The last chapter, "The New Kentucky," from Kentucky Yesterday and Today, written by Ruby Dell Baugher and Sarah Hendricks Claypool in 1961 and published by Kincaid Publishing House three years later:
There are silver-like strips that go east and west, north and south. They are highways that run right on through hills and over rivers. On those highways there are thousands of automobiles, trucks, moving vans, and buses. They are even now carrying more freight than trains. There has been a Louisville and Nashville train carrying passengers between Louisville and Henderson for more than a hundred years. It stopped November 15, 1958 because too few people had been riding it. Automobiles and planes are putting Kentucky passenger trains out of business. Nothing shows off our New Kentucky more than our 1961 civilization on wheels moved by gasoline. ...
Many would say that is is the schools that speak for a New Kentucky. There is the University of Kentucky Northwest Center at Henderson. It is so new that the 1960-1961 term was its very first, thus giving all in Western Kentucky who desire an education of university quality, an opportunity. Its first Director, they do not call him President, is Dr. Louis Alderman. In this our New Kentucky there are high schools and colleges available for all who will take advantage of their glorious privileges. And there is a public school for every boy and girl; the Minimum Foundation Law takes care of that. It provides each school district in the state a minimum program of education, regardless of the wealth of the district. State support for education provides sufficient funds to operate a minimum program defined by law. Those schools, all the way from the tiniest one-room school up to the most splendid college, are needed if Kentucky lives up to the highest expectations of Kentuckians in the past, the present, and the future.
Nothing helps more to make this a New Kentucky than electricity everywhere. Dix Dam, Louisville Dam, Wolf Creek Dam, and Kentucky Dam--these are the main sites for generation of electricity by water power. It is a New Kentucky with electricity in the milking barn as well as in the Governor's mansion. It is wherever practical necessity demands as well as luxury.
Western Kentucky has its smoke stacks and tipples proclaiming coal mines as viewed from the air. There is an Atomic Energy Plant at Paducah as recent as the Korean fighting. And there is Kentucky Lake drawing all people who have time to play.
There is nothing that announces New Kentucky more than Kentucky Lake. Last year it led all Tennessee Valley Authority impoundments with millions of visits from pleasure seekers. It is a recreational project that draws dollars from everywhere. Its thousands of houseboats, cruisers, runabouts, and rowboats are valued at more than eighteen millions of dollars. The value of its summer cottages run into thousands of dollars. Its tourist courts, cottages, and cabins rent for millions of dollars every year. At the 1960 Kentucky Lake Fishing Derby, Governor Combs said that tourists spent $160,000,000 in Kentucky in the summer of 1960. He said that the tourist industry was second only to agriculture in cash income in the State's industries.
There is a New Kentucky that does not shout. It speaks very firmly, sometimes in only whispers. But the whispers penetrate. This New Kentucky speaks through the devoutness of the churches, the desire for better teaching, sounder learning, cleaner politics, and in the problem of Integration.
This is New Kentucky, all forty thousand three hundred and ninety-five square miles of it for its population (1960) of more than three million people.
This is a great example of the optimism that flowed over the United States in the early 1960's.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I thought so, too. I thought it was interesting to see what these two authors identified as the building blocks of their 1961 optimism: car and plane travel overtaking passenger rail, expansion of university education to western Kentucky, guarantee of at least a baseline standard of public education in every school district, electricity everywhere, industry in western Kentucky and leisure activity.
ReplyDeleteI found this book this weekend in our church library. I'm reading it backwards. A few other things I learned last night:
ReplyDelete-- When Alben Barkley was growing up around Lowes in the 1880s and '90s, "country school terms ... were about five months at the longest, which was two months longer than several decades earlier." (365)
-- When Barkley showed public-speaking ability, the family moved to Hickman County so he could work as a janitor at and attend Clinton College.
-- Earle C. Clements, the son of a Union County judge, farmed and coached Morganfield High football before entering politics himself.
-- "One of the results in Kentucky of the Korean fighting was this--it is said that it was indirectly the cause of the teacher shortage. Some teachers, perhaps through patriotism, worked in war plants. It was so much easier than teaching! And the pay was better. Some women did not return to teaching. Another result was the construction of the great Atomic Energy Plant at Paducah. It furnished work for men everywhere--and women." (363)
-- "There is something about Kentucky that lends flight to the imagination from the good earth under foot to the sparkle of her stars." (352) The authors then put together a list of the state's leading writers: James Lane Allen, John Fox Jr., Annie Fellows Johnson, Alice Hegan Rice, George Madden Martin, Lucy Furman, Jean Thomas, Eliza Calvert Obenchain, Elizabeth Maddox Roberts, Theodore O'Hara, Madison Cawein, George D. Prentice, Henry T. Stanton, James H. Mulligan, Cotton Noe, Carlile Litsey, Joe Tandy Ellis, Cale Young Rice, Allen Tate, William McKinley Justice, Nellie Miller and Irvin Cobb. "More recent Kentucky fiction writers are Robert Penn Warren ..., Jesse Stuart ..., and Janice Holt Giles." (353)