Sandy's Hamburgers

Tonight I've been doing a little research for my proposed fifteen-volume encyclopedic work What Used To Be Where, Back In The Day (and you thought I was joking about that, didn't you?)

In the course of my studies, I just happened across a delightful web page devoted to the long-since-departed Sandy's Restaurant in Louisville. Sandy's, apparently a Scottish-themed burger joint, had a girl in a kilt and a plaid beret for their mascot and served a specialty burger called a "Big Scott". They operated one location in Paducah and three locations in Louisville. Of the Louisville stands, one was at 5009 South Third St. (pictured above in a photograph taken on October 16, 1971) another was at 1007 W. Broadway, and the other was at 1420 Poplar Level Road. The Paducah stand was at 1726 Broadway.


There's nothing like a gang of retro-obsessive hunter-gatherer archivists to restore my faith in the human condition. These people are hardcore serious about reconstructing the lost memory of Sandy's for posterity, as it should be. Here's an example from their site to illustrate their zeal:

"The 1968 Sandy's locations list shows one of these locations as a possible 1967 opening. The 1973 list shows Poplar Level Road as Sandy's #317 and 3rd Street as #318 which points to a 1973 opening. Perhaps these locations were rebuilt as the new mini or maxi Sandy's restaurants as some locations were switching to the new buildout at this time and maybe they were renumbered into the 300 range at that time.

Robby Delius shows yet another scenario by providing both the 1965 and 1969 city directory listings for Louisville which shows Poplar Level and S. Third Street as being in existence in 1965 as well as 1969!"

We need more people like this in America.

And it gets better. It turns out that this lovingly detailed paean to preserving memorabilia related to the Sandy's of Louisville is actually just one page among many in a greater effort to hoard photos, menus, and even signage from every Sandy's restaurant that ever existed on Earth. It could take two hours to absorb it all, and if you're as much a card-carrying member of the Society For The Preservation Of Everything as I am, then you will devote those two hours to this holy work.


But wait, there's more!

Sandy's is just the tip o' the iceberg - that link is actually just one small fraction of Captain Ernie's Showboat, a truly leviathan site that assiduously sniffs out all available effluvia regarding a whole raft of obscure and neglected stuff from our collective childhood of the Midwest - everything from Romper Room to Cactus Jim to the Davenport, Iowa Morning Farm Report!

Life is good.

Murderabilia

In 1997, a 14-year-old Paducah boy named Michael Carneal, endlessly tormented by school bullies and increasingly hearing voices in his head of a group of entities calling themselves The Danes, finally snapped.

On December 1 of that year, he brought a .38 handgun to school and opened fire upon the school's Christian prayer group, killing three and wounding five more. He then placed his pistol on the ground and said, "Kill me, please". He had been reading the Stephen King novel Rage which, coincidentally, was also in the possession of Dustin L. Pierce, a senior at Jackson County High School in McKee, who held his classroom hostage at gunpoint in a nine-hour police standoff in 1989.

Despite the fact that he was only a child, he was sentenced to life in prison in LaGrange.

Now, probably out of boredom being in a high security institution surrounded by far scarier people than himself, Carneal has turned to art as an outlet. People are actually purchasing his artwork, which inevitably draws the ire of people who don't want prisoners to be able to do anything, have anything, achieve anything.

It all started years ago when killer clown John Wayne Gacy started getting rich in prison selling his crude paintings, and someone decided that maybe it wasnt such a good idea for murderers to profit from their crimes. When you phrase it that way, it does sound logical, but on the other hand, there isn't much "profit" involved when you're in prison for life and all you can really buy with your windfall is stale, overpriced Reese's Cups at the prison commissary. I mean, the guy's in jail for life, it's not like he's living the life of Riley in the VIP room of a Monte Carlo casino.

It's also part of a growing trend to dehumanize prisoners, and to take away any shred of a reason to live for these people. Sooner or later, the same people who say "prisoners shouldn't be able to sell their art" will be saying "you know, prisoners shouldn't be allowed to watch TV or read books either. They committed horrible crimes, so they don't deserve to do anything enjoyable ever again." This mindset that prisons are supposed to be hellish only guarantees that these men and women will only become hardened sociopaths more than ever. No wonder recidivism rates are through the roof.

An organization called "Kentuckians Voice for Crime Victims" (do they have a website? I couldn't find one) has publicly decried the sales of Carneal's artwork and writings, even though Carneal is not actually directly receiving any cash from these transactions. The Courier-Journal devotes a disproportionate amount of a recent article to the opinions of some anti-prisoner-trade activist named Andy Kahan from Texas. According to the article, "Kahan estimates that about half of the criminals get some form of payment, but he argues it's just as wrong for third-party dealers to profit."

By this logic, no one would be allowed to write true-crime novels or even cover the news for profit.

Having said that, the websites offering Carneal's work - such as Ghouls Like Us, Serial Killers Ink, and Murder Auction - don't really seem like serious patrons of the arts. Rather, they seem like a bunch of unhealthy serial-killer fetishists who might need to be checked for Danes themselves.

(As a cigar enthusiast, though, I have to admit that my curiosity perked up just a tad when I learned that Ghouls Like Us is selling a cigar butt from another infamous Kentuckian, Charles Manson, and hyping it by saying "now you can say you've shared a cigar with Manson!")

Baby Found in Oven in Paducah

From WLKY:

PADUCAH, Ky. -- Authorities in western Kentucky said a man left his infant son in a cold oven, probably for a matter of hours.

The Paducah Sun reported 33-year-old Larry C. Long told police he had smoked marijuana at a Paducah restaurant where he works and then came home and drank alcohol.

McCracken County Sheriff Jon Hayden said the mother of the 5-week-old boy was awakened by his cries Monday morning and found him the oven.

Hayden said the baby was taken to a hospital where doctors found no injuries.

Long shares the home with the child's mother, 33-year-old Brandy S. Hatton.

The newspaper reported child welfare officials placed the infant and his 10- and 14-year-old siblings in the care of one of Hatton's relatives.

Long is charged with wanton endangerment.

Orange UFOs in McCracken County

From MUFON, by way of Billy Booth:

01-04-10 - On our way home from Paducah to Mayfield, I noticed six orange lights gliding slowly in the sky just off the side of the highway. The lights appeared to be moving at a slow rate of speed. My wife, two children and I observed these lights for approximately 5 minutes or more.

Several other cars pulled over on the side of the highway in that area as well. The lights slowly faded out of sight one at a time, beginning with the one at the tip of the chevron and ending with the last light. I was able to take the picture with my cell phone shortly before the lights started disappearing.

The person filing the MUFON report doesn't say at what point between Paducah and Mayfield they were when the incident occurred, but most of the trip would be in McCracken County, and they most likely took Highway 131 South.

The sighting has great similarity to two others that recently happened in states bordering Kentucky. In, Youngstown, OH about a month prior, on December 5, 2009:

I noticed five or six orange lighted craft in formation traveling from the ground up. I pulled over to get a better look and realized that there was more like 9-12 of them. The lowest was at about 700 feet and the highest was about 2500 feet. At one point the craft had stopped and then they started to move again and climbed to the highest elevation (2500 feet) and disappeared one by one until they were all gone.

And in Lenoir City, TN, on January 3, 2010, the day before the Kentucky sighting:

I was getting a drink from the kitchen and looked out the window when I saw two orange/yellow lights in the eastern sky. They stayed in the same spot for 8 to 10 minutes. I got my camera and started to take pictures. Then the lights started to move left behind a line of trees, and then moved up over the trees and back down behind them again. They were out of sight for at least 5 to 7 minutes.

Talking Tree of Paducah

But then the mystery was solved when it turned out the rock next to the tree was actually a ventriloquist, see...

Eckankar

The Eckankar religion has a considerable presence in Kentucky, and why not? Their founder, Paul Twitchell, was a Kentuckian.

Twitchell was born in Paducah in 1909, and went on to attend Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green and Murray State University. He dropped out of both colleges each time.

After returning from a stint in the Navy during World War II, he began dabbling in mysticism, Eastern religion, and New Age belief systems. He followed Swami Premananda for a time, then Scientology, then Kirpal Singh.

In 1965 he announced that he had been chosen by an ancient society of holy masters, to become the new leader of the formerly secret religion known as "Eckankar" to the world. He claimed a 500-year-old man (who supposedly still lives to this day) named Rebazar Tarzs visited him regularly in his apartment to guide him in his writings. According to Wikipedia:

Rebazar Tarzs presently resides in the Hindu Kush mountains, and is "the emissary of ECKANKAR in the physical universe". There are several essays by ECKANKAR followers who report having met him, including one who describes Rebazar Tarzs's guiding him to herbs that cured his heart condition, and one who tells of receiving a gift from Rebazar Tarzs during the Korean War, the gift later being traded for desperately needed food.

There is a story of a taxicab driver who picked up Rebazar Tarzs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in around 1952, and during the ride, Rebazar Tarzs was able, among other things, to read the driver's "secret prayers." In a second incident, Rebazar Tarzs miraculously repaired the driver's automobile.

Twitchell claimed that past members of the secret ECK society included Plato, Pythagoras, and St. Francis of Assisi. He also made some pretty lousy predictions, such as that the Vietnam War would end in 1968, and that Lyndon Johnson would be elected US President for a second time.

So what exactly do Eckists (followers of Eckankar) believe? Their website says this:

"Eckankar teaches that there is an audible life current known as the ECK, or Holy Spirit, that connects each of us with the heart of God. We can experience the ECK as Light and Sound. Through study and practice of the Spiritual Exercises of ECK, we learn to recognize the Light and Sound of God as It touches our lives and brings increased divine love."

They also believe in the power of HU, which is a Sufi vocal ritual considered by Eckists to be "a love song to God". Reincarnation and astral travel are also important parts of the religion.


Twitchell died in 1971, which also dashed another of his predictions; he said he would live into the 1980s. Currently Eckankar is headed by one Harold Klemp (pictured above), who attended Indiana University and was connected to military intelligence before joining the ECK movement while in Japan. Klemp is regarded to be "the 973rd Living Eck Master" in an unbroken line that goes back to the dawn of human life.

400 Mile Yard Sale Across Kentucky

I live for yard sales, flea markets, junk stores, auctions, trading posts, antique malls, and such. And in this economy, "secondary market" stuff is quickly becoming primary.

So it should come as no surprise that you'll find me somewhere in all the hubbub of the 400 Mile Yard Sale across Kentucky.

The sale follows Highway 68 (though there's always plenty more yard sales going on in the periphery each year) from Maysville to Paducah and hitting all points in between - including Paris, Lexington, Nicholasville, Wilmore, Harrodsburg, Danville, Gravel Switch, Lebanon, Campbellsville, Glasgow, Bowling Green, Cadiz, Hopkinsville, and Benton. Yee-haw!


(By the way, Catclaw Theatre is having a yard sale this weekend at 2107 Lakeland Road in the Anchorage area of Louisville. Come on down and say howdy! And if you can't make it, make a donation!)

The Danes

Monday, December 1, 1997. Heath High School, Paducah, KY.

Michael Carneal - then 14 years of age - brought a .38 handgun to school and gunned down the school Christian prayer group, killing three and wounding five more. He then placed his pistol on the ground and said, "Kill me, please".

The day before, Carneal had bragged to everyone that "something big is going to happen on Monday".

Carneal had a history of having been bullied by other students. According to an essay by Mark Ames in the SoMA Review:

Many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life—smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.

But the story began to get a bit more complicated than the "Revenge of the Nerds" scenario, when Carneal gradually opened up to interviewers and admitted that he had once been controlled by a group of entities calling themselves "The Danes".

Wha? The Danes? Yup, that's what it says right here, the Danes. Here's what the Louisville Courier-Journal said on 9-11-08:

He says now that he had been warned not to reveal them and feared the therapists themselves may have been Danes.

Much of the information about the Danes is in sealed court files and Carneal's lawyer declined to go into detail about them.

"I felt that ... everybody I met might be a Dane," Carneal told a psychologist in 2004 who asked him why he hadn't initially said anything about the delusions. "Even though I didn't tell you, the talking in my head said, 'You told him too much, we're going to kill you now.'"

And LEO Weekly:

In 1998, several psychiatric experts who examined Carneal noted peculiar patterns of behavior leading up to the shooting. For example, the defendant explained that he always showered quickly and covered all of the heating vents in the bathroom to prevent people from watching him, and that he often feared there were people hiding under his bed and peering into his window.... The inmate eventually described hallucinations involving a group of tormentors he called “the Danes,” people he believed were trying to harm him.

Sounds nuts? Maybe so. And yet, the official position of the original prosecutors in the case is that Carneal was examined extensively and found to be perfectly sane and competent.

So... is he, or isn't he? And was he or wasn't he?

And, most importantly, were the Danes real or weren't they?

I'm not quick to believe it was a post-MKUltra mind control experiment, but on the other hand, nor do I instantly and unquestioningly accept the idea that his many experiences with these people were all entirely hallucinatory.

FAA changes Space Junk story

A couple days ago, it was reported that the FAA admitted the weird booming sounds heard in Kentucky were pieces of the U.S. and Russian satellites that collided last week, burning up on re-entry.

Now, the FAA have abruptly changed their story.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) -- Astronomers say bright lights in the sky and noises like thunder observed over much of Kentucky were meteors.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that after the reports came in from people in Kentucky and Texas late Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration cautioned pilots to beware of satellite debris, but the advisory was quickly withdrawn.

FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said it was a natural phenomenon.

That's how the AP wire story (cited in the Paducah Sun) described it, but if you look here at kentucky.com, you'll see that's not quite what Bergen said. What she said was "It was the result of some sort of natural phenomenon".

Some sort of. Meaning she doesn't really know. Meaning no one really knows.

It also says that the FAA space-junk advisory was quickly withdrawn "after the military advised that no satellite debris was falling". I find this to be most interesting. How exactly is the military in a position to state unequivocally that no satellite debris has fallen? How do they know?

Even if they have super spy-telescopes pointing both up to space and down at the Earth's surface, and even if they have teams of secret agents combing the hills with secret tracker gizmos, how can they be so sure of themselves?

The recent satellite collision has released, in the BBC's words, "massive clouds of debris" into orbit - so much debris, in fact, that the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center has been thrown into a tizzy trying to sort it all out. Such a task will take months, maybe even years. Are the military claiming they've achieved it in just a few days?

"Move along, folks, nothin' to see here."

Much of Kentucky Still Without Power

Apparently I spoke too soon when I said the current ice storm wasn't quite as bad as the one in 2003. According to the New York Times:

Much of Kentucky remained blanketed in ice Friday as more than 600,000 homes and businesses were still without power after being hit this week by the worst winter storm in memory. Utility officials warned it might take two weeks before all electricity was restored.

Emergency officials in three of the hardest-hit cities — Paducah, Owensboro and Benton — said that utility workers were doing everything they could, but that there simply were too many felled lines, especially in remote areas of the state, to move any faster.

Although the storm left more than 1.2 million people without power as it stretched from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania last Saturday, Kentucky was hit hard Tuesday night and into Wednesday, causing the largest power failure in state history.

And in Time Magazine:

Life has come to a standstill in Kentucky, and it's difficult to imagine just who in the Bluegrass State had the more miserable Super Bowl weekend. For those half-million residents who were still without power Saturday night (and 200,000 who were also reported to be without water), this past weekend involved shuttling between one of the estimated 172 emergency shelters that have been operating across the state since Wednesday.

As for state officials, the weekend involved a rapid reassessment of just how dire the situation had become. Speaking out the day after some local municipalities decried a lack of federal or state emergency relief, Gov. Steve Beshear described the fallout from last week's ice storm as the state's largest-ever natural disaster. He then activated every last member of Kentucky's National Guard, dispatching all 4,600 Guardsman to assist with the statewide crisis.

Most reports of the chaos have focused solely on the numbers: 700,000 Kentuckians thrown into the dark last Tuesday, nearly 200,000 of those concentrated in Louisville alone, with more than a dozen deaths now being investigated.

(First photo: Paducah, KY, swiped from the New York Times. Second photo, Spottsville, KY, swiped from Time.)

Paducah Chemtrail Blizzards

The "chemtrails" conspiracy theory claims that the contrails left by jet planes are being augmented with various mysterious substances for nefarious purposes. Some versions of the story say it's for mind control, biological experimentation, weather control, and/or "Secret Weapons for Secret Wars"-type stuff whose actual purpose we could never fully grasp.

This fellow in Paducah shot some digital video of what seems to be bits and strands of white gossamer webby filaments falling en masse on a sunny day, and makes the claim that these are dangerous chemicals being dispersed as part of some evil Government conspiracy.

I present it here impassively, neither endorsing nor ridiculing it.

(Okay, I'll ridicule it just a little: instead of shooting endless videos of these webs and posting them to youtube, how about saving some in containers and having them analyzed by a professional lab? Seriously. Either you have a smoking gun or you don't.)

The Bridges of Kentucky

For those of you who have an unexplainable obsession with bridges - and I know you're out there - the "street view" feature on Google Maps can be quite a handy toy, allowing you to traverse Kentucky's bridges virtually.

Madison-Milton Bridge, Milton, KY

Cumberland River Falls Bridge, Whitley County, KY

Boonesboro Bridge, Boonesboro, KY

Sherman Minton Bridge, Louisville, KY

Clark Bridge, Louisville, KY

Gordon Hill Pike Bridge, Corbin, KY

Paducah Bridge, Paducah, KY

J.R. Miller Blvd Bridge, Owensboro, KY

Lake Barkley US 68 Bridge, Cadiz, KY

Clays Ferry Bridge, Clays Ferry, KY

Ironton-Russell Bridge, Ashland, KY

Roebling Suspension Bridge, Covington, KY


And while Google currently doesn't let us street-view the William H. Natcher Bridge in Daviess County, we do get to go underneath it, at least:

Whitehaven

Paducah's spooky old Whitehaven Mansion was built in the 1860s and then abandoned a century later, in 1968. It sat empty in a dilapidated state, heavily vandalized and falling apart, until a major restoration project brought it to its former glory in the 1980s.

Today Whitehaven serves as a tourist welcome center/rest area for I-24. It also houses a sort of mini-museum dedicated to the former Vice-president Alben Barkley. The collection includes his Vice-Presidential desk and chair, walking canes,
shaving mugs, his 1948 inaugural Bible, and more.

Supposedly a female ghost is occasionally sighted on the balcony of the second floor bedroom, and some versions of these anecdotes attribute the ghost to a woman who once lived there and bled to death during an appendectomy.

Paducah purchased for Five Dollars

"In 1827, Gen. Wm. Clark purchased 37,000 acres of land, including the site on which Paducah now stands, for $5".

What the sign forgot to tell you is that Clark purchased the deed to the land directly from the United States Government, not from the people who actually owned and occupied the land, who were forced out. Oops.

The city was called Pekin then, by the Native Americans and white settlers who lived together in an unusual-for-then arrangement of harmony and cooperation, until Clark showed up, claimed to have bought the land for a five-spot, and told everyone they had to scram.

The Indian Chief Paduke, who ran Pekin, could have fought Clark over the land, but was smart enough to realize that most likely, he would be wiped out (along with everyone else) by the U.S. Army who would come in as Clark's backup if needed to enforce the land transfer. So, Paduke and everyone else in Pekin peacefully moved along to Mississippi. As a gesture of thanks for being so cooperative and docile, Clark named the city after the Chief but got his name wrong. What a sport.