Oral History Interview with Mike Mullins

LOYAL JONES: Interviewing Mike Mullins here, on, this is August the second, nineteen ninety-nine. And the interviewer is Loyal Jones, and this is in Berea, Kentucky. Just want you to talk a little bit about your background, information on your family and education and that sort of thing.

MIKE MULLINS: Well, I grew up in High Hat, Kentucky. I am the oldest of five children. My father and mother, Herman Mullins, and Mildred Mullins. My father was one of eleven children, the next to the youngest. My mother’s one of eight children. She was the oldest of those.

JONES: What County is that?

MULLINS: That is in Floyd County. My father’s side of the family grew up in 1:00Knott County, where the Hindman Settlement School is and moved into Floyd County in the late forties, early fifties, that period of time, to work in the mines. I grew up in a large, extended family. That little place, mouth of Bryant Branch.

JONES: What branch?

MULLINS: Bryant, B R Y A N T, Bryant. I attended Bryant Branch Elementary School in my early years, the first and second grade, a one-room school. And I could walk through the bottom, a corn field and go to school at the end of that. So, I can remember that very, very clearly. We used to, when I was in that one-room school, we lined up, that’s three grades, first, second and third. And we would line up each morning in each grade, out in front and we would raise the flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance 2:00before we went in. And we had outdoor privies, the whole bit, you know. I remember I was only seven or so, I used to help my friend, get up many mornings, during the cold mornings and I would go early to help him build a big fire in the coal stove. That was during the winters, our seats just basically circled the stove, is what we did. A big, old coal stove. But 3:00then I went onto a little old, I went to a big school. I went to a three-room school, Clear Creek Elementary. That was a big step up for us, going to that school. It was a wonderful place to go to school. I started in my third-grade year. But I got in my, the later part of my third-grade year, I think it was nineteen fifty-six or fifty-seven, I got, in about March of that year, of my third-grade year, I got hit by a car. I was coming home from school, and I got hit by a car. And I spent close to a year, I had major operations, and I missed an entire year of school.

JONES: You broke bones?

MULLINS: It was all internal injuries, you couldn’t tell that I had anything wrong with me, but my gall bladder, I mean 4:00my spleen, liver, and everything. They gave me less, far less than a fifty-fifty chance to live. I guess the only reason I am alive today is that they had just opened within a year, the miners, the United Mine Workers had, the McDowell Hospital there. And they got me there and I was operated on. It was a month, close to a month before I even, from that time, that I even realized anything. I was not able, didn’t know anything for almost a month.

JONES: You were how old now, at this time?

MULLINS: I was in the third grade. I was seven, I would have been eight that summer I think, in June. I was born in June twenty second, nineteen forty-eight. That was an important, that was a big thing in my life, because I missed an entire year of school, so I was held, I didn’t graduate with the folks that I started school with, because I had to miss an entire year. I had major operations also at Williamson Hospital in Williamson, West Virginia, they couldn’t do it all the first time around. But...yeah?

JONES: You had good care?

MULLINS: I had wonderful care. I developed a relationship at McDowell with a big Texan named Doctor Ward. 5:00He was the surgeon. And he came and visited me at my house. We became great friends. He and I became very close. He was a big, raw boned, vulgar sort of man in a lot of ways. I could hear him cussing down the hall, in the hospital, but he saved my life, you know. We loved him dearly, to us he walked on water.

JONES: Is he still living?

MULLINS: No, he died years, and years ago. He had trouble with alcohol, but he saved my life. I can remember, I can remember those days of waking up in the night and seeing lights and having no idea. I thought I was like in a big city or something. I had no idea where I was at and then I would sort of go back under, you know. But I, it took me, it took me a total of almost three years to recover from that 6:00accident, physically. And it also did a, how do you say this, even when you are very young, when you experience a life-threatening experience, where you realize that you are on the verge of death, I honestly can tell you that I can remember thinking that I was dead. I mean I didn’t think I was in the land of the living, 7:00because I can remember these lights. And I can remember all this, it was garbled, but it was, it had a tremendous impact on me. Because I was just a normal, young boy, just like everybody else, wanting to play baseball, get out and have a good time. I laid in the hills and all that. But after that, I was very weak, and I couldn’t do things like other folks, and it took me a while to recover. But I did, and I became a real good Little League baseball player. I was an All-Star, and I got my strength back and I did, but I was very, very skinny, very, very thin, you know. I wasn’t ever very strong from then on, but then when I went back to Clear Creek Elementary, I ended up.... My fourth-grade 8:00year, I had this one teacher, she wasn’t all that great. But then I got what I consider the greatest education that a young fellow could ever have, between my fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where I got my education. In the fifth grade I had an old teacher, who graduated from old Alice Lloyd with a two-year certificate, named Wade Slone. Wade Slone had taught my mother. I mean he had been teaching, I think when he retired, he taught fifty some years. He never would quit, you know. He was just a strict, get it, no nonsense, route, get it sort of teacher, you know. But he really instilled the value of learning in me. But then I had probably I will consider, one of my greatest, if not the person who had permanent tremendous influence on me in my sixth-grade year. I had a teacher, who graduated from Berea College. His name was James A. Gibbs. He married a young lady from Floyd County, whose father was a school board member. And when she was a nurse and she got a job at McDowell, I mean at the hospital, and he got a job as teaching the fifth and sixth grade at 9:00Clear Creek Elementary. And he was my sixth-grade teacher. He was a young fellow. He had grown up down around Corbin. He didn’t have a mother and father. His brother had raised him. And he got to come to Berea College. And he talked about Berea College all the time and what impact it had on him, and what the place meant to him. And he and my father became fast friends. My father would take him coon hunting. They would go fishing together. And every day my father would come, my mother worked at the elementary school, at Clear Creek Elementary. She cooked in the room there, in the dining room area. And we would play basketball, or we’d play football every day, touch football and stuff. We had a true community school there. To me, that’s why I look at the schools today and I say, if they 10:00could have what we had, then or educational system would be a lot better, because consolidation just doesn’t improve it.

JONES: Small is better, quite often. Before you go farther, let me back up again. Was your father a miner and thus eligible for benefits at the hospital there?

MULLINS: Yes, my father was a UMWA miner. And worked, my father worked almost thirty years in the mines. He’s retired UMW Black Lung recipient, seventy-one years old at this time. He’ll be seventy-two in January.

JONES: Okay. He’s exactly my age.

MULLINS: My father and Mr. Gibbs got along so great; it was just like he became part of our family. But he talked about Berea all the time, you got to understand and that had an impact on me. And I started enjoying school and I started 11:00enjoying learning, I mean I couldn’t get enough of it. I mean, I was the type who would get bored and grab encyclopedias and read encyclopedias. I’d study maps. I loved geography. And I’d study, I mean I prided myself knowing the names of every country and every capital and every river and about in the world. I would just do continent after continent and all this stuff. So, one of the hardest things I ever did, was when I had to leave Clear Creek and leave Mr. Gibbs and go on down to McDowell, which is a bigger, consolidated school.

JONES: Is that still elementary?

MULLINS: It is now, it was elementary and high school when I went there.

JONES: What grade did you go there?

MULLINS: I went there in the seventh grade.

JONES: I see.

MULLINS: And I met. When I got there, they placed me in the classroom, in my seventh-grade year with a lady named Philistine Hall. She was a very religious lady, who had an Old Regular Baptist. A younger, probably in her late twenties or mid-twenties, but 12:00had a bun on her head, and was meaner than a snake. [Laughter - Jones] I mean, shoot, you walked in her room, you did exactly what she said. And she was an absolutely, unbelievable teacher. I just learned so much. And then I, I was really hungry, I mean I couldn’t get enough. I can remember, it was just like I was a big, old barrel that wanted to be filled. I can remember that to this day, and so I just really enjoyed it. And then the next year I had another wonderful teacher, Marie Stumbo, in my eighth-grade year. And when I went there, you know, I came from up “fer” Beaver, as we call it, up right, up left Beaver Creek. And I was sort of, but all these other, most of the other students that were in the classroom, had grown up in the McDowell area and had gone to school all their life there. And many of them, 13:00there were several teacher’s kids in my room. And I can remember, you know, I gained respect from them through the fact that I beat their butt in class, is the way I gained respect. It wasn’t anything I consciously, I mean, I just wanted to do good. I always wanted to excel in school, I don’t know why, I always wanted to. So, I worked hard and I graduated; in my eighth grade year, the leading male and female eighth graders were the ones who were ushers at the graduating class of the seniors, you see. I remember the great honor. I mean all these folks thought they were going to get it. I can remember these folks were my good friends. And I was chosen, and I didn’t think 14:00I had a chance. But it turned out I was the top student going into high school, I guess. Me and a lady, Glenda Atkins, I can remember now, you know, we were chosen. That was a big honor. But it also set a certain tone, I think, because they knew there was somebody else, they had to look over their shoulder at. So high school to me was a blur, I guess is the best way to say it. I enjoyed high school, but I can’t tell you that...

JONES: Did you not have as good of teachers?

MULLINS: I don’t think so. I think, there’s probably, it’s hard for me to say. In four years of going to high school, one teacher that I felt like that even measured up to the four years that I was in the fifth through the eighth grade. The only one was a high school English teacher, her name was Miss Turner. And she was decent, and so forth, but she had her picks. And I don’t think she treated 15:00all the children the same. I think she chose the group that she wanted to deal with, and I happened to...

JONES: Did you sort of have town kids and country kids?

MULLINS: Yeah, but also, I guess it’s hard to say. She chose the ones that probably had more, looked like they had an opportunity to go to college and also had some, academically were excelling. And then there was the other senior sponsor who took everybody else and who was just loved. I ended up with Miss Turner. She was an interesting lady. She was a neighbor, not too far. But she had a sort of superior attitude. And I felt at times that it didn’t sit right with me. I guess I’ve always tried to feel that I’m no better than anybody else. And then I felt sometimes she thought some children were better than some of the others. And that always bothered me. I’ve always had a sort of thing in me. I don’t like that attitude.

JONES: Don’t you think that is sort of a mountain attitude? Don’t you think that mountain people really resent that as much as anything else?

MULLINS: I think so, because I 16:00grew up in a family, as I said, that was very supportive. But I also grew up in a family that we didn’t feel like we were better than anybody else. Look, I guess it is important to point out that I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I grew up in a home where, literally there might be months when there was no money in the house. We raised a big garden, we raised our own hogs, we bought beef. We had a horse we plowed with, later on a mule. I grew up working in the gardens. I mean that was part of my life. We put up all kinds of food every year.

JONES: Mostly canned?

MULLINS: Canned and frozen and then salted down, we killed four and five hogs a year. I mean put me in a, I mean it’s been a little while, but give me a little time and I can still kill one today. Because I helped kill probably, I don’t know how many hundreds over the years, you know. We killed them right up until my father 17:00got to the point where he couldn’t do it. But we raised hogs. And then I also, I grew up where a work ethic was absolutely very important. My family always worked and the Mullins’ had the reputation that they always worked. When I was eleven years old or twelve, I started working in a theater, sweeping the floors there at Frye’s to get in free. I sweeped [swept], cleaned the bathrooms, and it only cost a quarter to get in, okay? And then later on fifty cents. But I mean I worked, I swept three, they had shows Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I cleaned the floors; I cleaned the bathroom. I swept and cleaned that up.

JONES: Did you watch the movies too?

MULLINS: I got in free. That was all I got, that was my pay.

JONES: Did you ever read David Madden’s Bijou?

MULLINS: Yes.

JONES: About Knoxville, isn’t that a wonderful book?

MULLINS: Absolutely. And what’s his name, Ed McClanahan has a thing in his book about movie theaters.

JONES: Yeah, The Natural Man.

MULLINS: The Natural Man, yeah. But that was real important to me, because I worked and then later on I started learning how to run the machines, okay? The projector machines. So, I ended up being the projectionist 18:00and then I made the mistake one time of coming downstairs and helping in the concession stand. And the fellow who sort of like a second father to me, a fellow named Sammy Wells, a teacher and so forth, who ran that, wouldn’t let me go back upstairs, because he said I was so good behind the counter making him money at the concession stand. He kept me down there, you know. I liked hanging out upstairs.

JONES: How many years did you work for him?

MULLINS: Well, I worked until I graduated from high school. I worked every weekend, Loyal, every weekend from the time I was in about the seventh grade.

JONES: How much did you get paid an hour?

MULLINS: Well, I didn’t get paid an hour. I got paid based on how well we might do in a week. The most I ever got paid for a weekend’s work was ten dollars. I usually got paid four dollars to six dollars a weekend.

JONES: Yeah.

MULLINS: And that’s what I got paid. That’s how I got paid. That was a wonderful opportunity though, it kept us all out of trouble. He took us fishing and all this stuff. 19:00We, there was a big group of us. And he just did it, he had a bunch of us there, kept us around there. But as I say, I developed a work ethic, you know. I never, that’s why I have this thing, I can’t sit still. I can’t, I mean to me, going a day without accomplishing something just blows my mind. I have to do something every day. My family, back early years, I can tell, get up on a Saturday and I’d start, and they’d tell 20:00me the night before, don’t plan my day tomorrow. I’m going to do this and this. Don’t you try to, we aren’t going to do that, you know. And I’d say, “well you know you need to get some things done.” So, they give me a hard time, even today, about how I always....you know, I’m one of these early birds. I’ll get up and be out doing stuff while, you know. But I just like, I like to do things. But those were wonderful years.

JONES: That’s good. That’s good to hear that. And you, where was the theater? In McDowell?

MULLINS: No, it was at Price. It was basically within a three, five-minute walk from my house. It was out here in an isolated community, but it was the only thing we had. People would come from all around, and the biggest times we ever had, was when we had Elvis Presley shows. I mean we would pack that place. But I became a movie freak is what happened. I’d watch all these old movies. You know when I was just a little boy, my father worked for a company 21:00that owned that theater, they had built it there. It was a little, old coal company. And then later on they sold it. But I could get tickets to go to that theater for fifteen cents a piece. And then of course, you got popcorn for a nickel and a coke for a nickel. A quarter, that’s all you needed. My grandfather, Willard Mullins, who I’m supposedly a whole lot like. My grandfather Willard could not read nor write, never went to school a day in his life. He was also a retired miner, but he was a trader too. He used to take me, and we would go to the stock markets and spend all day. We’d drive a car, never even take a truck or anything, or take any livestock. He’d stay there all day and trade left and right and go home with three or four hundred bucks. He’d just buy and trade there on the grounds and so forth. He was just an absolute, 22:00excellent trader. But my grandfather, he had a lot of influence on me. I was, later on when I got my driver’s license, I would drive him to the county line every now and then to get him a drink or two, you know. And I used to do that. But he was just one of these people, he also used to show me where he made moonshine up in Salisbury Branch, when he lived up in there.

JONES: Did he become a church person?

MULLINS: No, never.

JONES: Never?

MULLINS: Never.

JONES: What about the rest of your family, were they “Old Regular Baptist?” MULLINS: Yeah, most of them were, my, his wife, my grandmother, died in nineteen forty-nine, shortly after I was born. She was a member of the Old Regular Baptist Church. Poppy as we called him, he never made it. He never made it to the altar; I tell you what.

JONES: Did they go to Left Beaver Old Regular Church?

MULLINS: I think so, over there, because 23:00my mother and father are both Old Regular Baptist, you know. But my grandpa, Poppy, Willard was...

JONES: Now, was he a Mullins?

MULLINS: Mullins, yeah, Willard Mullins. But he, and then my grandfather on my mother’s side, Pete Dawson, he grew up in a Masonic Lodge Orphanage in East Tennessee, in Cotton County, Tennessee.

JONES: Oh, I know where that is.

MULLINS: And he came up with the railroads when he was in like fifth grade. He left when he was about eleven or twelve years old. He ran away and came up, was water boy on the railroad line. That’s how he got up in eastern Kentucky and met my grandmother, Mary Alice Likens. And they ended up getting married, she had never, neither one of them, my grandfather could....I don’t even know if my grandmother, I don’t think she could read nor write. But my grandfather Pete could, basic stuff. He wasn’t all that great, you know. 24:00JONES: Well now in high school, how did you come out? How did you rank in high school?

MULLINS: Well, I ranked third in my class in high school because I got two Bs in P. E.. My friends, the valedictorian and I, in the top five there were three boys and two girls. My friend Terry Heinich was valedictorian, the salutatorian, the co-salutatorians, and I was third in the class. The valedictorian and myself came to Berea College. We came here. There were three of us that came here. Well, the co-salutatorians came here. Valedictorian, co-salutatorians and myself. I’m the only one that graduated Berea College.

JONES: Oh, is that right?

MULLINS: The other two, this was in the sixties....Let me tell you how....I guess it says something about Berea, is that when 25:00I was in the sixth grade, I decided I was going to Berea College. Okay? I decided that and I was going to major in American history. Well, when I was a senior in high school and I started applying, the counselor you know said, they bring all these people in. “You need to apply to this, this and this.” And I said, “no, I’m applying to Berea College. I’m going to Berea College.” And he got sort of irritated with me because I refused to even apply.

JONES: What was he a graduate of?

MULLINS: Alice Lloyd and it was a two-year college, and then he went on to Pikeville, I think. And so, he wanted me to do that. He said, “well, why do you want to do this?” I said, “well, I decided a long time ago that, that is what I was going to do.” He said, “well, have you ever been to Berea College?” And I said, “nope, never been there in my life.” I said, “all I know is that it is somewhere south of Lexington. I’ve never been there. I don’t even know how to get there.” And he said, “well, you better apply, they might not take you.” 26:00I said, “they’ll take me.” I said, “I’ve worked hard. I don’t know why they wouldn’t take me.” And so, I can remember this conversation because he got irritated at me. I applied to Berea College, and I got accepted. The first time I visited Berea College was the summer before I enrolled. And it was, and you know, 27:00they were taking bets in my family that I wouldn’t stay. I had never been away from home. I’m not one of these fellows who stayed away from home. I never stayed overnight with friends and stuff like that. I was very much a homebody, okay. I just didn’t go anywhere. And I probably hadn’t been out of the state of Kentucky more than maybe twice.

JONES: Where did you go then?

MULLINS: Went up to Portsmouth, Ohio to see family, you know, across the river. [Laughter - Jones]. I hadn’t been anywhere, you know. We never had a vacation. When I was growing up, we never had a vacation. I don’t remember missing anything. I just don’t remember it. We had a great time. My childhood was fantastic, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. So, I remember coming to Berea and how fascinated I was with this place. I remember coming and I stayed three weeks 28:00before I went home the first time. And then I went home.

JONES: How did you get home? Did they come and get you?

MULLINS: No, I caught a ride with a friend from over in Eastern [Kentucky University], who was going over there. I had several friends going to Eastern and they drove back and forth. And I rode with them. But by my sophomore year, I never went home except for the holidays, you know. I came here to Berea. And I was hired, you’ve heard some of these tales. I was hired at Boone Tavern. And I worked for Haligen, and I was a tray boy. And I wanted, I wanted to stay a tray boy, and he wanted me to become a waiter. I told him I didn’t want to become a waiter. And he said, “well, that is not the right attitude. That is a step up.” I said, “for me it is a step down.” 29:00And he wanted to know why. And I don’t remember if I articulated to him, but the reason was, I felt, like I said, “I don’t feel like I am too good to do anything.” But on the other hand, I don’t like, when I walked out there in that dining hall, there was a feeling that I got of condescension, that I did not appreciate. That’s the best way I can....and I didn’t want to, if I could just carry the dishes in and out and clean tables and stuff, I was happy. I didn’t want to interact with those dadburn tourists and all those people, who asked me, told me how lucky I was to be at Berea College and have this opportunity. I want to tell you something, I felt Berea College was lucky to have me, you know, I mean that was my attitude. I mean I had worked hard, and I was working hard. I never ever felt that I was ever poor or anything. I mean I had basic stuff. 30:00I didn’t have a whole lot of things. I didn’t have a lot of clothing. I had no money, heck, I didn’t have any money, you know. But it was no big deal. I was fine, you know. But there was a feeling and so Haligen got mad at me because I wouldn’t do that, and he fired me.

JONES: He did?

MULLINS: Yeah. He told me I needed to get another job, so I did. So, I went over and ended up in the gym and got a job. Clarence White, the coach over there, hired me as a statistician. And I became a stat man for the basketball team, because I knew basketball and baseball and all that. And I did that. I traveled. For two years I traveled every place the basketball team went. Oh yeah, I did all of that. I took care of all of it. And then in my sophomore year, or about the end of my sophomore year, I ran a foul of Oscar Gunthler. I did the spring sports 31:00booklet for all the spring sports, put in, did all this tremendous amount of work, did a design and everything. And I took it and handed it in to him. He gave it to a couple of his butt-kissing youngsters here, let’s see Bowles and a red headed guy, I can’t remember his name. They took it to the print shop and when it came out it had, compiled, and edited by these two fellows, you know. I did all the work on it. They had done absolutely nothing on it. So, I went to Gunthler and I opened it up and I said, I mean there shouldn’t have been any name on it. But I said, “these fellows didn’t do this. I did this. This is my work. I put this together.” And he said, “well, you know, I run this place and they had to re-arrange this,” and so forth, “and they’re editors.” One word led to another, and I can’t remember exactly what 32:00I said, but I know that I got fired before I left there. We parted company right there, buddy. I mean, I just wouldn’t take that kind of crap.

JONES: Go ahead with that.

MULLINS: I was going to say, after I got fired from that job, I went over to the Alumni Building and they hired me as a host over there. And I worked there the rest of my time.

JONES: Who did you work under Bill Best, there?

MULLINS: Over at the Alumni Building, no. I can’t remember who was in charge then. But then I became the assistant under Jim Avery.

JONES: I remember Jim.

MULLINS: Jim was the, he was manager of the site. But I was the assistant director there and that was a good experience because I got to work with a lot of people. And I ran that building and I closed it up and saw to a lot of things. That was a lot of responsibility. I was working twenty and twenty-five hours a week in my Junior and Senior year, taking a full load. I did well at Berea.

END OF TAPE 1, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE BEGINNING OF TAPE 1, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE B JONES: Tell me about getting into history. 33:00MULLINS: Well as I was telling you a while ago about my time in grade school, I used to just study encyclopedias and anything in history. I was just fascinated by history all my life. I decided, as I say, when I was in the sixth grade, I decided I was going to Berea College, and I was going to major in history. And I never did change my mind. But I like the social sciences. I like sociology. I like psychology. I liked political science. I liked political science until I ran into a certain professor here, who was a total ass, as far as I was concerned. And I dropped out of the Political Science department. But I love Literature, they had the old humanities curriculum when I was here, and I remember taking the different sections. If it hadn’t been for literature, I would have been in trouble. But I love literature, I just loved literature. But then of course, 34:00I’m being interviewed by Loyal Jones. And then I stumbled into the only Appalachian studies class I ever took. I took it under you, you know. As I said the other night, at the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, that opened up a whole new world to me. It was just like I had been; it was just like I had been out there searching for a long, long time to find where I fit. And you know, I had been searching for who I was. I had been studying about all these other people, who they were, but I still didn’t know who I was. To come into a class where the literature, and the history and the sociology and all that was combined, because that was the way that you taught your Appalachian studies class. It had all of that. You know I can remember the author of Stephen Creek, coming to class.

JONES: John Federman.

MULLINS: I can remember that. 35:00To me, a real live author, who wrote something about the region, was absolutely an epiphany for me. You don’t understand how important that was to me. JONES: Yeah, he had won the Pulitzer Prize you remember, for that story...

MULLINS: That’s right.

JONES: About Private Gibson, The Vietam Funeral.

MULLINS: Well, you know, it was just wonderful to bring that person. And I just really eat up....I think I became, I became a far more serious student in my junior and senior year. For some reason or another, I wasn’t finished. I wanted to go straight from undergraduate school on to graduate school, so I started applying early in my senior year for assistantships and so forth. And the two place that gave me offers were the University of Kentucky and the University of Cincinnati.

JONES: Before you get into that, who were some 36:00of the teachers that you appreciated at Berea in history?

MULLINS: I tell you what, General Lambert was one of my favorite teachers. He made history come alive. Heck, when we....I fought the Battle of Gettysburg. I mean, I just didn’t read about it, I fought it buddy. I was there. I sweated; I dodged the balls. I’m telling you; I was there.

JONES: General Lambert looked as if he was a veteran and spoke as if he were a veteran of these battles.

MULLINS: That’s right. [Laughing] I mean, you know, sitting there, looking up at him pacing back and forth, and in that tone of his. He’s still a great friend of mine.

JONES: I guess we ought to say his name is Dean Warren Lambert.

MULLINS: Yeah, Dean Warren Lambert.

JONES: General was an honorific title.

MULLINS: But I tell you in his own inimitable way, and that’s Doctor Ray, historiography the study of history, the different 37:00theories of history, was a great class. I took that on, had historiography, listen to this, you know Berea used to do this to folks. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday morning, at eight o’clock in the morning, had a historiography class, you know? Like to kill me, you know. [Laughter] But I loved that. And to his credit, Dave Nelson when he first came here.

JONES: Oh yeah.

MULLINS: I mean, he, you know I really enjoyed him philosophically and we really, really enjoyed it. And then I’ll have to say I learned a whole lot from Doctor Drake.

JONES: Yeah, well he certainly knew...

MULLINS: He knew his business, and he, not only he knew it, he was committed. I’ve learned to appreciate Doctor Drake more after the fact than during the time. Okay? Because of his great commitment to the region. I think he has a true love 38:00of the region and its people. And I think he’s stayed steady in that.

JONES: Oh yeah, yeah.

MULLINS: But those folks, I really enjoyed. I enjoyed Psychology under B. Prevlin( ).

JONES: He’s nice.

MULLINS: I got an “A” in that class. I don’t know, just something in there that really turned me on. I didn’t want to do it, and most people have never done it to themselves, but I went ahead and took an extra writing course, an exposition under Doctor Guessner. You know. I mean I took it because I felt like I needed it, you know. And she just whipped my butt, I’m going to have to say it. I mean she gave it to me. I still have all my papers that I wrote for her in my...

JONES: Is that right?

MULLINS: Yeah, I have them, where she made her comments and all of that.

JONES: She is a good teacher. She is acerbic and...[Laughing] MULLINS: Oh yeah, but she knew her stuff, you know. She knew her stuff. 39:00But I enjoyed, I could talk for days about Berea College and the time I had here. Of course, you know, there are a lot of high points in your college career. I think the work experience was invaluable. I think that the level of education, but you know, later on I came to appreciate people more, after I got out. I learned to appreciate the President here, so much more after I left here President Weatherford.

JONES: Oh yes.

MULLINS: I mean, you know, he was just a person here, who we tolerated. Because as students that’s what you do with presidents. But later on, I learned how great a man he was.

JONES: He was a singular man.

MULLINS: Yeah. He, I can just....It was a very difficult time, you know. I was here when some times....I tell you the whole Black Revolution was right 40:00in the midst of it. I always, I don’t know whether it is pride, but I always wanted to get along with everybody. And I never looked at color, you know, I never looked at color. Here was Berea College with its history of integration and so forth, didn’t have one Black faculty member on the campus when I was here. So, they brought one, imported one down from Kentucky State, to come down and teach a blackified issues class of the evening. I don’t know if you can remember this.

JONES: No, I don’t.

MULLINS: And I signed up with them for it. It was an evening class, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I signed up for this thing, okay? There were about forty of us in there, big class, over in, let’s see, Frost upstairs, big classroom. Well, we started off, and we had probably militant Blacks 41:00in this class. And it was wide open, I mean, the language was wide open, it was the time....There was a book written at that time, called Rhetoric of the Black Revolution. That was the bible of these sort of militants. Well, after the first week, you had about, and it was dominated by blacks in there, of course. There were about fifteen of us, white, I guess, the rest of them black.

JONES: Was Virgil here then?

MULLINS: Virgil was here, Virgil was here. Virgil was...

JONES: Virgil Burnside.

MULLINS: Yeah, Virgil....So, I can remember after the first week, we had eight or ten people drop out, all white. The next week you had another eight or ten. There was about three or four whites stayed in the class. Okay? They did everything they could, those Black militants and so forth, to run everybody out of there except Blacks, okay? They could not run me out. I would not leave. I mean they....Because 42:00you know, the thing about it is, I felt a tremendous kinship with them. Hell, they were talking about being oppressed, they were talking about all this stuff. Heck, I looked around and I said, “you know a lot of this is going on up in eastern Kentucky too.” I felt a tremendous kinship. I developed a wonderful friendship with a guy named Larry Robinson, an African American that was here. And then I did something that, I don’t know, I later on....I don’t know if I rated it or not. You know I ran for student vice-president of the student association here, vice-president. And the person who ran against me was a big, old, tall Black guy named Homer. I can’t remember...

JONES: Oh Homer, I know him.

MULLINS: He got killed, you know.

JONES: Yeah, he, Homer Williams...

MULLINS: Homer Williams.

JONES: ...he headed the Black Appalachian Commission of the Council of Southern Mountains, so I knew him very well.

MULLINS: Well Homer ran, Homer and I ran 43:00against each other. There were three of us that ran, and Homer and I ended up in a run off, and Homer ended up winning it, okay? I got three hundred and some votes. And then he went home that summer and was in a car wreck in a truck. And I don’t know the details, but he bled to death, cut his jugular or something and he died. And that left a tremendous impression on me. But it came down to he and I and then when I came back, I had the opportunity to be student vice...and I wouldn’t. I didn’t feel right about it, I just didn’t feel right about it. But that left an impression on me. And then I headed a thing during college called the Little United Nations Conference, they had up in Bloomington, Indiana. I went up with Abdul Rafi, political science professor and General Lambert up there. I was in my twenties. I was twenty-one by then. I was legal, so I went to a pub with them there on the campus at Bloomington, Indiana. And I can remember me and the General and Rafi, we were drinking pitchers of beer. And the General got in fighting the Battle of Gettysburg there on the table with glasses and pitchers and everything. [Laughter - Jones] I can remember that to this day, it was wonderful, you know. Of course, I don’t remember much else after that, but that...had a great time, went up there. But college was, I got a great educational foundation.

JONES: Let’s say a little bit about the University of Cincinnati then.

MULLINS: Well, it was weird. I got an assistantship to both places. My parents thought I should go to UK, of course. But honestly, I had developed a certain philosophy related to history and I felt U.C. had a better program. And that philosophy, I was real 44:00interested in history from the bottom up, looking at the role of the common man, or the new left theories of history, okay? And they had some top people at the University of Cincinnati, and I wanted to study with them. So, I go up there, and I had an assistantship. They paid me so much and they paid my tuition, but I had to teach. I was one of seven or eight assistants, student assistants under a fellow named Doctor Beaver, a Military Historian. The most stodgy fellow you ever met in your life. He would lecture one day a week to about eight hundred to nine hundred students in a big, old auditorium. The night college and the day college at the University of Cincinnati had thirty some thousand students, you know.

JONES: Oh, my goodness.

MULLINS: And so, I mean it was huge. And then I met with two classes, twice a week, with thirty students in each one of those. And I had to teach. Here I was, fresh out of college. 45:00I have to say, I never had one problem. I cannot remember one problem. Of course, when I went into a classroom, I was prepared. I was prepared to the hilt. But I can remember some sort of strange looks. They thought I talked funny; I’ll be honest with you. And so, I would be giving some of these lectures, or doing, talking, explaining something. And I would look, and I would see these puzzled look[s] on the faces of these fellows. And I would say, “I know what’s wrong, you want me to translate now, because you don’t understand some of the language I’m using.” And I would translate. And they would just laugh. And it was true. But I understood. But they were very respectful. I never once had to have any kind of confrontation with any students, or anything. 46:00And I really appreciated that, being young like that. And then, I got married right during graduate school.

JONES: Okay, you had met Frieda.

MULLINS: I had met Frieda here at Berea. Frieda, during, between my junior and senior year, Frieda had graduated from high school and was working here. She had been here for three or four summers as part of the Upward Bound Program.

JONES: Upward Bound, yeah.

MULLINS: And I was here. I had to go one summer school to get enough hours in to graduate the following year. Up until that time, Loyal, I worked in car factories up north.

JONES: Really?

MULLINS: Oh yeah, every summer, I would go to....I went to Ypsilanti, Michigan. I lived with my cousin and her husband. I worked in a car factory making hubcaps one summer. I made about two hundred a week, after cuts I cleared about one hundred and seventy. 47:00I paid my aunt twenty dollars a week. I put a hundred and some dollars in the bank and I’d keep ten dollars. And I would do that every week. That’s all I did. I worked, and every weekend we’d load up after twelve o’clock on Friday night and come home. We’d drive from Ypsilanti, Michigan. About every weekend, we’d come home. And then we would go back and work, never missed a day, never missed a day of work. And you might be interested. When I was in school, when I was in high school....From the fifth grade through high school, Loyal, I never missed a day of school.

JONES: Is that right?

MULLINS: Never missed a day of school.

JONES: Hmmm, I’ll be darned.

MULLINS: Yeah, I never missed school. Well, I know I never missed a day of high school, and I can’t remember missing any in the fifth and sixth grade. I never missed any school.

JONES: So, you and Frieda got married when, what day?

MULLINS: Well, we met that summer, between my junior and senior year and then we dated off and on my senior year. And then that summer 48:00after I graduated I worked in Dayton, Ohio, ( ) Ohio in a chemical factory. I worked in a chemical factory, third shift, like to kill me.

JONES: How did you get that job?

MULLINS: Had a cousin up there...

JONES: Oh, okay.

MULLINS: Stayed with the cousin. He worked in the factory. He helped me get a job there. Worked my butt off, you know. And then, so Frieda and I, I saw her some that summer. Then school started, and graduate school was pretty tough on me, and I was very, very lonely. And Frieda was having a difficult time in school. Frieda didn’t believe in borrowing money. And she had some problems with the financial aid department here and stuff. They wanted her to take these big loans out and stuff and various things. For her it was a big loan, it was really no money at all. And she was just having a difficult time at home and there were a lot of situations going on. 49:00So, make a long story short, in October of seventy-one I sent Frieda a bus ticket. She came to Cincinnati on a Thursday. We had this long conversation and so forth. And we talked it over. We talked about getting married, we talked about getting married. Then on a Friday after I got out of school, we drove down, and we were here at the college. This is very romantic. We came to the college, out front of Woods Penn, out there on a, there’s sort of a rock place there, that had some steps or something, used to be there in front of Fairchild, I guess there. And that’s where I asked Frieda to marry me. 50:00She was just going to try to get a job, she wasn’t going to go on to school. She came, that was like on a Wednesday or a Thursday and on Friday we decided to get married. Told her parents, on a Friday, went down and told them. Then on Saturday morning, Ron Dailey was going to go with us, be our best man. He got out and got so drunk the night before, the next morning he couldn’t move. He was comatose, so he couldn’t even go with us. [Laughing] And so he got out and had a big party that night. And so, we went to head down toward Jellico, Tennessee. And on the way to Jellico, I called my parents. I told my mother. I called her and I said, “I’m on my way to get married.” She started crying and that was the end of it, you know, that was the end of that. [Laughter - Jones] So, we got to Jellico, Tennessee on a Saturday morning.

JONES: Goodness.

MULLINS: I got, 51:00this is the way it happened. I got a blood test, got a six pack, waited for the blood test thing was all right. Went over to the little church there at Jellico, called Crouchy’s Creek, as you just go into Jellico.

JONES: Little Baptist church? Yeah, I know it.

MULLINS: Went in there...

JONES: Photographed it.

MULLINS: Rousted out the minister. His daughter was visiting. I can’t remember his name. Went over there, she was the witness, Frieda and I got married, drove back to Cincinnati.

JONES: I’ll be darned.

MULLINS: And in October of this year, it will be twenty-eight years. [Laughing] JONES: What about that. My goodness.

MULLINS: And all I can say, and it will be enough said, I married way above myself. There’s no doubt about that. And by the grace of the good Lord and an absolutely fantastic woman, we’re together today. And she’s been everything and more to me. There’s not enough I can say.

JONES: Well, she is a fine woman, and she is an achiever, 52:00 herself.

MULLINS: Tremendous achiever.

JONES: So, she graduated then from Alice Lloyd College, many years later.

MULLINS: Well, after we got up to graduate school, she got a job with a bank over in Covington, as a bookkeeper. And I finished my masters in eleven months.

JONES: Really?

MULLINS: Yes, I did a masters in eleven months. The day I finished my masters, I had my U-haul filled and we headed home. We got back and we moved in with my parents, which was probably the roughest time, one of the roughest times we had. And I substituted. I wanted to get a job teaching in the Floyd County school system, but I didn’t have a certificate. But I had a Masters, so I was a substitute teacher. And they said they couldn’t hire me, but my politics weren’t right. They hired, that year, like twelve or fourteen people who didn’t have certificates that year. But I wasn’t one of them, you know, 53:00I wasn’t one of them. And then I heard about this job over at Alice Lloyd College. Word came that there was a job over there. Some fellow that worked over there from the community said I might want to look into it. So, I drove over there and applied for a job as campus director of the Appalachian Oral History Project. Fellow named Bill Weinberg, hippy looking fellow.

JONES: Had he created that thing?

MULLINS: Yeah, yeah, he had written the proposals and helped get that. And I just ended up, you know they went through a process of interviewing. In about October of seventy-two, they hired me in as campus director. And then immediately also put me into teaching and a little bit of everything. I was hired in....What we did was we were collecting oral history interviews with folks throughout eastern Kentucky there. 54:00And I had several students working for me in the summer, then transcribing as work-study during the regular academic year. And then I taught. First thing he told me, said next semester you are going to be teaching Appalachian history. I said, “I’ve never had any Appalachian History.” I only had one Appalachian studies course in my life. He said, “nobody else has, I have the outline, I’ve taught it, here it is, get ready. You are teaching it next semester.” Said, “nobody knows it, you’ve got to start sometime.” And that’s the way I started. So, next semester I taught Appalachian history. And I also taught a sociology course later on. And I taught, what you call a social problems course. I taught and I also ran this oral, but mostly administration. Working with....It was an exciting time to be at Alice Lloyd. They had the Appalachian Learning Laboratory. We had the magazine. We had a summer theater. We had the Appalachian Heritage magazine. We had a summer theater. We had this whole course of study. We had 55:00visiting groups through a thing called the Appalachian term. It was just, and this oral history project. We had a theater, I don’t know if I mentioned, a summer theater. All these things going on. It was just absolutely, just a mind-boggling opportunity. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

JONES: Well, that’s great. Of course, I knew a little bit about that.

MULLINS: Well, it was, you know we were right on the cutting edge relating to Appalachian studies at that time. I attended the first meeting, well that began the Appalachian Studies Association here at Berea College. I think it is what seventy-seven, seventy-eight or something like that?

JONES: I guess.

MULLINS: Something like that, over in the Oak Room. But we were doing it, we were creating it and had no idea that we were on the cutting-edge, because we were just doing it, you know. And I did that for five years. I did that for five years. And those were wonderful years, too. 56:00Bill Weinberg, you asked me the greatest teacher I ever had. Bill Weinberg was the greatest teacher I ever had.

JONES: Okay.

MULLINS: And you know why?

JONES: How did he...yeah, go ahead.

MULLINS: Well, the reason why was, buddy, you had to either sink or swim with him. He put me out there doing it and if it was done wrong, he would tell me, and I’d have to re-do it. I mean, I learned how to write and how to do proposals, just so much. Administration, just dealing with every, all kinds of issues and so forth.

JONES: Maybe on this tape we, say just a little bit about your children, you know, when they were born and what they are up to now.

MULLINS: Well, we need at least two tapes for that. I have three children, two that were born to Frieda and I, and my older daughter, 57:00Brenda is a niece that we adopted when she was eight years old. Brenda graduated from Alice Lloyd College with honors, ended up getting a job with the Social Security Administration. She is twenty-six years of age. Into her second marriage, lives now in Fayetteville, North Carolina working for Social Security Administration. Very beautiful, very intelligent young lady, who came to us late. Raising her was a challenge to say the least. My daughter, Cassie, is twenty-two years old. Cassie was our first natural born child. Always has been an, just an exceptional student, and an exceptional young lady. My children all went to the 58:00June Buchannan School, a private....They went in early years to the public school, but later on all of them ended up at the June Buchanan school, a small, private school at Alice Lloyd College. Cassie graduated with like a 3.9 something average from June Buchanan, was all everything at the school. Chosen as the June Buchanan student for her class, which goes on a plaque, which is the biggest award they give. And she chose to attend Georgetown College, where she just graduated this past May, Magna Cum Laude, with a double major in Spanish and communications, and a minor in political science. In about three weeks from now, she will enter the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky, with a tuition scholarship. 59:00So, she is going to go there. Cassie, out of two hundred and thirty-four graduating seniors from Georgetown College, she was one of....They chose a male and a female student leader, by their peers. And she was chosen as the female, I think more of it based on the fact that she was the editor of the school newspaper, in which she really did some unbelievable things as editor, that they all appreciated. Nathan is my youngest. He is nineteen. Nathan is, Cassie is the hardest working young’un that I have. Nathan is the most gifted young’un that I have. I mean, Nathan is truly gifted, he has been. You just have to be around him. He has a mind that is unbelievable. He graduated valedictorian from June Buchanan School, 60:00was very active in sports. He started point guard for the, at five eight or five nine for two and a half years. Just has a tremendous competitive spirit. Received several good offers of scholarships from Centre, Kentucky Wesleyan, and Georgetown. The last place we thought he’d ever go would be Georgetown, because his sister is there, but he chose Georgetown also. He and his sister were there together for a year, and it was probably to be considered, probably the greatest year that those two had ever had. They are extremely close, just unbelievable close. And Nathan is a pre-med major. He wants to be a doctor. He had a 3.6 average his freshman year. And he told me that he is starting to get the hang of it though, getting a feel for the 61:00classes. He’s never been challenged, and he is being challenged now. Nathan, the turning point in his life was in nineteen ninety-seven, when he was a Governor’s Scholar. And when he spent a year in that program it really changed his life. This past summer he was a staff member for the Governor’s Scholar program at Northern Kentucky University and really enjoyed it. So, my children are doing well. They are good young’uns. All of them are Christian young’uns. They are all part of the Hindman United Methodist Church. And sometime, we need to talk about that, I guess, in this interview, about my affiliation with that.

JONES: With the church, okay. Say just a bit about Frieda and what she’s done. You’ve got about five minutes there on that tape.

MULLINS: Well, my wife, Frieda, after we went over to Alice Lloyd College, she had not finished. She had only finished about a year 62:00here at Berea College. So, once we got over there, we needed to make sure....Well, she started looking for a job immediately and after a while she got a job there at Alice Lloyd. But in the meantime, she took some classes there also. It was only a two-year college at that time, so she was limited to what she could get. And so, she worked part time and she took classes. And then when we left Alice Lloyd College after five years, when we moved over to the settlement school. She worked for H&R Block. But oh, a couple of years, three after we got over to Hindman, we went into the newspaper business. Ron Dailey 63:00and his wife, Amy and Frieda and I, started a local newspaper called, The Troublesome Creek Times. And Frieda worked as the bookkeeper. She had taken vocational school courses in bookkeeping also. And she had worked for H&R Block doing taxes, so she had a very good knowledge of that. So she ended up being the proof reader, layout design, photographer, book..

END OF TAPE 1, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE B BBEGINNING OF TAPE 2, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE A JONES: She’s running. You and I both had our problems with some of the missionary attitudes at Berea, at Hindman, at Pine Mountain Settlement School and everywhere else. Would you comment a little bit about the missionary era and all the wonderful things it did, but also some of the problems that it caused in relation to Appalachian people, mainly in sometimes condescension toward Appalachian people, and making Appalachian people feel somehow unworthy 64:00unless they were uplifted.

MULLINS: Well, I think that there were a lot of well-meaning folks, who came in around the turn of the century, who felt like mountain people needed to be saved from themselves to a certain extent. I think there is a definite difference between the settlement schools and the mission schools though, because the mission schools had, while they were, came about to educate and do uplifting, they also wanted to make good Presbyterians or Methodists or so forth, out of people. And while the settlement schools were basically there to provide for needs ir-regardless of religion and politics and so forth. So, you have two different schools of thoughts and a lot of times they are just lumped together. 65:00But one of the things I think that you have seen that has happened with the missionaries is that I do believe that sometimes they picked and chose what they thought was important. And they tried to change some things that they thought should be changed. Well, I guess I would have to agree, sometimes I even guess I agree with Whisnot(*) in relationship to that, because I think that the music of the mountains and the crafts and so forth, was a very artistic part of the culture. But I think that sometimes what was presented to the nation as a whole by these missionaries was done in a way that I think took away from the originality in many ways. I just think that sometimes they exploited that in a way that made the 66:00mountain folks become so romantic, you know. They romanticized the area to the point that sometimes these folks out in the rest of the country saw these little, quaint cabins and all this. This sort of romantic lifestyle, when these folks were eking out an existence in those early years. My father, I talked to him, one time, I said, “daddy, how was it like to grow up on a hillside farm?” He said, “Mike,” he said, “you know, it was, we just barely existed. We had a big family, we had to go back and clear these new grounds, we had to raise corn. We had to do all this. And it took every one of us, working from daylight until dark, every day, just so we could put food on the table.” JONES: Some of the coal mine companies or the coal camp, which a lot of politically oriented people today said was a bad thing and exploited 67:00and all that, was to some people a step up in the world.

MULLINS: Well, you know, Mr. Still’s book, James Still’s book, River of Earth, you see that move from the farm to the coal camp. But let me tell you something. The minute my daddy had a chance to get a job at the mines, where he could get a steady wage and bring in money, so that he could have a family and so forth, he jumped on it. Because you could not exist in eastern Kentucky on those hillside farms. It just wasn’t, I mean the land was worn out. I mean after generations of farming and so forth, and the steepness of it. And so there was tremendous amount of exploitation of the mountain folks by the mining industry, and it continues today. But it was like my father said, he said, “let me tell you something, I’d rather have given my, and even though I’ve got black lung and I got injured two or three times, I wouldn’t change it.” 68:00He said, “it gave me an opportunity to raise a family, and to buy a home and to put food on the table and have a car and send my kids to school. And I know that they took advantage of me,” but he said, “it was the best that I could do. I never had any education, you know.” But he said, “you know the minute that they couldn’t make no money, they threw you on the scrap heap, you know, you were expendable.” JONES: Yeah, well that’s true. How do you think the missionary era maybe taught us something about how to do current projects?

MULLINS: Well, I think the thing about, I think the CDI project that I’ve talked about, the Community Development Initiative, is a good example of what can be done now, as opposed to the missionary sort of approach. And that is, that in order for the area to be built up, I think the leadership and the stimulus, and the commitment has to come from within. I no longer think that it can come from 69:00outside to save us. I think if we are going to improve the region that we live in, I think it has to be the native-born leader and we need the support of the outside. I’m not saying that. We need those resources and so forth, but no longer are we a missionary field. We’ve had our fill of them, of the missionaries. I think they served a certain role there. But they had a limited view and their missions changed. And when that mission changed, they abandon the region like everybody else. You know and I know, the Appalachian region and eastern Kentucky has been discovered at different times for different purposes. But for the most part, it has never been discovered for the right reason. It’s been mostly for the exploitation on a lot of different levels, everything from the culture to the religion, to the mineral resources and so forth. You can just look at it, up and down. But to try to say, you know we’ve got this new initiative by [President Bill] Clinton. I went to listen to him 70:00a couple of three weeks ago. And I am going to a big summit up in Ashland next week or two weeks, this new markets approach. Well, if the new markets approach is just a continuation of smokestack chasing, then it isn’t going happen. What we’ve got to have is absolutely investment in the people. The most important investment are [is] in the people, educationally and the development of indigenous sort of jobs and so forth that people will make the commitment to be there. We don’t want to become; I mean what are we going to become? The Third World part of the United States for the sweat shop technological workers, is what you are going to be.

JONES: Well, as Ray Marshall has said, “if we try to compete for the lowest wages, we are going to lose out to all kinds of Third World countries.” And I think in a way, Bill Bishop, who is leaving us now, by the way...

MULLINS: Yeah, I read it. 71:00JONES: He’s had his problems with the governor with one thing and another. But I think, in general we will miss him, you know, because he does raise some...

MULLINS: Yeah, I believe that, while I think we have to have several approaches to the development of the region. But I think the major approach that has to be done is the empowerment, the educating and the funding of local projects and people. Because I don’t think that the major initiatives are going to come from outside. I don’t think it is ever going to happen.

JONES: I agree. Okay. If you’ll say just something on the very fact that in a country where one in four children are in poverty, I mean one in five. It is one in four in eastern Kentucky. What kind of short sightedness is this, that we allow children to...

MULLINS: Well, you know, in our infinite, in our infinite wisdom 72:00in this nation, we have a major welfare reform program, which has taken millions off the welfare roll. And to a certain extent, many of those people needed to be off, but what we are getting down to now are the people who are going to start suffering. And that is going to be single women with children, one parent families, mostly women and children. And we have an inordinate proportion of those sort of folks in eastern Kentucky without any kind of educational skills or anything.

JONES: And no jobs there.

MULLINS: And no opportunity to better themselves. So, what are we going to do? Are we going to abandon those women and those children? Are we going to let them starve? Are we just going to throw them on a heap and let them, and just let them go away? Well, I don’t think so. I think this nation has more compassion than that, 73:00but what I keep coming back to, is that in eastern Kentucky, where I grew up, here we have one of the richest parts of the world, coal, oil, gas, all kinds of wealth there. But the people of the mountains have never benefited from that wealth. It is time that we started benefiting from the wealth. It is time for these multi-national corporations which have taken so much, they need to invest more in our region. They need to give something back. If Clinton wants to do new markets, he needs to figure out a way of putting the arm on them, to say look folks, it’s time for you folks to put up. It is time for you to start helping build, helping with the schools, and helping with the environmental controls and so forth. Because they are the ones who destroyed the region, and they should have to pay for it.

JONES: But they are the very ones that are removing themselves from the region. 74:00MULLINS: Oh, at an alarming pace, too.

JONES: How do you say, well you’ve already mentioned it, but how do you differ in philosophy and outlet from most of the directors of non-profits in the state, would you say?

MULLINS: How do I differ? Well, I believe, I don’t know if I differ that much from a lot of them. I know other folks. I do believe that you need to use what abilities and talents and contacts that you can develop. I guess I may be more political than some of the others. I also believe that you have to dig in. I think that if you want to have an impact, you need to dig in, you can’t just flip from here to there. You need, because it is over the long haul that you are going to make the difference. 75:00Because things, the major problems that have developed, took a while to develop. And if you are going to have any impact, you have to get in there and spend the time to bring about that change. Also, I think it is important that you be willing to accept the fact that, I guess that financially, you are not going to be on top of the earth. I mean, you are going to have to live within your means and you are constantly having to deal with that sort of thing. And I think if I am, as President Shin says, a social entrepreneur, I guess that’s where it comes from, I’ve been willing to....The work is so satisfying, and what I do, I’m so compassionate and committed to, that it is worth the other things that 76:00maybe I could have made in corporate America, you know. But I think it is a commitment, it comes down to commitment. What do you want to be? And I’ve never been ambitious in a sense of titles or this or that. My ambition hopefully is laid in the fact that doing a good job and of contributing, rather than taking.

JONES: A lot of the people who have come in and worked for non-profits have gone onward and upward and are no longer in the region and are doing well elsewhere.

MULLINS: That’s right. I didn’t, I don’t see it as a steppingstone. I had, when I graduated, when I left Alice Lloyd College to come to Hindman, I had, it was within my grasp, a major fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. Bob F(), the head of that program had spent the night in my house, had interviewed me about applying for a fellowship over a three year period to work on, 77:00at thirty thousand dollars a year, to work on my Ph.D. So, when I took the job at Hindman, I took it realizing that I had another way of going. I could have gone another way. And some people have asked me, well why did you do that? Or why in the years did you not move on to these other jobs? I’ve been offered other jobs, I’ve been recruited for other jobs. But I’ve never, in looking, and I’ve looked at them as you well know. But I’ve never even felt at any time that the job, that anything I was going to would be more important than what I as doing, and that I would probably have as much impact at that place, as where I am at now. So, I made a conscious decision many, many times, that this is where I probably have the greatest impact. And I also have this sort of flippant statement about going back to college or graduate school, is that I didn’t want to interrupt my education by going back to school. 78:00JONES: Well, why aren’t there more people like you? It seems to me I used to know, when I was still Council of Southern Mountains, people would call and they needed somebody for this and that and the other, and it seemed I knew lots of people. And today I don’t know, of course part of it is because I’m out of it, but...

MULLINS: They’re not out there, Loyal.

JONES: They’re not out there anymore it seems to me. Why is that?

MULLINS: Well, this may be simplistic, but I do believe that in the sixties and early seventies, there was an atmosphere of giving, there was an atmosphere of volunteerism, there was an atmosphere in this country of wanting to give back, of being involved, an idealism, and a populism that influenced a generation there. And then we moved away from that now. I mean everybody is wanting to be a damn, conservative Republican now, you know.

JONES: This is a very selfish 79:00age, wouldn’t you say?

MULLINS: Self-centered, it’s no longer, it used to be....I like to tell people that I feel sorry for folks who didn’t have an opportunity to be part of the sixties. As crazy as it was, it was the most caring, compassionate period of time in the history of the United States, in my opinion. And then out of that came people who were committing to service, people...and we’ve lost that mentality, you know, we’ve lost that service attitude. We think it’s all--has to be for us. It is a me, me, me, no longer we, it’s a me attitude. And then you have administrations like Reagan come in, who trickle down, it never trickled down. And then you just ignored the fact that people were doing without, you know. It is easy to forget the poor and forget those who don’t have it. And if they do, it’s their fault, you know, it’s their fault because they are not making it. It’s an attitudinal thing, I think. And so, I’m 80:00just like you, I’ve been looking for somebody to come and work with me now for several months, and it’s been almost impossible to find anybody.

JONES: Are you going to get Sam?

MULLINS: It looks like he is the best prospect right now.

JONES: Well, okay, he looked pretty good, I think.

MULLINS: And you know, I just hope I don’t bomb out. I spent another day with him and his wife the other day. I just really need them. And then I’m having him back for a whole day of interviews.

JONES: Well, there are few people like him. But I, it seems to me that there are not a lot anymore. What’s the greatest threat, do you think, to the Appalachian culture and way of life?

MULLINS: I guess it’s the same things that were the greatest threat from the very beginning, and that is I think, we all want better for our children, and 81:00in the process of wanting better for our children, we sometimes do not pass on to them the things that have made the Appalachian culture unique. We’ve worked ourselves, we’ve become so, we don’t want them to work as hard. We want them to have a better education. We want them to have all these experiences and, in the process, we don’t give them an opportunity to experience a lot of the things that have made the culture of the region the beautiful thing that it is. And I’m talking about the music, I’m talking about the literature, I’m talking about just the whole thing. I mean, I told Frieda the other day, I said, I’ve been a failure to my kids. And she looked at me and said, “you’ve been a good daddy.” I said, “Frieda, my son doesn’t know how to raise a garden. My daddy taught me how to raise a garden. I can raise a garden. And I’m proud of raising a garden. 82:00My daughters don’t know how to cook worth a diddly squat.” I said, “you’ve failed them, they don’t know how to cook.” I said, “we, there are things,” I said, “there are things that we have failed our children about.” And you know, I have one daughter, Cassie has an appreciation for a lot of these things. Nathan has no appreciation for, none of, lot of things.

JONES: It’s part of that generation, the new generation and everything.

MULLINS: But I think it, that’s to me, I think it’s just assimilation, it’s a constant bombardment by all these outside forces, you know. That’s a simplistic answer, but I do believe...

JONES: My son-in-law, Susan’s husband, said the other day, we were partly talking about that World War Two generation that [Tom] Brokaw and Steven Ambrose had written about. And he said, you know I don’t believe the generations after the Great Depression, you know, will ever be like those people, you know, 83:00because they went through so much and they learned so much, and life has been too easy for everybody else.

MULLINS: And that’s the thing, we’ve made it too easy for our kids. We’ve not expected much from our kids, you know. And as a result, that is what they give us. If you don’t expect much. And I see, and I’ve got absolutely, unbelievably good young’uns, okay? I couldn’t be more proud of them than anything, but on the other hand, I know that there has been a lot lost between, from my father to me and to mine, a lot relating to the region has been lost.

JONES: Yeah.

MULLINS: And I’m a person who treasures it and who would have loved to have seen it carried on, and I’ve not been able to do it.

JONES: Well, what needs to be changed about Appalachian people? We romanticize about Appalachian people, but there is a whole lot, as you implied, out there that wasn’t good. And mountain people, well 84:00mountain people have done everything that anybody else has done, but there are some out there that are not doing too well. What needs to be changed?

MULLINS: Well, I think there needs to be tremendous changes in the political systems in the region. I think that would, because I’ve divided up the politicos of these counties into two categories, there’s the one group who’s whole being is to get in control so that they can take care of their own, no matter how incompetent and inept and so forth, and basically raid the county treasurers and so forth, to get everything they can while they are in there. And then there’s another group that is slowly emerging and sometimes have had the sway in these counties, where they’re there for the public good. And when those folks are there, they are trying to build up infrastructure. They are trying to build up civic capital. They’re trying to provide for jobs. They’re trying to inspire a better educational system. 85:00And so I think you have those two things going on, and we need to do away with this political crony-ism and all this nepotism and all of this stuff that says....And I think that has really hurt us tremendously, I think. That’s one of the major things.

JONES: But if you compare that to campaign financing at the national level...

MULLINS: National level...

JONES: .....you know...it’s..

MULLINS: It’s not...

JONES: It’s not as bad....

MULLINS: It’s not an isolated thing, [Laughter - Jones] but how remarkable is it in these counties when you have an enlightened leader in charge, who tries...I mean we now have, it’s almost a given now, every county has a solid waste pick up, which ten years ago, was unheard of. But we’ve had some enlightened leaders, who said we are going to do this, you know. I mean, there are just small things. And I think the other thing, 86:00you know, we need to develop the ability to work together, whether we like each other or not. Now, that is a key thing. We are so person oriented, as you point out in your book, Appalachian Values, that it stifles our ability to even come together on anything, Loyal. We’d rather, I mean if somebody insults you, that’s it. Hell, they’ll hate you for the next hundred years. Well, we have to work around that, we’ve got to be able to look across the table at people totally, who you have nothing in common, who you’ve been politically against and all this, and you need to sit down and say, no matter what our differences are, this is what needs to be done for the betterment of our community. We need to develop that ability.

JONES: That Eastern Kentucky Leadership [Conference] has done that to....

MULLINS: That’s helped to a certain extent, and we are working on that, but we’ve got a long way to go, long way to go. And we’ve got to be able, we’ve got to support each other. I mean gosh, we’ve got to quit cutting each other down. 87:00I mean, we have a basic attitude of getting above our raising, that doesn’t mean, what that means, like Grady Stumbo says, “well, you know, I could have been governor, if so many people in eastern Kentucky hadn’t figured out I was getting above my raising.” [Laughter - Jones] And they want to show you, that they could just cut you down. They’d rather cut you off at the knees, because....It’s just like my daddy, he worked in the mines all those years, and he was working with all these men. Well, he got his foreman papers. For fifteen years, they begged him to be a foreman, but he didn’t want to be over those men, you know, but he was the best one. And finally, he became a foreman, you know, he finally did, because he was good at it, and he was knowledgeable. He knew how to do the job. But for years, and years, and years and years he wouldn’t do it. I mean, we’re all, like everybody, about our own worst enemy. But you know, this whole thing of holding grudges, administratively, if I didn’t change my attitude in the way I was brought 88:00up, I couldn’t be an effective administrator for Hindman Settlement School. I’ve got to be able to take some shots and move on. I’ve got to be able to deal with some people and move on. If I don’t, it’s going to eat me up and I’m going to become totally ineffective, you know? I have got to do away with some of the ways that I was brought up with, you know, get even no matter what, no matter what. And it’s been hard, it hasn’t been easy, you know.

JONES: Yeah, and I think that is good. And I’ve seen that in you, working with Paul Patton and strip mining on Eastern Kentucky Leadership.

MULLINS: Some people say I’ve compromised to the point to where I am part of the establishment. I don’t know, if I’m part of the establishment, it took me thirty years to do it. I mean it’s just that I’ve been out there in the field for so long, 89:00that what happened I think, some things came together and for a brief period of time, and it may already be over with, as far as I know, I had a chance to be in a place where I could make a difference, you see. And I appreciate that opportunity.

JONES: That’s great. Well, I think this is probably a good stopping point. I’ve had a good time talking with you today.

MULLINS: Well, I appreciate you taking all this time.

JONES: Well, I hope there will be a lot of stuff in there that will be useful to people. So, we may need to ask you a few more questions along the way, but thank you very much.

MULLINS: Thank you.

END OF TAPE 2, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE A [END OF TAPE 2]BEGINNING OF TAPE 3, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE A JONES: Continuing interview with Mike Mullins, this is Loyal Jones, and this is August the second, nineteen ninety-nine and we are in Berea, Kentucky. Go ahead.

MULLINS: As I was saying, after five years of working at the Troublesome Creek Times, Frieda 90:00and I sold out to Ron and Amy. The main reason being is that Frieda was not satisfied working at the newspaper and just a variety of things. So, we decided that we would take the monies that we got from the sale of the newspaper, and we would use that, and she would go back to school. So, I guess Frieda was in about her mid-thirties, thirty-four, thirty-three, thirty-four, in that age. She went back to Alice Lloyd College. By that time, Alice Lloyd College had become a four-year institution, so she decide[ed] to go back and pursue her teaching degree at Alice Lloyd. So, here I was running the settlement school, we had small children and Frieda was taking a full load, was taking a sometimes sixteen, eighteen hours. One time she took twenty hours, I think, in a semester. And of course, she took to it, like 91:00a duck to water. I mean, honestly it was the most satisfying time, because you could see that she had found what she really wanted to do. So, she got her undergraduate degree, finished it in two years and then did her student teaching in the next year’s first semester. And then immediately after she got out of Alice Lloyd and got her teaching certificate and her degree. In January she was hired by the public school system of Knott County in the Title I program, working and reading. Also, immediately she began working on her masters at Morehead State University. She started taking night classes. And then she went, she spent one entire summer at Morehead, and she took, she was taking two and three classes a week of a night on her masters, working on a Masters in Reading. 92:00She finished that within, in two years of going to summer school and night, two to three years, she finished her masters. And then that wasn’t enough, she then started working on her Rank I in the area of supervision and administration, and that’s forty hours or fifty hours beyond the masters. And over, I don’t know a three-to-four-year period, and all this time she had moved from the Title I Program into teaching basically first grade and was going to school and taking all of these graduate classes. But she finished her Rank I in Supervision, which provided for her to be elementary school principal or superintendent. But then the school reform was coming in, where she had been working in the lower grades, she took an interest in the primary program 93:00and was chosen as one of the, of a group of teachers to work on the primary program for the state of Kentucky. And really developed a statewide reputation and expertise on the primary program, which she is a very big proponent of and feels that it was absolutely one of the best parts of school reform. But which was never implemented in the right way. So, she as a result of having that expertise, she was recruited by the Region Eight Service Center to be their primary consultant for a year. And she served in that capacity, and she traveled the entire state and all-over eastern Kentucky. But the travel was so intense that it was absolutely, with her traveling and me traveling, it became an absolute, almost nightmare of trying to deal with the children’s schedule 94:00and all the activities. And after a year, she resigned from that and went back into the primary classroom, and became a primary, teaching primary in an elementary school. But then she finished up her credentials to be a principal and she was hired as an assistant principal at Carr Creek Elementary for about three months. And then a principal position opened up at Jones Fork Elementary and the site-based council chose her as the new principal. And she is going on her fifth year as principal at Jones Fork. The thing about Frieda is, that she is, just doing the regular principal’s job has not been all she’s done. She’s become, her school is one of the Annenberg Rural Challenge Grant schools. Her school is also one of the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative Schools. She’s brought 95:00in thousands and thousands of dollars to her school for a lot of other additional things. And just this past week, she was one of two principals that put on a region-wide Principal’s Institute at Gatlinburg for about fifty principals that she spent the entire year working on. So, she’s stepped out of the box, did a lot of other things in that area. Right now, she has applied for a position as supervisory instructor in the Central Office in Knott County, and waiting to hear from, whether she is going to be the new supervisor in Knott County. Don’t know if she will get it or not. I doubt if she is the most qualified, but that don’t mean diddly squat. [Laughter - Jones] JONES: Well, that’s good. We better move along here. When did you hear about the Hindman Settlement School and getting interested in it? 96:00MULLINS: Well, when I was at Alice Lloyd College, I ran a program called the Appalachian Term. And the Appalachian Term is where we had individual students, as well as, groups would come to visit the region and we developed programs for them, anywhere from a week to two weeks in length. And then we had students who would come there to take our Appalachian curriculum, individual students. One of the things we did when we were doing these groups occasionally, was we traveled around to different places. We’d go over and see Eula Hall, Joe Begley, over to his store, Eula Hall with her health clinic. We’d visit mines. And then one of the things we’d do, we’d visit the Hindman Settlement School. And we’d go over there and there’d sit this institution that I’d heard about, knew a little bit about, but I didn’t know much about. And there was this beautiful piece of property, you could tell it was sort of getting moldy and mildew. And we’d go there, and we’d visit. 97:00And I don’t know, something just in my head said, “boy this place has some potential.” Well, I got that in my mind, after about four years at Alice Lloyd and Bill Weinberg, who had hired me there had moved on. He was a lawyer and he had gone back into practicing law. I’d taken over all the Appalachian emphasis programs and the oral history project. And I’d hired my former roommate, Ron Dailey, to come in and take my job. But I don’t know, there were things going on, I felt a restlessness, I think, to be where I thought I could have more of an impact. I got this idea of maybe one day the Hindman Settlement School position would be open. So, I, the chairman of the board at that time was Mrs. Ann Weatherford, the president’s wife--of Berea College. Now, I graduated from Berea College, President Weatherford was here at that time. I can never remember 98:00ever speaking or ever meeting or having any interaction whatsoever with Mrs. Ann Weatherford. None whatsoever.

JONES: Really?

MULLINS: Never. I probably did when as a freshman, we went and had their picnic and you walk through a line and that was it. I can’t remember anything other than that. So, I, it was in like January of nineteen and seventy-seven, I was coming through here for a reason and I’d called Mrs. Weatherford to ask if I could meet with her about a matter. She was very gracious. I went to her house. I remember she came to the door, I went in. That was the first time we’d officially ever met. And I said to her, I said, “well you may think this is presumptuous and so forth, but you know I live there in Knott County, and I’ve been visiting the settlement school over the years, taking groups. You know, if something were to become available there, I would like to know. I have an 99:00interest in that institution.” We had a pleasant conversation. I never had any idea anything was going to happen. I went off on my merry way. I was having a wonderful time at Alice Lloyd. We were getting ready to get a new president. I was involved in that process, very much involved in that process. And thought I had a future there. But I just did this, I don’t know, it was just something that said in me to check on it. In about April of that year, March, or April, I get a little short note from Mrs. Weatherford, saying that the director over there, Lionel Duff, had told them at their recent board meeting that he was going to resign. And that he wanted them to have someone on board as soon as they could find someone, and that the application process was beginning. So, I talked it over with Frieda. 100:00We talked about it, here I was head of this program, and I was doing good. I mean, because I thought this would be something later on, you know, I didn’t see it coming in two or three. I wasn’t ready to leave or even think about it, big decision for me to even apply. But I decided well, I ought to look into it. So, I applied. And you know, several people applied, a bunch of applications. And it came down to, I think about three or four applications, and I was still in the hunt, you know. And then they called me in for an interview up at Lexington. And I went in and was interviewed. The other person was being considered, it came down to two of us, and one was a nephew of Jean Ritchie, the ballad singer, who was on the board. She excused herself 101:00from any of the discussion, totally professional in her dealings with it. And it is my understanding that it finally came down to, they voted. They had a vote on which one to hire. And I think the vote was seven to five, that is my understanding. And so, I was offered the job. Now I didn’t immediately take the job. I had to think about it. I went to the president at Alice Lloyd College at that time and told him, this was in about September, I guess...

JONES: Who was the President then?

MULLINS: Jerry Davis.

JONES: Davis.

MULLINS: He had just come in; I mean this was like August and he had just come in. He and I, we were close at that time. He was like in my office every morning talking with me, but you know 102:00and then I mentioned this opportunity. And you know he never said anything like, well you know, I really want you to stay here, I think there’s a future for you here and stuff. And I can remember that, and it sort of said to me, maybe I don’t have a future here, you know, maybe I don’t. And it turned out I wouldn’t have, based on his philosophy. So, I agreed to take the job and they told the folks over there that I was going to get the job. And I think it is historically correct to say that some folks were not pleased with the idea that they were hiring somebody from Alice Lloyd to run Hindman Settlement School, because there had been some major animosities between the institutions in early years. And there was a feeling that maybe I was just a stalking horse for Alice Lloyd, and that they would just end up taking it over. The word was spread 103:00that, that would happen, you know, that, that would happen. They didn’t know who I was. Even Miss Watts, I think, was very upset that they chose me, Miss Elizabeth Watts.

JONES: Who was the, who was your competition? Was that Chris Kermit?

MULLINS: Yes.

JONES: Yeah, okay.

MULLINS: He was a nice fellow. I met him, you know.

JONES: But completely from somewhere else, and completely into folk...

MULLINS: Yeah, he was, he lived out in Colorado, he grew up out there. But he would have taken it, I think, in a totally different direction. So, I can remember going over and meeting the staff and meeting the director and his wife. The director’s wife over there at that time, Mrs. Duff, was absolutely distraught that I was hired, based on what some staff members have told me.

JONES: Did she know anything about you? 104:00MULLINS: Knew nothing about me.

JONES: Just because of the Alice Lloyd...?

MULLINS: Alice Lloyd, they had pretty much lined up another person they wanted to get the job and it didn’t work out. They had their own pick, you see. But she had told staff that when I came in, I would bring my own secretary, that I’d fire people, I’d do all these things, you know. I moved on campus in October of seventy-seven. I was asked to move on campus at that time. I didn’t take over officially, I actually was running the place, but I didn’t take over officially until December the first. When basically I moved on the campus, the past director and his wife moved off. They moved off. They moved out as I was moving in, you know. So, I was officially there from about mid-October. I was running the place, but I didn’t officially take over his contract and stuff didn’t end 105:00until December the first.

JONES: Well, how did Lionel feel? Or did he say?

MULLINS: It’s hard to say. I never got any feeling that he....I think Lionel had wanted to leave earlier. He was a retired schoolteacher from over at Decoy. He spent about seven years there. I think he; I think it was his wife who really wanted to stay. I think he wanted out of it earlier. It is my understanding he’d retired, and they gave him this full time job and he didn’t want a full time job, you know. And the place had showed that too, I mean just to be real honest with you. And he was being pushed by the Board to do various things. He also had some personnel problems there I think, on campus with some folks. But he’d already worked thirty some years as a teacher out in one of the isolated schools. 106:00JONES: And they were very good teachers out there.

MULLINS: They were unbelievable teachers from what I can hear. I think they were just fantastic. So, I came on campus, and I was twenty-nine years old. I had an eight-month-old daughter, Cassie had been born and Frieda and I came there. Honestly, I’d have to say, if I had known what I was getting into, if I’d known what shape that campus was in and so forth, I doubt if I would have taken the job, because it was in pretty terrible shape.

JONES: The campus hadn’t been maintained?

MULLINS: No, the grounds, buildings, everything. The first thing that I hit when I came there, Loyal, was, and there was this little, freckled faced youngster, who was the secretary, named Rebecca Ware, who was convinced that the day I came in, she would 107:00be fired. And I’ve been there, what now, twenty-two years and she is still there. So, I took care of that sort of concern. There wasn’t much program[ming]. They had a small day care, Kindergarten thing going on. They had a weaving program. There wasn’t much...

JONES: Were they doing...

MULLINS: And they had a music and an art teacher going around.

JONES: Music and arts in the schools.

MULLINS: And that was about it. The place was pretty much at low ebb.

JONES: Now, did they allow other groups to meet there?

MULLINS: No, there was none of that going on. I mean, I guess, I don’t want this used for, let’s just say that it was made clear to some folks who even....I was told that some, a person who stopped there to just take some photographs at one time, 108:00was asked literally, to take some photographs of Uncle Sol’s cabin, was literally asked to leave the campus, that, that was private property and they didn’t want people over there wandering around. They weren’t welcome, okay? Plus, they had a few students when I came there, just a few. Four or five that were staying there in the dorm area.

JONES: And going to the public school?

MULLINS: Going to the public school. So, I came in and there were tremendous physical plant problems. I remember Rebecca handed me an envelope, she said, I got this out of the trash can and put it in a folder. I asked for records of the personnel. I asked to see the records and ( ) of the previous administration. There was none. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, not one file. Okay? In that one file that she gave me, there was a letter from the state fire marshal saying we have sent numerous letters asking you to 109:00indicate when you are going to take care of all of these different things that need to be taken care of and never responded to them. This was shortly after the catastrophe at Beverly Hills [Supper Club fire], where all those people were killed. And they were just over everything. And so that was my introduction. I was handed that. Water leaks, this is seventy-seven, seventy-eight, Loyal, there were t-shirts people wore, “I survived the Winter of 77-78”. Well, I just barely survived the Winter of 77-78. When I got there, it started snowing in December. There was snow and blizzard-like conditions all the way to almost the first of April. Pipes froze and burst. I had, in the dorm area, one froze and burst and there were six inches of water and ice in the dorm of the May Stone. Out on the campus, you could, 110:00I mean it looked like Yellowstone National Park, water shooting up out of these pipes and nobody fixing them. Maintenance man came to work at ten and went home at two, I think, you know. That was his day, you know. All of these problems, people, water freezing up in their apartments, windows, if you had a rain, water would come down and go through the windows. They had cups sitting along the ledges to catch all the water. The electrical wiring was absolutely atrocious. You had one service entrance out on a pole for five buildings. And all of these wires when they hit together sent an overload. I had seen the conduit so hot in the kitchen of the settlement there, that I had to go out and throw that to let it cool off, because it was sending such an overload into there. I mean, it was absolutely a nightmare. The pipes froze and burst in the ground. Had to bring in backhoes with weather, zero degrees. I mean I was literally in the water up to my knees 111:00with boots and so forth, it went over them sometimes, in ditches helping to fix water lines with folks I hired to come in to help me do it. Had buildings that were heated by water, you know, big boilers and so forth. And we had to keep them, or these buildings were going to be destroyed. It was a nightmare, that’s the only I can, just an absolute nightmare. As I say, if I’d known what I was getting into....I knew nothing about a physical plant, okay? I mean I can’t hammer in a nail, but boy I started learning real fast. So, that was my introduction. In November of that, right before I took over, they celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hindman Settlement School. Now, there was [were] about forty or fifty people there. And at that time, I was introduced, and I will never forget this, because Mrs. Weatherford introduced me, 112:00and Miss Elizabeth Watts was there. And I need to mention the fact that Miss Watts had been, come there in nineteen and nine, spend a year, and stayed there until retirement in nineteen fifty-six. She had served in every capacity at that institution. She served on the board until she was ninety-seven years of age. And she was sitting there, and I was going up to takeover the mantle, I was taking the job that she knew so much about, you know.

JONES: She was then living in Berea, wasn’t she?

MULLINS: Yeah, and they had brought her up for this. And I can remember that stern look at me. She scared the hell out of me, is the only way I can, her presence was unbelievable. And she was real concerned about my being the director. She wasn’t for me being the director. And so, I get up there, and what is the first thing I do? I don’t know if you can remember this, but what happened was Mrs. Weatherford introduced me, and when I got up to speak, I got all choked up. I couldn’t speak. I could 113:00not say a word.

JONES: I remember. [Laughing] MULLINS: And the only thing, and I think it was, what I realized for the first time, is what I had accepted. Okay? It was very overwhelming. And so, I was overwhelmed, and I couldn’t even speak. Well, then we got into all of this physical plant stuff. I started looking at the staff. I started looking at trying to get the place fixed up. They wanted me to try to keep the boarding program going. I visited all the isolated places of the county, put the word out that we were going to accept students and so forth. I worked on the physical plant. Started looking at staffing and so forth, what we were doing, looking at our money situation, all of these different things. I mean I just totally immersed myself in it there, from the very beginning. And after the, I came there like in December and the next year I had, that summer, 114:00you know in seventy-seven, or seventy-eight. Al Stewart had tried to hold a Writer’s Workshop and a Family Folk Week combination. And it really didn’t go over, but that really was the beginning of that, and so I said the next year, “let’s hold a separate one, a Folk Week and a Writer’s Workshop.” And we held our first ones. I started getting a brochure together, you know. And Sibyl Clark was here at Berea, and I got her to come and help the next year’s Writer’s, I mean Folk Week with a dance week. And then Al and I put together the next year’s Writer’s Workshop with Harriet Arnow(*) and various folks. And so, we began those two weeks. We started, then we had, I had about twenty or twenty-five children come the next year to be in the dorms.

JONES: What year was that when you did the two separately?

MULLINS: Seventy-eight, seventy-eight.

JONES: Seventy-eight, yeah, go ahead. 115:00MULLINS: So, we had these children to come, and we put them in the dorms, hired dorm directors and all that stuff. And then I hired another music and art teacher. They only had one music and art teacher, and I added two more, so that we could cover more schools with them. And it was just a time of trying to work on the campus, start a program, get the place so people would start saying....We had our alumni banquet that spring. The alumni banquet, I’m talking about spring of seventy-eight. Twenty people came and the discussion was whether to continue to have anything, and I asked them to let me work on it. So, I started working on [an] alumni mailing list and so forth, to put it together. We now average a hundred fifty to two hundred each year for our alumni banquet. And it started the next year, the first year I ran it, we had a hundred people, 116:00you know, when we put it together, invited and put together a program and everything. And those were exciting years, I mean gosh oh. I didn’t know which end was up, working night and day trying to get all these things started. But I just didn’t like, the thing, we started out with all those kids in the boarding program. But, what we ended up getting were kids who were from broken homes, problem kids and so forth, kids who didn’t want to go to school. And it really was very, very difficult. After the first year over half of them had either quit or I’d kicked out for a variety of things, because they just didn’t want to go by the rules and regulations. So, the following year we ran it again, but in about nineteen and eighty, I came to the board and said, “this is not working. This is a waste of our resources and every child in the county can get to public school by public 117:00school transportation.” And what we were getting was folks away from here had been, there in that area, were sending their kids back, who they didn’t want, couldn’t take care of. We were getting a lot of problem kids. So, we had to make a decision. And I didn’t want to run an institution for problem kids. I really didn’t. I wanted to run a community-based education and service program. So, we did away with the boarding program. And I think that was very, very smart, but also a lot of folks felt like we should just close our doors after that, too.

JONES: Well, what, talk a little bit about the community-based thing, as opposed to this school idea that is now there.

MULLINS: Well, as I say, I was young and naive and I had these ideals of things that we should do, but what it became, slowly but surely, 118:00I started realizing that the program of the Hindman Settlement School needed to come from the community. It should evolve from the community. And not come out of me sitting over there thinking this would be a good idea or that’s going to be a good idea. And you know, during this period of time, Loyal, one of the things that had happened, is that the Board of the Hindman Settlement School never met on campus. The staff were not involved in any board meetings or any discussion of policy or program or anything. They met in Lexington or Berea here. And when I, when I was, when I became director, I was just naive enough to say, “if you want me to be your director, then you are going to meet at the Hindman Settlement School twice a year.” Okay? I didn’t know that, that was....There was a group out of Louisville, some older folks, who were on the board, who didn’t like that idea, didn’t want to come to Hindman.

JONES: Did they just meet once a year before that? 119:00MULLINS: They met twice a year.

JONES: Oh, twice a year.

MULLINS: But you know, they met, but sometimes they never met, some of the board members never set foot on campus for years, you see. It was almost run in isolation, you see. And that’s why all the things that I inherited and saw, that’s why it was like that. No one was there who had any accountability, you know. Until you know, you had Joe Graves got on the Board and he wanted to see some things happen, so he commissioned a guy to do a study about possible programs and stuff. And that really didn’t sit well with some folks that were working there. But he wanted to see some things happening for the community. So, when I got there, and I started looking at the potential for what could happen there. And I wanted the board to meet there. The board started meeting there. And one of the craziest things that ever happened, which I thought was absolutely 120:00what you needed to do, I invited the staff to come to a board meeting and sit and hear all the reports and be part of it. That had never happened before. You know? I wanted to open up the process. I wanted them to know what was being discussed. And so, they were just amazed at that, the staff that were there. They were amazed at that development. Well, it wasn’t long, I asked a fellow named Loyal Jones to come on the board too, started board development, started getting some new blood on the board, you know, some other folks coming on. Mrs. Weatherford was still the chairman, and she was absolutely excellent. She was a wonderful chairman and very supportive. I always could call on her. I met with her many, many times. And then I had my back-up, and that was Miss Watts. I’d visit with her. She moved down to Knoxville Tennessee, into a retirement home. And I was constantly visiting with her, talking with her about things relating 121:00to the settlement. She was my mentor. And we developed a very, very, very close relationship. I can tell you that I became a great, big fan of hers and I think she became, I became a fan of hers. We really developed a tremendous relationship. But the programs themselves started to develop out of the community then. For several years there, the program, one of our major offerings were music and art teachers in the public schools. And we sent them out into the public schools. One time I had three art and three music teachers, you know.

END OF TAPE 3, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE ABEGINNING OF TAPE 3, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE B JONES: Let’s get back to the Mennonite Service Corp people, and when you first started using them.

MULLINS: MCC, or Mennonite Central Committee has had a presence 122:00in, I guess, eastern Kentucky for about thirty years, it is my understanding. And what they do is, they take volunteers and place them into two years of service throughout the world. And they are not just Mennonites either. I’ve had, through the Mennonite Central Committee, I’ve had Baptists and Presbyterians, several different denominations. But they have tendency to really screen the people really good. And they also, they also have a tendency to get quality people, I mean. So, I’d been there probably about four or five years, when a fellow named Gingridge(*) came over and talked to me about whether there could be some kind of cooperation between the settlement school and their Appalachian program there that is based in Whitesburg. So, I jumped on it like a dog on a bone, because it was an opportunity 123:00to get some staff. You’ve got to understand that we weren’t able to pay professional staff what they deserved, settlement school never has, never will be able to. Therefore, we had to look for people with some sort of service orientation in order to get staff. And we wanted to be able to cover every school in the county with music and art, so the first ones that we looked for were some music and art teachers. And they were able to get us a couple of young ladies from up at Eastern Mennonite College. And then later on they helped us get a piano teacher. And from there we were able to get, over a, oh, several year period, we got several in the area of music and art. But then when the educational reform came in, we ended up, the county actually got monies to pay for music and art teachers. Now, as a kind of a segue into this, what had happened though in the settlement, the program had started changing and had started to kind of formulate several areas 124:00where we were making a big emphasis. For example, we’d started a program in about nineteen and eighty for children with dyslexic characteristics. And that program started just taking off, we went from after school programs, to summer schools, and eventually to a full-time school. And we will discuss that in more detail later on. But what was happening was a lot of our resources were shifting, as far as financial resources. And so, we had been providing these music and art teachers, which was the main drain on our income and our money. And when they got all this school reform money, the public schools had the money to hire them. So, I went to the public school, I went to the Superintendent and say, “you know, if we want to continue to send these out, then I need to develop some sort of a partnership with you folks. Because my people are going to be able to get jobs now. They are going to be able to apply for jobs, either in surrounding counties or around this area and make exactly what a 125:00full-time teacher makes.” Well, the superintendent deferred, he said that they would get their own music and art teachers, and they’d take care of it, and we wouldn’t really be needed anymore. So, I go to the board, and you were there, I mean we made a conscious decision to move out of providing that service. Because our philosophy is to provide, you know, activities and services that can’t be provided by other agencies and groups. Well, the school system could have provided it. And all of my music and art teachers ended up being hired away, over, Laurel County and Perry County, in Letcher County and in Floyd County. They all got full time jobs. And the Knott County school system then ended up not hiring others to do it, and so to this day, the music and art program in Knott County is very sporadic, and they’ve never hired teachers to cover that. But they had an opportunity to work with us, and I believe we could have worked something out. 126:00So, we moved out of the music and art. And then another program that had started with a call to me from a lady who wanted to learn how to read her Bible. She gotten to be a new-born Christian and couldn’t read her Bible. Out of the blue she calls me and wanted to know if somebody could teach her how to read. So, I had a lady there who was working with, I had a little fledgling wood-working program for a while, which didn’t really take off. And his wife was very bright, and she agreed to tutor this lady. Well, that began our Adult Education program. And then another person found out. So, we started asking the MCC for teachers to help us in the Adult Education Center, doing tutoring. And that’s when we started getting a whole string of people. Over the past, close to twenty years now, eighteen to twenty years, we’ve had somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-two to twenty-five MCC workers that come from all over the country, especially Canada. We have had, a dozen of those have 127:00been from Canada. And these folks have been remarkable people. They have added immensely to our program in a way that we would have never been able to do and to afford. At least three of the couples who’ve come and volunteered and been part, have won Volunteer Tutors of the Year for the state. And not another program in the state has ever had that, you know. And today they continue to be a vital part of our program. We just lost three volunteers who finished up their term. We have two more new ones coming in and we may have another one before the year is out. But they’re constantly looking for folks. But our philosophies really mesh well together.

JONES: Well, the music and art teachers went back to what? Raymond McClain’s era?

MULLINS: Well, if you look at the history of the development of the settlement, the settlement was a 128:00full-time school program when it was founded in 1902. And then it evolved and as it evolved, it pushed for the building up of the public schools. The settlement never did want to be the public schools, they wanted to be an adjunct and help. Nineteen thirty, around then they helped build a high school, supplied most of the teachers. Okay? Then they boarded all the students there, who couldn’t get to the high school because of transportation related problems. And then they ran a grade school there until nineteen and fifty-five on campus, when it closed down. But they pushed for the development and the build up of the public schools. Well, in the thirties and forties and fifties and sixties and so forth, they had a big program of sending teachers and sending recreation directors and the bookmobile and the music mobile out into the one-room and public schools. So that extension work was a major part of the settlement school from about the thirties on, 129:00you know, right up until the day that I came. Raymond McClain, who came there, was a recreation teacher. Raymond came, before him, one of the Ritchies, Paula Ritchie, or Pauline Ritchie. Pauline Ritchie Kermit was a recreation teacher. But music and the crafts were always a big part of the settlement school. So those ladies, they went out into, and they provided, we have photographs of all the dancing and show them out there, dancing around the Maypole and stuff. So, Raymond McClain did that until he was hired as the Executive Director. You’ve only had, the first executive director was May Stone. And she was, she and Miss Pettit, the co-founders of the settlement, were there....Miss Pettit left in nineteen thirteen and went to Pine Mountain. But Miss Stone was associated with the settlement until her death 130:00in nineteen forty-six. She basically lived off campus, fund raised and so forth and just came in the summer. Miss Watts ran the institution almost totally for I don’t know how many years. Then when Miss Watts retired in nineteen fifty-six, Raymond McClain became the executive director. And he, that was a period of time, he pretty much rebuilt the campus. A lot of buildings were old and so forth and he was an aspiring, amateur architect and he loved to build. He loved to move things. I mean, he just really did. So, he really sort of set the stage for the existing campus today. The problem was he never had enough money to really do what he needed to do, so he put up the best he could, with what he had. Now I inherited that best, and that’s been a lot of work, trying to fix that up. When he retired in about nineteen and seventy, 131:00not retired, he left. He resigned, took another job here at Berea. Lionel Duff became the administrator and director. Then myself in nineteen and seventy-seven.

JONES: Okay. Well, let’s get to what you consider the important programs since you were there.

MULLINS: Well, the music and art, in the early years, was the primary program. And then we started the program for dyslexic children and then we started the Adult Ed., and then we started having these workshops on Appalachian life and culture. We had the Appalachian Family Folk Week. Then we ran a thing called Appalachian Visual Arts Week. And then the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop in the summer, June, July, and August. You had one for each month. And those all had been fairly successful, even the Visual Arts Week.

JONES: What was that?

MULLINS: That’s when we invited in local artists, in painting and so forth. 132:00And we had a big crew of folks who came every summer.

JONES: Who were some of the artists?

MULLINS: Tim Sizemore, Tom Whittaker, Doug Adams, Russell May, those were ones that just come to mind. We had a good following; people came from all over. But we weren’t able to sustain that week, because when the, as the dyslexia program developed, it began. And it is important to note that this program began with a lady named Lois Combs Weinberg, who is a good friend of mine. Just met there with four students and four parents. She had a son who had this learning difference. And I let them meet there. And next thing you know, they needed a bigger place to meet and so we gave them another room. And then some other folks from another county found out about it, so they brought some of their kids in, and before you knew it, we started having spin-off programs.

JONES: About what year was that, that she started the group?

MULLINS: About nineteen and eighty, 133:00maybe nineteen seventy-nine, in that period of time they just had a few kids, you know, in the after school. From that one after school program there at Hindman, we at one time had seven. And then we had a bunch that needed to go to a summer school, children go to summer school in Louisville. And so, we ended up sending some, I raised some money, sent some students up there, sent an adult to take care of them. And then the next summer a whole slew wanted to go, and we couldn’t afford that. So, we decided to start a summer program at Hindman. And this summer, nineteen ninety-nine, we just finished our eighteenth summer school. And that program began to take more and more resources. And then in nineteen and ninety, we opened with the James Still Learning Center, which houses all of our work in that area, the dyslexia program. But we also opened the first full time program for children with this learning difference in central Appalachia. 134:00So, you have after school programs, you have summer school, and then you have the full-time school. That’s become the major emphasis as far as the settlement’s concerned, because of the amount of monies being spent, probably a good third of the budget is spent on that program.

JONES: Let’s back up and talk about that new, innovative building and what that entails.

MULLINS: Well, what had happened, as we developed this program, as I said, we had the after-school program. But there was a group of kids who needed more intense efforts, so we started the summer school. The summer school met the needs of another group, but then there were still those folks who had severe problems and needed a more full-time approach to their learning difference. So, Lois and I, we had been in contact with some folks in Louisville, who have a full-time program for children with this learning difference. We visited with them in about nineteen and eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-seven, something like that. And we came to the Board 135:00and said to the board that we need to pursue monies to renovate the old Hindman High School, Hindman Settlement School High School Library into this facility for these children. We started off, it was going cost us three hundred fifty thousand dollars. We started raising money, make a long story short, it cost, the whole project cost close to a million dollars. And we raised that money and incurred absolutely no debt. But we had one of the finest facilities you could have. The only problem was, the minute we got it finished, it was too small. That’s always the case.

JONES: Okay, and who were some of the major...

MULLINS: The major benefactors of that were the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Steele-Reese Foundation, the J. Graham Brown(*) Foundation, the Berea College Appalachian Fund, the 136:00O.E.O. Robertson Mountain Fund and monies from the Daughters of the American Revolution. They made significant contributions. And then several individuals made, John Priest and several others made donations to it. But at the time when it was finished though, it was totally paid for and there was not one bit of debt, is the important thing.

JONES: Okay, and do you want to go on and tell us a little more about the dyslexic school while you are at it, you know?

MULLINS: Well, I just think it is important to point out, this is a prime example of how the settlement has responded to the needs of the community. It wasn’t anything we started. We responded, and as the need increased, and as they needed resources, we tried to get those resources for them. So, 137:00in the almost nineteen years of this, existence of this program, we’ve worked with somewhere over fifteen hundred students and fifteen hundred parents. It is a parent involvement program. The person that’s been the main catalyst, the person who continues to be the main catalyst and founder of this, is Lois Combs Weinberg, who has been in charge and working with this program from day one. We’ve just had an unbelievable group of dedicated parents, who have made this program possible. And you know, we’ve had, it’s hard for us, we need to do a study, but we just really don’t know what impact we have had. We do know that we have students today, who went on and graduated from college, they’ve become everything from Architects to Ph.D. candidates in education, who have said to us, “without this program they would have never gone through high school.” So, there’s just a whole group 138:00of young folks out there, who are getting a chance in life, because of the opportunity to get this additional help that we’ve provided. But it has been a major financial undertaking, literally millions of dollars have been spent in this program, and every penny of it has been worth it. And it continues to be the thing that seems to be pushing our program today at Hindman. We just really are having a hard time meeting the needs of that program financially.

JONES: Now, you’re getting some help now from county school boards for the boarding program, I mean the regular in-school program?

MULLINS: Well, I think it is important to point out that this program was really something that the public schools supported in the early years a great deal, because it didn’t cost them anything. And then later on, as we began asking them to help provide some funding to help do the job that they hadn’t done, they, some 139:00of the assistance became rather intransigent about that. But we’ve developed a working relationship now with our full-time program, where we are working with Kentucky Valley Educational Co-Op. And we have a full-time program that basically is a public school program through a Co-Op, where the public schools after we’ve identified them, they go through an extensive placement process; these children are placed in the James Still Learning Center. We can take up to thirty with our present staffing. And last year was the first time in about eight or nine years that we had at that level, with other students wanting in. So, we have this relationship, but they only pay the average daily attendance for the full-time school students, and we pay the rest of it. It’s costing us between, probably I estimate about eight thousand dollars a year per child. And they are providing at the most, three thousand. So, we’re still subsidizing five to six thousand dollars per child to make that possible. 140:00But it is, without their support though, we wouldn’t be able to do it. We wouldn’t be able to do it, because we wouldn’t be able to come up with that, basically hundred to a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year that is now being paid for those teachers that are paid through the Co-Op.

JONES: It would have been harder to work this out without the Co-Op.

MULLINS: I don’t think we could have worked it without the Co-Op. I think, we tried this on a school system to school system basis, and it was impossible to put together. Our, what’s Cornett?

JONES: Elwood Cornett.

MULLINS: Elwood Cornett, who had started the Co-Op and worked it until his retirement was the key person. He helped steer us through this process and helped convince the Superintendents to go along with it. So, I give tremendous credit to Elwood. We’d never have been able to do it without Elwood.

JONES: You need to point out that he is an Old 141:00Regular Baptist moderator of an association, and very progressive in his educational ideas.

MULLINS: And once he left Kentucky Valley Educational Co-Op as the executive director, he became a distinguished educator and went down into Harlan County and helped work with some schools down there.

JONES: Is he still working? I think his brother, Lily, told me that he is still doing that.

MULLINS: I’d say he is still doing that. I don’t think he will ever quit. He really loves the educational field.

JONES: Yeah. Well, who is the new Director of the Co-Op?

MULLINS: There’s a new guy named DeVole(*). I’m not too, Dr. DeVole(*).

JONES: Didn’t they bring him in from...?

MULLINS: Well, they had another person, and he left after about two years. And Dr. DeVole(*), who I think is from up in Breathitt County or, well, maybe he’s from over, he’s from the hills someplace up there.

JONES: Okay.

MULLINS: I think he is doing an excellent job, seems to be.

JONES: But that’s another example of a program that 142:00came in with the War on Poverty and additional funds that has really made a difference.

MULLINS: Yeah, those educational co-Ops are really, can provide services that these independent school systems cannot have provided.

JONES: Or wouldn’t.

MULLINS: Or wouldn’t have. A lot of psychological services, a lot of special education services, a lot of testing services.

JONES: They sort of share psychologists and testing people.

MULLINS: That’s right. They co-op it together. And one of the big things is the purchasing of insurance, the purchasing of supplies, stuff they buy in bulk for all the systems, too. And that really, that really helps. But I think that brings up an interesting point, that the settlement school, one of the things we try to do is leverage our resources. And we have a lot of cooperative arrangements. Now another program that the settlement has done absolutely for years and years, has been providing the library services for the county. When I came there in nineteen and seventy-seven, there hadn’t been a public library for several years because 143:00of some sort of public outcry relating to taxes and the library tax got caught up in the political shenanigans and so forth. And so, they closed the library and never had one for a few years. Then the settlement offered to build in ( ) money to start a demonstration project. When I came, they had a retired schoolteacher, a Mrs. Grace Slone, who had come to just prop it up until they could see what they were going to do. Well, I got with Grace, and I said, “let’s try to keep this thing going.” And she was ready, she had already taught for like thirty some years and was just going to do it interim. Well, Grace ended up staying for the next seventeen years. And we basically were able to get the county to support it, and the settlement to support it and then some state support. And we were able to keep this public library going. And it is still going today. And hopefully within another year or two we’re going to have, well not hopefully, but it will, we are going to be building a new public library as part of a big multi-purpose building 144:00that will be part of a Community Development Initiative that will be on the Hindman Settlement School Campus.

JONES: Yeah, about how much are you putting in currently?

MULLINS: Well, we provide the facility, we provide the utilities and part of the salary. I would say roughly twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars a year, you know, the insurance, all of the things that go into keeping a library going. And the state puts in so much and the county, but it’s a co-operative effort or there would not be a library in Knott County. And there definitely wouldn’t be a library in Knott County if it wasn’t for the Hindman Settlement School.

JONES: Okay, why don’t you mention the other programs that you’ve been involved with just briefly.

MULLINS: Well, the dyslexia program we’ve talked about. The adult education program has been a remarkable program. I started talking about it a while ago. We started out with that one, you know that one person. And then we ended up getting the Mennonite workers. And then about eight years ago, 145:00we combined our program with the KVEC, the Kentucky Valley Educational Co-Operative’s Adult Education program. We pooled them together and set them up in one place, the Knott County Adult Education Center. We also for the last twelve, fourteen years had a GED testing service there on campus. And we provided that. We’ve had over, about nine hundred folks to get their GED in Knott County through our program, which I think is remarkable. And then we had, we’re working with anywhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty adults every year in our adult education program.

JONES: How many people in the county don’t have a high school ...?

MULLINS: Well, somewhere between thirty-five and forty percent of the folks in Knott County, probably somewhere close to forty percent, I think, do not have a high school education. We have a major problem with literacy in our county, major problem. 146:00What happens, the ones who get education leave, because there is [are] no opportunities for jobs and so forth. And those who don’t, end up staying. So, you keep, and you have a high dropout rate today, somewhere close to forty-five, between forty-five and fifty percent of the students who start first grade in Knott County today, still end up dropping out of school.

JONES: And there used to be an old saying, every time somebody moved from Kentucky to Ohio, it lowered the education rate in both states. [Laughing] MULLINS: Yep, wouldn’t doubt it, that’s exactly right. But who knows, I’d say that it improved the education level of Ohio, I can tell you that.

JONES: Well, I think so too, because we lost a lot of teachers and lawyers and doctors.

MULLINS: You got the cream of the crop, I mean this out migration between nineteen and sixty and nineteen and eighty or nineteen seventy, was like three million people.

JONES: Yeah. Mention Lee Smith and what she did with that program.

MULLINS: Well, the Adult Education program has had some real high points, I think, winning these awards. 147:00JONES: What awards have you won?

MULLINS: Well, they’ve won the, on the Kentucky Department of Education Award in Volunteer Tutors. We’ve had the outstanding student award for the state of Kentucky. And our program is considered one of the finest literacy programs in the state of Kentucky. We are often cited for our work in that area, because of our approach and our openness and our willingness to go where the people are. We go and meet them where they can be met to develop the best opportunity for them to succeed. Oh, about five years ago, you know the settlement runs a Writer’s Workshop. We’ll talk about that later on. But this Writer’s Workshop, one of the persons who’s been a member of that staff for many years, is the author, Lee Smith, who’s from over in Grundy, Virginia. But Lee has a national reputation and has written, oh, twelve or fourteen books. And she has become 148:00a dear friend of the settlement, as a matter of fact, now is on the board of directors. But she was given a Reader’s Digest Literary Fellowship, where she got so much money over a three-year period, but one part of that is that those people have to associate with a non-profit to do something to give back. And so, she chose to work with the Hindman Settlement School’s Adult Education Literacy Program. And for a period of three years at various times, she would come and do workshops and work with those people in the Adult Education program. And several booklets were published, and it had a remarkable impact. As a matter fact, Lee and I were invited to New York to speak to the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Board of Directors, to talk about our work. And when we got through, and these are high powered executives, one was Melvin Laird, who used to be, I think, secretary of state or something like that. 149:00JONES: Of Defense.

MULLINS: Defense. Well, we had them in the palm of our hand, is the best way to say it, especially Lee. And we were just going over the things we did and the reactions. And some of these hard-nosed CEOs sitting there with tears in their eyes when we would tell them some of the personal stories of the folks that we’d been working with. And so, Lee is, after that, after that three years, agreed to come on our board, and is now on our board of directors.

JONES: Didn’t she also have an NPR segment in the CBS Sunday Morning Segment on that?

MULLINS: Yeah. There was a major piece done on NPR, National Public Radio. And then CBS Sunday Morning came and did a fifteen-twenty-minute show about our program, and about Lee’s being involved in it. So, that program has garnered some attention nationally also.

JONES: Well, it says something for you and the settlement that you were able to get someone like Lee 150:00to work for such a long period of time with it. And talk about the workshops some.

MULLINS: Well, I think I’ll go through the various programs, the dyslexia program, the Adult Education program, the library services. And one of the programs that has been a part of the settlement and a person who I consider probably just an unbelievable, talented, and dedicated staff member. And I have several of those, but this person epitomizes, I think, what the settlement is all about, is our 4-H instructor, Jim Phelps. Jim Phelps came there twenty-seven years ago, and the settlement helped sponsor him, provided part of his stipend for salary, and provided him a place to live and everything. And without that arrangement there, there would not have been a 4-H program in Knott County. And Jim has now been there for twenty-seven years and continues 151:00to provide a valuable service to the county and he lives on campus and is in a major part of our program. And what he does, is he represents that continuing commitment on behalf of people, who come there and give their life to that institution. First of all, I never dreamed I’d be there twenty-two years. Now, I couldn’t think of any place else I’d ever could have been. We have several folks who have come and given their entire life of twenty-five, thirty, forty years to that institution and so you have that continuing today. We also had a major emphasis on promoting the cultural arts of the region. And so, we’ve had visiting folk artists. We’ve sent out all kinds of artist groups out into the community, out into the schools. Literally thousands of people have been exposed to various art forms as a result of what we call our Visiting Artist Program.

JONES: Didn’t that mean getting money from the Kentucky Artist...

MULLINS: Arts Council, 152:00mostly from the Kentucky Arts Council. We’ve gotten several major grants and a lot of money over the years from the Kentucky Arts Council. I’ve served on the Kentucky Arts Council. I’ve served on a lot of different boards and organizations and so forth over the years. But the two weeks that have sustained themselves and continue to be in demand, and we turn people every year, we turn them away every year, is our Appalachian Family Folk Week and our Appalachian Writer’s Workshop. This past summer, the twenty-second Annual Appalachian Family Folk Week was held. We were booked solid, had to turn people away. We just finished our twenty-second annual Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, booked solid, again had to turn folks away. And these weeks, especially the Writer’s Workshop has actually become, has really developed such a reputation and a following, that it has had a major impact on the literature 153:00of the Appalachian region. We’ve had unbelievable number of staff be involved in that week. Early years, folks like Harry D. Craydis Williams, and as the years went by, we’ve had folks like, of course I mentioned Lee Smith....

END OF TAPE 3, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE BBEGINNING OF TAPE 4, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE 154:00A JONES: You were listing the writers who have been involved.

MULLINS: We’ve just had, what we’ve tried to do is create a community of writers through this writer’s workshop. So, we’ve had folks who would demand high salaries and so forth at other workshops, who kind of worked for us for a pittance, because they want to be part of that. And I mean I just can’t give enough credit to those folks especially, like Lee Smith and her husband Hal Crowder, and Gurney Norman, George Ella Lyon, Sharon McCrumb, Michael McFee, just all these folks that come. And this workshop has really gained some attention and has....I think when we had our twentieth anniversary, we had a big celebration 155:00and it just showed the impact that we’ve had. But it is a gathering that brings together sixty-five to seventy participants, eight to ten staff members in an intense week of working and celebrating writing and writers about the Appalachian region.

JONES: Okay, who are some of the people who came for the Appalachian Family Week?

MULLINS: The Appalachian Family Folk Week began basically as a dance week, and it has evolved into a week that involves music and dance and crafts and story telling and instrument making and instrument playing. And over the years, some of the premier people have been folks like Jean Ritchie, the great ballad singer, who is also on our board of directors. Edna Ritchie Baker, her sister, was for many, many years part of the program before she passed away. 156:00Some of the finest musicians that you could ever find, in folks like Lee Sexton, Marion Sexton. In earlier years, a person who used to be a troubadour around here, John McCutcheon, who went off and became a major person in music, folk music throughout the United States, was on several of the staffs.

JONES: That was Marion Sumner you just mentioned.

MULLINS: Yeah, Marion Sumner, greatest fiddle player that I think you could ever come up against. We’ve had a lot of other musicians, like Tommy Bledsoe and Rich Kirby. And then we’ve had, in later years, we’ve had young folks like Carrie Norris, whose grandmother was Lili Mae Ledford of the Coon Creek Girls. Just a lot of local crafters, Verna Mae Slone, who’s a well-known crafter and also writer. But we’ve just had an abundance of talent, who’ve come in and shared during this week. 157:00And it is a true Family Folk Week, because we have a lot of activities for children. So, it’s really, it goes from one generation age area to another. And it has been highly successful.

JONES: Very good. Are there any other programs, well East Kentucky Network?

MULLINS: Well, a program that we held hopes for many years, that was an outgrowth of the Foxfire Project out of north Georgia, was the East Kentucky Teacher’s Network. This was a professional development program of using the Foxfire methodology in the public schools and so forth. We hosted that for several years. It’s pretty much now gone by the wayside. It is no longer a major part, because they are not really supporting those activities all that much now. But we provided a home for them for many, many years. Without us I guess there would not have even been a program. Other things we do, 158:00we serve as sort of a conference center. We have groups coming and going from all over the region, just daily we have groups coming and going that take advantage of our facilities, on the local level, on the regional level and sometimes even on the national level. So, we’ve sort of become a stopping place for many, many folks who are traveling throughout the region. You just never know who will be at our door. We also have recently, in the last couple of three years or four, we opened our crafts shop. For years the settlement was involved in crafts, but then we got out of the business because philosophically, I keep going back to this, we are not there to compete with anyone. But folks kept coming to us and saying, look we need someone who will get quality crafts. We’ve got so much junk out here and all the good crafters are being pushed out 159:00by folks who make junk and people buy it, because they don’t know any different. So, about eight or ten years ago, we started thinking about that and some folks gave me, to the settlement, gave us a log house over in another part of the county. A wonderful lady named Naomi Powell and her friend Clara Martineau, who had bought some land in the fifties for a pittance. Clara came to one of our writers workshop[s], I mean to our Family Folk Week, and we went over there to look at this cabin. And it was real up in this isolated hollow, and I said, what you need to do, they’re going to burn this thing down, because you could see where they had been building fires inside right on the floor. And I said, “you ought to let us have this, it would make a great craft shop, never dreaming anything would happen.” Well, she talked with Naomi, and they ended up giving it to the settlement. It sat there for two or three years, had no money to do anything with it. Then this coal company wanted to buy their property, and offering them what they considered a good sum, but I asked them to let me have someone negotiate and we got a lot more money than 160:00what they would have gotten. So, they gave me a chunk of money and I moved the cabin. It sat over there at the settlement for another couple of three years. I got a little money and I’d work on it, get a little bit more money and I’d work on it. And then about four years ago or five, a lady passed away who was an alumnus of the settlement, Marie Stewart, who grew up there. And they brought her back to be buried there in the family cemetery. And her daughter came. And her daughter came over and visited with me. I went to the funeral, which kind of struck her strange. She didn’t know me, and there I was, this total stranger. But this was a graduate of the Hindman Settlement School, I therefore was representing the settlement school. Plus, she was the sister of Al Stewart, another graduate who I’ve known for many, many years. So, I was there for a couple of reasons. She came by, she wanted to check the settlement out. Her mother really loved the settlement and was a real fine needlework person. So, she came and looked around and we hit it off, 161:00I mean there was something just clicked between us. Her name was Doctor Jess Stoddart, she was Professor of History at San Diego State University. And she said she would like to do something to honor her mother’s memory at the settlement. So, I gave her a few ideas, including helping us finish the crafts cabin. And she went back, her stepfather, a fairly wealthy person from what I could tell, they decided they wanted to do, finish the craft shop. And they gave us a substantial sum of money, thirty-five, forty thousand dollars, that was used to complete the cabin. And we named the cabin, the Marie Stewart Crafts Shop. But that began a relationship, for then Jess found out, Doctor Stoddart found out about some diaries we had there since the turn of the century. And she being a historian, got to reading them and said how much they needed to be published. She agreed to become 162:00the editor. She edited them and Jesse Stuart Foundation Press ended up publishing them. And then she’s come on our board. She is now a member of our board and now is in the process of writing a history on the Hindman Settlement School. So, things, you never know what’s going to happen when somebody shows up at your doorstep.

JONES: You know very briefly, Jess was interested in this, just characterize sort of the different evolution of the programs from the time of say, Miss Watts to your time, through Raymond and Lionel.

MULLINS: Miss Watts retired, as I said, and left and came to Berea here in nineteen fifty-six. The program probably when Miss Watts retired was pretty much the program that had been in operation for many years, basically a boarding program, an outreach program, out into the public schools. That was basically the program. 163:00Raymond McClain continued that, I think with probably more emphasis in the arts area of recreation and working out in the schools, but also a pretty big boarding program, which really took up most of their time and their resources. Any time you have a boarding program like that, that’s expensive, it is time consuming, and it also involves a lot of personnel. That was basically, I think, their program. But as the public schools built up, the need for the boarding, and as the schools consolidated, the need for some of that outreach was discontinued, there was not as much done. And so, when Lionel became, Lionel Duff became the director, he pretty much was in a period of time where the settlement school didn’t really know what it was going to do with itself, the way I feel. They were trying to determine 164:00at that point, there was a juncture there, it couldn’t be what it was, okay, it used to be. It couldn’t be what it used to be, because really the need wasn’t there. It needed to be something else. And I think those were years of struggling, trying to figure out what to do with the Hindman Settlement School. And then that’s when I came on the scene, you know. I came on the scene in seventy-seven. I never had any preconceived ideas about anything, you know. I mean my philosophy of the Hindman Settlement was what I read and what I studied from Jane Addams’s Hull House and so forth. And that is to go in and be a good neighbor. Take what resources you have and try to deal with the needs of the community, and let it come from the community, as opposed to trying to dictate some sort of program to the people. And so, I think you had a real transition there in the later years of McClain’s administration and then through the administration 165:00of Lionel Duff. I think there was a searching, a searching for what....And you know, I’m not criticizing anyone, but I’m saying....Because all you have to do is look at what happened to so many of these. Some of them never did make the transition. And for the most part, most of them closed, Loyal. All we had to do....When I came in, there was a thing called a Settlement Institutions of Appalachia Agreement that met, out of North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky, eight or ten institutions. And that organization ended up dying itself because so many institutions closed over the next several years, you know, they weren’t able to sustain, Hazelgreen, Anvil Institute. I mean, you know, they just weren’t able to make it.

JONES: That was a program you were involved in, what don’t you say something about, I was going to ask you later, but say something about the preservation of papers and photographs from...

MULLINS: Well when I came to the Hindman 166:00Settlement School, down in Uncle Sol’s cabin, in a corner, there was this big stack of, in the back, in the old office area was, in a corner in old boxes and stuff, and with no ( ) on it, were all the historical archives of the settlement. There were papers and photographs and stuff, just stuffed in boxes. Well, I was appalled, I mean, that’s the only way....And so, I don’t know, I started immediately thinking how can we get this done. One of the things I brought with me from Alice Lloyd was contacts and the ability to work with the National Endowment for the Humanities. We had gotten major grants at Alice Lloyd, and I knew the system. I knew the people up there. And so, it wasn’t long, after a year or two that I’d been at the settlement that I approached President Weatherford here at Berea College and I said, and then I’d moved in slowly over the years, a couple of three years. I’d become the President of the Settlement Institution of Appalachia organization. 167:00So, here I am, I’ve got all these papers, but I knew we couldn’t afford to do it. So, I came to Berea College, and I talked with President Weatherford. I had a good in of course, you know his wife was chairman of my board. I had already primed her, of course, and talked to her about it, and the board. And I asked if Berea College would be interested in maybe, in cooperation with the Settlement Institution of Appalachia, of helping doing a big, old archival project of the papers and the photographs and oral history. Really, Doctor Weatherford, President Weatherford, really liked the idea. And so, I had to sell it to the Settlement Institution of Appalachia group first. And what happened was, it was a pretty easy sell, because what you’re saying, they will take the papers, they’ll archive them, they’ll microfiche them, they’ll have a central archive here, but all the originals and everything will come back with a listing and them all in 168:00acid proof envelopes and all this. And they will be in order, that they can be used. Well, I had several of the institutions, they were very interested in it. We approached NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities], I talked with them about it, and in their infinite wisdom they said, “well what we’d like for you to do, is you need to have a survey of what is available.” So, we put in a proposal first through the college to get someone to survey it. Her name was Fredricka Toida (??). I don’t know if you remember her.

JONES: Yeah, I do.

MULLINS: She was good. And we got about a seventy-five, eighty-thousand-dollar grant, or something like that, to do that. She did a survey of all the institutions. Then we had, so we had all of what was available, and it was a tremendous amount of stuff. Then the NEH agreed to take them in installments. They didn’t want one big proposal. They wanted [to] do the papers, do the photographs and then 169:00look at oral history. Well, we did the first proposal. I remember coming to Berea. I spent three or four days. I stayed at the president’s house, working on this proposal. And there was a debate here at the college, whether the college should get involved in such an archival project, since they were basically a teaching institution, not a research institution. Do you remember that debate?

JONES: That was probably Dean Stolte (??) wasn’t it?

MULLINS: Stolte and the folks at the library, I mean there was this whole debate. Well, President Weatherford listened to the debate and said we’re going to do it. I mean that’s the type of fellow he was.

JONES: That was one good thing about him. [Laughing] MULLINS: So, I remember going over to see Lee Jones, I had to get some financial information. I walked in and I said, “I’m here to, I have to have certain information for this proposal.” He said, “tell me what you want, and you can have it.” He said, “the president’s called and said give you anything you want.” [Laughter] And he said, “and he’s the president and I do what the president says.” 170:00I remember that Lee was just very straight forward on that. We put in a proposal like two hundred fifty, three hundred thousand dollars with all the match and everything. And they funded it. And so here all these papers were brought, and we got those archived, finished that up. Then we put in another big proposal for the photographs, got all that finished, finished all that up. And by that time, several of the schools had closed and the Settlement Institution of Appalachia as an organization had folded. And we never did get around to doing the oral history part, which was the part that was dear to me, because I had run an oral history project. And so, I guess that’s what we’re doing here today, and this oral history for the Hindman Settlement School history is part of that.

JONES: Yeah, that’s part of that. Let’s see, everybody, these were microfilmed in Frankfort, and they became part of their archives and then Berea College Archives, plus the originals then went back. 171:00And the photographs, we made copies of those, and everybody got, the films are here, but they got a copy of the original photograph, didn’t they? It was a good deal, and the only thing that I regret, you remember Pine Mountain Settlement School had a certain...

MULLINS: I didn’t know if you were going to bring that up or not.

JONES: Well, I just thought it was interesting. It shows what happens in archives if you fool around. There was one person, who didn’t want anybody to see some of this, because it involved local people and so forth. And they left it in an old, wooden building and we didn’t get to microfilm it and the building burned down. And all of this segment of Pine Mountain’s history is gone.

MULLINS: And they really had the best archives of any of the institutions.

JONES: Yeah, they had plenty of people with cameras back in those days.

MULLINS: And the thing about it is, the only way we got, President Weatherford, who was then President of the Board at Pine Mountain, had to force them to even co-operate. I 172:00was, I was considered persona non grata down there for a while, over the fact that I forced the issue. And they saw me as being an interloper, I guess.

JONES: Well, it is interesting how certain custodians of things, see things as private and theirs and nobody else’s, you know.

MULLINS: Well, if you come to the Hindman Settlement School today. The settlement school’s archives are very thin because that same thing had happened there. The Administration Building burned under the administration of Raymond McClain, and they lost tremendous amounts of their archives. They also lost, there was heavy flooding, and they lost archives and papers in floods. So, there really isn’t too much of a record at all of the years for Lionel Duff and for Raymond McClain and several periods of time.

JONES: That’s too bad.

MULLINS: Now, for the last twenty-two years everything that’s ever been done, 173:00it’s there, during my administration. Because I am an archivist by nature, I do it. I mean it is all there, every wart, every letter, everything is there. There’s some things in there that most, some people probably would have taken ought. Well, it shows, it shows how some people have reacted to some of the things I’ve done, and how I’ve reacted back. Well, that’s part of the history. And I’m going to let it, I’ll just leave it in there.

JONES: One of the things I got out of all of that, was a Xerox of the Hindman Ballad Collection, you know, that various people there had compiled of ballads from both the community and that the teachers themselves had brought. It is kind of nice.

MULLINS: Well, you know the thing that has kept me at the Hindman Settlement School, and I want to emphasize, when I came there, the thing that I wanted to do, 174:00Loyal, the first five years. I wanted to get that place to the point where it was decent to live at for the staff, and to begin looking at some programming that would be of a need to the community. Because basically when I came there, the local community was saying what good is the Hindman Settlement School? It’s outlived its usefulness. It’s ready, really, it’s ready to be closed down, I am convinced of that. Well, five years was just starting to getting [get] some confidence in the community, developing a program, starting the development and getting the physical plant. The second five years, I’ve had sort of five-year, sort of things, I’ve had kind of goals. The second five years was to consolidate those programs and make them important to the community, continue that work on the grounds and the buildings to where we really had a very nice, 175:00and a very functional facility there. And the people would start saying the Hindman Settlement School is coming back, it’s doing some good, okay? My fifteen-year thing was to get it to the point in fifteen years, that people would say, isn’t it wonderful what the Hindman Settlement School is doing, look at what they’re doing, library, the dyslexia program, the Adult Education program, all of these groups, hosting all of these activities and so forth. And look how beautiful the campus is slowly becoming. And in twenty years, I wanted it to be said, “we can’t do without the Hindman Settlement School.” That is sort of progression of things. But what that involved was people. The most important component of that has been people. It’s been a wonderful board. I mean, I cannot say enough for the board that I have had. People like yourself, who now as my chairman of the board, but Mrs. Ann Weatherford. Let me tell you something, she took a 176:00young, naive, I’ve been described as brash, and I’ve been described as many things, I guess. But she let me make mistakes and counseled me and was there when I needed it. I cannot give enough credit for Ann Weatherford and her tenure as president. And then there were those board members like John Priest on the local level, who took me under his arm and made a son out of me in many ways. But in the process, get us hundreds of thousands [of] dollars’ worth of support, anything I needed. And gave me legitimacy there in that community. Because if John Priest is for you, then a lot of people can’t be against you. Okay? It gave me a real....And then folks on the local level, like Beckham Combs, our former superintendent and his wife Virginia. They adopted me and my family, you know. And then Joe Graves, Joe Graves, who saw that place and had a vision 177:00of saying this can do something, if you give them an opportunity. And he was always there, pushing for the place to do something good for the community. And then you had folks like Wibbie Pratt, who’s been a board member for many, many years, a graduate of the settlement and vice chairman. I mean, he has always been very supportive. Lois Weinberg, who’s been a longtime board member and also friend and everything, who’s been invaluable. Then you look at folks like Marlene Payne, Marlene has been a dedicated board member from the time that I came to the settlement school. She’s probably got as good a track record and attendance record as anybody that you could imagine.

JONES: That’s true.

MULLINS: And so, those people are important, that board, and then you have those staff members. Rebecca Ware, little freckled faced nineteen-year-old when I came there, who’s gone from being, just 178:00being a secretary, to being my bookkeeper, to being my assistant, my accountant, everything, takes care of all persons and money. Mrs. Helen Earp, who was there when I came and was the bookkeeper, gave thirty some years to that place. Then my long-time secretary, who left us recently, Jana Everage, who did an unbelievable job in that position. And then Doris Miller, who is working for me in the office. And then you get into the other areas of the program, those were sort of people in the office. Some of the MCC workers like Agnes and Peter Stobe (??), Bill and Betty Bach (??), I mean just several of those people. And then you know, it is easy to thank those people. And then there’s people just on the maintenance staff, Moses Owens, who’s been there for the last fifteen years, my maintenance man. And before him, Chuck Bentley, 179:00who had been there for twenty some years, and before him, his father, who was the maintenance man for forty years, Ezekial Bentley. I mean they go back. I mean you add that commitment, you know. The people have made that. There’s just others, in the dyslexia program, Ann Titsworth, Linda Amburgey, who’s been working for us for fifteen years. You just go on and on. And then of course, I mentioned Jim Phelps, twenty-seven years he’s been at the Hindman Settlement School. But these people have made a commitment that is unbelievable. I asked Miss Watts one time, I said, “what kept you at the Hindman Settlement School for so many years?” She had one answer, the people. She said, “the people.” And I’d have to agree with her.

JONES: Talk just a little bit now about the relationship of Hindman Settlement School to the town 180:00of Hindman, the commercial and political relationships there.

MULLINS: Well, I guess, when they hired Mike Mullins, they hired a person who was from the local area, who had background in the local area, and who has a strong interest in community and has a strong interest in the politics of the area. And so, I have tried to use that effectively for the good of the Hindman Settlement School. So, I’ve been highly involved in the local community and organizations and just a lot of different ways there. I believe it would be safe to say, that there is one of the things that you can’t do, and I’ve seen institutions do this. It is not a town versus gown syndrome there. There has always been a tremendous close connection, because the Hindman Settlement School is the biggest landowner 181:00in Hindman, Kentucky. We own about two hundred acres within the city limits of Hindman, so we’re one whole end of the city. And so, we’ve had this very close working relationship with the county officials, with the mayor and the city council and the folks there in that area. We’ve had a close working relationship. And I think that’s been one of the reasons that we’ve been successful, is we’ve not forgotten to be part of our community. We have strived, we have always worked hard to be part of our community. And that involves everything from being involved in the Gingerbread Festival, to being involved in providing scholarship assistant to several local students, to making our facilities available for family reunions, for weddings, for showers, to providing the playing field there back years ago for baseball, softball, soccer now. But being open to letting the community know that, that 182:00institution is theirs. We’re the stewards of it and we’re going to take good care of it, but we’re there for the community. We’re there for the community and we make it available to the community. So, all of those things, it is a continuing thing to be part of the community and being involved in the local churches there, just all kinds of different ways, you know.

JONES: Maybe this is a good place to mention how you got involved with, through the Methodist, you coming from the Regular Baptist background.

MULLINS: Well, I don’t know if this is important to the interview or not. The settlement school was founded, you know, it’s a non-denominational institution. But it is a Christian institution, and I knew that when I was hired. But it is not a proselytizing institution. And so, when they hired me, the best way I could describe myself, they got pretty much a heathen, you know. Because I hadn’t made any profession of faith or anything. 183:00I grew up in the traditional church of the mountains. I come from an old Regular Baptist background and culturally who I was, was very much influenced by that traditional church. It is not something that you can go out here and outline what it’s about, but it is inside of you and the way you act and the way you react to things and so forth. I later on, realized came from that background of growing up in a home and having grandparents and so forth, who were old Regular Baptists. There were just certain things you did, and you didn’t do. And there were certain respectful things. It was a theology of culture in a lot of ways, because I wasn’t Bible based in anything. I managed to get through, and this is not bragging, this shows how ignorant I was, through two, Old Testament and New Testament at Berea College and didn’t really figure out 184:00the difference between them. Okay? I was able to do that, get Bs in both of them, so I was able to do that. What happened was, as I say, Mrs. Earp is the primary person that got me involved in the Methodist Church. She was one of the pillars of that church for years and years. She kept inviting me to all these things. I was one of those Christmas, Easter churchgoers. I go at Christmas, and I go at Easter, and that was it. And when my daughter was five years old, Cassie, she attended a Bible school down there and then wanted to go back to Sunday school. Mrs. Earp came in one day and said, “I just heard the most, one of the nicest things today.” And I said, “what?” “Cassie, five years old, has asked to pray in church, pray in her Sunday school class.” And said, “the thing she prayed was that her Mommy and Daddy would go to church with her.” 185:00Now you talk about something going right straight to the heart. I mean, it was just like somebody had plunged a dagger in me.

JONES: You weren’t going to church at all?

MULLINS: Going at all. Had no intention of going to no church. Okay? Well, when I told Frieda, Frieda broke down and started crying. Well, I did too, if you want to know the truth. And the next week, we started going to church, or the following week or something. We checked around some churches, but we ended up at the Methodist [church]. And we never have quit going yet. And so, we both became members of that church. All my children are members of the Methodist Church. But I tell everybody, that I am an old, Regular Baptist, Methodist, because culturally and inside of me, I am so much of what I was brought up to be. But the theology of the old, Regular Baptist doesn’t quite set right with me. My Mommy gets real mad at me, she still doesn’t really believe that I belong to a real church, you see. Because 186:00she is old, Regular Baptist and that’s the only church there is. She is a hard shell. She’s part of that group and she....One time we were having a little, we can’t talk theology, because we’ll be into it big time, real fights, you know. And I told her, that my God....

END OF TAPE 4, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE A BEGINNING OF TAPE 4, MIKE MULLINS, SIDE B JONES: We ran out of tape, so start again on fund raising and major fundraising projects.

MULLINS: As I was saying, that one of the major jobs of the director is to raise funds. And we’ve always tried to live within our means at the settlement by not starting off on projects without having the money committed, so we won’t incur any debt. And therefore, in twenty-two we’ve not had a, run a deficit. And that is something I am very proud of. We had about a million and a half dollars in endowment when I came there, that the settlement controlled and then there was another endowment or monies that we didn’t control the principal, of about 187:00another million. But one of the things that became very evident not too long after I got there, that we were going to have to raise, to increase the endowment and that we were going to need to raise monies to work on the physical plant. And I can’t exactly remember the year, but we decided that we needed to have this endowment drive and we were looking for something that would, some way of starting this, and we came up with the idea of having an endowment drive in honor of Congressman Carl D. Perkins and his wife, Verna. Now, Congressman Perkins was a graduate of the settlement. He was a very powerful member of the U. S. House of Representatives, Chairman of the Labor and Education Committee. But he was also a fellow who didn’t accept any political donations, who was, had no opposition for 188:00his House seat for years. Because there was no way in the world to beat him. And therefore, he was very, he didn’t want, he was real concerned about anything that would look like he was taking advantage of his political position. But we got him to come for a supper one night, at John Priest’s house, who was a very good friend, he, and his wife. And we broached the subject there, that it would be an endowment for the settlement in memory, I mean in honor of him and his wife. And he didn’t turn us right down. That’s what we were expecting because everybody said he wouldn’t do it. And he mulled over it. And I think the thing that he liked was the fact that it was going to be, not for him, it was also him, but it was for Verna. I think he really wanted that, as much as anything. So, he agreed to do it. So, we began this national campaign. We got all these high-powered people of the United States too be on the advisory board. Our 189:00goal was to raise a million dollars. We hired a firm out of Lexington to help( ). We spent most of our efforts on this in Washington. When Congressman, we were in the midst, right in about eight or ten months into the solicitation part of this, had about seven hundred thousand dollars raised, and several major other commitments. One was a birthday party in New York City, that was going to be done by the Bradimus (??), who was then President of New York City University [City University of New York], who had been the Congressman’s great friend, was going to pull all this. We would have made beaucoup money. The Congressman was going up, it was his wife, and we were going to see a Broadway show, and all this, all set up. And then he died. He had a heart attack and died in an airplane flying into Lexington, Kentucky. And essentially from there, we weren’t able to sustain the drive. But we ended up raising somewhere in the neighborhood 190:00of seven hundred thousand, of which over, close to five hundred and sixty or about six hundred of that ended up going into the endowment, because we ran the endowment out of the monies we raised too. So, that was the beginning. That was our first venture into that. Then we also decided to raise some monies or started raising some monies for the dyslexia program. So we did a bunch of solicitations and ran ( ). We raised probably somewhere another three hundred thousand something for that program. We’ve had major drives for some facilities. I’ve mentioned the James Still Learning Center. That was a project where we raised a million dollars. And then just the most recent one was a renovation, sometimes things can get out of hand, I like to say. I wanted to fix a sink in the old kitchen, which had fallen through twice, and spent eight or ten thousand dollars to do that area. 191:00And Glen Leveridge, a new board member at that time, and a great friend, said, “what we need is just build a new kitchen.” Well, that was exactly what we needed to do, so we began plans to build a new kitchen. And then we were going to build a new kitchen and a little porch off to the side of it. As we got into this, trying to raise these monies, it was really hard. That’s not a very fancy or romantic thing to get money on. I got about fifty thousand dollars raised, when an organization that’s been very supportive of the settlement, and an organization that continues to be very supportive of the Hindman Settlement School, as one of their approved schools, is the United States Daughters of the American Revolution. And they were helping raise money for this, the Florida Daughters especially helped raise some money, and the Kentucky Daughters. I was traveling all over the country speaking to groups. And I had about fifty thousand 192:00dollars raised, and we estimated that it was going to cost us about three hundred and fifty, four hundred thousand dollars for this kitchen. It was going pretty slow. About three, oh close to two and a half, three years ago, an Elder Hostel group came through the settlement and there was this lady with that group. I never even met her. That was Board meeting time, and I was off hidden someplace. My assistant Doris Miller talked with them, and she told them about us working on the kitchen. And this lady said, “send me some information, I might want to help you.” Well, written on the back of a brochure, and it laid on my desk for about three weeks. And I get a call about before Thanksgiving of that year, she was waiting for that information. And I threw some stuff together and sent it out to her. She called me back and wanted to know how much it cost to get the kitchen part, just the kitchen. I said, “I’d have to have at least three hundred thousand dollars to start, oh, two hundred thousand dollars I said, 193:00to start it and I have fifty.” She said, “well I’ll get back with you.” Make a long story short, she got back with me, this lady, Mrs. Antoinette Staville (??) and her brother Vincent sent me a check for this project, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I never met the lady. And to this day, three years later, I still haven’t met her. We’ve talked several times and she’s made several times she’s going to come to the settlement, several appointments, but never has shown up, something would happen. But then about, after we got a hundred and fifty thousand, and of course she still knew that, that wasn’t enough to finish the entire project. So, about a couple of months later, I get another hundred- and fifty-thousand-dollar check from her sister Madeline, who I never even talked to, matched her gift of her brother and sister. So that’s three hundred thousand dollars from that family. Then she said, “if you have any other needs, let me know.” Well, that’s just like opening up a can of worms. 194:00I needed, I wanted to replace all the windows in that entire building and do a bunch of work also in the dining hall and paint the building, and really do a nice sunroom for a meeting room. I wrote all this up for eighty some thousand dollars and sent it to her. And she sent us a check for that. So, that family put about four hundred thousand dollars into that facility.

JONES: Isn’t that something?

MULLINS: And then in the meantime, I used that as leverage for two one hundred thousand dollar grants from the Steele-Reese Foundation and from the James Brown Foundation. So, that project cost about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it was the day that it was finished, the day it was paid for. So, I think the lesson that I learned real soon, is not to indebt yourself. If it sometimes takes a while for you to get the money, it is better to wait, then to go into debt. It took us eight to nine years to do the Marie Stewart Craft Shop. 195:00Okay? But it is a beautiful facility, has nothing but juried crafts in it. It’s beautiful. It took me almost nine years from the time I got the idea to move it. The James Still Learning Center, it took us from the time we had the ideal to when it was built, almost five years. And so, you have, it’s a matter of taking, it took us about four years to finish the kitchen project, you see. But the ideal is to not rush it. And people appreciate that in fund raising because they know you are being careful.

JONES: How long is the relationship with the DAR? That goes back a long way.

MULLINS: That goes back to the nineteen and twenties, when Mrs. May Stone....I have letters and correspondence where she has given presentations to chapters in [the] nineteen twenties. She was a DAR member herself. So that relationship goes back a long time. 196:00JONES: And you haven’t attempted to get involved with the Sons of the Revolution at all?

MULLINS: Well, they’re not as, I haven’t, they haven’t, they don’t have the same sort of philosophy of support that the DAR, that the women do. When I became Director there were like two hundred and twenty thousand members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It is down to about a hundred and sixty-five, seventy thousand now.

JONES: Is that right?

MULLINS: Yeah, they are an older group of folks who aren’t really replenishing their organization. But they have a real commitment to education.

JONES: But you get a lot of little grants from different state organizations, from state DAR?

MULLINS: I would say that we’re getting somewhere indirectly or directly, fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars a year.

JONES: But how many of these places, 197:00meetings do you have to go to every year?

MULLINS: Well, I’ll average going to eight to ten state conferences, you know, at least. I’ll travel all over the United States speaking. Starting here in August, I go to Oklahoma City for a workshop, where they have two to three hundred members in August. Then in September I’m going to New York and Vermont. And then October, I’m going to Pennsylvania. So, you know, I’ll do that and then next spring, in January I’m going to California for an entire week of chapters and visiting individuals. What has happened is that there have been several grants and several donations that have literally, from DAR members, that haven’t gone through the DAR. Just an example, a DAR member, the Daughters of the American Revolution’s School Chairman for schools, national, 198:00is on our board, they rotate on. This past one, Mrs. Creden (??) has given, in the last three years, in the neighborhood of almost twenty thousand dollars in gifts of stock to the Hindman Settlement School. That hasn’t gone through the DAR at all. Also, this past year, there has been set up in Washington, D.C., an endowment for the Hindman Settlement School. It now has close to two hundred thousand dollars in it, but DAR members are putting money into that. They monitor it, and we get the interest off of it.

JONES: That’s the National DAR.

MULLINS: That’s the National. And so, and just every so often, I have no idea how many wills and legacies have been left to the Hindman Settlement School. You don’t really know until they come through. But it’s been a group that has provided a great deal of support.

JONES: Okay, well that’s great. I guess we ought to talk about the economic development initiative 199:00and Hindman’s relationship to that, and how, and what part you played in that, and how important the Hindman Settlement School was to that whole project.

MULLINS: I guess the best way to start talking about what’s called the Community Development Initiative is to, there has to be a little bit of background. As I said, I have been involved politically, both on a local and a state level for several years. About fifteen years ago, fourteen or fifteen years ago, a county judge in eastern Kentucky by the name of Paul Patton, decided to run for lieutenant governor, and he got soundly beaten. After that he came to meet with a group of us in Knott County about why 200:00couldn’t someone from eastern Kentucky win a public office statewide. The reason was that people in eastern Kentucky didn’t stick together. I mean, they just didn’t come out and vote for their folks from the region. And so, we met at a little clinic called Eastern Kentucky Health Services Center, about five of us and we decided that we wanted to try to put together a group of folks to look at issues and how we could come to start working together. So, we started a thing called the Eastern Kentucky Leadership Foundation. And that was made up of myself, Bill Weinberg, Grady Stumbo, Paul Patton, and I think Bennie Bailey was at that, Bennie Ray Bailey. Well, it’s important that then Patton, Patton then decided to run for Lt. governor again. And he ran and he won. He ran for Lt. governor. And 201:00we were running these leadership conferences, we’d meet once a year for two days. And we’d pool all the people together and just deal with real hardcore issues facing the mountain to get people talking to each other. And to say “look, we need to stick together, rather than cutting each other’s throats.” And we dealt with everything from strip mining to health issues, to education issues. You name it, we dealt with everything. But it was getting people talking to each other and trying to break down some of these county lines of saying what’s good for Perry County, is good for Knott County, and what’s good for Letcher County is good for Harlan County and starting that sort of dialog. Well, that’s been going on now, we had our twelfth conference this past year. In the meantime, Patton then ran for governor and he won. He won for governor, even though he was not given 202:00much of a chance. On the day of the election, fifteen major media people were polled, fourteen of them said he was beat. He won by twenty some thousand votes. I was chairman of his campaign in Knott County. And I’ve been with him for years and these others. So, there we had the first eastern Kentucky Governor since Bert T. Combs, the father of Lois Combs Weinberg. The first one in thirty-four years. One of the things that happened under the previous governor, Brereton Jones had started a thing called the Kentucky Appalachian Commission, with a lot of support out of the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian, especially support from Ron Elder. And they were looking at what kind of things could be done to kind of do some work and get some things done in eastern Kentucky. Well, when Patton won, he decided to make that a major development and focus area for issues in Eastern Kentucky. 203:00So, he put together this, he increased the amount, the number of people on it, and put all these folks from state government on it, all these cabinet secretaries. And in the process, they started looking at ways of dealing with a lot of the tremendous economic problems of eastern Kentucky. And in one of their meetings, General Bickford, Head of Natural Resources, you know there have been various ways of dealing with economic development in eastern Kentucky. One is sort of a shotgun approach of giving everybody a little bit, but there was never enough monies and stuff to really make any difference. Well, Bickford in discussions and so forth with the governor, said, “what we need to do is concentrate resources in some of these small communities where it can make a difference. This approach is not working. We are just diluting it and not having any impact.” So, the concept of the Community Development Initiative came out of this whole process of this Kentucky Appalachian Commission. 204:00So, the Governor said, he put a group of people together, “I want you to develop a proposal process, and then I want you to send it out to those small communities that are not making any progress, the Hazards, the Prestonburgs, the Pikevilles, the Painesvilles, they can’t get it. It has to be the small towns that are drying up and they have to have certain criteria, and they have to be able to do this. And I want them to look at what they would like to be in thirty years, a visioning process.” Well, they threw that out there and you know, this is another pie in the sky, and most of these communities just got their local ( ) to put together a little proposal. Well, we got serious about it. We got very serious about it. We put together about twelve or fourteen people, and then we expanded it to about thirty people, then we expanded it to about sixty people. In total over a hundred local people got involved in the planning process. And we sat down and put together the most unbelievable vision for Knott, and Hindman, 205:00that you could come up with. We just dreamed, you see, and we put this together. And we put together this vision and we had all of this involvement of all of these local people. Now what was my role? Well, I was one of the first people involved in this. All of the meetings took place at the Hindman Settlement School. We were the home for this, we provided the place, we fed them, we provided the meeting space, and we sent out all the mailings. I served as secretary, I mean, we kept all the record, we did, I mean, we got it all there at the Hindman Settlement School. And we pulled all these people together and they started getting excited about the possibility of this happening. And so, we applied. And to make a long story short, we ended up being one of two communities that got the Community Development Initiative. Now there will be those who say that we got it because of our political connections to the governor. Well, you know what? I don’t care how we got it. Number one is, we had the best proposal.

JONES: Well, Ron Elder, 206:00who was on the committee, said that yours is the best.

MULLINS: It was the best, because what it said is we wanted to build sustainable development in our community around who we were, not bringing in some sort of industry and so forth. And we saw that one of our major deficiencies was education, so we wanted to used an educational sort of foundation of developing an educational program in the Hindman area, as the cornerstone. So, we started talking about how we could build on our culture. And we started talking about some sort of major technological center. We started talking about a branch of a community college. We started talking about how we could harness this thing of the culture through arts and crafts and artisans. And all of these things were all talked about, how to build up the infrastructure, we have to clean up our environment, and all of these things were part of this. And so, we, 207:00and then we took the vision and we had specific projects that were part of that, that we felt could be part of it. Well, we got chosen, and then we go into the legislative session, and we ended up getting, out of the legislative session, over twenty million dollars in projects funding. Again, how did we do that? Eastern Kentucky governor, a fellow who understood who we were, who knew that we had a track record of getting things done and put his weight behind it. And then we had a State Senator who was elected as Chairman of the A&R committee, who was helping to do the budget, and so all of these things came together. But what it ended up being is sort of continuing campus from the old Hindman High School through the Hindman Settlement School to downtown, to develop a corridor there. And the role the settlement played is that, I mean, the major facility 208:00is going to be on the Hindman Settlement School property, on land given by the Hindman Settlement School. It is going to be a four-story, thirty-three to thirty-six thousand square foot facility, will house the Hazard Community College branch of Knott County. It will house the public library, which we got some special funding for, it will have our Adult Education Center that the Hindman Settlement School has been running with KVAC, it will have a childcare component, and it will have a major, major technological center for distant learning classes, for CenterNet. All of these things are going to be in this facility. And then out of a lot of this discussion, we came up with the idea of a technical college for arts and crafts. There’s not one in the state of Kentucky, so we proposed that Hindman become the center for a new two-year technical college for arts and crafts. And the governor approved it and put four and a half million dollars in the budget for it. Also, he set up a Knott County Arts and Crafts Foundation, of which I am a member of, 209:00which would become a support and marketing center for artisans in eastern Kentucky and gave us a million dollars to purchase property downtown to renovate to do this. Been working on this for several months, the designs for the big building I just mentioned are almost done, we’re starting on the design and working on the community Technical Arts and Crafts college. And the Artisan Center downtown, right now, the buildings are at this time, the state is purchasing those facilities and we will begin renovating them within the next six months. What you’re talking about is an influx of over twenty million dollars into a community of, in a square mile area, of about thirty square miles of twenty million dollars. Infrastructure, we are talking about a new sewer system, new water system. We’re talking about also a recycling program. We’re talking about cleaning up all the stream paths going into the left and right fork of the Troublesome Creek. And this, 210:00whether you want, I mean, if I didn’t make it home, if I left this earth today, I’d say the greatest legacy that I would leave the Hindman Settlement School has been this work with this Community Development Initiative. Because I’m telling you right now, it is going to change the whole structure, the whole base, the Hindman Settlement School campus. But it is also going to bring about tremendous change in the Hindman-Knott County area.

JONES: Okay.

MULLINS: I can’t, I mean it is unbelievable as I sit here and being involved in it, it is almost hard for me to believe, but I know it is going to happen, because the money is there, and it is happening.

JONES: As you think, do you want to just speculate a little bit about the future of Hindman Settlement School and the region?

MULLINS: Well, I think that the Hindman Settlement School has a tremendous future 211:00if, number one, if additional funding can be accessed to continue the operating of the physical plant and the programming, which will need to change to meet changing needs. We should never do what we are doing, just because we have always done it. We should constantly be pushing the envelope. We shouldn’t be sitting there accepting well this is the way we’ve always done it sort of attitude. I think that is crucial, but there also has to be money to pay for it. So, I think that one of the things that the board has to do, and the thing that I have to do, is to try to insure a future financially, by going out and bringing in substantial, I’m talking about substantial, endowment monies to undergird the running of the institution.

JONES: You want to talk just a little bit about the next campaign?

MULLINS: We are in the midst, 212:00right now, of talking about the beginning of a major fund drive for Hindman Settlement School, that would involve raising funds to help offset the cost of the present program, but also providing a secure financial foundation in the future years. And we are just in the infancy stage, but we got to start somewhere. We’re starting to look at what our programs cost us today and what kind of monies would be needed in the future to sustain those. But we are also looking at how to improve the salaries and how to improve the benefits to the staff, because the staff there have worked for a pittance of what they are worth, and they need more benefits. And so, my goal, I have made a commitment as long as the board wants me and I’m doing the job they want me to do, to stay basically until this job is done. Because I think that is, to be the greatest legacy that I can leave, to leave it to where it will continue after me. 213:00So we’ve got a lot of work to do, it is not over with. Honestly, I’m fifty-one, I came at twenty-nine, I’m fifty-one and I feel in many ways, that I am the most valuable right now to the Hindman Settlement School that I’ve ever been, because of the tremendous contact that I’ve made on behalf of the settlement school. And I need to take advantage of those contacts. Because I’m not bashful about asking folks to help this program.

JONES: Okay, that pretty well does what Jess wanted to hear, and in the process, you’ve also answered a lot of things that I had. Here’s one, what about the leadership, what about the graduates of Hindman Settlement School and other settlement schools that have assumed leadership positions in the region? Have you been aware of that?

MULLINS: Well, I think there would be a tremendous void 214:00in the region, Loyal, without the impact of these institutions. Hindman Settlement School has an unbelievable number of educators, lawyers, politicians, folks from all kinds of professions that will give total credit for the opportunity to be at an institution like Hindman. And if you take that out of the picture in our part of the country, I just don’t know what kind of area the area would be. I mean I just know there would be a tremendous loss. Because you know, I’m not of the school of David Wisnott (??) and his book, All Native and Fine, that it would have been just as well if Uncle Solomon Everage hadn’t made that walk over to Hazard and asked those ladies to come. Because that is throwing the baby out with the bath water, and there are so many folks who got their education and have used that 215:00for the good of the people of the mountains and of this country.

JONES: Yeah, well David couldn’t have known what resulted from this. He’s caught up in his little, you know, the politics of culture thing here. And it is true that there were negative things that happened.

MULLINS: Well, I think, he takes about cultural interventionists, and I just say that there has to be, all cultures have interventionists, I mean that is the way they evolve.

JONES: But isn’t education by itself...

MULLINS: By itself, that’s right.

JONES: We’re talking about additives, and I think the people at Hindman, like everyone else....I think back to when they assumed that because old Regular Baptists didn’t give Christmas presents, it was because they were ignorant and didn’t know how, when there were political reasons why they didn’t do it.

MULLINS: That’s right. Well, I liked to go on record, 216:00first of all, anyone reading about the history of the Hindman Settlement School and my role, they should understand that I came there as a young person, not really realizing why I came there. That I have come to the conclusion that I was, and this may sound sort of strange to some people, but I felt like the good Lord led me to the Hindman Settlement School. I mean I truly believe that I was led to come there. And I truly believe that I have been led to stay there. So, I think that I was given an opportunity, I talked about my injury and being hit by a car. Well, I’ve often thought that I was given a second opportunity in life. And that my life had to be more than just for me. It may sound, and that’s not being a martyr or anything. But I’ve always felt that I have to give back because 217:00I was given the opportunity...

JONES: Okay. You know it is interesting that Ike Van der Poole, who was on that Prestonsburg school bus that went into the Sandy, I guess. He always had that same feeling, that he was saved for some reason. Because he went out the back end of that bus faster than somebody got out through the front. That’s interesting you both came from that area.

MULLINS: Well, I think that is, it is something that has been in me. And the other thing I want to say is, I have given night and day and worked very, very hard in this job. There’s times when I just wonder why in the world was I doing this job. I really have had those sorts of thoughts because it has just been overwhelming many times. But I can tell you no matter how much I have I’ve given to that institution, no matter.... 218:00END OF INTERVIEW