The Florence Water Tower

For some reason, millions of people have been enthralled and captivated by the fact that this water tower in Florence, KY bears the nonsequitur "Florence Y'all". I remember that as a child, I was too - I remember seeing it at a young age, probably shortly after the sign on the tower had first been painted. Maybe it's a false memory, but I seem to remember there being no apostrophe on the tower's "y'all" back then.

According to local legend, the sign originally said "Florence Mall" but supposedly had to be changed to avoid violating some sort of signage-zoning law that forbade business advertisements being of a certain height. Another rumor states that the sign was actually a mistake that the city couldn't afford to immediately correct, and by the time they could, it had become a popular attraction all its own. (It was a simpler time in the 1970s!)

I won't go so far as to try to debunk these rumors, but I will note that some things sure strike me as odd. If, as the official version of the story goes, the apostrophe was added when changing the word MALL to Y'ALL, it sure is strange that a space exists between the Y and A to accommodate said apostrophe, one that should not be there if things are as we are told.

The official story also says the sides of the M were whited out to create a Y, but I'm just not seeing that when I look at the Y; it would have been an odd M indeed. Finally, the word "Y'all" is already slightly off-center to the left, but if the Y had once been an M and taken up additional space in so doing, it would have been even more off-center to begin with.

The Southgate House

Newport's Southgate House is a historic old edifice that is currently home to a rock club that has a strong reputation for being one of the region's best.

It also has something of a reputation of being haunted, but this is not so strong and not so well-founded. Reports on the web are sketchy and among people I've made inquiries to in person, most are of a highly anecdotal type: "Dude, a friend of mine said he saw a beer bottle fall over by itself", and so forth. If someone has some
seriously detailed and verifiable reports of paranormal hauntings, I'd love to hear them.

According to the bar's website, the Southgate House story is drenched with historical goodies: built in 1814, it has hosted Abraham Lincoln, John Taliaferro Thompson (he was born here, in fact) and troops of General Sherman's soldiers on their way to fight in the Texan War for Independence.

You can find the Southgate House at 24 East 3rd street, Newport, KY.

John Taliaferro Thompson

The "Tommy Gun", or Thompson Machine Gun, was invented by a Kentuckian: John T. Thompson, who attended Indiana University in Bloomington before going on to a military career. The Thompson gun was popular among everyone - soldiers, civilians, police and criminals - because of its compactness, portability, large .45 caliber, and extremely high rate of automatic fire. Although rendered somewhat unrealistically in many Hollywood films, the Coen Brothers classic Miller's Crossing does a great job of demonstrating the characteristics of how the Thompson gun operates.

In 1904, President Roosevelt and his Chief of Army Ordnance William Crozier gave Thompson, along with Major Louis Anatole LaGarde of the Medical Corps, the mission to scientifically investigate which caliber guns performed the best. At the Nelson Morris Company Union Stockyards in Chicago, Thompson and LaGarde tested several types of handguns and ammo by firing them into human cadavers and live cattle. Cows that took too long to die after being shot were put down by a hammer blow to the head.

The Thompson-LaGarde Cadaver Tests of 1904 are today regarded as barbaric and completely unscientific. In fact, according to this site, Thompson and LaGarde fudged the data to give the desired result to their superiors.

Thompson's submachine gun was greatly popular with gangsters in the 20s and 30s, known in the underworld as a "chopper" or "Chicago Typewriter". The gun became standard issue for the U.S. Army in World War II.

Google Maps Glitch in Lexington?

This is probably just a digital glitch, since there's certainly nothing relating to national security that would make anyone want to censor out this little area near Jacobson Park in Lexington.

Then again, such things do happen. The territory inside Washington D.C.'s Observatory Circle have been digitally dulled down for Dick Cheney's protection (he lives there). A construction site for a new American embassy is, for some reason, considered off limits. And this blurry spot in Russia has stirred some speculation.

They Put Them Up, I Take Them Down

A recent rant of mine from the Transylvania Gentlemen blog:

As you may know, I'm big on getting rid of plastics in our environment, since they have a bad tendency to slough off plastic molecules and in so doing, are poisoning our ecosystem.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that I have been waging a personal vendetta against "guerilla advertising" corrugated plastic signs that glut roadsides all across our fair state. Not only are they ugly, but they're literally harming the environment. 99.9 percent of these signs are never retrieved by the people who disseminate them; they usually end up being taken down by city employees or, more often, they just fall down or blow away. I've found dozens of these things littering roadside gulches, laying flat and covered in mud and weeds.

Not only that, but the vast majority of these signs are illegally placed on someone else's property, usually public property. I'm not talking about a small business that puts a plastic sign out in front of their own store, or even in the median of the road nearby; I cut some slack for instances such as this, even though the plastic aspect still irks me. Nothing wrong with trying to advertise a sale for your store near your store, but most of the plastic signs out there are from businesses that chose to blanket the entire county and beyond.

And then there's the worst offenders of them all: national companies that cover the nation with the same stupid plastic signs. These are usually weight-loss scams, suspicious "job opportunity" announcements with toll free numbers, religious proselytizing, predatory lenders, and "We Buy Houses" real estate moguls. Then there's all the political campaign signs that never get taken down from all the places they were illegally stuck in the first place.

So, I've made it a habit of plucking these signs whenever I see them. Usually it's on an as-encountered basis, and I've often raced out of the car at a red light to snatch plastic signs off poles and from intersections, toss them in the back of the car, and throw it back into Drive with seconds to spare. Other times, when I'm feeling particularly onamissionfromgod, I'll drive around late at night and clean up the city of these wretched things.


Which begs the question, what the hell do I do with them now? I have a huge collection of signs, hundreds in a spare bedroom at home and hundreds more in storage. I don't really want to throw them away because they'll end up in the dump and pollute the groundwater. Most likely, I'll do the same thing I did with my leftover Project Egg eggs: when in doubt, turn 'em into art. Not sure what sort of art project I will come up with to incorporate these signs, but I'm sure I'll think of somethin'. Meanwhile, dear readers, I beseech thee to help keep Kentucky beautiful and help nip these signs in the bud whenever you encounter them yourselves.

This guy is my hero. So are these folks.

More Weird Mailboxes of Kentucky

The American South is a treasure trove of unusual and creative mailboxes, and Kentucky's no exception. The tractor is from Reeds Crossing, KY, the schoolbus is from Richmond, and the pump is from Lexington.




See also the birdhouse mailbox in Lancaster and a dog mailbox in Berea.

Weird Cemetery

Inadvertently came across this yesterday while surfing the net.

Apparently "Weird" in this instance is a family surname, with a Weird Cemetery located on Weird Road. Bullitt County is not far away from me at all, so looks like a road trip will be in order soon....

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a humble optician from Lexington, KY, unwittingly became one of the twentieth century's greatest - and weirdest - photographers when he took up the hobby of taking photographs of his children in the 1950s. Gradually his photos took on more and more of a "Southern Gothic" feel, with his children looking menacing and sullen (sometimes even wearing horrific masks) among the crumbling debris of old rotting houses in the country. I quote from an essay by Mario Cutajar:

The images he is justly renowned for are ones of children and adults wearing dime-store Halloween masks. The device is so transparent that part of the pictures' intrigue is why they work at all. They do because of Meatyard's eye for setting and pose, because of his ability to extract startling black-and-white contrasts from the silver-rich photographic paper he used (contrasts that create amorphous voids out of which the masked figures materialize like apparitions), but just as importantly because Meatyard never tried to disguise his artifice. Later on toward the premature end of his life when he shot the Lucybelle Crater series, he even dispensed with the murky backgrounds and relied entirely on the transgressive impact of his masked figures nonchalantly inhabiting the daylit world like regular folk--as if they belonged.

These grotesques (which were only a fraction of Meatyard's output but which were the fruit of an obsession that endured throughout his life) are most closely allied to painterly antecedents than photographic ones. They recall the odd family portraits painted by the Douanier Rousseau, Ensor's masked characters, and, more distantly, Goya's caricatures. Their psychic source can easily be located in a sense of estrangement from the world that crosses over into depersonalization, except that Meatyard--who made his living as an optician, raised a family, and lived a settled life in Lexington, Kentucky--was not a withdrawn or morose individual. The singular oddness of his work intimates, rather, an appreciation of the more ubiquitous and easily overlooked oddness of individuality itself and of the dissociation inherent in the photographic process, whose arrest of time makes moments eternal at the price of removing them from our possession.

On May 6, 1972, Meatyard, diagnosed with terminal cancer, watched Riva Ridge win the Kentucky Derby on television. He died in his sleep during the night, in the early hours of May 7.

Blue Moon

Random disassociated fragments, in search of glue:

1. Elvis Presley, in private moments filtered through his own internal gobo of pills and vodka, often stated that he felt as if he was not of this world.

2. The mysterious term "blue moon" is one whose origin is shrouded in antiquity, and has seemed to have had numerous meanings over time. The first recorded instance of the term was in British in the year 1528. Interestingly, the first recorded instance of the idea of moon being made of green cheese was one year later, in 1529.

3. According to some ancient myths, a blue moon is a rarely occurring magical event during which the moon's cratered face speaks.

4. The term "blue moon" is most commonly used metaphorically to describe a rare event, as in the saying "once in a blue moon".

5. Kentuckian Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, wrote "Blue Moon of Kentucky" in 1947.

5. According to Wikipedia: "Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but each calendar year contains those twelve full lunar cycles plus about eleven days to spare. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years there is an extra full moon (this happens every 2.72 years). Different definitions place the extra moon at different times - the extra moon is called a blue moon".

6. Many people call a full moon a blue moon if it was the second of two full moons to occur in the same calendar month. However, this definition of "blue moon" originated from a mistake in an article in the March 1946 Sky & Telescope magazine. This mistake has perpetuated and taken on a life of its own since 1946.

7. Elvis Presley had an unusual propensity for recording "blue" songs, and three of them specifically were blue moon songs: "Blue Moon", "Blue Moon of Kentucky", and "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again".

8. "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" was written in 1941 by Kentuckians Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan.

9. The band R.E.M. featured a blue moon on the cover of their "In Time" compilation CD.

10. One of R.E.M.'s biggest hits was "Man on the Moon", which seems to express doubt that mankind actually went to the moon, and also mentions Elvis.

11. In an early interview, Michael Stipe said that R.E.M. actually stood for Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a Kentuckian best known for his epic photographic work The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

12. The blue people of Kentucky were originally believed by some to be aliens, or angels, from another world.

13. The matriarch of the best-known Kentucky blue-people clan was named Luna.

Blue People of Kentucky

This subject has always been one of the trickier ones for me to write about. Although the blue people of Kentucky are a real phenomenon that has been well documented and written about in all manner of publications from science journals to mass-market magazines, I really don't want you goofballs loading your cameras and going on a gawking spree, bothering innocent people. But it’s too fascinating a story not to tell:

From at least the year 1800 to the 1960s, multiple families of blue-skinned people made their home along Troublesome Creek near Hazard, KY. Local superstitions and rumors about them were rampant, and included theories that they were either aliens, angels, or a separate race of humans. Apparently, it all began with a blue-skinned family called the Fugates, who came to the Hazard area in the late 18th or early 19th century. They descended from one Martin Fugate, who supposedly came from France (just like the alien Coneheads from Saturday Night Live!)

In the 1960s, a Lexington hematologist named Madison Cawein suggested the blueness could be caused by an extremely rare disorder called methemoglobinemia, in which the patient has an abnormally high level of methemoglobin in the blood. This in turn causes one's skin to be tinted blue.

Cawein injected a chemical dye substitute for the missing enzyme into some test members of the Fugate family, and within minutes their skin turned pink. Many of the blue Kentuckians came out of rural seclusion to seek the treatment, but others, it is said, chose to remain blue. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there have been no reliable sightings of them since 1979. And the very few old family photographs known to exist of the blue-skinned people were taken in the 1940s and 1950s with, alas, black and white film.

It is unknown how many, if any, blue-skinned people still exist in Kentucky, but their lack of visibility would seem to indicate they want to be left alone. There’s a story about a Hollywood camera crew getting shot at and chased away by dogs when they trespassed on a blue person’s land.

According to an article in Science 82 magazine, these families were intensely inbreeding and intermarrying, which perpetuated the methemoglobinemia gene on both sides.

Despite what we are told about the disastrous effects of inbreeding, these people did it consistently for generations with seemingly no ill effects: the Fugates were not impaired in terms of mental or physical abilities in any way. One woman (with the wonderful name of Luna) gave birth to 13 healthy blue children and lived to be 84. And while most people with methemoglobinemia acquire it through health-threatening circumstances such as heart and artery defects, nitrate poisoning (“Blue baby syndrome”) or respiratory problems, the Fugates and the other blue families were in perfect health and lived long robust lives.

And thus another wonderful bit of human uniqueness is eradicated by modern technology. Me, I’d love to see deliberately induced blueness become a new fad in body modification.

Blue Grass

For a fledgling tourist to Kentucky, one of the biggest mysteries is "where is the blue grass?" Often have I heard newbies inquiring about where to find it, and I've even heard them pull the wool over their own eyes and convince themselves that they're seeing it: "oh, look, Martha, the grass really is kinda bluish here."

Fact o' the matter is, blue grass isn't blue. It's as green as any other kind of grass, green as the valley, green as them little apples, green as the grass of home.

Blue grass is a common grass called poa pratensis, and it's only blue when you allow it grow tall like weeds, so that the blue-flowered seed heads can bloom in Spring. Ironically, because Kentucky is "horse country" and thus covered in groomed and manicured farms, you rarely ever see fields of unmown blue grass. Small patches of poa pratensis are everywhere you look, to be sure, but it takes a whole huge vista of rolling hills covered in the flowering plants to get that "blue" effect.

Despite popular assumptions, poa pratensis isn't even especially indigenous to Kentucky. It's an extremely common plant in North America, and all across the world. Had some other plant, such as Witch Hazel, Ginseng or Devil's Trumpet, become the official symbol of Kentucky instead, bluegrass music might have ended up being called "Devil's Trumpet Music". Then tourists would then be wondering why there's no trumpets in Devil's Trumpet Music. And can you imagine the Devil's Trumpet Army Depot?

JSH on PBS again

From the KET Press Room:

Jeffrey Scott Holland, author of Weird Kentucky, shares some of the Commonwealth's strangest tales on the next edition of Louisville Life, airing Thursday, Oct. 30 at 7:30/6:30 p.m. CT on KET2; Saturday, Nov. 1 at 7/6 p.m. CT on KET1; and Sunday, Nov. 2 at noon/11 a.m. CT on KET2.

Holland uncovered the stories behind the myths of the Pope Lick goatman, a half-man half-goat reported to live beneath a railroad trestle at Pope Lick Creek; giant Jim Porter, who stood close to 8 feet tall; and the day it rained meat in Kentucky. The author also discusses his successful art career and why he prefers to live in Louisville and commute to his coastal art galleries.

Louisville Life is a KET production, produced and directed by Gary Pahler. Jayne McClew is producer/writer; associate producer is Kelli Brodersen. More information about Louisville Life, including streaming video, is available at www.ket.org/loulife. More information about KET programming and education services, as well as how to support KET, can be found at www.ket.org.

Upcoming Airdates:

KETKY: Monday, November 3 at 5:00 pm EST
KETKY: Monday, November 3 at 7:00 pm EST
KETKY: Tuesday, November 4 at 6:30 am EST
KETKY: Saturday, November 8 at 7:30 pm EST