Election Day is Tuesday, don’t forget to vote!

With all the current talk about voter fraud on the national level, this week my mind went back to the days of my youth, when vote buying was practically a sporting event in the mountains.

If you think recruiting a guy to get on a ballot who has the same name as your opponents is outrageous, you ain’t never lived through a Kentucky primary back in the good ol’ days.

Elsewhere, we have the second part of our series on Appalachian newspapers, The Wayne Train stops at Gilmer County, Ga. for some apple pickin’ and the sandhill cranes continue honking overhead as they head south for the winter.

Have a great week, and if you still have one of those old fashioned clocks that won’t set itself, don’t forget to move the hour hand back an hour sometime today.

- Wayne K.

The motto used to be dull.

"A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday." That's what the Whitesburg Mountain Eagle said about itself before 1957, when Tom and Pat Gish took it over. Somewhere along the way it became two words.

"It Screams."

The Gishes met in a Spanish class at the University of Kentucky. Pat was the journalism student. She talked Tom out of engineering. They took over the Eagle in Letcher County, coal country, a place where the company usually did the talking and the paper took notes.

They didn't take notes.

Pat went to a school board meeting and was told it was closed. Tom said the public's business ought to be done in public. The board never did offer her a chair, not even while she was expecting. She stood. She reported it. Their fight is credited with helping bring Kentucky its first open meetings law.

Then came the boycott.

Advertisers pulled out. Neighbors quit speaking. At one point the boycott shrank the Eagle to four tabloid pages. All five Gish kids worked the shop, and some of them slept on cardboard pallets in the mailroom. By sixteen, each one could put out a paper alone.

In 1969 Charles Kuralt asked Tom why he didn't just leave. Tom said leaving "would amount to a kind of surrender that I just can't do."

In August 1974 somebody firebombed the building.

The Eagle had been writing about police harassment of local kids. Tom had suggested in print that if the town wanted teenagers off the streets at night, it could dig a moat and put in a drawbridge. A Whitesburg police officer, Johnny Caudill, was convicted of arson in 1975. A man named Benny Bentley confessed to setting the fire. The judge on the bench owned coal mines and handed down a suspended sentence. Tom's editorial that week was headed "Open Season on The Eagle."

The next issue came out on time. The masthead read "It STILL Screams."

The same year, the Gishes won the Zenger Award for press freedom.

Years later Caudill ran a used car lot and bought ads in the Eagle. Bentley volunteered with the Whitesburg fire department. Ben Gish, who edits the paper now, and Caudill eventually nodded at each other in passing. That's how a small town does forgiveness. Nobody says the word.

Pat Gish did more than the masthead let on. She handled most of the reporting, editing, and business end of the paper. In 1968 she founded a federally funded housing group, the Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corporation. She rode a Greyhound bus to Louisville every weekend for two years to earn a master's degree. She raised five children through all of it. Tom said it plain: without Pat, the Eagle would have gone under long ago.

Pat was asked about all of it once. She said they were "just doing what we thought a newspaper was supposed to do."

Tom had a saying of his own. You never win permanent friends in this business.

He didn't act like he needed any.

He wrote the editorials last. He sat down at an IBM typewriter and pecked out whatever Letcher County needed to hear that week, liked or not.

Then he'd pull the page, hand it off, and somebody would fire the press up.

And the Eagle went back to screaming.

When I was growing up in Bell County, a vote could be worth five dollars or a half-pint of Kentucky whiskey.

The whiskey was what we called rot gut. Ancient Age and J.W. Dant were among the common brands. It was purchased by the case, and sent out along with five-dollar bills to people known as vote haulers.

A vote hauler’s job was to get people to the polls and bring them back. Some folks needed the ride. Others were happy to accept the ride, the whiskey or the money, and cast their vote. The buyer could only hope the ballot went the way he wanted. There was no receipt.

It sounds like a rough way to run an election. In the mountains, though, it was a gentler chapter in the story.

For generations, Election Day could be reunion, court day and powder keg all at once. Men came in from the hollows. Whiskey passed around. Guns came along, too. One account says drinking “typically accompanied voting” in Eastern Kentucky.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud got one of its bloody starts at the polls. In 1882, at Blackberry Creek in Pike County, Tolbert McCoy and his brothers attacked Ellison Hatfield, brother of Devil Anse. Ellison died. Hatfield men later tied McCoys to pawpaw trees and shot them. Even the romance between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy is said to have begun at an election gathering on that creek.

In Morehead, an Election Day fight helped set off the Rowan County War. In Breathitt County, a disputed election was followed by years of killings. On election night in 1909, armed partisans fired for hours in Jackson. A dynamite blast tore into a row of stores. Women fled across the Kentucky River. State troops stood in the square but reportedly had no ammunition. That does put a damper on crowd control.

In 1921, an argument at the Clayhole precinct over how Katie Sizemore intended to vote became a gunfight. Four men were killed, seventeen wounded, and ballot boxes ended up shot and thrown into Troublesome Creek. Apparently the creek was the original ballot shredder.

Coal-camp elections could be worse. The Associated Press reported 18 people killed on a Kentucky election day in 1933. Union organizer George Titler described company gunmen firing a machine gun at deputies carrying a ballot box. Four men died. The box reportedly held a Democratic majority of fifty votes. Titler also wrote of voter rolls that included dead men, mine mules, pit cars and family pets. At least the pets were probably loyal voters.

The violence eventually eased. Historian Bob Hutton offered a hard explanation: “You eventually run out of people you want to kill for the sake of power.”

I don’t remember Bell County elections as a battlefield. I remember the vote haulers, the half-pints, and the money changing hands in plain sight. Maybe that was progress. At least nobody had to throw the ballot box in a creek.

And I remember Charlie Asher.

Charlie was what we in the newspaper business called a perennial candidate.

Every four years, he ran for sheriff. Each time, he lost, and got fewer votes than the time before. He kept using a campaign picture that looked like it came from his high school yearbook, even as the years went by and he became a much older man.

After the fourth or fifth defeat, Charlie got fewer than a hundred votes in the county-wide race. The story goes that the next day he walked into the Hub Grill in Pineville with a .45 pistol strapped to his hip.

His buddies looked up, a little alarmed.

“Charlie, what are you doing with that gun?”

Charlie slowly replied, “A man that don’t have no more friends than I’ve got NEEDS a gun.”

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

Two rivers come down out of the north Georgia mountains and meet in the middle of Ellijay.

The Cartecay and the Ellijay. They come together in town and leave as one river, the Coosawattee, headed west.

The Cherokee had a big trading town there long before anybody drew a county line around it. Some say the name means "place of green things." Some say "many waters." Both sound about right to me.

Gilmer County got cut out of Cherokee land in 1832 and named for George Gilmer, the Georgia governor who later oversaw the final removal of the Cherokee from the state.

So the county wears the name of the man who saw its first people out the door.

I'm not here to preach about it. That's just what it says on the deed.

His name was Whitepath. He lived at a place called Turnip Town, a few miles from Ellijay. Back in 1827, when the Cherokee Nation was writing itself a constitution, Whitepath stood up against it. Go back to the old ways, he said.

He was an old man by the time the soldiers came.

He went anyway, helping his own people down a road none of them chose.

He made it as far as Kentucky.

In November of 1838, his detachment camped outside Hopkinsville, way out in the western end of my state. Whitepath died there.

The town cemetery wouldn't take him.

A farm family named Latham said bury him with ours. So they did. Another Cherokee leader, Fly Smith, was laid beside him.

The brush grew up over the fieldstones, and for better than a hundred years the graves were just about lost. In 1954 a man clearing his backyard found them.

There's a park there now, with bronze statues of the two men standing over the graves.

If you're ever out that way, stop. Take your hat off.

What saved this county was a piece of fruit.

Farmers here started out growing cotton. Cotton. In the mountains. Then the boll weevil came through in the 1920s and ate that plan alive, and folks went to planting apple trees.

Smartest thing they ever did.

These valleys turn out more than 600,000 bushels a year, more than any other county in Georgia. The Apple Festival's been running every October since 1971. So has the traffic.

In the early 1960s, a poet named James Dickey had a bad canoe accident on the Coosawattee. It stuck with him. Years later he wrote a novel about four city fellows paddling a wild Georgia river one last time before a new dam drowned it.

The book was Deliverance.

Hollywood shot the movie on the Chattooga. But the river Dickey had in his head ran through Gilmer County.

And the dam came for it, same as in the book. Carters Dam was finished in 1977, the tallest earthen dam east of the Mississippi. Most of the lake behind it sits in Gilmer County.

In the novel, the men wanted one more look at that river before the water closed over it.

In real life, the water closed over it.

When you get hungry, go to Poole's Bar-B-Q in East Ellijay.

Oscar and Edna Poole started it out of a roadside shack in 1989. Oscar favored a bright yellow suit and a red, white and blue top hat, and he wore them where people could see.

Behind the restaurant there's a hillside covered in painted plywood pigs. Thousands of them, every one with a customer's name on it. They call it the Pig Hill of Fame. It's exactly as silly as it sounds, and I mean that as high praise.

Oscar passed in 2020. When the family was ready to hang it up, somebody bought the place and kept the recipes. The coleslaw too.

Last I heard, the pigs were still up on that hill.

Two rivers meet in Ellijay and go on as one. A man from Turnip Town is buried in Kentucky. A poet's river is at the bottom of a lake. And come fall, there are apples on every road out of town.

Bring a sack.

Come see your neighbors.

THE SKY ABOVE

The clocks went back at 2 this morning. Enjoy the extra hour.

Sunrise today is 7:02 a.m. Sunset is 5:38 p.m. By Saturday it's 7:08 and 5:32. Supper is in the dark now.

The mornings are the show, and they start before the roosters do.

Monday, a half moon hangs above Mars and Jupiter. Tuesday, an hour before sunrise, look southeast. The moon has slid east past Regulus, the bright star of Leo, and thinned to a crescent. Jupiter is the bright one off to its upper right. Regulus sits between them. Mars is a little farther up and to the right of Jupiter, redder and dimmer.

Mars keeps closing on Jupiter. They're closest on the 16th.

Venus is back, this time as the morning star. After months in the evening sky it's low in the east-southeast before sunrise. You need a clear eastern horizon, so for once ridge people have the edge on hollow people.

Saturday morning, around 6, the thinnest sliver of moon, about 3 percent lit, parks beside Venus and Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. Binoculars will hold all three at once. They won't bunch up this tight again across North America until 2034.

Thursday night into Friday the Southern Taurids hit their main peak. Same slow, bright meteors I mentioned last month, five to ten an hour on a good night. A thin waning moon stays mostly out of the way.

THE GROUND BELOW

Listen for the cranes.

From late October into November, sandhill cranes come down out of the north, following river corridors like the Tennessee. You'll hear them before you see them. It's a rolling, rattling cry, and it carries about a mile. People stop in the yard and look up like somebody called their name.

Thousands spend the winter at the Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge in southeast Tennessee. Plenty more pass over Kentucky and keep going. If you hear it, go outside.

Somebody else is watching the thermometer.

The old sayings were cold enough to kill hogs, and cold enough to hang meat. Mountain families butchered once the weather turned cold enough to hold the meat while it cured, usually late November or early December. A warm spell in the middle of the job could spoil the whole thing.

Not yet. But the nights are headed that way.

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