Good morning!

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and so it does. The calendar shows 2026 is about over. We’re a little over six weeks from Christmas. My weather app is showing possible snow showers this week. We are working on the Thanksgiving menu as we speak.

Meanwhile, somewhere in my mind, I am still waiting for the Fourth of July parade to start and college football has just barely started.

This week, we remember the bravery of a Medal of Honor recipient from these Kentucky hills, recall when the highway ditch held a seemingly never-ending source of wealth and visit our Appalachian neighbors in Hawkins County, Tennessee.

Have a great week!

- Wayne K.

When Leonard Foster Mason climbed out of a gully on Guam in July 1944, he knew where the gunfire was coming from. Two Japanese machine guns, less than 15 yards away, had pinned down his Marine platoon.

He went after them alone.

Mason was 24, a coal miner’s son from Middlesboro, Kentucky. He was a husband and a father. What he did that day would earn him the Medal of Honor. He would not live to receive it.

Born in 1920, Mason grew up in a coal town cradled in a meteor crater near the meeting point of Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. The Great Depression made an already difficult life harder for families in the Appalachian coalfields.

His family eventually moved north to Lima, Ohio, where he went to work at Superior Body Works. In April 1943, he enlisted in the Marines.

After training at Parris Island, Mason became a Browning Automatic Rifleman. The BAR was a heavy weapon with considerable firepower, and the Marine carrying it had an important job when his unit came under attack.

By March 1944, Mason had been promoted to private first class. He served with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, and saw combat on Bougainville before joining the fight to retake Guam.

The Marines landed on Guam on July 21, 1944. The next day, Mason’s platoon was advancing through a narrow gully when two Japanese machine guns opened fire at close range.

Mason moved out of the gully and circled toward the enemy position on his own initiative. Rifle fire hit him again and again in the arm and shoulder, but he kept going. Just as he reached the guns, a burst of machine-gun fire caught him. That was the wound that would kill him.

He reached the position and opened fire with his BAR, killing five Japanese soldiers and wounding another. With the machine guns silenced, his platoon could advance.

Despite his wounds, Mason rejoined his fellow Marines before being evacuated. He died aboard the USS Elmore on July 23 and was buried at sea.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal later presented Mason’s Medal of Honor to his mother. His citation describes how he continued forward under fire despite repeated wounds, destroyed the enemy position and returned to his platoon.

It ends simply:

“He gallantly gave his life for his country.”

In 1946, the Navy launched the USS Leonard F. Mason, a destroyer that carried his name through service in the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam.

Recognition came closer to home, too. In 2013, Middlesboro named a section of its main street the Leonard F. Mason Medal of Honor Memorial Highway.

But for his family, there was still no grave to visit.

In 2017, veterans in Lima placed a Medal of Honor marker beside his parents’ graves. For his son, Larry Eugene Mason, the marker gave the family a place on land to remember a man buried far out at sea.

The Marine Corps Coordinating Council of Kentucky also remembers Mason among the state’s distinguished Marines, honoring him during his birthday month of February.

Those tributes matter. A ship’s name, a highway sign and a cemetery marker each offer someone a reason to stop and ask who Leonard Mason was.

The answer begins in Middlesboro and ends in a gully on Guam, with a young man who saw what was happening to the men beside him and acted.

We cannot know everything that went through his mind. The record tells us what he did. Wounded repeatedly, he kept moving toward the guns. After silencing them, he returned to his platoon.

He was a husband, a father, a son and a Marine.

And he was a young man from the Kentucky coalfields whose story deserves to be remembered.

Two Cents a Bottle

Back in the ’60s, folks driving U.S. 25E treated the side of the road like a trash can.

Finish a Pepsi. Roll the window down. Pitch it.

Nobody thought twice about it.

We young’uns thought about it plenty. To us, that ditch line was a bank. And the vault door was always open.

Every empty pop bottle was worth two cents at Mr. Whiteacre’s store down the road. Two cents doesn’t sound like much now. But back then there really was such a thing as penny candy, and two cents could ruin your supper.

We lived right beside the highway, so the supply never ran dry. Folks kept drinking. Folks kept throwing. We kept picking up.

Closest thing to a money tree I ever saw.

Mixed in with the Coke and RC bottles, we’d find half-pint whiskey bottles. A bunch of them. More than you’d think a church-going county could account for.

I didn’t know what to do with those until I found out about an old feller who lived up the hill from us.

He made a little moonshine.

Not a lot. Just a little. The way some men whittle.

And a moonshiner, it turns out, is always short on bottles. He’d pay a nickel, sometimes a dime, for every half-pint we hauled up there. Whiteacre’s paid two cents. I didn’t know what a market was, but I knew I’d found a good one.

I’d like to think he sterilized those bottles before he filled them back up. They were kinda dirty from lying in the ditch.

I’d like to think a lot of things.

Then there were the coal trucks.

Coal was booming, and the big Mack trucks came through loaded to the tip-top. The road past our house climbed over Log Mountain, and that grade would humble any engine built. Those Macks dropped down into bulldog gear and crawled. Some stretches, they weren’t much faster than a walk.

Some of the more enterprising boys I knew noticed that.

They’d trot up behind a truck, climb on the back and start chucking big blocks of coal off into the weeds. Then they’d hop down, let that Mack grunt on over the hill, and go back with a burlap sack to gather it up.

That was heat for the house and fire for the cookstove. Didn’t cost them a dime.

I’m not saying it was legal. I’m saying those houses stayed warm.

And there was the gumball machine. Drop in a penny and you might get the prize ball, the one that paid off a dollar or maybe five. I don’t remember which. I just remember feeding pennies into that thing like it owed me something.

I don’t recall it ever paying up.

But when I did hang on to a little money, I knew where it was headed. Howard’s Drive-In. Or Harbin’s. Or the ice cream shop over in Pineville. A hamburger, fries and a milkshake, bought with money I’d earned my own self.

I’d sit there with that shake and feel like I owned the county.

I never did learn to save any of it. Not then, and if you ask my bank, not a whole lot since.

What I learned was simpler. It’s good to have money. It goes quick. And when it’s gone, you get back out there by the road and find some more.

I’ve been walking that ditch line ever since.

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.

The first newspaper in Tennessee was called the Knoxville Gazette.

It was printed in Rogersville.

November 5, 1791. A printer named George Roulstone set up a hand press near a tavern in the Holston country and started cranking out news. Knoxville was supposed to be the capital, but Knoxville wasn't quite ready for him yet. So he put the town's name on the masthead and printed it seventy miles up the road.

The next fall he loaded up the press and moved to Knoxville, where the name made more sense.

I spent more than forty years around newspapers. I've seen a lot of stretching on a masthead. That one takes the prize.

The tavern he printed beside belonged to Joseph Rogers, and Rogers is the reason there's a town there at all.

He was an Irish boy out of County Tyrone. Came down through Virginia after the Revolution and took a room at a tavern next door to Colonel Thomas Amis, a war hero with good land and a pretty daughter named Mary.

Rogers fell for her. The colonel did not fall for Rogers.

They married anyway, in 1786. Somewhere along the line the old man came around, and he handed his new son-in-law a piece of land near a spring. Rogers put up his own tavern on it. When Hawkins County's first court met in 1787, that tavern served as the courthouse.

Two years later the town got its charter and his name.

Joseph and Mary had fourteen children. He died in November of 1833. She died a month later. Folks said it was a broken heart, and nobody's bothered to argue with them since.

Now the sad part. The spring Rogers settled by already had a name.

Crockett.

In 1777, David and Elizabeth Crockett were killed in a raid on their cabin, right about where Rogersville stands now. Their grandson told the story years later in his autobiography. You'd know him as Davy.

He said his grandparents were "murdered, in their own house." He said one of his uncles, Joseph, took a ball that broke his arm. Another uncle, James, was carried off. James was deaf and couldn't speak, which made it harder for him to get away.

He was a captive for "seventeen years and nine months." Then Davy's father and the oldest Crockett brother found him and bought him back from an Indian trader.

Seventeen years. Think about that one a minute.

The grandparents are buried in the old Rogers Cemetery at Crockett Spring Park, along with Joseph Rogers and a good many of the town's first families.

The county itself carries the name of Benjamin Hawkins, a North Carolina statesman who probably never laid eyes on it. They usually didn't.

Head a few miles out of town and you'll find the strangest thing in the county.

In 1911, the International Printing Pressmen's union packed up its headquarters in Cincinnati and moved it to the woods of Hawkins County. Pressmen were the men who ran the big printing presses. Their president was George Berry, who'd grown up near the place, and he talked the union into buying an old mineral-springs resort.

They built a whole town and called it Pressmen's Home. It had a hotel, a chapel with Tiffany windows, a farm, its own post office and its own phone system. There was a sanatorium for members with tuberculosis, which hit men in the printing trades hard. And there was a trade school that turned out thousands of pressmen.

At one point it was the largest school of its kind in the world. Out in the Tennessee hills.

In 1967 the union announced it was moving to Washington. Within a couple of years it was gone. The school closed. The buildings went to weeds, a failed resort, a few fires.

The chapel's still standing, last I read.

Some of those boys learned to run presses in Hawkins County. Then they went off and printed the news everywhere else.

Thomas Amis built a stone dam across Big Creek around 1780 and put a mill beside it. The dam's still there. So is the waterfall coming over it, and so is his house, which is better than 240 years old.

Up on the hill above it sits the Amis Mill Eatery. Barbecue, steaks, seafood platters, homemade desserts. You eat with the sound of that water coming over a dam a Revolutionary War colonel built. The same man who didn't care much for Joseph Rogers.

The county's growing, by the way. About 56,700 people in 2020. Close to 59,600 last year.

A newspaper with the wrong town on it. A love match the father didn't want. A boy carried off for seventeen years. A school full of pressmen out in the woods.

Hawkins County was printing stories before the rest of Tennessee could read them.

Come see your neighbors.

THE SKY ABOVE

The moon goes dark Monday at 2:02 in the morning.

New moon. No porch light in the sky for a few nights, which is just what you want for the rest of this list.

Before sunrise, step out and look high in the southeast. Jupiter is the bright one. Mars is the rusty one beside it. Sunday morning they're about two fingers apart at arm's length. By Saturday you could about cover both with your pinky. They're closest early next week.

They aren't really getting close. Mars is a lot nearer to us than Jupiter is. They just line up from where we're standing, like two trucks on the same stretch of interstate a few miles apart.

Venus keeps climbing out of the trees in the east-southeast. It sits a little higher every morning, and nothing else up there is half that bright. If you see a light out your kitchen window at 6 a.m. that looks like a plane that forgot to move, that's Venus.

The Northern Taurids peak the night of the 11th into the 12th. It's a lazy shower, about five an hour. They come in slow, and every so often one comes in bright. With no moon to speak of, this is the year to look. Late evening into the small hours, when Taurus is up high.

The moon shows back up Wednesday evening as a fingernail low in the southwest right after sunset. Thursday it's a little fatter and a little higher. Saturn sits off in the southeast after dark, steady as a fence post.

Sunrise Sunday is 7:09 a.m. and sunset is 5:32. By Saturday it's 7:16 and 5:27. We lose about 11 minutes of daylight over the week. The mornings take most of the hit.

THE GROUND BELOW

Saturday is opening day.

Kentucky's modern gun deer season starts November 14 and runs 16 days, through the 29th. Last season Kentucky hunters took 145,433 deer, the fifth-highest total on record. Modern guns accounted for 72 percent of them.

Expect blaze orange at the gas station Saturday before daylight. Expect a man in camouflage who has been awake since 3 telling you he doesn't need coffee. He needs coffee.

Wednesday is Veterans Day. The guns on the Western Front went quiet at 11 o'clock on the morning of November 11, 1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Plenty of mountain boys were in those trenches. If you know a veteran, a phone call doesn't cost a thing.

The same day is St. Martin's Day on the old church calendar, and the almanac folks have been hanging a weather saying on it for a long time. The Old Farmer's Almanac counts November 11 through 20 as the window for Indian summer, or Second Summer. To count, the warm spell has to come after a cold snap or a hard frost.

So if it turns off warm this week after the cold we've had, you have permission to call it that. If it doesn't, nobody's handing out refunds.

The snowbirds are down off the mountain.

That's what most folks call the dark-eyed junco. Slate gray on top, white belly, flashes white tail feathers when it flies off. In Tennessee they breed up in the high country, mostly above 4,000 feet, and they stay up there all year. Everywhere else, they come in with the cold. They show up by early October and stick around till about mid-April. They like to hop around under the feeder picking up what the cardinals drop.

The persimmons are ready, too.

The old saying is a persimmon isn't fit to eat until after frost. Extension folks will tell you that's not exactly so. A persimmon is ripe when it's ripe. It just happens to get that way about the time the first frost comes, so the frost got the credit.

You'll know. A ripe one is soft as a water balloon and about ready to fall off on its own. Pick one too early and it'll turn your mouth inside out.

Pick them off the ground. Make a pudding.

The Wayne Train pulls out of the station every Sunday morning. Subscribe for free:
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