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

ON

BEING

8

NASHVILLE

1993
The Southeast Regionals of the NCAA Tournament this weekend were a coming-out party for two kinds of Kentucky basketball fans.

You had the old kind, back after several winters in hibernation, with the swagger and the pronouncements that this Wildcat team is the best in the country.

There were thousands of those in attendance yesterday as Kentucky trashed Utah, 83-62.

And you had the new Kentucky fan, who looked on wide-eyed, glued to the edge of his seat even when the Cats were up by 27. By all appearances, there might have been only one of those, and his name was Michael Clayton.

Michael, 8, of Columbia, Tenn., sat in stark contrast yesterday to the majority of other Kentucky fans, many of whom fully expected the Cats to win and wouldn't have considered the day much fun without a victory.

"It's kind of that Joe Hall-type thing," said Doug Willoughby, a UK fan from Ashland City, Tenn. "They're expected to win."

Even as a fan, Willoughby said, "I feel the pressure."

But Michael, at his first-ever Kentucky game, was "real excited" just to be here, said his father, Bob Clayton, 39.

So excited, in fact, that Michael's dad didn't even have to look at their tickets to find out what seats they had in Section 2E, Row 3. Michael had remembered: "Seats 7 and 8," he said.

It was all as new to Michael as last year's tournament was to Kentucky's legions of fans who had endured the dark days of NCAA probation. The Cats' performance last year surpassed all expectations, said Jesse Stockton of Clarksville, Tenn.

But this year's team will not be able to do enough in the eyes of many fans unless it wins the school's sixth national title, said Stockton, a graduate of UK and its law school.

"It's almost like it was before the team got put on probation," he said. "They're expected to win.

"Kentucky fans are getting spoiled again, I'm afraid."

Some fans yesterday wore T-shirts that read, "Kentucky versus Utah: Start Svoboda," a reference to UK walk-on Todd Svoboda, who does not leave the bench unless Kentucky is winning easily.

Few expected Kentucky to have trouble with Utah, ranked 12th in the country.

As Stockton and his wife, Michelle, sat on a railing outside the gym waiting for the Kentucky game to start, a man in a blue sweater approached.

He called Kentucky the best team in the country. Said the Cats should win it all. Said it's the greatest team ever.

"Proves my point right there," Stockton said after the man walked away.

Willoughby, who wore a blue-and-white pompon hanging out of the back of a Kentucky cap, said UK fans "don't want to have any fun and enjoy."

"They just want to have them in the final game."

Willoughby doesn't number himself among those fans. He stayed until the end of the lopsided game, cheering and clapping until the final buzzer.

So did Michael Clayton, who held up a big sheet of paper with the numeral 3 on it every time Kentucky scored from behind the three-point line.

With 18:15 left in the game, Michael took his hat off, turned it around backward and jammed it back on his head.

With 15:54 left, he joined in a cheer in which his side of the gym yelled "Blue" and the other yelled "White."

With 15:46 left, he turned to his dad with his eyebrows raised and just the hint of a grin on his face and said, "They gonna put the one with the shaved hair in later?"

With 1:42 left, Michael got his answer: Todd Svoboda ran onto the court. Michael grinned. It was a good day to be 8.

PEACEFUL

PROSPECTS

LEXINGTON

1993
The man whose remains lie on Table No. 1 in a second-floor laboratory at the University of Kentucky Hospital lived such an inauspicious life that nobody claimed him when it was over.

But there is no telling how many high school students he has inspired to greatness since he died almost three years ago.

Gary Ginn, coordinator of UK's body bequeathal program, plucked the cadaver's carotid artery like a harp string recently as a cluster of Morgan County students crowded around.

"This might just be the stimulus they need to go into the health-care field," Ginn would say later.

Ginn, UK's undertaker, fields so many requests he could take at least one class of high school or community college students a day through the lab doors marked "Restricted Admittance, Biohazard."

This is UK's gross lab, where students learn about the human body by studying the remains of people whose bodies were left to science.

Ginn doesn't accommodate morbid curiosity seekers. Each group that enters the lab for Ginn's demonstration must have a valid reason -- education, preferably.

"The primary objective is for them to learn something," Ginn said.

'The ultimate gift'
Thousands of Kentuckians have made plans for a future beyond pension plans, Social Security benefits or a house by the ocean.

They've bequeathed their remains to science, a gesture one UK doctor calls "the ultimate gift."

Almost 3,000 Kentuckians have willed their bodies to the University of Kentucky's department of anatomy and neurobiology, associate professor Bruce Maley said.

The department receives about 50 bodies a year, a number that continues to rise as UK's body-bequeathal program becomes better known, Maley said. Bequeathal is the most common method of leaving a body to the department. A few are donated by relatives. Still fewer are unclaimed drifters.

At the University of Louisville, the pledges of those who have promised their remains to research fill two filing-cabinet drawers.

"The people of Kentucky are very generous," Maley said.

Not all of them have left their bodies to Kentucky universities, however.

Roy Crawford III, 41, of Whitesburg, decided last month to leave his body to a research program at the University of Tennessee. He also will donate his organs for transplants.

Crawford's father doesn't mind his son's leaving his body to science. But he isn't wild about his son's choice of research institutions.

Crawford said, laughing, ". . . Probably his main complaint is that it's a UT project."

'Winding up outdoors'

Crawford's plans make death seem like a camping trip: The mining engineer signed over his remains to a UT professor who studies human decay rates by watching corpses left to rot on a peaceful hillside near Knoxville.

When Crawford dies, his body will be placed on the edge of some trees overlooking the Tennessee River -- high above the metallic blur of lives passing by on the highway below.

His decaying remains will help Tennessee forensic anthropologist William M. Bass and his students better understand how human tissue decomposes. His bones will be used in the classroom.

It's useful research, especially for police in states such as Tennessee and Kentucky, whose isolated rural areas are popular dumping grounds for murder victims.

"It's kind of a relief to have made plans," Crawford said. In a letter to Bass, he wrote: "I like the idea of winding up outdoors and the possibility that I may help catch a criminal someday."

And in an interview last month at his office in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, Crawford said: "I like the idea of being propped up against a tree."

At UK, U of L and most other universities with body bequeathal programs, cadavers are used quite differently from those in the field at Tennessee.

They become teaching tools and research projects for students in medicine, dentistry, physical therapy, anatomy and certain doctoral programs, said Dr. Harold Traurig, acting chairman of UK's department of anatomy and neurobiology.

The department does not accept the remains of people who have died violently or of a communicable disease, so few of the cadavers are of people younger than 50.

The bodies are treated with as much respect as patients at the hospital, Traurig said. "We tell the students that these people have given them the ultimate gift."

About 90 cadavers lie on metal racks in the hospital morgue, ready for a second chance to make their mark on the world.

Who would want to end up here?

Beth Wachs, for one. Wachs, 86, of Lexington, has willed her body to UK -- partly to honor an unrealized childhood dream of a career in medicine.

Wachs, who spent almost 30 years as a animal-research lab technician at UK, likes the idea of helping others -- in this lifetime or any other.

"I'm kind of scientifically minded," she said.

Final resting place
The plaque in Section 36 at Lexington Cemetery honors those buried in the shade of a towering Norway spruce for having "rendered humanity a high service."

This is where UK buries the ashes of its cadavers.

There are the graves of the war veterans, the homemakers and a man remembered as "Pop." There's a woman once known as "Grandma Penny," and there are devoted spouses who chose to spend eternity side by side.

Here lie the silent heroes honored on the plaque, which says "Mortui Vivos Docurunt" -- "Dead, they have taught the living."

Here lie those who have helped fresh-faced med students understand all about the size and capacity of the human heart.


THE

LAST

FRONTIER

LEXINGTON

1993
Tobacco warehouses are nearly as synonymous with Broadway in Lexington as theaters are with Broadway in New York City.

The same question applies in both places: What will Act 2 hold?

It's an especially pertinent question in Lexington, where South Broadway -- long the staid epitome of Kentucky life, with its racetrack and wafting odor of tobacco -- is ripening for redevelopment.

Business people and city officials say the venerable old thoroughfare, whose sidewalks are littered with brown tobacco leaves in winter, is more susceptible to sweeping change than any other main road downtown.

Unlike other roads near the center of town, where land for redevelopment is virtually non-existent and parcels are too small to encourage speculation, South Broadway is something of a new frontier.

"With the combination of The Red Mile and the tobacco warehouses, there is so much land here in downtown Lexington along South Broadway," says John Glover, who owns Glover's Bookery, a used- and rare-book store on South Broadway.

Elsewhere, Glover says, "Lexington is so squeezed inside New Circle Road."

Russell Casey, senior comprehensive planner for Lexington, says the tobacco warehouses "represent redevelopment opportunities we really don't have anywhere else, especially for putting employment so close to the city."

The sprawling warehouses that dominate the urban streetscape between Maxwell Street and Waller Avenue occupy large chunks of land -- just like the one being redeveloped into a 21-acre retail center complete with a Winn-Dixie Marketplace. The site's previous occupants? A single tobacco warehouse and a redrying plant, both demolished in November 1991.

City officials and South Broadway merchants have taken note of how little it takes to drastically change the face of the road, and they worry about how to prevent developers from turning it into a generic commercial strip.

That in mind, city planners have taken unprecedented steps to control the direction of redevelopment by drawing up a blueprint for the South Broadway corridor.

The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Planning Commission adopted the half-inch-thick document in 1990 as an amendment to the 1988 comprehensive plan.

"That kind of gives a working block that relieves a lot of anxiety on the part of those of us in business on the street who will be here a long time," Glover says.

"I'm straight across the street from tobacco warehouses. It worries me to death what they might do with that if there were not some kind of suggested plan."

Few doubt the day will come when speculators hover over some of the warehouses like buzzards.

Tobacco is not being produced in the volume it once was, and although Lexington warehouses are enjoying their biggest year since 1982, the industry as a whole has been slowly declining.

"The economy of tobacco is already hurting, and it's going to continue to decline," Glover says. "We're going to see the warehouses one by one give way to something new."

When or how that will happen is anybody's guess. "The whole thing's pretty speculative," says Bill McGinnis of Central District Inc., which owns four of the 16 warehouses in the South Broadway area.

"If this shopping center goes over well, someone might want one of our warehouses.

"It's something we'd consider."

Charlie Kahn, for one, would not miss the warehouses.

"The main thing the tobacco warehouses tend to bring in is rickety trucks that get on the road once a year," says Kahn, who has owned Le Cheval, a riding-apparel shop on South Broadway, for 17 years.

"If somebody else can find a better use for them, then it's building a much safer environment on the street. These things are firetraps for the most part."

Don't look for sudden, drastic change along South Broadway, however. The street is torn between the past and the future, stuck in post-industrial limbo.

City planners have not fielded a rush of zone-change applications. Nelson Keesey, a commercial specialist in the Fayette County property valuation administrator's office, says there is little buying and selling in the area.

Brian Hill, a landscape architect with CMW -- the local architectural and engineering firm working on a beautification plan for the road, said he thought the full transformation of South Broadway would take at least 20 years.

There will be little redevelopment without improvements to the road, long stretches of which have no left-turn lanes, Hill says. Beautifying the streetscape would help, too, he said.

Although South Broadway has its share of success stories -- there are vital, thriving businesses such as Le Cheval, Glover's Bookery and Rogers Restaurant -- there also are crumbling buildings, such as the old Scott Hotel, condemned last year.

And until it was razed last summer, the old Southern Depot sat abandoned and gutted by fire -- a forgotten monument to an era when time along South Broadway was measured in minutes rather than decades.


LEXINGTON

GROWS

UP
LEXINGTON

1993
Richard and Norma Burks of Lexington know housekeeping. For 3 1/2 years, they have diligently cleaned and straightened their stately old home on West Second Street so it would be presentable on a moment's notice to prospective buyers.

Three-and-a-half years.

Larry and Donna Haffler sold their house on Moylan Lane before the lawn had to be mowed twice.

The difference lies in the complexities of a housing market shaped by an unlikely construction boom.

Despite the sagging economy, Lexington last year issued a record 1,794 housing permits for single-family homes and appears on pace to exceed that this year.

Ray Umberger of the city building inspection office said 697 housing permits had been issued as of May 31. No slowdown is in sight. The Lexington-Fayette County Planning Commission this year has approved zone changes for the construction of more than 2,000 homes.

The dusty brown wave of construction has created the illusion of a boom town. But Lexington's population has not kept pace with the number of households springing up on its south side.

"You wonder where they're coming from, who's buying these houses," said Larry Haffler, whose business, Athena Cultured Marble Co. Inc., has benefited handsomely from the boom.

"You keep reading about a recession, and you don't read about new industries coming into Lexington. And yet -- Andover. Hartland. Copperfield. Firebrook."

Those southside developments rank among Lexington's most desired and successful new subdivisions. Many homes continue to spring up there and in other residential developments off Tates Creek, Harrodsburg and Richmond roads just south of Man o' War Boulevard.

Census figures show that between 1980 and 1990, the number of households in Lexington rose from 75,440 to 89,529 -- an increase of almost 19 percent. During that time, however, the city's population increased about 10 percen -- from 204,165 to 225,366.

Jobs grew at a faster rate. Between 1980 and 1990, full- and part-time employment in Lexington shot up more than 42,000, with almost all the new jobs in service and retail.

But with the emergence of Lexington and surrounding counties as a true metropolitan area, many of the people who got new jobs in Fayette County chose to live in bedroom communities like Nicholasville, said Ron Crouch, director of the Kentucky State Data Center.

Which leaves the question: Who has been buying all the houses in Lexington?

"That's the number one question of anyone who comes in from another city: 'Where in the world are all these people coming from, what's spurring all the growth?' " said Jonah Mitchell, a Lexington real estate agent.

"We get that question all of the time from our customers."

The answer: Lexington is not growing so much as it is growing older, Crouch said.

Shrinking households
Between 1980 and 1990, the number of residents 65 or older ballooned 26 percent -- nearly triple the growth rate of the city as a whole.

During that time, many baby boomers came of age to enter the housing market. The number of Lexington residents 18 or younger dropped 3.2 percent. The college-age population also dropped, but the number of people ages 25 to 44 climbed from 62,411 to 81,267.

Shrinking households have resulted. In 1980, the average number of people for each home was 2.56, Crouch said. That had dropped to 2.38 by 1990.

In the 1980s, the number of houses in which the owner lived alone rose 56 percent -- "a huge change," Crouch said. A third of all housing units in 1990 were occupied by one person.

The number of two-person households has shot up, too. Children who grew up and moved away from home left their "empty-nester" parents to consider finding a smaller house, Mitchell said.

But the greatest movement in the housing market is in the opposite direction. "The starter homes are hottest, and the move-ups are hot," Mitchell said.

Tom Collier, president of Realty Research Corp. in Lexington, said low interest rates have prompted apartment dwellers to buy houses.

"The renters and the people who have outgrown small, starter homes are all moving up," Mitchell said.

Despite the exodus, apartment complexes are not suffering much. Somehow the occupancy rate has held at about 93 percent, Collier said.

But housing construction almost has completely eclipsed the development of apartment complexes, Collier said.

Tricky proposition
An apartment-construction boom in the early and mid-1980s that left the city "way overbuilt" with a vacancy rate of 15 percent seems a distant memory.

"I've never seen it stop so dead since we started apartment building. It's come to a screeching halt," Collier said.

He does not expect the trend to continue long. The housing market might appear stronger than it is because all the construction is concentrated in certain areas of the city, especially Harrodsburg and Richmond roads, Collier said.

Mitchell expects housing construction to continue at a healthy rate, however. Lexington is the place to be in the eastern half of the state.

"This is where people come to get educated, this is where people come to get well, this is where people come to play," Mitchell said.

"You have to take a longer view than one or two years or a spurt in the market."

The construction boom has made buying and selling homes a tricky proposition. Some houses might seem almost impossible to sell. Others go in the blink of an eye.

Most in demand are newer homes, and those in the $60,000 to $100,000 price range, Collier said. Location in a southside subdivision also does not hurt.

"New-construction areas are doing extremely well," real estate agent Ken Silvestri said. "Builders rarely get a home finished before it's sold."

Some agents are also contacting people in the most desirable subdivisions and trying to persude them to sell their homes.

Larry Haffler said he prefers a house that is "brand-new and up-to-date."

The Hafflers sold their house in the Hidden Springs subdivision last month for $89,400. They hammered out a deal with a buyer nine days after the house was put on the market.

Their brick ranch house has 1,960 square feet, a finished basement, a fireplace and a jacuzzi.

With a 4-year-old girl, a 3-year-old boy and a baby due Monday, the Hafflers plan to move to a bigger house in Palomar subdivision.

On the other side of town, Richard and Norma Burks have been trying to sell their 5,000-square-foot antebellum home.

The house, built about 1850, has hardwood floors, a full basement, a new roof and a priceless history. It is thought to have served as a refuge for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad.

The Burkses are asking $225,000. The original price was more than $300,000, but it didn't take them long to realize they would have to lower it.

Norma Burks blames the economy and the surplus of houses -- new and old. But she also suspects her house might not be modern enough to compete in its price range.

Many prospective home buyers might prefer amenities to ambiance, she said. Self-contained southside developments with clubhouses and pools and tennis courts are in vogue.

Unfortunately for the Burkses, turrets and Second Street and memories of the Civil War apparently are not.

CURSE

OF

THE

CALLIOPE
LEXINGTON

1993
Eli Barnes points his bike in the general direction of the two-faced kitten and the devil people, pops a wheelie, then takes off. The wind already is in his face when he hears his mother call him back.

"Hey, Eli! Go straighten up the top first."

The carnival calls in strange ways. Eli, who is 12, turns his bike around, returns to the "top" -- the tent-like dining area beside his parents' cookhouse at the Blue Grass Fair -- and begins to wash tables, sweep up and throw away empty cups.

Eli is a typical child of the midway: bored with the attractions that lure the local kids; and content to ride his bike beneath the hot sun or help his parents tend to business each day in the interminable hours before the fair opens. "I get tired of riding the rides and stuff," Eli says, "but I don't get tired of this."

The carnival might prolong childhood for those who visit, but it saps it quickly from the kids whose families work and travel with the show.

"I was a kid for a couple of years," Eli's brother, Jeremy, 16, says. "I'm not too much a kid anymore. You grow up really fast out here."

Eli and Jeremy Barnes have given away their youth to the children who scream on the Scrambler. But they don't mingle with the beneficiaries of their gift.

"They just stay to themselves," Eli says, "and I just stay to myself."
A family fair
The boys' mother, Debi Dolce, waves an American Family Sweepstakes envelope in the air.

"Everybody see this?" Dolce says, holding the envelope aloft as she pops out the door at one end of her Seats & Eats cookhouse to address the carnival workers seeking refuge from the sweltering sun.

"This is my ticket outta here. If I win, I'm gone."

Carnivals are places to suspend disbelief, so Dolce smiles as she slaps the envelope down on the counter between a pack of Marlboros and a half-empty bottle of Crystal Hot Sauce to affix the postage stamp.

If she's lucky, she could win $10 million. She picks up the salt shaker off the silver counter top and throws a dash over her shoulder.

Jeremy rolls his eyes.

"Tell her you have to buy a magazine," he says, tending to the grill with an indulgent smile.

Smiling and cutting up with resting carnival workers in the quiet hours before the fair opens, Eli washes the tables under the top with a green cloth.

Carnival children start working young.

"My son had enough money when he was 15 to buy a new Chevrolet," says Bill Myers, owner of Myers International Midways, the Florida-based company that runs the Blue Grass Fair.

"Kids, when they get around 12 here they start working," Jeremy Barnes says. "And once you start working, you can't stop."

Children are a plentiful source of labor. Many of the families that travel with the carnival bring their kids with them.

Tiny pink cars, tricycles and other toys sit in the dirt and weeds outside the trailers and buses that clog the field west of the midway at Masterson Station Park.