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

Escape from the fire
Tonight, he climbs aboard The Groomsman, bounces out to the ring. The crowd applauds. The lights are bright. Sweat glistens on the necks of both horse and trainer. The horse is tight. "He's been through some trauma," Nevitt says. But for the first time all night, Nevitt is not thinking of the fire.

The flames were extinguished the moment he boosted himself into the saddle.

"That's one reason you ride," he says. "You block things out and don't have to see psychiatrists so often."

Nevitt and The Groomsman win the blue ribbon for three-gaited saddle horses, return to the barn.

Nevitt's graying hair hangs in strings on his face as he lifts a Coors Light to his lips. The beer is sweating, too. Nevitt smiles.

Tonight, The Groomsman has carried him out of his nightmare, has high-stepped over his ghosts, has returned a favor: Tonight, the horse has rescued the trainer from the fire.

ROLLING

ON

THE

RIVER

HICKMAN

1993
As the mighty Mississippi strained against levees protecting low-lying pockets of farmland in Fulton County, Brother Dick Haley said, "Let us pray."

"I would remind you of the flood victims, but I know we've got some other things we need to be praying about, too," Haley, pastor of the First Methodist Church of Hickman, told his congregation yesterday morning.

As choir member Mike Majors knelt in silent prayer for relief from the flood, all of his 2,500-acre farm lay underwater. In this part of Kentucky, farmers and others learn faith and humility in church and at one other altar: the rich bottom lands of the Mississippi River.

By depositing silt that enriches the soil for farming, the river here has given much life, but it also has taken away: This summer, 40,000 to 50,000 acres of farmland in the four Kentucky counties along its banks are underwater, the year's crops lost.

Although the flooding upriver in Missouri has devastated entire towns and washed people out of their homes, in Kentucky it has been a problem almost exclusively for farmers.

But in this flat, sun-baked, rural part of the state, that is enough. About 100 families who grow soybeans and corn in the fertile pockets of bottom land have been affected. And the worst may be yet to come.

The river is expected to crest Friday at 44 feet at Cairo, Ill., and it is rising fast on Wayne Earl Bean's farm in Ballard County, not far from the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

In places on Bean's farm, the water stands taller than a grown man.

The strain on makeshift dirt levees, mounded up quickly by farmers trying to save at least part of their crops, has become almost too great. From Thursday to Saturday, the floodwater rose a third of a foot on Bean's farm when a levee beside the river gave way.

It is the biggest summer flood in far Western Kentucky since 1958, farmers say. But the timing of the flood rather than its magnitude is what makes it especially bad.

Flooding is common in the counties along the Mississippi River. In 1973, floodwaters all but washed away Madrid Bend, 10,000 acres of farmland west of Hickman that looks on the map like Kentucky's decimal point.

The Bend, part of Fulton County, is home to all of 18 registered Kentucky voters -- none of whom expects to be displaced by this year's flood. Levees so far have held out the Mississippi, which loops around the Bend.

Although riverboat gambling has been an issue in this part of the world, farming never has come into question. Everybody admits that planting soybeans next to the Mississippi River is a form of legalized gambling, however.

"It's a risk," Rick Majors said. "You're just rolling the dice.

"There's nothing you can do about it. The whole river bottom is like a high-water storage facility, and we don't mind it. It brings in acres and acres of topsoil every year."


Unlike Missouri, which lies low all along the river, Kentucky is vulnerable to flooding only in pockets, said George Frazier, a mechanical engineer from Fulton County.

People moved out of the bottoms long ago to save their homes from the river. Most towns and communities along the Mississippi are perched on bluffs and high ground, and are in no danger of flooding, Frazier said.

The most vulnerable to flooding is Hickman, seat of low-lying Fulton County, which has been hit hardest by the flood. But there is no fear of the river here.

Yesterday as Haley finished his sermon at the First United Methodist Church, three bare-chested young men swam in the river below town, and a fisherman tended to his catch.

The gates were not even in the floodwall around town.

Even the Bend was calm. Kim Whitson smiled and played with her infant in her mobile home.

But the baby's grandfather, Winston Whitson, worried about his crops. Workers sweating beneath a merciless sun used equipment supplied by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to pump slimy, green river water back over a levee into the Mississippi.

The water had leaked through the levee and crept to the edge of Whitson's farmland.

Farmers can only work and wait and wonder. Whitson, who farms 650 acres in Madrid Bend, has been able to protect almost all his land -- so far. But he does not know whether the levees he and his son have built will do any good should the river rise to 32 1/2 feet around the Bend, as expected.

If the river makes it over the levees, Whitson, who grows soybeans, expects to lose all but 150 acres of crops.

"It'd probably be a disaster," Whitson said. "I'd probably have to stop farming. I got a lot tied up in that crop."

Farmers whose fields are flooded stand to lose not only the money they would have received from selling their crops. They also will lose what they had invested in seeds, herbicide, fuel and labor for the year, Majors said.

Bean, who has held floodwaters off 450 of his 1,100 acres with hastily built dirt levees, said he stood to lose $250,000, including all his crops, if the river crests as predicted.

Most farmers have no crop insurance, said U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who visited the flood-stricken area Saturday. Only slightly more than 17 percent of farmers buy the insurance, McConnell, R-Ky., said.

Farmers rightfully expect the federal government to bail them out of disasters such as floods, said McConnell, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

"I don't think anyone in this area I know of has crop insurance," Majors said. "It's a pretty high expense."

"Maybe helping crop insurance will be one of the things that will come out of this," said McConnell, whose car sloshed through floodwater up to the manifold as a staff member drove him Saturday along Ky. 123 in Hickman County.

Many farmers who agreed before the growing season to sell their crops to a certain grain company will be obligated contractually to buy back their own crops. Because market prices have risen since the start of the growing season, the farmers owe buyers the difference, Majors said.

Many of the crops grown in the bottoms eventually are sold to the federal government for export, Mike Majors said. The flood could have far-ranging economic effects, some of which remain to be seen.


There is little left to be done except wait. Many of the farmers who attend the Methodist church in Hickman were absent yesterday morning. Many had decided it was time for a vacation.

"It's good to see a lot of our farmers are on vacation," the Rev. Haley said. "Some of them have nothing else to do anymore but take a vacation. And they all deserve it."

"Now," Rick Majors said of the flooding, "you just hope it goes down pretty quick." Some farmers might still be able to grow green beans or some other crop that requires only a short growing season, he said. But it is unlikely unless the water recedes soon -- and quickly.

"It's getting worse every day and every hour it goes on," said Paul Wilson, a Fulton County farmer whose 750 acres are almost three-fourths underwater. "And nobody knows when it's going to stop.

"I think we'd all like to get back to square zero."

AN

UNPREDICTABLE

LADY

CAIRO, Ill.

1993
Ground Zero for flooding in parts of Kentucky, Missouri and Illinois is at the bottom of Fourth Street in this decaying Midwestern town, where a federal river-gauge tower uses a computer to measure and predict water levels for the entire region.

Measuring the level of suffering over such a wide area is not as simple.

North and west of Kentucky, flooding has cost some people their lives, others their homes and businesses. The effect has been dramatic and easy to see.

But in the Purchase Area of Western Kentucky, where direct flood damage almost certainly will be limited to crops in the field, the effect is much more subtle.

The streets of Hickman on Sunday were full of slow-moving cars bearing Tennessee license plates. Occupants craned their necks looking for exciting flood scenes, but the gawkers did not see much, said Brent Williams, a barge worker on the upper Mississippi who was laid off because of the flooding there.

As the Mississippi rises toward an expected crest Saturday of 45.2 feet, the watchful worry of Kentuckians provides stark contrast to the frenzied activity of their neighbors in Illinois and Missouri.

"We have friends calling in, asking if we're sandbagging the house," said Rick Major of Hickman, whose family lost all 2,500 acres to rising floodwaters. "But nobody lives in the bottoms anymore, and that's all that's threatened."

"People think it's strange," Hickman Mayor Judy Powell said, "that we have all this water in the bottoms and the town is fine."

Upstream of Kentucky, north of the Mississippi's confluence with the Ohio, entire towns are under water and the mighty river has been closed so the wake of passing ships does not wash out more levees.

Here the Mississippi River attacks fast and furious, creating a sense of urgency whose focus can shift in a matter of seconds.

At the edge of a soybean field off Illinois Route 3 yesterday, children, vacationers from Hawaii, women with painted fingernails and 64 state prisoners worked side-by-side making sandbags and loading them onto trucks to be delivered where needed.

"They're about to lose it over there -- the river's taking over," a worker yelled suddenly, prompting a flurry of activity as a load was made ready to respond to the emergency.

Across the highway, a house was about to be washed away.

No homes are in danger in Kentucky, however. In Hickman, the Purchase Area's only true river town -- most of the others are perched safely on bluffs over the river -- the gates have not even been put in the floodwall.

Mayor Powell is keeping her eye on the numbers out of Cairo. The floodwall gates, which take a day and a half to install, must go up if the river reaches 50 feet. The town starts to flood at 51 or 52.

There have been worse floods -- like the one in 1991, which forced Hickman to put its floodwall gates up.

The river is wider here, and washed-out levees upstream in Illinois have relieved much of the pressure on the Purchase Area.

In the four Kentucky counties along the Mississippi, the flood's timing, not its magnitude, make it a disaster.

Flooding is common in Fulton, Carlisle, Hickman and Ballard counties only in the spring and fall. This year's flood has devastated farmers by coming in the middle of summer -- too late in the growing season to start again with new crops.

Yesterday about 40,000 acres of farmland -- 38,000 acres of soybeans and 2,000 of corn -- lay under water, said Bob Carrico, area coordinator for state Disaster and Emergency Services.

State Agriculture Commissioner Ed Logsdon has estimated the damage to crops at $25 million. Farmers stand to lose $7 million more of what they had invested in this year's crops, Logsdon said, but those numbers change daily.

The river keeps rising.

Many farmers have lost their entire yield to the flood.

"What if your boss said you would have no income for a total year?" Fulton County farmer Paul Wilson said. "How would you survive?"

Farmers are not the only ones in Kentucky who will be affected by the flood, but the ripple effect will take some time to reach bankers and merchants.

Once it does, the flood of summer '93 will haunt residents long after the water recedes. Agriculture is the area's biggest industry by far.

The river bottoms are to the Purchase Area what the coalfields are to other parts of Kentucky, Wilson said.

"It affects this whole area," Powell said. "We all end up paying each other. It's just a cycle, and when one group suffers, everybody suffers.

"It's been pretty gloomy around this town for a couple weeks now."

Even schools will be affected by the damage done to the area's economy, Fulton County Superintendent Charles Terrett said. "When the fields are flooded," Terrett told one farmer, "that's just like flooding a classroom."

In contrast to the immediacy of the danger in Illinois and Missouri, all that's left to do in Kentucky is wait. The higher the river goes, the more fields will be flooded -- and the harder the economic impact will be.

Nobody knows for sure when it all will stop. Powell said that if rains swell the Ohio River to the north, the flooding could get much worse -- fast.

"I've seen that ol' river when you'll walk up to that floodwall and it'll slap you in the face," Powell said.

"It's an unpredictable lady."

RAISING

SOYBEANS,

GROWING

DESPAIR

MADRID BEND

1993
Acloud of dust rises then fades like hope over the endangered soybean fields of Winston Whitson as he drives his pickup atop a dirt levee.

As Western Kentucky farmers busy themselves battling the Purchase Area's most devastating growing-season flood in 25 years, they are being blind-sided by another menace: a drought that threatens to finish off whatever the Mississippi River spares.

"We're burnin' up and about to drown," said Whitson, a soybean farmer in Madrid Bend.

The irony of the dilemma is especially pointed in the Bend -- that part of Kentucky that on a map looks like the state's decimal point. The Bend, 10,000 acres of farmland separate from the rest of the state, is surrounded on all but its southern tip by the Mississippi.

But as Whitson builds levees and expands existing ones in hopes of keeping the river out -- so far it has worked -- his soybean fields are criss-crossed with cracks as ominous as the earthquake fault line for which this region is famous.

Many farmers own land in the river bottoms and on hillsides. Randall McQuady of Ballard County might lose 500 acres to the flood and 900 to the drought.

Most farmers in the area grow soybeans, corn or tobacco. Although corn and tobacco are relatively resilient crops, McQuady's corn yield is down by almost half.

One Purchase Area farmer, Jake Radford, 83, stands to lose all of his 100 acres. "I run irrigation on the hills and get flooded in the bottoms," Radford told Mitch McConnell when the U.S. senator visited the stricken area Saturday.

"If the weather pattern continues as it has, the biggest problem in Kentucky might not be too much water, it might be too little," McConnell said.

The region has not received any significant or widespread rainfall since June 28, said William Birney, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's soil conservation office in Ballard County.

"That's becoming a big problem fast," Birney said. Farmers planted corn later this year because of a wet spring, and it has not developed enough to withstand the effects of the drought.

The humidity and heat -- temperatures in the Purchase Area have been hovering near 100 with a heat index even higher -- have been hard on area residents. "Doggone, it takes your breath," said Fulton County Property Valuation Administrator Mike Alexander.

But for crops, the steamy weather has been deadly.

"The drought's just giving us a fit," said Wayne Earl Bean, a Ballard farmer. "To the corn, it's just like putting it in the microwave. With the heat index, it scalds it. It steams the pollen."

Scorched land that has been flooded stands little chance of yielding anything, Birney said. The heat makes crops especially vulnerable to the effects of flooding.

"It doesn't have to be underwater long to be destroyed. The corn yield is being cut every day," Birney said. "And tobacco is having it hard, too."

Like the flood, the drought has a ripple effect that will be felt far beyond the bottomlands of the Mississippi.

"It's going to hurt the farmers, it's going to hurt us, it's going to hurt the merchants in the towns," said Bill Latimer, who owns Warterfield Grain Co. in Union City, Tenn., and Browder Grain Co. in South Fulton, Tenn. "The dry weather is going to hurt us more than the flood."

Grain companies like Latimer's in Tennessee and Kentucky buy from the farmers, then sell the yield for a profit.

Latimer's grain companies buy wheat and soybeans, which are sold to exporters, and corn, which goes mostly for chicken feed in Mississippi.

Hope fades with each passing day. "A lot of the crops could be salvaged," Birney said, "if we could get some rain now."

THE

HEART

KNOWS

NO

BOUNDS

WICKLIFFE

1993
Ballard County Judge-Executive Bill Graves cut short his lunch Friday, leaving half-eaten pork chops on his plate at a downtown diner so he could rush to help out flood victims in nearby Olive Branch, Ill.

Mississippi River floodwater, unleashed when a levee broke the day before, was threatening to wipe out homes and businesses in the little town in southern Illinois.

"When people's lives are in jeopardy, state and county lines don't mean nothing to us," Graves said.

The Mississippi River, which forms more than 50 miles of Kentucky's border with Missouri, has obscured boundaries and wiped out arbitrary state allegiances.

Kentuckians are giving time, effort and money to the relief effort in Missouri, Illinois and Iowa as well as in their own Purchase Area.
Pitching in
Nearly 30,000 acres of farmland was underwater yesterday in far-western Kentucky, said Bob Carrico, area coordinator for state Disaster and Emergency Services.

By the time the river crests Friday or Saturday, as many as 40,000 acres could be flooded, Carrico said.

(State Agriculture Commissioner Ed Logsdon told The Associated Press that 36,000 acres are underwater and up to 44,000 in danger of being submerged when the water crests.)

More than 100 farming families live in the river bottoms. They stand to lose about $7.5 million in earnings alone, said William Birney, executive director of the Agricultural Soil Conservation Service in Ballard County.

(Logdson estimated damages up to $32 million.)

Still, flood damage in Kentucky will not reach the levels it has in other states, where raging river water has killed 29 people, caused millions of dollars of damage and damaged 22,000 homes.

But the state's narrow escape has not kept Kentuckians from pitching in.

American Red Cross chapters in Kentucky have dispatched three emergency relief vans to Des Moines, Iowa, St. Louis and Omaha, Neb. The vans, from Lexington, Louisville and Hopkinsville, are carrying food to homes in flooded areas, said Louisville Red Cross spokeswoman Malanie Koch.

Many people in disaster areas choose to stay in their homes rather than evacuate, Koch said. Besides food, the relief vans deliver cleaning supplies such as mops so residents can remove at least some effects of the flood from their living rooms.

The Red Cross also issues checks to flood victims to pay for essentials ranging from food to eyeglasses, Koch said.

The Red Cross encourages donations of money rather than food or clothing, which is hard to store and transport, Koch said. Volunteers at the wheels of relief vans stop along the way to pick up supplies from other charitable organizations.

Giving flood victims money to buy their own food and supplies also benefits flooded towns, Koch said. "The money is spent back in the community."

More than $2,000 has been donated for flood relief through the Paducah Red Cross, said executive director Barbara Grimes.

The Louisville chapter has received more than $5,000 in donations, said financial development director Wes Wilkinson.

Volunteers on standby
Robin Hollar, spokeswoman for the Lexington chapter of the Red Cross, said her office has received more than $1,000 in donations for flood victims. Many people have called to offer money and to volunteer for service in flood-stricken areas, Hollar said.

But Red Cross volunteers, who provide everything from disaster counseling to money, must be trained in relief work. Those who volunteer for the Mississippi flood-relief effort might be trained in time for the next disaster -- but not for this one, Koch said.

Two trained volunteers from the Lexington chapter who are helping out in storm-damaged areas of Central Kentucky have been told to report to Iowa and Illinois for flood relief in the Midwest, Hollar said.

Louisville has eight volunteers working in flooded areas and more on standby, Koch said.

In Lexington, the Salvation Army is helping coordinate donations of money, non-perishable food and cleaning supplies, Dianne Williams said. And a car dealership, Ol' Don Jacobs, has set up trailers where volunteers are packing up donated items to ship to the Midwest.

Many Kentuckians are acting on their own, said Graves, the Ballard County judge-executive. Graves let Alexander County, Ill., officials use three Ballard road-department dump trucks, a pickup and a handful of county employees to haul sandbags for diverting floodwaters when the levee broke.

Graves drove the dump truck himself. He and other Ballard County employees hauled 3,000 empty sand bags supplied by the Army Corps of Engineers to sand pits to be filled.

Graves did not hesitate when Alexander County officials asked for his help. Townspeople in Olive Branch, Ill., were moved to tears by the sight of those trucks with "Ballard County" painted on them, Graves said.

"God bless you," they told him.

WHAT'S

IN

A

RANKING?

LEXINGTON

1993
If you keep up with current events, it might not surprise you that Kentucky is being ranked pretty highly these days. What might surprise you is that some of the rankings have been about business, not basketball.

In the last six months, Kentucky's performance has drawn rave reviews in at least two national magazines. The context: rebounding from the recession, not off the backboard.

The rosy picture, deftly painted by Forbes and U.S News & World Report, has a Camry frame. The March 29 issue of Forbes, in a short article titled "Lucky Kentucky," notes that Toyota's 5-year-old plant in Georgetown has led to the creation of more than 17,883 jobs in the Bluegrass State.

The windfall, Kentucky's best insulation from the economic chill, has been felt mostly in Central Kentucky -- which might help explain why Lexington's economy got a high ranking from the Cato Institute in the Feb. 24 editions of USA Today.

But in Kentucky, whose unhappiest county, Elliott, has a nearly 20 percent unemployment rate, not too many people put a lot of money on the economic-statistics derby.

"Most any rankings, the people here right now, they do take it with a grain of salt," said Jimmy Herald, judge-executive of Owsley County, where the unemployment rate stands at 7.4 percent.

U.S. News & World Report ranked Kentucky second only to Oklahoma for "relative (positive) changes in their economies over a year's time." Such a high rating might be misleading, said Charles Haywood, director for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky.

One reason Kentucky ranks near the top is that much of the rest of the nation is doing so poorly, Haywood said. "We've been on a steady path with no major upswings or downswings.

"We've been the tortoise in this race, and right now we're ahead."

The glowing reports on Kentucky's economy, although true to an extent, mas the state's diversity, Haywood said. Oldham, the county with the lowest unemployment rate -- 2.7 percent -- is a long way economically and geographically from Elliott -- and many of the other Eastern Kentucky counties that continue to struggle as coal mining fades.

"Coal will be adversely impacted by the Clinton energy tax," Haywood said. "So we've still got our problems. But we're doing better because Toyota has had such success and good productivity."

Ed Sturgeon, research manager for the Lexington Chamber of Commerce, chuckles a lot when discussing such rankings. "If you're down so low, any actual increase is a great percentage," he said.

Alan Kirschenbaum, editor of The Lane Report, said Toyota has skewed the picture. He puts it in terms easily understandable to most Kentuckians:

"You're at Keeneland and you're having a mediocre sale, when one person suddenly buys a horse for $10 million. In the end, the total amount spent looks good, but what you actually have is only one person going home happy."

Sturgeon is more blunt: "You can take what is actually good information and crank it with a computer and come up with all kinds of trash."

And what of the Cato Institute's ranking Lexington as the fifth-fastest? "I just dismissed it," Sturgeon said. "They screwed up."

The Cato ranking measured economic growth of the nation's 75 largest cities from 1965 through 1990 -- a period that includes the 1974 merger of Lexington and Fayette County.

From 1960 to 1971, the city's population rose from 62,810 to 108,137. The total county population in 1971 was 174,323. Three years later, in a single election day, Lexington's population ballooned to include everyone in the county.

The 1980 census showed the new, improved city with a population of 204,165. The merger artificially had inflated Lexington's population and jobs, two important criteria for Cato's rankings.

Ron Crouch, of the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville, said Lexington's real growth occurred in the '50s and '60s, with the arrival of IBM and subsequent booms in manufacturing and retailing.

"Without the merger, we wouldn't even be there," Sturgeon said of the ranking.

Sturgeon's wariness of numbers stems partly from an awareness that when too many layers of bureaucracy are involved, numerals often change for no apparent reason. Sometimes the formula changes. Sometimes the explanation isn't even as good as that.

Before 1980, the census said Lexington was 283 square miles, including waterways. In 1980, the number changed to 284 square miles. Now, in 1990, it's 285. "Where the hell did this land come from?" Sturgeon said, laughing.

Kirschenbaum said the Cato ranking has little meaning because it covers such a long period. "You need to look at what has happened in the last five years," he said.

The thoroughbred industry has declined and commercial real estate has nearly dried up since passage of the Tax Reform Act in 1986, Kirschenbaum said. Horse sales at Keeneland and Fasig-Tipton are way down, especially since 1990 -- the last year of the Cato study.

The '90s also have seen IBM selling the bulk of its Lexington operations, fewer investments in horse farms and the end of the housing industry boom of the '70s and '80s, Kirschenbaum said.

So does anyone take these rankings seriously?

Companies looking for a place to put a factory probably don't, said Alex Warren, senior vice president of Toyota's Kentucky operation.

Toyota spokeswoman Barbara McDaniel said the decision to locate in Georgetown was based on climate, the quality of the work force and the proximity to interstate highways and rail service. A generous incentive package from the state didn't hurt.

Toyota has played a big role in Kentucky's -- and Lexington's -- economic fortunes.

"Toyota kept us from feeling the real jolt of the recession for a long time," Kirschenbaum said. "I'd hate to have seen what our local economy would have been like without Toyota."

Besides creating thousands of jobs, Toyota has "gotten (Kentucky) on the map as a place to do business," Warren said.

Before Toyota took a chance on Georgetown, site locators would have gotten strange and ominous reactions upon suggesting a move to Kentucky.

"What would have been the reaction? 'This is your last job as a site locator,' " Warren said, laughing.

Toyota's success in Kentucky has helped, too. While the rest of the nation suffers through a decline in manufacturing jobs, Kentucky is creating them, Haywood said.

Gary Bello, president of Clark Material Handling Co., said Kentucky's rural work force has proved adept at the increasingly popular team approach to manufacturing.

Farmers make good factory workers because they are good problem-solvers, he said. "You grow up on a farm, you're an independent guy. These people don't want to be run by management and they don't want to be run by a union."

Companies interested in moving to Kentucky have asked Warren whether there are enough of these people left after Toyota has its pick of the crop.

At least they're asking. Manufacturers haven't always been that interested in the Bluegrass State.

The bottom line? Although Lexington and Kentucky might not be slam-dunking on the opposition, both are doing relatively well.