Larry McKnight Jr.

Larry McKnight Jr. Industrial Mechanic and Artist, Clintwood, Virginia: 

“My mom’s family is originally from Mississippi and my dad’s family; my grandma grew up in Clinchco, Virginia, which isn’t to far from where I live now. My grandfather is from Barboursville, Kentucky. They both moved north to get jobs in the auto industry. When my dad got older he decided he wanted to move back down here and they had me. My grandparents moved back down too and we’ve been here ever since. 

I’ve lived here all my life. I have been all over the place, as far west as Phoenix, Arizona, as far north as Maine and as far south as the Keys. So I’ve been around a place or two. I worked in Florida for a while, worked in Baltimore for a little. I worked as a boilermaker then, worked on trash burning power plants. I’m a mechanic… an industrial mechanic is what they would call it.

I used to tell people when I did travel work that working and traveling, that’s what I did. When I came back home it was like being on a vacation. And that’s how life is here. It is as hard as you want it to be. I feel that if you have a decent amount of drive and aptitude to do things you can do anything here in these mountains regardless of the economy. There are ways to make a living. It’s all about living within your means by doing that. You can’t expect to have a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget.

The original MacGyver probably learned from one of these old boys back in one of these mountains. Book sense will only get you so far. I think common sense will get you a lot farther. Because of the adversity we have in this area you have to learn to do a lot of different things. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades. Lets say you do one thing on your job all day, once that job is gone what are you gonna do? I wake up every morning and try to learn something new. That way I know I’ll always have something I can make a living at. 

I have noticed in this area that there are a lot of people who aren’t afraid to do things themselves. I was taught at a young age, in our family, we did everything; carpentry work, electric work, mechanical, farming. It didn’t matter what it was someone close to me already knew how to do it so I had really good teachers growing up. There is one thing my dad wouldn’t touch much,. That would be masonry. We usually outsourced masonry. There is a reason. That stuff has to be spot on. There is no room for error with masonry. 
Being raised in these here mountains and having parents that support me; that always did what they wanted to do, growing up in that lifestyle, my mind is the only thing that can keep me from doing the things that I want to do. 

Where we live we are blessed. If you have a talent and you can hone that skill there is somebody that will buy your work. You just have to do it. You just have to stick to it. If you put love and care into it someone will see that love and care and have a connection to it. 

(Appalachians are) probably the most honest and humble people you will ever meet. They are not afraid to work, they are not afraid to help their fellow man. I do worry sometimes though that we are being to get a little separated. There’s not as much community as there once was. Here, in Whitesburg, (Kentucky) I do see a growth in community. I see a big change. There seems to be a lot of people actually touching one another in ways of making art or business. It’s not about money. It’s about people being happy. 

We are a minority. We are not a mainstream people. The media doesn’t know us. The media has a tendency to betray us, as backwards which is not the case. Just because we get from point A to Point B differently than someone else does, doesn’t make us wrong. It just means we like to look at things differently. I think the perception, the reason the perception is the way that it is, is because we don’t have a good voice from here telling people how we really are. Ignorance causes the most hate and I think they (the media) are ignorant of who we are, what we are; the differences we have and the similarities that we have. We are all the same at the core but we are all raised a little different. There is nature and there is nurture. Our people grew up hard from the day they were born here. You have to actually work hard if you want something. 

(Regarding coal) I don’t necessarily like how a lot of coal is being taken from our land but I do like toilet paper and electricity. It real hard to talk people out of using their air conditioners when it’s 90 degrees outside. What needs to happen is, they actually need to realize that there is other ways to get things and there are ways that people in the area can benefit from it as well. Take natural gas for example. Our natural gas is piped hundreds of miles away from here. Why not make an infrastructure here based on natural gas right where it comes from. Make it easier on the people that live here first. And then help everybody else. Charity begins at home. 

We need to quit worrying about the dollar; it’s just a piece of paper. Worry more about the people. “

Plez Dean

Plez Dean, Age 9; Harlan, Kentucky:

“I’m short. I was born short. I play video games and ride my bike. I like jumping on my trampoline. I like living in the mountains but sometimes the radio gets static-ee when you drive through them. 

I want to be a person that makes video games (when I grow up).

I haven’t had any sad times (in my life) yet. Had some hard times though… can’t remember them.

My dad works in the coalmines and my mom, she’s a head start teacher. 

Coal mining, it's really hard in this place called the temple, in the coalmines. My dad works in the temple. He gets really, really dirty with all that dirt on him. He looks like dirt, dirt everywhere. He does paperwork, mines some coal out and some other things. He is loading the train, getting pipes unclogged. 

I did once want to work in the coalmines, but once I saw my dad was getting really, really dirty I didn’t anymore.

I saw people get hurt in the coalmines. My dad, his back, it broke. He was laid off, to where you don’t go to work. I think you still get paid but I ain’t sure. My dad has friends in the coal mines.

I can’t tell which are the peace ones and the Hillbilly ones. I’m getting hippies and hillbillies confused. The hillbillies are the poor ones.

I’m not a hillbilly. It means you are poor and stuff. I ain’t. It’s hard to tell a hillbilly. They may have nice clothes but that doesn’t mean they have money. That’s what I think. 

It was a pleasure you meet you. You need to grip whenever you shake a hand. It makes you confident.”

Valerie Ison Horn

Valerie Ison Horn, Retired as a Teacher and Counselor, now Works with Grow Appalachia and Community Farm Alliance (A Voice For Farmers) and the Appal-TREE Project...Appalachians Together Restoring the Eating Environment); Little Dry Fork, Kentucky:

“I work with local foods and food nutrition, but I also look at it as community building, helping neighbors, buying food from neighbors, sharing seeds with neighbors, the better our community grows. 

I was born up on Cowan. Was born in 1965, about the time the war on poverty began. I went away to school and that’s the only time I’ve been away from these mountains. 

Right now, my son-in-law works for a strip mining company and drives about an hour and a half to work and an hour and a half from work for ten hour shifts, six days a week. They have a daily, three-hour window to be a family. Although he makes good money so my daughter can stay home and take care of their child, it is my dream that someday they can live off the family land making a living growing fruits and vegetables. 

A lot of things have changed over the years. Our grandparents grew gardens, as did most who lived here then. My grandmother raised a big garden; she had nine children and lost her husband in a mining accident when my mom was three years old. The children never questioned working in the garden. It wasn’t a big scale agriculture garden. They had nine hoes; a few reap hooks, no tractor, and no tiller. It wasn’t easy, but they did it every day. If you were too young or, like my mom who was sick with polio, your job was to bring the others lunch. Everybody had a job. 

One of my favorite stories is about my Aunt Mary Lou. She worked on the mountain near Scuttle Hole Gap near Little Shepard Trail hoeing corn for ten cents a day. She was never rich, just a steady worker all her life. She took care of herself and helped others. She worked for Harry Caudill’s sister-in-law for many years. (Harry Caudill was an accomplished Appalachian author writing, among other things, ‘Night Comes To The Cumberland’s’). Harry’s sister-in-law left her some money when she passed away. Aunt Mary Lou took that money and bought a new cook stove, along with the land on Scuttle Hole Gap she hoed as a little girl. That’s a full circle of life.

Somehow, we lost that ability to garden here in the mountains. Things became more convenient, they became habits. We didn’t consider that processed food might not be as good for us, that it might have the health implications that we know it does now. We just got comfortable with those choices. I’m sure if my grandmother had had the opportunity to order pizza and feed all the children, she would have. Those choices just weren’t available then. 

We have to reeducate folks. It is an opportunity that has to be learned. It’s hard to get back to. What I like about Grow Appalachia is that we are trying to reconnect those folks with the skills, provide opportunities and reduce barriers so folks can learn, experiment and find out if gardening is for them. Grow Appalachia has about 60 family gardeners, 20 market gardeners and 10 community gardens. 

We are planning a Grow Appalachia camp for children in July. It will be our first year doing this, small scale. Another program we work with is ‘Mountain Garden Initiative’ who works in the schools in the area to get school gardens growing. We have been successful with that. We also help folks who want to sell eggs, getting licenses etc. to sell eggs to restaurants and other retail outlets.”

B. Terry Ratliff

B. Terry Ratliff, Artist, Woodworker and Chair Maker; Floyd County Kentucky: 

“I’ve been making chairs for over 35 years, maybe longer if you count it out. I was inspired to make chairs when I went to buy some chairs on Conley Fork of Ball in Knott County. I went to buy some chairs off of ole Irvine Messer. He pulled a spiral bound notebook off the wall. He told me “I have a chair or a basket I made in every state in the union’. Then he showed me the book. ‘These people here are still waiting on a chair or a basket’. I bought the chairs then thought that there might be something to this.

I was raised a poor white boy here in Appalachia. At 12 years old, mom and dad moved to Indiana. It’s what takes most folks away from here; dad needed a job. He worked in factories up there. The coal industry has been boom and bust, has been since it first started. You would be rolling in it in April and shot down in May. In the forties it was strikes, unions getting established. Lately it’s been, what they claim, environmental cutbacks, but it's about natural gas, the cheapness and availability is what a lot of it is.

In a way, it was a lot of hardship, but in another it was a growing experience. I got to go to high school up there. I got a good taste of prejudice; I guess that’s a good word for it. I was the little hillbilly boy. Hillbillies are the only people you can still make fun of, poke fun at. They (other students) made derogatory statements and I was put down. 

From Indiana, I got an opportunity to go to school down here and I came back. I got the opportunity to go to the community college and then transferred to UK. I took it on as a job and finished in four years. Got my bachelor's degree and worked a few years in community mental health here in Eastern Kentucky. Not long after that, during the Reagan years, they had a big cutback and I lost my job. (Mental health) is also a boom-bust business, they empty the institutions out for a while then fill them back up. There is no easy solution to the mental heath problems that the country has.

I got laid off and started building.

I had been kinda helping a fellow build a log house and the job was about up. At that time, I started building my own log house and I started making furniture. I called it Smurf furniture. Big long slab tables with legs on them. Looked like something on those little Smurf cartoons. Then I was encouraged to begin making hickory bottom chairs along the lines of what Herb did. I changed it up just a little bit by strictly using hand tools. I didn’t use any power tools for the first eight years I was in business. 

I only used a shaving horse, a drawknife and after eight years, I began using a drill press to make the holes in the chairs to help out a little bit. And now, after 35 years I’m still making handmade chairs, just the way they have been made for thousands of years before the machines took over. I learned from oral traditions. I got out there and I wanted to do it so bad I felt I had to. The more people that told me I couldn’t, the more I wanted to do it. I took that as a challenge. 

I take pride in being from here. There are so many good things about this culture, from having a good work ethic to having heritage, to all the special things that set us apart from the rest of the world, from dancing to music to the way people treat one another. All in all people are good to each other around here and that’s why I choose to live here. I live here by choice. I think I could live about anywhere but I still live right here where I was born and where I got raised a lot. I’m still getting raised at 60 years old. 

But I feel like I live here by choice. A lot of it is because who the people are and how everybody treats one another. There’s bad apples in every bunch. I think there are a lot fewer bad apples here (in the mountains). I think that if you just greet someone with a smile and stick your hand out they will give you the shirt off their back. If they thought you were in need they would do everything they could to help you out. It ain’t that way everywhere. 

Since the war on poverty we have had folks come down here to help these poor Appalachians out. They come from Minnesota and Wisconsin among other places. They used to bring them out to my house to visit. My house was a treat. I fed them fresh lemonade and homemade cookies. Ever so often I would ask them, I’d say, don’t your people up there need a little help? You think we could have some missionaries here go up there and help your people out some? I don’t know how many people got it. Not sure who got it but I would like to get a group of people together and go up there, send them up to Milwaukee, send them up to Wisconsin and help those poor people up there out because they’d make you think there wasn’t any up there. It just sets a little funny to me. 

I’ve worked wood long enough to know it flows right up out of the ground like the flow of a stream. If there is an adversity there, if someone’s tacked bob wire to it, if there is a big rock there close to it, it will swallow it, surround it and make it part of it. In ways it makes that tree stronger. I feel the same way about adversity, about negative stuff that comes into your life… It’s hard to do. Your first instinct is to get the hell away from it but if you can, embrace it, deal with it. It can become part of you and make you stronger. If you allow yourself, you will grow over it and you will be stronger when you are done with it. You won't be weaker the next time it comes around. It won’t hurt near as bad."