Olivia Denton

Olivia Denton, Marina Manager; Bristol, VA:

"I grew up in Denton’s Valley, which is in Sullivan County, Tennessee, technically a part of Bristol, Tennessee.

I grew up as the oldest of four kids. My momma and daddy have been married for forty years. We grew up on a small farm. We always had either cows or pigs, or both. From the time I can remember, we grew up outdoors in the garden and raising tobacco. Play time was spent in the creek, running through the woods, building forts and building dams. We grew up knowing how to work, and how to work hard, and how to play, and how to play hard and knowing the joy and value of family. 

So what makes [Appalachia] special to me [more] than anything is because of where I grew up, and the limited means of my family growing up. We spent most of our time together as kids, my siblings and I. My family was always together. We learned very quickly that we would depend on each other above anybody else and that I always would be able to depend on them no matter what. I think that is a unique thing in growing up this way and in growing up in this area. I know other families that grew up the same way, and then beyond that family unit, you could depend on other families that were like you. It is a sense of not only a very compact and close family unit, but then a very compact and close community as well.

Appalachian people are very honest and are a very talented type of people. I think we are misunderstood, and some of our nuances are mistaken as lack of intellect. But definitely I think that is a misconception. There are a lot of talents and a lot of down home common sense that is characteristic of Appalachian culture, but we get very misunderstood.

[Media Portrayal] Just because of the way I talk, they’re gonna expect me to be as dumb as a brick. But that’s not true. Many of the smartest people I have ever known, if they go away from here they are going be expected to be unintelligent just because of how we speak. I think how we speak is very unique and I think it sounds great and when you walk away from here, people always want to hear it. But the media does tend to look for a way to portray us in that misconception. They look for those of the Appalachian culture who may almost concrete that misconception. But. the media’s job is to attract the listeners and viewers and they do that by being sensational.

I get homesick [when I vacation]. I get homesick! I wouldn’t call myself well-traveled, but I would call myself traveled. I have been in Mexico; I have been in the Upper North East, United States. I have been into Canada and spent some time in L.A. My best friend and I grew up here from sixth grade on, and were raised very similarly and the track of her life took her all over the country and she has lived in many different places and I have visited her. I always enjoy going to see different places and seeing how different people live. I‘ve never wanted to go and stay away. I always wanted to come home. I love it here. It is a relief, almost. to get home.

I would say in a lot of ways I’m still a hillbilly. I think it’s just a way of being. People call you country. I grew up being known as a mountain kid more so than a hillbilly. I just think there are characteristics of that; things that are important and things that are not important to you. I am not real concerned about clothing, or I am not real concerned about having my nails painted, but by the same token I am real concerned about family and I am real concerned about hard work and I am real concerned that people perceive me as being honest and trustworthy and determined. 

I think it is more how I want my characteristic and my personality winds up being perceived. As a mountain kid, what that really means to me is just that those things that were ingrained in me as a kid that are still there. I was taught the value of family that they are a priority, and the value of God and church and the places that those things have in your life and that those are still there. I can dress up and go sit down and eat with a dignitary and do just fine, but my heart and spirit is still a mountain kid.

I am very much into fitness. I go to the gym five or six days a week. I got very deeply involved in nutrition and working out and, you know, part of being a mountain kid, and part of being a country girl, is you eat that way and eventually that tells on you. So I went to work on that. 

I like anything with a motor. Growing up, I always liked cars and I always liked motorcycles and those kind of things. As an adult, I spend time with my toys. I have a big old jacked up Jeep that I like to run around in, and I have a souped up Mustang that I really enjoy and I ride a motorcycle. 

I grew up watching my dad race motorcycles. He always had one, and he was always taking us kids for a ride with him on one. That’s how I got interested in motorcycles, and to this day, he loves ‘em. He has a couple of Harleys, himself. My momma had her own motorcycle and rode it as a sixteen year old rather than a car. I think it’s just something about growing up around it that made me interested in it. What kept me interested in it, to me, it’s a freedom thing. You ride a motorcycle, and if [you] ride it up here in those mountains, and when you go around those curves, it’s a freedom thing. You feel like you are flying and dancing at the same time. On a motorcycle, you are completely alone if you want to be. You stick your helmet on, you can put music in or not put music in and you are in nothing but your head and that’s a lot of times a relief.

One of my brothers has a ‘57 Chevy that he’s been working on, restoring for a lot of years and eventually, he’ll get it done. My other brother, he is all the time building some sort of Jeep or Samurai just to go out and get in the mud. Both of my brothers are interested [in cars] but not my sister so much.
Primarily, the first thing I would say is, don’t listen to the way that I talk, listen to what I say.

My momma had been sick for a long time; she has had problems for as long as I can remember. It is heartbreaking to watch a parent to not be in good health. My mamaw passed away a few years ago and I was very close with her and I miss her every day. She was part of who ingrained all that in me. You know, I wish she was here to see me now.

She was feisty. That was probably the best word to describe her. If she got a knock at the door and didn’t know who she was expecting, she would meet them with a shotgun and she wasn’t afraid to run them off with it. She was the epitome of independence. My grandfather who would have been her husband, passed away before I ever even was born. She had a son with Down’s syndrome that she took care of until the day that he passed away. And she did it by herself. Like I said, she just was the epitome of courage and independence and determination. 

Her name was Flossie Martin. She taught us how to make biscuits. She was a lot of fun. At the same time, she didn’t allow a great amount of nonsense. She wasn’t great on whoopin’ us but, like for example, if I spent the night with her, if I wouldn’t stay in the bed she’d tell me some ghost story about a ghost being under the bed, to make sure I’d stay in the bed. So, she had her ways of making sure that you did what you were supposed to do.

My story probably is not anything uncommon; a lot of people have to start over in life repeatedly. My family grew up as a construction family. My dad has always worked in construction and he started his own company back in ’96 and both my brothers and I worked for him. I worked full time for him for fourteen years and figured I always would. 

Then, of course, everybody is probably familiar with the housing market crash that occurred a few years ago. A good deal of what I did for him was involved in housing. So when that housing bubble burst, my job with my family then had to go. No longer was the company able to support a fulltime Office person/Residential Project Manager. So I had to start completely over. 

I did a few things on my own. I owned a couple of businesses during that point and I have climbed back up to here, to the Marina. I feel like that is a huge accomplishment to go from basically being laid off and changing careers almost completely and now being here, managing this beautiful place.

The Marina has over 600 slips. There is the rental of the slips to the clientele. We also have a ships store that I manage which is more of a retail type of activity. I’m also involved in managing the restaurant that we have down here. It’s a big customer service business and we are down here right on South Holston Lake year round. I get the best of both worlds. I get to use my talents that I’ve developed over time in management and also be outside in the mountains. 

For a mountain girl it is the perfect setup."

Dr. Ernest J. Benko

Dr. Ernest J. Benko, Retired, Now Works With ARC TV, Doctor in Business Administration, Norton-Wise County, Virginia:

"I went to military school for seven years. I’ve got dyslexia, I see everything backwards and that’s the reason they sent me to military school. Then I came back and went to Clinch Valley College, University of Virginia at Wise, Union College and Cumberland College and ETSU and King University, worked in the coal mines, worked for Clinchfield Coal Company, had my own coal mines mining property, worked for Barge Waggoner Summer and Cannon, largest engineering company in the state of Tennessee. I was Vice-President of the Strip Division of Clinchfield. Clinchfield at the time employed over three thousand people and mined over eighteen million tons of coal, about thirty years ago. Then I worked for Gulf Oil, I was an expert in explosives for Gulf Oil. I traveled all over the mid-south. 

People had to work together to survive in the mines. It didn’t make any difference what color you were, or what nationality you were. It doesn’t make any difference in the mines; you are all brothers under that ground if you want to survive.

Pocahontas was the first major mine in this end of Virginia that was in the 1880’s. The first major railroad went to Pocahontas in 1881, is my understanding. They had something like 27 different churches in Pocahontas because they would get people right off the boat and bring them in to work in the mines. Bringing all those nationalities together has cemented the culture as much as anything. 

But also, a lot of people here are real suspicious. They want to look back to make sure who they are talking to because, for lack of a better term, there’s been a whole lot of carpet baggers here. They come in and they take what we have, our strength, our energy. 

In this general area, the Central Appalachian Mountains, we have over two hundred idiosyncrasies that are found no place else in the world except right here. We’ve got more different kind of vegetation here than any place else in the world, with the possible exception of Amazon River Basin. 

Our history here goes back to the 1500s and then Daniel Boone lived in the next county over. Colonel Russell and Daniel Boone were going to have the first settlement in Kentucky and Daniel Boone’s son, James, was killed along with Colonel Russell’ son, Henry. Colonel Russell’s son’s mother was Patrick Henry’s sister. And you go on and on, on what a significant impact people coming through here have had. And of course Daniel Boone led the first, mainly, group of people through the Cumberland Gap 240 years ago. 

But also, we have two of the oldest rivers in the world in our backyard here. The oldest river is the Nile, the second is the New River, and the third, as far as we know is the Clinch River. It’s got over 100 kinds of fish in it, and something like 47 different kinds of shellfish. 

One side of the Clinch is 400 million years old, that’s the limestone. The other side, where it is coal, is 300 million years old. You lost 100 million years in that river. Right over here going to Jenkins that’s one of the biggest faults that you can see anywhere this side of the Mississippi. You can go through there on the weekends, particularly during the school year and find people looking all over at that fault going through there. That’s the upper thrust. And then the coal, there is so many different seams that we have, depending on what community you’re in, they have different names for the same seam, basically. But down in Appalachia, they got the Kelly and Imboden seam and it’s at the top of the mountain. In Jenkins it is way below the ground. But that is the result of the fault.

Music is vitally important to us and it depends on [the] operational definition of what one calls mountain music, bluegrass, etc. Of course the Birthplace of Country Music is Bristol, and most the people that they had over at the Bristol Sessions are from this general area. Fortunately, we still have the Carter Fold going strong. 

Another thing that is kinda interesting is most of the people that died at the Alamo were from this area and there [are] some Stanley’s in Texas, and they feel like they are certain that they are related to Ralph. I think the Tex-Mex music actually is kind of a division of our people from here, because our people took our music from here and then they mixed it down there. 

Sam Houston is a Virginian. There is a Wise County, Texas too, named after our Governor, Wise, because he supported Texas. Sam Houston, he’s a Virginian. He was from Virginia, he went to Tennessee and went through a messy divorce or separation or something, and said the hell with Tennessee, and then went on to Texas, and he was an emperor down there for a while and then he was the first Governor, and he was a good old Virginia boy. 

John Sevier was one of the leaders at Sycamore Shoals, Elizabethton, Tennessee, and the first real victory of the Revolutionary War was people from this area. They met at the muster ground in Abingdon, [Virginia] went on to Sycamore Shoals down in Tennessee, and then defeated the British in King’s Mountain. Then he [Sevier] was the first and only Governor, [of the] State of Franklin and then he was the first Governor of Tennessee. 

We’re developing ghost towns through the Appalachia Mountains. The Federal Government, particularly the EPA, is putting all these people out of work and shutting down the mining industry. And all they need to do is get like Virginia Tech or University of Kentucky or University of West Virginia and put some money in research on how to make it cleaner. People say, ‘oh well, we can’t that, we can’t do this.’ Well, if you don’t do it, you can’t do it that’s for sure. 

The Germans ran WWII on petroleum made from coal, and that’s over 70 years ago. We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t get our act together to make clean coal? And furthermore, just like the power plant they put over at St. Paul, they’re going to have approximately two million tons of ash. They are not real sure what to do with it, but you can take that ash and mix it with certain chemicals, salt and other chemicals, put electrodes in that, get the heavy metals out and you can almost use it for any building material. Then you can also sell the heavy metals. We’ve got everything to work with, its just getting people that are in the politics off their butt to do something."

Rebecca Brock

Rebecca Brock. Chiropractic Office Manager; Evarts, Kentucky:

“I was born in Harlan. I grew up in a little community called Kildav. When I grew up everybody knew everybody; we got to ride our bikes till dark. When mamaw came out on the porch and hollered your name and you heard it you knew you had to get home. You had neighbors that watched you; you knew to behave ‘cause word got back. I liked to climb trees, I liked to play house, play school. 

I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I think that the mountain people are full of heritage and you can’t find that everywhere else. We’re more close knit; everybody knows everybody. I think we’re a resourceful type of people. We might not have nothing to eat but we know how to grow it; we know how to hunt it. Appalachian people are resourceful. The stereotypes of Appalachian people, I guess there is a certain few of us that are like that and I believe that could come out in all of us in one point in time. Why does the media do anything they do? I guess just to make one person look bad to offset somebody else. Money has everything to do with it. Oh, yeah. “Dumb hillbillies ain’t too smart and can’t talk right.” That we are not all dumb, inbred hicks from a holler. We’re educated, we’re down to earth, we’re very family oriented. I think that’s what I’d tell them. I consider myself a hillbilly. I was raised in the hills. When you go away from here everybody’s like, “Wow, you’ve got an accent”. Yeah, I was raised in a holler, in Harlan, so yeah, I’m a hillbilly.

Apple-at-cha. It’s the way I’ve always said it. It don’t really bother me ‘cause I talk the way I wanna talk and they talk the way they wanna talk. I don’t like putting other people down for the way they talk. I really don’t care what they think about the way I talk either. 

By no means is it easy (in the mountains). You know, when you’re growing up you have to work for what you want. If you want that bike or whatever you gotta go out there and work. That’s what I had to do. It never was just handed to you. I think it makes you a stronger as a person as you grow older ‘cause you know that to get what you want you’ve got to work for it. 

The hardest time I had in my life was three years ago on January 24th my father passed away; he had stage four lung cancer. That was a very hard time. My dad worked in the coal mines off and on when I was little. He held down several jobs; he was a mechanic. What really kept him from holding down a job and really providing was he was an alcoholic. It was hard for him to hold down a job. He wasn’t an abusive alcoholic by any means. Me and my dad were best friends. He watched cartoons with me, we rode dirt bikes. I think he always wanted to kill me ‘cause he’d put me on something and he’d say, “Hey Bec, do a wheelie!” “Okay dad, I got this!” And I would go flippin’ backward or he’d put me on a go cart and say, “Go ahead and drive it!” You’d drive and the steering wheel would come off bout ready to go into the creek. He got me into some trouble but he was always there to bail me out. He was 49 when he passed; it was very early. 

Having my kids. My daughter Kytalynn, she is eight now. She is sassy; she’s my sparkle. She really is, she’s my sparkle. She’s a big helper, she helps me take care of my son, Gideon, who is one. She does pageants. I always love watching her go onstage. She just lights it up. I try to teach Kytalynn especially, no matter if you are a girl or not, if you want to do something, by all means go do it. Don’t let nobody tell you that you can’t, because we can. She see’s me as far as working a job, taking care of the house and kids and still being able to do all of it. 

We like to competition barbeque. I think it’s fun to cook. I approach competition as just kinda cooking for my friends. I put it out there whenever we’re cooking, I’m like hey, just cooking for our buddies in the back yard. It’s definitely a lot of stress. We prepare for a week to get ready for a competition. Monday we’re prepping our meats. I work only two days a week, but I work Tuesday and Thursday, on them two days you know I’m picking up what we’re needing whether we’re needing like butter or whatever. Wednesday we’re making our injections and rubs. You don’t just stop that. You still got the house, you still got to cook dinner, you still gotta mow grass. You still got all that to do around everything. Sometimes I feel I’m about paper thin. When we (get to a competition) I kinda relax. My goal is to have fun cause if it’s not fun I don’t want to do it. I always tell Jerry that, “Let’s have fun, let’s go enjoy us being together, being able to see people and talk to people and just enjoy it.” 

I love it. I’m very proud of him. I love being a coal miner’s wife. Every night when he goes (to work) I don’t like saying “bye”. I say, “See you tomorrow.” It’s never “bye”. See, you just don’t know when they’re gonna come back. It’s always hug and kisses and, “How was your night?” The bodily injury? He’s already had one back surgery so bodily injury is one thing that always that weighs; just wondering, it’s not if he’s gonna get hurt but when is he gonna get hurt. The way I always look at it is when they sign on for a job as a coal miner they know what they’re getting into. They know it. They ain’t going in there like, “Oh crap! I didn’t know we was gonna do this.” Just like somebody in the military that goes over to Iraq be like, “Oh crap! I didn’t know you was gonna shoot back at me.” You knew what you were getting into. 

(Coal mines closing) It’s hitting Harlan pretty hard right now. I always say if they close down the last couple of mines we got you might as well go ahead and turn Harlan into a lake. That’s all it’s gonna be good for. There’s nothing unless they come up with some kinda industrial park or something then Harlan ain’t gonna be nothing. It’s just gonna be a memory. Cumberland, Kentucky is way worse. You go up there and the stores are all empty, everything looks abandoned. You can sit back and picture how it could be in it’s heyday. Same way with the main street of Evarts, they’ve had to consolidate the schools because there’s not enough kids to go to school, because there’s not enough jobs to sustain families so everybody is having to move. That’s where we went to school, that’s where we graduated. It’s so sad ‘cause we live half a mile above the high school. We go by it everyday and just like, “Dang, I can’t believe that place is closed down.”

Jody Hall

Jody Hall, School teacher; Lives between Langley and Wayland, Kentucky:

“I live in Eastern Kentucky, between Langley and Wayland, Kentucky. Been a resident there probably the last four years. I was born and raised in Wheelwright, Kentucky. Wheelwright was the first to have an Olympic sized swimming pool in the state. (That was) when Inland Steel was still a coal company there in Wheelwright.

I’ve lived around the state and without a doubt in my mind it’s [the mountains] the best place you could ever raise a child. Family values goes deeper than family. Your community is your family and to raise a child in that atmosphere is irreplaceable. 

Family makes the culture different. You know, people are raised to respect their family, take up for their family, and I believe it’s an understanding that other families are gonna do that as well. It’s kind of a love, love relationship there. 

Hillbilly? I love it, call me hillbilly all day! It’s something I’m proud of. It’s our heritage. If you’re educated about what a hillbilly is it shouldn’t offend you. So yeah, I mean, I’m cool with that.

I think it is ignorant (stereotyping) to what we really are. What we’re portrayed as on mainstream media, even movies, most of the time is 99% wrong. You know, come and check us out and see what it’s about and then judge. It’s about living your own life and letting others live theirs. You know, whatever you want to do, you do. If it don’t bleed over on me, I don’t care. That’s like all the political stuff that’s going on now, whether it be the rebel flag or gay marriage or whatever, I’m a devout Christian, but I’m not the one to judge. You know, we’ve got one man that’s gonna do that, no need for me to.

I teach high school social studies at South Floyd High School for 10 years. Sadly, students don’t have an appreciation for the Appalachian culture. The culture that this area has come up with is what you see on TV now. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Eric C Conn social security scandal that is just absolutely a black eye for this region. Being in school systems I see people, or children being raised to follow in the footsteps of parents who have been lifelong recipients of state aid. That’s what they know, that’s what they’re raised with, you know it becomes the thing to do. Where I was raised education was put on the top shelf. My old man wanted me to have a good education and to be able to provide for myself and that’s what happened. But I was lucky to have the parents that I do have. 

I lived in Louisville for six years and Corbin for two years. I left [the mountains] once and don’t ever plan on leaving again. I’ve got a wife who also teaches school, I’ve got a two-year-old son and I would love to raise him where I was raised. 

I guess, you know, probably the saddest thing that I can see right now is the kids that I teach in school that are living in the communities that I was raised in, the difference in that community now. It is not as prideful, it is not as, I don’t wanna say booming cause where I was at was not a booming city by no means when I was growing up but we did have the bare essentials. You’ve got a Dollar Store, a grocery store, we had the swimming pool and a movie theatre, you know, enough to make it. But the kids don’t have it anymore. They don’t have a lot to be proud of. But at the same time, they’re not proud of what they got.”