Alex Brashear

“We may not have had the best things, but we always had everything we needed. Yeah, that and a lot of love.” 

Alex Brashear, College Student and Carpenter; Cornettsville, Kentucky: 

“[Living in the mountains] I love it. A lot of good friends. Good people. Just good times. Hunt. Fish. Garden. I stayed outside all the time. It was fun. I still hunt and fish and garden. 

Dad, he was a carpenter. And he worked at a photo shop. And Mom, she worked at a Senior Citizens Center. Both my Papaws were miners. And my one Grandmother, she worked at a nursing home. And the other one, she worked like at restaurants, waitress and stuff like that. It was fun times, a lot of good lessons learned. I was taught to be honest and kind, and do people right. You know, be good to people, good things come back. 

Well, there was a big rock fell on one of them’s knee. Busted it up real good, and he’s…he’s bad off with cancer now. Lung cancer you know. My other Papaw, he had Black Lung, but the mines he worked at, they moved out and burned everything. And he didn’t have any of his check stubs left. You know, he didn’t save ‘em, and all that, didn’t have no proof that he worked there. So he didn’t get to draw Black Lung, or nothing like that. 

My Papaw, whenever I was little, he always told me I was worse than the stuff a cat would cover up. (Laughs) I never knew what he was talking about until he died. And it took me a couple of years after that. I thought about that, and I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ We’d get out, and he wasn’t in all that good health at the time. But we’d get out and walk around, look at stuff in the woods. And (we) gardened a lot. 

I know they had a bunch sweet pepper planted one year. Mamaw grew all different color bells and things. And she got out there, she was gonna pick ‘em. And I was real little. And I remember it, ‘cause she had red and yellow, purple, and everything. And Papaw told her. He said, ‘You’d better pick them peppers tonight.’ She said, ‘Naw, I think I’m just gonna wait till in the morning.’ And she went out there the next morning, and the deer ate ever one of them she had. (Laughs) She didn’t get a one off of ‘em. One day too late. They took them that night. 

(Growing up) It was pretty tough. We raised our food and didn’t have to worry about starving to death. We always had chickens. Here recently, we got into goats. Help keep the place cleaned up.

(At Papaw’s) when I was little, I remember going up to the hen house and gathering eggs and stuff. They had two big turkeys in the chicken lot. They kept running around. And Papaw kept them to bring wild turkeys down from the mountains. He enjoyed seeing them. I was scared to death of them. I remember I thought one was getting after me one time, and I took off running, grabbed Grandma right by her britches leg. She started laughing. I thought I was eat up.

We used to raise hogs. We raised about two a year. You just start ‘em out as pigs, and make sure they get enough protein to grow up big and healthy. We liked them to get to about three hundred, three hundred fifty pounds. You definitely want to butcher them in the wintertime; nature’s refrigerator. You don’t want your meat to spoil. We started bright and early in the morning. Everybody would help. It was just something for the family and neighbors to do together. Everybody swung by, they’d have to stop and see what was going on. Hang around, help and get a fresh piece of meat to take home. 

We may not have had the best things, but we always had everything we needed. Yeah, that and a lot of love. 

I got out of high school. I went to college. I went to Alice Lloyd for two years. And I went to EKU for a year, and then I came back here. I still ain’t finished yet, but I’m working on a Biology degree. Trying to go to medicine. 

In 2011 I took classes on working underground. My buddy, he was working at Sapphire (mines), and they were getting ready to open one up over there in Pikeville. And he told me he’d get me on there. Well, I went and finished my class and caught up with him. That next week they ended up shutting the mines down and laid everybody off. That was whenever it (layoffs) started hitting real heavy. 

(Jobs) There’s nothing, where I live at. I’m thirty miles from town and you can’t drive to McDonald’s to work three hours, and then come back home, and make gas money, you know. It’s awful. We’re up here selling a few vegetables and stuff (at the Farmer’s Market)…but that’s about it. (What we need is) Factories. Roads. Factories. You know we’re rich in art and crafts and stuff. If people would get back to their roots, I think it would help a lot. 

Music? No, I never did pick up anything, but a lot of family members, you know, they pick and go on; bluegrass and gospel. Stuff like that. ‘The Singing Cookes’ is on my Mom’s side, and then ‘The Master’s Harmony’ is on my Dad’s side. And the rest of ‘em, they just pick for fun and stuff. I write a little bit. That’s it. 

Appalachian culture? We’re the best. (Laughs) Humbleness, I think for the most part (is what separates us). Really. Because you know, we never give up. (You) can’t get us down. We’re used to dealing with hard times, and it’s just been bred into us, I think. I was taught to never give up. 

I think it’s funny. I took two Appalachian Studies classes at EKU, and I really enjoyed it. The teacher, he got up talking and everything. Everything he brought up, you know it was my life. 

(The media) I think they come in, and they pick the worst they can find, and throw them up on the screen. ‘Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia’; there’s that type of people here but I don’t think we’re all hillbillies, with no teeth and no sense at all, you. It’s funny that people believe that. The accent I think it has a lot to do with it. Really. We’re good, honest folks; great work ethic. And if people would just give us a chance, they’d be surprised at what they’d find.

I met this guy one time, while I was in Richmond, (Kentucky). He was from Australia. And it kind of made me really proud. I was talking about his accent, the Australian accent, I think it’s cool, and he was talking about my accent. I said, ‘What do you mean, my accent?’ He said, ‘That’s America’s accent.’ I said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’ He said, ‘No. That’s America’s accent. I like it.’ You know, it made me proud. It really did. 

The happiest times? Probably when I was little. Way up to the top of the mountain, Dad took me up there. A big old rock up there. It had like a ledge, came out and stuck over the mountain. A cave kind of, look back in it. And they call it ‘the big rock,’ is all I know, no official landmark. But I think about that. It’s always been my safe haven. I call it my happy place. It’s just a big rock. You know, it’s my safe haven. It’s my happy spot, I guess. My dad and I, we used to go up there and squirrel hunt, and see what all we could find.

I love fishing and hunting. Catfishing for the most part. Night fishing, I like doing that. With chicken liver and night crawlers.

One night, my little cousins, they’re going on, ‘Let’s go fishing. Let’s go fishing.’ I said, ‘Alright, let’s go.’ We loaded up lanterns and stuff, and went down there and got set up. I always use cane poles in the river. It’s a lot easier. And I had one set out there, and there was a limb sticking out, coming off the bank. A catfish had got hooked and wrapped itself around one of those limbs. The lanterns had died. It was pitch dark. All we had was a little flashlight, and I was trusting my little cousin to shine it for me. I walked all the way out there on that limb, and whenever I got out there on the main end, I reached down to get that cat, and my foot slipped, and there I was. Soaked! Soaked! Standing in the middle of that river in the middle of the night. Couldn’t see anything. He started laughing and dropped the flashlight. I was holding on to a catfish, trying to get to the bank with it. It was awful. It was. It was a fun time though. 

I do some crappie fishing. And white bass whenever they start running. They’ve always said that whenever the redbuds start blooming that the white bass are running. Usually you can go by all them old sayings. That’s another thing I learned. We plant a lot by the signs. I learned that from my grandparents.

Mamaw, when she was little, her Daddy, and his brother, and a friend made moonshine. And her Mom would peddle it over cross the mountain. She rode a big mule, and had it in the saddlebags. She’d also take and sell possums. She would put (the moonshine) down with them dead possums The revenuers were constantly after them. They stopped her on top the mountain one time and they caught on to it. Then she started carrying the possums live in her saddlebags. 

They stopped her on top the mountain again, and said, ‘We know what you got in them bags’. And she said, ‘I got possums.’ They said, ‘What else is in there?’ She said, ‘That’s it.’ They wanted her to get down and get them out. She said, ‘If you want ‘em you can get down in there and get ‘em out.’ They wouldn’t touch them live possums. Loaded down, she hauled over to Vicco. She got away with it.

People I went to school with here, I’d say there ain’t a quarter of us left living here. All jokes aside they’ve moved (away) for jobs. Twenty years from now I hope that we will have more business. People are gonna have to move away from coal. We seen that already. Then, hopefully, a more stable economy (will develop), and folks will come back that left (the region). I hope to (live my life here). Do the best I can. Do whatever I have to. I ain’t afraid of work. I’ve known it all my life.”

Wayne Stephenson

“I was in the Army for three years, and I was in with Elvis. We were in Germany together [and] he was just an ordinary guy, to be honest with you… He was just a country boy that made it good, and got rich.“

Wayne Stephenson, Retired Welder, Retired Pastor; Greenup, Kentucky:

“It was nice [growing up here]. It’s a lot like you see on Mayberry. We could walk to walk to the theatre and go in the on a movie for ten cents. We could walk home, and even after dark, no fear of anything happening to us. There used to be a dime store right there. The elementary school was right back of here, on our lunch hour, which we could never do today, we could come over in town, go wherever we wanted. We could come over and look at the things in the dime store. You could get something if you wanted to eat, if you had the money. It was a real safe place. Laid back town, and just about everybody knew everyone else. You could ride your bicycles up and down the street with no problem.

A group of us boys would gather a lot of times by the railroad track up there. We had an old hoop, didn’t have no net on it. We played basketball until dark, and then we’d go home. In the wintertime, we couldn’t do anything much because we had chores to do. We had to get in coal and wood, and stuff for the fire. My dad worked evening shift, and I had to do most of that, because I was the only boy. The other ones were so small they couldn’t do that, and they didn’t make the girls do that. They did the housework. (Laughs) 

[My parents] had eight kids, and wages weren’t that high. My Mom would can, oh, hundreds of [cans]! She didn’t can in quarts; she canned in half gallons because of the size of the family. We canned everything that we could. We canned tomatoes. We even canned sausage. Any more, it’s a lot more practical to just freeze it, because it’s easier, but we didn’t even have freezers. We had an icebox, and in the wintertime, everything froze outside. We always butchered two hogs in the fall, and my Dad would salt cure them, in a smokehouse. We didn’t smoke them. . We always had a milk cow. We had that meat and all the canned stuff, [and] that’s what we lived on during the winter. All she had to buy was flour and meal 

My Dad was the youngest of thirteen children, and I never saw my Grandma Stephenson, but my Grandpa Stephenson, I saw him. He died when I was six years old. My grandparents on my mother’s side were Sturgills, and they died pretty early, too. I was about fourteen or fifteen when they died. I didn’t get to hang out with them, but we were a family of eight kids, so there were never any dull moments around there.

Oh, my goodness, that’s been a long time since I was a boy. (Laughs) Dad was always talking about his work. He enjoyed farming [and] gardening. He had a job at a creosote plant in Russell and I used to go to work with him. It was a place where they pressure treated creosote ties and electric poles. It was on a railroad track, and he worked, he worked at that plant there several years until it went out of business. Then, he worked at the National Mine Service Company in in Ashland. They built mining equipment. 

Growing up, everywhere dad went, I went, too. We didn’t have a car, if you can believe that, with eight kids. If we had a real need, he would borrow my uncle’s car, once in a while. But everywhere we went, we walked, and I would take about three steps to Dad’s, to keep with up with him. I was the first boy that was born. I had five sisters. Four girls born, and then I was born, another girl, and then two boys. I just recently lost of my sisters. One died in December. She was eighty-three, and another one died in June, she was seventy-nine. We were a real close family, and still are. 

Mom was the disciplinarian. She always taught us to have respect for others, and when we didn’t, she didn’t spare the rod. I tell you that. I’ve often said, if we lived in an area today like it was then, with the discipline and stuff, dad would have been in jail. It is, but it didn’t hurt us [and] it probably did help our personality. 

Everybody knew everybody else. You didn’t really see poor people and wealthier people. There were those, but nobody emphasized it, nobody paid any attention to it, because the most of us were poor. But it was a nice town to grow up in. I really hated it, because a lot of the buildings and stuff they let go, and they didn’t restore them. 

The Blue Ribbon Bus would come down, and the Greyhound too, later on. Going south, it stopped right in front of the drug store there. You went in [the drugstore], and there was a little food bar on the right as you went in. It was a fountain and had stools down through there. They sold sandwiches and milkshakes, and Coke, and they had a pharmacy that was in the back. This pharmacy up here that’s in Greenup, Stultz Pharmacy? Well, Dave’s Grandpa was the one that run that one, and now his great-grandson is running Stultz Pharmacy, up here now. He was the type person, if you had something wrong and you needed medication, he’d go in there any hour of the night and open up and get it for you. 

After I finished high school, I went in the Army. I was in the Army for three years, and I was in with Elvis. We were in Germany together [and] he was just an ordinary guy, to be honest with you. The Post we were at, it wasn’t as big as Greenup. Twice a month, we’d have a mandatory, it wasn’t exercise, but you had to go out and either play football or do some kind of sports or something. He played football with us. Yeah, he was really nice. I talked to him several times, then one day, I took some pictures with him. We had an Open House for the Germans over there in that little town, and he was very popular then. [He was] a big man, but he never did do anything but his regular job. He never sang any. He never performed any. He was in the Tank Battalion, and the Tank Battalion and Armored Infantry Battalion were on the same Post, and we worked side by side with them. He was just a country boy that made it good, and got rich. 

I was in the Armored Infantry Battalion. It’s a lot like the regular infantry, but the difference is you traveled in the Armored Personnel Carriers, and you fought alongside tanks. I was in from ’58 to ‘61. Vietnam was already started when I got out, but see Vietnam was never declared a war, and therefore they couldn’t keep you after the date that you were supposed to be discharged. I was still in the active reserve for three years after I got out. Had it been declared a war, I would have been in Vietnam. I was just blessed, I guess, I didn’t have to go. A lot of others lost their lives; a lot from around here. 

After I left the Army, I came back here again. I went to vocational school, and then that’s when I moved to Illinois. It was hard to get a job around here then, [but] I got a good job working up there. When you’re young and you have to start a new way of life, you can adapt a lot easier than you can when you’ve lived a long time. I just adapted pretty well. 

My first wife and I had just got married when we moved up there. There were plenty of jobs to get up there. We finally we bought a house, and she got cancer of the uterus. She had to take treatments, and at that time they used experimental drugs on her. It was very hard on her, but she made it through it.

She always wanted to come back home to Kentucky. I promised her when she got well with cancer, we’d come back. She got a five-year clear physical that it was gone, so we decided to come back. 

Her father lived just about five hundred yards from where I live now. He had a farm, and he always told all his kids that they could have a piece of property to build their house on, but he didn’t want them to build it and sell it. He wanted them to stay on it, if they built it. 

She’d lived here all her life, and that’s where she was raised, out there on the farm. Before we moved back, we had two girls and she wanted our kids to be around their grandparents. We built a house there, and I’ve been there forty-three years. I’m glad we did, because they got to be around their grandparents, know my parents, and her parents, and I’ve never regretted that. But had she not got sick, and I had not made that promise, I was satisfied [and] I could have stayed right there [in Illinois]. I’m glad I didn’t now. 

My first wife got cancer again and she died in 1990. I remarried about two years later.

The first time I become a pastor, it was 1986. I was preaching at different places before then, but I was called as pastor in Little Sandy in 1986. I just yielded to the call and I went to school up at Southland Bible Institute. I preached at several different places. This church out there, where I’m at now…well, I’m not the pastor now, but it’s where I pastored. Their pastor left, and they called me, and it just so happened, it’s about two hundred and fifty yards from my house. 

The hardest part [of being a pastor] is dealing with someone who’s dissatisfied, or problems in the church, and you can’t solve them. Of course, it’s always hard to lose someone through death. I’ve had so many funerals in this town, in the last twenty-five years. 

There’s a little boy that lived out there by me. This has only been maybe ten, ten years ago, and his parents really didn’t care for him and he was just left to run up and down the road. We used to get him to go to Bible School [and] he’d come to Sunday school some. He went with a group over to the river and went swimming, and he wasn’t that great of a swimmer. He got out about halfway and couldn’t make it back, and he drowned. I had to have his funeral. It was really sad, because I knew him. He used to come to my house all the time. He’d always have to have his tire aired up on his bicycle, and he finally got him a little dirt bike, but he’d awful conveniently run out of gas in front of my house. I really, I still miss him. 

Anybody that lives here in this area, whether they admit it or not, are hillbillies, because that’s all we got are hills. [The media is] trying to make us less than someone in the larger cities and other parts of the country. To me, we got a better relationship and better culture than you see in New York City. You don’t seen homeless people on the street here. You don’t see drunks walking up and down the street. There is a drug problem around now, but that’s come from out of this area. Our culture, it’s different, and it’s not that we’re uneducated. A lot of people in this town are very educated. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say there are a lot of millionaires in this town. [The media] try to downplay us, and try to make us look like hicks that don’t have any education.

I would like for [people] to remember me for the ministry, dealing with people in church and kids. I love kids, and we used to have a big ministry of teenagers when I went to Flatwoods Church. We have a lot of kids at our church today, too. If you don’t have kids growing up and getting the right teaching, and going and learning about the Lord while they’re young, they just drift away.”

Kim Johnston

“I feel a kinship here. I love to visit other places and see the landscape differences and all the different things, but this is home. This is where I like the seasons, and the people. It’s just peacefulness, especially if you’ve been in some of the very flat places, like in Florida or up north. Like I said, it’s nice to see and experience different places, but this is just peace and home.”

Kim Johnston, Nurse, Civil War Re-Enactor; Riner, Virginia: 

“Riner, Virginia, is about halfway between Christiansburg and Floyd. We’re a wide spot in the road, but we’re growing. I grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia [and] in the surrounding area there’s plenty mountains.

[As a child] I had fake tea parties with rocks and leaves, and rode my bike, and mostly it was outside things. Back then, thankfully, we didn’t have a lot of TV, and so we were out and about, and running and playing. 

My grandmother on my father’s side passed away when I was about seven, so I don’t have a lot of memory of her. His father was already passed away before I was born. My mother’s father passed away when I was a month old, so I don’t remember him. But my grandmother that lived here in West Virginia, she was a very quiet lady. We would go spend holidays and weekends, and different times with her. 

She was the one that would can over three hundred cans of food in the winter, to make sure they could eat. She would make clothing out of feed sacks and crochet. I have items that she crocheted at home that she made me. She was a wonderful cook. I have her wood stove at my house that she cooked on, because I remember when she still used the wood stove. [She] didn’t have a bathroom in the house, but we still had an outhouse to go to

I don’t know that I thought about it as much when I grew up, [but] as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate my roots, and my history. My family has been in the Blacksburg area since the 1700’s. One of my relatives, I can’t remember how many greats back; his will was the first one recorded in Montgomery County. I’ve done a lot of genealogical research in the last year, and I have started to appreciate more of the handcrafts, the roots. I have coal mining family from this area, too. I appreciate how hard they worked, growing gardens and canning, making their clothing, and all that. That’s some of the things that I’ve tried to learn how to do myself; I can, and I sew and different things to carry that tradition along.

I first went to Virginia Tech for two years, and then transferred to Radford to get my Nursing Degree, and I’ve worked as a nurse since then. I worked in a hospital for twenty-eight years. There’s tons of nursing stories; anything from people crawling out of bed, to supposedly the ghost of where the hospital was built on. Some of them were heartwarming stories of the wedding we threw at the hospital that was put together in six hours so a lady who was terminally could be part of her daughter’s wedding, or the concert we threw for a terminally ill patients who loved to play music, so he could have friends in and have a jam. 

I’m still in nursing, [but I] went to work in April for a school system, working with Middle School kids. I love it, just the kids that come in that we get to care for them, because they sometimes don’t get that at home. Also, I get to share a little bit of history, because I have some of the historical stuff in my office and I tell them I’m a re-enactor. 

[Those who perpetuate the Appalachian stereotype] are people that probably have not visited Appalachian people, and don’t always understand the way of life [and] they probably don’t have an appreciation for things that are handmade, or homemade, and making your own way. 

Part of [the culture] is the ‘use what you have’ and the ‘make do with what you have’ spirit. Being self-sufficient. There’s a determination in the Appalachian people because, through history, so many of them had to overcome so many obstacles just to survive. 

I would like to think I am somewhat of [a hillbilly]. This summer we made wattle fences for around where we planted our garden, and I made trellises out of sticks in the yard so I didn’t have to go buy something else. It’s a pride in your roots and background. Where you came from.

I feel a kinship here. I love to visit other places and see the landscape differences and all the different things, but this is home. This is where I like the seasons, and the people. It’s just peacefulness, especially if you’ve been in some of the very flat places, like in Florida or up north. Like I said, it’s nice to see and experience different places, but this is just peace and home.

When I got married, and of course, the birth of my children and some of the adventures I’ve had with my camera, I think are [some of my happiest times]. [But] one of the most fulfilling times was finding my re-enactment group. They’re like an adopted family.

I do photography on the side and I’ve always loved history, so a friend of mine who dresses as a solider, said, ‘Come take pictures of me at the re-enactment.’ I went with her, took pictures, and started making some friends, and then I ended up meeting Debbie by accident, and volunteered to man the artifact table at Cloyd’s Mountain, the 150th. 

I was there for school kids’ days, and one of the little boys that went by, there were some things that they could pick up and touch. He had freckles and blue eyes, and he said, ‘I got to touch it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you got to touch history. To me, that’s what it’s all about. 

I travel with Debbie, who has ‘Traveling Tara.’ We have a home that’s like the 1860’s, a Civil War house, and we explain about life in the Civil War on the home front. We’re in a bigger group, called ‘Ladies’ Victorian.’ I have also started doing a studio where I educate about women that were running photography studios during the time period. 

As early as 1850, there are women advertising themselves as daguerreotypists, and they would work with the men, and some of the aspects of the industry they would do was as the colorist for pictures, because any picture you see that has coloring on it, it was all by hand. Some of the women who were more proficient at that could make up to $25 a month, which was a very high salary for anyone, especially women. 

You also had women who a receptionist in a photography studio. The women would help pose and all that, because social rules were different then as to who would be able to adjust someone’s clothing versus who wouldn’t. [Women] would help put together daguerreotype boxes. If they had worked together with their husband, or their father, or whoever, and something happened to them, they would take over the studio. 

1850 is the earliest female photographer I have seen. The photography industry really started in the late 1830’s when Jacques Daguerre took his daguerreotype, and then it became an immediate hit in the U.S. There’s articles that say there were as many as fifty studios in New York City alone, [nearly] one on every corner. They would have articles on what to wear for your sitting, how to fix your hair, and all this kind of thing. I collect antique photos, and have some of that information. I collect books about photography I bring with me so that people can get an idea, and look at it. And they’ll say, ‘Oh! I have a picture like that at home!’

[Also in our group] we have a seamstress and a laundress, who also portray Sally Tompkins, a nurse. We have another lady who portrays a local woman from Pulaski County, Virginia, who dressed as a soldier and went in and fought the battles.

If you can get someone engaged in the history, hopefully that can get them interested in something that has a promise of a different way of life. 

Right out of high school, I had a very inexpensive, small 35mm camera. I went to college, and the first thing I bought out of college was a Minolta film camera. I would take pictures with that, and everyone would tell me I had a good eye. And then, I took pictures of my children as they grew up and didn’t get as involved [in photography] until they became a little bit older. 

My youngest is eighteen now, almost nineteen, so now I can develop my own interests. I joined a photography club [and] we’ve done all kinds of crazy things. Went out in the middle of the night to the waterfalls, took star pictures, and came up here to Hinton to Sandstone Falls in the middle of the night, when it’s freezing cold. I’ve learned to do a lot by hanging out with those guys. I’ve taken a picture of everything, from people, to animals, to landscape, to nature, but some of my favorites are landscape and nature. 

One thing I have to say with my photography is I have met so many neat people through it. You take their picture, and if they find it on Facebook, or they see you in person…I’ve met so many people through the camera that I probably would never have talked to.

[I hope people remember] that I made them smile. That’s important. If you can make somebody smile, you’ve added to their day.”

Debbie Adams

“We’ve had people ask, how could you have your son arrested? We’ve been the ones to get warrants on him before, and sent him to prison. You’ll do anything you have to, to save your child’s life. I’d much rather go visit him in prison, as him be dead. People are going to judge you no matter what you do in life. It doesn’t matter.” 

Debbie Adams, Former Lab Technician, Disabled, Letcher County Farmer’s Market; Jeremiah, Kentucky: 

“I grew up on Blair Branch, right up in the holler. When my children were younger and they disagreed with what I said or whatever, they’d go ‘Oh, mom you don’t know nothin’. You was born and raised up in the head of a holler!’

Being raised in a holler and being poor, you made do with what you had. My younger sisters and me would get out and we’d hit the hills! I’m sure they’re probably laurel trees or laurel bushes, but we called them monkey trees. There was a bunch up on the hill beside where I was raised, and we would go up there and climb all over those trees and just have a good time.

We played in the creek a lot…stuff that I would not want my grandkids to do now! I remember we would go in the creek and we’d catch crawdads. I remember making little graves up and getting flowers and weeds and putting on them, and making dirt patties and stuff like that. Even after dark we were just all over those mountains playing hide and seek. [We also played] hopscotch and jump rope and stuff you don’t see kids do today. I was probably ten, twelve years old before I got my first bicycle to ride, and it wasn’t my bicycle! I was riding a brother or probably a sister’s. Now I look back, and it was a more peaceful time. 

I came from a family of fourteen. There were twelve of us that made it to adulthood. We were poor. By the time that I was old enough to realize it, my dad was not physically able to work. He was a coal miner and he worked a little bit on some Happy Pappy program. It didn’t make a lot of money for the number of children that he had. He had emphysema from smoking, and the black lung from the coal mining. Before he died, he only had a fourth of a lung that he was breathing on. He always had breathing difficulties as far back as I can remember. 

He was an old man when he married my mother. He was drafted Into WWII at thirty-seven, I remember them talking about it. I was one of the younger sets of children. I was probably twelve or thirteen when he finally got his settlement for black lung. It was only like ten or twelve thousand dollars that he got, but that was a lot of money for us back then. I remember he asked each one of us kids what we wanted. There was a little store out there in Isom called the Cow Shed. It was just a gift shop and had some clothes and stuff, but they had this big ol’ purple bear. It was purple and white, and I always loved the color purple and I remember telling him that’s what I wanted. They got it for me and that just meant so much as a child, getting that. I’ve still got that bear.

He always had health issues when I was growing up. When he was able, like on Easter Sunday, we would walk from our house at the foot of the hill and walk back on the mountain. We owned forty-two acres, hillside property most of it. We would walk up the hill and take whatever we had to eat and enjoy. That was probably one of my fondest memories of my Daddy. Kind of like a picnic. We had what we called a little pond, basically it’s a little mud hole that was on a strip job, but we’d go back there and we thought we was swimming

The older I got, the less Dad could do because he was so weak and he’d have to stop a lot and everything like that. I lost him in 1980. He was a veteran of WWII. He’d been wounded two or three different times. He got a purple heart and he got three bronze stars. He didn’t like for us to even watch war movies or anything like that. I guess it must’ve been really traumatic for him. I was very interested in the family tree and stories and I wish we’d had the technology that we have now so I could have those stories! 

I have two sisters who are alive that are younger than me. One of the sisters was a twin, and when they were born, my mother always told me that both of them were very sick and feeble. They always thought the little girl, my sister Maggie, wasn’t going make it. My mother always said that she had a high fever and they thought it burnt up her brain cells so she has a lot of problems, learning disabilities. But then, my mother told me that when the twins were a month old, she was exhausted and she took the little boy to bed with her. That morning, when she woke up he was laying on her arm, but he had passed and was cold

I’m fourth up from the bottom. We were blessed that there was twelve of us lived to be adults. As far as siblings, we didn’t lose any of them until 2009 when my oldest sister died with cancer. In August 2010, another sister died of cancer. And then my brother Den, he died in November 2013 with cancer. In my family, it’s not if you’re going to get cancer, it’s when you’re going to get cancer. To say the least, I keep my cancer policy up to date. 

My mom was a homemaker. She canned, she cooked; I always said she could take nothing and make a meal out of it. I realize now how she did that, with the canned foods and stuff she had on hand. If we had company come up she’d just go in there and cook something or other. It might be green beans and corn bread or whatever; we might not have had meat at every meal. But she would always make a meal out of whatever she had. We was raised on soup beans and taters, stuff out the garden. I have to say, I did not want to be in the garden. That was not what I wanted to do when I was younger. I wish my sister could see me now. The summer before she passed, we let her use some of our land and she raised a big garden, a huge garden. I went over and helped her because I knew she wasn’t able to do a whole lot. She goes, ‘I know you don’t like being out here.’ I said, ‘no, that’s all right, I’ll help you.’ She would be impressed with what I’m doing now. And my family would be impressed because I never pretended to be a farmer or anything like that. 

My grandmother would come in from Ohio and tell us these booger tales. You wanted to hear the booger tales, but then you were scared to death to go to sleep at night. My older brother who passed away in 2013, he was the one that begin our family reunion. We have a large family reunion the first weekend of August each year and there’s been as many as 400-500 people come. He was instrumental in organizing that, but he would share a lot of the stories of our grandparents that I never knew. 

One of my favorite stories was he said that my grandfather used to go over to Stonega, Virginia and get supplies for everybody in the holler One person in the community would go get these basics that you couldn’t ordinarily get or grow. One time, he went over there and he took the lady that he had caring for his wife. His wife was pregnant, and she must have been having a lot of health problems. So, he (my grandfather) took the lady with him that was caregiver to his wife. Well, they never came back! After the first wife died, my grandmother and my grandfather got married and they were farmers down there in North Carolina. They had one child that passed while they was down there. They came back up here and made their life here on Blair Branch. They had inherited land off his father and his great-grandfather. They said that Grandpa, after they came back up here, would do moonshine. The way they’d keep it hid is Grandpa would be on this side of the holler doing the moonshine, and my grandmother would draw attention away by burning the fields off over here on the left side. 

When I originally started school, I went to a little two-room school. I have more vivid memories of that probably than my older years! I loved the two-room school. They had a great old big partition type door that they separated the classrooms with. At Christmas, and different things everybody would be in one big classroom. They were four of us that started first grade. Two of us are friends and we get together every few, even after all these years. In that classroom you had the first grade up to the fifth grade. Then in the other classroom you had sixth, seventh and eighth. Hassie Breeding was my teacher and I know I just loved that lady to death. She was such a great storyteller. In life, when we got older, every time she would see me she would remind me I had terrible nosebleeds when I was in first grade. She would bring this bag of rags and put underneath my desk, and I learned that if my nose started bleeding to get those rags out and wipe it. 

Hassie and her and her husband, B.G. had gone to Hawaii or somewhere. She brought this little stuffed alligator and she said it was alive and that meant a lot to me because I thought that thing was alive at some point! I really enjoyed Hassie as a teacher. 

I went to Letcher High School. I enjoyed it. I didn’t try as much as I should have; I was more interested in goofing off. I was really shy. I wish I had tried harder, but I didn’t. I started working probably when I was about twelve or thirteen babysitting for a handicapped child. I enjoyed it; it’s a good memory. There was a program called the NYP, the Neighborhood Youth program. And of course we were a poor family so I was eligible to work on that program. I worked on it for years, like cleaning the school or working in the cafeteria at school. 

Of course, when the hormones kicked in there I met my soon-to-be husband. We’ve been married forty years in August. Mostly, I was focusing on that instead of my education. But then I did go back to school after I had my kids. They were probably in middle school when I went back to college and became a medical lab technician. I had two kids. I had a boy and a girl. 

I’m disabled, so I just sell for my husband at the farmers’ market. I worked for years as a medical lab technician for Mountain Comprehensive Health. 

My husband worked in the mines 37½ years before he got laid off. From the time he was eighteen, he had worked in the mines up to June the 9th of 2013. ‘Course he got six months unemployment and that was over with. He’s only 58 year old right now so he’s too young to retire. He wasn’t in union mines or anything like that. Only thing he’s got to look forward to is getting social security, but we’re just spending the kids inheritance. (Laughs) That’s what you do when you don’t have anything else. He bought a tractor in January, so people hire him to bush hog their ground and he got the loader part on his so he can move dirt and different things like that. 

We had the land [and] his family had always raised vegetables and things. We just decided in the beginning just to raise enough to supplement us, to help our income out. We enjoyed it and were really amazed. I just posted some pictures on Facebook, next thing I know people wanted to buy the beans and the corn and everything I had! So I became a part of Grow Appalachia this spring and oh God, this is such a wonderful community. I feel like they’re family. They are wonderful people. It’s just been a blessing. I’m so grateful to be part of it. 

I don’t see coal coming back at all. I really don’t. That’s the reason I try to encourage younger people to start farming. I feel like the future of Letcher County lays in tourism or agriculture. There’s hope that we’re going to get a commercial kitchen up here in Letcher County. It would be a blessing. We’re hoping to do a commercial kitchen where you can come up here and can your vegetables. Of course, there’d be demonstration kitchens for 4-H or different clubs that want to come up and can. 

I’ve had my micro-processing class and I’m hoping to get my recipes submitted to the state pretty soon for some of the things I can so I can sell it. The things I’m going to submit right now are a spaghetti sauce and a chow-chow and pickled beets. I’m working on getting me a good canned vegetable soup. I’ve canned some this summer and I like it! Hopefully I can get them all submitted and get them on the market pretty soon. I’m a decent cook, I don’t say I’m really a good cook. I can cook though! Do I look like I’m going to starve, honey? 

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through is my son’s addiction. My son is a drug addict. It was traumatizing for me at first. By the time he was eighteen years old he was a barber, living in Lexington making $750 a week. The next thing you know, he was a drug addict, living back here in Letcher County and can’t find a job for nothing. It was traumatizing. That’s been a struggle for the last ten or twelve years. To be honest, I don’t know how I was able to work while I was going through the rough part of it. But I had great co-workers and understanding friends. Yeah, I would say that’s been the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with in life, other than losing your parents and your siblings. You just have to pray about things and go on a lot. 

I’ll be honest; I’ve dealt with depression. When I first started dealing with it I was in shock because nobody in my family had ever been an alcoholic or a drug addict or anything like that. One of the ladies he worked with as a barber in Lexington had messed her back up and gone to the doctor. They gave her oxycodone and apparently she must not have needed it that much because she was telling these other two guys how great it made her feel. To me, it wouldn’t have made you feel that great if you really needed it, it might have comforted you. Next thing you know, they were using it too. 

We just deal with it one day at a time. He’s been in and out of prison; he’s been in and out of rehab. All because of drugs. He had so much potential. That’s going to be something we deal with for the rest of our lives. We’re just grateful for every day he’s alive. 

We’ve had people ask, how could you have your son arrested? We’ve been the ones to get warrants on him before, and sent him to prison. You’ll do anything you have to, to save your child’s life. I’d much rather go visit him in prison, as him be dead. People are going to judge you no matter what you do in life. It doesn’t matter. 

[Happiest times] I don’t know why you have to have kids to have grand kids! I love my kids dearly and I’d give my life for either one of them, but them grandkids, there’s just something about them! My grandchildren are so precious. I got two granddaughters that are eleven years old; they were born two months apart. And then I’ve got a little five year old granddaughter. My daughter has two children and my son has one. All girls! They have just stolen our hearts. They’re a blessing. They sure are. 

I’m very proud to say I’m a hillbilly. I think everybody around here really cares about each other and I know if I needed help with something, somebody would be there for me. I’m not sure you got that in these larger cities and towns. There’s a closeness in the mountains, and I’m glad to say I’m part of it. We’re a proud people. I know we get insulted a lot, and I don’t care if it’s in Letcher county or if it’s California, you’re going to have people that don’t want to work or don’t want a better quality of life. But I don’t think most people are looking for a hand-out, maybe a hand up. 

I hope people realize that I will help a person if they need help. I try not to bother nobody, don’t want nobody bothering me. I try to live a private life. I love to be social and everything like that. I feel like I’ve got a lot of friends and family and I hope they remember me as a nice person.”