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ANN COX: Start out by telling me a little bit about yourself?

WALTER BEGLEY: We 1:00are natives of this area, both our parents, my brother and I are twins and our parents were from, both from Leslie County. Hayden, Kentucky. And they worked really hard to get an education, both of them did, you know, it wasn’t easy then to be educated but they made the effort and they met at UK. They, they were from the same part of the state, but they didn’t know each other until they were in college. And so, they moved to Breathitt County, that’s where we are now and bought property, started a whole bunch of businesses. Our dad was kind of an entrepreneur before, you know, in his time in the forties and fifties. 2:00We have two sisters, both older than us.

AC: What year were both of you born?

WALTER BEGLEY: We were born in 1950.

WADE BEGLEY: Baby boomers.

AC: Yeah. Could you just tell me all of, so you said you lived in Lexington a little while?

WADE BEGLEY: Yeah we did, yea.

WALTER BEGLEY: A little later.

AC: In the seventies?

WALTER BEGLEY: Yeah. After college. Kind of during college. We’ve done basically the same thing our whole lives. We were womb-mates, we’re still roommates.

WADE BEGLEY: You might want to edit some of this stuff.

WALTER BEGLEY: Yeah. Back in the old days when we were real young, Jackson was kind of self-. . .

WADE BEGLEY: Sufficient. 3:00WALTER BEGLEY: Yeah, self-sufficient.

WADE BEGLEY: More so than now.

WALTER BEGLEY: The roads were hazardous and, you know, winding and it took a long time to get from Lexington from here. That was the nearest big city. But our, yeah we grew up going to Lexington. A lot of people didn’t, you know. So we got a, we got out maybe once a month anyway and went to Lexington, maybe more often than that. Stayed at a hotel and went shopping and kind of knew about the outside world more than most people did, or got to, you know.

WADE BEGLEY: Well I don’t, I don’t feel I was isolated that much. He may feel that way, but I don’t. I looked at Lexington as the outside. I mean, as for the main part of the world, Lexington was isolated as far as I was concerned. 4:00I, I thought the opposite way than he does.

WALTER BEGLEY: Huh! Okay.

WADE BEGLEY: To me, my main thing was here in eastern Kentucky and it still is.

AC: How, what you said, Jackson was self-sufficient? What do you mean by that?

WALTER: Had a lot more business.

WADE: There were a lot more businesses here and more people here.

WALTER: There was a lot more pride in people’s yards, living and so on. . .

WADE: The county itself had a lot more character than, you know, than it does now. There weren’t any Wal-marts then. So there were more privately owned businesses here.

AC: When did that start changing?

WADE BEGLEY: I think in the late seventies, mid to late seventies it started changing 5:00but I don’t know. I would say the, yeah, late seventies, early eighties.

AC: Where in Jackson did you guys grow up? Was it like right around this area?

WALTER: Yeah, we’ve lived in the city limits all our lives. Well, where we are now used to not be city limits but it was just a couple of miles out, out of town, so. . .

AC: Did your parents own a farm?

WALTER: No, but they sold insurance, and our dad would go write a lot of policies out in the county and . . .

WADE: He leased farming over here. I mean, he had, when we first moved down here he was farming, but he had people that were, that did the actual work.

WALTER: Tenants.

WADE: He hired them, you know, 6:00just something like tenant farmers I guess. ‘Cause he was busy doing his own, with other businesses.

AC: So, what was it like growing up here? What did you do for fun?

WADE: It was great. We had two movie theatres. We don’t have any now.

AC: Oh, you don’t?

WADE: No. There were more people here. We had, we had cable T.V. in town because that’s the only way you could get television you had to, you had to be on the cable even back then to get more than one channel, you know.

AC: Mm-hmm.

WADE: A lot of people out on the farm would have their own little antena out on the mountain, you know? They got maybe one station. But, but I remember watching a lot of television.

WALTER: Somehow there was a lot more. . .

WADE: When television 7:00was good and the three networks were actually showing good programming.

WALTER: There seemed to be a lot more time then, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s that way when everyone’s a kid, but, oh, you know people would sit on the porch and watch cars go by or, you know, take walks or ride bikes.

WADE: There was more leisure time then, more free-time then than there is now. Things were cheaper to buy. They were better made then too, but they were also cheaper to buy then. Why all that went up, I don’t know, the prices blew up everything. Especially cars. Back then you could buy a decent car for a thousand bucks or under that, maybe a little bit. Now you couldn’t even buy 8:00the four tires that let it run on.

AC: Were there a lot of people your age that grew up around you?

WADE: Yeah. That’s true with any generation.

WALTER: But, well we. . .

AC: I mean right around you, like in your neighborhood. . .

BOTH: Yeah, we had a neighborhood.

WALTER: I guess we weren’t, we went to city school system so we got, when school was out we could still visit with our friends who lived in town. If you went to the county system you were separated after school and, you know, you might not see anybody until you had school again. So summers people went their own way. Here we had a city pool to go to and we went to camp, you know, just kind of normal, great upbringing. We, we. . .

WADE: Typical fifties family. 9:00WALTER: There were lakes in the area, Buckhorn Lake opened in ‘64, is that right?

WADE: No, it opened in ‘62. The dam was ( ) dedicated that place. And we were in the junior band in city school. I remember the governor came over there, I think it was Governor Combs, Bert Combs?

AC: Mm-hmm.

WADE: And they filmed all that. There was people there shooting movies and I was gonna ask you about that since you work in Frankfort, I wonder if any of those films still exist but. . .

AC: I’m sure they do. We have an archive full of. . .

WADE: We were probably in some of those films for a little bit.

WALTER: We’d like to see. . .

WADE: Junior band in the city school. We played over there, the dedication. I remember there were people running around with movie cameras, 10:00you know, sixteen mila-meter, whatever they were, cheap film. That’s when they dedicated the dam, now, the lodge, it didn’t open until like, two years after that. Early ‘64 I guess. But, but in that place, they made it a state park and I’ve been to a lot of state parks but Buckhorn’s my favorite. Still is.

WALTER: You have any more questions?

WADE: ‘Cause it’s more isolated. When you go there and visit and stay at the lodge you feel like you’re getting away from it all, you know, which is what a lot of people want to do when they go on a vacation, you know, get away from it all. That’s why I like Buckhorn.

AC: Did you both go to Breathitt County High?

WALTER: No, we went 11:00to Jackson City School.

AC: Oh, okay. So Breathitt was the county school. . .

WALTER: Right. And Jackson is the city school.

AC: Oh, okay.

WALTER: Our mother taught at Jackson. She retired from there. . .

WADE: She first taught in the county school system WALTER: Yeah. But when we were going to school she taught there so it was convenient to ride to school with our mom. She went there everyday so. . .

AC: What did she teach?

WALTER: Commerce.

WADE: You know, typing and book-keeping. Stuff like that. Shorthand.

AC: So were kids who went to the county high school, were they all bused in just from all over the county?

WADE: A lot of the kids that lived in the city limits usually would go to grade school at Jackson High, Jackson City School. But some, a lot of them, when they got up to high school they would go to the Breathitt County 12:00School system.

WALTER: But Breathitt’s one of the largest counties in the state and so we’re talking, but back then there were a whole lot of small schools that don’t exist today, so, like Big Rock, Kay, Vancleve, Wolverine, Beach Creek, Beach Grove, I mean, those are all consolidated now.

WADE: Well they merged them into the, into the, three elementary county schools which would be Marie Roberts Kay, the Highland Turner School, and ( ) school. But then, then, then in the late seventies or mid seventies they opened SMS. . .

WALTER: Middle school.

WADE: . . . Which made the seventh and eighth grade, you know, middle school. County middle school. 13:00So that changed it. The elementary schools were grades one through eight, now they’re one through six.

WALTER: There was a day when all the schools marched around like at a parade and school fair and that was like the major event of the whole year as far as people coming together. And there were thousands of people in town that day.

WADE: That was in the, mid October, they had that every year.

AC: Is that what you said eventually turned into the honey festival?

WALTER: Honey, yeah. Kind of, yeah.

WADE: Well, it didn’t turn into, the last one of those they had was in 1976, then in ‘77 they didn’t have that anymore. Then the year after that, ‘78 they came up with the honey festival. That’s how we’ve been having that. But that takes place on Labor Day weekend. 14:00The old Kiwanis School Fair was in mid October. So they backed it up a little bit then had it, you know, on Labor Day weekend, the honey festival.

AC: Did most of the people you went to high school, do they still live in Jackson?

WADE: A few of them.

WALTER: I wouldn’t say most people do, most people. . .

WADE: A lot of them have moved away or, some of them have moved back. Most people our age are still working, you know, they’re not retired yet. Although maybe a few of the teachers might be near retirement. ‘Cause I don’t think they’d have to teach as many years now and retire as they used to, you know. But, I think most people are still working that I went to school with.

AC: So 15:00when people moved away, when they moved back, but still work? Or would they move back when they retired?

WADE: Both.

AC: Both?

WADE: Yeah. And a lot of people that I went to grade school with, they left and I never saw them again. Where they are now, I don’t know. I’m sure they’re somewhere. But I’m talking about the students that were my age. But a lot of people came and would come and go.

AC: Do you remember when you were young, any of your relatives that did that? That left you and came back or. . .

WALTER: Oh yeah. We have relatives that we thought were from Indiana because they had gone to Indiana when we were kid, you know, infants.

WADE: Their, their, some of their children were born in Indiana so they are. . .

WALTER: They’ve spent their entire lives there, you know, made it their home. 16:00WADE: They’re real authentic hoosiers, you know, because they were born there. They’re parents were born down here in eastern Kentucky.

WALTER: Northern Indiana up near ( ).

WADE: For some reason a lot of people went to Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio although some people did go to Appalachian part of Virginia and West Virginia, somewhere in there. Some of them did. But most of them went north.

AC: Did most of your relatives move to Indiana?

WALTER: For some reason that came to mind, you know, they. . .

AC: Like your aunts and uncles? Is that who you’re talking about?

WALTER: Yes, and cousins. Just family. They went up there to 17:00get jobs. This is our nephew over here.

AC: Hi.

WALTER: You want to stop right here?

AC: Oh sure. [tape goes off and on] WALTER: He’s gonna take off again.

AC: Bye, nice to meet you.

WADE: Well, see you later.

AC: Sorry I interrupted your. . .

WALTER: That’s okay. Our nephew just stopped by to say hello.

AC: Okay. Let me make sure. I just want to make sure that the microphone is getting it okay. [tape goes off and on] Okay, okay, let’s see, okay, so, your relatives mostly moved to Indiana you’re thinking probably. 18:00WALTER: Well, I mean, they’re scattered all over the United States, we’re from a large family on both sides.

WADE: Yeah, we’ve got people out in Oregon and over on my mom’s side, I think. I haven’t seen them in a while. Some of them I’ve never met. Of course you know, we’re all immigrants. Most of the people in this area are of Irish descent, some English, some Scotch. The only true Americans are the American Indians. A lot of people forget that.

AC: Did your parents ever think about moving too, or were they always, did they just want to live here?

WADE: What now?

AC: Your parents. Did they ever think about 19:00moving or. . .

WADE: Well they were, they were both pretty busy, you know. They had four children but they didn’t have the, and the economy here then was really good, you know, there was plenty of work for everybody. I mean, compared to now I thought it was a lot better working here back in the fifties and sixties. Of course some people did leave to get, you know, better paying jobs, but there were plenty of jobs here then. I think a lot of people just moved to see, see another part of the country, you know?

AC: Did your parents ever retire or. . .

WALTER: Our mother did. Our father didn’t live long enough. He died before he retired. 20:00AC: Can you tell me a little about how, like, do you think how the kids are living in Jackson now, how they’re growing up in Jackson, is different than when you were a kid? Like, how is it different?

WADE: Well, one way it’s different is that all of these kids have cars. And when I was, of course I never drive anyway, I’m not a good driver, I, I just don’t, I don’t drive, I’m not a good driver so I’ve got enough sense to stay off the road, you know? But even back then people that did know how to drive, they didn’t have cars, you know? But that’s the biggest 21:00difference I see. Every kid you see now has got a new car, you know? Got a car, you know? But I think that’s a negative thing in a way ‘cause, and then the computer thing, you know? We didn’t have those. But we came up with more innovative ways to entertain ourselves. We did the cowboys and Indians and fight the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War, you know. We’d play army and that type of thing. But, then you know, even the toys were better back then, you know. The ones I remember. They were better made for it. There was more of a variety of toys then for kids but, but, better made toys. 22:00WALTER: I see a lot of new toys though, that I would have liked to have when I was a kid.

WADE: But overall, the toys I had when I was a kid were more. . .

WALTER: That’s two different opinions.

WADE: My opinion is they were better than the ones now. But, I don’t know. There was a lot of stuff to do, you know, I mean we could go ( ), we could go swimming. You know, like we said, we went to camps, 4-H camp, conservation camp, church camp, you know, boy scouts. That was a big thing then; cub scouts, boy scouts, and girl scouts and brownies for the girls, you know. That was real popular. And the city school then did a lot of the, lots of the English teachers would do plays, 23:00you know. So there was always, in my opinion, the city of Jackson then, then, then when I was a kid, growing up, was a lot more cultured than it is now. They knew more about the arts. In a way people were more intelligent in, in the city of Jackson there were more intelligent, more cultured people in the town then than now. So in that respect it’s gone backwards, I don’t know, instead of forwards to a large extent. Because I remember going to a lot of plays, a lot of recitals, what they called operettas back then. You don’t see that anymore. And, I don’t know, it was, it was kind of like a different, like a different world almost. 24:00I don’t know. People did watch a lot of T.V., but even the television was a lot better then than it is now. Well, they got four or five channels then. Now you can get like 300 channels, but usually there’s nothing on, you know? So even the television was better I thought. It seemed like people were more intelligent then overall than they are now. Not just here, but everywhere. It’s hard to say, they just seem different, you know? But I’m glad I grew up at that time. I wouldn’t want to be a kid now growing up.

AC: What 25:00do kids do now for fun around Jackson?

WADE: I have no idea.

AC: You have no idea? Do you have any idea?

WALTER: I think they cruise, they, you know, probably more kids now to go Lexington and you know, movies, spend a lot of time away from home, I guess. It’s just real fast paced, the society now and, you know, some of the things still, I mean they still have camp for kids and a few of the things we talk about, but, I don’t know, there’s no time like your youth, where, when we grew up it just seemed to be a very nice place to live.

WADE: It was a slower paced life style back then than what it is now. 26:00That’s, like I said earlier a lot of the kids my age they didn’t have cars, you know, so we had to, our parents would take us somewhere if we had to go somewhere, you know, or maybe you have relatives or something. But we had to do a lot of things especially play time where we’d have to do some, you know, stay within a certain area, but we were more innovative with what we did, you know? As far as play time. We had, we had the, we’d come up with original ideas for games you know, and things like that, so, although there were games you could buy. We were exposed to those. But, the main thing, it was a slower paced life style. 27:00And I think anybody, any my nephew, you know, he probably, he was back in the, when he was a kid in the late seventies, it was even a little slower paced life style then than it is now. People had more leisure time.

AC: When you were, when you were little, like in the 1950s, did you have everything in your house? Like did you have a T.V. and a phone and everything.

WALTER: We did. You know, we had black and white T.V.

WADE: I heard there were a few people in this county who didn’t have electricity, but I didn’t see it, I didn’t see it, but. . . Most people I knew, just about every, you know, everybody I knew had electricity, you know. Most people had running water, although there were a few well, 28:00people had wells, you know? But at that time the water was good, you know? So it didn’t do, you know, it was cool if you had a well, you know.

WALTER: That’s our biggest criticism of today. There’s too much litter. Especially here where we grew up seeing beautiful places. It’s just a shame.

WADE: They need to clean up the rivers and streams and especially in this county, and need to get the garbage off the roads and prevent people from throwing it back down.

WALTER: We pick up every day that we live here.

WADE: Now that was, it was quite a bit different when we were growing up, you didn’t see a lot of that. But back then the people that did do that tended to stay in their homes way out in the county, or wherever that was, and you would just maybe see it a little bit there. But it wasn’t spread out all over the county.

WALTER: Like a dump.

WADE: Right. Another reason for it was these fast food restaurants that moved in from here. That caused a lot of it. 29:00But, but you know, people then that had more pride in their community and their state, not to do that. Somewhere along the line they’ve lost that.

WALTER: I think they should declare the whole state. . .

WADE: That’s what they need to get back to.

WALTER: . . . A state park. And then people would take care of the park. It would be the state of Kentucky state park.

WADE: But we’d get a, you know, when I was in grade school and Sunday school we were taught, if we would have thrown down any kind of litter or garbage on the campus we would have been chastised for it and rightly so. They need to get back to that in the public schools and even the private schools END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE A BEGINNING OF TAPE ONE, SIDE B WADE: To teach these kids not to throw garbage everywhere, everywhere they go, you know. They need to get back to that. Because they did do that then and you can tell a big difference. And it. . .

WALTER: Welfare 30:00was a big mistake I think too for this area. Introducing welfare. It’s just kind of an incentive not to do anything, to be lazy and, you know, get a check for it I guess.

AC: When did welfare start around here?

WADE: Oh, it started when it started everywhere. Probably in the thirties. Part of the big deal, or the new deal, whatever they call it. It started out as a pretty good thing but what they should do, I think, is let people, you know get checks every month that need it, you know. In my opinion only the sick and elderly should get that, you know, help from the government. But the ones that, that do get it, that 31:00aren’t sick and elderly, let them work for it, let them work forty hours a week if nothing else, picking up the litter, cleaning up the rivers and streams. Let them do that to get that check, you know.

AC: Do you recall if people were on welfare when you were young? Like in your teens or younger?

WADE: I don’t, yeah, I remember some were but it wasn’t as ramped as it is now, I don’t think. Of course, you know, we lived in town. But even then the poor kids that I went to school with were more intelligent and more, had more initiative, even then, for a lot of them. A lot of those kids that came from poor families 32:00went on to finish school and you know, got good jobs.

AC: Did you go to college at Lees? Or where did you. . .

WALTER: We went away for high school to military school and then we came back to Lees College. And so we were at Lees in the early seventies.

WADE: Late sixties.

AC: Where did you go to military school?

WALTER: Kentucky Military Institute. And we had a campus near Louisville. A place called Lindon, Kentucky.

WADE: Right outside of Louisville.

WALTER: Near Westport, LeGrange Road area. And then we had a campus in Florida too, so in the winter months we’d go to Venice, Florida. So that was nice.

AC: Did you like it 33:00for the most part?

WALTER: I like Florida a lot, but I didn’t, I didn’t. . .

WADE: I didn’t like it at first, but after the first year with them, your first year of military school is like an initiation and at that time they didn’t have that many rules against hazing so you had to put up with that, you know, your first year, after your first year you thought, well if I’ve gone through that, I might as well stick it out, you know? And finish, you know? Because it was, well it was bad your second, after your first year, if you got through that all right then the rest of it wasn’t that bad so you stayed down there and finished. But I didn’t like it at first. At first I wanted to just leave, you know. Come back home.

AC: Would others from Jackson do that too?

WALTER: Oh, a few. Not very many.

WADE: There were 34:00a few other students there from eastern Kentucky but most of the, most of the kids that went to KMI then were from all over the country. A lot of them, we had a lot of kids from Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati area. There were actually more students at KMI then from out of the state than actually in Kentucky ( ). I’m sure it fluctuated from time to time, but that school closed down in ’72 so it no longer exists, you know, but. . .

AC: Do you think it changed how you grew up? Like, if you had stayed here and gone to high school here do you think you would have ended up differently or. 35:00. .

WADE: Possibly.

WALTER: I think so because coming back from military school, we noticed that our friends were out maybe racing cars at night or, you know, we were separated from the social life that, that our friends had so, I don’t know. A lot of our friends were married early and divorced eventually. Some, you know, some have lasted, the marriages have lasted. . .

WADE: Everything we’ve said could be, you could take any of these small communities in eastern Kentucky at that time up to now, they would tell you almost identical to what we’re telling you. This area, this part, this eastern Kentucky area. A lot of the same situations. Almost identical. 36:00So it was very similar.

AC: When people were going north, like in the 1950s, did it seem like a big deal to you then? Like, did you really notice how people were leaving to go north?

WADE: Well, I was a kid, but, yeah, I remember people, but like I said, people would come and go and nowadays you don’t notice it as much as you did then ’cause, ’cause of the faster paced life style, you know, you’re more used to it. But back then, you know, it was a lot slower paced life style and you would notice something like that a little more. 37:00Plus people actually took the time to know each other better back then than they do now. Neighbors were more interconnected then than they are now. Yeah, I mean, it made a big difference.

AC: When I interviewed Hubert, he was telling me how he sort of lived in this small community where everybody knew everybody who lived around them. Did you guys feel like that when you were growing up?

WADE: Yeah, I did in Jackson.

WALTER: Well the whole town was a very big community so, so, yeah, we, we, you know, we’ve made life long friends, you know. And we kind of remember when everybody either moved here from somewhere else or relocated.

WADE: Like I said earlier, like, I felt as if when I’d leave the area and go to Lexington or somewhere 38:00that I was leaving civilization. I wasn’t going to civilization, I was leaving it. When I came back to my hometown and county, I felt like I was coming back to civilization ’cause, you know, I knew, I was more familiar with it and I knew everybody. That’s what I meant earlier by that. I’m not putting Lexington down or anything, but this is just, you know, how I felt about it. Some people like him I guess, I guess they thought they were going to civilization when they went to Lexington, although Lexington did offer more shopping and stuff like that, but by the end of the day I was ready to come back to eastern Kentucky.

WALTER: It’s still like that for us.

AC: Mm-hmm. You’re ready to come back?

WALTER: Yeah. It’s a good place to visit, but it’s nice to come back to a slower paced life here like he was saying it seems slower than the rest of the world, or it seems to me. 39:00WADE: But even then, Lexington was a smaller place then. Lexington underwent the similar thing that happened here, it started growing out of control, it moved, the downtown part of Lexington at that time was a great place. And it’s nothing like that now. It all moved on the bypass or whatever you, but yeah, Lexington at that time was a good town, you know a nice town to visit. But now I avoid going to Lexington whenever I can. I don’t really have any big desire to go there anymore.

AC: What, what is the business you run out of your home? You do run a business right? 40:00WALTER: Yeah. Videography.

AC: Videography?

WALTER: Yeah. And we’re musicians too. We play some music.

AC: Oh, okay.

WALTER: But not a whole lot anymore. We were more active in the seventies and eighties I guess, playing music.

AC: What did you play?

WALTER: We played for dances and rock n’ roll.

AC: Okay. Where, did you, did you say where your sisters lived?

WALTER: One sister lives just down the road.

AC: Oh, okay.

WALTER: Around the curve. And the other lives in Winchester, she moved to Winchester when she got married.

AC: So what do they do for their work?

WALTER: They both have been teachers but, the ones retired now and the other’s 41:00just a housewife.

AC: Mm-hmm.

WALTER: But they went to college and became educated, you know, and had a career. One was a speech pathologist for a while and the other taught different things, art, different things.

AC: Did they meet their husbands around here?

WALTER: Yeah.

AC: So was it people they had known growing up or. . .

WALTER: Not necessarily, no.

AC: Oh, okay.

WALTER: Although that’s common for people to have high school sweet hearts and get married and stay together, you know.

WADE: That’s common anywhere. Like, you know, even I know that’s common, you know. That’s not restricted 42:00to eastern Kentucky at all. Be true in your hometown.

AC: Yeah. When you lived in Lexington, what did you do?

WADE: We worked on a road construction crew over in Bourbon County, a neighboring county of Fayette so we had to drive in every morning.

WALTER: We did different jobs. I think when I first moved I worked for a printing company.

WADE: Yeah, and I worked for a small plant down there. For about a year and a half and then we got on the road construction thing.

AC: What made you want to do that?

WADE: Do what?

AC: What made you want to do that? Get a job over there? Or did you just have to?

WADE: Both. You had to do something, you know.

WALTER: I tried to get work here 43:00and couldn’t get hired by a coal company. That’s what I tried.

WADE: At that time though, this was the early to mid seventies, a lot of kids my age were in school or, a lot of them went to, I’m talking about college, they would go out and they could take off a while and work some and then go back, you know, there’s a lot of that then.

AC: So when you, so when you came back here was it, just because you felt like you were done over there?

WALTER: No. Our mother made a business deal with friends of hers that owned a, a business that had been here for years and years and we ended up buying that business 44:00thanks to our mom, you know, we came back. So we ran a retail store for fifteen years after that.

AC: What was that store?

WALTER: It was Deaton Brothers Farm Supply.

WADE: It was a farm supply store. And there was a lot more farming in this county even then than there is now.

WALTER: It was a southern state store.

WADE: And at that time, even in the fifties, there was a lot, even a lot more farming then than there was in the seventies and eighties.

AC: Yeah. Are there still people who farm around here?

WADE: Yeah, a lot of people raise their own vegetables and things, a lot of people still do that but the big time farmers, there are only a few left.

WALTER: It’s kind of because the mountains, any further east there’s few farmland, 45:00I mean it’s hard to find level ground to farm on. So this it the last of the farming country in the east.

WADE: I remember when I was a kid, when I was a kid there was a lot of tobacco and corn. People even grew a lot of peanuts then, I remember.

WALTER: There’s still tobacco being farmed.

WADE: They had a lot of life stock but you don’t see much of that anymore.

WALTER: There’s a reclaimed land though up where the strip mining was done, up south fork and so a lot of that reclaim land is potentially usable for something, I mean it’s like Texas up there. So, you never know, there might be cities up there someday, I don’t know.

WADE: But I don’t think you’ll live to see it. 46:00[laughing] I’d say it’d be a long time.

WALTER: A lot of them ( ) up on the farm where the strip jobs were.

AC: Yeah I went, I guess Hubert Hollon owns some land up there and he took up, I got to see.

WALTER: Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, that’s a good example of what it can be like after the mining was done.

AC: Yeah, yeah, he built a little cabin up there.

WALTER: Yeah, yeah, you’ve been up there too?

AC: Mm-hmm.

WALTER: Okay. I know where that is.

WADE: But even now if you go over to some parts of the county, you still see people growing their gardens on hillsides or whatever. They still do that a lot. Wherever they can plant a garden. But the big time farming they did in this county ( ) has really gone down a lot although there is a little bit of it left. 47:00I don’t think you can make as much money farming as you used to because it costs so much to farm, you know. That takes a lot of the initiative out of it.

AC: Is this the Kentucky River right out here?

WADE: The what now?

AC: The Kentucky River? Right out here?

WADE: Right here? No, this is a small fishing lake that they put in there in the early sixties.

AC: Oh, so they put it in there?

WADE: The main river that runs through Jackson is the north fork of the Kentucky River and it runs out from Whitesburg through Hazard down through Jackson. Then there’s a south fork of the Kentucky River too and I know it runs partially through Booneville. 48:00There’s a lot of nice creeks and, big creeks in this county, you know, Quicksand Creek is just like one mile of being classified a river. So there’s a lot of real nice waterways in this area if they could just clean them up, you know, get the junk cars out of them and get the garbage out of them and clean them up. They can do that because the river will clean itself if you get all the garbage and stuff out of it, it will, you know, it will clean itself as it runs down. They can, they can, it can be done.

WALTER: They need to go up to the headwaters though and start there and work all the way down to Frankfort and all those.

AC: Has it always, have people always lived back here like where you guys live now? Like, 49:00have there always been people living back here as long as you remember?

WADE: Do what now?

AC: Have there been people living, like, you live kind of back from the main road, I just wondered if people had always been living back here.

WADE: Oh yeah, yeah. The main road now is 15 out here. The road you came in on. That was built in the early sixties. Actually they started in what I believe is the late fifties, doing basic work on it, the initial work on it, but I think it opened fifteen opened, I believe late ‘63, early ‘64, somewhere around there. But it didn’t open, 15 didn’t open Hazard to Whitesburg until the late, early seventies. They were that long in getting it completed. 50:00AC: Do you think when the roads were finally finished more people were coming and going?

WADE: Well, they all, you know at that time they said oh things will be better, you know, things will be cheaper when we get the road through here, you know, but actually they were totally wrong and things got more expensive and it just, it just allowed people to leave the area faster. And I, you know, if I had, you know, I liked it better when we had the old roads. And also, when you put new roads in, it makes people drive faster, there are more car wrecks. I think the old roads were better because people didn’t drive as fast. Especially with kids. They couldn’t drive as fast and when the new road opened up, a lot of the character of Jackson died because 51:00people moved, you know, people moved away and, and a lot of stuff moved out on the roads that was originally in town, you know, so it didn’t, I think overall the new road, the new 15 had a negative effect on this town. ‘Cause I liked it better before it went in. A lot of people wouldn’t agree with that but some people would. We were more self-sufficient before that new road went in.

AC: Yeah.

WADE: A lot of the, most of the stuff brought into Jackson then was brought in on rail road freight. But I don’t know, there was more, this sense that the town of Jackson had more 52:00character to it than it does now because, you know, because we were more self-sufficient. There were more businesses here then. And a lot more, you know, like at that time Jackson had four or five car dealerships. We don’t have any now, I mean new car dealerships. We’ve got some used car dealerships. But when I was growing up we had four or five new car dealerships. Now, now there’s none here.

AC: When was the coal boom when you were growing up?

WADE: When was what?

WALTER: The coal boom.

WADE: Oh, it was. . .

WALTER: I think there was more mining east of here when we were kids, like in Perry and Leslie County.

WADE: The part of Breathitt County was at one time 53:00was part of Perry County.

WALTER: And Clay County.

WADE: And that area was mined earlier on than other parts like he was talking about. But up to a certain point they were deep mining, there wasn’t any strip mining.

WALTER: Yeah, that’s the newer, easier way to get it all. . .

WADE: But strip mining has its limits too, they can only go down so far and your in a rugged, mountainous area, you got to watch about flooding when you strip mine. So it has its limits too, you can only take so much out of it, you know.

AC: Mm-hmm. But when that became popular again, that was in the sixties, did you say?

WADE: Well, it was, but I didn’t notice it as much then.

AC: ‘Cause you were younger?

WADE: Yeah, I was younger.

WALTER: I don’t think, I don’t think it was in the sixties.

WADE: But the boom actually 54:00here I think was the early seventies.

WALTER: Yeah, the seventies or eighties.

WADE: The early seventies to the late eighties. But like, like we said earlier, there was a lot of deep mining going on in the other counties, you know. Especially Perry and Leslie and Letcher County, you know, and Knott County.

AC: Did you notice more people coming back then in the seventies and eighties when there was more mining jobs?

WADE: Well we were gone part of the time.

WALTER: There was a lot of, there was a lot of mining in the area then because of the coal industry.

WADE: Yeah. The ( ).

WALTER: So there were more people stirring around, more jobs, I’d say thanks to coal.

WADE: But, you know, I remember as a kid the economy was real good in the fifties 55:00here because mainly it didn’t cost as much money to buy something. You could go buy a loaf of bread for what, fifteen or twenty cents? But you might buy stale bread for that now, but not fresh bread. Like I said about cars, you could buy a new car for a thousand bucks or cheaper. You couldn’t even buy the tires for that now probably. So that’s, you know, everybody was saying when the new road comes through, everything will be cheaper. That didn’t pan out. But a lot of things got more expensive, especially cars. I wouldn’t pay thirty grand for a car, you know, the way some of these people do. There’s no way. There’s no way I would pay thirty thousand or even twenty thousand for a car. There’s not a car made in this country worth twenty thousand dollars. 56:00WALTER: I wanted to say the main town in eastern Kentucky probably is Hazard. So people have always driven through Jackson to get to Hazard or, you know, it’s close enough to where it’s not really the same community, but it’s, you know, it’s close. We enjoy things in Hazard now that, like we said, we don’t have any cinemas, they have, they have cinemas in Hazard so we go into Hazard for. . .

AC: How long of a drive is it? Did you say?

WALTER: About what, a forty minute drive?

WADE: What, to Hazard? Depends on the traffic [laughing]. There’s not much traffic you can get there in what, thirty minutes? 57:00I know when we were kids it took three hours to go to Lexington and it took almost an hour to go to Hazard but I liked it better then ‘cause when your little, a trip like that, it was more of an experience, you know, and the scenery was a lot better. You could drive slower ‘cause you had to drive slower so it made the trip more, more fun for me, you know.

AC: What did most, you know what most people did for a living in those fifties and sixties? Do you remember?

WADE: In this area?

AC: Yeah.

WADE: All lot of them would have been teachers. A lot of them social workers, you know typical, a lot of people worked in the stores, retail, you know. 58:00Just your normal type of jobs ( ). But there were a lot more businesses.

WALTER: Logging was ( ).

WADE: There were four or five car dealerships through here, new car dealerships, not used car. And they, those places employed people. And we had a couple of movie theatres, you know.

WALTER: [sneezes] Excuse me.

WADE: There was more business in Jackson than there is now. More, especially more of a variety. And there were some bus, the restaurants and everything that aren’t here now. We didn’t have all those fast food places then. But the restaurants that were here then were actually better. The quality of the food was better. 59:00Maybe you didn’t see the cups and paper thrown out all over the road back through there. Not anything like you see now. But that’s true in a lot of communities, you know, where fast food comes in there. And I’m not blaming the fast food companies, you know, a lot of them say don’t litter the highway, you know, but people do it anyway, you know. That’s the fault of the person, whoever’s doing it, you know.

WALTER: There were a lot of school teachers in our family. On our mother’s side and our father’s side so, it’s just kind of something we’ve grown up with, hearing stories about the schools and stuff.

AC: 60:00I’ve asked most of the questions. Did you ever go on vacation when you were little?

WALTER: Yeah.

WADE: Oh yeah.

AC: Where did you go?

WADE: Usually we would go to Florida.

AC: Florida.

WADE: And we would stop in the Smokey Mountains along the way or even come back.

WALTER: But now, we have an uncle who lives in Florida and who owned a hotel there, so that made it, we had a place to stay when we got there. So that, that helped. And we’re, I don’t think a lot of people in this, I mean, you know, you’d drive there on summer break so being here was a great place to spend a vacation too. 61:00AC: Yeah.

WADE: Of course, we always went in June during summer break. During summer vacation to Florida we used to go. I think one year we might have gone in July but most of the time we went in June.

WALTER: But we had cousins that didn’t see the ocean until they were grown, you know? So, we were—we weren’t the average family, I don’t think because we got to travel and---.

WADE: Well, it was just whatever you wanted to do. A lot of people that didn’t travel chose not to, but they could have. For some reason they didn’t—they didn’t get around to it. Maybe they didn’t have time, you know.

AC: Did you have lots of cousins who lived around here?

WADE: Oh, yeah. Um-hmm. Yes.

AC: Did most of them leave or are they still here?

WADE: I would say that you know--.

WALTER: What?

WADE: ---Maybe 62:00fifty percent left.

WALTER: Well, a lot of their children would—when they grew up, would let them go away to school or live here a while and they moved off you know, but they still have connections here you know, family connections here. But a lot of people have moved out of here, even since the early 1980s you know, there’s a lot of people that were living here then that don’t live here now, that moved away.

AC: Do you two think you will stay here [laughs] for the rest of your lives, you think?

WALTER: Well, how knows? Maybe, probably.

WADE: We don’t anticipate leaving.

AC: Okay. [laughter] 63:00WALTER: As you get older, you tend not to move around as much.

AC: Oh, yeah—yeah. [laughter] WADE: It’s like Dorothy said, ‘there’s no place like home.’ [laughter] AC: Well, I mean some people I’ve interviewed, they’ve gone away and lived away for like twenty years but came back just because this place is different from any other place--.

WADE: Don’t drink the water here right, or you’ll stay. [laughter] AC: Yeah. Well, alright, that’s all.

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE B

64:00