Economic Anemia in Kentucky:
MORGAN, EDWARD P.
Economic Anemia in Kentucky By Edward ?. Morgan Manchester, Kentucky The sun doesn't shine bright enough on too many old Kentucky homes today. Like a longlingering London fog, the blight...
...You can kid yourself into a decline," the editorial continued, "by thinking persistently that you're losing your health, initiative, courage...
...Trapped in a narrow valley which nearby Goose Creek can easily flood and often devastatingly does, Manchester's less than 2,000 citizens depend for their livelihood on tobacco and coal...
...Edward P. Morgan reports nightly on the American Broadcasting network...
...In jackets and blazers men stand idly outside the Rexall Drugstore, their hands thrust deeply in overall pockets as if groping for the bottom, the end, of disappointment...
...That's more to the point...
...Coal is in the ground for more energy...
...Yes, they're interested in the legislation to relieve depressed areas pending in Washington but that's not the long-run answer...
...The clannishness remains, however...
...Clay County is non-union and Judge White reflects a still live if somewhat unbalanced bitterness when he says, "John L. Lewis priced coal out of the market and drove everybody to oil and gas...
...A recent editorial in the New York Daily News complained that the Kennedy Administration was dispensing "dangerous doom drivel" and declared "we're getting fed up with talk about how the nation's economy is going to hell in a bucket...
...Tobacco farmer Squire Sizemore's principal income is the $600-odd he grosses from his one-acre field...
...Business is terrible," testifies merchant Mary Muncy, "the worst February I've ever seen...
...The writer of that editorial should pay a visit to this mountain town, located 150 miles southeast of Louisville in Clay County, in order to test his psychology of inspiring people to think big and cheerfully...
...But returns on both, especially coal, have been sparse and Manchester shows the strain...
...Where Richmond Road runs into the Town Square there stands, as if on crutches and about to collapse from exhaustion, the weather-beaten Webb Hotel...
...Many Clay County folk draw federal food packages, and unemployment in eastern Kentucky is as high as 25 per cent of the work force...
...Out of a window over the Thurman and Muncy mercantile store stares a sign: "Used clothing for sale...
...How can Clay County's economy be developed...
...Reservoirs would dam floods and provide power...
...His face is aged more by care and worry than by years...
...Our mountain people, generally speaking, are proud people...
...A girl was in this morning and said her husband had three days work in the mines last week...
...We could use an annex," says Republican County Judge Charles H. White, staring out of a smudged window into a grey morning, tilting a long-holdered cigarette between his teeth...
...Call us underdeveloped," says Judge White...
...The County's population, 23,000 ten years ago, is down to 21,000 at present, although, the judge concedes, "if you started looking sharply up some of these hollows you'd count more children...
...Black, leafless trees prick the high ridges like hog bristles and on a knoll above the town stands the eloquently ugly, rectangular, WPA-built limestone courthouse...
...He is hopeful of progress...
...Many men have been out of jobs too long to benefit from Congressional action to extend jobless insurance payments...
...Clay County could also use flood control, reforestation and roads to invite industry and tourists, consolidated schools to replace the oneroom frame buildings with outside plumbing which now house Clay's entire educational system...
...Under the kinetic chairman of Kentucky's economic development commission, Lieutenant Governor Wilson Wyatt, bold plans are being broached to bring industry to the eastern counties but Wyatt argues that the problem of the whole Appalachian area is so serious that it needs special legislative attention from Washington adapted to the region...
...The judge's son John White is on the community development board and his cousin Joe B. White is Manchester's mayor...
...They'd rather have a job than a handout...
...On an unreliable wooden bench, naked of paint, outside the barbershop, slouches a bareheaded man in a battered blue overcoat...
...We've had to bar new credit accounts and cash sales are down 50 per cent over three years ago...
...In the interim, communities like Manchester resemble an old prizefighter trying a comeback, game but dazed with the sickly grey of age showing around the edges and confusion and uncertainty lurking in the eyes...
...The answer is not easy...
...Like a longlingering London fog, the blight of bad times hangs heavily over some 30 eastern counties in the Bluegrass state, posing a problem of relief and readjustment which is spreading over the whole Appalachian mountain region...
...This is clannish country, once of the violent Hatfield-McCoy variety, though the feuding has quieted now thanks in part to the pacifying' efforts of what a Baptist preacher calls his Almighty Institute...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 11
