Good Morning!

The World Series is about to begin. It’s a uniquely American tradition that once rivaled leaf-looking as the most popular autumn activity.

This week we look back on those days in a column that first appeared in KentuckySportsStyle Magazine, published by my friend Jamie Vaught, who has been covering the Wildcats for decades now. It’s well worth checking out.

It’s Fall Ya’all! Have a wonderful week.

- Wayne K.

There was a time when the World Series could interfere with your education.

I consider that one of baseball’s better traditions.

When I was a boy, we had a little black-and-white television that picked up three channels on a good day. They came floating over the mountains from Knoxville, Tennessee, courtesy of an antenna on the roof and whatever arrangement the Lord had worked out with the weather.

If the wind was right, you got baseball.

If it wasn’t, you got snow.

Not the kind you sledded in. The kind that covered the television screen while somebody twisted the dial and somebody else hollered, “Right there! Don’t move it!”

Television reception was a family project.

The World Series was different then, too. A lot of it happened in daylight.

That part is not nostalgia playing tricks on me. For years, October baseball really was afternoon baseball.

Which was fine unless you were 10 years old and somebody had decided you needed to be in school.

There you sat learning fractions while the World Series was being played somewhere.

This seemed deeply unreasonable.

Fortunately, mankind had invented the transistor radio.

A transistor radio was one of the greatest pieces of technology ever handed to a boy. Small enough to hide. Cheap enough to own. Powerful enough to bring the World Series into a classroom if you could find the station and keep the volume low.

You might have an earphone wire running up through your shirt.

You might keep the radio tucked in your desk.

You might suddenly become very interested in resting your head on one hand while listening through the other.

Teachers probably knew.

Some probably didn’t care.

Some may have been listening themselves.

That was part of the magic.

You didn’t simply watch the World Series.

You found it.

You hunted for the station. Adjusted the antenna. Listened through static. Asked somebody in the hallway, “What’s the score?”

Then you hurried home hoping the game was still on.

Today we carry televisions in our pockets that can show us almost any sporting event anywhere in the world.

That is progress.

I am not convinced it is always improvement.

There was something about baseball coming through a little speaker, the announcer describing everything you couldn’t see, that made the picture in your head better than anything television could provide.

You could see the ballpark.

You could see the pitcher staring in.

You could see the runner taking his lead.

And you knew it mattered because this wasn’t just another baseball game.

This was the World Series.

The names became permanent.

Koufax.

Clemente.

Bench.

Gibson.

Rose.

And Reggie Jackson.

Mr. October.

Three home runs in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. Three swings that helped turn a very good ballplayer into a piece of baseball mythology.

That is the sort of thing a boy files away and keeps for life.

Hollywood understood the importance of October baseball, too.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy wants to watch the World Series. Nurse Ratched refuses to change the schedule.

This does not improve their relationship.

So McMurphy sits in front of a blank television and starts calling an imaginary game himself, shouting and cheering until the other patients join in.

I have always considered that one of the most accurate statements about the World Series ever put on film.

You do not come between a man and October baseball.

Nothing good can come from it.

Eventually baseball moved the World Series into prime time. More people could watch. Nobody had to sneak a radio into school. Nobody had to race home hoping to catch the last three innings.

It made perfect sense.

And we lost something.

Nobody stands beside the television antenna anymore shouting, “Back a little! BACK A LITTLE!”

Nobody listens through static while pretending to study.

Nobody has to imagine the green grass, the dirt around second base or the pitcher looking in for the sign.

We can see everything now.

Maybe that is why I remember so clearly the days when we couldn’t.

Every October, when the World Series comes around, I think about that little black-and-white television and those three channels drifting over the mountains from Knoxville.

And I think about a boy with a transistor radio, trying to hear a baseball game when he was supposed to be doing something else.

Some things were worth getting in trouble for.

The World Series was one of them.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

The Fort That Wouldn't Stay Put

On the morning of October 18, 1859, U.S. Marines knocked down the door of a small brick fire engine house in Harpers Ferry. John Brown's raid was over.

It had cost lives. The first was Hayward Shepherd, a free Black baggage handler for the B&O Railroad. He was shot on the bridge while trying to find out what the commotion was.

Brown hanged that December. The building didn't.

It went up in 1848 as the armory's fire engine and guard house. The Civil War took the armory. The engine house was the only thing left standing.

People started calling it John Brown's Fort. In the early 1890s somebody bought it, took it apart brick by brick and shipped it to Chicago to stand near the World's Columbian Exposition.

When the fair closed, it was headed for the wrecking crew. A Washington newspaperwoman named Kate Field raised the money to send it home.

It sat on a farm outside town for about ten years. In 1909, Storer College, founded for Black students after the war, bought it and moved it. It became a stop for John Brown Day pilgrims, who marched around it single file.

In 1968 the Park Service moved it a fourth time, to within a stone's throw of where it started.

One account says the crew that rebuilt it worked from a photographic negative. So it came back as a mirror image of itself.

Most of us can't get a recliner out of a house without an argument. This building went to Chicago and back.

Also This Week

•     Oct. 21, 1861: Camp Wildcat. Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer pushed up the Wilderness Road into Laurel County and ran into Union men dug in on Wildcat Mountain. He was forced back into Tennessee. Union reinforcements marched in from Big Hill, near what's now Berea. You can still see the trenches in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

•     Oct. 22, 1734: Daniel Boone is born. By the old calendar, anyway. The switch to the new one bumped his birthday to November 2. Boone stuck with October.

•     Oct. 22, 1977: New River Gorge Bridge. About 30,000 people turned out for the dedication. The span sits 876 feet above the river. It cut a 40-minute drive down and back up the gorge to under a minute, and held the world record for longest steel arch until 2003.

•     Oct. 23, 1890: George Alley. The C&O's Fast Flying Virginian hit a rockslide outside Hinton. Engineer Alley, 30, died trying to stop her. A ballad followed, “The Wreck on the C&O,” credited to an unnamed Black engine wiper at the Hinton roundhouse. The Carter Family, Flatt and Scruggs and Doc Watson all recorded it. The song gives Alley golden curls. Photographs show straight, dark hair.

•     Oct. 24, 1861: The vote. Voters in 39 counties approved a new state, 18,408 to 781. Only about 37 percent of eligible voters turned out, and Union troops stood at many polls. The ballot said Kanawha. When delegates picked a name that winter, West Virginia beat Kanawha 30 to 9.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Drive east out of Cincinnati until the strip malls give up.

Keep going.

The hills start showing up. Then the creeks. Then the Ohio River slides into view, and you're in Clermont County, where Ohio's Appalachian country begins. Thirty-two counties wrap around the southern and eastern edges of the state from here to Ashtabula on Lake Erie. This is where the line starts.

Yes, a Kentucky man is writing about Ohio. Stay with me.

Clermont was carved out in December 1800, a few years before Ohio was even a state. The name is French for "clear hills." Somebody was feeling generous.

The county seat couldn't sit still. Williamsburg first, a village founded in 1796. Then New Richmond. Then Batavia in 1824, which finally got to keep it.

Before any of that, there was a fight on the East Fork of the Little Miami River.

April 10, 1792. Pioneer Simon Kenton against Tecumseh, at a place called Grassy Run. It was the biggest frontier battle in the county's history. A Wyandot village stood at the mouth of that creek until 1811.

Nobody put up a Waffle House there. They should have.

The most famous baby ever born in Clermont County arrived April 27, 1822, in a one-story cottage in Point Pleasant, on the river.

His parents paid two dollars a month in rent. His father ran the tannery across the road. They named him Hiram Ulysses.

You know him as Grant.

The family left for Georgetown before he turned one. He later covered his Clermont County beginnings in two short sentences in his memoirs. That's it. That's the whole hometown tribute.

The cottage did better. After he died it went on tour. By 1896 it was sitting under a glass house at the Ohio State Fair in Columbus. In 1936 they took it apart and hauled it home to Point Pleasant. The spring after that, the Ohio River flooded it.

A two-dollar rental that toured the country. Not bad.

Now go down to US 52, along the river, and find a wide spot in the road called Utopia.

Yes, really. Utopia, Ohio.

In 1844 a group of Cincinnatians who followed the French thinker Charles Fourier started a commune called the Clermont Phalanx. The idea was to live together, work together, share everything, and usher in an age of peace.

Debts piled up. Neighbors sued each other. The river wrecked the crops. By 1846 it was over.

Next came a group of spiritualists led by John Otis Wattles, who bought the land in 1847. They took the big brick hall and moved it to the edge of the river, brick by brick. Locals told them not to.

On the night of December 13, 1847, the Ohio rose. People crowded into the hall for shelter. The river took the south wall and carried people off with it. Many did not survive.

Two tries at a perfect society on one stretch of riverbank, and the river had the last word. Fewer than a hundred people live in Utopia today. When the water runs low, you can still see the old foundation.

Back inland, the village of Moscow is home to a couple hundred people and one very strange piece of American history.

In 1969 three utility companies announced a $395 million nuclear power plant there. They named it for William H. Zimmer, the president of Cincinnati Gas and Electric. Costs ballooned to something like nine times the original promise. In 1981 the project was fined $200,000 over a breakdown in safety and quality controls.

In January 1984, with the plant around 97 percent built, they gave up on nuclear and decided to burn coal instead. It was the first time anybody in this country had converted a nuclear project into something else.

The bill came to about $3.3 billion. The coal plant started up in 1991.

It closed for good on May 31, 2022.

I never heard of a single glow-in-the-dark wasp at a Clermont County cookout. Credit where it's due.

More than 200,000 people live in Clermont County now. Plenty of them are closer to Cincinnati traffic than to a creek bottom. But the old county is still down there, along the river and back in the hollows.

Go to New Richmond. The riverfront was once an abolitionist stronghold, and the park there is part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

Then walk up to Front Street and eat at the Green Kayak Grille & Pub. It's a family-owned place that describes itself as housed in an 1860s riverside building. Sit where the river can see you.

Come see your neighbors.

THE SKY ABOVE

First quarter moon today. Half a moon, high in the south at dusk. A porch light with one bulb burned out.

The Orionid meteors peak the night of the 21st into the 22nd. The moon will be about 80 percent full and won't set until nearly 4 a.m. It will drown most of them. Set the alarm if you're stubborn. Otherwise sleep.

Before sunrise, look east. Jupiter rides high, brighter than any star up there. Mars sits above it and to the right, redder and dimmer, about a fist away this week. Mars gains on Jupiter every morning. They pass each other November 16.

Saturn is low in the east after dark and stays up all night. Steady, no twinkle. Stars twinkle. Planets just stand there.

Venus, the evening star since spring, is already gone. It slips between us and the sun right around midnight Friday night. It comes back in the morning sky in November.

Sunrise today is 7:48 a.m. and sunset is 6:55 p.m. By Saturday it's 7:54 and 6:47. A little over two minutes of daylight gone every day.

THE GROUND BELOW

Frost is due. The National Weather Service in Jackson puts the median first frost for most eastern Kentucky stations somewhere between October 9 and 21. Lexington's average first freeze lands around the 28th.

If you're still babying tomatoes, you're borrowing time.

Frost does one nice thing. Collards, turnip greens and mustard taste sweeter after it. Cold turns the starch in the leaf into sugar. The more frost they take, the better the pot.

Beattyville's Woolly Worm Festival is the last full weekend of the month. The woolly worm has 13 segments, one for each week of winter. Brown means a mild week. Black means a hard one. The festival has run every year since 1988.

Nobody has audited the worm.

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