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🗞 FEATURED STORY
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You've seen the picture.

Six men. A flagpole. A volcano top on a Pacific island most Americans couldn't have found on a map.

Joe Rosenthal's photograph, snapped on February 23, 1945, won the Pulitzer Prize and became the most reproduced image in the history of photography. It got turned into a war bond campaign, a postage stamp, a 100-ton bronze statue in Arlington. Marines use it as their emblem to this day.

You've seen it so many times it has almost stopped being real. It's become a symbol. An abstraction. A logo.

But those were actual human beings.

One of them was Franklin Runyon Sousley.

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Born September 19, 1925, in Hilltop, Kentucky. A place so small it barely shows up on a modern map. Fleming County. Eastern Kentucky hill country. The kind of place where you know everybody and everybody knows your business and the nearest big town is still pretty small.

His father died when Franklin was eight years old. Oldest son. Man of the house, more or less, before he had any business being either. His mother Goldie raised the boys in that hollow, and Franklin did what Kentucky boys did. Went to school. Helped out. Grew up.

After he graduated high school in 1943, he moved to Dayton, Ohio, got a job with the Frigidaire division of General Motors. Nineteen years old. First time off the home ground, probably. Working a factory line in the industrial Midwest, sending money back to mama.

Then the Marines came calling.

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The 5th Marine Division — some 21,000 strong — would become the most highly trained division in the history of the Marine Corps. It would fight in only one battle.
Iwo Jima.

The 5th set sail for Hawaii on September 19, 1944. It was Franklin's 19th birthday, and it would be his last.

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The fighting on Iwo Jima was unlike anything the Pacific war had produced. The Japanese had burrowed into the island like termites into a house, sixteen miles of tunnels connecting bunkers and caves and artillery positions. They had no intention of surrendering. Out of the 2nd Battalion, which numbered 1,688 men at its peak, only 177 walked off the island.

Franklin Sousley walked up Mount Suribachi on February 23rd and grabbed a flagpole.
That's it. That's the moment. A farm kid from Fleming County, standing on top of a volcano in the Pacific Ocean, helping plant a flag that the whole world would see. He survived the battle for Suribachi itself. Kept fighting. Kept moving north across that terrible island.

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On March 21, 1945, Franklin Sousley was shot in the back by a Japanese sniper. He was nineteen years old.

On April 9, a telegram bearing the awful news arrived in Hilltop, Kentucky. Word of Franklin's death raced like wildfire through the countryside. His neighbors reported hearing Goldie's screams all through the night and into the next morning. Their home was a quarter-mile away.

Let that sit for a second.

A quarter mile.

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Flag Day lands every June 14th, and millions of Americans will see stars and stripes hanging from porches, snapping in the breeze outside post offices, printed on napkins at barbecues. Most won't think much about it. The flag has become wallpaper. Background noise. A decoration.

But that photograph — the one that still gives people a catch in the throat eighty years later — has a Kentucky boy in it. A holler kid who grew up without his daddy, who worked a factory line to help his mother, who grabbed a flagpole on a Pacific volcano and never made it home.

The flag belongs to all of us.

But a piece of it came from the hills of Kentucky.

And a boy named Franklin Sousley never got to know it.

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🗞 APPALACHIA 250
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Picture Appalachia in your head right now.

I'd bet money you saw a man. A miner with a headlamp, maybe. A fiddler on a porch. A mountaineer with a rifle.

That's the postcard. It's not the whole picture. The icon of Appalachia has almost always been male — the coal miner, and before him, the mountaineer. The women got cropped out of the frame.

So with the country turning 250 next month, let's fix the photo.

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Start before the country existed. Nancy Ward, a Cherokee woman from these mountains, picked up her fallen husband's rifle in battle and led her people to victory, earning the title of Ghighua — Beloved Woman. She spent the rest of her life trying to keep the peace between her people and the strangers pouring over the ridges. She didn't always succeed. Nobody could have. But she tried harder than most of the men on either side.

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Then there's Mary Draper Ingles. Taken captive in 1755, hauled to the Ohio country, and she escaped and walked somewhere around 500 miles home through untamed wilderness, eating berries and bark, with winter coming on. Forty-some days. No map. No shoes worth mentioning.

I get winded carrying groceries up the porch steps.

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Jump ahead. The coal camps. The mills. Here's the part they really don't tell you. When the mines would only hire men, women became the labor movement's secret weapon — they couldn't be fired from jobs they weren't allowed to have, and soldiers were a lot less eager to shoot them.

Mother Jones figured that out and organized them into an army of brooms and washboards. The owners called her the most dangerous woman in America.

She was in her seventies at the time.

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It wasn't just the famous ones. Aunt Molly Jackson, a coal miner's daughter and a coal miner's wife in Harlan County, wrote protest songs giving voice to miners killed, children starving, and women trying to feed their families through all of it.

Florence Reece wrote "Which Side Are You On" — a question this region has been asking for a hundred years.

In 1965, a Knott County widow named Ollie Combs laid her body down in front of a bulldozer that was about to strip-mine her Kentucky farm. She spent Thanksgiving in jail.

Her stand helped push strip mining legislation through the Kentucky General Assembly in 1967, and ten years later she was invited to the White House for the signing of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

One widow. One bulldozer. Federal law.

Eula Hall, over in Floyd County, watched her neighbors go without doctors and decided that was enough of that. She turned her own trailer into a clinic — the Mud Creek Clinic, free health care for all. When an arsonist burned it to the ground in 1982, she rallied the community and rebuilt it. It's still serving patients today.

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And the contributions didn't stay in the hollers.

Katherine Johnson, born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, did the math that put John Glenn in orbit and helped land men on the moon. Glenn famously wouldn't fly until she personally checked the computer's numbers. A girl from the West Virginia mountains, double-checking the machines.

A girl from Sevier County, Tennessee, did alright too. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library has put more than 100 million free books into the hands of children, starting right here and spreading across the country and beyond.

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Coal, cloth, songs, clinics, rocket math, and a library the size of a nation. That's the Appalachian women's ledger, and I've barely cracked the cover.

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The thing is, not one of the women on this list set out to be in a history book. They set out to get home. To feed somebody. To keep a farm, a union, a clinic, a child's chance.

The country they built turns 250 this summer.

Took a lot of women holding these mountains up to get it here.

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🗞 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLOW
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Six men raising a flag on a pile of volcanic rock in the Pacific. Joe Rosenthal caught it on Iwo Jima in February 1945, one frame, shot from the hip, no time to even look through the viewfinder. He figured he'd missed. Instead he'd taken the most famous war photograph in American history.

Here's the part they didn't tell you. For seventy years, we had the names wrong.

Not all of them. But enough. Three of the six men carved into history, into a bronze memorial, into a movie or two, weren't who we thought they were. The mistakes happened the way mistakes do in war, through chaos, dead witnesses, and a Marine Corps culture that didn't encourage anybody to raise their hand and say otherwise.

The truth didn't come from the Pentagon. It came from a toy designer in Omaha and a fellow in Iowa, two amateur historians squinting at old film frame by frame, noticing things like a dangling helmet strap and a wedding ring. The kind of details only somebody patient and stubborn would catch.

This facinating story from the Veterans Breakfast Club lays the whole thing out. It's worth your time.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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Eastern Kentucky's Whip-poor-wills Are Going Quiet, and Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why

Grew up in the mountains, you know that sound. Three notes. Trills in the middle. Fills the dark between the trees from dusk until you fall asleep. Some folks around here haven't heard it in twenty years and just now realized it. That's the problem.

A team of researchers out of UK has been living in a cabin in Robinson Forest — sharing it with a pretzel-stealing mouse named Billy Bites — strapping tiny backpack tags onto Eastern Whip-poor-wills and tracking them all the way to Chiapas, Mexico and back.

The bird is an indicator species. When it goes quiet, other things follow. The question one researcher keeps asking is a good one: how quiet are you willing to let the night get?

Visit The Kentucky Lantern for the story.

👉 Read the full story

A World-Famous Opera Singer and a Banjo Player Walk Into a Recording Studio. What Came Out Is an Appalachian Album Worth Your Time.

Renée Fleming is one of the great opera sopranos alive. Béla Fleck is, well, Béla Fleck.

Twenty years ago they got an idea. Last month it became a record. The Fiddle and the Drum is an album of Appalachian songs — love, loss, war, women left behind — sung by Fleming and produced by Fleck, with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Dolly Parton, and a handful of other people who know exactly what they're doing in the room.

The Bluegrass Situation sat them both down and let them talk.

Read more at The Bluegrass Situation:

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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School is out for the summer almost everywhere now. Vacations and summer activities are in full swing.

That brings to my memory VBS.

Most of us as children can remember the days of VBS—Vacation Bible School— at the local churches. It was a week of fun and excitement for all the kids that attended, and I do believe most of the adults enjoyed it too.

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I can remember the stories we were told and read about. Jesus in the manger, Jonah and the whale, Moses in the basket, the 10 Commandments, the walls of Jericho tumbling down, and many more. There was always a coloring page to go with the story each time. Sometimes there would be crafts to make and songs to sing that went with our lesson.

I remember so well the story of Noah and the ark. Noah tried to tell the people to get in the ark, but they would not listen. The rain came for 40 days and nights, flooded and destroyed everything and every person on the earth, except those that were inside the ark.

God made a promise that the earth would not be destroyed by water again by placing a rainbow in the sky.

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Our class made a rainbow on cardboard with colored ropes, and we drew the sky and clouds. I thought that was the neatest craft with the prettiest rainbow!

And, oh yes, the snacks we had each night were sure a treat. Those jugs of Kool-Aid, all different colors, were so good when we came in from playing games. We always got cookies too. I’m not sure if it was true or not, but that was always seemed to be the best Kool-Aid and cookies anywhere around!

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This week we have had VBS at our church, Red Lick Baptist. I  have enjoyed watching the kids of all ages enjoying the music, the lessons, crafts, and food. What a blessing to know that there are still churches and people that pour time and energy into the children!

May we always be able to look through the eyes of children and enjoy the pleasures of this life. One thing for sure, as we get older, things sure look different, don’t you think so too?

Bible Verse of the Week

Genesis 9:13
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

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Gospel singer Kay Himes Knuckles has been sharing her music ministry in Eastern and Central Kentucky for more than 40 years.

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📜 KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS
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The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Way down at the bottom of the map, where Appalachia runs out of mountains and has to make do with hills, there's a county in Mississippi with no railroad, no four-lane, and a county seat smaller than most high school graduating classes.

Pittsboro. Population, give or take, two hundred souls.

It's one of the smallest county seats in America, and it's been the seat of Calhoun County since the courthouse moved there from a river landing called Old Town back in the 1850s. The courthouse burned two days before Christmas in 1922 and took most of the county's records with it. Folks saved five books of land abstracts out of the fire. That's it. Five books. Everything else a county had written down about itself for seventy years, gone in one night.

They rebuilt. Hill people do that.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Mississippi? Appalachia? But the Appalachian Regional Commission counts 24 Mississippi counties in the family, and Calhoun is one of them. These are the red clay hills of the north part of the state, cut through by the Skuna and Yalobusha rivers, and the people there have more in common with a Kentucky holler than with the Delta flatland an hour west. Always have.

Here's a number that tells you something. When the census takers first came through in 1860, slaves made up 19 percent of the county, the second-lowest share in all of Mississippi. This was never plantation country. This was corn country. Small farms, small blacksmith shops, men working timber. Sound familiar? It should. That's the Appalachian story, just told with a different accent.

The county got its name from John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator, which is a thing a lot of Southern counties did in 1852 and a thing none of them would do today.

The towns are Bruce, Calhoun City, Derma, Vardaman, and Pittsboro, plus crossroads communities like Big Creek and Slate Springs that you'll miss if you sneeze. Bruce is the biggest, and it exists because a Memphis hardwood flooring company decided in the 1920s that the timber around the Skuna bottom was worth building a whole town for. A sawmill town, through and through. Around 13,000 people live in the whole county now, and like most of our counties, the number's been sliding. The latest estimates have it under 12,700.

But here's the thing about Calhoun County. For a place that small, it has produced some people you ought to know about.

Start with a farm near Slate Springs, 1874, where a boy named Fox Conner was born. You've probably never heard of him. Dwight Eisenhower sure had. Conner rose to major general and served as the operations chief for the entire American war effort in France during World War I. But his real legacy was what came after. In the 1920s, down in Panama, Conner took a young, going-nowhere major named Eisenhower under his wing and spent three years teaching him military history, strategy, and how to think. Eisenhower later called Conner the ablest man he ever knew. The man who planned D-Day and then ran the country for eight years got his education from a farm boy out of the Calhoun County hills. They call Conner "the man who made Eisenhower." The hills made Conner first.

Then there's Dennis Murphree of Pittsboro, and I'll confess a soft spot here, because before he was anything else, Murphree was a newspaperman. He published the Calhoun Monitor in his home county. He went on to become lieutenant governor and ended up serving as governor of Mississippi twice, in 1927 and again in 1943, both times because the sitting governor died in office. He ran for the job outright and never won it. Twice handed the highest office in the state, twice turned away when he asked for it himself. There's a country song in there somewhere.

And then there's the sax man. John Henry "Ace" Cannon was born over in Grenada, but Calhoun City claimed him and he claimed it right back, living there most of his life. They called him the Godfather of the Sax. He cut records at Sun Studio in Memphis in the fifties, played with the Bill Black Combo, and in 1961 recorded an instrumental called "Tuff" that climbed to No. 17 on the pop charts. Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis, called Ace Cannon the greatest saxophone player who ever lived. When fame was done with him, Ace came home to Calhoun City and spent his last thirty years playing shows and working on his golf game at Pine Hills. When he died in 2018, his honorary pallbearers were his Sunday afternoon golfing buddies. That's how you want to go out.

I'd be run out of the newsletter business if I wrote about Calhoun County and didn't mention sweet potatoes. The town of Vardaman calls itself the Sweet Potato Capital of the World, and every November they throw a Sweet Potato Festival to prove it. The sandy loam in the east end of the county grows them like nowhere else. The town's main drag is named Sweet Potato Street, and I am not making that up.

If you're passing through and your stomach's growling, point the truck toward Bruce and find Ella Kate's Cafe. It's the kind of small-town cafe this series was built to celebrate, where the locals fill the tables and the cooking tastes like somebody's grandmother is back there keeping an eye on things. No chains. Never chains.

Calhoun County never had a railroad come through. Still doesn't. The world's main lines passed it by, and the county just kept on, growing sweet potatoes, sawing timber, raising up generals and governors and sax players, and sending them out to do big things.

Most of them, like Ace, found a reason to come back.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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The moon goes dark Sunday night. New moon arrives June 14, which means the first few nights of this week are about as black as a June sky gets. If you've been meaning to drag a lawn chair out past the porch light and look at the Milky Way, this is your window. The lightning bugs will provide the foreground.

Then the show starts. On the evenings of June 16 and 17, a thin crescent moon lines up with Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury low in the western sky after sunset. Four for the price of one. Venus is the bright one you can't miss. Jupiter sits nearby. Mercury hangs low, so you'll want a ridge-free view to the west — a tall order in some hollers, I know. On the 17th, the crescent passes extremely close to Venus, close enough to make you stop whatever you were doing.

By Friday and Saturday, Venus slides past the Beehive star cluster. Binoculars help. Squinting also works.

One more thing. Saturday night is the last night of spring. The solstice lands Sunday morning, June 21, at 4:24 a.m. Eastern. Which means this week holds the longest evenings of the year, and the daylight you're getting right now is about all the daylight there is. Use it accordingly.

The woods are switching shifts. Spring greens are done, and the summer crowd is clocking in.

If we keep getting rain, the chanterelles start showing up — along with oyster mushrooms and chicken of the woods. Golden, apricot-smelling, growing near hardwoods on damp ground. The usual warning applies: plenty of poison mushrooms dress up like the good ones, so don't eat anything a field guide and an experienced forager haven't both signed off on.

Elderflower is blooming now in the creek bottoms — those big white plates of tiny blossoms. Gather the blossoms now for cordial, and the berries come late summer for syrup. Granny medicine, the old folks called it. The serviceberries are ripening too, if you can beat the birds. You usually can't.

In the garden, it's the hopeful stretch. Beans climbing, squash blooming, tomatoes making promises. Mulch now and thank yourself in August.

THIS WEEK IN APPALACHIAN HISTORY

Saturday is West Virginia's birthday. Number 163.

On June 20, 1863, West Virginia entered the Union as the 35th state — the only state ever born out of the Civil War. When Virginia voted to secede in 1861, the delegates from the western counties refused to follow Richmond out the door. Some wanted to preserve the Union. Some opposed slavery. Some just resented being run by planters who'd never seen a mountain. All three reasons sound about right.

They set up their own government in Wheeling on June 20, 1861 — two years to the day before statehood became official. Lincoln signed the bill, and Congress required the new state to write gradual emancipation into its constitution before the deal closed.

It's been a legal state holiday since 1927, and Charleston and Wheeling will both be celebrating Saturday. The rest of us can raise a coffee cup in their direction.

Saturday night, the sun will set as late as it sets all year. Stay out for it.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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1925-1945

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The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

If somebody forwarded this to you, climb aboard:
👉 thewaynetrain.com