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

ALL

AGAINST,

VOTE

NEIGH

LEXINGTON

1990

Nothing is pastoral or beautiful about this horse competition. There are no white fences to clear.

This arena, smack in the middle of rural northern Fayette County, is full of strange and ugly symbols of big-city life: A pile of litter. A churning backhoe. A noisy gravel chute. A wailing police siren.

The sound of gunfire.

Welcome to the seventh annual Mounted Police Colloquium at the Kentucky Horse Park, where the less a horse does, the better it scores. See how the horse from Detroit walks past all the clattering and screaming and whirring and banging so nonchalantly? That's how it's done.

This is one equine competition in which many of the better horses come from urban areas. "It's just such a complete, way-out competition compared to what you would think of when you think of horses," said Joan Shinnick, a member of Lexington's horse-patrol commission.

Police officers and their horses from all over the United States and Canada came to Lexington this week for four days of classes, seminars and demonstrations that end this morning.

Almost 100 officers and their horses attended this year's colloquium, including some from the United States border patrol, said Sgt. Pat Murray of Lexington's mounted patrol.

The Lexington mounties are hosts for the event, which drew 30 officers the first year and 67 a year ago.

The climax is the competition, which enables officers to show off their horses' ability to remain calm and collected in the midst of urban chaos.

The arena is strewn with obstacles and hazards that include pipes, piles of litter and bag ladies pushing shopping carts -- a featured attraction in last year's contest.

Many of the horses and officers that compete, however, are from small towns, where the mounted patrols mostly just rides in parades.

Meet, for example, all 4 feet, 3 inches of Marguerite Smith, who wears a wide-brimmed white hat as she waits to take her turn in the ring.

Smith is a member of the Medina County, Ohio, mounted patrol. Two weeks ago, they were saddling up getting ready for a manhunt when the man, a 90-year-old runaway, was found in the woods.

Just as well. The Medina County all-volunteer mounted patrol is not your crack law-enforcement unit. Mostly they patrol parades. But they know how to ride horses.

That includes Smith, who happens to be about the same age as her horse. Neither is young: She is 73, and her horse, Blue, is 20. Smith has two artificial hips.

"I'm old enough to be any of their mothers," she says, grinning.

It isn't the size and age of the rider that matter, though, Smith says. It's that gravel chute. Ask Smith's Medina County comrade, Susan Frank, who has just finished a fitful ride on her big Tennessee Walker.

"That was bad," Frank tells another member of the Medina force as they sit astride their horses.

There is a smile on her face, though, and her voice is soft as she turns her attention to her mount and begins to rub its neck.

"Look at that sweat," she says softly, bending close to the horse. "You tried, you tried.

"Not real haa-ard . . . "


TIME

PIECE

PINEVILLE

1990

Bobby Ray Hatfield got his draft notice in summer, the season for pulling and shucking corn.

Chrysanthemums were in bloom when his name was added to the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Frankfort.

"For everything there is a season," says the memorial, but Hatfield's mother, Eliza, has not seen it. She did not even know as she gathered autumn chrysanthemums from her garden Thursday morning that a work crew 145 miles away was laying a slab of granite etched with her son's name.

Bobby Ray, the Hatfields' youngest son, was killed Feb. 19, 1968 -- two days before his 23rd birthday. But because he lived in Michigan when he was drafted in July 1965, his name was omitted from the federal government's original list of Kentuckians killed in the war.

Bobby Ray's name was missing when the Kentucky memorial was dedicated on Veterans Day 1988, but it will be there for today's observance, thanks to a boyhood friend who noticed the omission. And that makes today extra special for Eliza Hatfield, 84, who has lost three of four sons to the ravages of war.

Eliza Hatfield lives alone in Pineville and has no way of traveling to visit the memorial, but she won't let that dampen her spirits.

"I'm going to put my large flag out, and I'll be a-thinkin' and prayin'," she said Friday.

"I'll be a-thankin' the good Lord his name's on there, and I'll be watchin' some church preachin' on TV."

Eliza did not find out her son's name had been added to the memorial until a reporter called and told her Friday.

"You just made my day," she said.

Larry Arnett, director of veterans affairs for Kentucky, said the state's military affairs department had no procedure set up for notifying the relatives of veterans whose names were added to the memorial. Usually it is a relative who brings an omission to the department's attention, he said.

The memorial started out with 1,069 names and now has 1,088, said James Halvatgis, executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

Two names were added Thursday morning. Besides that of Bobby Ray Hatfield, who was a sergeant in the Marine Corps, the memorial now contains the name of Arthur T. Finney, who was 38 when he died Aug. 1, 1966.

As in Hatfield's case, many of the omissions occurred because a Kentucky native had been drafted while living in another state, Halvatgis said.

Bobby Ray left home the day after graduating from high school, forgoing his dream to attend college so that he could find work and help support his poverty-stricken family.

He went to Detroit, where he took a job as a mechanic. And he sent money home to his parents.

Eliza Hatfield, whose husband died Oct. 9, has not led an easy life. Besides outliving her husband and three of her children, she has sacrificed all her life to provide for her family.

The Hatfields scraped by after Eliza's husband, Joe, was disabled in an underground coal mine explosion in 1945. Bobby Ray helped out by sending home savings bonds from the war, which his parents used to help put his younger sister through college.

And in February 1968, Eliza sacrificed yet another time to send Marine Bobby Ray a birthday present: nuts, cigarettes and homemade candy.

He never opened any of the gifts.

The last letter Bobby Ray wrote his parents -- "Hi, Mom and Dad," they started out -- seemed to be steeped in loneliness. It arrived the day he died.

"It was so very sad," Eliza said. "He was having such a hard time. I could tell he was so depressed and homesick.

"He said he'd be home on leave in less than a week."

Through it all, Eliza has kept an even perspective. The pain "never gets old," she said. But she harbors no bitterness -- "I'll spread my flag out just as big as I can spread it," she said -- and she has not lost her appreciation for life's beauty.

That includes her own gentle garden.

On Thursday, her vegetable garden, which produced the corn and tomatoes that Bobby Ray loved to eat, sat dormant for the winter. But she worked in her flower garden, gathering a potful of color to give her neighbor even as her son's name was being immortalized.

"I have the prettiest flowers of anyone in town," she said. The chrysanthemums were bronze and yellow, purple and white.

"A time to plant and a time to pluck up what has been planted," the memorial says, and Eliza Hatfield knows . . .

MAYBERRY

R.I.P.

LOUISA

1990

The long trail of headlights winds aimlessly through town and curls back out again, like a funeral procession that doesn't know which way to go. Where would you bury all that has died in this town?

It's another Friday night in Eastern Kentucky's Big Sandy River Valley, and the young people of Lawrence County are cruising. The procession of lights is theirs, and it crawls eastward from the old U.S. 23 bypass, loops through Louisa's lifeless downtown, then returns to the highway.

Like so much else here, the cruising begins and ends at Louisa Plaza, up on the old bypass. This is the place to be. Nobody seems to mind that the L.A. Joe's department store closes in just half an hour; the parking lot is all light and sound and motion.

Just a mile away, downtown Louisa is dark and silent except for the procession of young motorists, none of whom stops there. Why should they? Once, there was a movie theater downtown, but it's a carpet store now. Once, there was a downtown, but . . .

Steve Liming reaches through the open window of his pickup truck, parked in the middle of the lot, and cranks the volume on his factory-installed tape player. "This is a song about Louisa," he says, grinning around a toothpick.

The music rides a long way on the clear, night air:

Nobody gets off in this town

Trains don't even slow down . . .

The Greyhound stops! Somebody gets on.

But nobody gets off in this town . . .


Here lies Louisa, population 1,840.

Like so many other Kentucky towns, it has lost its soul.

Better roads and an increasingly mobile society are bypassing Smalltown, Ky., leaving dead places where the hearts of our communities used to be. Mayberry RFD is gone; welcome to Mayberry R.I.P.

"It's the end of a way of life," said Howard See, president of the Greater Louisa Industrial Foundation. "We're seeing the end of community life in small towns."

The bypasses and interstate highways that skirt so many small towns in Kentucky keep traffic whizzing past fast enough to create a vacuum downtown.

"Eventually all the towns will be empty and decayed," said a furniture store owner in the Lincoln County community of Crab Orchard. "All the roads go around 'em. Nobody stops anymore."

The economic effect of bypasses and interstates only begins with the diversion of potential tourists.

Better highways also make it easier for local residents to leave the county and shop in larger cities, where they can find bigger selections and lower prices. Even harder on downtown businesses is the commercial development that crops up along those highways.

The Wal-Mart on Jackson's bypass in Breathitt County "has absolutely crucified small businesses," Jackson Mayor Lester Smith said.

Locally owned stores, most of which usually are concentrated downtown, find it tough to compete with the national chains whose stores anchor outlying shopping centers. The Wal-Marts and K marts, which deal in much larger quantities, simply buy and sell too cheaply.

That's good for the consumer but bad for downtown, said Thomas Ilvento, a rural sociologist at the University of Kentucky.

"These outlying auto-oriented shopping centers pretty much kill off the downtowns," said Ken Munsell, director of Small Towns Institute in Ellensburg, Wash.

"Towns are moving outside of towns," said Lawrence County Judge-Executive Clyde Johns.

"Just since the bypass was built, most business people will tell you business has fallen off."

Louisa's downtown, which has the dubious distinction of suffering two bypasses -- the first was built in 1972 and the second, a mountain farther from Main Street, was finished just last year -- is in double trouble.

As if development along the first bypass didn't do enough damage -- "Louisa's about as dead a place as you'll find on the river," Lawrence County farmer John Blankenship said -- the junction of old U.S. 23 and the new bypass already is sprouting a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut and a Sun Expre, a gasoline station and convenience store.

Rather than fighting to survive downtown, some local business owners simply move to the bypass. Their defections are especially hard on Main Street, because they take chunks of the town's soul with them.

When the late Betty McKinney abandoned the Frostee Freeze in downtown Louisa and built her own restaurant up on the bypass four years ago, many customers followed her.

The regulars at Betty's are retired farmers and coal miners, and they sit at the counter for hours each morning, drinking coffee and jawing about the weather, their crops and the unpredictable price of steel fence posts at Earl McKinney's supply store.

Listen to stubbly Carson Holt as he tells the story about being hit by lightning while working at a strip mine in Martin County. The bolt momentarily flicked his 228-pound body into the hereafter, he says.

Watch waitress Wilma Shannon as she gently takes hold of old Sam Laney's gnarled finger and asks him whether he's hungry. "Do you want anything," she asks, "or did you eat at home?"

It's simple: Betty's is the kind of restaurant you used to find downtown, but with one important exception:

It has plenty of parking.

Finding a parking spot quickly and getting in and out of a store fast is much easier on the bypass than it is downtown. And that's what shoppers want most.

"It's kind of like the new generation's way of living in the '90s," Louisa Mayor Mike Armstrong said. "We're on the road, we're quick eaters, and we're in and out of stuff in a hurry."

Downtowns, so slow by nature, have been lost in the shuffle. Although the first highways were built largely to provide rural residents a way into town, those built today effectively serve to keep motorists away from Main Street.

"The downtown economies all over the state are drying up because of bypasses," said Jackson's Mayor Smith.

Downtown Louisa, for one, is fading fast, with its eroding sidewalks,abandoned buildings and vacant lots. The liveliest thing on Main Cross Street these days is a talking Coke machine that for 50 cents will gush about the joys of recycling.

The machine's voice sounds like that of a perky young woman, which makes it seem like something of a space alien in downtown Louisa. Like many small-town downtowns, Louisa's has become almost exclusively the domain of the elderly.

Old men and women congregate every morning on benches in front of the Lawrence County Courthouse to wait for lunch at the senior citizens center.

On a cool Friday morning in late September, Theodore Perry, 78, stood gazing across the street at the dark second-floor windows of a building four years his senior. He blamed the bypass for what he saw.

Trigg McCoy, 70, walked over jingling his pockets. "I don't think it hurt that much," McCoy said halfheartedly.

Perry stared at McCoy in disbelief.

"Why, you know it did," Perry said, his voice tightening.

"If you know anything, you know it hurt Louisie."

Straight across the street from where Louisa's elderly residents gather, there are signs this town once thrived. One of them says "Western Auto," and it hangs high above a block where no such store can be found anymore.

Once, Louisa was one of the world's largest hardwood lumber ports. The town, which lies at the confluence of the Tug and Levisa forks of the Big Sandy River, had a steamboat dock and the first newspaper in the valley, and folks in nearby towns like Inez gravitated to Main Cross on Saturday nights.

Now downtown buildings sit empty, peeling, sagging. Many windows are dark. Osten Mathiesen, vice president of a Huntington, W.Va., bank that owns three of the vacant buildings by default, said of one especially dilapidated structure, "It needs people down there who care about it."

There was a time when it just needed people, period. Theresa Chaffin, who manages a gun shop near the vacant buildings, knows how tough business can be.

"By the time I reach retirement age, this'll probably look like a ghost town," she said.

Business downtown is slow. "Have to have some kind of gimmick to bring people in," Chaffin said dourly.

The jewelry store several doors down sells Bibles. Chaffin's gimmick? There it is on the door of her shop: a hand-lettered sign promoting a Groundhog Contest. That's where you shoot a groundhog and tote the carcass in to Chaffin's shop to be weighed. A prize hangs in the balance, but so far the response had been less than enthusiastic.

It would not be fair to blame the death of Smalltown, America, entirely on bypasses and interstates. Many other factors come into play, including a tough economy -- especially in Eastern Kentucky, where King Coal is in trouble.

Bypasses are not all bad. Besides making long-distance travel easier, they make downtowns safer for pedestrians and divert the heavy "through" traffic -- especially trucks -- that drives away local shoppers.

"It's a sword that cuts both ways," Louisa's Mayor Armstrong said.

A 1989 study by Iowa's state transportation department found that while towns with more than 2,000 residents generally benefited from bypasses, smaller towns suffered. A greater percentage of small-town trade is dependent on traffic passing through, the study said.

Service stations, small cafes, convenience stores and motels suffered most after construction of a bypass, the report said.

Historically, development has gravitated toward transportation networks, UK sociologist Ilvento said. First there were rivers. Then cattle drives. Then railroads. Then highways.

Lincoln County's Waynesburg, whose eerie downtown on Ky. 328 looks like a movie set for a ghost town, grew up along the cattle drive that became U.S. 27. With the advent of the railroad and the construction of tracks just to the west, however, the town moved in that direction.

Now it is a sprawling bedroom community with no focal point. What little commercial development there is in Waynesburg is strung out along U.S. 27, like the remaining beads on a broken necklace.

Towns generally go with the flow, and the focus of some communities has shifted with the times. Eastern Kentucky developer Joe Young thinks Louisa's old bypass will become that town's Main Street within five years.

When a bypass becomes the focal point of a community, downtown merchants have, for all practical purposes, lost the fight. Many bypasses and interstate interchanges in rural Kentucky have become almost self-sufficient, with post offices, stores, professional developments and even government offices.

In many cases, small community high schools were consolidated and a new, countywide school built on or near the bypass. Lawrence County High School, whose first graduating class was in 1978, drew from Louisa and Blaine, both of which had lost their own high schools.

There is a highway culture, of sorts. Henry Moon, an assistant professor of geography and planning at the University of Toledo in Ohio, completed a study last year of rural Kentucky. The study, titled "Interstate Villages as Urban Places: A new form for small communities," was published in Small Town magazine.

Construction of interstates started in the 1950s, and since then many a town has been bypassed nationwide. A study by the Maryland Downtown Development Association in Annapolis found that "most often, this proved to be detrimental to the economic well-being of Main Street."

In Kentucky, interstates account for just 1 percent of the state's total highway system but carry 23 percent of the traffic. That means many of the roads that go through Kentucky towns have dried up. And, as a result, so have the towns.

What's left, in many cases, is an imposter. When motorists exit the interstate where the big, green sign says "Berea" or "London," they don't get the real thing. Often they aren't yet even inside the city limits. And they never see downtown.

They're stopping at a mass-produced representation of the town. See the McDonald's and the SuperAmerica? This is what Moon calls an interchange village. It's the new, generic face of Smalltown, America.

"I can drive from here to Texas," said See, the president of Louisa's industrial foundation, "and all the small towns look the same."

Outlying clusters of development -- Kentucky has 65 rural interchange communities, Moon says -- frequently are more alive than the town's Main Street, a mile or two away.

"Interchange villages are centers of commerce and administration that furnish residents and passers-by with goods and services," according to Moon. "They also often serve as a hub: the focus of a community's religious, educational and social activities."

The same holds true for many bypasses.

For Kentucky, which ranks seventh nationally and second behind North Carolina in the Southeast for percentage of population living in rural areas (almost half), the changing face of rural life is of vast importance.

But it's a nationwide concern, too. The Maryland association asked that state's Highway Administration to study the effect of bypasses on traffic in downtown areas. The Maryland study, which looked at eight small towns, showed that traffic volumes on city streets that were bypassed dropped sharply -- in one case, 12,000 cars a day. That's more than 12,000 potential shoppers a day the town missed out on.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation says the economic and social effect of a bypass on a town depends on its proximity to Main Street. The closer the highway is to downtown, the greater the effect.

Downtown: The broken heart

The key to controlling outlying commercial development that might harm a downtown lies in local planning regulations, said Munsell, director of Small

Towns Institute. Moon's report says none of Kentucky's 65 interchange communities comes under a land-use or zoning plan.

The feeling of community is not nearly as strong in these outlying developments as it was on Main Street. "When I was young," Louisa's Mayor Armstrong said, "as I'd play cards with my buddies we'd watch TV, and a lot of those things on 'Andy Griffith' happened here in Louisa.

"Downtown becomes the heart of a city like Louisa."

So many hearts are broken. The irony is that residents and city officials almost always start out wanting the bypasses and the Wal-Marts -- only to end up lamenting the largely irreversible changes those things have wrought.

"A lot of times, they don't know what they've lost until they've lost it," Munsell said.

What they've lost is downtown and the downtown way of life. Many urban experts say the way for downtowns to survive is to concede the loss of retail and concentrate on service-oriented businesses and professional office buildings. Munsell disagrees.

A healthy downtown must have a good mix of residential, professional, governmental and retail, he said. "When you take out retail, you take out a huge portion of downtown. And there's nothing else to serve as a center for the community, so the community aspect is hurt."

But the economic effect is not limited to Main Street. An entire town feels the effects of a transfer of wealth from local hands to those of an outside corporation.

As each locally owned business fails, there are fewer local profits for reinvestment in the community. National businesses generally do not keep their money in local banks or contract for local services.

"What you have is money and vitality being sucked out of the community," Munsell said.

"You lose a real sense of community and a sense of shared responsibility for each other."

There are fewer philanthropic gestures because outside corporations are less likely to donate to local causes or participate in civic activities, Munsell said.

"There are so many businesses in Louisa that belong to somebody else," See said. "That doesn't lend to a sense of community or family."

Get this: Louisa had to obtain permission from New York before holding a parade in the shopping center parking lot on the bypass when Heck's was the anchor store there.

Blankenship, the Lawrence County farmer, said Louisa lost its sense of community about the same time the first bypass opened a brand-new area for development. Coincidence? Blankenship thinks not.

The ensuing competition for land, money and commerce introduced to Louisa certain un-Smalltown feelings, such as fear, anger and resentment, on a wider scale than ever before.

But something much more subtle has done more to undermine small-town life in Louisa, something not unlike big-city fragmentation and unfamiliarity.

"I don't know whether there's the closeness there used to be," said Jerry Dotson, downtown Louisa's one-chair barber. "The highways have opened it up, and there are more different people of different backgrounds."

Munsell thinks a top priority of local governments should be encouraging residents to use downtown -- "not just to help merchants, but also to encourage community cohesiveness and help develop a sense of sharing among residents.

"To do this . . . it is essential to stop thinking of downtown as just a shopping district. A broader definition that recognizes it as the community's physical and emotional center leads to an understanding of the central role that it should play in a dynamic community."

Louisa officials have tried to revive downtown. But there is only so much they can do.

A downtown beautification plan still sits on the shelf years after the town hired a consultant to draw it up. And unless some things change, Louisa might never be able to afford such an ambitious project, Armstrong said.

The town's tax base has not expanded as much as it should, See said. A big reason is that until this year, property had not been reassessed since the 1960s. Although there was a net increase because of new development, the city had decreases amounting to $500,000 that reflected the decline of downtown buildings, Property Valuation Administrator James Heston said.

See thinks the town's problems also have roots in Lawrence County's lack of industry. "We've been satisfied to let other places furnish us with employment," he said. "With better roads, it's easier to drive to work in another county, and there's more commuting. . . . But that doesn't help Louisa."

See, who is 68, blames the lack of industry on his own generation, which he sees as inflexible and complacent. But the effect is felt mostly by Lawrence County's young people, many of whom must move away to find jobs when they graduate from high school.

The county's population dropped from 14,121 to 13,983 in the 1980s, and that represents a significant decrease, state demographer Michael Price said. All other things equal, the county's population should have risen 5 percent on births alone.

Resentment lurks amid such statistics. Some of Louisa's older residents think the new generation is abandoning ship -- "Just say the old generation passed on and the new one didn't carry on," said one elderly regular at Betty's -- but the younger ones say they have no choice but to go away.

"I guess if I wanted to stick around a couple years and drive a coal truck, I could do that," 25-year-old Steve Liming said.

You want resentment? How's this: Liming would like to buy Louisa and pave it over. Make a giant parking lot.

He's tired of the way his hometown works. Old folks have control politically and civically, and they're too resistant to change, he said.

It is the young people who must become politically and civically involved if the changes that will preserve something of the old way of life are to be made.

"Leadership in Eastern Kentucky has changed dramatically," Lester Smith said, "but there's still a long way to go to get rid of old-time politics."

Steve Liming tightens his teeth on a toothpick as he looks at something just beyond his side-view mirror.

"What's Lexington like?" he asks, staring thoughtfully out the open window of his truck.

He listens silently to the answer.

"I been thinking about going to Lexington, but I don't imagine there's much call for a diesel mechanic," Liming says, still staring in the distance.

A half-moon hangs amid the pastel pinks and blues of the twilight sky.

It's time to cruise now, and Liming steers his truck, its row of cab-top fog lights glowing amber, onto the drive leading out of the parking lot. He joins a line of other cars and pickups carrying Louisa's youth in single file toward town.

The electronically amplified sound of a voice singing the gospel wafts toward them across the pavement from a church revival beneath a tent near Druther's. "Wherever we're at, wherever we're going, we can always feel the presence of God." But the young people cannot hear the older generation's song.

They are insulated in their cars and trucks. They cannot even speak to one another once the procession begins, but what else is there to do?

Over L.A. Joe's, in the direction of Lexington, the western sky glows soft. But eastward, where downtown Louisa squats low on the riverbank like civilization's footprint, night already has fallen, removing all color from the land and sky and cars and pickups, and turning the lush mountains the color of coal.