Springfield: Kentucky's Own

Elvis is alive and well in Springfield, Kentucky. He’s been seen in the same room with Abraham Lincoln and a local moonshiner. More about that in a moment.

Central Kentucky has its iconic images. They begin around Lebanon, well, Loretto and continue in a fair swoop until about Paris or so. The distilleries. The horses. Those pastures and fences. Travel Brochures in the flesh and blood. At the same time, the bluegrass region is confidently predictable. Woodford County reminds of Bourbon County. Fayette outskirts remind of Mercer. Anderson flows into Franklin. It’s by design and hopefully forever. In that midst, there is Washington County. It draws from most but answers to none, an identity all its own.

At the north end of the county is a long, old covered bridge contributing to that identity. At one time, Kentucky had 400 across rivers and creeks from end to end. Today, just 13 are left and one can be seen silent here. It’s cordoned off next to the newer bridge built to replace it. Nothing replaced the nostalgia it created, however. Simply staring at it was enough to bring a smile to the face and wonder what earlier times were like.

In Springfield, those earlier times included much religious study and occasional entertainment. In the 1820s, Catholics set up a school that has today become a sprawling campus of up to date structures called St. Catharine College. As for the entertainment, an Opera House downtown, built in 1900 and still staging productions in 2014 and beyond. An anchor in a downtown that also sports a Lincoln history museum in the old County Courthouse across the street from a statue of the 16^th President. His folks married in the county in those early days of Kentucky history.

The horses are in places here and there, but certainly the local alpaca farm is the most popular with visitors. Here, a couple moved from Idaho along with 20 or so camel looking creatures and began to shear them for their wool to make crafted items ranging from socks to scarves. One can feed, pet, or smile at the animals. Then buy an item made from their fur.

Winemaking has come to Kentucky, and in the valleys surrounding a backroad near Horseshoe Bend, the grapes are harvested for Reds and Whites. The names of the flavors alone are enough reason to sit down and enjoy a conversation with the experts here. "King Kong’s Thong" was one such variety that made it on national television a few times.

Friendliness was certainly noticed here, and back in town at Mordechai’s. A restaurant downtown that had a chef out on the buffet for Sunday brunch that could make an omelet to order. The sort of place where folks said hello to you from the next booth over.

But it was the nightcap that gave the most entertainment. Near that college, an old mansion first constructed by one of the town’s founders, now occupied by one of the town’s most talented. A dollmaker, who, with wool and a needle, had made a figure of Lincoln so accurate he may as well been still with us. Next to him, a moonshiner was still in progress next to his still. Every doll, several of them, had a story to go with them. And marionettes hung on the walls. One was Elvis. At the request of one visitor, Elvis, still in the building, danced the Jailhouse Rock while Lincoln looked on. After that, our host, Norma Campbell had us sit down at her spread of country ham, green beans, hot tomatoes, casseroles, fresh bread, and berry berry pie.

At the last bite I paused to take in the definition of hospitality that the day had been. And how Springfield had certainly contributed to the cultural wealth of Kentucky in a way only it could provide.

-Special Thanks to Carla and Atam Abbi while on site in Washington County.

For more information on these attractions and locations, visit www.seespringfieldky.com

Scottsville: A Town Square With Heart

Scottsville has a bypass, but you wouldn’t know it from the intersection on Main Street. There are four crosswalks, two lanes wide, and a person becomes a modern day version of Frogger to get from one corner to the next. The traffic never lets up. But that's a good sign things are alive and well downtown in the Allen County seat. And not just the typical fare of lawyers and accountants, either. Boutiques, salons, the town library, and several antique stores give Frogger plenty to hop to. Not to mention the second Dollar General Store ever opened, still operating on the square since 1955.

Downtown Scottsville has a group titled “Heart” to keep the décor in shape and promote a sense of place and home, both for folks living and folks visiting. It shows. With every passing season, the old style lampposts are decorated to reflect the common mood. October brings scarecrows a plenty. Christmas sees a tree covered with red balls and topped with a lit star. Railings along the brick lain sidewalks are wrapped in evergreen garland. Multiple Santa Clauses beckon from storefront windows. You could be in a Rockwell painting of a town if you imagined for a second.

A half century ago, the place to be seen in the Heart of Scottsville was the Jacksonian Hotel. Not just for rooms, but for the elegance and parties that happened on the 31E main highway. It’s gone now, but in an old drugstore cattycornered from the hotel site, elegance has returned. Downtown Scottsville has scored a sit down, upscale, great food restaurant. The place is called 1881 On Main and worth a step inside to see the ceilings alone. It’s the old style every building had in the early days. A drugstore sign sits in the shadow of moonshine, well, medicine jugs painted with the new logo. A bar sits under a giant sign that reads “Soda Fountain,” though the stools are hoping for a move towards more in the future. Outside for warmer weather patrons, several of the iron table and chairs that any good downtown should have in their plea for visitors to stay a while. I would.

I sat at the bar and had the fish and chips, looking out the front window at the Christmas Tree centering the square of all the historic buildings and forgot where I was for a moment. The comforts took me to several memories of places where the environment stuck with me for being so well put together. Worth crossing several streets. Worth the trip to Allen County.

For more on the progress in Scottsville, visit them online at http://www.heartofscottsville.org/

The Mintonville Grocery

Mintonville has its own little green sign, up a bend along a two lane road. There’s that sign, a church, a Masonic Lodge, the sunshine, the open air, and an old general store with a Pepsi Bottlecap sign. That’s it. True Map Dot Country.

I was a few sips into Five Star Coffee that I picked up in Columbia off the Cumberland Parkway. At the Nancy exit a half hour later, I delved off the four lane to old Kentucky 80 which used to be the primary route west to east. It took me as far as Kentucky highway 837, where I caught a right and skirted the Casey County border with curves and quick hills that grabbed the pit of my stomach. At the end of the ride, I was parked in the gravel next to rocking chairs and old style gas pumps out of service. Paint flaked off the building with the breeze. Traffic was nowhere to be heard.

The old door creaked and rang old jangling bells when I opened it. The room was dark old hardwood from top to bottom and it filled the senses, with the linger of ham and cheese in the air all at the same time. My peripheral vision caught Ale 8 on a shelf to my left. The place brought a smile before I said hello. It was perfect.

The walls were a mixture of antique and Christmas ornaments per the season. I sipped on the coffee from the modern quick mart while I talked with the owners about the history of the place. Opened in the 1920s, it was the sort of environment where you could trade a chicken for a sack of flour if you didn’t have the paper money on hand. It just meant your chicken would sell a few days later as poultry. One of those places where a man’s word was a good as gold. The building had been vacant for a while before reopening as a functioning grocery store last spring. And though the chickens are no longer accepted as payment, it’s the nostalgia of the place that is noteworthy. Patrons have dropped off items for permanent display. Oil cans, paintings, cannon balls, license plates. Old toy Tonka Trucks still on the shelves they had been on since the 1960s. Things don’t change much around Mintonville.


Outside, not much has changed, either. The old Pepsi sign above the front porch was taken down when the original owner closed the store, but a reproduction was painted right in its place, just like it never left. That’s the way you feel when you’re here. Just like you’ve always been around these parts.


Those looking for a feel of the old ways have come by the tour bus load. Last spring, such a bus pulled into the back road lot on purpose and off came nearly a hundred to peek at the Beenie Weenies propped next to 10W-30 and pocketknives. It’s the attraction of a modern day Mayberry that stirs such an emotional connection to places that still feel like the old days. And in Mintonville, the old days are the newest thing.


For more information about the Mintonville Grocery, visit them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mintonvillegrocery

The Fancy Farm

“I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.”

-Hunter S. Thompson

If only Hunter S. Thompson could have been alive to produce an apt commentary on the Kentucky spectacle that is Fancy Farm. The Map Dot name sits unassuming on a sign fronting an exit on the future Interstate 69 dream. For 364 days a year, it points to nothing more than a couple stores, a new Dollar General, and a church. But that Church. In 1880 St. Jerome Catholic Church put on a picnic same as the others. But theirs seemed to stick. And became the once yearly political circus that everyone coast to coast still realizes today.

It was my first trip to the Farm. Named Fancy at one time in its early history by a visitor. On this day, many more visitors and Fancy was perhaps in name only. The politics started eight miles out beside cornfields. Instead of the usual Dekalb and Sanders signage, Alison and Mitch rowed the crops. Hundreds of signs, big and small. Pictures of the candidates for United States Senate, along with the locals running for office come November. A countdown per mile to “Mitch’s Retirement Party.” Traffic got thicker behind a State Trooper around "Mile 4 To Go."

The same two lane of Kentucky Highway 80 had been traveled that morning by former and current Governors, Senators, Representatives, Court Justices, Hundreds of Troopers, Hundreds of Journalists, and Thousands of the Hungry.

Hobb’s Store had the first parking about a half mile from the grounds. Sun Drop soft drink signage was stapled everywhere. A Sauce smell filled the air. We walked into a throng.

Sweaty women in tank tops and visors. Educated and lack thereof swarming for free stickers and T shirts and signs with pictures of Obama and Alison on either end. Men dressed as pirates with bullhorns. Uncle Sam was spotted. A European model in a coal miner’s hat. A fake Senator named Honest. Bingo numbers being hollered in southern tones.

Nobody was talking politics directly before as much as how large the crowd was and how long the wait was for a mutton sandwich. Fifteen lines of the gathered stood forty deep to wait at least thirty minutes to place an order. The “chop, chop, chop” of the cooked shoulders by sweaty cooks heard over the upbeat classic rock playing to get the crowd riled up.

Kids were tossing carnival rings for stuffed bears beneath more Sun Drop sponsorship. Photographers were slung with several cameras, catching every moment of everything. There was no signal for a phone. But everybody was looking for one.

Sandwich eaten, we approached stage right, but still four or five people deep from under the new platform itself. All of the faces were up there. KET was rolling. The New York Times scribbled notes. Several Priests introduced in church picnic style. National Anthem Sung. My Old Kentucky Home sung, even as several officers attended to someone near us passed out in the Old Kentucky Heat. Then the mud was slung by those trying to be elected or elected again. The Governor took a selfie with Senator McConnell. Another speaker said his name was spelled close to “Hatchett” associating with Washington and a cherry tree. Alison spoke about Cloverlick, Kentucky in the shadow of hand writ Iron Dome signs. She thanked the local church at St. Jerome for throwing a great retirement party for her rival. Mitch had his yellow sleeves rolled up warning of electing someone without experience. Rand Paul read poetry.

We left about the time James Comer got up to tell everyone he wanted to be Governor, too. Got back to Hobb’s store and bought a couple Sun Drops. Headed out 80 back to the parkway a couple of mutton sandwiches the fuller while others spoke on at the picnic behind us. Fancy Farm Indeed. Nothing like it in the world. Proud that it's part of Kentucky.

Ode To The Hushpuppy

Gene Crabtree is participating in the perfect by-product of a fishing trip. He's overseeing the crackle of cooking oil as morsels coated in cornmeal fry to tastebud ready wellness. I'm attending the annual fish fry at the Liberty Baptist Church in Fulton County. While not exactly the bustle of Fancy Farm and its yearly cookout, revered all the same by the local Baptist and other denominations that find out there's free food up the two lane.

There used to be more shade trees on the church grounds. Now down to just one, and underneath the usual splay of unmatched lawn chairs and tailgates loosed for a constructed seating arrangement. The elders stand watch over the fry duty. Women, per tradition, perhaps, in the fellowship hall readying sweet tea and ice cubes for a wash down later.

I love a good fish fry mainly because I grew up eating creek caught fare with my Dad and his Dad before. If it wasn't deer-something, it was fish tonight, after night, after night. But it's the fixings, as called, that I'd like to ponder for a moment. Everything tastes the same at a good fish fry. The fish taste like the fries, which taste like the onion rings, and especially the dollops of cornmeal themselves just cooked and eaten alongside as if the coating on the fish wasn't breading enough. Therein lies the South's fascination with the hushpuppy.

We have our favorites. It became entree alone. You ate the rest of the meal not to look like a person just eating hushpuppies. A good one is fluffy, greasy, and good in bunches eaten much like potato chips dipped in too much ketchup.

The term dates back to 1899, but hushpuppies were perhaps named such during the Civil War. Soldiers making cornbread would tear off a little piece and toss to the Confederate dogs to "Hush the puppies." Now we've stuck with the name, and better such, the side item.

So synonymous with seafood now that it almost seems like it was caught in the water just as well. Think about it. We never hear of hushpuppies served with hamburgers or BBQ. Not with any other major food group except the fish group. And so it seems that at one point in its life span that the cornmeal nugget was a bottom feeder in a creek with legs and fins sort of like a crawdad or similar. I could picture my Granddaddy pulling into the driveway and calling to Grandmamma in the kitchen, "Marthann (her name is Martha Ann, but was always shortened), get the stuff. Got fifteen crappie, a couple catfish, and we caught 25 hushpuppies near this one stump." Hushpuppies caught on a cane pole? He could have done it, cornmeal or not.

Well, I've now sat here and written an entire column on hushpuppies, and what's worse is you just read an entire column on hushpuppies. Time to find another church having a cookout.

Originally published in The Hickman Courier, August 2013

The Hat Lady of Cave City, Kentucky

I just needed a road. That’s usually how these things start. Two hours and nothing else to do but drive and seek. Park City seemed close enough to establish a makeshift outpost for the morning. From there, plans were to drive a back road of Barren County until I had to double back for work.

The plans rerouted. My lone Park City Shell Station was lined to the brim with Interstate pull off traffic and the local yocal needing five dollars worth. So I settled for the Dixie Highway north to the next City. Cave City, that is. Another Shell Station across the street from the new KFC neighboring the old Kentucky Fried Chicken. Cave City’s Colonel held onto the old Bucket sign for years and years longer than most others. Now, the bucket of chicken is gone, replaced by a marketer’s brainstorm.

My Shell pump clicked full, another bank hold added to the fifty or so dollars to fill the tank. They all do that. Try filling up three or four times a week with a card at the pump. Hundreds float around on hold at all times.  Got on the downtown loop to figure out where to go, and a tailgater gets right behind on the bumper. Why not? Bumper to bumper so close I may as well had a trailer hitch for his car. I pull over to a parking spot in front of a bank in the historic district and let the enthusiastic driver pass. Idling, I look in front of me to see a faded sign on the side of a faded building. Magaline’s Antiques. Hundreds of Booths, it says. Air Conditioned, it says. I went in.

Well, before I opened the door, I saw a handwritten sign. “No Large Purses allowed! You will be searched!” So, I entered to find the typical antique store welcome and asked if they’d like to “Check my purse.” From there, the memory of the day began in earnest.

My host was dressed like Halloween. It was June. Maybe the Derby, still a month late. Hat with green sash. Green vintage dress that looked to be antebellum at best. Antiairconditioned at worst. To which, there wasn’t as much as advertised outside on the building. I broke a sweat looking at the Swisher Sweets.

"Hun, is there anything I can help you with?” said Jolly Green. I had spied a toy John Deere tractor in a locked case. One of those little ones. A day earlier, I had promised a girl a tractor if I came across one. Ok, a young lady my age that I was hoping to win over with a tractor (another blog). “You’ve got everything locked up in here! Can’t get to nothing!” I exclaimed. “I can tell you’ve never had a business!” She said. I picked out a tractor for a lass. And entered into conversation with Magaline Meredith. Hat Lady of the South.

To pay for my find up at the archaic cash register, I turn around and see pictures of country singer Marty Stuart of Hillbilly Rock memory posing with her. The Kentucky Headhunters posing with Mrs. Hat, too. An article written about her…by Byron Crawford. Next to the Kentucky Colonel certificate and Grand Marshall Award for the Cave City Christmas parade.

Turns out, Magaline pioneered a downtown renaissance in Cave City two decades ago after a try at a sandwich shop that turned antique store when the junk made more money than the food service. She was the first to try her hand (along with her husband) at opening a new store away from an interchange.  At one local event in 1995, she dressed up in a hat and the yocals when crazy with compliment. It’s been a hat day ever  since. She has 400 plus. A room built onto her house. For the hats.

I realized I was in no ordinary antique store. Same stuff one sees at a hundred of these places. A stand alone personality second to none. Flamboyance all the difference.  Makes one want to come back. I stayed as long as great conversation allowed.  Heard about the house she grew up in at a holler named Buzzard Roost.

About her newfangled e-cigarette. About the time a guy drove right into her store and busted out the plate glass. And decapitated a concrete lion, too. She had Polaroids of that. I aksed her if she was on Facebook. She said no. I took a picture for Map Dot anyway. Left with a John Deere tractor, a Pepsi race car, and a smile. From  just needing a road.

Selfie With A Billionaire. Kiley At The Derby.

THOSE DEGREES OF SEPARATION. Supposedly you're only six contacts away from anyone else in the world. Many relate it to Kevin Bacon for some reason. I’ll just settle on the Prince of Monaco. We have this connection. I better back up a bit and explain. It started twelve years ago. I was a student at WKU and had won a national broadcasting award named after paper baron William Randolph Hearst. I was to fly out to San Francisco to wine and dine beneath the Golden Gate Bridge aboard a fancy yacht. Before the flight, I met up with a previous winner a little older than me named Gertrude (name changed). A two time winner from our school, and daughter of a legendary Kentucky disc jockey. A blonde with a smoky radio voice. Well, after describing her now, how about I change her fake name to Bambi? We had a five minute conversation about the winnings and left it at that. My only conversation with Gertrude Bambi Lee in my four and a half years at Western.

Fast forward about nine years. Now an alum, our former professor was compiling a list of Hearst winners via Facebook, and for the first time in nearly a decade, I spotted my blonde classmate. You know how it goes. Friended, chatted, dated, almost married Gertrude, on and on. It happens. We parted ways, but as with any relationship, mutual friends happen through the course that stick around after the fact. One such of our mutual friends was a reporter at a television station in Lexington, who made custom stitched monogrammed shirts and wares for kids. Last month, as I was expecting nephew number two, I arranged with the design expert to make a custom Map Dot onesie for the newborn. Her outfit (choice of word intentional) followed me on my newfangled Instagram page, so I looked at who else was following her constant barrage of monogrammed clothing. Kiley In Kentucky stood out among the list (Kiley is her real name). Looking at her page, here was this Miss Kentucky hopeful who was working in her hometown of Greensburg, a talent worthy of big city attention to the benefit of a Map Dot. We connected, and her last name proved familiar. Shuffett. That Suffett. Dave’s cousin, of whom I had worked with a few times, most recently with KET in a Kentucky Life role last year.


Kiley. For Real.

I made a roadtrip to Greensburg and had coffee with Kiley. In the midst of the historic Green County town square, Longhunters Coffee Shop rivals anything found in Kentucky’s larger cities. Impressive, though the historic district itself is a great lesson in small town done beautiful. I took my coffee per usual (roadtrip burnt rubber black), and bought a second for pageant hopeful (with a splash of cream per request). As the java was savored, she interviewed me for her weekly Kentucky blog followed by a walk through downtown talking pictures. In passing, she mentioned that for the first time in her 23 years, a girl friend was treating her to the Kentucky Derby. A bulb lit atop my balding head. I wanted a correspondent at Churchill Downs in a fancy hat, and she was just my girl.

Derby Day Southern Belle

Derby Day, 2014. Kiley and her friend Ramsey (for real) doll up for the spectacle. She’s in Blue with the matching hat and sash reading “Miss Monticello.” Apparently, you can enter these pageants from just about anywhere, even if you’re really from Green County. She was “Miss Cumberland Falls” once, for example. Whatever she was, she was texting me while I was at my factory job in Bowling Green, running off the floor to the locker room to run the Map Dot, Kentucky page in between truck frame inspections (nobody tell). First was the Red Carpet. She had somehow managed to get pictures with country star Miranda Lambert and Terry O’Quinn of Lost. We could have just stopped with that and been fine. I kept welding and got another buzz from my phone. “I’m on Millionaire’s Row right now! Don’t even ask me how I got here.” My jaw dropped. Beyond infield crowd for this crew. They had managed to get up to the exclusive Skye Terrace level of Churchill Downs, where a table goes for 50,000 dollars. Beyond Millionaire’s Row, in fact. She had attained to the High Cotton. Another text. “I just met the Prince of Monaco.” Um K. Two weeks prior, my crew had been eating bologna in a four way stop dot called Gold City in Simpson County. The name was about as close as gold got. Now this. She was taking selfies with a Billionaire. Hanging out with the heirs of the Campbell Soup name at the same moment. That’s about as Derby as you can get.

California Chrome

The pictures kept coming of hats and juleps and the view from the high dollar seats. I was in the car out in the factory parking lot at post time, listening to My Old Kentucky Home broadcast live on WHAS. The same way it had been for nearly a century. Then they were off. I was pulling for Uncle Sigh, who put on a good shew for a little bit, but was overtaken handily by California Chrome. How’s that for a turf writer’s use of wording? Kiley sent her last picture. She was holding up her iPhone as the shiny named horse crossed for roses.

And we were there, through her, all the way to the Prince himself. Those degrees.

-Originally in The Hickman Courier. May 2014.