decisions about ultimate use.

To be a good place to live, Maysville needs to be a good place for everybody who lives here. The struggle to keep things up is never over, and successes are bound to be interspersed with failure. We just cannot ever give up!

Reflections on the Kennedy Legacy.

I guess I wasn't surprised this morning when the television announced that Senator Ted Kennedy had died during the night from brain cancer. It came a little sooner than I expected, but it was inevitable. Brain cancer is a devastating disease; I think he confronted it bravely.

The Kennedy family was a wealthy one and leaned heavily toward the liberal side of things. There were four brothers in Ted's generation and he was the only one who died of natural causes.  Brother Joe died in combat during the Second World War and John and Bobby were assasinated.  As unusual as that is, it is even more unusual, indeed unique, that three brothers simultaneously held  the offices of President of the United States, Attorney General of the United States and Senator in the United States Senate.  I don't think that's ever happend before or since.

On a different level, Teddy Kennedy is the pinnacle example of how a public figure can redeem himself in the court of public opinion. Driving drunk at Chapaquiddick with a young girl who drowned when the car plunged into a salt pond would be enough to destroy the most well-loved of public figures; I thought at the time that Kennedy could never possibly recover from the stigma. While he avoided prosecution (undoubtedly with the help of influence in the right spots), he nevertheless took an incredible beating in the press and television media on a nation-wide basis. Portrayed as a person of privilege, he appeared to be above the law. And such a person is one who the American people love to hate.

And yet as the years went by, Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy clan, grew in stature and garnered respect from both sides of the aisle in the Senate. On his Sunday morning show last week, George Stephanopolous asked John McCain if the health care debate in the Senate would have been different had Teddy Kennedy been actively involved. McCain replied that Kennedy would have made all the difference. That's a long, long way from Chapaquiddick.

Jewels of Maysville - Elsie Downing

Elsie Hatfield Downing was born in Lancaster, Ky. Dr. Hatfield, her father, practiced dentistry there and sent Elsie to school at Transylvania. She pledged Tri-Delta and was a lifetime supporter of the sorority. I don't know exactly how she met Mr. Downing or when they married, but I think it was before the beginning of the Second World War.

Anyway, Mr. Downing was a very shrewd businessman; he was a farmer and cattle breeder, a warehouseman, a silent partner in a farm equipment business and an investor who rarely shrank from risk. Simply said, the man knew how to make money. And he did.

Mr. Downing died in 1982 and Mrs. Downing took over the farms and the investments; she was very careful with money and, while she lacked for little, she never threw money away. Mr. and Mrs. Downing never had children, and Mrs. Downing's only sibling, her brother was killed in a car accident, leaving no children.

All along, the Downings had quietly helped deserving kids with college expenses. There was never any mention of their generosity along these lines, but it was something they both strongly believed in. Elsie's other love was music. In fact, she studied organ at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music for a short time. By the time I got to know her well, arthritis had put an end to her playing.

When Mrs. Downing died, she left an estate of approximately seven million dollars. That is a matter of record in the courthouse, so I am not disclosing any confidential information. As it turned out, she left about two million to her farm manager,Lawrence Parker, upon whom she depended heavily. Of course, Uncle Sam came in for his share, but the rest, nearly $5 million was divided among Transylvania ($1 million for scholarships), Hayswood Foundation ($3 million for scholarships) and the Limestone Youth Orchestra Foundation ($1 million for the promotion of classical music and the arts).

Since her death, here in Mason County, there have been dozens and dozens of high school graduates who have been awarded scholarships for any college of their choice. The first criterion for scholarship help is need, followed by highschool academic achievement. At anyone time, there are as many as twenty to twenty-five students in college with Downing scholarships. Having served on Hayswood's board for many years, I am confident that there are young men and women from this county that would never have been able to go to the college of their choice without the help provided by Mrs. Downing.

Similarly, the Limestone Youth Orchestra has used Mrs. Downing's money to endow the Limestone Chorale, the Limestone Orchestra, both conducted by Coralie Runyon Jones, as well as various other musical endeavours.

In addition, the money is being used to operate the Downing Academy for Performing Arts. This program is conducted in the Presbyerian Church Sunday School building and involves four college professors who travel here to teach music to applicants for the program. Offerings include voice, piano, organ, guitar, strings, and other musical instruments. This organization has made an incredible difference in the level of achievement which is perhaps most noticeable to the public when Downing students take leading roles in C. J. Hunter's annual high school play, both on the stage and in the orchestra pit. The Downing Academy has subsidized music lessons for as many as 75 students a year; and the availability of college level instruction has yielded some fantastic results.

Yes, Elsie Downing was a Maysville Jewel, no question about it. She left a permanent monument, the effects of which will be felt for a very long time to come. And there will be countless people whose lives have been touched. You can be sure that Elsie's jewel will continue to sparkle brightly for years to come.

Election Reform

For people in Mason County and adjoining counties, tomorrow is election day. I do care that you vote, but I don't care who you vote for. Neither candidate has been forthcoming on the issues. Maybe there'll be a block allowing us to vote for "Neither of the above!" That would send a message, wouldn't it?

I know that we have a lot of problems which need attention. On the national scene, President Obama feels that health care is the number one priority. And, since he's in charge for the time being, it's his prerogative to pick and choose what the country needs to address first.

There is one problem which I think takes precedence - Election Reform. The cost of getting elected to federal office, House or Senate, is astronomical. A candidate for Congress can expect to spend $1 million dollars or more for a seat in the House of Representatives. Senate races cost $4 to $6 million. And the question always is, "Where does the money come from?" Well, it comes from donors, some of whom simply want to see their candidate elected. But most of it comes from people who want something in return, and that's trouble.

While most of us are not politicians, it's not hard to understand that you would find it very hard to vote against something that a major donor wants. Because, the next election is right around the corner. And if you want to be re-elected, it will take even more money. So, how will you vote? Because of the expense of campaigns, with all their TV ads, full pages in the newspaper and balloons and on and on and on, you simply can't afford to ignore your donors' interest.

Government finance of elections is supposed to be a question which Republicans are against and Democrats are for. Truth of the matter is, I doubt that either party is very enthusiastic about seeing the government finance elections. Why not? Almost anybody, Democrat or Republican, who has already been elected has a long list of big donors. The guys who might run against them don't have a long list, if they have a list at all. Maybe this is the reason that Obama can't make this a priority: He knows it doesn't have a chance!

But you can rest assured that until our Senators and Representatives don't have to beat the bushes for contributions, the money will continue to talk. And what the money says is not always in the country's best interest.

Jewels of Maysville - Generally

Our community has had the good fortune to have spawned some extraordinary people. Not that they were necessarily born here, nevertheless they have had their principal effect on the local level, for the betterment of us all. Martha Comer, the deceased editor of the Ledger-Independed and, before that, the Daily Independent, had a remarkable ability of capturing the essence of a person in lines of print. I always envied her art and the confidence with which she wrote. Toward the end of her career, she wrote a column called "Do You Know." It was usually most interesting, comprised principally of squibs about this and that. Reading the column, you were always impressed with the width of Martha's knowledge, that is until you bought a copy of the current U.S.News and World Report, where you would find most of the information she had imparted in her column for that week.

I toyed with the idea of suggesting to her that she write another column, perhaps once a month, on the "jewels" of Maysville, people who had made a real difference to the town. In this morning's paper, Kirby Wright wrote a tribute to the recently-deceased Felici Felice, former superintendent of the Mason County School System. He certainly was a jewel of Maysville, a largely unsung hero, responsible for upgrading our school system so that it became one of the best in the state. The school system now furnishes the superintendent with a very nice car to drive. In Mr. Felice's case, however, it was a state surplus police car, and he drove it until the wheels simply fell off. He didn't spend money foolishly.

Anyway, there are lots of people like Mr. Felice who live here and have made contributions to the quality of life in Maysville. From time to time, I will mention some of these people and, based on my own knowledge, say a little about them. In a lot of cases, the general public is unaware of the magnitude of their gifts and the number of lives they have touched.

You know, if you think about the meaning of community, it is far more than streets and buildings and neighborhoods; rather it is a sphere in which we all live and love, work and play, suffer and grieve; and each of us, in some measure, affects the others, for good or ill. Fortunately for Maysville, there are far more people who have affected us for good than for ill. It's what makes this such a phenomenal town. We all should probably appreciate it more than we do.

Stay tuned!

HEALTH REFORM

The national conversation about health care reform is very confusing. I readily admit that I don't know all of the ins and outs about the subject, but my own experiences tell me that something is seriously wrong with what we now have.

Several years ago, I went to the hospital emergency room for help with a moving kidney stone. The pain is pretty bad. Arriving at about 2:00 in the afternoon, I got home at 4:30. I remember the shot of pain medicine they gave me, and perhaps I have the faintest recollection of an x-ray. Admittedly, this occurred a numaber of years ago, so I may have forgotten other procedures. I was very grateful for the pain shot.

A few weeks later, I was notified that my insurance company was billed $4,500 for that two and one-half hour visit. That amount of money is absurd. It led me to believe that insurance companies really don't care what it costs; they just raise premiums to cover the cost and their profits. The point is, there is no economic brake on medical costs; our recent history confirms this. This is the reason I favor a "public option." Over the years, I paid more for health insurance than income tax; and I paid a lot of income tax.

I am not sure, but it's my impression that about 40-60 million people in the United States have no health insurance coverage. Let's face it, if you have no health insurance, you have no health care. A friend, dicussing the subject, told me, "Well, that's wrong. You just go to the emergency room and you'll find all kinds of people there getting free health care!" Truth in what he says, of course, but those same people are not going to get surgery for a slipped disk, a worn hip joint or cataracts.

When opponents of the concept begin scaring people with the notion of "death panels," it means to me that they don't really have a serious and rational basis for their opposition, other than preserving the status quo, which is enormously profitable for some. There is no substance to the claim of "death panels." The legislation only addresses compensation to doctors who are willing to discuss living wills with their patients. As an attorney, I've been doing that for years, and charging the patient/client for it.

Yes, I'm willing to give it a try!