Walter Tevis

Walter Tevis was a good ol' Madison County boy who served in World War II at a young age, attended Model High School (now Model Laboratory School) in Richmond, and went on to college at the University of Kentucky. His two biggest passions were playing pool and writing, and he somehow managed to juggle the two well enough to earn his Masters degree. Tevis spent a great deal of time in the smoky, dirty pool rooms of Richmond, even after becoming a schoolteacher in small towns like Science Hill, Irvine, and Carlisle. Later, he went on to become a professor at UK, and then Ohio University. His pool shark's life of drinking and smoking caught up with him in the end, however, and in his final years he battled alcoholism and lung cancer. He died in New York in 1984.

Oh, and he also just happened to be the author of three blockbuster novels: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and the Science Fiction classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, all three of which were also made into equally blockbuster Hollywood films.

The nationwide pool craze created by Tevis with his book The Hustler and the subsequent movie version single-handedly revolutionized the billiards industry, making it what it is today and giving it enormous new popularity and respectability.

For what it's worth, Tevis also inadvertently gave the world "Minnesota Fats", AKA Rudolph Wanderone Jr., the world famous pool player who achieved fame by appropriating the name of a character in The Hustler and claiming that Tevis (whom he had never met) had based the book on him! Tevis denied this and called Wanderone a fraud, stating, "I made up Minnesota Fats just as Walt Disney made up Donald Duck."

Tevis is buried in the Richmond Cemetery in Madison County, not far from where the last of the great old Richmond pool halls - Taylor's Billiards - still existed up until just last month.

The Death of Hunter S. Thompson

The great anti-establishment icon of the 1970s and 1980s, Kentuckian Hunter S. Thompson, allegedly took his own life with a handgun in his Aspen, CO home on February 20, 2005. He left the single word "counselor" typed haphazardly in the center of a sheet of paper in his typewriter.

He had been in a phone conversation with his wife, asking her to come home from the gym to help him on a column he was writing. Suddenly, his wife says, he went silent on the other end of the phone. He didn't hang up the phone, he simply stopped talking. She heard no shot.

I repeat: she heard no shot.

Shortly before his "suicide," Thompson had been an increasingly outspoken critic of the U.S. Government's role in 9-11, and was said to be working on a massive exposé alleging the Bush administration's complicity in the World Trade Center attacks. As Mack White says:

"Thompson's family says he was not depressed, nor was he in enough pain to kill himself. In fact, by all reports, he was quite happy. He was talking on the phone to his wife, getting ready to work on his column, when he decided it would be wise to kill himself, so that he could go out (we are told) while still at the top of his form, even though this would mean not finishing his column or his expose on 9/11 (potentially the most important thing he would ever write)?..."

In Thompson's own words: "the US government was going to benefit, and the White House people, the republican administration to take the mind of the public off of the crashing economy….And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well in the White House and you know, campaigns and I've known enough people who do these things, think this way, to know that the public version of the news or whatever event, is never really what happened."

Though his best-known work is the breakthrough "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," for my money his finest hour is his 1959 novel "The Rum Diary." In it, he writes like the early Jack Kerouac's dark twin, and sums the era up with Burroughs-like incisiveness: "I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."

Quite unlike William S. Burroughs, however, Thompson was that rare breed of writer who, myth and hype aside, really did write better under the influence of drugs and madness. As critic Kurt Loder has stated, Thompson spawned a whole generation of young slacker writers trying in vain to follow in his footsteps, failing to understand that Thompson was already an accomplished seasoned journalist before he became a walking pharmacy.

Bill Murray portrayed Thompson in the incredibly low-budget film Where the Buffalo Roam, and irritated fellow cast members of Saturday Night Live to no end after picking up Thompson's mannerisms while preparing for the part. Fellow Kentuckian Johnny Depp, who played him in the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, will reprise the role in an upcoming film The Rum Diary.

Henry Faulkner

Henry Faulkner was an eccentric crossdressing painter and poet, who considered his homeplace to be both from Simpson County and from the more exotic-sounding Egypt, KY (a very small town in Jackson County). He moved to Lexington in 1955, where he lived on Prall Street for a time with fellow crossdresser Sweet Evening Breeze before getting his own place at 462 West Third Street, in which he kept a small chicken farm in the back yard.

(Henry's home, incidentally, was directly across from the street from the haunted Hampton Court.)

Throughout his life, Henry seemed destined to be connected to celebrities. He was a cousin of the writer William Faulkner. He was one of Tennesee Williams' lovers. He was incarcerated in a mental ward with Ezra Pound, whom he befriended. Though living in relative obscurity, his art was sought after by many serious art collectors and celebrities, such as Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Nat King Cole, Phyllis George and Vincent Price. Socialite Anita Madden, famous for her wild Derby parties, was a friend of Faulkner’s.

He loved cats, chickens and goats, of which he had many, much to the consternation of some of his neighbors. One of his favorite pets was a goat named Alice who loved to drink bourbon. Alice even accompanied Faulkner to a court appearance once. His favorite watering hole was within walking distance, a place called The Fish Net at the corner of 2nd and Jefferson, where the Wingspan Gallery currently occupies.

Faulkner’s behavior may have seemed bizarre to many, but he lived life to the fullest without the shackles of social convention. Never losing his awe of nature, he often expressed himself in paintings of flora and fauna. By the early 1960s he was earning a living with his art.

Legends about Faulkner abound – and some may be truthier than others. Some say he had a habit of stiffing restaurants by grazing at salad bars and neglecting the check. Another story is told about Faulkner abruptly imploring the driver of a car he was in to pull over, so that he could jump out, strip naked, and frolic in a field of flowers in broad daylight for a long while before finally returning to the car as if nothing unusual had happened.

He was often seen riding his bicycle in drag down Third Street, or reading poetry and singing old blues ballads in bars. Extremely sensitive to beauty, Faulkner was at times given to convulsions while viewing a painting.

Faulkner died in an auto accident at The cursed corner of Third & Broadway on December 3, 1981, at 9:05pm.

(Image of Henry (with two friends in the service) courtesy of Bob Morgan by way of J.Todd Dockery.)