Oh, Kentucky

"Our hearts are heavy in Fredonia tonight."

“Let them pull that stuff in other places if they want, but not in Jackson County, Kentucky.”

“This is not elevating any group above another, this is just making everyone equal.”

Given to hospitality in Hoptown.

"Cash mom" in Muhlenberg County.

Onward and upward for Dippin' Dots.

Louisville Ballard and Marion County top the KHSAA basketball polls.

Cadiz and Franklin are both expanding their fiber-optic infrastructures.

President Clinton is coming back to Owensboro.

The Edward T. Breathitt Pennyrile Parkway was closed for several hours yesterday between Slaughters and Hanson, and so traffic was detoured to U.S. 41. Northbound lanes were actually reopened before I started around noon to Evansville to see my mom, but, what the heck?

That's downtown Hanson, which, according to one of my college teachers, was a hotbed of basketball in the early 1940s. Today, it's home to a great elementary school, the Western Kentucky Veterans Home, an outlet mall, a good fish restaurant and a guy from whom I once bought--via eBay, when I was living in North Carolina--an awesome Munro All-Star Hockey Game.

I felt sorry for the folks in this car, who decided to spin around and backtrack. I imagine that they didn't realize they were within three-quarters mile of the end of the detour.

Fun to think about how exciting it must've been to purchase this camper originally and all of the neat places that it might've gone.

I love seeing those giant swarms of black birds. I'm uncertain whether these are officially blackbirds, however.

Here's Sebree, which is not the seat of Webster County. This town lost one of its more recognizable citizens this past fall. Rest in peace, Mrs. Darr, owner-operator of the Friendly Market for 52 years and unabashed fan of President and Mrs. Carter (just as is my mom). 

Sebree is home also to many Mexicans. Saint Michael Catholic Church there offers Sunday mass services in both English and Spanish.

I'm fascinated by monuments like this one to Milton Ashby in the Sebree Post Office. I'd like to know more about him; for example, how's he connected to Brandi Ashby, Kentucky's 1992 "Miss Basketball" and a Lady Topper who eventually transferred to the University of Hawai'i? I did find his dad's obituary--but nothing about Postmaster Ashby specifically.

It was a stone-cold joy to discover that Bell's Drugs hadn't yet totally dismantled its prodigious Christmas window display. Bell's Drugs is on the north side of Main Street/Ky. 56 through downtown Sebree.

The Purple Opry, Cadillac Jack's Billiards and the Sebree Banner ("Webster County's Oldest Newspaper") are along the south side. 

Back out on "The Dixie B-line" (sort of, anyway--that nickname really applies to the original U.S. 41, which runs through Dixon, which is the seat of Webster County, and is now U.S. 41-A) stands the American Legion post, which is housed in the old African-American school. 

There's a significant concentration of industrial concerns between Sebree and Henderson, and this one photograph, of course, fails to do it justice. (It's hard to capture big buildings in a cell-phone-camera frame while you're driving at 60 miles an hour.) For example, there's a big aluminum smelter, a chicken processor and a power plant through there. 

I first saw this eatery just inside the Henderson County line 23 years ago, and I've failed to stop there about 50 times since. Some day, I'm excited to try their strombolis. 

I hope Sebree's late Mrs. Darr got to see President Carter when he visited up the road in Henderson in 1975 and Robards in 1980. Said the president on that second trip: "You have a special opportunity in Kentucky, in the future, for another aspect of our Nation's security; that is, energy security. We've become overly vulnerable to a heavy dependence on foreign oil. This year we will import $90 billion worth of oil from overseas. That's a lot of money, hard to understand. It amounts to $400 per man, woman, and child throughout the United States. I want to depend not on foreign oil at the end of a 12,000-mile uncertain pipeline into a doubtful area of the world, but in the future I want to depend on Kentucky coal." 

Henderson is one of Kentucky's great towns, and that's the southern edge of it. 

But exploring Henderson is for another day and another post. I bailed off old 41 and jumped on the four-lane toward Mom here. The end.