Oral History Interview with James Sewell

ANN COX: These two are originals? This one here?

JAMES SEWELL: The ones opposite walls.

AC: Wow.

SEWELL: This one’s never been printed. And the one on this wall has been and it’s a, it’s a kind of unusual painting for Sawyer because it’s got some bright colors in it, it’s, he, you know, he used a lot of pastels and not, not much in the way of bright but it just sort of fit with him. It’s an interesting painting, really.

AC: That’s neat. I’m just gonna. . . Okay, this is, oh, okay.

SEWELL: Do you want me to turn this thing off? I don’t think it hums, but. . ..

AC: Oh no, I think it’s okay. Okay, this is Ann Cox interviewing James Sewell on February 4th, 2004. 1:00Okay, I guess just start out by telling me the year you were born and where you were born.

SEWELL: Okay, I was born in Huntington, West Virginia on October 17, 1945. The reason I was born in Huntington was because my father was the Board County Health Officer, but he was a native of Jackson and he had taken a job. I think he told me once upon a time that it was the highest paying public health job in the state at the time. And he stayed there for, I don’t know how many years, a couple, three years and then moved back to Jackson where he went into medical practice.

AC: So how old were you at that time? You were about six years old?

SEWELL: I don’t think, I think he might have moved back in ‘46 or ‘47 so I wasn’t more than one or two years old.

AC: Oh, o.k. So you were really. . .

SEWELL: Yeah. When we went back to Jackson 2:00AC: What did your mother do?

SEWELL: She was a nurse. She worked in my father’s office until she decided she didn’t want to work anymore, so she didn’t. She just quit.

AC: Do you know how they met?

SEWELL: They met, she was a nursing student at Vanderbilt and he was at med. School in Vanderbilt so that’s where they met.

AC: So, can you talk a little bit about your grandfather? Maybe tell me what you were telling me before?

SEWELL: Yeah, he, my grandfather was a, a mostly I guess a merchant. He had a general store and what they call, and still call south Jackson, which is across the river from the main part of town. And he was at one time the mayor and had the streets paved in Jackson, although when I was growing up we lived on Broadway, right across from the court, or, the post office and 3:00Hawk Street made a tee intersection with Broadway right in front of our house and Hawk Street was not paved when I was very young. But, like it was paved. He had most of the streets in the downtown area paved.

AC: Can you describe what your house was like? The house you grew up in?

SEWELL: Well, the house I grew up in, we first lived in south Jackson, right across the street from my grandfather’s store which was sort of faced the ice house, they had an ice house there where they delivered ice I guess, or people came and bought ice there, but there was a house next to the ice house, faced perpendicular to it and I think that’s where we moved first of all and I don’t know how long we lived there but it couldn’t have been very long when he bought a house 4:00on Broadway that was a brick, one story house, it had an attic that he finished off at some part of the time, in some point in time and it had a basement with a coal chute and there was a safe, like a vault in the basement that the original owner had put in there for some reason or another, but we never used it and didn’t know the combination to the lock. We never could even close the door to it, but it was there. And it did have, it originally had a coal burning furnace and we converted that to, to steam heat, gas, steam heat and I remember not having any air conditioning and I guess it might have been even before they had wind air conditioners, I don’t, I don’t recall, but 5:00I remember some nights in the summertime sitting outside because it was too hot to sleep. We’d sit out in the yard and it was right across the street from the post office and there was a vacant lot on the corner next to the house and we played baseball and softball and football in that vacant lot.

AC: Is that post office still there? Is that post office still there?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm. It’s no longer the post office. I think they’re using it now for, maybe the city’s taken it over, I’m not sure, but the post office was there until long after I went away to college and then they moved it, I think it’s out on the bypass now.

AC: So did you live there until you went to college?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm.

AC: O.k., so you lived there a long time. Was your, 6:00were your parents both in healthcare until they both retired? Were your parents both in healthcare until they retired?

SEWELL: They lived in that house and, well, my father never got the chance to retire, he died when he was fifty-seven and mama, I guess retired, probably about 1950 or ’55, I mean, she just quit working and did never work again but daddy was working until he died.

AC: Did you have a lot of relatives that lived in Jackson?

SEWELL: No, we had a distant cousin who lived sort of across the street to the side of the house, it was where the corner is on Cherry Street, but he was like a fourth cousin, you know, he was fairly distant. Other than that we had my great uncle lived there. 7:00My uncle had moved and started practicing medicine at Mount Sterling so he didn’t live there. Really I guess it mostly it was just, just my great uncle was kind of, and a couple of distant cousins. The rest of them all moved away for some reason. I guess there were bigger and brighter things.

AC: Do you know when most of them moved away?

SEWELL: No, I, I assume that my uncle, he may have come back to Jackson for just a brief period of time after he got out of med school, but then most of the time I remember he was in Mount Sterling. And I guess they were our closest relatives except for my Uncle Ben, he was vice president of the bank until he retired.

AC: ’Cause there’s a 8:00time that I’m sort of interested in, in that region where a lot of people left, you know, they call it the great migration out of Appalachia. Do you think that they were part of that? The people who left?

SEWELL: No, he, I mean Mount Sterling really is sort of on the edge of the mountains so he really didn’t, I don’t consider Mount Sterling as part of the flatlands I don’t guess but I think most of the people, there were a lot of people who I went to school with, of course I didn’t go to school with that many people, there were only seventeen people in my graduating class, but there were a lot of people who would go to high school and graduate and move to Ohio and Indiana for the manufacturing jobs, you know, and Michigan, a lot of them went to Detroit and worked in the automobile industry. One of my classmates went to, 9:00I think Ohio somewhere and worked in the Hostess Bakery, like in the shipping department there. He and I both thought he was making big money. [laughing] I don’t know, there were some other kids that were in high school that moved up there and there were a lot of parents that moved to Ohio and Indiana and Michigan for the manufacturing jobs.

AC: What high school did you go to?

SEWLL: I went to Jackson City School, Jackson Independent School.

AC: And that’s was that smaller than the county school?

SEWELL: Yeah, the county school, in fact there was an article in the paper last week that the city school may have to close because of the budgetary problems and that would be a shame because their percentage of graduates 10:00who go off to college is unusually high, that means high even compared to some of the more urban, supposedly more sophisticated school. But it’d be a shame to see it close. But it’s a very small school. Like I said, there were seventeen people in my graduating class and I graduated in 1963.

AC: So were you one of the few who went to college after that? After you graduated?

SEWELL: Well in my class, let me see, one girl skipped a grade and she went to college, she graduated before I did because she skipped a year. And, you know I guess there were only [phone rings] three off us, I’m gonna let that ring, there were only 11:00like three of us out of my class that went to college.

AC: Oh, okay. Where did you go to college?

SEWELL: Centre College.

AC: Centre College? Where is that?

SEWELL: It’s in Danville, it’s a small, private school.

AC: Oh, okay.

SEWELL: Academically a very strong school. Listed consistently as one of the better small private schools in the country.

AC: When you were growing up did your family do any sort of farming? Or. . .

SEWELL: No.

AC: ’Cause a lot of people I interview, their families did a lot of farming so I was just wondering. . .

SEWELL: My mother owned some property in Alabama that we did farm, but nothing in Kentucky. We didn’t, we didn’t own much property except what we inherited from my great grandfather and that was all. Mostly 12:00too rough to, he, he acquired it for the mineral rites but it was not something you could farm. Pretty rough, hilly.

AC: Yeah. Did most people when you were growing up live, in Breathitt County, live down in the, like city part like you did or did most of them live up around the hills and. . .

SEWELL: I think the population of Jackson was about twelve hundred and I can’t remember what the population of the county was, but the county had a pretty good population. When I was young Saturdays everybody came to town to get their provisions for the week. And Main Street and Broadway would be very crowded, it’d be, sometimes it’d be hard to walk on the sidewalk on Saturdays 13:00because people came to get all their groceries, supplies. Then they’d go back home and stay for the week, then come back again the next Saturday and there were people who actually came in wagons and I remember there was this one fellow who I guess must have come to the post office in his wagon and we’d get out and there was a little bench on the back of his wagon and we’d jump up on that bench and ride on his wagon and. . . I don’t know, it’s almost like a frontier town. [laughter] They called, I don’t know whether you’ve run across this or not, but they used to call it bloody Breathitt County because of all the people who were killed and shot in feuds and things and my father, being a doctor, I saw several people who’d been shot and came to the house that needed medical attention. 14:00AC: When you were growing up did you feel like there was a difference between the people who lived in the city and the people who lived out in the country?

SEWELL: Well, yeah sort of.

AC: How?

SEWELL: I don’t know, it just seemed like the kids in the city were a little more sophisticated for some reason although I don’t, I never got the feeling that there was any prejudice or like a cast system or something like that, you know, I mean we all kind of inner-mingled but there was a rivalry between the two school and that pretty much, I mean there was not, not much in the way of trouble but there were, I mean we did have trouble with schools from other counties, I mean that was 15:00a war sometimes [laughter]. They were always ( ) but we never really got, that I know of, got into any trouble with the county school systems. But when the out of county schools would come in, or we’d go to their places to play basketball there were fights that broke out and that kind of stuff. Kind of peculiar. Hadn’t thought about that. [laughter] AC: How did you meet Walter and Wade?

SEWELL: Well I’ve known them ever since they were born, just about. Their sister was in my class, she in fact was the girl who skipped a grade and went off to college and they were budding young musicians and I was kind of a musician at the time and we sort of, I sort of helped them along I guess in their musical career and they far surpassed me. They’re, they’re really good musicians and I 16:00just sort of wack around. Don’t do it much anymore, but they still are at it. How did you meet them?

AC: I interviewed Hubert Hollon.

SEWELL: I know the name.

AC: And his son told me to interview them. His son is Johnny, Johnny Hollon. Okay, but that’s how I met them. Let’s see. What did you do after you graduated from college?

SEWELL: I came here. I went to work for state government. I didn’t, I guess I was pretty naive, I didn’t 17:00know that much about the job market, I probably could have gone to work at the ( ). That’s not something that really appealed to me at the time. Although it might have been a smart move for me to do that. But I started work here with state government and I made gross 415 dollars a month and that was before they took out any taxes and all that stuff.

AC: So you’ve been in Frankfort since you’ve graduated?

SEWLL: Since 1968 and I went away for about two years and worked at Eastern for a couple years and then I came back to go into the real estate business.

AC: Did you ever think about moving back to Jackson?

SEWELL: Not seriously.

AC: Okay SEWELL: I just kind of put my roots down here and 18:00I don’t know, if the opportunity presented itself earlier, I might have done that. But then I know how much they pay. But didn’t think much about the future then, then you start to get old and the future sort of looms on you, you know?

AC: Mm-hmm. But you say you go back to visit a lot?

SEWELL: I used to until my brother got an apartment in Lexington, now he’s, you know, the only relative I’ve got up there and he’s, he’s my brother and my best friend too. It’s just so much easier when they’re in Lexington maybe two or three times a week. His son and daughter are there and they have a grandchild ( ) so they get to Lexington ( ) and it’s just so much easier. So I don’t get up there much anymore. But I still have a lot of good friends up there.

AC: So 19:00your brother is a doctor?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm.

AC: Okay.

SEWELL: He’s retired.

AC: So he was a doctor in Jackson?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm.

AC: Okay.

SEWLL: He was doing his internship in Savannah when my father died so he was about ready to venture out on his own anyway and he just, he had an office that was equipped and staffed and a practice already made on it. Just walk in the door and start practicing medicine so that’s what he did.

AC: When you were in school what type of activities did people do?

SEWELL: Well, we only had one sport until I guess junior or senior year. Basketball was the sport. There was no football and soccer had not yet hit the scene and 20:00basketball was the sport and I was not a basketball team and we played in the band and baseball, they started a baseball team either my junior or senior year. I can’t remember. But, I don’t know even if they still have it or not, but started playing baseball. And then in Breathitt County, which was a much larger school, finally got a football team and they’ve done real well with their football team. But the whole community kind of gets behind it, you know, the city school, I think they go down there and cheer for them and stuff.

AC: So was it, do you think it was very different going to the city school than the county school ‘cause it was so small?

SEWELL: Well, it was so much smaller, but, now, of course, you know, I was never in a big school. You know, Centre was a very small college 21:00so I felt pretty much at home at Centre. But I wouldn’t know how to react to a great big school.

AC: Yeah.

SEWELL: And it’s, I think they’ve got like 2,500 students or something like that at Breathitt County so. . .

AC: Wow.

SEWELL: I’m sure it was a different environment but I never really got a first hand look at it.

AC: So, can you describe how high school was? Like, how many teachers you had and what classes you took? That sort of stuff.

SEWELL: Well, I guess I would say our curriculum was fairly limited. I took, we finally got a foreign language teacher. We had a fellow coming in and teaching maybe some kind of science or something who also taught French and 22:00it was sort of unheard of, it was the first time a foreign language had ever been taught in that school system but really it was just the basics, I mean, I took health and chemistry and I don’t think we had a biology course, history and English every year. I took typing for two reasons, one because I knew when I got in college it would come in handy and two ‘cause all the girls were in it [laughter]. And, just, really just kind of basic stuff, you know, we didn’t have any Latin or anything like that, just French was, like I said, the first foreign languages ever taught there.

AC: Mm-hmm.

SEWELL: And it was really just kind of the basic stuff. Algebra, took algebra. I don’t 23:00recall taking geography although I took a geography course in college. Geometry, I took a geometry course. Didn’t have that many teachers, there were, you know, some teachers would teach two or three different subjects and you know, we had only four homerooms at the high school because there were only four classes and, you know, the classes were small. We weren’t all split up. And it was like, you know, we had, wasn’t a senior prom, it was a junior/senior prom, the juniors, but everybody in the whole school came. I remember going to the prom when I was in the seventh grade.

AC: [laughing] Wow.

SEWELL: I went every year, you know.

AC: Mm-hmm.

SEWELL: It was, it was fun. 24:00It was very different, it was a much simpler time I suppose.

AC: Would you have a, like the prom in your gym?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm. Yep. We’d all go in there and decorate. The juniors and seniors did, the rest of the school didn’t have anything to do with the decorating but. . .

AC: Neat. Do you have any sort of memories that stand out in your head about growing up in Jackson?

SEWELL: Well yeah, I’ve got all kinds of memories! We started, my grandfather he, fact is his general store after he died was, you know, just kind of sat there for a long time so we went in and cleaned it up and made a youth center out of it. There was no, 25:00really no activity hub except for the school and of course during the summer time the school was closed so we just kind of swept his place out and we had dances there and. . .

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE A BEGINNING OF TAPE ONE, SIDE B SEWELL:. . . Sock hops I guess you’d call it. And I don’t know, we, when I was young we played night games during the summer time, sort of like kick the can and a game we called town chase and it was, it was, it didn’t cover the whole town, it covered an area where we all lived called the frog pond. And it was an area that, the river made a curve around this neighborhood and there 26:00were some really bright, in fact my mother wrote and article for the newspaper about the achievements of the young people that came out of the frog pond. And pretty astounding really, for a little bitty neighborhood like that, for all it’s lawyers and doctors and scientists and actors, successful screenwriters, I guess not an actor, but, came out of the frog pond. But we played these games and we’d catch frogs and operate on them, disect them and stuff. I don’t know, it was a, and we, we, you know, we dated and we’d go out and ride around and go to the, the Dairy Whip was kind of a gathering place for the sixteen to eighteen year olds. We’d go sit around there and eat ice cream and eat hamburgers 27:00and hotdogs and pretty much like everybody else did at that time. Talk about cars and girls and that kind of thing. And we’d go out and park. Not any, not any drinking at all and the group of people that I was with, we just didn’t, never even thought about it, I don’t guess. Just didn’t do it and it was before pot came along so. . . [laughing] we just kind of drank cokes and made out, parked and that kind of stuff. Went camping when we were I guess still in high school, we’d camp out, the guys. Pretty simple existence really. But we had fun. It was a fun place to grow up in.

AC: Did anybody you graduated with stay in Jackson? That 28:00you know of?

SEWELL: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what became of most of the girls, except the one girl that I’ve been close to really. I mean, I don’t see her that often but I still correspond with her by e-mail and have dinner with her and her husband, I don’t know, about six months ago. But she lived and I think the rest of them probably hung around unless they married somebody that moved away, but the guys, most of them stuck around. There’s one guy who owns a hardware store and Radio Shack there and one guy works at the bank. I guess most of them, one guy died. Well, two guys died when he, one of them moved away, 29:00one was actually killed trying to rescue a guy.

AC: Oh my gosh.

SEWELL: And he, he got down in a, I think he was working in a sewer line or something and passed out and this guy crawled in there to get him out and they both died. Jackie moved away to the manufacturing north and R.D. moved away. I’m trying to think who else was in there. Richard moved away, his brother lives here now and they, they grew up right, kind of behind my, our house in the next block. And all those guys, they all moved away. I think most of them did but two or three of them stuck it out. 30:00AC: When you were growing up was there a profession that more people were than another profession? Like, I mean, were a lot of people’s parents teachers or what did people do when. . .

SEWELL: Well, the coal industry was big and I, there were, really I guess there was only one guy in my class, but there weren’t, there were five guys in my class, who was, his father was a coal miner. And that was before they did strip mine so it was deep mining. Dangerous stuff. And these guys didn’t, they didn’t have anything. They didn’t make any money. And worked hard. One girl’s father was a policeman, 31:00no, it was kind of spread out, you know, they sort of did everything. There were merchants and bankers and coal miners and truck drivers. You know, a pretty, pretty much a cross section I guess.

AC: Was coal a big thing when you were growing up? Coal? Was it a big thing when you were growing up?

SEWELL: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

AC: Okay.

SEWELL: It always has been. It was, it was one of the top ten coal producing counties in the nation for a while. I don’t, I think the coal business has been down but there’s still plenty of coal up there to be mined, but it just doesn’t. But a lot of it they stripped away and there’s a lot that can be deep mined but deep mining I gather is not nearly as profitable because they’re sort of reluctant to do it. But it’s always been a big, big industry. I mean, there was a coal mine right 32:00on the edge of town and that’s where this kid lived who was in my class. His father was a coal miner, worked for Clay Buyers that had a coal mine, it was right there. And it was a walk so from his house, just about.

AC: Mm-hmm. But, so did anybody your age work, was anybody your age involved in coal?

SEWELL: No.

AC: No. Okay.

SEWELL: And I don’t think anybody from my class got in the coal business. I’m sure there are probably some people who, some of the guys probably wound up driving coal trucks because it was ( ) late sixties and seventies was very profitable. Eighties. I mean, you could make 150,000 dollars a year driving a coal truck.

AC: Where 33:00did the other people who graduated with you go to college? Do you know?

SEWELL: Melba went to U.K., Martin went to Western, I went to Centre, and I’m not sure where Richard went, I’m sure he probably went to, to school, maybe to engineering school because his father and brother wound up in engineers. And, and, and, but I’m not sure he went to college. And other than that, I don’t think anybody else in my class went to college.

AC: Okay. So what exactly is your job now?

SEWELL: Now?

AC: Yeah [laughing].

SEWELL: Well, I’m a, I’m, essentially I don’t do anything but appraise real estate. I had a real estate company here for almost thirty years and we sold it five or six years ago. And 34:00I work here at home, I go into the office and check my faxes. Occasionally I get some mail but not very often at the office, I get most everything here. And I enjoy it. Going to the office, I couldn’t get anything done. So I, I just mostly work here. I’ve got a real estate license hanging over there but I don’t ( ).

AC: Is your brother old than you or younger?

SEWELL: He’s older.

AC: He’s older? How much?

SEWELL: He just turned sixty-one in December and I was fifty-eight in October.

AC: Okay. Did you guys get along when you were growing up?

SEWELL: Well, he was always picking on the little guy, you know. But once he went away to military school, 35:00he went to McCaulay for a year, and it seemed like we got a little closer then, but then when he came back he started all that stuff again but, but once he got away to college we got to be real close. And, not that we weren’t close, it was just there was this sibling rivalry and it kind of settled down when I blacked his eye one time in front of his girlfriend. [laughter] But once he got to college, then we got to be really close.

AC: Where is McCaul? McCalla?

SEWELL: McCauley.

AC: Yeah, McCauley.

SEWELL: Yeah, it’s a real well known school. It’s in Chattanooga. It’s a, it’s a really good school. But it’s a military, I don’t know whether it’s still military or not, I just haven’t kept up with it, but it’s a really well known prep school.

AC: Mm-hmm. Did he want to go there?

SEWELL: I 36:00don’t think so. He went one year, his freshman year then came back and didn’t go back.

AC: Oh, okay.

SEWELL: I guess he, I think some of the guys in his class thought he had gone to reform school. Seriously though, they did. [laughter] But they didn’t really know what a prep school was.

AC: Where did he go to college?

SEWELL: Centre.

AC: Centre? Oh, okay.

SEWELL: Yeah. Then he went to med school at U.K. He’s on the board of admissions at the med school now.

AC: Oh. Wow. Do you know how your parents decided to go to Vanderbilt?

SEWELL: Well, I think my father probably did because his brother did. But no, I don’t. And how 37:00my mother got there, I don’t know except that she was from the south and I guess Vanderbilt was the crown jewel of schools in the south. I mean it’s a great, a great university. Academically it’s very good. But she was from a little bitty town in south Alabama that nobody’s ever heard of. It’s Peerow. We still got a farm down there and if anybody asks me where the farm is, I say, “Well, it’s two miles from Jamback and eight miles from Smah.” Which is true.

AC: Okay.

SEWELL: But it’s a, it’s just a, in fact when I was a kid, the population was just listed at sixty-five. And it’s fallen off since then.

AC: Uh-huh.

SEWELL: It’s not even, I don’t think they even give the population anymore. 38:00And they closed the post office, in fact. Not too awful long ago. But that’s a place you probably ought to study too. [laughing] It’s very strange. Everybody loves it who visits there. I get to Peerow about as often as I get to Jackson, I guess.

AC: When you were growing up were the roads like they are now in Jackson?

SEWELL: Well, there’s a, they built 15, new 15 I guess, I think they were building it when I was in the sixth grade because I remember being in the classroom and watching them blast over there and they, there was, there was a natural tunnel, there was a range of river came like this and made a, like a horseshoe band and there was a fairly 39:00tall ridge that in between the legs of that band and there was a natural tunnel through the mountain. And the brave guys would shoot through that tunnel, they’d call it the tunnel hollow and they rerouted the river as a measure to eleviate the flooding. ’57 which was, there was a, the ’57 flood was a big deal in here in Frankfort, but it was also a big deal in Jackson. I remember tooling around behind my grandfather’s store in a boat over in south Jackson. But it was, they, they, what they did essentially was blast out 40:00where the natural tunnel was, which I thought was a shame to blast that thing away, but they did and made a big cut through the mountains so that the, the flow would be easier than going around that long narrow bend so that the water can sort of jam up ( ) flood. And I suppose it did eleviate the flooding some but I hated to see them do it, but anyway at the same time they did that they, they were building new 15 and the roads were, it took two and a half hours to drive from Jackson to Lexington and it took like an hour, forty-five minutes to an hour to drive to Hazard. And now it takes about twenty-five minutes to get to Hazard and an hour and fifteen minutes to get to Lexington.

AC: Did you go to Hazard much and Lexington when you were growing up?

SEWELL: I 41:00went to Lexington probably when I went to, to Hazard because that’s where my mother liked to shop and daddy gone to school there. Didn’t really go to Hazard much at all except to basketball games. And we actually didn’t play Hazard. Breathitt County played Hazard, it was a bigger school and more of a basketball powerhouse than we, we were, we never did anything. But you know, Lexington was the place to go. And my mother would go shop and have dinner and come home, she’d get home late, we’d stay up and wait for her and see what she brought us. She’d go shopping. But it was a two and a half hour drive back then, 42:00before they put 15 through and the Mountain Parkway. My grandfather, I think when they built old 15, he said, “You ought to route it this way,” and they didn’t do it, they routed it another way, and they came come back in through and put the Mountain Parkway in they, they built it around the route he said they should have originally built it then.

AC: What was the, like city centre of Jackson like when you were growing up? How is it different?

SEWELL: Well it was not, there was not like a town square, but there was what would have amounted to a town square. It was all, you know, like a, you know, street block area. It centered around the courthouse. You know, the courthouse was in the middle of town but there was no square exactly around it but, and that’s where everybody congregated on Saturdays. 43:00And that’s where all of the, the stores were, the grocery store was there, the dime store was there, the Hot Flash restaurant which was open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year and they sold hamburgers for ten cents and it’s still there. But it’s not open 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day. And the movie was there on Main Street. The Whiz restaurant was there which is kind of like a bigger White Flash. My father’s office was there, two drug stores were there, the Corner Lunch was there and it was, they sold hamburgers for like a quarter, you know they were big hamburgers, not like hamburgers, more like White Castle’s kind of.

AC: Yeah.

SEWELL: But they were a dime. 44:00And, well they all had jukeboxes, all the restaurants had jukeboxes. There were two movies when I was young and then the closed. One we called them the upper show and the lower show, and actually the lower show was called the Past Time Theater and the upper show was called the Jackson Theater. And they closed and actually the Past Time Theater, it was down on Broadway. And also in that area there were two hardware stores, a feed store for, you know, they sold like cracked corn and feed for livestock. Kind of like a little small ( ). A couple hardware stores, police department, and city hall which is all in the same building. Chapman’s department store 45:00which was in a Steven Segall movie. But they tore it down for really, made me kind of angry. They’ve torn down some marvelous buildings. The old train depot which also was in a Patrick Swayze movie was in that movie and they tore it down. And it really should have been on the national register of historic places, it was a really neat building. A couple of drug stores, four or five restaurants of different varieties. Two sit-down restaurants, Corner Lunch had a sit-down menu for dinner and so did Deaton’s but Hot Flash and the Whiz were hamburgers, you know. And car dealership, the Jackson 46:00Times and one, two, three, four churches, and a funeral home which had been my grandfather’s house and that’s kind of a curious deal. He had a, ( ) he was, next door there’s a filling station on the corner and across from the side of the filling station was the courthouse and on the other side was my grandfather’s house and he had a smoke house, he’s right there on Main Street and a smoke house and he smoked country hams. But I remember him smoking hams and I remember going in there with him and he had a, like a, kind of like a coffee can, might have even been a coffee can, I don’t know and he would put hickory in there 47:00to smoke the hams, just in his coffee, not much, just little sticks, you know, just not very big pieces at all. And he had two gold fish ponds in his back yard and I would cut through going to school and I’d knock on his back door and he’d give me like a dime and I’d go to school and a dime would buy you like a soft drink and a moon pie at, at recess, they had this little school store that was nothing more than a, it was a, as I recall a plank door with a little window cut it and you know, when they had recess, which was only ten or fifteen minutes, they would open this little window open and sell you stuff, you know. 48:00They had like creamscicles and fudge bars and potato chips and moon pies and RC’s ’cause they had an RC plant there, Royal Crown Cola, RC, and, but anyway one winter we cut through my grandfather’s yard. We’d go to his back door and get his money for the day, get the loot, then we’d cut through Miss Dust’s yard, which she didn’t mind, since she didn’t work, so she let us cut through her yard and we didn’t trample any grass or ( ) anything because ( ) up there. And one winter the gold fish pond froze over and I was gonna be really cool and walk on the ice and I fell in, up to my waist and it was, I don’t know how cold it was but I was frozen, I mean I ran all the way home 49:00and mom and daddy put me in the bathtub with sort of school tipid water in it so I’d thaw out. I was humiliated ’cause I had to run down Main Street [laughter] with my pants clear frozen. It was pretty embarrassing.

AC: Was there any sort of, was your, where did your dad work? Did he work mostly out of the home?

SEWELL: No, he had an office on Main Street.

AC: Okay. I didn’t know if you already told me or not.

SEWELL: Next to the bank. Actually the bank owned the building and he just rented from them. And when he died they built ( ) brother. You need to turn your tape over?

AC: No, I’m just making sure 50:00that the microphone is doing okay. It’s fine. Okay. So when you lived there, the hospital wasn’t there.

SEWELL: No. There was a hospital there called the Back hospital. And my father worked there when he first came back to Jackson, I guess after he, I don’t know whether that was before he went to Ashland or when he first came back after he lived in Ashland. But it was called the Back Hospital and the building is still there, I think it’s a dormitory for Lee’s College now.

AC: Oh, okay.

SEWELL: And Doctor Back I guess it was, was written up in one of the histories 51:00of Breathitt County. There was a, elections had always been a very passionate thing in Breathitt County and END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE B BEGINNING OF TAPE TWO, SIDE A SEWELL: . . . Elections were known to get violent. In fact, one of the polling places was at the school, city school and my mother would not let me go to school on election day because she was afraid there might be trouble, you know. But there was a, there was a deal back I guess early in the century called the Clayhole Massacre, and there was a voting place in a community called Clayhole and they had a, a shoot out that involved a whole bunch of men and I, there was, I think there was several people killed and a bunch of people wounded and I think it was Doctor Back 52:00that was called to go to Clayhole which was about, you had to go up Snake Valley and go to Quicksand and cut up Quicksand Creek. I want to say it was probably eight or ten miles from town to Clayhole.

AC: Mm-hmm.

SEWELL: And they called, I’m fairly sure it was Doctor Back, to go up there and administer to these wounded people and some of them were wounded so bad that they decided that they would put them on a flat railcar and take them up to either Harry, or maybe even Hazard, to the hospital. There was a clinic area up in Perry County And they put one faction on one end of the flat car and one faction on the end of the other. All these wounded guys, you know, and they were screaming ( ) at each other all the way up on this rail car. It was pretty funny. It was written up in one of the history books about Breathitt County. 53:00But I’m fairly sure it was Doctor Back and he ran this place that he called, everybody called the Back Hospital. Probably one of your relatives.

AC: Maybe. I’ve never known, nobody’s ever told me about that. That there was a hospital called the Back Hospital.

SEWELL: Yeah, it closed and was, and really I guess as far as I remember, I never, never remember it ever being open, but I know my father worked there at some point in time. He helped Doctor Back. And there was a fellow named Doctor Hogue who played some sort of role in that too.

AC: Did any of the people you graduated with go to Lees College?

SEWELL: Not that I know of. 54:00Now Greg Lemons might have gone to Lees College. But I’m fairly sure that he never graduated from any college unless he graduated with an associate’s degree at Lees. I don’t know. He works at the bank.

AC: Do you know when Lees opened up there?

SEWELL: No, I don’t, but I do know that the fellow who founded it, I’m fairly sure came to town and met my, I guess my great-grandfather and he helped him out. I think he may have even put him up or something. He’s, he’s mentioned in one of those Breathitt County history books too. But no, I don’t know. I think it was in the 1800’s, 55:00but I’m not sure.

AC: Oh. So it’s pretty old.

SEWELL: Yeah. I think so. Early 1900s.

AC: Did your grandpa go to college?

SEWELL: No. My great-grandfather was a lawyer but he didn’t practice law, he, in fact we have his, I don’t know what you call it, his ordination as a lawyer [laughing]. He, this was back before they, they didn’t require a lawyer to go to law school. He had to be examined by a judge and one of the judges there I guess questioned my great-grandfather on the law and wrote out this, like a letter 56:00saying that I’ve examined G.W. Sewell and found him knowledgeable on the law and fit to be a lawyer. We’ve got that somewhere, my brother gave it to me and I kept it around here and then he said he wanted it back and I gave it back to him and he’s lost it, he can’t find it, he was gonna frame it and I don’t know what, it’s somewhere in his house I think with him.

AC: Yeah.

SEWELL: He was, his, his primary occupation was, is a buyer for a land and timber concern and he bought up a bunch of land for himself while he was doing it with their blessing and he bought it for the mineral rights. It was all in coal, gas, and timber.

AC: Was timber, like sawmills a big thing when you were growing up?

SEWELL: Not, not when I was growing up. There was a sawmill 57:00up there but once upon a time the timber industry was really big in Breathitt County and there are pictures if you’ve dug around, I don’t know how much you’ve done about the timber industry but you could see acres and acres and acres of solid timber. Up at Quicksand there was a big, big sawmill at Quicksand. Another, another breaking of the Appalachian with the countryside. Not only coal, but the timber too they stripped it.

AC: Mm-hmm.

SEWELL: Carpetbaggers.

AC: [laughing] Do you, so do you call yourself an Appalachian person?

SEWELL: Sure I do. I’m proud of my Appalachian 58:00heritage. And my ( ).

AC: [laughs] Let’s see what I want to ask. Can you think of any big changes that took place in Jackson while you were growing up other than the roads?

SEWELL: Well, really it was kind of, kind of the fizzling of the coal industry which happened over a period of years and a great part of it happened really after I had gone away to college. The, the road 59:00probably changed Jackson more than anything. All of the business, even Rose Brother’s department store which was on the corner of Main and Broadway for years, closed and moved out to be on 15 and then you know, you had to have all the fast food joints that sprouted up just like everywhere else. McDonald’s and Burger King. Funeral home moved out, moved out of my grandfather’s house, moved over the to new highway and Kentucky Utilities bought the, bought the old house and tore it down ( ) in there. I wonder if there are any remnants of those fish ponds back there. [laughter] Behind 60:00the Kentucky Utilities building. But the road would be the most marked change that occurred in Jackson. It just sort of changed everything. I don’t know what the population has done but I don’t see a lot of new houses going up in Jackson.

AC: You do see or you don’t see?

SEWELL: Don’t.

AC: You don’t see.

SEWELL: I mean, I just don’t see any great population bursts. Just changes in the landscape, you know. Burger joints. Even the White Flash built a White Flash too out there on the highway.

AC: Yeah. Would people you would play with when you were little, were those the people who lived 61:00around you?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm.

AC: Okay.

SEWELL: Yeah, we had kind of a cozy little neighborhood that, that everybody knew everybody and we all played togeth, older guys were, I don’t know, they had their chemistry labs and that kind of stuff and we’d play softball and football and baseball and town chase and that kind of thing. Is there something I wanted to say now? I forgot what it is. Can’t remember.

AC: Did most of the people, like that you played with when you were little, did they stay in Jackson, like, did you grow up with them? Did they go to school with you?

SEWELL: Mm-hmm. They were, most of them were not my classmates but 62:00some of them were and some of them weren’t, I mean it was a, like if we didn’t, didn’t welcome any, in fact there was a guy that called me not too awful long ago who lived there just for a little while and he said, “I couldn’t believe that you all treated me so nicely.” He said, “I didn’t have anything. I had holes in my shoes. I put cardboard in the bottoms of my shoes because I had holes in them, but you all treated me like I was one of you all.” And I said, “Well, you were!” I mean discrimination was not anything we thought about. And there were some, there were a couple, a handful of blacks in Jackson and I was really good friends with two, I played in a 63:00rock and roll band with two of them, played in the high school band. We were all three of us drummer and this one guy played and sang in a rock and roll band. We ran across some prejudice there real quick. But evidently way back when, like in the twenties, I guess they had a pretty active clan in Breathitt County. Never heard much about it but I think my father told me that that was the case but we never discriminated against them.

AC: Mm-hmm. So you never, you never, when you were growing up you didn’t feel like a lot of people were migrating out of Jackson, is that how it was?

SEWELL: Well, I knew it was happening but I, I mean I, 64:00I don’t guess I saw it as any great migration because most of the people I knew for the most part hung around until we were out of high school. I mean their parents stayed there and, and, Benny McGuire moved to Lexington and ( ) I don’t guess. And Jackie Strong did go up north and Artie South went up north. I mean, the rest of us just ( ) either eastern or central Kentucky somewhere or stayed home.

AC: So do you plan on staying here in Frankfort?

SEWELL: Yeah, I think so. We’ve got a family cemetery up there and it’s about full and I’ve just about made a decision to plant myself in the Frankfort cemetery. If 65:00they’ll have me. Of course I guess by the time I die, it really won’t make a difference to me, right? [laughter] AC: Where is your family cemetery in Jackson?

SEWELL: It’s in Jackson.

AC: I mean but where?

SEWELL: Well, it’s out on a little, it’s a picturesque little place, it’s on a, on a mountainside, there’s a little point that sticks out and there’s some pretty big old trees around it, gosh what’s that, I’m trying to think, we went up there, I guess the last Christmas that my mother was alive, she and I went up there on Christmas day and there was a real heavy frost that covered all the trees and the branches, the boughs, 66:00they were, and there was an evergreen tree, I’m trying to think what it is. She made me break a bough off that tree and put it on my father’s grave because it was green and alive. What was that? That’s what happens when you get old. You can’t remember. [laughter] I forget. But it’s, it’s up on the mountainside, right on the edge of town up on a hill. If you know, have you tooled around Jackson any much?

AC: Mm-hmm.

SEWELL: Do you know where the Jackson City School is?

AC: Mm-hmm.

SEWELL: Well, if you just keep going, that’s Highland Avenue, if you keep going up Highland Avenue to the end of it, it becomes a gravel road and it forks at the top of Highland Avenue. If you take the left fork, there’s a gate there 67:00and I don’t know whether it stays closed, or whether it’s open, or what the deal is, but anyway, the gate, if you go through that gate, the little cemetery’s right up there on the left beyond that gate. And the water tower and the television tower are on our property. We own that property and we’ve been in a dispute for years with the T.V. company. ( ) after the guy that put the tower in died. He sold the cable company and the tower was on our property.

AC: So much people have, like, family cemeteries there, right?

SEWELL: No, most people don’t. There’s the Jackson cemetery. But there are scattered family cemeteries around the county.

AC: Yeah, ‘cause I see them. When I’m driving, I’ll see. Seems like a lot of people do.

SEWELL: There are two dogs buried 68:00at the cemetery which gave my mother a fit, she said the last one that was buried there, she said, “That’s the last dog that’s going to be buried in this cemetery!” [laughter] AC: Well, I guess that’s all I really. . .

SEWELL: Can I get you something to drink?

AC: I’m all right.

SEWELL: Okay. A glass of wine?

AC: No, I’m okay.

SEWELL: Okay.

AC: I’ll just go and turn this off.

SEWELL: Well, if you think of anything else feel free to call me.

AC: Okay.

END OF INTERVIEW