Lewis County Revisited - FAREWELL
By John Black
I had never considered writing anything other than an article for a profession journal or a technical proposition for a change in the curriculum at my high school. My college and university work had been in mathematics and physics. I am a terrible speller and I am thankful for the spelling checker in Word.
I failed at diagramming sentences in my college freshman English class and my wife who is an English and Journalism major throws up her hands when she reads my run on sentences. I didn’t attend college until after my service in World War II. After graduating from The University of Oklahoma my first teaching job was at Missouri Military Academy. The editor of the academy catalogue, always eager to feature new employees, was happy to point out that I had a Purple Heart, a Combat Medics Badge and a Bronze Star.
However, these awards didn’t help increase my salary over the next eight years that I taught there. My picture in the catalogue was right next to President Harry Truman’s picture. Harry Truman had been a speaker at an earlier commencement. The editor didn’t inform the parents of prospective students that President Harry Truman was a county judge when he made the speech. Like most combat veterans I had never said much about my war experiences. When my young children asked about my injured arm I told them a shark bit me.
Of course they didn’t believe that but it saved talking about an unpleasant experience. After I retired, my daughter Dr. Nancy Thornton, who is a former army major, suggested that I write about my war experiences in Europe. At that time I was spending my summers at our cabin in the Arizona mountains. I had just bought a new computer and had moved my old Macintosh Plus to the cabin. I decided to attempt an autobiography. I started writing about what I could remember about my youth in St. Paul, Kentucky. I would write an article, record it on a floppy disk, and take it home to Phoenix where I transferred it to my new computer.
At the end of the summer I had covered the first twenty-four years of my life including my time in Europe during World War II. I recorded the articles on a CD and took the disk to Staples and had them print and bind a dozen copies that I distributed to members of my family. Two years ago I was sitting at my desk reading a copy of the Lewis County Herald. I always opened the paper to the page that carries “Col.” Brown and Garry Barker. As I was reading I wondered if someone might be interested in reading some of my articles about Lewis County.
I e-mailed a few of the articles to Editor Dennis Brown. He wrote back saying he was interested in publishing them. That was the start of my column “Lewis County Revisited”. When all of the articles in my autobiography had been published, I started writing more about Kentucky and Lewis County. I enjoyed writing and it was wonderful to start getting e-mails from the children and grandchildren of people that I had known in Lewis County in the thirties. I have sometimes commented on the fact that older people repeat the same stories over and over.
I think this is because in later years people have less new experience and tend to think more about the past. I think as I approach my eighty-ninth birthday I may have fallen into this trap. I don’t live in or visit Lewis County very often and I don’t have any new first hand experiences to write about. As I look back over what I have written I find that I am repeating some of the experiences that I have had. I think it is time that I end my column.
This will be the last item that I submit to Publisher Brown. I want to thank him for the opportunity of seeing some of my memories in print. I hope that some of you have enjoyed reading the column as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I will continue looking forward each week to “Col.” Brown’s Corner, Garry Barker’s Head of the Holler and my new friend Bill Tom Clark’s Quiddities.
Best wishes and a fond farewell.
-John Black, johnarthurblack@aol.com