A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

THE

FORGOTTEN

FAMILY

SAND GAP

1987


For as long as anyone could remember, it seemed that the seven youngest children of Herman and Eva Isaacs did not exist.

There was no record of them anywhere.

They had no birth certificates, no Social Security numbers and no medical records because they did not go to the doctor.

They also did not go to school.

All that changed in June. The Isaacses, a large but close-knit family, left their isolated world in Jackson County's Rock Lick Hollow and moved "up on the road."

With that, their seven youngest children -- those still living at home -- got shots and birth certificates and started school. For Leonard, the shy 5-year-old entering kindergarten, life was going according to schedule. For the other six, whose ages ranged from 7 to 15, it was not.

But there would be no turning back. Time finally had caught up with the Isaacses, who hid as long as possible before deciding to move to a house with electricity in the walls and cars passing just outside.


Brenda Isaacs Walker, 27, is the second-oldest child of Herman and Eva Isaacs and the first to get an education.

She grew up in the deep hollows of the Jackson County countryside, a place like many other Eastern Kentucky communities where people can hide in the shadows of the land.

School buses navigate the back roads with difficulty, and tree branches often scrape their yellow sides like fingernails on a blackboard.

No buses ventured anywhere near the Isaacs home, which was accessible only by driving for miles without a road and crossing a creek bed 17 times.

As a child, Brenda did not leave her parents' isolated home much. And she did not go to school.

The 30-year marriage of Herman and Eva Isaacs has produced 17 children. One died soon after being born. The others range in age from 5 to 29. But before Brenda began studying for the General Educational Development test in 1979, none had cracked a textbook.

The only book the Isaacses allowed in their home was the Bible, but the children were not taught how to read it, Brenda said.

Once, when Brenda sneaked another book into the house, it "got missing," she said, smiling. "I guess Mamma found it."

Brenda began to grow restless, especially around her cousin, Debbie Isaacs. "We were the same age, and I felt bad because I didn't know how to read and she did," she said.

The girls, whose families lived a mile apart, chopped corn together each day. And Debbie began smuggling scraps of paper into the fields to teach Brenda the words scrawled on them.

"Sometimes she'd spend the night and we'd go upstairs, and she'd read books to me," Brenda said. "Or she'd write a letter, and I'd copy the letter. That's how I learned to write."

When she was 19, Brenda left home and discovered almost immediately that jobs go to applicants with at least some formal education.

She decided to try for a GED certificate, the equivalent of a high school diploma.

"The hardest part was just calling the woman (in charge of adult education) and saying, 'Teach me,' " she said.

Suddenly, the world was a place to be explored. One night as Brenda danced in a Richmond bar, a young college graduate named Jerry Walker, now a psychologist, saw her and became enchanted.

Their relationship blossomed despite Brenda's early doubts and insecurity.

"I had them kind of feelings like we didn't match," Brenda said. "A lot of words he used at that time I didn't even know what he was saying."

Walker, a native of England who spent most of his childhood in New York City, brushes aside the notion that he knows more than Brenda. Highly educated people, he said, "tend to carry a lot of garbage."

His education did not bother the Isaacses. They liked Walker, but they were never in awe of him. "He's a psychiatrist," Isaacs said, grinning. "But I don't know if he could tell me anything or not."

In 1982, Jerry and Brenda were married. In June, after eight years with tutors and books, Brenda earned her GED certificate.

Just as they had embraced Walker, Brenda's parents embraced their daughter's education.

"They came to my graduation," Brenda said. "Things had changed that much from when I started."

Her success helped pave her brothers' and sisters' way to school. "As they watched my wife change and grow and still keep the things they valued in her, they changed their emphasis," Walker said.

And Herman Isaacs could not help wondering whether his other children might someday think they had been "left out of something."

The Isaacses, a gentle couple who smile at each other easily, have always been self-sufficient. "Never drawn anything," Isaacs said proudly. "I don't believe in that. I think you ought to bear your own burden."

They grow all the food they eat, canning almost 1,500 jars every year.

"Faith in the Lord has provided a lot for them," Walker said. "That's what isolated them from the world, but it's also provided them a lot."

Isaacs earns money stripping tobacco, but his hands are good for other things, too. Such as playing the mandolin. Or making wooden chairs.

A small man with steel-gray hair and a mischievous smile, Isaacs was born in 1930 on a mountaintop in Jackson County. When he was 3, his family moved to a log house in Floyd's Branch Hollow, where "you looked straight up to look out," he said.

After working at several factories and paper mills in Ohio, Isaacs was drafted into the Army in 1955.

The most dangerous thing he encountered during his hitch was a skating rink, and it was there that he fell for his future wife. "That's when we met," he said, grinning. "She was picking me up off the floor."

Eva, 45, a native of Baltimore, quit school in the 10th grade when she married Herman.

Herman's parents, Godfrey and Bessie Isaacs, did not send most of their 17 children to school. And those who went did so infrequently.

"I'd have loved to have gone to school, but my dad thought it was wrong," said Herman's sister, Lillie Isaacs. "I would've liked to have had a different life, but I didn't."

Lillie has six children, and all of them went to high school.

But her father, a self-made preacher who died two years ago, went to jail for harboring truants in the early 1950s. He was released when he could not pay the fine and persisted in quoting from the Bible in court.

"He stuck with it until they got tired of keeping him," Herman said.

"They kept him in jail for 40 days," Eva said, "but when he got out, they didn't bother him no more."

Once away from home, Herman learned enough in the Army to fill out job applications on his own. But he and Eva dreamed of returning to the mountains.

In 1966, with six children, the Isaacses moved back to Kentucky to stay.

"When you marry a mountain man, you come back to the mountains," Eva said. "And I love the mountains."

Herman's mother taught his new wife the basics, such as how to make lye soap and brooms.

"We just kind of lived the old-fashioned way," Mrs. Isaacs said.

"We taught our kids the basic things about trying to live good. They get out with other children and get ideas in their head."

Isaacs said: "I've always told the children, 'You ain't stupid, you're just not educated.' "

The Isaacses, following the lead of Herman's father, "never even thought of sending" their children to school, Herman said. "I didn't believe in it."

But there was another reason, too: "There's really a lot out there to learn that people shouldn't even know about," Isaacs said.

"I've lived my life without ever taking any kind of dope or doing anything like that, and I hope the kids don't. But that is going on in schools."

By law, parents must send their children to school or notify the school board that their religious beliefs call for educating the children at home, said Tony Collins, state pupil personnel director.

The Isaacses did neither, but Jackson County school officials never visited or sent a letter, Isaacs said.

Children rarely elude school officials as long as the Isaacses did, Collins said.

"That kind of boggles the mind, but it's easy to happen in those areas," Collins said.

"I really believe there are lots of forgotten families, families who want to be forgotten.

"There are a lot of people moving in and out of that area constantly to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and the ills that go with it.

"Those families fall between the cracks."

Clay Harmon learned about the Isaacses soon after becoming Jackson County schools superintendent last year. "I didn't believe it," he said. "It's hard to believe."

Evelyn Powell, who teaches adult education classes, said she did not think the Isaacses had been "totally ignored" by the system.

But school officials had no proof the children even existed, she said. All but three had been born at home, and they had no birth certificates.

To complicate matters further, school officials were wary of visiting the Isaacses. Approaching homes in parts of rural Kentucky can be frightening for strangers, Collins said, adding, "I wouldn't want to do it."

Pupil personnel directors -- the modern-day truant officers -- are authorized to carry guns and often do, Collins said.

But no truant officer, armed or otherwise, ever visited the Isaacs home. "I guess somebody had told him we'd shoot him or something," Isaacs said.

Over the summer, the Isaacses decided to send their children to school. They had recently moved their family to a house alongside a paved road and decided they could no longer get away with keeping the children at home.

"I'm getting older," Isaacs said of moving his family, "and we had a mountain to climb and a very dangerous creek to cross when it was rainy."

It was unavoidable. Time, which the Isaacses had cheated by living in the past most of their lives, had finally prevailed.

Last Tuesday, the clock at the front of third-grade teacher Melinda Davidson's room at Sand Gap Elementary School said it was 9:30 a.m.

Judy Isaacs, 10, and her sister, Cindy, 12, had their books open and their math homework in front of them. The first problem was three times four.

"How many got that?" Mrs. Davidson asked. Both Isaacs children raised their hands as high as they could.

"How many got all of them correct?" Mrs. Davidson asked.

The two raised their hands again.

"I keep seeing the same hands," Mrs. Davidson said, smiling.

The Isaacs children are popular and have adjusted well to school, said school principal Jim Harrison.

All of them are on grade-level in math, but they are in remedial reading classes.

The Isaacses were placed in grades with children who were as close as possible to their ages. Donna Isaacs was 15 when she entered the fifth grade. Her 14-year-old brother, Estes, was placed in the same class.

Of the others, Cindy and Judy were placed in third grade; Janet, 9, and Patricia, 7, were put in the first grade, and Leonard, 5, entered kindergarten.

"Their placement was based more on socialization than anything else," Harrison said.

Teachers and classmates tutor the children in some subjects, but they are quick learners, Harrison said. Most have made the honor roll for mastering work on their grade level.

"They're doing really good," said Tammy Welch, the first-grade teacher. "Their writing skills are so neat. I think it's because they've worked so much around the house with their hands."

The children like school. "It's littler than I thought it would be," Donna said.

"All their teachers will comment that their manners are something one just doesn't see out of young people today," Ms. Powell said, "It's fascinating."

As for their parents, "They're real proud of them kids," Brenda Walker said.

"I think," Isaacs said, "they're handling them real good at the school. They really are."


Three weeks before Christmas, a tree adorned with ornaments and lights stood in the living room of the Isaacs white clapboard house off Kentucky 2004.

The oily smell of burning coal filled the air as a stove heated the house.

Burdette Mullins, who runs a service station in Sand Gap with his brothers, has eaten dinner at the Isaacs house before. He is impressed by the family. "They're good people," he said. "Always kind of stuck to themselves."

But now things are changing.

An assortment of oil lamps, once the Isaacses' only source of light at night, now sit unused on the mantle.

"'We all worked together," Isaacs said, "and it was a family thing. Now all that's changed."

The children are changing slightly, too.

"There's been a difference in all of 'em," Isaacs said. There was a hint of sadness in his voice.

Mrs. Isaacs hugged Leonard. "I can see a difference in this one already," she said, smiling at him. "He's learned some mean little things from his kindergarten friends."

The phone rang. It was Brenda. She would be over later to cut a Christmas tree for her own house.

Once a family without electricity, the Isaacses now have a phone and a television. They watched the Kentucky Wildcats beat Indiana from their living room.

But no amount of contact with the world outside can ease the vague sense of loss the Isaacses sometimes feel.

"We're lonesome," Eva said. "We've never been by ourselves without the children."

1988

Contents
37 A Boy of Summer

42 A Christmas Story

46 Just Another Love Story

51 The Stillness and the Void

56 In Time with the Music

60 What’s Wrong at Richardsville?

71 The Long Trial of Cleston Higginbottom

88 One-Way Ticket

92 Welcome to Waddy, Where Minutes Crawl and Years Fly


A

BOY

OF

SUMMER

LOUISVILLE

1988
The day my grandfather was buried, Tom Pagnozzi exploded for three home runs, and the Louisville Redbirds beat Oklahoma City.

That was two summers ago. Now here it is autumn, and another baseball season is winding down. The World Series evokes memories of my grandfather, who used his connections to get me tickets to see the only Series game I ever attended: Game 3 of the 1975 battle between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox.

My grandfather's name was Fred Grimm. His connections to baseball had been cultivated during his stint as president and general manager of the old Louisville Colonels. That was when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States.

The Colonels were a triple-A minor-league team during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, black-and-white forerunners of the Redbirds. My grandfather kept a scrapbook of those days filled with scores of yellowed newspaper stories and pictures.

The Colonels won the Junior World Series in 1954, but what I remember most from those tattered clippings is a face -- my grandfather's. It is young and ruggedly handsome, stretched taut by a huge grin. His hair is thick, dark and swept straight back.

It is strange, I realized not too long ago, that I now remember him that way as well as the way he was in my lifetime. I never met that young man in the newspaper pictures but somehow I think I knew him.

My grandfather was not always a thin, white-haired man struggling to breathe. He was young once, and in the scrapbook he will be young forever. Which is kind of appropriate. Baseball is like that. Right to the end, my grandfather had the heart of a little boy. The problem was he had the stomach of an old, old man.

I knew things were getting bad when he could not summon enough energy to read the sports page.

The day before he died, he received a letter from the Redbirds inviting him to the dedication of a new Louisville Baseball Museum, which consisted of numerous glass-enclosed panels of pictures on the walls of the concourse. Afterward, the Birds would play Oklahoma City.

My grandfather asked his family to attend in his place. As it turned out, he was buried only hours before the dedication.

The dedication ceremony made me feel better. The morning had been gloomy, but not long before the game started, the clouds broke.

The late-afternoon sun was shining when I found my grandfather's picture on one of the new museum's panels. There he was, just like he had looked in the scrapbook. Proudly, lovingly, I grinned back at him.

I'm still amazed at how soothing it was to all of us to go to the ballpark that day. There were all those people in all those faded, colorless pictures, and there were players out on the field ready for their day in the newspaper.

It was happy and exciting and timeless, and it didn't matter what teams were on the field. Pagnozzi would make the sports page the next day.

So would my grandfather.

Thanks to him, baseball is something special for me. Now that the World Series is upon us, it would be great if my favorite team were still playing. But it's not. And so what?

I watch the World Series, but I don't care who's playing; I root for one team, then the other. It matters not what colors the players wear. Heroes come in black-and-white.

A

CHRISTMAS

STORY

CAMPBELLSVILLE

1988

The houses across the street from the Campbellsville Baptist Church were decorated with lights and wreaths and ribbons yesterday.

Johnny Edrington was home for Christmas.

Edrington, the state trooper found dead on the side of the road early Wednesday, lay in the church in a coffin draped with an American flag.

His funeral yesterday, on Christmas Eve, was attended by more than 1,000 people -- most of them police officers.

Troopers from eight states and dozens of police departments across Kentucky converged on Campbellsville to pay final respects to a fallen comrade.

Edrington, who was 34, grew up in Campbellsville, a south-central Kentucky town of 10,000 people north of the Green River.

He was buried in Brookside Cemetery overlooking Broadway, less than half a mile from where he lived as a boy.

Many town residents attended the funeral or stood along North Central Avenue in front of the church to watch the solemn proceedings.

Roy Pelley, who attended Campbellsville High School with Edrington, closed his radiator repair shop for the day -- not because it was Christmas Eve, though.

"Nah," he said. "Because of Johnny."

Pelley, wearing his work jacket, watched the activities from a front yard across the street from the church.

Bob Rotschi of Campbellsville stood in a driveway as he waited to enter the church.

"I think it's a terrible thing," he said.

"Nobody expects anything like this the day before Christmas."

It was easy to forget that it was Christmas Eve in Campbellsville. An early morning storm had filled Rotschi's pond to overflowing, but the afternoon was sunny and mild.

In the street, hundreds of police officers stood in rows facing the church. The funeral would start in 15 minutes, but many of them had been there more than an hour.

The crowd swelled into the front yards of houses along the street, dotting them with countless shades of blue. There were troopers from Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Also attending were Gov. Wallace Wilkinson, Lt. Gov. Brereton Jones and Attorney General Fred Cowan.

"Campbellsville's never seen the likes of this, and I hope they never do again," Pelley said.

Edrington, who lived and worked in London, was killed around midnight Tuesday in Laurel County. He apparently had stopped a motorist for speeding along Ky. 80, police said.

Edrington was shot with his own gun, a .357 Magnum, apparently after a struggle with his assailant. Police are seeking clues to identify the person involved.

Yesterday, he was home -- in Campbellsville and in his church.

The road in front of the church was closed to traffic and lined with police cruisers, emergency lights flashing.

At 1 p.m., the police officers who had been standing silently in the road filed into the church.

"We're assembled here in God's house today to worship Him and pay tribute to Johnny Edrington," said Chester Badgett, the pastor who gave the opening prayer.

"As far as I know, Johnny never had any greater life's goal than to be a state trooper.

"Jesus told us that greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Johnny Edrington lay down his life for all of us."

The church was filled with the sounds of sniffling, many of them coming from police officers.

An enforcement officer from the state Division of Fish and Wildlife wiped his eyes.

"We hurt and we grieve," trooper Steve Owen, chaplain for the Kentucky State Police, told the gathering.

"I think it only fitting that since it is the Christmas season, we call upon the Christ in Christmas."

A state trooper in the balcony sniffled.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."

Sun streamed through the stained glass windows, casting rainbows on the pillars inside the church.

When Owen began reciting a poem -- "I once admired a lovely rose . . . " -- a state trooper in the seventh row of the balcony whispered the words along with him.

The organist played the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," as the church emptied.

The funeral procession that included 200 police cruisers took Edrington down West Main Street, where he had frequented the Dairy Queen as a teen-ager.

Along Broadway, below the burial site, cars lined the shoulders of the road and adjacent lots as spectators caught a glimpse of the procession.

Gunshots from the cemetery crackled a salute to the fallen trooper, and a bugler played taps.

The flag was lifted off the coffin, folded and given to Edrington's widow, Diane.

Edrington and his wife had been married five months when he was killed. She is pregnant.

Trooper John Lile reached under his glasses to wipe his eyes. "It's pretty tough," Lile said.

Below the gravesite on U.S. 55, traffic moved slowly. Eight miles south, the Green River carried tears from the morning rain downriver toward the sea.

Special Report:

Alcohol and Driving --

Every day's tragedy
JUST

ANOTHER

LOVE

STORY
FRENCHBURG

1988

This is a love story.

In the first chapter, Phil Lawson and Clara Jean Fugate meet, and the scrapbook begins. My first card from Phil: ''I keep thinking about you every few minutes all day.''

In the second chapter they pay $20 for a blood test in Jellico, Tenn., then get married. Our first Christmas.

The third chapter is where Kamilia Anne and Sheena Renee are born, and everybody is happy. For my darling.

In the fourth chapter, a drunken driver kills Clara Jean Lawson.

Love stories often have senseless endings.

Phil and Clara Jean Lawson were married for six years and four months. He was a real-estate broker in Frenchburg; she was a second-grade teacher at Menifee County Elementary School.

As newlyweds in 1981, they drove to Lexington to see the Beach Boys at Rupp Arena.

In late 1982, their first child was born. They named her Kamilia Anne because Clara Jean did not want her daughter someday to be ''one of five Lindas or five Sues in the classroom,'' Phil said.

In 1985, the couple named their second child Sheena Renee.

The family lived in an immaculate ranch house in the country with flowers in front and a sky full of stars overhead.

''We had a lot of fun,'' Phil said. ''We enjoyed what few little things we did do.''

Things such as spending a night at a Cumberland Falls hotel. Taking the kids to the lake. Going out to dinner in Lexington. Cooking out at home.

Clara Jean learned to water ski and fascinated Phil with her penchant for turning cameras sideways and taking vertical pictures.

They had a shoebox of photographs labeled ''Box of Memories.'' And, although Phil did not know it, his wife was keeping a scrapbook of cards and flowers and ribbons he had given her since they had met.

''You couldn't ask for anybody better, really,'' Phil said.

Some days Clara Jean would take the girls shopping, and the threesome would drop by Phil's office to say hello on their way to the city.

In the fall of 1987, Clara Jean earned a master's degree in education from Morehead State University.

She began her eighth year of teaching that September. In November, she secretly had her portrait taken with the girls. The picture would be a Christmas gift for Phil.

In December, she helped her husband with a farm-machinery auction and caught a cold.

She was still sniffling the afternoon of Dec. 14, 1987, as she climbed behind the wheel of her car after another day teaching school.

For a while, she had considered going home after school rather than driving to Mount Sterling for Christmas dinner with her co-workers. After all, it was raining.

But when she steered out of the school parking lot, she turned left onto U.S. 460 -- toward Mount Sterling. She and her passenger, first-grade teacher Charlotte Nefzger, were going to join their colleagues at the Golden Corral Steakhouse.

It was 4 p.m.

Phil was visiting a friend's television repair shop in Frenchburg when a cousin called to tell him his wife had been in a wreck.

''Fender-bender or something?'' Phil asked.

''Yeah,'' the voice on the other end of the phone said. ''I guess.''

Phil rode the 12 miles to the accident with his father, Sam Lawson. When they reached the top of Lucky Stop Hill, they rolled to a stop behind a line of traffic.

Rain misted against the windshield as Sam Lawson leaned out the window. ''This is the husband of one of the girls in the wreck,'' he told the deputy sheriff flagging traffic.

Something in the deputy's face made Phil Lawson's stomach hurt. Ahead, he could see his wife's crumpled Chevrolet Cavalier on the side of the road.

Less than an hour before, a pickup driven by Leonard Mullins, 24, of Jeffersonville had crossed the center line and rammed into the car, tearing off the driver's side.

''Oh, God,'' Phil Lawson said when he saw the wreckage.

Nine miles ahead was Mount Sterling, a town of 7,000, county seat and home of the nearest hospital. Clara Jean would be there.

''I thought we'd never get there,'' Phil said.

The journey sticks in Phil Lawson's memory:

''As we pulled up the little road to go to the hospital, you're up above'' the hospital, Phil said. ''I looked down in there and saw the coroner's car parked outside the emergency room entrance. I just about flipped out. I didn't want to go in.''

Phil Lawson had seen enough. ''I just lost all my strength and everything else.''

Still, he kept going. Inside the hospital, Phil Lawson was taken to the morgue. Clara Jean was there.

Family members and friends always had called her Jeannie. ''She was little, and Jeannie sounded a whole lot better,'' Phil said. ''She always looked so young. That name would have been good for her 'til she got to . . . .''

He paused.

'' . . . 40.''

Clara Jean was 29 when she died.

Phil pulled back the sheet.

''I kissed her and stuff, you know. But her body was cold.

''Her lips were so cold.''

Back home at his parents' house, Phil Lawson went straight into the bedroom, closed the door and cried alone.