Morgan Canty

Morgan Canty, Age 21, College Student/Server at his family’s restaurant; Bristol, Tennessee:

“I’ve lived here all my life. I lived in the Virginia side for part of my life, and the over on the Tennessee side. 

It was a good place to live, calm, not too much going on. Peaceful. As a child, we went to the YMCA a whole lot. Played in the parks [and] played at the fountain down the street at the Memorial Park. We did a lot of singing. 

(His singing) It started as me listening to some old jazz singers when I was a kid, and I used to do impressions of it; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, stuff like that. Eventually, I was like, ‘oh, well, I can sing and I like singing so I’m gonna do that.’

[Liked jazz as a kid] mostly ‘cause I liked the way they ‘scatted.’ My mom and dad [are into] music. My mom sings, too. I’ve got four brothers. No sisters. Me and my brother are the only ones into music. My mom is the musical parent. She sings a lot of gospel at home [and] sometimes at churches when we visit. 

I’d like to be a recording artist. The music makes me feel good. I can express myself through it. And also, it’s another way to tell a story. One of my friends, he’s an actor, and that’s probably the best way to describe music and acting, is storytelling. I mean it’s a great way to get [something] across, and you can do it in as many words as you want, or even in a few words. Basically, you get the emotion of a song by how someone’s singing it, so that’s why songs are usually a chorus and a repeat. 

I did a show over at the Paramount (Bristol) for the Tenors at Noon Series, which is a showcase of local talent and artists that they do during the summer. It’s every other Friday. I did mostly songs with the piano. I had my brother play the piano [and] I sang a little bit of everything. Little bit of Otis Redding, TLC, some Macy Gray, some Michael Jackson, a lot of different stuff. 

I would have to say [Appalachia] has it’s own culture going on. It’s like all the different kinds of music are branched out from this region. You’ve got bluegrass and you’ve also got this mountain music sound. 

I hear it from a lot of people that visit here, they ask why people are so nice here, and I’m like ‘I don’t know, that’s the way people act.’ That’s how people are. 

Growing up here, I’ve learned a lot [about] how to treat other people. I’ve met so many different people from going to school in this area and working down here at the restaurant. You meet every type of person imaginable. I’ve learned about working. Almost everybody here is a working person. 

I’d definitely say [one lesson learned is] that hard work pays off. Having faith in what you’re doing. That’s another important thing. Believing it. 

Cooking’s been a big deal in my family. We cook every day. Holidays are big in our family. Sunday dinner is big in our family. They cook everything. Have lobster for certain holidays, switch it over and have fried chicken, turkey and dressing.


On Christmas Eve, we usually have a beef brisket or something like that. We’ll have lobster with that, and some roasted potatoes with garlic, vegetables and some type of punch. Then the next day, on Christmas, we’ll have turkey and dressing, sweet potatoes, and baked mac and cheese. That’s something the whole family cooks, not just my mom. Everybody will meet down here at the restaurant, or we’ll meet up at my grandfather’s house up in Glade [Glade Springs, Virginia].

My father’s parents, I never actually got to meet his father. He passed away before I was born. His mother, she lived here in the area for a long time. Now she resides in Atlanta. My mom’s parents, my grandmother passed away a couple of years ago, and my grandfather is still alive. 

We spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother, she loved to cook. Both of my grandmothers loved to cook. My grandmother, Marge Coleman, she cooked everything. And that was something she learned from her mom, ‘cause I believe it was her mom that used to be a cook in people’s houses. 

My grandfather, he likes to cook. He likes to do a whole lot of gardening, and he’s always been a worker. He served in the Army, I believe it was the Korean War, and then after that, they came back and he lived up in Glade Springs and it was hard for them to get a job, I remember being told. They worked at a couple of different jobs and then finally he was able to land a job at the Appalachian Power. He worked there for a long time and retired. My grandmother, she was a nurse up in, I believe, it was Abingdon [Virginia] Hospital. 

What is life? Life. Life’s a journey. That’s my best explanation. [My journey] is going good. I’ve hit some road bumps along the way but I feel like in the end, it’s not about exactly being perfect, but it’s how far you’ve come.

One [bump in the road] is about being frustrated about singing. Trying to figure out where do you go from here. Do you move to the big city or do you stay here? ‘Cause big city’s [are] completely different. And acting. That’s one of my bumps. School, going to college. Trying to figure out what to major in, ‘cause I’ve switched so many times. 

I want to move to Los Angeles. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like. I want to go out there and visit. I’d tried to go out there this summer, but it didn’t work out for me to go out this summer which means it’ll probably work out better for me to go in the fall. 

I expect it to be completely different. What I’ve heard about the city is crime and not knowing anybody, which is different than being at home. There’s not that person you can just reach out and lean on, especially when you don’t know anybody.

I feel like one thing [that’s different about Appalachia is] most police officers in the area know me, my family, which is a good thing. I know people. You can walk around on the streets of Bristol, and not really worry about somebody attacking you, stealing your money, that stuff. There’s a low crime rate in the area. 

There’s a unity that’s in these communities and part of being in the South, or I guess in the Eastern Tennessee or Southwest Virginia area, there’s a sense of community. You talk to your neighbors. You wave at people on the street. You say hi to people you don’t even know. Ask how they’re doing.

[Racial profiling] does happen here. It’s happened to me and my family multiple times. At times, it can be humiliating, especially when you know you’re not doing anything wrong. 

One time in particular, me and my mom were followed to our house. We pulled into the driveway, and they [police] flashed their lights and stuff. Made us show ID to basically prove that we lived in the neighborhood. We live in an all white neighborhood, but it’s nothing fancy or upscale or anything. They told us the reason was they were making sure we lived in that house. 

Sometimes, you get pulled over for something and they’re looking for something and they assume you have something, but there’s nothing wrong. Eventually, after they start talking to you, they’re like, ‘well, this is a good kid.’ That’s what it ends up turning out to be. 

I think at times we avoid the talk about race. I feel like we need to talk about it. If you ask any of my friends, I will talk about race at any point, anywhere. And for people, if you haven’t talked about it, it gets uncomfortable. I think that’s where you break down those walls of fear, and you take away those prejudices when you get to know people: when you’ve been over there, and you’ve talked to those people, black and white, or any other race; when you start talking to each other and you start learning about [them]. 

Me and my best friend, we’re complete opposites on [the] political spectrum, completely different backgrounds, different news channels, everything, but we’re tight. We can talk about the President, we can talk about anything without getting into a fist fight. We agree on a lot of stuff, which we never thought we’d agree on. 

You talk to somebody, you find out exactly who they are. 

To people that are not from the area, sometimes they’ll sense a little bit of this Appalachian accent, but I wouldn’t self describe myself as a hillbilly. It’s funny, ‘cause I’m taking a History of Tennessee class, and we had to do a whole chapter about that. I don’t know if I have a regional label. I’d say [I’m] an Appalachian. 

We’re [Appalachians] usually viewed as either being less clean or not as smart. I don’t even know where the stereotypes come from exactly, but sometimes we can be viewed like when we’re talking about negative stereotypes, as under the level of everyone else on certain stuff. But the view is how people in Appalachia act. It’s usually kind, unless you run into some rednecks who just don’t like anybody that’s an outsider!

[On how to change outsider’s perspectives of Appalachia] Well one thing that can be alarming [is] where some people in Appalachia haven’t been outside of Appalachia, or haven’t really had that encounter, like a lot of the old people here. 

Meet people. Meet different people. Different backgrounds, races, religions. Different things, cause there’s a saying here, ‘tell your kids not to talk to outsiders’ even though the person right next door could be getting ready to do something to you. 

Greatest triumph? I want to say keeping it together. I’d say staying ‘me’ through the years, which is kind of hard to do, especially when you’re younger. And, still keeping my eye on goals. 

My mom and dad started out regular. You gotta start somewhere, and they worked their way up, and told me that in life you’re not going to be handed stuff. 

And even when you’re given stuff, you’ve gotta keep working to keep it.”

Teddy W. Ratliff

Teddy W. Ratliff (they call me ‘Ted’ around here), Retired Military, Bee Keeper and Owner/Uncle Ted’s Honey; Thornton, Kentucky, Letcher County:

“Elkhorn City was a good place to grow up. It was a small community, but the river was there. I lived on the river, the Big Sandy River. I drank about half of it swimming in it, fishing, and doing whatever. Fishing and hunting. That was most of the things I got into, and I still do fishing and hunting. 

I could barely remember World War II, back when I was growing up. I can remember getting the coupons for coffee, and gas, and stuff like that. And people don’t understand, living now, what it was like then. 

My brother would go out, and collect rubber, and leather, and things for the war effort. Any kind of metal, or anything like that he collected, and he would get a prize for collecting the most of something like that. We grew everything. If we had to eat, we grew it and raised it. We raised pigs and chickens, and had eggs, and all that. Yeah, growing up in Pike County, Pike County’s good.

[My father] was a coal miner. He started off back when [he] was, sixteen years old. They used the pony lines then. He worked for Republic Steel, all his life. He retired out of there. He was in underground mining for all his life. He was eighty-three years, when he died. About a year before he retired, a shuttle car run over his little toe, and cut it off. And that’s the only thing, really, that he had majorly [happen] in the mines. He had Black Lung, that’s not what killed him. He was a pretty healthy fellow, like most of the Ratliffs. We’re fortunate in having the health we’ve got. We’re all healthy. 

Well, I seen him go to work at 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, and not come home until dark. And it just wasn’t my bag of tea. I wouldn’t say I qualified to go in college. About five of us got together one day [while] fishing, and decided, ‘Let’s do something else. Let’s go in the military.’ 

We said we would go try the Air Force, and if the Air Force didn’t take us, we’d try the Navy, and if the Navy wouldn’t take us, we’d try the Army, and if the Army wouldn’t take us, we’d come back home. (Laughs) We weren’t going to go in the Marines. 

Five of us went down to go in, and three of us made it. One of us had a finger cut off, and the other one had flat feet. Two of us actually went to basic training together. He lasted about six months of service, and he got out. I was the only one out of the five that really stayed for the duration, made a career out of it. 

I was in the Air Force for twenty years. Come right out of high school, went in doing special weapons. I was in Vietnam [and] made three trips to Southeast Asia, during that time. In fact, I was in Thailand at the time they took the people off the embassy. I built the bombs, rockets, and the missiles that goes on the B-52’s and the planes. 

I actually volunteered to go to Guam. I was stationed in Northern Michigan. I got there, and it was thirty below, and two hundred and seventy-six inches of snow that winter. 

I went in, and said, ‘Where can I go to get out of here as soon as I can?’ Well, they said, ‘We can send you to Guam, you get out in about a month. But you got to know that it’s an island.’ I said, ‘Send me! (Laughs).

When I came back to the states, I was in nuclear weapons. When you’re handling them, they’re a lot safer than a conventional weapon is. It was interesting. That’s the reason I stayed for twenty years. I really loved it. I’d go back in a minute. 

I’ve been all over the world, but I settled right here. My sister and her husband had a business here [and] when I retired, I had a job waiting on me. I was out of the service one day, drew unemployment one day, and went to work the next day. Been here ever since. Came here in ’79. And I got married. I met a lady here, two years after I retired, and settled down here.
I retired about four times, out of different jobs. 

When I got out [of the Air Force], I ran convenience stores. I ran the Quick Marts for thirteen years. I retired from that, and went in business for myself, and I bought convenience stores. I had three convenience stores, a garage, and five tobacco stores. And I sold them, and retired again. 

Then I went to work for a drug testing company, doing drug tests in coalmines and [on] truck drivers. I did that for about six or seven years. And when the coalmines went down, kindly worked it’s way out of Eastern Kentucky like it did, it kind of done me in. So I went ahead and retired [again]. 

While I was doing the drug testing, I got into beekeeping as a hobby. I started off with four hives and built it up over a period of time. 

If you ever do anything with bees, once you start, you’re hooked. You’ll be doing them from now on, because they’re so fascinating. 

I’ve got the bees back on a strip [mine] job, my son’s property, which is a good place to have it, because they’ve got plenty clover. They’ve reseeded it good in clover, and things that the bees really like. It worked out real good, and it’s built up now until it’s become a job, instead of a hobby. 

I made my own label up. ‘Sweet as a mother’s heart.’

Appalachian Pride contacted the state, and they wanted a product out of Eastern Kentucky. [They] called me one day, and said, ‘Would you like to send some honey up to NASCAR?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, I guess.’ 

The state agricultural department met me, and picked up the honey, and took it up to Sparta, Kentucky, for NASCAR. They featured it on the menu. They NASCAR] did a commercial. 

A lot of my friends in California and Arizona seen that, people I went to school with. They said, ‘That’s got to be Ted Ratliff. They ain’t nobody else would do something like that.’ The number’s on the label, and they called me, and sure enough, they said, ‘You gotta ship me some honey. I gotta have some honey.’

(About getting stung) I’ll go in a certain time of year with just Bermuda shorts on and a short-sleeved shirt, because the bees are busy doing what they’re doing. They don’t pay no attention to you. But when you go in, and steal their honey, you suit up, because they get mad. They go to the refrigerator, and steal your food, you’re gonna get mad. And that’s what happens. You start stealing their food, they’re gonna be mad about it, so they do get a little violent then. 

The bees are fascinating. They’ve got a structure, a hierarchy that they follow. We still make beehives and things as they did back in Biblical times. 
We’re losing our bees. People in the United States don’t understand what’s happening with the bees. Two years ago, in the United States, we lost eighteen percent of our bees. Last year, we lost forty percent of our bees. This year, we’re on track to lose fifty percent of our bees. 

If we lose our bees, you’re going to lose your fruit, and lose your nuts, because that’s what does your pollination. I’ve lost eight hives already this year. 

Two years ago for forty dollars, you could buy a package of ten thousand bees with a queen in it. This year, it was ninety-two dollars for the same package. The scarcity of the bees is causing the price to go up so much. 
They call it a mass hive disease, or colony collapse. 

The government, about five years ago, allowed them to use insecticide, and the insecticide that they use goes inside the plant and kills the worms and bugs. It’s good for the vegetables, the corn or whatever, but what happens is, the insecticide gets into the nectar. The bees come and get the nectar to take back to the hive, and then they become disoriented. They can’t pollinate and find their way back. 

They call them zombie bees. They just fly in all directions, and either birds get them, or at night they get cold and they die. 

I’ll go in a hive, and I’ll have forty thousand bees in there one day. Two days later, I’ll go in there, and there won’t be nothing. They’ll be gone. I mean no dead bees, or nothing, ‘cause they didn’t come back. That’s how we’re losing them. 

It’s going to take the government five more years to get that insecticide out of the system. It keeps killing these bees. The government, you know, is what done it. Europe doesn’t allow them to use that insecticide. They don’t have the problem that we’ve got. 

I’ve been all over the world [and] I want to be here. People will not appreciate what they’ve got, until they’ve been to another country, and see they live off of what we throw away in this country. You wouldn’t believe it. 

[Appalachia is special because of] the camaraderie, the friendliness, the kindness. If someone comes up here, like that lady that come up here, she didn’t have any money, I’d give her some [honey]. What’s it worth? I’d rather see her have it. That’s the way people are, and that’s what makes it [special] to me. 

I fish and hunt. A couple of years ago, I killed a buffalo. My nephew, of course, my nephew gets me into everything, called me up and said, ‘Let’s go hunting.’ I said, ‘What are we going to hunt for?’ He said, ‘Whatever you want to kill.’ We’ll say harvest, shouldn’t say kill. 

I said, ‘Well, okay. I’d like to get a buffalo.’ I’ve killed deer and stuff like that. I hope to get to elk hunt, you know, in this country, in Kentucky. And bear hunt. Got a bear in my back yard, if it gets my bees, I’ll get a bear this year. (Laughs) 

We went to a game reserve. Somebody said, ‘Where’d you get a buffalo?’ I said, ‘Oh, we went out west, and killed this buffalo. We’re gonna put it in The Mountain Eagle, the local paper; Ted’s nephew goes out west, harvests eight hundred pound buffalo in big hunt.’ 

I said, ‘Next week, we’ll run an article in there; Petting zoo in Frankfort looking for buffalo. Anybody can find the buffalo, a reward.’ (Laughs) But anyway, we had fun with it. 

(About the regional economy) It’s good to go with the environmental thing, to cut the coal out. But, you don’t put the cart before the horse. You don’t eliminate the coal, and then expect technology to catch up with it. That’s not the way it works. You know that, and I know that. 

If you develop a technology, it will make the coal do better, where you don’t have the environmental problem. But that’s what happens, when you come in and just say, ‘We’re just gonna cut this business off.’ I could ask people in California, and they would say, ‘Oh, coal, it pollutes. It’s terrible. You need to do away with coal.’

I’d say, okay, the biggest polluter in the United States is cars, automobiles, and trucks. We’ll keep the coal, if you do away with the cars. Let’s see how they like it. If you want us to do away with coal, we’ll do away with coal, but you’re hurting people by doing that. 

They come in here to Appalachia, the great society, they’re going to bring the people in Appalachia out of poverty. Spent billions and billions of dollars to do it, and in one sweep of the pen, you put everybody right back to square one. All that money they spent was wasted. It’s gone. Which, if they hadn’t of given it to the people, and had put it in the infrastructure back then, like roads and industrial parks like they’re doing now…

(Tourism) I don’t know. Somebody says, put something in Letcher County, in Eastern Kentucky. There’s only so many Dollywood’s in the world you can put in.“

Scott Mullins

Scott Mullins, Maintenance, Dickenson County Board of Supervisors; Lee Holler, Clintwood, Virginia: 

“I’ve lived here all my life. It’s home, and it’s the only place that I recognize as what matters to me. Just like this cemetery here [Dutton Cemetery], this is my family, this is my people and I love where I come from.

I grew up in a family of five kids, and I was the youngest. We attended meetings like this [dinner on the grounds], went to church all the time. My dad was a singer and a minister, and my mom was too. I ran right around all these hills and hollers. I was raised not too far from here in a little place…well it was before Wolf Pen. Wolf Pen is where I spent most of my teenage years from about eight or nine. Bartley Branch is what I was trying to think of, I’ve spent most of my life in this general area right here.

We run around through the hills, played ‘fox and dog,’ had picnics, rode bicycles all over the place, went down to Rita South’s Store when we was kids and got a popsicle. We got on an inner tube and sled in the wintertime. Fox and Dog is just about like a version of hide and seek. You go around, and one person is the fox and the rest of the kids is the dogs chasing after the fox. Basically, the dog has got to find the fox through the woods, so living in the woods like this, it is considerably harder to find you if you know where to go to. 

There’s just a lot of fond memories of my childhood. I have had probably one of the coolest childhoods that I guess you could ever think of. 

We didn’t have a whole lot, my daddy was a coal miner, but we were blessed. Daddy provided for us and we had family, we had music. We had a lot of music in my family. I come from a singing family that dates back to my great-grandfather. Mostly gospel music and then, earlier in the years, daddy was raised on Johnny Cash and had all kind of record collections of country music. 

Whatever made the heart feel happy was what they sung. Listened to a lot of Carter Family stuff. If you don’t have an education in the Carter Family, then I feel sorry for you. I have been trying to teach that to my own children. They have a little bit of an idea from it because some of the material we do touches on the Carter Family stuff.

I was the only one out of my family that never did go in the mines. When I was about eight years old, maybe seven, Daddy took me down in the mines down at Splashdam. It was a shaft mine. I will never forget this as long as I live. He took me down the shaft and opened it up and let me look at what I couldn’t see, pure and utter darkness, except for a section of light. 

One time, he made me put my hands over my eyes and he said, ‘shut your eyes real tight, as tight as you can shut ‘em.” I put my hands over my eyes, and he put his hands over my hands and he said, that would give you just a little bit of an idea what it’s like in the coal mines, just how dark it is. That influenced me in a big way to not go in that profession, even though it would have been pretty easy to do as soon as you got out of high school. But I didn’t. I chose other ways.

[Daddy] had some minor injuries and things; you don’t come out of the coal mines unless you get hurt in some degree. I remember he talked about getting the breath about knocked out of him around the pinner machine one time and it nearly killing him. He was around electricity a whole lot; he was an electrician and welder. And I remember his fingernails being black. He had two or three black fingernails where he had mashed his fingers a whole lot. Dad was a hard working person, but he loved the Lord and enjoyed playing music just about as good as any man I’ve ever known. He loved to sing.

(Describe the 69th Annual Dutton Memorial) It’s a coming together, it’s about reconnecting with your people, with the people that you may not always get to see. When I was a small child, all the way out Wildcat Ridge there used to be cars parked all the way out back to my great-grandma’s house. They was a great amount of people that would come here and they would be about all day. They would be two or three preachers and all kinds of singing. 

This is an annual memorial meeting to remember those that’s outstripped us and gone on. It’s held at the Dutton Cemetery. It was started in about, we estimate about 1946, in honor and memory of Jack Dutton who had a home place all around this area right here. He was a Brethren preacher, Brethren Elder, if you want to call him. 

He was responsible for helping a lot of the people like my grandfather and so many other names I could probably not name them all off, that became preachers. They came together as a form of worship, as a remembrance. Gathering together, the family just meets, the singer sings, the preacher preaches the message and we have fellowship and gather around. 

For the longest time, and still in some Brethren Churches there’s no music. This is about the second year that we’ve incorporated music into the service. For a long time, we just sung without music. It wasn’t until after the service that you were allowed to bring your instruments out and play during the eatin’ parts of it, you know. David played a harp and he pleased God with his harp, and I feel like I can do the same thing. We always want to try to do things in decency and in order and reverence to God. We began to incorporate music into the services because we feel that’s just as much a part of it as anything, and still yet hanging onto the roots and singing in the a capella old tradition that we knew and grew up in.

[My singing is] kind of a mixture of stuff. Like I said, it’s Brethren Church. It’s long metered, [and comes] from Scotch Irish traditions; from the old church traditions of long call and response…the drone. I don’t think it’s nowhere near as represented today as what it was fifteen or twenty years ago. Some people might call it mournful, the sound. But to me, I didn’t think of it as a mournful sound at all. It’s that long drone it comes from, and you can hear the element of Scots Irish in it still yet today.

When I’m not doing music, I love to gather history. I love to gather, document and keep track of my family roots. I spend a lot of time with these guys here. I spend a lot of time with my son. We stay pretty busy as far as our ministry work goes. I like to go and visit a lot of people and visit other churches. It is a very great pleasure and an honor and very humbling when people ask you to come and sing for them. It’s our life. It’s my life. 

We’ve all had to live through hard times. This has been a hard-pressed economic area as long as I can remember. Families depended on one another to survive. If you didn’t work and raise a garden, you didn’t eat. There wasn’t any welfare system at the time, and people had no other choice but to draw together and come together. Worship was the main connecting forces what brought people together. 

[One of my favorite quotes is] ‘Never had a people know so much for so long, with so little they could just about make anything out of nothing’.

What makes this place special is our deep-rooted faith that we have in the Lord, in God and that’s what strengthens us. Without that we have nothing. The worship of the Almighty God, the love of the scripture, the love of the belief that there is a Christ, there’s a God in Heaven.

There’s all kinds of religions. Daddy used to say that you could make a religion out of a rock, if you wanted to. There’s a difference between religion, and true salvation. These are the connecting threads. It was demonstrated today. You represent what is the changing face of Appalachia. Things have changed. The older generations die out. The purity of the singing and the type of life that our ancestors lived, we’re losing that. But there are still very many elements that are still very much alive today.

[Outsiders view of us] We’ve got our negative points just as much as the rest of the whole world, [but] we have dealt with people before. We‘ve been interviewed by folks from like, National Geographic Magazine. I am not pickin’ on anybody or naming names, but I think there is the whole stigma, or the whole stereotype, that people have from what they’ve seen. Walter Cronkite saying ‘this is Appalachia,’ and the whole thing back in the fifties and sixties. 

They painted this picture that we’re nothing but barefoot and hillbilly and poverty-ridden and that’s part of it, sure. But we are also a proud people. We are a very hard-working people. We are a people of faith, very deep-rooted faith.

People have their own preconceived notions of who we are. But you can’t come, for say a weekend, and begin to understand who we are. You can’t come in here for twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours and expect to understand the people unless you talk to them. Get to know them, go and stay in their homes for a little while and see how they tick.”

Tom Hess

Tom Hess, Magistrate & President of the Rich Valley Fair; Grady’s Gap, Saltville, Virginia:

“I’ll be eighty years old in December. I’m a magistrate here in Smyth County. For the past thirty-five years [I’ve been involved with politics.] I was an investigator with the town of Marion, and investigator with the Smyth County Sheriff’s department. I’m a football official and just got a plaque last week for fifty years of refereeing.

I grew up in Broadford, just down the road here from the Rich Valley Fair. Played in the mountains all the time. Instead of walking the road going’ down to the store, we’d head to the mountain and go all the way [up] top of the mountain, then come out down at the store, which was about five miles. If we’d go straight down, we’d only have gone ‘bout half mile. More fun that way. Ol’ young boys, you know how they are. 

We played baseball all the time [and] rode the bicycle. We had three stores down at Broadford [and] we hung around down there till up in the evening. We had a volleyball court down there under the bridge [and] we’d play volleyball ‘bout every evening. 

I spent the summer with [my grandparents]. They’ve lived on a farm about a mile from me. We’d spend some time over with them; then they moved up in what they call Possum Holler. We’d go and ride our bicycles four or five miles, and spend ‘bout the whole summer with them on the farm. 

My grandfather was a hardworking farmer. He worked for the Buchanans back in those days. [They] had a big farm, and he worked on that. My grandmother done all the cooking. Stayed in the house and cooked all the time. 

(Values they instilled) To be honest, and to look people in the eye when you’re talking to them and just try to be a good person. If you got anything to say to anybody, say it to their face. That’s what my grandfather always taught me. My grandfather always said, ‘Hello boy, what are you doin?’ 

I went into the military in October of 1955. I graduated high in school in ’54, and went in just three or four months later. I was in the U.S. Army. I went to Port Jackson and got my training down there, and then went on to Massachusetts [and] stayed there the whole time. Back in those days, we had these Nike Ajax missiles set up all the way around protecting Boston Harbor. 

I worked in the office of one of those bases. I got married when I was in the Army. My wife was in college in Radford. We got married and so she stayed in college a little while longer, then came on to Massachusetts with me. We stayed up there for two and a half years. [We] came back to the hills, and she went back to school, got her Master’s degree and taught school for thirty-two years. We have three children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. 

I went to work for the Sheriff’s department in 1975. I worked patrol, and then as time went on, I was appointed to a Captain. In 1979, we got defeated in the election [and] the town of Marion hired me as a patrolman. About six to eight months later, they promoted me to investigator, so I stayed there till 1988. 

My nickname is Curly. We had a big fight downtown one night. We all run down there --- three or four police cars. One old boy knew me, and he said, ‘Curly, I think I’ll just whip your tail end.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve never whipped nobody, but you might be the first one.’ He just got in the car and we just went on up to the jail. 

The judge was a good friend of mine and he asked me one day, ‘How would you like to be a magistrate? I said, ‘When can I start? I started in 1988, and I’ve got twenty-six years in now as a magistrate. 

Everybody knows everybody and I guess everybody in Smyth County knows me; been around a long time as a policeman and a magistrate; seen a lot of people as a football referee. Man, I’ve refereed from Roanoke to Lee County. I believe I was twenty-six years old when I started. I worked the field for about six or eight years, then the commissioner promoted me to head referee, so I’ve been a head referee about forty years. 

I was over in the coal fields callin’ one night and my outside man was on the same side as the coaches, and they wanted to get all the bad words and fussing. I’m out in the middle of the field and I can’t hear them. They were giving my outside man just down the road. Finally, he told me, ‘I can’t stand it anymore, he’s really layin’ it on me over there.’ It started in the third quarter and he couldn’t take it anymore; the coach couldn’t. He says, ‘I wanna see Tom Hess, the head man.’ 

I called time out and started over to the sidelines to talk to him, and I got to thinking. I just read in the paper [that] week where his daughter had been in a car accident. I met him on the sidelines and he was tellin’ me how bad my crew was, they must have learned that from me, and how much he hated my mother. 

When he got done I put my arm up there on his shoulder and said, ‘Coach, how’s your daughter?’ And he didn't’ know what to say. That just shut him up. At the end of the game we was loadin’ up in the car to leave, and he came over to me and he said, ‘Dang you, Tom Hess, you know how to get to a man! 

I’m a full-time magistrate with the state of Virginia, I work for the Supreme Court of Virginia, but I’m burning a lot of my time. I work Tuesdays and Thursdays, and play golf Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’d play Saturday and Sunday if I could get anybody to play. 

This is our eighty-first year of the Rich Valley Fair. I’m the president, but we all work together. Rich Valley Fair is just a good place for good ol’ hillbillies to come and hang around. We put on a pretty good show each night, and people seem to enjoy it. The fans come from everywhere; they come from Tennessee, North Carolina, especially [for the] horse show. We had the truck pull this past Saturday night, one of the biggest crowds we ever had here. Got a few vendors up there that sell a little food. I think we got the ninth rated hamburger in Southwest Virginia. Best hamburger you ever want to eat. 

In 1996, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I didn’t know anything was wrong with me. My daughter-in-law is a nurse, and she told my wife, said, ‘Something’s wrong with Tom. He’s lost all of his energy.’ They made me go to the doctor and they did tests on me and found out I had prostate cancer. The doctor over at Marion called me and my wife in. We had no idea. I’d never been sick hardly in my life. 

We was sitting in front of the doctor and he said, ‘Well, I got bad news. You got prostate cancer.’ That just devastated you. I was about fifty-seven or eight years old. I said, ‘Man, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.’ We heard how bad cancer was and you don’t last very long, but I’ve fought it and never did give up. I was bad and didn’t know it; it was really, really bad. You know the prostate is about the size of a walnut, and the whole thing was cancerous. 

They sent me to Bowman Gray in Winston Salem and had surgery down there and removed my prostate. I’ve had several other operations for cancer, but today I’m doing well. I’ve got lung cancer, but it’s really almost under control and doing real good. 

I had a good friend who was a deputy sheriff with me. I was the Captain in the department and he come in and had a little sore right under his badge. He said, ‘Do you mind if I take that badge off?’ I said, ‘Just put it on your belt.’ He found out he had cancer, and about three months he was dead. Laid down on the couch and died. I’d go about everyday and try to get him to ride around the police car with me and he wouldn’t. 

I told my wife, ‘If I ever get cancer, don’t you let me lay down.’ My friends and my family they won’t let me lay down, they make me go all the time. I think that’s one reason, I got a good attitude and I exercise and I keep my body in pretty good shape. I think that’s a lot of the answer to it. It’s devastating when they tell you you have it, but you can’t quit. If you quit, you’re dead. Just fight it and keep going. 

Don’t give up, like I always told my kids, when you get down on somebody else’s level, they win. And when you give up, cancer wins.”