Rowan's Progress
by
James McConkey

The author does, however, limn tolerable biographies of
Frank and Phoebe Button, who founded Morehead State College, where
McConkey taught as a young man. And as McConkey progresses to the
present in this informal chronicle, his people begin to breathe,
particularly Claire Louise Caudill, a physician descended from
Tolliver and still practicing at the age of 75--with the aid of her
nurse of 30 years, Susan Halblieb.

The genesis of this book was a dream.  In that dream, I was reenacting
a moment in a doctor's office that took place about thirty-five years
ago, while my wife, jean, and I were young parents, living in a little
town in the hills of eastern Kentucky.

Our three-year-old son Larry was seated on a table under a bright lamp;
his upper lip was badly split.  He was grave before his injury, trying
not to cry.  "If I don't align the lip just right, the mend will show
the rest of his life, " the doctor said, in that gentle hill drawl that
to an outsider suggests tolerance, an ironic control of self based on
the acceptance of whatever life can bring.  But her hand was shaking so
much that she asked jean to hold it as she began to stitch.

The dream faded, to be replaced, as I was awakening, by a momentary but
very clear image of the face of my son as he looked now, at age
thirty-eight.  His lip was perfectly aligned, unblemished by a scar.

Indeed, so carefully had the doctor sutured the lip that the wound
-inflicted by a tooth or claw of an overexcited cocker spaniel puppy as
Larry was romping about the house with him-had been lost to my
conscious mind for maybe a quarter century.

The professional name of that doctor-the one on her office door and in
the slender telephone directory for Morehead, then an isolated town of
about three thousand inhabitants in the Cumberland (now Daniel Boone)
National Forest-was C. Louise Caudill, M.D. The initial stood for
"Claire," but to her patients she was "Dr. Louise."  Throughout the
six years-from the fall of 1950 until the fall of 1956-that my family
remained in that town, Dr. Louise treated not only Larry but our
second child Cris, who had been born in a hospital in Lexington, since
there was no such facility in Morehead then.

In those years, the town (despite the presence of the small state
college where I held my first real teaching position) had but two
doctors active enough that I knew of their presence.  Dr. Louise had
an extraordinarily heavy work load; she and her assistant-a nurse known
to everybody as Susie-attended to patients throughout the county, often
delivering babies in remote cabins in the hills, sometimes being gone
for two or three days.  Word spread rapidly when Dr. Louise and Susie
returned from the countryside; hill and townspeople not too sick to
require home care, some of them men but most of them women and
children, would line the staircase to her second-story office, above a
jewelry store on Main Street, waiting for them to show up-and so Dr.
Louise and Susie had to tend to them, before getting any sleep.

On the evening that Dr. Louise sewed up Larry's lip, she had been
without sleep for three days; fatigue was the reason that she needed my
wife to steady her hand as she worked.  For some reason I don't recall,
Susie wasn't there.

What had caused me to dream about such a distant event?  With the birth
of each child, a parent is born to a new and immediate concern or
apprehension, for life seems a precious but delicate affair, and each
infant breath a kind of small miracle; the worry about possible
accidents or illnesses, about all the unknown vagaries waiting for the
moment they become fixed as part of a child's destiny, remains with the
parent long after the child is grown and gone far from home-remains,
indeed, until the father or mother loses memory to his or her death or
disease.  Still, no fear for a child had been attached to this
particular dream, not even as I relived the sight of the doctor's
trembling hand; in fact, so quickly had the image of my son as an adult
followed the episode that it seemed I had dreamed of the gash and then
of the doctor's sewing of it so that I could juxtapose them against a
picture of the unblemished face of my oldest son that was sharper than
any willed recollection of it has ever permitted me.

The dream and succeeding image seemed gratuitous.  As an affirmation-of
healing; of the power of human hands, whatever the fallibility of our
mortal condition -they might have constituted one of those blessings of
memory that are effortlessly released from their deep burial to offset
a much different kind of double vision in our later years.  Our
youthful ambitions, directed as they are on rising in the world, tend
to take that world and all of its institutions-universities,
corporations, nationswith their surrounding rules and values and
promised awards as a solid given.  But as we gradually detach ourselves
from the occupation that has been part of our social identity, a
certain uneasiness sets in.  At I vulnerable moments our individual
lives, and even the history of our species, are held up to a
dispassionate ideal or ultimate meaning so far beyond human
achievement, or even formulation in language, that the competitive and
frequently violent sociopolitical world in which we have struggled for
recognition or status becomes as petty as it is illusory.

At any rate, I had been granted a fine dream, one that acknowledged the
competence and caring of a doctor, a woman fully engaged in matters of
everyday life, whose qualities, though remarkable for their separation
from convention, egoism, or professional pose, I indeed had been in the
process of forgetting.

Soon after my family's arrival in Morehead, Larry, still a baby,
developed a slight fever.  At the suggestion of a new acquaintance,
jean and I took him to see Dr. Louise.  We took our place on the
bottom step of the staircase that augmented the small waiting area
moving upward, step by democratic step (nobody being summoned ahead of
anybody else), until it was our turn to enter a room with a bare wooden
floor, a table and some chairs, and an elderly couch.  At first we
confused Susie the nurse, who was a fairly tall and slender young I
woman, with the doctor, since Susie was the one weaning a white
smock.

Maybe Dr. Louse had been too busy to don her own uniform, or for some
reason had discarded it.  In any event, she was wearing jeans and a I
sweatshirt.  Though smaller than Susie-she wasn't much more than five
feet tall-she too was slender, and her eyes showed a friendly and
youthful vitality.

"Well, what's bothering the young-un?"  she asked, gently taking Larry
into her arms.  After we told her all that we knew, and while she was
making the customary investigations with thermometer and stethoscope
and tongue depressor and mirrors, she made small talk with us, asking
us (as best I can recollect) such questions as how did we like the
little town and where had we come from (our accents gave us away as
Northerners).  She said she knew where we'd bought a house, and so
on.  "Well, the symptoms don't add up to anything that makes sense to
me," she said cheerfully, giving Larry a last little thump or pat on
his back.

"Let's sit down together and see what the book says."

So jean, with Larry on her lap, and I dutifully sat on the old couch,
with Dr. Louise between us.  She turned the pages of her big medical
text (which categorized diseases under identifiable common features, 'n
the manner of a Peterson bird or tree guide) until we found a disease
that perfectly fit the symptoms.  I've forgotten now the name of the
ailment, which wasn't serious (given medication, Larry quickly
recovered) but not Dr. Louise's forthright admission that she didn't
know everything already, nor her willingness to include jean and me in
the search through a textbook.  A couple of years later, on Dr.
Louise's advice, we took Larry to a Lexington specialist to see about a
hearing problem in one ear.  The specialist told us that, among the
physicians in Lexington, our doctor had a reputation as a rural
practitioner who had never been known to make an incorrect diagnosis.

jean and I, who already trusted her, found his testimony, while
gratifying, far less surprising than the openness that had at once won
our confidence in her.

On the day before we left Morehead for upstate New York and my new
teaching position at Cornell, Dr. Louise, busy though she always was,
stopped at our house to have a final look at her two young patients,
and to say goodbye to jean and me.  As she was standing at the doorway,
she said to me, as frankly as ever, "I always figured you would
leave."

"Why did you think that?"  I asked, surprised.

"Because you're too good for this place," she said, with a sweep of her
arm large enough to include everything-the surrounding hills as well as
the town itself -to which she had dedicated herself and of which she
was a part.

After a firm handshake, she briskly walked out of our lives.

I remembered that remark on the morning of my dream, not because I was
flattered by it, but because of what I didn't say in response, though
the thought immediately came to my mind: If I truly were good, Louise,
I'd stay here, as you do.  But actually I was glad to be leaving a hill
college with maybe eight 'nundred students for a major university in
the East.  Unlike Louise, I had no commitments to a specific region.

My friendships were mainly with my colleagues, most of whom had come
from elsewhere, and with a few bright and caring students.  I'd never
managed a successful conversation with any of those impoverished
people whom so much of her professional career was dedicated to
helping.  I found them shy and proud, difficult if not impossible for
an outsider (maybe shy and proud himselo to know.  Caught up in my
college duties as well as my aspirations, I had made little effort to
absorb the history or even the atmosphere of a county foreign to much
of what I believed myself to be.  Only after I left did I regret that I
had permitted so much to slip by, considering it merely quaint or
picturesque.  For instance, I had never attentively listened to the
ballad singer who, blind and crippled by age, sat in a wheelchair
outside the bus station, a cup with for coins in his lap, singing to
passing and indifferent travelers the bloody legends of Rowan County
and the stories of love and betrayal that were common to all
Appalachia.  Had the instrument he plucked, strummed, or bowed been a
store-bought guitar or violin, or perhaps a homecrafted dulcimer?  I
didn't even know that.

In my early years at Cornell, one of the chairmen of my department was
a native Kentuckian whose voice (despite a Yale education and a
professional lifetime in the East) still contained a touch of drawl.

Now and then, he consciously emphasized the accent for humorous or
satiric effect.

I had a recurrent dream in which that drawl became sardonic,
implicating me in a past he knew about but had outdistanced.  "Naow,
Jim," he would say to me, "don't you think you ought to take yo self
ri-i-uht back to Mo-hayed?"

"Of course, Bill," I would reply after some hesitation, and would wake
in terror to a Morehead I had never known, a dark cell in the prison of
my past to which my inadequacies had sentenced me.  On one particular
night, though, when he came to me with that question, my answer while
the same was immediate and made with a chuckle that turned into
laughter-for the dream was now a joke at his expense, and Morehead a
place of infinite promise and delight, a bit of geography in my future
that was far superior to everything in the present he wanted to exile
me from.

And so my latest Morehead dream, in which my subconscious mind had
faithfully reconstructed an actual experience, had caused me to
remember, among other things, my first Morehead dreams, and to see them
as the psychical projections that they were; and to realize how much
and how long a town and its county had existed for me, not as a
geographical entity with living inhabitants that included an actual
C.

Louise Caudill, M.D but as a symbol by which I consciously or
unconsciously judged my professional competence and standing.  I now
felt my Kentucky past to have been a swift Journey down the
subterranean river of a limestone cave, the lantern in the prow of the
little barge that carried me along only now and then glowing upon
glittering formations or illuminating side passages never to be
explored.

As a man of sixty-six, troubled by the solipsistic myopia of his youth
and worried that a new ailment, self-diagnosed as double vision, might
be interfering with his current notions of reality, I immediately sat
down and wrote a long letter to Dr. Louise.  I told her many of the
things I have put down here, and said that I would like very much to
see her and Susie, and hoped that the pair of them would remember jean
and me enough to welcome a visit from us sometime.  Did you ever get
that clinic you wanted?  I asked, recalling her desire for a clean and
comfortable place in town where the pregnant hill women could come for
safe delivery of their babies.  I wrote all that, not knowing whether
Dr. Louise and her nurse were still in practice; not knowing, even, if
they were alive.  I wrote the letter because it made me happy to do so,
not because I expected a reply.

2

I wrote that letter in early October.  In January, jean and I planned
to fly to Florida for a brief visit with her sister and brother-in-law
before taking another flight to the Yucatan peninsula.  But, because of
a phone call I received about a month after my letter to Dr. Louise,
we ended up driving to Florida in order to spend a couple of days in
Morehead en route.

When I answered the phone late one evening, the caller said, "This is
Susie, Jim."

"Susie?"  Among my friends and acquaintances were any number of Susies:
former students, present and past colleagues, country neighbors.  "Oh,
Susie," I cried, only then connecting the name with the soft eastern
Kentucky accent that had given me an immediate and surprising
nostalgia.

"Louise isn't much at writing letters, but she wants you to know that
she surely did appreciate yours; and so did I. " "Is Louise all
right?"

The thought struck me that maybe she had been incapacitated by an
illness, maybe a stroke; after all, she would be in her seventies.

"Why, she's just fine, fine as ever.  She's sitting here by me, at the
kitchen table."  In the pause that followed, I heard a muffled chuckle,
no doubt from Louise herself "She's been after me to write you, but I'm
not one to spell out my heart in letters either.  We were wasting time
just now wondering what you and jean were up to, and what had
happened to the babies-" "Babies?"

"Larry and Cris.  The ones we used to doctor.  So I just picked up the
phone and dialed your number; and here I am to tell you we'd be
delighted to see you, as soon as you can get yourselves down here.

Here's Louise."

" Jim?"

"Louise?"

"If you think it would be fun to see us, come right on down; it would
be just as much fun for us to have you."  Her voice was a bit deeper
than Susie's, and more measured or deliberate; it was the voice of my
dream, the drawl that seemed amused or playful while remainng in
control, able to cope.  "Come on a weekday before five or so, you can
stop at the office, right on Main Street."

"You're still practicing?"

"Shoot!  How else would I pass the time, except for a little swimming
or tennis when the sun shines?  Later than five, or on weekends, give
us a call from town for directions to the house.

It's a little peculiar, getting here.

"Wouldn't it be easier if we stayed at the Midland Trail?"  I
remembered that to be the name of the two story brick hotel on Main
Street; highway 60, which ran through town, had been built on the old
wilderness trail.

"You'd find that 'just a mite uncomfortable.  The beds are all gone.

It went out of business after the interstate bypassed the town."

"What interstate?"  Louise laughed.  "You won't recognize the place,
Jim.  The changes have come so fast, oldtimers like Susie and me hardly
know what to make of it."

"But you said your office was on Main Street.  That's not one of the
changes, then?  You're still above the jewelry store that's next to the
pool hall?"  My real question, of course, was whether or not she had
been able to get the clinic, that dream of hers.  Understanding what I
meant, Louise said her office was now in the clinic, constructed
according to her own plans, that was about a block away from the former
office, but that it had been built so many years ago it had outlived
its usefulness as a little lying-in hospital for the country women.

Like our bodies, towns are apt to change considerably in thirty-five
years, but voices don't.  Talking with Louise and Susie, I was hearing
voices indistinguishable from those I remembered and, of course, seeing
both the doctor and the nurse (as they would be seeing jean and me) as
still young.  The telephone call, then, seemed a transmission from a
distant time as well as a distant place.  No doubt this was one of the
reasons (another was my subconscious idea of the stopover as a return
to the past) that, despite Louise's cautionary words, I was to be
bewildered and disoriented by Morehead's transformation.

In the 1950s, Morehead, small though it was, had been a congested
community, so confined by its valley that houses seemed to press
against each other.  A twolane asphalt highway bisected the town,
connecting it (seventy twisting miles to the west) to Lexington; and
(roughly as many tortuous miles to the east) to Ashland and neighboring
Huntington, West Virginia.  Its only wide street was the boulevard,
with its scattering of college buildings, that looped from the business
district back to Main Street, meeting it at the town's edge.  The few
residential streets resembled paved alleys, and were apt to end in dirt
trails that wound their way alongside seasonal streams, up the forested
hollows.

An efficient four-cylinder engine creates a white noise conducive to
the form of reverie that recovers old emotions, lost sensations.  At
about the midpoint ofjean's and my fourteen-hour drive, I found myself
recapturing wisps or fragrances of what it had felt like to be a young
man in the town toward which we were headed.  Dusk came before we
crossed the Big Sandy River, that natural boundary between West
Virginia and Kentucky.  jean was driving.  When freed from any willed
effort at recall, our memories can select details from a present
environment that will encompass an entire past.  For me, the headlights
of our little Plymouth Horizon became other headlights shining through
fog, and the glowing radio dial in the dashboard a similar one in our
Morehead living room; and these two images expanded to create much of
the atmosphere, as subjective as it was enveloping, within which I had
once lived.

Though I had often driven through mists or heavy fog in Morehead, that
particular memory of headlights beaming into fog came from an
experience on our first Christmas Eve in town.  I had forgotten to buy
a stand for our tree; the telephone operator (I had already learned she
was the one to call in any emergency, however large or small: a
comforting night-time intelligence, she was privy enough to whatever
was going on in town to transfer long-distance calls to the house in
which the desired recipient was playing bridge) told me that the Big
Store on Railroad Street might have a few, and that it was still
open.

The valley fog was particularly thick that night; I had difficulty
finding the side street that led toward the railroad tracks.  As I came
out of the Big Store (called that because it sold appliances and
furniture as well as clothing, yard goods, and seasonal items, all in a
friendly confusion) with my purchase, I heard what seemed to be drunken
curses, and then a single explosion, as if a gun had been fired; but
the fog muffled sound so that I couldn't be certain.  Back in my car, I
switched on the lights, twin tunnels that dimly lit the point at which
they met, and backed the car in an arc so that I could make out a good
stretch of what seemed to be empty sidewalk and deserted buildings.

Christmas Eve in Morehead, Kentucky, I said to myself.  I said nothing
to jean, as we decorated the tree, about what might have been only my
imagination; after all, Railroad Street, which contained a number of
wooden stores with false faqades that made it look like the set of a
Western movie, encouraged fantasies of cowardly snipers and
shootouts.

Furthermore, though the town was dry, there was a saloon on Railroad
Street to lend credence to the set; it was common knowledge that a
bootlegger sold whiskey by the glass as well as by the bottle behind
the shuttered windows of one of those false-fronted structures.

But the sounds had been authentic.  In the next issue of the weekly
Rowan County News, I read a brief item about the Jailing of a male
who, on Christmas Eve, allegedly had killed another male on that
street, following an argument in the saloon.  Naturally, I followed the
case in the ensuing newspaper accounts.

Because both the alleged killer and his victim had many kinfolk in the
region, there was difficulty in obtaining either a jury or a
conviction.

Ultimately, the charge was changed to a much smaller offense and the
defendant spent a few months behind bars.  Because of adverse
publicity, the bootlegger was forced out of business, at least at that
location.

The lightness of the punishment struck me as strange, as did the
treatment of the bootlegger, who hadn't been charged at all.  For that
matter, the local option law, which, like Prohibition, spawned any
number of bootleggers (a profession that I thought had been rendered
superfluous in my childhood with the repeal of the Eighteenth
Amendment), was alien to my experiences.

Throughout our stay in Morehead, I felt uneasy to be attending parties
at which the host, having run out of beverages, called the mayor or the
sheriff to discover where supplies could be purchased on that
particular night.  I never found out why our elected officials did
this; maybe they were simply paying a necessary obeisance to, or
arranging an exped' lent compromise with, that fierce Appalachian
independence that makes lawmakers and law enforcers suspect.

Still, the community at large (urged on, I came to understand, by
clergy and bootleggers alike) had voted to keep the county dry.

Supporters of local option included a majority of the veteran teachers
at the college, most of whom had been born in the region.  A recently
appointed college president who had come from Nashville-during my brief
tenure, there were three presidents, the other two Kentucky
natives-once pal 'd a call to my office to make sure I would attend, as
what he hoped would be a moderating influence, an emergency faculty
meeting demanded of him by a coalition of older teachers.  Its purpose
was to determine whether or not a graduate student, caught by the
police beneath a streetlight late one night while celebrating the
completion of his studies with a can of beer, had sufficient moral
character to be awarded his master's degree in education.  After an
angry debate and by a narrow margin, the faculty decided not to
withhold the degree.

Meanwhile, I was becoming friendly with the owner of the Oldsmobile
agency.  I got my gasoline from the pumps in front of his showroom, and
on frequent evenings chatted with him from a chair adjoining his
desk.

He was a tolerant man, generous in his sympathies, and his political
attitudes were congenial with mine; ours was one of those relationships
that are nurtured by banter.  Once I asked him how it could be that
Kentucky, famous for its bourbon, its beautiful women, and its fast
horses, could include an enclave like Rowan County, which, while it
might have its share of pretty girls, had mules but not a single horse
I knew of, and had outlawed whiskey.

He said he knew a man out toward Salt Lick who long ago had bought a
fine little saddle mare, and maybe old Sim still had old Molly in
pasture.  In speaking of the dry law, though, he became much more
serious.  It was something, he said, he had to defend.  He did so by
referring to a past era of open saloons that brought bloodshed.

Alcohol, he instructed me, had a long history in this county and
elsewhere in the mountains as the major stimulant to rivalry between
families.  But it was a subject he refused to expand upon, maybe
because it touched upon his own ancestors (he was a member of one of
the town's long-time families), or those of others he felt a loyalty
toward.

We tend to remember remarks that imply far more than they reveal.  I
used to wonder if maybe the Christmas Eve violence hidden from my
sight, its sounds muffled, had been a vestige of some old and bitter
conflict between families.  The subject of past feuding, though, was
one that no native of the region seemed willing to discuss.  In May of
our last year in Morehead, with the Rowan County News, in honor of the
centenary of the founding of the county, put out a huge edition108
pagesdealing chiefly with the past.  One article alone made a major,
if tangential, reference to a feud known as the Rowan County War; its
actual subject was an 1888 proposal by the state legislature to abolish
the county unless the feuding stopped.  In a box, the newspaper s
editor explained the reason for excluding the feud from scrutiny, even
at this late date: The Rowan County News has the story of all the
gruesome and seemingly almost inhuman killings and deeds of the Rowan
County War as historians compiled, and in many instances, magnified,
the three years of the struggle in which citizens were afraid to walk
on the streets or be out at night.  Hundreds upon hundreds of present
Rowan Countians are descendants of the Tollivers, Logans, and others
who participated in the feud.  Reprinting the story of the Rowan County
War could mean only embarrassment for scores of our fine, progressive
citizens of today and it is not the purpose of this edition to start
any more feuds-to lay blame on any action-or to rehash a period in our
history that is best forgotten.  . . .

Surprisingly enough, that historical edition of the Rowan County News
contained in a prominent position a two-column picture of one outsider
to the regionmy with e, jean.  Some years earlier, she had been hired as
the college's one-person news bureau, as well as to teach a course
enjournalism and serve as adviser to the student newspaper; the editor
of the county weekly had asked her for help with the special issue.

The caption to the picture said that, in addition to writing articles
about the centennial for the metropolitan papers, she "had penned much
of the material" in the edition.  Despite her contacts with businessmen
and other established citizens, her only knowledge of a possible
connection between past feuding and present families came from that
little editorial box, which she and I read after the newspaper was
published.

Had I persisted, I might have found on some undisturbed shelf of the
college library enough documentary evidence to unlock a mystery that
made me a stranger.  I didn't; "gruesome and seemingly almost inhuman
killings and deeds" had little to do with what I valued.  I preferred
to listen on our family radio to sounds of an opposing and more
congenial culture, the music and informational programs from WQXR, the
radio station of the New York Times.

The surrounding hills generally made for a fading and distorted
reception of radio signals.  A local station came into existence during
our stay in Morehead, but it devoted its hours to gospel music and
preachers whose excited utterances, punctuated by gasps for breath,
were undecipherable to me.  Through some topographical quirk, WQXR came
through to us with greater strength and fidelity than even the local
station did.  I had discovered the phenomenon quite by chance; one
night, as I was driving into the gravel patch at the end of our tiny
yard, the car radio lost the wavering signals of the station it had
been tuned to, maybe in Cincinnati or Wheeling; in its place, with a
glorious resonance, came the chords of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  I
rushed into the house, to discover that our high-fidelity set (a valued
possession, as one of the first of such sets in town: I had put it
together from components ordered by mall from an Allied Radio
Corporation catalog) caught the music as if the orchestra were in the
living room, or at least as if WQXR, knowing we had tweeters as well as
a woofer, was beaming a special signal to us.

The announcers I remember from those years were Pru Devon and Martin
Bookspan.  The former introduced a program sponsored by the Ritz Thrift
Shop, purveyors of used fur coats, that was called "Nights in Latin
America" and which we listened to while eating our supper; the latter
was in charge of the following and much longer program of classical
music, interspersed with ads for Sam Goody and others.  We listened to
Martin Bookspan's program after our children were in bed and jean was
writing her news stories while I graded another set of freshman
themes.

From a radio in my upstate New York farmhouse, I once heard the voice
of Pru Devon announcing musical selections for a Rochester public radio
station; and occasionally I have heard Martin Bookspan as the unseen
announcer for televised orchestral events on PBS.  Hearing those voices
has always filled me with a longing for my Morehead past, identical in
kind to the longing I had then while listening to them on WQXR, and
makes me realize how much our unobtainable desires impart a poignant
value to where we are and what we presently possess.

On the night that WQXR increased its power from ten thousand to fifty
thousand watts, our radio got nothing but static, whistles, and the
competing noises of closer stations.  No longer did those signals from
Manhattan fortuitously bounce off some hill slope, to enter our living
room as if Carnegie Hall, the Ritz Thrift Shop, and Sam Goody's various
record stores all could be found up one neiuhborin hollow or another.

9

Such a loss contributed to the dissatisfaction that led to our
departure.

On the night of our return all those years later, we approached
Morehead on a banked, gradually curving interstate highway that,
although it afforded vista after vista of whitened and empty hills made
spectral in starlight, did away with that old sense of separation so
crucial to my remembered feelings.  The headlights occasionally lit
wisps of mist, and gave the luminescence of fireflies to exit signs for
invisible towns and villages-Grayson, Sandy Hook, Olive Hill-that jean
and I knew from former Sunday drives on more primitive roads.

We were listening on the radio to a lovely quartet neither of us
recognized.  The radio signals were surprisingly clear.  "Do you
suppose we can get the Morehead station yet?"  I asked, as the quartet
came to an end.  I was about to switch the dial when the announcer
identified the performers as members of the Morehead University
resident quartet, and the station itself as that of the university I
had known as a tiny college.  As we slowed for the Morehead exit, the
station picked up a National Public Radio program, Adventures in Good
Music": the accents of Karl Haas followed, as infuriatingly affected or
as amusingly campy as they were at home.  "My God, can you imagine
that," I cried, clicking off the radio, not knowing if I were referring
to Karl Haas, the Morehead resident quartet, or the neon signs for the
liquor stores, the fast-food franchises, the video outlets, the Holiday
Inn, and the shopping mall.

It was a town that had so thoroughly entered the mainstream of America
that nobody could be truly lost in it unless he or she knew it from a
previous epoch.  (Stores selling liquor, beer, and wine were not the
only indication that a past violence had been mastered.  The next day I
was to pick up from a placarded store rack a brochure about the Rowan
County War, describing participants and killings in detail.) All that
distinguished this community from any other small city in the land were
two institutions at opposite ends of the downtown district: a
university, complete with dormitory and library towers, a student
union, laboratories, classroom structures, and a sports complex, at one
end; at the other, a modern hospital, a seven-story building with wings
and a large and illuminated parking Iota facility much too extensive to
serve only the immediate area, regardless of the town's growth.

Nothing was familiar to us, except for the eyes of Dr. Louise as she
opened her door to our knock; they held the humorous and friendly glint
I remembered, and all the old vitality.  As yet, of course, I had no
idea that this small and modest doctor had played a major role in the
transformations that still were bewildering me, and had surmounted
prejudices and rivalries that made a far greater barrier than
mist-covered hills ever could; or that she (born Claire Louise Caudill,
and a lifelong member of the local Christian church of her baptism) had
been unofficially sainted for her efforts, as the St. Claire for whom
the Catholic hospital had been named-an ecumenical honor so fitting to
her nature and accomplishments that it made sainthood itself
respectable in that resolutely non-Catholic region.

"Welcome back, " she said.  Susie was at her side.  jean and I entered;
the four of us embraced.  It was as if jean and I, strangers in
Morehead while living there, had returned to a home that always had
been ours.

Of all the Mayan sites jean and I visited in the Yucatan, Coba was the
one I liked best.  I was drawn to Coba because it is as remote as it is
beautiful, because the pyramids are towering tumbles of stones from
which only the immediate trees and undergrowth have been cleared, and
because I found it a pleasure to greet small children of Mayan descent
leading their pigs through the ruins , in search, not of stelae, but
rooting grounds.  jean and I, in leaving the circuitous path for a
vantage point in the tangle of vegetation, discovered that the trail
had been worn into the surface of an ancient causeway or road maybe
thirty feet wide, built four to six feet above ground level, and
(whatever the natural obstacles) proceeding in a straight line.  Coba
is the hub for a number of such causeways, some of which extend for
many miles, a prodigious engineering feat for purposes that remain an
archaeological riddle.

During our explorations at Coba, we used a guidebook to find various
ruins, but no guide.  When a civilization is dead, one has the illusion
of making contact with it through personal discoveries.  And it
gratified me that the stones had not been painstakingly reconstructed
into immaculate pyramids, and that so many artifacts lay buried beneath
their mounds.  Any city long dead has disappeared into the mystery that
envelops continuing life itself, and our imaginations respond most
fully to ruins at which there has been a minimum of digging and
Portland cement.

From our wonder at such ruins, what can we, the still living,
reconstruct, both as a bulwark for our own imperiled civilization and
as a help to the riddle of our personal existence?  In the days
following jean's and my return to upstate New York, I found myself
thinking less of a dead community in the Yucatan than of a in eastern
still-growing one ' Kentucky and of the transformations that had come to
it.  Sequestered for generations, the town and its county had
compressed into my lifetime much of the social and cultural history of
our nation's last one hundred and fifty years.  To return to that
region after three decades was like viewing a living organism through
timelapse photography.  The town's twin institutions-its modern
university and its equally modern and well-staffed hospital-had given
it sufficient pride in the present to enable it to come to terms with
its past.

Education and medicine were intertwined and had made an immeasurable
difference.  Dr. Louise, who had been the chief driving force in the
establishment of the hospital, had also been an agent in a long,
educative process begun as an attempt to bring an end to the vendettas
that had made the county notorious.  I learned all this and much more
during our stopover, not so much from Louise and Susie as from
townspeople who were glad to talk with us about their community.  One
of them, an admirer of Louise, told me that the doctor was related to
the family that his own family had warred against; another, whose
ancestors included members on both sides of the conflict, said, "I
dearly love Louise, and think of her as a spiritual descendant of Cora
Wilson Stewart, whom my daddy worked for when she was superintendent of
schools."

I knew as little about Cora Wilson Stewart as about the Rowan County
War in the 1880s, or its aftermath.

Still, I was beginning to view Rowan County as a kind of living
laboratory, a region of such rapid alteration, not only in institutions
but in human attitudes, that the past was yesterday and the future
possibly tomorrow.  And I was beginning to see Dr. Louise not only as
one who had affected me personally, but as one whose presence had
affected many others in an equally benign way; as best I could tell,
that diminutive, rural doctor was the most influential contemporary
figure in the evolving history of her county.

Future archaeologists, I told myself, will never uncover stelae bearing
Louise's image, for our monuments, like those of the ancient Mayans,
honor political and military leaders.  (Some of the stelae in Coba show
a woman, but she is a ruler, her throne the submissive backs of
kneeling captives taken in warfare, their hands bound.) Such monuments
are of no help to anybody whose obsession it is to reinvest the human
world with a meaning that transcends violence and brutal power.

At least one local truth I had gained from my years in Morehead is that
eastern Kentuckians get a great part of their definition from the
history of the region they were born into.  What I now was beginning to
realize was the degree to which Morehead and its surrounding territory
(perhaps here like many places in America) had achieved their present
definition through a historical progression in which the actions and
even the attitudes of individuals-Louise and her predecessors-were
supremely important.

THE PAST: A WAR In his Little Kingdoms: The Counties of Kentucky,
18501891, Robert M. Ireland, writing in 1971, remarks that Kentucky is
second among the states in the union "in number of counties per square
mile," a status that is the consequence of its nineteenth-century
"proficiency in the art of creating counties, carving out 100 by 1850
and adding twenty more in the next sixty-two years."

The General Assembly of the Commonwealth formed Rowan County
(pronounced by generations of its citizens as a single syllable,
"round" without the "d") in 1856 from sections of Morgan and Fleming
counties.  It was named for judge John T. Rowan, who, though he helped
form the first constitution of the state and was a United States
senator at the time of his death, is best known now as the proprietor
of the estate in Bardstown that inspired Stephen Collins Foster to
write "My Old Kentucky Home."  The reason given by legislators for the
creation of the county, Ireland says, was simply to provide a
convenient county seat at Morehead (also named for a politician,
Governor James T. Morehead) for the thousand or so residents of the new
entity.  Another historian suggests a second, more crassly political,
reason-Rowan might have been formed in consequence of machinations in
Fleming over the location of its own county seat.  Political
considerations may have been involved also in the attempt to abolish
Rowan County in 1888, following the last major conflict-a pitched
battle in Morehead-of the Rowan County War, sometimes referred to as
the MartinTolliver feud, sometimes as the Tolliver-Martin-Logan
vendetta.

That is to say, the pleas of the residents not to do away with their
county after its period of almost complete lawlessness were no doubt
reinforced by the awareness on the part of the Democratic majority in
the General Assembly that neighboring Fleming County might go
Republican, if the Republican portion of Rowan were returned to it.

In any event, the particular history of Rowan County, including the
efforts of families to decimate each other, has to be seen within the
context of the factionalism, chicanery, and struggles for dominance
that mark Kentucky's political history.  That larger history provides a
casebook on what can happen in a democratic land if its central
government delegates the major authority to its smaller political
units and, still in the spirit of laissez-faire, lets them
proliferate at will, while neglecting to establish a clear leadership
post within any of them.  Individuals or groups fought for power within
the counties, while the counties struggled against each other.

According to Ireland, the rivalries among Kentucky counties during the
period of frenzied railroad construction beginning in the 1860s was
"not unlike that between city-states of fourteenth century Italy."

Certainly he provides enough evidence to demonstrate the degree to
which the individual counties are very nearly autonomous units, with the
General Assembly serving primarily to rubber-stamp the bills coming to
it from those with power or privilege in the "little kingdoms."  For
example, 1,034 of the 1,109 statutes passed by the assembly in 1873
were such bills; fearing "the wrath of special interests if they did
not attend to their needs, the General Assembly inevitably put off to
the end of the sessions proposals dealing with the Commonwealth's
general needs."  Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter, the authors of
Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900, describe the conditions under
which the assembly met those "general needs" on the final night of the
1877-78 legislative term.  To permit the passage of hundreds of bills,
the house and senate set back their official clocks.  A reporter who
was present at the house session wrote that "as the apparently
nterminable conflict continued, the gentle flow of drinks increased,
until at least one member was scuttled, I and others though not
overflowing were full-" It was to celebrate the passage of the final
bill, not a departing year (for the month was April), that those
members who were still able to carry a tune sang "Auld Lang Syne.

If alcohol influenced the quality of the general laws passed by the
General Assembly, it also played a dominant part in the county
electoral process; saloons remained open during voting hours, and
candidates bought votes with whiskey as well as with cash.  In Rowan
County, as elsewhere, voting was not by secret ballot but by voice,
with the sheriff and other officials (as well as interested citizens,
such as candidates running for their posts) present to keep a
tabulation on how each person voted-and, of course, to be sure that
those who had been -bribed voted as they had promised to.

The minority party in one county achieved a record vote in 1886 by
renting a saloon and giving away free drinks.  A newspaper in a
southeastern Kentucky county reported that candidates "were trying,
most laboriously, to float into office by way of groceries,"
"groceries" in those days serving as a synonym both for alcohol and the
saloons that supplied it.  Ireland recounts that a newly arrived
citizen to Kentucky, one who had settled in "turbulent" Morehead,
discovered, for the first time in his life, that candidates could buy
votes.  A smart voter would hold off until the election was about to
close, for then he could get as much as fifty dollars from a candidate
in a tightly contested race.

The Rowan County War ("in many ways, " Ireland says with scholarly
calm, "the most spectacular feud of nineteenth-century Kentucky") began
within such an election-day environment, as the ballad inspired by its
opening events shows.  Though the following version, titled "The
Tolliver Song, " gets some of the names wrong, it is the one, codified
by folk-song specialists, that Josiah H. Combs includes in his
collection, FolkSongs of the Southern United States: It was in the
month of August, all on election day, Lent Martin, he was wounded, some
say byjohnny Day.

But Martin could not believe it, or could not think it so; He thought
it was Bud Tolliver that struck the fatal blow.

They wounded young Ad Simon, although his life was saved; He seems to
shun grog shops since he stood near the grave.

They shot and killed Sol Bradley, a sober, innocent man; Left his wife
and children to do the best they can.

Martin did recover, some months had come and past; All in the town of
Morehead these men did meet at last.

Tolliver and a friend or two about the street did walk; They seemed to
be uneasy, with no one wished to talk.

They walked intojudge Carey's grocery, and stepped up to the bar; But
little did he think, dear friends, he had met his fatal hour.

The sting of death was near him; Martin rushed in at the door.

A few words passed between them concerning a row before.

People soon got frightened, began to rush out of the room, When a ball
from Martin's pistol laid Tolliver in the tomb.

His friends then gathered round him, his wife to weep and wall; And
Martin was arrested and placed in the county J'all.

He was put in jail at Roand, there to remain a while, In the hands of
law andjjustice, to bravely stand his trial.

The people talked of lynching him, at present though they failed; The
prisoner's friends removed him to Winchester jail.

Some persons forged an order, their names I do not know; The plan was
soon agreed upon, for Martin they did go.

Martin seemed to be discouraged, he seemed to be in dread.

"They have sought a plan to kill me," to the jailer Martin said.  They
put the handcuffs on him, his heart was in distress.  They hurried to
the station, got on the night express.  Along the line she lumbered,
just at her usual speed.  There were only two in numbers to commit
the awful deed.

Martin was in the smoking car, accompanied by his wife.

They did not want her present when they took her husband's life.

And when they arrived at Farmer, they had no time to lose.

A band approached the engineer and bade him not to move.

They stepped up to the prisoner with pistols in their hands; In death
he soon was sinking, he died in iron bands.

His wife overheard the noise, being in the smoking car.

She cried, "O Lord!  they've killed my husband," when she heard the
pistols fire.

The death of these two men has caused trouble in our land, Caused men
to leave their families and take the parting band.

It has caused continual war, which may never, never cease.

I would to God that I could see our land once more in peace.

They killed our deputy sheriff, Baumgartiier was his name.  They shot
him from the bushes, after taking deliberate aim.  The death of him was
dreadful, it may never be forgot; His body was pierced and torn with
thirty-two buckshot.

I composed this song as a warning.  Oh, beware young men!

Your pistols will cause you trouble, on this you may depend.

In the bottom of a whiskey glass a lurking devil dwells, Burns the
breath of those who drink it, and sends their souls to hell.

2

If, during the six years my family lived in Morehead, I had attended to
the blind ballad singer at the bus depot as he sang a variation of this
song, I would have understood a historical reason for the proscription
of the selling of alcohol in Rowan County.  Actually, I first listened
to the words of "The Tolliver Song" at Cornell, while I was being
interviewed for my new job i by the folklorist in my prospective
department, a scholar with a far greater knowledge about the past of
eastern Kentucky than I possessed.  Nor did I know that earlier and
more famous blind singers had performed in Rowan County; they included
Blind Bill Day (a family name that probably gives him a connection not
only with the "Johnny Day" of "The Tolliver Song," but at a farther
remove, with Bob Day, the Oldsmobile dealer I talked with on many
Morehead evenings), who seems a likely source of the initial version of
the ballad.  According to Charles K. Wolfe's Kentucky Country, an
account of the state's folk and country music, Blind Bill Day began
"composing topical broadside ballads on local events as early as 1884,
and either composed or popularized well-known songs like 'The Rowan
County Feud' [another title for the ballad], 'The Coal Creek Troubles,'
and 'The Murder ofj.  B. Marcum.  ' " In 1926, Day was performing for
handouts before the Rowan County courthouse; the court stenographer,
who a few years earlier had been a script girl in Hollywood for Cecil
B. DeMille's first and silent version of The Ten Commandments, heard
him as he played and sang "The Lady Went AHunting," and saw him as
having show-business potential.

As a result of this encounter, both the stenographer, jean Thomas (who
later organized the American Folk Song Festival at Ashland and wrote a
series of popular books, including The Traipsin' Woman), and Blind Bill
became famous.  In his case, though, he became a public figure as
jilson Setters, a name jean Thomas dreamed up for him, no doubt because
she thought it had more local color.  Dressed up in carefully selected
homespun clothes, carrying, in addition to a new name, two suitable
props, "a ladderback hickory chair and an egg basket," Blind Bill was
taken to New York for theater performances and radio broadcasts.

A recent cataract operation had restored his sight.  One wonders what
that formerly blind minstrel made of himself and the world he was
exposed to; so fully was his identity changed that even the Rowan
County News, in its 1956 county centennial issue, refers to him only as
jilson Setters.  The article about him in that issue says that, prior
to his discovery by the courthouse stenographer with show-business
connections, "he could be seen nearly any time with his fiddle in an
oilcloth poke trudging along the creek, up a hollow or wherever there
was a gathering of any kind.  . . . Miss jean Thomas," it continues,
"took him to New York where he played in the opera house and the music
was said to be the most perfect that ever had been heard.  Later she
took him to England where he played for the King and Queen."

In one of the many closets of our upstate New York farmhouse, which are
jammed with castoffs and mementos, my with e found for me the yellowed
and brittle pages of that bulky centennial issue of the Rowan County
News after our return from Morehead and the Yucatan.  Whatever the
editor, W. E. ("Snooks") Crutcher, now deceased, said about the extent
of her work on that issue, jean remembers that her main job had been to
make articles out of material submitted by merchants about the history
and prospects of their firms.  Stories like the one about "Jilson
Setters" are not given attribution, but appear to be transcriptions of
accounts by elderly citizens-recollections drawn from their own
experiences or handed down from one generation to the next.

The first settlers in the county, who arrived during the final decades
of the eighteenth century, were, according to the centennial issue,
"Mrs. Abbie Oxley and Mr. Ben Evans," whose last names still serve as
the names of the small creeks that bisect the present county seat.

These two settlers divided much of the area that was to become Morehead
between them, Abble Oxley taking the western section and Ben Evans the
eastern.  (A descendant of Ben Evans continued to reside in the eastern
portion of town in the late 1950s, not far from our house on Caudill
Court.) I suppose that they came into ownership of the land through
Revolutionary War land grants, for the article containing their names
says that "the first people to settle in Morehead for the most part
came from Virginia on military grants."  Others who settled in the
county originally had destinations farther west in mind, but elected to
stay because of the plentiful wildlife in the surrounding forests, the
availability of land, and the lack of an Indian presence.  Still, since
Morehead was a way station on the Midland Trail, the majority of its
early buildings-inns and tavernswere built for transients.  The paucity
of permanent residents was such that Andrew Jackson White, born in 1835
on what has become known as the Andy White Branch of Christy Creek, is
commemorated by the Rowan County News as one of the "county's first
citizens."  Twenty-six years younger than a far more famous native
Kentuckian, Andy White was much like Lincoln, at least so far as his
desire for education was concerned, and maybe the teller of the tale
that is transcribed in the newspaper had Lincoln in mind.  In Andy's
youth, 66 schoolhouses were few and far apart.  . . . Young Andy being
determined to have an education would go on the high hills and gather a
load of pine knots, then while the rest of the family would be sleeping
at night young Andy would light a pine torch and stick it up in the
corner of the fireplace .  . . to make a light for him to study by and
he would often study until after midnight."  The tale interests me both
for what it includes and what it ignores.  Andy White became "a school
teacher, one among the best in those days.  He taught school for 35
years and he was also a music teacher and taught music for 22 years."

During the Civil War, a period in which Kentucky was officially
neutral, its young men serving either for the Union or the Confederacy,
Andy joined the rebel cause.  Later, "he served as deputy sheriff under
Squire Hogge.  At the age of 55, he decided he would marry and settle
down," and so "he won the heart" of Nancy Carter, a young widow, and
the pair had seven children.

"In the latter years of his life," the storyteller continues, "he was
not able to work much and he did a lot of reading, his favorite book
being the Bible.  He almost knew it by memory.  The ministers of our
vicinity would sometimes ask him where to find certain scriptures.  He
could tell them immediately what book of the Bible to look in and
usually what verse of that book it was in.  He had many friends and he
sure enjoyed having them come and visit him which they would do quite
often.  He always had plenty of good country food on his table and no
one ever left his home hungry close to meal time."  He lived his entire
eighty-six years on Andy White Branch at the headwaters of Christy
Creek, dying there in February 1921.

What the storyteller neglects to mention is that Andy White's service
as deputy sheriff under Squire Hogg (though his descendants spell the
name with a final "e," he apparently didn't) coincided with the
climactic months of the Rowan County War.  During these months of
heightened violence, White openly spoke of the Tolliver faction as "our
side."  The death, in 1885, of a previous deputy sheriff, Stewart
Baumgartner (it is the "dreadful" ambush referred to in the penultimate
stanza of "The Tolliver Song") took place at the headwaters of Christy
Creek, close to Andy White's home.  Baumgartner was a Republican and a
supporter of the opposing Martin faction; he had a reputation for
brutality.  The ambush perhaps was a retaliation for the wounding, in
the same general vicinity, of Z. T. (for Zachary Taylor) Young.

Whatever his claims to objectivity, Young, the Democratic county
attorney, lent the powers of his office to the Tolliver cause.  Only
circumstantial evidence-motive and a likely propinquityconnects Andy
White to Baumgartner's death, and I may be the first, at least in
recent years, to wonder about the possibility of his involvement.

(There is no doubt about his involvement as a Tolliver partisan in a
later event, one I have yet to relate.) One can perhaps explain the
seeming contradictions n such a figure as Andy White, by seeing him as
a hospitable family man and self-educated teacher who, caught up in a
second, if miniaturized, civil war (and one that more accurately can be
termed a civil war than the attempt by the South to secede from the
Union), elects through belief or necessity one side over another, and
considers himself deputized and always on patrol to defeat the enemy.

Given the political climate in much of the state, particularly in its
eastern counties, any official -sheriff or his deputy, 'judge or
justice of the peace or town marshal-must have felt himself far more
responsible to his allies than to the general citizenry, or to
the ineffectual government in Frankfort.

Indeed, the lawlessness to which White was such a willing contributor
seems a continuation of Civil War conditions in the region that became
Rowan County less than a decade before the cessation of those larger
hostilities.

"The Civil War," one article in the centennial issue recounts, was an
age of guerrillas" in Morehead and the surrounding area.  "These bands
of men, mostly leaning toward the South, kept the villages in constant
terror
with their invasions and threatened raids.  One of the worst
raids came on Nov.  10, 1863, at Morehead, where the guerrillas entered
the town early n the morning and held s 1way some time until they were
finally driven off but without loss.  Again on the 21st of March in
1864 the guerrillas entered Morehead ucceeded in destroying the
courthouse by fire."

Such guerrilla bands were interested less in supporting the Southern
cause than in looting houses whose male occupants had left to become
soldiers, whichever side they chose.  According to another article,
"The situation became so bad that a Captain Barbour of Morehead
organized a society known as 'Home Guards' whose purpose it was to
protect the women folk of the county" as well as to prevent theft; like
similar selfappointed groups elsewhere, Barbour's men became known as
"Regulators," and they "took the place of the official law forces of
the county for some years."

Several state historians find that the history of terrorism and
vigilantism in eastern Kentucky predates even the Civil War.  Such was
the case, of course, in the American West; for that matter, lawlessness
and selfappointed posses seem typical of any frontier society.

History, that sad chronicle of human disorder, is the account of
societies moving toward or away from those periods of relative
integrity, justice, and general enlightenment that now provide us with
whatever hope or meaning our species has.

Since it lacks abundant supplies of coal, Rowan County was spared the
ravaging of hills, streams, and people that came to other parts of
Appalachia.  It possesses clay of the sort that makes good bricks,
including fire bricks, and so clay mines and refractories came to the
county; since its land also holds a particular kind of bluish
sandstone, known as Rowan County freestone because it splits easily in
any direction, a number of quarries have been excavated.  Until the
hills were denuded of their virgin forests, timber-oak, pine, walnut,
hemlock, and ashwas the major resource.  Sawn-mills once proliferated,
the largest apparently being the one described in the historical
edition of the newspaper as "a million dollar sawmill at Rodburn" (a
hamlet near Morehead, now celebrated only for its picnic grove) built
by "the old Iron-Rodburn Company from New York."

If timber brought the first railroad to Morehead (apparently one
constructed by the Iron-Rodburn Company or its successor), the
development of the larger railroad system that became known as the
Chesapeake and Ohio in turn intensified both logging and the
manufacture of wood products, such as broom handles, wagon spokes,
barrelheads, and railroad ties.  In 1881, the first train to travel on
the system's tracks arrived at Morehead; the centennial issue reports
that people came miles" to see it.

One might assume that the arrival of trains, the passenger cars lighted
with kerosene lamps and heated with potbellied stoves, would, by
lessening the county's insularity, diminish rather than exacerbate
family rivalries.  In the view of Stuart Sprague, a present-day
historian at Morehead State University, however, the coming of the
railroad brought enough new people into the area to create a political
instability in a county that had typically given the Democratic party a
narrow majority.  In the August 1884 election for county sheriff, the
Republican Cook Humphrey defeated the Democrat Sam Gooden by twelve
votes.

The election-day violence that began the Rowan County War apparently
started as a fist fight in a saloon.  In the melee, John Martin, a
Republican and a personal friend of Cook Humphrey, lost a tooth (as
well as suffering other facial damage) to a "heavy instrument @9
apparently wielded, or so "The Tolliver Song" says, either by one of
the Tollivers orjohn Day-the latter a deputy sheriff on the outgoing
force.  Allegedly, Martin drew a pistol.  In the gun fight that
followed, Solomon Bradley was killed-perhaps as he was rushing to the
assistance of Adam Sizemore, who had been struck down by a bullet in
his neck.  No reliable evidence exists as to the person or persons
responsible for the death and the wounding; the participants themselves
might have been too frenzied and drunk to know.

Martin, who was a friend of Bradley as well as of newly elected Sheriff
Humphrey, obviously thought that he, at least, knew who had injured
him: Floyd Tolliver.  And so, as "The Tolliver Song" reports (although
mistaking Floyd for his cousin Bud), Martin killed Floyd Tolliver not
long afterward in another saloon.  Members of the two families, both
prominent in the county, spread contradictory reports as to which of
the two men had wanted to avoid bloodshed, and which had pulled out his
gun first.  According to the Martin version of the story, as it was
later reported in the Louisville Courier-journal, the "mortally
wounded" Floyd Tolliver, "raising himself in his dying agonies" after
his friends had rushed into the saloon, "said to them, 'Boys, remember
what you swore to do; you said you would kill him, and you must keep
your word."

" In any event, the feud was on.  As the ballad recounts faithfully
enough, John Martin was removed to the Winchester Jail to prevent
Tolliver supporters from breaking into the Morehead jail to lynch
him.

Subsequently, a number of men (not two, as in the ballad version, but
more likely as many as five) of the Tolliver faction brought a forged
order to the Winchester jailer i to release Martin to their custody,
and the jailer-James Eeton by one accountreluctantly did so, despite
the desperate pleading of the prisoner.  The differences between "The
Tolliver Song" and what actually took place are perhaps slighter than
the differences from truth found in most such ballads.

According to the account in the Courier-journal, "Martin's wife was in
Winchester, and she started back to Morehead on the same train that had
her husband, although she was unaware of the fact.  . . . When [long
after dark] they reached Farmers, a little town in Rowan County, a few
miles west of Morehead, the train was boarded by a large body of masked
men.  Martin was sitting handcuffed on a seat of coach 38, of the
Chesapeake and Ohio railroad.  The men drew their pistols and filled
him with lead.  Although shot many times, he did not die until the
train reached Morehead, and his wife knew not that her husband was on
the same train until she was called to see him die."

The leader of the masked men, and undoubtedly the strategist of the
entire ruse, was Craig Tolliver, Floyd's brother.

Henceforward, he would be the subject of stories and editorials
throughout the nation.  I find it difficult to see him as an Andy
White, one with a contradictory mixture of qualities.  He demonstrated
a final, reckless courage.  He was also a ruthless killer and a bully
who terrorized a community to such an extent that more than half of its
citizens fled.  The railroad, whose coming, by disrupting a tenuous
political stability, may have precipitated the violence, and which
served as a conduit for guns and ammunition as well as the scene of a
dramatic slaying, was also the background for the end of the
hostilities, as far as they can be said to end with Craig Tolliver's
death.  He was fatally shot during his escape from a hotel.  Running
down a lane, Tolliver almost managed to reach the railroad tracks; his
body fell near the switch.

4

The issue of the Louisville Courier-journal from which I've been
quoting is that of Thursday morning, June 23, 1887.  The front page is
almost wholly devoted to the exploits of the previous day in Morehead
and the history of the events leading up to them.

Under the drawing of a mountaineer holding a whiskey bottle in one hand
and a pistol in the other, the account begins: CRAIG TOLLIVER.

LEXINGTON, June 22.-[Special.]-The news from Rowan to-day is of the
most exciting character, as it appears to be an indisputable fact that
Craig Tolliver is killed and his gang dismembered forever.  The news
comes by a Lexington minister and others, who came through Morehead
to-day on the solid train from Norfolk, Va.  At about 9:30 o'clock this
morning, when this train was within a few miles of Morehead, it was
flagged by some citizens, and when it came to a stop they informed the
conductor that A BLOODY BATTLE was going on in Morehead between a
Sheriff's posse and the Tolliver gang, and that it would not be safe
for the train to proceed until hostilities ceased.

The passengers and trainmen were very much frightened, and at their
solicitation the conductor ran the train on to Martin's switch, two
miles and a half east of Morehead.  There they remained until nearly 12
o'clock, when they were notified that the fighting was over and that
the train might safely pass through Morehead.  The train stopped at
Morehead for some time, and there the passengers viewed the slain and
learned the particulars of the battle ...

This front page, with its many columns of small print, whatever its
inaccuracies, has served as one of the primary sources for historians
of the Rowan County War.  Another source is a detailed report made by
Captain Ernest MacPherson, commanding officer of the state troops
brought to Morehead to keep the peace during and after the August court
session, at which the alleged killers of Craig Tolliver were
acquitted.

(His report is an attempt to explain as best he can "the peculiar
predicament of Rowan county [that] renders it one of the curiosities of
the nineteenth century.") The events leading up to the Morehead battle
include so many atrocities that, as one early chronicler (with a love
to embellish each death with imaginative adjectives) complains, "to
detail .  .

. [them] would prove tedious."  One of the more important of these
events was an attack led by Craig Tolliver, who had become town marshal
and the dominant power in the local government.

Having learned that Sheriff Humphrey and another Martin supporter,
Benjamin Raybourn, were spending the night at the home of John Martin's
widow, Tolliver organized a posse that managed to burn down the house,
kill Raybourn, and Jail two Martin daughters for no cause other than
their lineage.  His most-desired victim, Humphrey, who had wounded him
inside the house, escaped into the surrounding woods.

Soon afterward, Humphrey resigned as sheriff, perhaps finding too
uncomfortable the post to which he had been elected by such a narrow
margin amid so much hostility.

As he surely must have expected, a Tolliver partisan was elected to
replace him; that new sheriff, William Raney, promptly attempted to
arrest him.  In the ensuing gun battle, which took place mostly within
Howard Logan's store, Logan put himself on Humphrey's side; though
Raney made no arrest, one of his bullets killed Logan's son.

On two occasions previous to the ultimate establishment of peace by
MacPherson's detachment, troops arrived, but their attempts to end
violence and bring .  justice failed before the continuing hostility of
the factions, the mass of contradictory testimony, and the blatant bias
of Juries and judges.  Though there were numerous trials for murder and
other violent acts, the only killer to serve a prison term had no
connection with the rival factions.  (Actually, no more than two dozen
people were killed during the Rowan County War; the preponderance of
wounded among the casualties must have been the result of indifferent
marksmanship.) Toward the close of the second occupation by the troops,
the prosecutor who had arrived with them, unable to gain convictions of
either Humphrey or Tolliver, arranged for a truce by having both of
them sign documents in which they swore to depart permanently from the
county.  Humphrey left for Missouri, and remained in exile; Tolliver
not only returned to town after the court adjourned, but consolidated
his power by becoming police judge in an election even more controlled
than earlier ones.  With Humphrey gone, the Martin faction had lost
even its residual strength.

Tolliver operated from his headquarters in the American House, a hotel
he apparently had confiscated, much as he had taken another hotel for
the use of the confederate elected to his former post as town
marshal.

According to Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1890, Tolliver, from
his hotel, "took control of the whiskey business, which he operated
without license," while (as another historian suggests) making himself
a role model for all those aspiring to crime and violence.  Though
Charles G. Mutzenberg's Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies (1917)
seems an attempt by a popularizer to take advantage of the nation's
continuing fascination with bloodshed in Appalachia, it probably can be
trusted even in its more lurid passages recounting Craig Tolliver's
reign of terror.  "Magistrates refused to issue warrants," Mutzenberg
reports, "knowing that such an act would forfeit their lives.  Had the
warrants been issued, no officers could have been persuaded to execute
them.  The residences and grog shops of the Tollivers resembled and
were arsenals.  An effective and favorite method of Craig Tolliver to
rid himself of any, to him, undesirable citizens, was to send a written
communication to them, setting forth the fact that Rowan County could
dispense with their presence, and that on a certain day in the near
future certain funerals would take place unless they were gone from the
county."  The new police judge also could obtain from willing county
officials indictments of anybody whose actions or words displeased
him.

During the two years of his increasingly absolute rule, the population
of the town diminished, according to one estimate, from seven hundred
to fewer than three hundred citizens.  Howard Logan was among the
merchants and members of the professional class-the lawyers and
doctors-who emigrated.  A relative, Dr. Henry Logan, had also aroused
Tolliver's displeasure.  In what most commentators perceive as a bogus
charge, Z. T. Young, who had relinquished to his son the position of
county attorney, was able to secure Dr. Logan's indictment for
conspiring to kill the county judge, as well as Young himself.  While
that physician, likejohn Martin before him, was waiting for his trial
in the Winchester jail, Craig Tolliver led a posse that included
Sheriff Hogg to his house a few miles out of town, ostensibly to arrest
Logan's two sons on a warrant as false as the one that had imprisoned
their father.  Sprague, the Morehead State University historian, thinks
that Tolliver might have wanted them out of the way, to prevent them
from testifying at their father's upcoming trial.  I suspect that
Tollivers love of power had become so obsessive that he needed no clear
motive to sustain it by injuring or killing helpless people.  With
Tollivers permission, Hogg put out a fire the posse had lit on the
Logan having coaxed the rot ers-the younger eighteen, the older
twenty-five but a consumptive weighing no more than a hundred
pounds-from the house by promising them protection, Hogg fled from the
scene as Tolliver and the others (according to Captain MacPherson's
report) "opened fire and killed one of the boys, and then the other.

The posse comitatus, or some of them, continued to fire shots into the
dying or dead boys, and then left them where they fell."  Hogg rejoined
the posse for its return to Morehead.  "On the brow of the hill
overlooking the town," MacPherson continues, the posse halted, to be
"instructed by judge Tolliver that all should tell the same story: that
is, that the Logan boys were killed in resisting a proper arrest, and
only as an absolute necessity."  MacPherson says that Hogg "kept his
knowledge of the affair a profound secret" as long as he could, though
the truth obviously came out during the August court trials that
MacPherson attended.  If, as I assume, Hogg maintained his silence
until the trials, he may have done so as much out of personal shame as
fear for his own well-being.  According to an article about Tolliver
that appeared in the Lexington Morni@q Transcript two days after his
death, he "had a good face; it was not brutal.  His manners were mild
so long as he was not aroused."  That "good face," as well as his
perversions, makes him the stuff of nightmares.  Still, it is Hogg-the
sheriff with no propensity for sadism, whose pity, maybe, forced him to
run away from the very act he helped through cowardice to engender-who
carries for me the greater threat, as representative of the part in all
of us that makes such evil possible.

For this selective account of what Editor Crutcher called 66 the story
of all the gruesome and seemingly inhuman killings and deeds of the
Rowan County War" and refused to chronicle, I have largely depended
upon the documents provided me by jack D. Ellis, a former director of
the Morehead State University library.  Included, perhaps
inadvertently, among the papers Ellis sent is a copy of a decade-old
letter he wrote to somebody who had contacted him for information in
connection with a proposed film on that war.  If only a little
alteration could turn the opening events into a folk song, the
concluding events certainly lend themselves, without the slightest
change, for use in a motion picture.  Indeed, perhaps the project never
came to fruition because the great Morehead battle, while a true story,
has since become a convention in Western films, with an oppressed hero
(entering the struggle at a late moment, he is the single major figure
yet to be defined in my reconstruction of the events) taking matters
into his own hands, and the villain dying with his boots either on or
off.  (Some accounts say that Tolliver swore to die with them on, and
did.  A more interesting report is that, having heard a prophecy that
he would die with his boots on, he discarded them in the unsuccessful
attempt to thwart his fate, and so ran barefooted to his doom.) D. B.

Logan (named like a number of other Rowan Countians for Daniel Boone),
the twenty-eight-year-old lawyer most responsible for ending the
tyranny, was a cousin of the murdered brothers; after their deaths,
Tolliver, as he had done with so many others, banished Logan from
town.

The Commonwealth's adjutant general, Sam E. Hill, made a brief visit to
Morehead in November 1887 and sent a report of his investigations to
Governor S. B. Buckner (named not for a Kentuckian but for the South
American patriot and idealist Simon Bolivar, whose final, disillusioned
words about his attempt to unite the warring factions and nations of
his hemisphere were the famous "We have ploughed the sea").  Among
other references to Logan and Tolliver, Hill paraphrases a
communication sent by the latter to the exile in which "Tolliver goaded
him .  . . [by saying] that he intended to rent out his house, and hire
out his wife to make a living for herself and children, two in
number."

No doubt the governor, still new to his post, already had heard of
these matters from his predecessor, James Proctor Knott, whom Boone
Logan had visited in Frankfort in order to plead either for a return of
the troops (a request denied because of the cost and the uselessness of
such troops in the past) or for the loan of rifles from the state
armory (a request likewise rejected, as being an Ilegal use of the
Commonwealth's weaponry).  According to Kentucky: Decades of Discard,
1865

1900, "the quiet-mannered Logan," realizing that "Knott was deeply
sympathetic," then said to him (in a speech I've found quoted in other
histories even though its first printed source seems to be the
sometimes inventive Mutzenberg), " 'Governor, I have but one home and
but one hearth.  From this I have been driven by these outlaws and
their friends.  They have foully murdered my kinsmen.

I have not before engaged in any difficulties-but now I propose to take
a hand and retake my fireside or die in the effort."

" Something of this sort, though expressed in plainer phrases, may
indeed have been said, since Adjutant General H'Il casually reports to
Governor Buckner that Governor Knott "suggested that the good people of
the community should take the matter in hand and themselves suppress
the outlawry.  Thus advised," Logan purchased the weapons himself, and
formed his own posse, though a number of the "good people" he assembled
came from other counties: he wanted a force sufficient to crush the
Toli'vers, and so enlisted the support of nearly a hundred men.

Logan obeyed all the legal technicalities, securing a warrant, issued
by the magistrate "under protest," as MacPherson puts it, for the
arrest of Tolliver, on the charge of the murder of his two young
cousins, and then making sure that the warrant reached Sheriff Hogg.

"It was agreed," MacPherson says in his meticulous accounting of a
battle that lasted for two hours of nearly continuous firing, that
'Squire Hogg should go to town on the morning of the 22d of June, 1887,
and demand the surrender ofjudge Tolliver and the others charged with
the murder.  On the night previous Boone Logan and his friends
surrounded Morehead.  The "High Sheriff" failed to keep his
appointment, and did not approach the place [Morehead] until after the
fighting had begun, and remained outside until it was over.  About 8:30
o'clock on the morning of the 22d of June one Bryant was sent to
Pigman's store for information as to the movements of the Tollivers.

Returning to his comrades, he was seen by Craig Tolliver, who, with jay
Tolliver, ran down Railroad street and fired on Bryant, but missed him,
and he escaped into the woods.  As the two Tollivers were coming back,
Boone Logan commenced firing.  He was at once deserted by the men with
him, but continued firing, which was returned by the two Tollivers
until their Winchester rifle and revolver were emptied.  They then ran
from below the depot to the American House, Craig Tollivers hotel, and,
getting ammunition, were joined by Bud, Andy, Cal, and Cate Tolliver,
[Hiram] Cooper, and others, and all started on a run for the Central
Hotel.  Craig and Andy were the first to reach the Central Hotel,
leaving the others, and going through the alleys.  Bud Tolliver,
Cooper, and the rest, under constant fire from the brush, weilt on by
way of Railroad street.  Haltliig at the drug store, they fired into
the brush and wounded one Madden [a possible not an identification
then again, for the Madden error, most likely to be involved,
Bunk, was Craig's chief crony and his replacement as town marshal].

Bud Tolliver was shot in the thigh.  Cal and Cate, who were mere
boys, helped Bud up the lane and hid him in the weeds back of Mal
Johnson's store.  They then j'oiiied the others, who were all now at
the Central Hotel.  Cooper went out in front of the hotel, on Main
street, and fired on some of Logan's men; he was shot through the
breast, and retreated into the hotel.  He got into a wardrobe in a back
room up-stairs, and in this place of fancied security was again hit by
a bullet fired from the front of the house.

The Central Hotel was surrounded, a cessation of fire ordered, and
Boone Logan called to the Tollivers "to come out and they should not be
hurt."  A message of the same purport was delivered by a woman.  She
returned with Cate Tolliver, a boy of fifteen years of age, who was
disarmed and unmolested.  The others refusing to surrender, Logan,
profiting by the tactics employed against his cousins, ordered his men
to fire the building.  The Tollivers at once broke from the place and
started for the brush.  jay came out the rear way, got about fifty
feet, was shot three times and fell.  Craig and Andy came out the south
side, and amid "a perfect hurricane" of bullets, Andy, with two small
flesh wounds, succeeded in reaching the woods.  Craig Tollivers good
luck at last deserted him.  He started running, and firing as he ran,
down the lane which leads from the Central Hotel to the railroad
track.  At the corner, and by the drug store, [Hiram] Pigniaii and [Ap]
Perry and three others were posted.  They opened fire on Tolliver, and
the scores of others stationed about the Central Hotel continued their
fire.  Craig Tolliver went a few feet beyond the corner, fell, rose
twice and fell again at the switch, literally riddled with rifle-balls
and buck-shot.

Though later he was to deny composing the message, newspapers
throughout the nation reported that Boone Logan, upon winning the
battle, telegraphed to the governor the four words, "I have done it."

An approving article in the New York World said the telegram 66 excels
somewhat the laconic bulletin of the great Caesar."  A passenger on the
train held up at Martin's switch for the duration of the battle was
disappointed by Tolliver's death, for according to the Courier-journal
ofjune 23, he had "determined, if the train stopped long enough, to get
off and try to see Craig Tolliver, of whom I had heard so much."

Despite Tolliver's death and the defeat of his forces, the remaining
members of his faction-and here Andy White's complicity with them
becomes most evidentwanted the war to continue.  After the acquittal of
Pigman and Perry, the two men accused of Tolliver's murder, Captain
MacPherson observed what seemed to him a conspiratorial conversation
among White and other Tolliver supporters.  MacPherson found in a
railroad car a shipment of rifles consigned to Deputy Sheriff White;
this aborted attempt to renew the conflict and take revenge for
Tollivers death was possibly funded by Z. T. Young.

Aftershocks reverberated for years beyond that, of course.  Dr. Louise,
who is related to the Tollivers through her mother, told jean and me
that one of her earliest memories, from her fourth year, is of standing
with a sister at a courthouse window during a visit with their father,
a circuit court judge, and seeing a greatuncle shot down and killed on
the courthouse lawn by Martin men.  It was the last murder to be
directly attributed to the feud.  "I expect he had been drawn there by
a ruse, " Louise said.  He was Cate Tolliver, who, as a
fifteen-year-old, had survived the great Morehead battle by
surrendering outside the Central Hotel.

THE PAST: A CRUSADE The issue of the Rowan County News celebrating the
county's centennial devotes a section to the history of the college.

"The year 1887," the opening of a long story on the origins of that
institution says, was a memorable one for Morehead and Rowan County,
for it marks the end of the county's most crucial period and the
beginning of its regeneration.

Reverberations of the devastating Rowan County War were still echoing in
these hills when a young minister and his mother, Frank and
Phoebe Button, came as strangers to Morehead and laid the foundations
of the Morehead Normal School.

Indeed, it was the notoriety given to the town by Craig Tolliver, as
well as the opportunity provided by his death, that attracted the pair
to town shortly after the great battle of Morehead.  The article quotes
part of a speech made by J. Harlan Powers, a local attorney who had
been one of the school's first pupils, at the 1954 dedication of
Morehead State College's auditorium to the memory of Frank Button.

"These devoted people," Powers declared, "being inspired with the
missionary spirit, and believing that the salvation of this section was
in the teaching of the Bible and in Christian education of the children
. . . turned to Morehead as a field for their labor."

The Buttons arrived in Morehead without resources to build or staff
much of a school; initially, it was situated in their home and opened
in the fall of 1887 with one student for the son and his mother to
teach.  Frank Button, who had 'just been graduated from the Lexingi ton
College of the Bible, secured a small livelihood by assuming the
pastorship of the local Christian church, the one in which Dr. Louise
was later to be baptized, and of which she remains a member.  That
church, like all the others in Morehead, had suffered during the years
of violence and despotism.  Its services were so intermittent and
poorly attended that, according to a biographical account of the
Buttons in the centennial issue, "it had practically ceased to
function.

The State Board of the Christian Church contributed a small sum to the
new school, including a S500 donation given for that purpose by William
Temple Withers, a Lexington resident and former Confederate general,
who over the years made further financial gifts to a cause he believed
in-a school to prepare teachers who would spread Christian morality and
general knowledge throughout its region.  A former Morehead resident
donated land for the campus, and relatives of the Buttons from their
Illinois hometown gave $1,500 for the construction of a boarding
hall.

Until 1900, the operating expenses of both the local church and the new
school were mainly provided by the Kentucky Christian Missionary .

Society; in 1900, the normal school came under the jurisdiction of a
national organization of the same church, the Christian Women's Board
of Missions.

That board brought almost immediate improvements to the school.  It
gave funds to enlarge the facilities, teaching staff, course offerings,
and student body.  The school, now fully accredited, offered a
four-year high school curriculum and provided scholarships for mountain
students it found deserving.

Some of these were working scholarships in a newly established printing
plant and broom factory.  Departments were established in biblical
study, music, and teaching; students could elect to follow a college
preparatory program, or one that prepared them for teaching.

Ida Button, Frank's daughter, was another speaker at the dedication of
Button Auditorium, and the centennial issue includes her reminiscences
about the early decades of the school.  "I can see students arriving on
horseback or in wagons, with no advance registration, no money for
tuition, but they had faith that here they could find an education for
which they yearned," she recalled.  "I remember hearing my father talk
about them and my mother asking, 'What did you do?"  and his reply,
'They have come so far, I can't send them home."  No one ever knew
where all the scholarships came from."

Ida was born of the 1889 marriage of Frank to Hattie Bishop, a Morehead
native, but from the sparsity of references to Hattie in the centennial
issue, I assume that she had little to do with the school so central to
the lives of her husband and mother-in-law.  Frank and Phoebe's
attachment to each other seems to me a central fact in their lives, the
depth of it perhaps related to two deaths, father and husband, sister
and daughter, that left them the only survivors of their family.  To
support herself and her remaining child, Phoebe taught school in her
native town of Oquawka, Illinois.

When Frank was about twelve, the pair departed for Midway, Kentucky,
where the mother had been offered a teachingj'oh at the Female Orphan's
School.  The centennial issue reports that Frank "achieved the
distinction of becoming its only boy graduate."  Phoebe was forty-seven
and Frank twenty-one when they arrived in Morehead to ameliorate
through Christian education the conditions that had brought so much
violence to the region.

According to a newspaper article my wife wrote in 1951 that contrasted
the inauguration of a new president of the college with the arrival of
the first head of the Normal School in 1877 (derived from the French
cole normale, that title once was commonly employed for a school that
trained teachers), "His first day in town, Dr. Button was forced to
duck behind an old stone chimney to avoid getting hit by an exchange of
bullets in the city street."  An extant letter from General
Withers to Frank Button, telling him that the animosity directed
against his new school would give it needed publicity, suggests that
some residents wanted no strangers belit on moral uplift to interfere
with their lives, however endangered they themselves might be by random
lead pellets.

Whether helped or hindered by antagonism to them, Phoebe and Frank
persevered, nurturing their venture so successfully that by 1904 their
school had trained three hundred teachers.  In addition to his duties
as administrator, teacher, and pastor, Frank became a kind of nurse to
the growing student flock, attending to the needs, for example, of a
whole dormitory of boys afflicted with measles; and he also served for
a time as mayor of Morehead.  Phoebe seems to have given herself more
fully to teaching than did her son, though the author of a Christian
Women's Board of Missions report, referring to her as "one of the best
women I have ever known," praises her "movements among the people," the
"kind words and deeds" which made her "known and loved by all the
community."  Described as a frail woman even at the time of her arrival
in Morehead, she died in 1892 "following a serious illness which many
felt was occasioned by her heavy work and responsibilities.

Her son must have agreed with that assessment of the cause of her
physical decline; devoted as he was to the school, he abdicated his
position in a fruitless attempt to help her regain her health in a less
demanding environment elsewhere in the state.  After her death, he
responded to a call to return as the school head, but left once again
in 1911 to become State Supervisor of Rural Schools, a position funded
by the Rockefeller Foundation.  Perhaps the death of his mother
contributed to the apparent ebbing of his commitment to the school
which he, with her help, had founded.  He did return once again,
though, as first president, when the normal school was merged into the
state system in 1923 as the Morehead State Normal School-a political
coup for his hometown managed by Z. T. Young's son Allied, now a state
senator.  During Button's tenure as president, the school added "and
Teachers College" to its name, having been given the right in 1927 to
award college undergraduate degrees.  In 1930, the year of his
retirement, the school became simply Morehead State Teachers College.

"Doctor" or "Brother" Button-throughout his years in Morehead he was
called by one or the other of these titles-died in 1933.  Whatever his
piety, he had not become a zealot, or one who aspires through oratory
to raise the religious enthusiasm of the masses.  In a tribute read at
the 1954 ceremony that gave his name to the college auditorium, he
was called "quiet and unassuming, )@ a man who "plodded slowly along,
never letting up until his goal was accomplished," words that make him
seem dull but steady.  Whatever his temperament, he had already been
relegated to an earlier epoch, for he was seen in the same tribute as
"a man representing the missionary spirit of years past.  . . .

" Only two years before my appointment to the school Button had
founded, its name was further shortened to Morehead State College, a
title that took away completely its original emphasis as a normal
school to educate young people so that through their own classrooms
they could impart Christian learning to a violent and godless world.

But now-nearly forty years after my appointment-I realize that a form
of the missionary spirit still existed there in 1950 and that I had been
very much a willing part of it, for the Christian message had
been transformed or mitigated into a humanistic one.  I was one of four
new members appointed into a veteran department.  According to the
white-haired and kindly president who had interviewed me, the infusion of
so many newcomers into one department, an unusual increase for
such a small college, was the consequence of his desire to bring
humanistic culture and general enlightenment to a portion of the
country that geography had isolated.

Assuming our rightness and intellectual superiority, we rudely
displaced the courses, methods, and pieties of the two teachers from an
earlier era still in the department, one a former clergyman and the
other a survivor of the first staff to be appointed when the state took
over the school.

As a veteran teacher at Cornell, I have become to younger professors
and entering doctoral candidates as much an anachronism, I suppose, as
I found those two elderly Morehead colleagues to be.  Maybe we must be
displaced ourselves before we can look with any kind of comprehension
or empathy at a previous order that we had helped to displace.  Stuart
Sprague, the historian at Morehead State University who has written
extensively on the region, remarks that a belief in Christian education
was "commonplace among those who attributed the feuds to ignorance and
lack of religion," and "gave rise to an 'uplift movement,' creating a
number of 'academies' in feud-ridden counties."  His words are
professionally objective; they neither affirm nor deily that an
institution like the Morehead Normal School made a difference.

But if change is an inevitable process, one can say at least that
people like D. B. Logan, who ended a tyranny, and Frank and Phoebe
Button, who commenced a school, were agents of that process in
Morehead.

I suppose the success of Morehead Normal School is to be gauged by the
graduates with teaching certificates it sent into the countryside, the
idealistic young teachers who actually took ill-paying jobs in

their work in education.  Harlan Hatcher, a 1919 graduate, became a
respected scholar and administrator who was appointed president of the
University of Michigan, thus inaugurating a lengthy series of highly
competent local graduates who left the area for greater opportunities
elsewhere.  His achievements were remarkable, but those of Cora Wilson
Stewart were extraordinary.  Despite a growing national and even
international reputation in education, she never renounced her
allegiance to her native region.  She enrolled in the Morehead Normal
School in 1890, when she was fifteen, gaining her teaching certificate
two years later; she developed a lasting friendship with Frank Button
and served as a member of the school's advisory board.

Cora Wilson Stewart's mission was that of a crusader against
illiteracy, and its religious nature was never lost on her.  The public
speeches she made that remain in print all carry the repetitions and
rhythms of an evangelist.  "Those who delight in transferring to canvas
the beauties of earth and sky," she said in the concluding paragraph of
a major address on "The Elimination of Illiteracy" at the 1918
convention of the National Education Association, in tracing fair form
and beauteous color may do it; those who delight in transforming marble
block into figures of noble proportion and speaking likeness may do it;
those who delight in perfecting the form and fragrance and color of
flowers and in enriching the flavor and hue of fruits may do it; those
who delight in impressing first lessons upon the plastic mind of a
little child, molding his character and coloring his very soul, may do
it; but let it be mine to carry the light to the illiterate man as he
sits in his mental darkness, straining his eyes gazing after his
vanished opportunity, and agonizing in his secret soul over the
precious thing which he has lost.  Let it be mine to bring to him a new
opportunity, a new hope, and a new birth.  It is a task too holy, too
Christ-like for me, I must confess, but I crave that merit and that
alone which will fit me for this task.

The zeal of this Morehead Normal School graduate obviously exceeded
that of her mentor there.  Her speech at the convention was so
persuasive that the N. E. A.

called for national support of her efforts in Kentucky and put Mrs.
Stewart in charge of a newly created illiteracy committee of its own.

But her most extraordinary accomplishment came early in her career, and
it connects her, through a mutual concern for the welfare of the most
neglected citizens of their region, with the future Dr. Louise.  That
practitioner was a nine-year-old child when Cora Stewart undertook to
wipe out illiteracy within the adult population of largely rural Rowan
County.

2

Cora Wilson Stewart was born in 1875 on a farm in Powell County about
fifty miles southwest of Morehead.  Her father, Jeremiah Wilson, was a
physician who did some early school teaching to support his medical
studies; he married a fellow Powell County teacher, Anne Halley, and
the pair had seven children.

Cora was the third to be born, but the first to survive early
childhood.

In 1880, the family moved to Cross Roads, a village in Rowan County.

In this community, Cora's father began his medical practice and, with
her mother, operated a general store.  Soon after their arrival, the
village was renamed Farmers-the stop on the railroad where, one
December night in 1884, Craig Tolliver and others boarded a train
during its scheduled stop to kill the manacled John Martin.  Some of
the participants in the developing feud lived nearby and no doubt
shopped at the Wilsons' store; in any event, Cora as a child was
acquainted with a number of them.  Later, that vendetta became the
subject of her first published article ("The Rowan County War,"
published in the August 1902 issue of The World Wide Magazine), and a
handy reference for her of the need for education in the speeches she
gave while campaigning against illiteracy.

Since her father was frequently away, his growing practice taking him
into more distant areas, Cora developed the closer attachment with her
mother.  As the eldest child, she helped her mother care for her
younger brothers and sisters and aided her in the cooking and
washing.

The fullest account of her life is found in an admirable, but
unpublished, University of Kentucky master's thesis, Willie Everette
Nelms5s 1973 Cora Wilson Stewart: Crusader Against Illiteracy.  Nelms
remarks that Cora's mother "sprinkled her daily conversation with
quotations from the Bible and urged her children to follow the
trainings of Christ."  According to Nelms, Cora said in her later years
that her mother was the greatest influence on her life.

Emulating her mother's piety, Cora, in her ninth year, began "regular
pilgrimages into the woods to pray, and she continued this 'I she
reached maturity."  (In a sect' practice until ion devoted to that
period of Cora Stewart's life in which she had become a speaker in
demand throughout the country, both for her eloquence and her
reputation as the major authority on illiteracy in the nation, Nelms
says that she "would kneel and pray for guidance" before every address,
and "began every day by reading the Bible."  The optimism she felt
toward her crusade against illiteracy "was based increasingly on the belief
that she was in harmony with God."  In a 1926 letter she wrote,
"I believe that our Heavenly Father has called me to a mission.

To speak and write and work in behalf of all illiterate men and women
whose eyes are blind to His word and whose lives are limited and
darkened by ignorance.

When Cora was four, she declared that she (like her mother) was going
to be a teacher; a year later, according to Mrs. Wilson, she "was
conducting mock classes in the backyard and demanding that her students
address her as 'Miss Cora."

She became an adept reader before beginning school in the one-room
schoolhouse in Farmers, which (like the majority of its eastern
Kentucky counterparts) had a dirt floor, no glass in its windows, and
plank benches.  Her parents had a collection of books and a neighboring
family had more, and soon she had read everything in both libraries.

The neighbors were the only people in the area to subscribe to a
magazine, a fiction periodical called the Old Ann Chair.  By the age of
seven, Cora went to the neighbors' house regularly to read that the,
the only new literature available to her; once,
she "pulled
down one of her father's medical volumes, almost as big as she was, and
is said to have announced, 'If you don't get me something else to read,
I'll have to read the doctor books."

" The family moved to Morehead in 1890.  It was the most convenient
location for Dr. Wilson's practice, and there the precocious eldest
child could attend the normal school.  Cora, who was fifteen, not only
enrolled in Morehead Normal but was hired as an assistant primary
instructor in the public school.  She continued her work in the public
school after getting her teaching certificate; between sessions, she
took further courses at National Normal University in Lebanon, Ohio.

Upon finishing her Lebanon studies in 1893, she left the public school
to teach at Morehead Normal, and became active in church and civic work
in town.  A contemporary describes her at this period as less beautiful
than "handsome"-a woman "five feet five inches tall" with "dark brown
hair and eyes" who "enhanced her appearance with attractive clothes and
careful grooming.

Restlessness marks her early professional life, as if she were
searching for a cause as yet undefined, something larger than herself
to which-like one of George Eliot's ardent and generousspirited
heroines-she could offer her intelligence and vitality.

And so, after serving only two years on the Morehead Normal staff, she
resigned, to teach in rural schools in the county.  Boarding with
various hill families, she discovered, Nelms says, "their desire for
education.  Her respect for their staunch character and native
intelligence developed into a feeling of admiration which she retained
for the rest of her life."  (In reading her published writings,
particularly her book entitled Moonlight Schools, which was published
by E. P. Dutton in 1922, a reader today is apt to feel uncomfortable
and perhaps even embarrassed by her praise of the mountaineers,
emphasizing as it does their English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh ancestry
and distinguishing their "blood and bearing" from those of "Inferior
people" of "degenerate stock"despite that present-day reader's
realization that the author obviously was trying to counter the
national prejudice toward mountain people as the inferior and
degenerate ones.) Whatever her admiration of rural people, two years of
teaching their children in one-room schoolhouses was enough.

Though it seems an erratic choice for one with her sensibility and
aspirations, she elected to follow a business career, enrolling in the
Commercial College of Kentucky University in Lexington in 1899.  She
did so well in that one-year program that she was asked to remain as a
teacher, the first woman ever appointed to such a post at the
college.

(She was to become the "first woman" appointed to a number of
subsequent positions.) Because of the illness of her mother, who was
dying of tuberculosis, she taught at the school for less than a year.

Upon the death of her mother, she became a secretary for a lumber
company in Huntington, West Virginia, a job she apparently took in
order i to help her brothers and sisters complete their education.

(Her father didn't die until 1917; I don't know the reason for this
apparently skilled and busy physician's lack of adequate support of his
children, or for his virtual disappearance, after moving his family to
Morehead, from all biographical accounts of Cora Wilson Stewart's life,
including Nelms's detailed thesis.) Up to this point, her experiences
resemble those of many talented women of her own and other epochs who
struggle, without great success, to find a personal direction and goal
other than the one provided by marriage, and whose family loyalties
eventually entrap them.  But in 1901, the Democratic party in Rowan
County asked Cora to return from Huntington to run for the post of
county school superintendent in the upcoming elections, a position that
no woman had ever gained.  She gave her energies, intelligence, and
developing oratorical skill to that campaign, and won by a Substantial
margin over her male opponent.

Little public attention was paid to Cora Wilson Stewart during the
years my family lived in Morehead.  In researching some background
information on the college for the issue of the school newspaper
celebrating the inauguration in 1951 of a new president, Charles R.

Spain, my wife discovered not only the detail about Frank Button
finding refuge behind a chimney from the bullets spraying the streets
on the day of his arrival, but an account of Cora Stewart's
establishment of the Moonlight Schools.  Surprised by the drama and
success of Mrs. Stewart's endeavor, jean wrote a story for the paper
that, except for a later article in the issue of the Rowan County News
celebrating the county's centennial, was the only reference, whether in
conversation or in print, to that woman's accomplishments that I ever
came across during the six years of our stay in town.  Morehead, in
those days, was not finding pride in its past, and it is likely that
the campaign against illiteracy was associated too closely in the
memory of its citizens with the ignorance and killing that had preceded
it.

Attitudes of the townspeople toward their community and its history
gradually changed in the years following our departure.  A September
1961 issue of the Rowan County News carries an account of the closing
of all Morehead businesses for the groundbreaking ceremonies presaging
the construction of the St. Claire Medical Center.  (A streamer above
the headline declares, "Greatest Day Since College Established.") Adron
Doran, the college president, gave the principal address; indeed, the
future expansion of the college into a university depended upon the
construction of a modern hospital.  The growth of both institutions,
accompanied by much publicity, of course had much to do with
alterations in the community's sense of itself.

In 1973, Morehead State University brought to campus and there restored
"Little Brushy School," the first one-room rural structure in which
Cora Wilson Stewart taught.  It serves as a museum of, and tribute to,
her work.  The university now has an Appalachian Adult Education Center
and a Department of Adult and Continuing Education dedicated to
furthering the service to adults that Mrs. Stewart began; the center's
library has assembled materials by and about her that augment the
Stewart collection in the University of Kentucky archives in
Lexington.

It is surprising, in these days of resurgent feminism, that no
researcher as yet has resurrected the struggles and triumphs of Cora
Wilson Stewart.  The best study of her life remains that unpublished
master's thesis on a University of Kentucky library shelf.  Active at a
time in which women's rights were becoming a crucial part of the
progressive movement, Cora Stewart supported women's suffrage and
worked for the election of females to whatever offices they could then
obtain.  She was acquainted with some of the major suffragists, male
as well as female, and got help for her nationwide campaign against
adult illiteracy from Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the
National American Woman Suffrage Association; Jane Addams of the Hull
House in Chicago; the Kansas journalist William Allen White, and many
others.  She herself was elected the first woman president of the
Kentucky Educational
Association.  She was then elected to the executive
committee of the National Education Association and in 1929 was
appointed by President Hoover to chair the Executive Committee of the
National Advisory Committee on Illiteracy, a body she was instrumental
in creating.  She also was instrumental in founding the illiteracy
section of the World Conference on Education, and she presided over its
sessions in Edinburgh, Geneva, Toronto, San Francisco, and Denver.

As a delegate to the national Democratic convention in San Francisco in
June 1920, Mrs. Stewart gave the seconding speech for Ohio governor
James M. Cox as that party's candidate for president, and became,
following a vote for a prominent Kentucky suffragist, Laura M. Clay, on
an earlier ballot, the second woman in American history to receive a
vote for presidential nomination.

In 1925, a popular magazine, the Pictorial Review, gave her a $5,000
achievement prize for her "contribution to advance human welfare"money
she promptly used to further her work against illiteracy.  In 1930, the
National Council of Administrative Women gave her the Ella Flagg Young
medal for distinguished educational service, an award that Mrs.
Stewart, in accepting it in the name of all who were engaged in the
national battle against illiteracy, construed "as a commission, as a
mandate to carry on, for we have made only a beginning."  During her
lifetime, she carried her crusade against illiteracy across America,
not only into the various states, but into prisons and Indian
reservations, and into predominantly Negro communities as well as white
ones; and during the First World War her methods and a text she had
written for soldiers were used in army camps to teach conscripts how to
read and write.  She became so widely known that five of her speeches
on the adult illiteracy movement were broadcast nationally by CBS
radio, and another by NBC.  Near the end of her life she was scheduled
to appear as a subject of a weekly radio program, This Is Your Life,"
but was too ill to attend.

Cora Stewart's later campaigns were modeled upon and given impetus by
her initial one, made while she was serving her second term as school
superintendent, to abolish illiteracy in Rowan County.  Its remarkable
record buoyed her despite considerable sufferings in her personal life
and the inevitable setbacks to her national crusade.  The attention
paid by the New York Times and other metropolitan newspapers to the
success of the Moonlight Schools in Rowan County gave her the
reputation she needed to get legislative and financial suport for her
larger missions.  p Once, following the defeat by the Kentucky
legislature of a proposal of hers, Cora Stewart returned home to
Morehead for a considerable stay.  A questioner asked her if she had
retired from her battles.

Certainly it was that initial triumph in Rowan County that gave her the
temerity to respond, "You must not get the impression that I have given
up [the struggle against illiteracy].  I am only enlarging it.  My aim
of ten years service to my State, ten to my nation, and ten to the
world is now entering the second chapter."

It was during this seeming hiatus at home that she began writing
Moonlight Schools, that account of the educational experiment in Rowan
County; it achieved its promotional purpose, which was to prepare the
way for the second and third chapters.

4

As the new century was beginning, Cora Wilson apparently decided to
embrace life as fully as she could; she attempted marriage as well as
politics and public service.  Little is known about her first marriage
to Grant Carey, a Morehead youth (it goes unmentioned in Nelms's
thesis) except that it lasted only a year.

Several years later, in 1904, as she was nearing the end of her first
term as county school superintendent, Cora was married again, this time
to one of the teachers who served under her, Alexander T. Stewart.

Though she was to be chosen once again to that office, she did not run
in the 1905 race; Nelms conjectures that she 6 6 refused to stand for
re-election" because of "the stress that her superintendent's duties
placed on her husband," and adds that the death of the Stewarts'
ten-month-old son in 1908 increased the tension between the couple.

No matter how generously made, a submission to the wishes of another
can lead to mutual resentment, and possibly the voluntary
relinquishiiig of her position helped to hasten rather than postpone
the dissolution of the marriage.  In any event, Mrs. Stewart found it
impossible to remain at home, a dutiful wife.

Asked to give speeches throughout the state, she accepted many offers
and conducted a number of teacher institutes as well.

Whatever these public activities, she must have felt dissatisfied and
unfulfilled, and so in 1909 successfully campaigned to regain her
office.  Nelms, who examined the depositions and other legal papers
filed in the University of Kentucky library relating to the divorce
proceedings in 1910, finds evidence there that while "she performed the
chores of the normal housewife .  . . her husband was not happy with
her conduct.  He refused to work, became extremely jealous of his wife,
and often stayed out late at night.  Seeking escape from reality, he
turned to drinking and became a domestic tyrant."  She filed for
divorce only after "her drunken husband returned home late one night,
kicked open the door, and threatened to kill her.  He searched out a
pistol, took aim at her, and pulled the trigger.  Luckily, the gun
misfired, and Mrs. Stewart was able to get out of the house before he
tried again."

Cora Stewart suffered what her friends considered "a profound
melancholy" following the death of her child and the failure of her
second marriage-and no doubt the vituperation against her character for
being twice divorced contributed to that melancholy.  In that era and
place, one divorce was sufficient to bring censure, especially upon the
woman.  Apparently she gailied a gradual release from her depression
through everintensifying public service.  As county superinteiideilt,
she started vocational classes for rural pupils in which, Nelms
reports, "they cleared roadways and practiced building roads.  [For
years, the building or improvement of rural roads was to be one of her
persistent, if secondary, causes.] Out of lumber cut from the
surrounding woods, they made bookcases, picture frames, and furniture
for the schools."  She brought a horticulturist to the county, and,
following his advice, encouraged the farmers in the area to plant fruit
trees and such suitable, but ignored, crops as corn.  Later, she
organized fruit and corn clubs that held competitions to determine the
growers with the largest harvests.  Such achievements added to her
statewide reputation as an administrator as well as a speaker.  In 19

, the year of her election to the presidency of the Kentucky Education
Association, she instituted the Moonlight School program for rural
adults in Rowan County-the start of a project that gave purpose to the
rest of her life and provided her with a kind of fulfillment never to be
found in marriage.

In Moonlight Schools, and in many of her speeches and published
articles, Cora Stewart refers to three people who provided her with the
incentive to develop a program for others like them.  Her anecdotes
about the three become the parts of a single account, whose simple
details are generalized into a call; it is a story that shows that Mrs.
Stewart's persuasive skill as orator is matched by her controlled but
still evangelical writing style.

"When I was Superintendent of Rowan County schools," Mrs. Stewart
remarks in Moonlight Schools to open the story that became known to
thousands of Americans of her day as an illustration of the nation's
inner potential, I acted as voluntary secretary to several illiterate
folk-a mistaken kindness-I ought to have been teaching them to read and
write.  Among these folk there was a mother whose children had all
grown up without learning save one daughter who had secured a limited
education, and when grown, had drifted away to the city of Chicago,
where she profited by that one advantage which the city possessed over
the rural district-the night school.  She so improved her education and
increased her efficiency that she was enabled to engage, profitably, in
a small business.  Her letters were the only joys that came into that
mother's life and the drafts which they contained were the only means
of relieving her needs.  Usually she would bring those letters to me,
over the hill, seven miles, to read and answer for her.  Sometimes
she would take them to the neighbors to interpret.

Once after an absence of six weeks, an unaccustomed period, she came in
one morning fondling a letter.  I noticed an unusual thing-the seal was
broken.

Anticipating her mission, I inquired, "Have you a letter from your
daughter?  Shall I read and answer it for you?

She straightened up with more dignity and more pride than I have ever
seen an illiterate assume-with more dignity and more pride than an
illiterate could assume as she replied, "No, I kin answer hit fer
myself.  I've larned to read and write!"

"Learned to read and write!"  I exclaimed in amazement.  "Who was your
teacher, and how did you happen to learn?"

"Well, sometimes I just couldn't git over here to see you," she
explained, "an' the cracks would be up 'twixt me an the neighbors, or
the neighbors would be away from home an' I couldn't git a letter
answered fer three or four days; an' anyway hit jist seemed like thar
was a wall 'twixt Jane an' me all the time, an' I wanted to read with
my own eyes what she had writ with her own hand.  So, I went to the
store an' bought me a speller, an' I sot up at night 'til midnight an'
sometimes 'til daylight, an' I larned to read an' write."

To verify her statement, she slowly spelled out the words of that
precious letter.  Then she sat down, and under my direction, answered
it-wrote her first letteran achievement which pleased her
immeasurably, and one that must have pleased the absent ane still
more.

A few days later a middle-aged man came into the office, a man
stalwart, intelligent and prepossessing in appearance.  While he waited
for me to dispatch the business in hand, I handed him two books.  He
turned the leaves hurriedly, like a child handling its first books,
turned them over and laid them down with a sigh.  Knowing the scarcity
of interesting books in his locality, I proffered him the loan of
them.

He shook his head.

I "I can't read or write," he said.  Then the tears came into the eyes
of that stalwart man and he added in a tone of longing, "I would give
twenty years of my life if I could.

A short time afterward, I was attending an entertainment in a rural
district school.  A lad of twenty was the star among the performers.

He sang a beautiful ballad, partly borrowed from his English ancestors
but mostly original, displaying his rare gift as a composer of song.

When he had finished, I went over and sat down beside him.  "Dennis,"
I said, "that was a beautiful ballad.  It is worthy of publication.

Won't you write a copy for me?"

His countenance, which had lighted up at my approach, suddenly fell,
and he answered in a crest-fallen tone, "I would if I could write, but
I can't.

Why, I've thought up a hundred of 'em that was better'n that, but I'd
fergit 'em before anybody come along to set 'em down.

These were the three incidents that led directly to the establishment
of the Moonlight Schools.  I interpreted them to be not merely the call
of three individuals, but the call of three different classes; the
appeal of illiterate mothers, separated from their absent children
farther than sea or land or any other condition than death had power to
divide them; the call of middle aged men, shut out from the world of
books, and unable to read the Bible or the newspapers or to cast their
votes in secrecy and security; the call of illiterate youths and
maidens who possessed rare talents, which if developed might add
treasures to the world of art, science, literature and invention.

The period was a magical one in the history of Rowan County, for not
only were the rural people ready to learn, but the rural teachers,
abetted by Cora Stewart's persuasive abilities, were so eager to help
that at a staff meeting she had called to explain her plan "not one of
them," she says, "expressed a doubt or offered an excuse, but each and
every one of them .  . . volunteered to teach at night, after she had
taught all day, and to canvass her district in advance to inform the
people of the purpose of these schools and to urge them all to
attend.

Because of poor roads and the caution that had become a habit since the
Rowan County War, the rural people, Mrs. Stewart says, "were not
accustomed to venturing out much after night."  So she scheduled the
opening of classes for September 5, 1911, the night of the full moon.

Although the nightly sessions afterward paid no attention to moon
phases, lasting as they did Monday through Thursday for eight weeks,
the phrase "Moonlight Schools" attached itself to the educational
movement, not only in Rowan County, but in many other regions, first in
Kentucky and then elsewhere in the nation.

At that meeting of the teachers, the group had estimated an initial
enrollment of 150 adults, three from each district.  The teachers
assembled at the fifty oneroom schoolhouses.  "We waited with anxious
hearts," Mrs. Stewart says in her book, showing a talent for
suspense.

The teachers had volunteered, the schools had been opened, the people
had been invited but would they come?  They had all the excuses that
any toll-worn people ever had.  They had rugged roads to travel,
streams without bridges to cross, high hills to climb, children to lead
and babes to carry .  . . ; but they were not seeking excuses, they
were seeking knowledge, and so they came.  They came singly or hurrying
in groups, they came walking for miles .  . . . they came bent with age
and leaning on canes, they came twelve hundred strong!

6

Given the sparsity of the county's population, one would assume that
the first year of the Moonlight Schools probably had exhausted the pool
of interested adults; but when sessions were offered the following
year, an even greater number-sixteen hundred this time-enrolled, many
of them inspired by the new ability of neighbors to read and write.

Moonlight Schools is illustrated both with photographs and copies of
letters written by students to Superintendent Stewart as demonstrations
of their newfound literacy.  Each who could write such a letter
received a Bible, a gift valued not only for its contents by those who
could now read it, but as a kind of commencement certificate.

Graduates included a number of formerly illiterate preachers who had
previously depended on sometimes barely literate members of their
congregation to find scriptural passages that could serve as a basis
for their sermons.  Mrs. Stewart remarks that one preacher told his
flock that "Peter was a fisherman and Paul was an oyster man," for his
reader had turned austere" into that word; another minister, having
been read the sentence "Jacob made booths for his cattle," misconstrued
it as "boots for his cattle," and so, Mrs. Stewart says, "discoursed
from the pulpit on 'Jacob, that humane man [who] would not even permit
his cattle to go barefooted, but made boots for them to protect their
tender feet as they walked over the stones."

Each written in ink, the script obviously labored over, the letters to
Mrs. Stewart express a touching warmth of gratitude, and an eagerness
for the Bible to be sent; but the photographs of the men and women
intent on their lessons in the schoolhouses are as moving to me as the
far more professional ones by Walker Evans in James Agee's Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, a book about the summer in 1936 that Agee, and
sometimes Evans, lived with three tenant families in Alabama.  The
rural people of Rowan County came to their lessons wearing their Sunday
clothes-the women in blouses and skirts or long dresses, the men in
suits, many with ties neatly knotted at the collars of shirts no doubt
washed and ironed by their wives.  judging from the limited evidence of
these pictures, more men than women attended the classes.  The women
tend to be in groups, some of them with infants in their laps.  In the
foreground of one photograph, overcoats and hats lie on a desk; the
majority of the students are assembled in the front row, watching a
group of four men and one woman who, under the supervision of their
teacher, are solving problems in multiplication and addition on the
blackboard.  (The classes included lessons in arithmetic, as well as in
reading and writing, and drills that covered subjects as diverse as
history, civics, health and sanitation, and correct pronunciation.) On
what seems to be a varnished wooden wall above the blackboard, Abraham
Lincoln and George Washington look toward each other and the activity
beneath the other's framed portrait.

Unlike the schoolhouse in Farmers that young Cora attended, or the
descriptions of others I've come across ("Broken windows, swinging
weatherboards, leaky roofs, are noticeable from without," is the way an
official Kentucky document of 1871 describes a typical district
school.

"Inside are filthy floors, smoked ceilings, and walls defaced with
obscene images.  "), the rooms revealed in the photographs in
Mootil@qht Schools are clean and in surprisingly good repair; one
picture even shows wliidows decorated with filmy white curtains.

From the text we learn that the introduction of the night classes for
adults brought about the renovation of the Rowan County district
schools by the new students themselves, and that once renovated, they
became community centers for singing schools and prayer meetings, and
for meetings of clubs devoted to improvements in agriculture and in
roads.  "The schools used to 'just drag along and nobody seemed
interested," a trustee of one school said.  "We had not had a night
school but three weeks until we got together right.  We papered the
house, put in new windows, purchased new stovepipe, made new steps,
contributed money, and bought the winter's fuel."

Reminded by these Moo l@qlit Schools photographs of Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, I turned to Agee's discussion of rural education in
Alabama, remembering some words of his about literacy, and wondering
what, from his experiences among those poverty-stricken people in
1936

(the year of Cora Stewart's death), he had to say that might possibly
relate to her work among the Appalachian poor."  'Literacy,' " he
writes, possibly in reference to the continuing efforts against
illiteracy in Alabama that were begun in 1919 through her Rowan County
example and Alabama speechmaking, is to some people a pleasing word:
when "Illiteracy" percentages drop, many are pleased who formerly were
shocked, and think no more of it.  Disregarding the proved fact that
few doctors of philosophy are literate, that is, that few of them have
the remotest idea how to read, how to say what they mean, or what they
mean in the first place, the word literacy means very little even as it
is ordinarily used.  An adult tenant writes and spells and reads
painfully and hesitantly as a child does and is incapable of any save
the manifest meanings of any but the simplest few hundred words, and is
all but totally incapable of absorbing, far less correlating, far less
critically examining, any "Ideas" whether true or false; or even
physical facts beyond the simplest and most visile The success of
volunteer teachers in reducing illiteracy percentages through an
ever-spreading number of Moonlight Schools in America led to an
increasing attack on the schools by educational specialists, who,
whether Agee would find them literate or not, ultimately managed to
take control of the movement through arguments similar to his own about
the dubiousness of mere statistics compiled, they noted, by
nonexperts.

Agee's debunking of literacy ratios, though, was part of his criticism
of education itself as an institution-a criticism encompassing enough
to include those specialists and the Harvard of his own undergraduate
years, as well as the Cornell where I continue to teach.  He was
alienated enough to think of education generally as an adjustment to a
status quo that ipp e rater than freed its pupils.

Agee's own prose resonates far more with the rhythms of the King James
version of the Bible than does Cora Stewart's.  "In every child who is
born," he writes, indulging in those rhythms at the expense of
conventional or even "literate" syntax, "under no matter what
circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the
human race is born again: and in him, too, once more, and of each of
us, our terrific respons ability towards human life; towards the utmost
idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God."  The truly
educated person would have a sharpened awareness of human potentiality,
a scorn for the social authority that continually thwarts it, and a
desire to accept his or her responsibility for its liberation within
others.  Agee's Alabama tenant farmers have had at best but a few years
of education, but what does that matter, given the hopelessness of the
present-day educative process?  "They would be at a disadvantage if
they had more of it," he says, "and at a disadvantage if they had none,
and they are at a disadvantage in the little they have; and it would be
hard and perhaps impossible to say in which way their disadvantage
would be greatest.

Against such a view, I reread some of the lessons incorporated by Mrs.
Stewart into the various publications she composed as texts-first a
weekly newspaper of Rowan County events, later some readers-whereby
adults could become literate with the help of teachers.  Here is the
first lesson of the first reader: Can you read?

Can you write?

Can you read and write?

I can read.

I can write.

I can read and write.

A later lesson obviously supports the institutions of the day: I shall
pay my taxes.

I pay a tax on my home.

I pay a tax on my land.

I pay a tax on my cattle.

I pay a tax on my money.

I pay a tax on many other things.

Where does all this money go?

It goes to keep up the schools.

It goes to keep up the roads.

It goes to keep down crime.

It goes to keep down disease.

I am glad that I have a home to pay taxes on.

The rural poor of eastern Kentucky in Cora Stewart's time were surely
as impoverished as the tenant farmers that Agee knew in Alabama, the
important difference being that the mountaineers owned their own acres
of clay and were proud-sometimes fiercely so-of their independence.

But given the enormous disparity between them and the well-to-do in the
towns and in the cities of Lexington and Louisville, the lesson
encouraging them to pay their taxes, whether or not they had sufficient
food or clothes for their children, would, I think, have aroused Agee's
contempt, even as the pitifully small vocabulary they were gaining
would, in his opinion, only have made them more susceptible to the lies
and distortions that already had eroded the potentiality that had been
theirs at birth.

No doubt Cora Stewart, who was as patriotic as she was religious, had a
naive view of what her schools could accomplish for her pupils and
hence for America.  In a 1917 speech quoted by the Charlotte, North
Carolina, Observer, she said that the newly literate adults would
become "a new and powerful force promoting schools, building up trade,
and swelling the avenues of religious, civic, and commercial
enterprise."  And she argues in Moonlight Schools that complete
literacy in America would erase the ignorance that permits an opening
for Bolshevism and other revolutionary movements antithetical to our
heritage.

Whatever the inner tensions and anxieties that may have contributed to
the back problems that continued to bother her after an operation at
the Mayo Clinic, she had none of Agee's self-doubts, guilts, or worries
about our national moral failings.  In the second year of her Rowan
County crusade, the Louisville Courier-journal reported that she "would
appear at one school at the opening to encourage the teachers and spur
the students on.  Then she would mount her horse and ride over the
mountains to reach another school in time to say goodnight and tell the
people how splendid they were and how certain they were to win their
battle for knowledge.

Still, the Moonlight Schools were successful in what they set out to
do, not only because of Mrs. Stewart's energies, but because those
schools so clearly were a response .  to a .  desire within the people
they served.  Here was no institution forced upon a populace, but one
whose teachers received no pay and whose students came of their own
will.  Lessons on the betterment of their communities might include the
necessity of paying taxes in order to achieve better roads and schools
and to lower the crime rate, but such lessons seem to have been part of
what the students wanted to hear.  I have come across no indication
that the adults were anything but gratified by their studies,
especially by their ability to write their own names and then to read
their Bibles and newspapers, however haltingly they might at first do
so; and to compose simply worded letters to those family members who,
in numbers that were to increase with the burgeoning rate of literacy,
had left for greater opportunities in more prosperous regions of the
country.

Cora Wilson Stewart's mission, thwarted by the growing Great Depression
and changing social attitudes, was finally taken from her hands by
professional educators with less evangelical and more circumscribed
proposals of their own.  Toward the end of her life, the woman who had
wanted to save millions from the blindness of their illiteracy became
blind herself, a victim of glaucoma; but in her failing years she was
nurtured-so Nelms says, relying on the testimony of one of Mrs.
Stewart's relatives-by her memories of her successes as a crusader
against illiteracy.

Her most sustaining memory must have been of her initial crusade in
Rowan County, for it came far closer to achieving its goal than did any
other in which she participated.  On one of my recent visits to that
county, I ran into a former student of mine who now is employed in the
present literacy program; she told me that twenty-five percent, an
estimate that might be conservative, of the rural residents are
presently illiterate, and that teachers have difficulty first in
contacting them and then in persuading them of the worth of overcoming
the handicap.  The Japanese car plant that has come to the Lexington
area constitutes the single incentive she knows of, since a prospective
employee must be able to read instructions before he or she will be
considered for a job.

But in 1913, at the conclusion of the third and final year of the
campaign she led, Mrs. Stewart could find through patient canvass only
twenty-three in the county who couldn't read and write.  Seventeen of
these, she reports in Moonlight Schools, were incapable of learning
because of physical or mental disabilities.  Of the remaining six, two
had just moved into the county and the other four-the extent of her
failure-simply "could not be induced to learn."

I A COUNTRY DOCTOR: IN PURSUIT OF HER SECRET Though W. D. ("Snooks")
Crutcher, proprietor and editor of the Rowan County News for many
years, gave scant reference to such a major event as the Rowan County
War in an issue devoted to the region's history, he was never one to
let brevity or the objectivity claimed for his profession stand in the
way of his local enthusiasms.  (His boosterism was to make him an
invaluable ally of Dr. Louise in her attempt to bring a hospital to
Morehead.) The celebratory issue of May 10, 1956, gives more space to
one family than any other -a half-page of pictures and words under the
headline, "History of Caudill Family Runs Parallel to Founding and
Development of County."  The story's lead consists of three paragraphs,
each of them insisting on the same point to such a degree that any one
of them would have sufficed for a more temperate editor: No name in the
annals of Rowan County history has come more to symbolize progress,
community interest and outstanding citizenship than the name of
Caudill.

The Caudill family history has run almost parallel to Rowan County
history.  In every major enterprise since shortly after the county was
founded the Caudill family name has been represented, whether it be
business, civic, religious or educational.

So closely interwoven with Rowan County is the name Caudill that the
two are inseparable; members of the Caudill family have been and are
now leaders in the events which have marked Rowan County history.

"Caudill" is the name of so many families in eastern Kentucky that the
telephone directory of almost any town contains a block of them.  (The
folklorist at Cornell who interviewed me in connection with my
application for a job told me that the name, occasionally i spelled
46

Caudle, " is an erosion or elision of the Scotch "Caldwell, " though
Louise doesn't believe that this is the case: at least not for her
particular family.) The house that jean and I bought in Morehead was
located on a lane called Caudill Court, and our property adjoined that
of Cornelius P. Caudill, who then was president of the bank that issued
us the mortgage.  I supposed that the doctor to whom we took our young
son for treatment was a distant relation of that banker, but only in
the way that most Smiths or Johnsons are somehow related, which isn't
much different from the biological relationships that could be shown to
relate most of us, if the lineages could only be traced far enough
back.  While living in Morehead, I made no connection between the
doctor with rooms above the ewelry store and my neighbor who ran a bank
or others belonging to the most prominent family in the county.

During the years that Louise was physician to our children, both she
and Susie lived with her parents in a house on Wilson Avenue (named for
an earlier doctor who lived on it, Jeremiah Wilson, Cora Stewart's
father), a fact I connected with her probable heed to conserve funds.

Knowliig nothing about her parents, I thought of her as a woman with
few financial resources, who had probably gone into debt to gain a
medical education so that she might serve the truly impoverished.  I
knew she gained little recompense from her rural practice.

Her reputation among the specialists in Lexington was for the modesty
of her fees as well as the accuracy of her diagnoses.  The Lexington
obstetrician to whom Louise sent jean-for we decided that, however much
we trusted her, we wanted the birth in a hospital-let me know only
minutes after Cris was born that he wanted more than a sack of potatoes
for the successful delivery.

(Thinking he was joking, I smiled, but he didn't smile back.) My
pleasure many years later when I learned that Louise had managed to get
a small clinic, one with a birthing room, came from my misconception
that such a facility would probably have been beyond her means.

In short, I connected Louise with an ideal of poverty, one that, like
St. Francis's, I could admire from a distance, since I had no desire
to Join the brotherhood myself And so, when jean and I made our first
visit back to Morehead, I was as disconcerted by the house in which she
and Susie now lived as by any of the other alterations that had come to
the community.  While far from ostentatious, it had certain amenities,
such as a large enclosed swimming pool, the room containing it opening
on a terrace above a tennis court.  A rambling Florida-style bungalow,
it had large living spaces; and was set on a little hill in a park-like
area of similar homes built in what had been woods and overgrown
farmland during the years my family had lived in Morehead.  (The area
carried an odd sanctity in my memory.  Taking a walk through those
fields and woods on one of our final Sundays in town, jean and I and
our young children came upon a dilapidated barn where a man and his son
were dehorning a tightly tethered calf.  Until the son staunched the
flow with grease, twin fountains of blood rose high from the wounds,
one of them falling back on the calf's skull, matting the fur and
dripping toward its old eyes.  This image will always remain with me,
not mi only because the actual sight was shocking, but because it
returned me to the basement Sunday schools of my childhood, with their
pictures and lessons of a forgiving Christ on the Cross: to a
Christianity I thought I had left behind.

I found it disturbing, like an act of desecration, that the houses of
suburbia had replaced those dark woods and sunny fields become friendly
through neglect, that leaning and weatherbeaten old barn.) On the night
jean and I knocked at Louise's door, we thought we'd come to the wrong
house and were prepared for the occupant to direct us elsewhere, simply
because of the Cadillac parked in the driveway.

To return to a town after thirty years is to perceive some of the
misconceptions that once had served to excuse or to glorify the nature
of others.  Whatever the specific images that we can recall, the
personality of another is remembered as a kind of emotional
atmosphere, some  marvelously rich fragrance.  s imes as a "Louise,"
the current president of Morehead State University, C. Nelson Grote, is
quoted as saying in a recent Loulseville Courier-journal article about
the achievements she has made in her seventy-five years, "can make you
feel good just by transposing [to you] her own optimism and
attitude.

just going to see her is kind of a renewal."  His words are as valid as
any verbal description can be for the feeling I had for her when, after
years of absence, she returned to me in a dream.  They help to account
for the sense I had, as Louise invited jean and me into her house on
that night, of returning to a town and a home that always had been
ours, whatever my sense of being a stranger while actually living
there.  That is, my memory of her nature was accurate, even though my
assumptions about her background were wrong.

Since Louise is a member of that influential family whose name is "so
closely interwoven with Rowan County .  . . that the two are
inseparable" (indeed, the now-deceased banker who issued us our
mortgage was her "Uncle 'Nellus"), I give here much of the rest of the
Rowan County News story-which makes no reference to her-for its
information about her paternal antecedents, particularly about her
grandfather Abel: Samuel Caudill, grandfather of many of the presentday
generation of Caudills in Rowan County, was born in Wise County, Va.

in 1804.  His wife, Sarah Maggard Caudill was born there in 1809.

The Samuel Caudill family moved to Troublesome Creek in Letcher County
and then to Rowan County shortly after the Civil War.

Abel Caudill, their son, was a member of the Confederate Army during
the Civil War.  He had been born Feb.  4, 1843, in Letcher County.

Abel was married to Mary Ann Hall, on Nov.  15, 1866.  They were the
parents of 15 children: Robert T. and John Caudill (twins); Amanda
Susan Caudill; Samuel M. and Sarah W. Caudill (twins); Emma Caudill;
Lydia J. Caudill; George W. Caudill; William C. Caudill; Daniel B.

Caudill; Joseph E. Caudill; David C. Caudill; Cornelius P. Caudill;
Hannah M. Caudill and Watson H. Caudill.

Abel Caudill spent his entire married life in Rowan County.  He raised
his family on a farm at Wagoner, where he also successfully owned and
operated a general store and was postmaster.  He raised, bought and
sold livestock, owned and operated a grist mill, flour mill and 'II and
was one of the leaders in Rowan County's saw mi commercial life.

Abel Caudill founded the Peoples Bank of Morehead in 1906 and began its
operation on Jan.  1, 1907.  Another of his business enterprises was
the Caudill-Blair Grocery Company which he organized in 1910 and which
was operated until 1932.

Caudill Cemetery, at the west corporation limits of Morehead, was laid
out by Abel Caudill after he moved in 1910 to Clearfield.  It was
originally intended for a family cemetery, and a family lot for each of
his children was provided by him.

He left the farm at Clearfield and moved to Morehead n his declining
years, and lived here until his death on July 1, 1925.

A story elsewhere in that issue summarizes the history of the Peoples
Bank, and says that in founding it with others, including all of his
sons, Abel
envisioned that Morehead would grow and prosper"-a faith that also led
him, as I learned from local residents, to accumulate the real estate
that would eventually bring much of his personal prosperity.  The
financial acumen of Abel and his sons became a major benefit to the
community as a whole, especially during the depression years; the
article about the Peoples Bank says of the bleak period in which "many
banks had to close their doors," that theirs "not only remained one of
the soundest banks in Kentucky, but showed increases in resources in
the leanest years the nation has ever seen."

When she learned that I was thinking of writing a book that would place
her within the context of her native county and its history, Louise
took jean and me almost at once to that cemetery laid out by her
randfather Abel, as if it had to be central to whatever I pos@bly could
have inagined.  We wandered about those tombstones, reading the names of
her ancestors, Abel's as well as that of his wife, born Mary Ann Hall,
and those of their numerous offspring, including Louise's father, named
, like D. B. Logan and so many others in the region, for Daniel
Boone.

Daniel's grave, of course, was next to that of Louise's mother, Etta,
related through the Proctor family to the Tollivers.  Louise told us
the story (we were to hear it again, from others in town) of the
marriage of the twin brothers, Robert and John, both redheads, to
another pair of redheaded twins from Morgan County, Calah and Mahalah
Wells.  Six children were born to these two sets of twins, and thou h
there were no twins among them, they resembled each other.  What a
confusion of identities these two families made for others (and perhaps
sometimes themselves), when they came together at social gatherings!

The lives of the other twins born to Abel and Mary Ann, Louise's aunt
Sarah and her uncle Sam, were destined to be almost identical in
duration: driving to Sam's funeral, Sarah, along with her daughter
Pearl, was killed in an automobile accident in Loulsburg.

Louise likes the view from the grassy hilltop that Abel picked out for
the family cemetery; from here one can not only look down on a bit of
the town but across to the range of forested hills on the opposite side
of the Triplett Creek valley, and to the gap in that range through
which the road to neighboring Clearfield has been built.  We lingered
at the cemetery for maybe half an hour, not saying much, watching the
sunset color the sky and the way the hills seemed to draw farther back,
giving them an illusion of greater size, as evening came on.  I
remembered, from my years in town, how I had watched the hills move
back like that, not only on summer evenings, when mists rose from them,
but in fall, when the hardwoods lost their leaves.

Though she doesn't talk about the achievements of her family unless she
is asked to, Louise takes pride in her grandfather Abel's ability to
rise above his humble beginnings, something so many rural Rowan
Countians have been unable to do, whatever the efforts of Cora Stewart
and later teachers on their behalf.  (Morehead State University has
instituted a graduate program in social services largely because of
the pressing need for trained people to process welfare applications.)
When Jean asked Louise how she could account for those achievements of
Abel and his descendants that separated them from so many others in the
county, Louise said, "I reckon it's the genes, " an answer that
credited her buttons (if she were thinking of them at all) own contri
less to herself than the family from which she had come.  It was an
answer, though, that would have infuriated Cora Stewart and James Agee
alike.  But Louise is as forthright a person as I have ever met.  As a
native of eastern Kentucky, she carries beneath her tolerant,
unassuming, and ironically humorous outlook both a strong sense of
personal independence (neither social attitudes nor the ire of the
American Medical Association and its Kentucky affiliate can keep her
from saying or doing whatever she feels to be right) and a loyalty to
maternal as well as paternal ancestors that makes her declare of my
interpretation of Craig Tolliver that there's probably another side to
that particular story.

One long-time friend of hers believes that she has given herself so
unselfishly to others at least partly from her knowledge of just how
fortunate she and her family i have been.  Though the Peoples Bank of
Morehead has passed from Caudill hands (the friend thinks it a shame
that it didn't remain with the founding family: "Something's missing,
the bank's simply not the same any"), Louise became president of the
bank in Sandy more Hook, a much smaller town in the region, upon the
death of her brother Boone.  His widow, Jane, and their son, B.

Proctor, are the officers in charge of its daily operations.  (B.

Proctor, known as "Proc," was a firstgrade playmate of our son, Larry,
but, of course, then I was unaware of the family source of his name.)
Louise doesn't heat her swimming pool in winter, the cost striking her
as exorbitant.  Nevertheless, both the pool and tennis court enable her
for much of the year to engage in physical activities she enjoys (she
still would play tennis every day, if weather and patients
permitted).

Both facilities are connected to her first profession-for seven years,
she was the women's physical education teacher at the college and
instructed students both in swimming and in tennis.

The house itself constitutes the only bit of duplicity I've discovered
in her life.  Knowing that good doctors for the new hospital under
construction might be hard to attract, given the smallness of the town,
she built @ it, she says, a mischievous glint in her eyes, to let them
know the handsome fees and good life they could have if they came to
Morehead."  Her next-door neighbors, judge Elijah M. ("Lige") Hogge and
his wife, Norma, are two of her closest acquaintances.  (Lige's
paternal grandfather was Sheriff Hogg; through his mother's family, he
is related to D. B. Logan as well.) Both Lige and Norma think Louise
built the house where she did so that she and Susie would be able, in
any late-night emergency, to care for the Hogges' two children, both
afflicted with the same and finally fatal illness; but that a major
reason for the kind of house that she put there was just as she had
said, to put on a good show for all prospective surgeons and other
specialists.  Dr. Herbert Hudnut, a specialist in internal medicine
who now practices in Glens Falls, New York, was the first director of
the St. Claire Medical Center.  He and his wife recall their pleasure
at being wined and dined at Louise's new house, where they were offered
a dip in the pool, and for the warmth of the hospitality shown them not
only by Louise and Susie but by many others, such as Lige and Norma,
who wanted the hospital to succeed.  (Louise wasn't the only one of
that group to have friends at the state capitol in Frankfort, and so
Dr. Hudnut doesn't know for sure who persuaded the governor to give
him the honorary title of Kentucky Colonel.) Maybe Louise's first
Cadillac was for the same, now long since successfully accomplished,
cause; but the one jean and I saw in the driveway on our first visit
was not there on our second.  In her seventy-sixth year, Louise had
tired of Cadillacs, turning her latest one in for a Mercedes "just for
the fun of seeing how it would go."

2

In Morehead, as in any small town, the various churches are central to
social life, and I suppose one reason I remained a stranger there for
six years was that I did not joi in, or even attend, any of them.  In
1956, as I was already preparing to leave the region, I gave no more
attention to the article about the Christian church of Morehead in that
fat issue of the Rowan County News commemorating the county's centenary
year than I did to the article connecting that church to the beginnings
of the college.  The article about the Christian church calls Inez
Faith Humphrey, one of the two members of my department whose methods
and courses I had helped to displace, "a real spiritual leader" of it,
and says that the other, Gabriel Banks, frequently served as an interim
Pastor.

Miss Humphrey retired a year or two after my arrival, and I knew little
about her other than that she must have had a more than ordinary
influence upon the past generations, for each fall the entering class
contained a number of young women who either had been named by their
parents for her, or whose mothers had been so named by their parents.

I came to know Gabriel Banks better, for he was my colleague throughout
my stay.  He was a quiet and kindly person who never showed any
resentment toward the usurpers, not even when the antique rolltop desk
that seemed part of his personality was carted from his longtime office
to the basement space he was required to share with me and others as
proof that all the members of the department were comrades.

Toward the end of his career in the ministry, Gabriel had served as a
missionary in India.  He lent me, for a dissertation I was writing on
the English novelist E. M. Forster, some books on Hinduism.  Maybe in
the metaphysics of that religion, he said with a smile, I would see the
reason he had been unsuccessful in converting the heathens to
Christianity.  The strength of Hinduism, so far as he could tell from
his own experiences, came from its amoeba-like ability to surround
and digest whatever it came across.  A wealthy Brahman, for example,
had invited him to dinner, listened imperturbably to his message, and
then, without any alteration in his own spiritual views, had written
him a large check to be used to buy Bibles for other Hindus.

ked Gabriel for telling me that story, and I wondered if he had left
the ministry for college teaching as a consequence of that and similar
bafflements in India.  Among the books he lent me were a pair of thick
volumes, George Foot Moore's History of Religions, which, in their
account of Buddhism as well as Hinduism, were to influence me almost as
much as did my reading of Forster's A Passage to India.  They no doubt
also contributed to that frightening sense of the illusionary nature of
phenomenal reality of my older years against which, as I have said, my
dreaming mind seemed to have relived the moment in which Dr. Louise,
whatever the trembling of her hand, had so perfectly aligned my young
son's badly torn lip that no trace of the wound remains.

Obviously, Gabriel, that occasional Christian church pastor, was a
tolerant man; and one of Louise's continuing virtues is her willingness
to acknowledge that another's truth may be as viable as her own.

(Certainly her lack of religious bigotry helped to overcome that of
others who were opposed to the establishment of a Catholic hospital in
a region that continued to emphasize revivalism and a literal reading
of the Gospels.) Still, when I erred in one of our discussions by
referring to her Methodist upbringing, she corrected me at once; her
membership in the Christian church is to her an important fact in her
biography.

According to the article in the Rowan County News, the Morehead
Christian church "Is committed to the historic principles of the
Disciples of Christ," and so: The purpose of this church shall be as
revealed in the New Testament to win people to faith in Jesus Christ
and commit them actively to the church, to help them grow in the grace
and knowledge of Christ that increasingly they may know and do His
will, and to work for the unity of all Christians and with them engage
in the common task of building the Kingdom of God, tenets that suggest
its ecumenical nature.  Gabriel Banks was fulfilling the Christian
church's missionary demands in going to India.  His lack of success
perhaps can be attributed to its lack of doctrinal rigidity and his own
liberalism, as well as to another religion that, in acknowledging that
each of the triad of deities it worships is ultimately an illusion
whereby the adept attempts to approach the Unknown (or so I remember
from my reading of George Foot Moore three and a half decades ago)
cheerfully accepts Christ into its pantheon.  Gabriel's predecessors in
the faith, Frank Button and Cora Wilson Stewart, dedicated themselves
to Christianity with greater personal rigor, the -accomplishments
intimately connected with a demi , of spiritual belief that admitted no
obstacle.

In renewing my acquaintanceship with Louise, my primary desire was to
uncover, like a detective of the soul, her spiritual basis.  It seemed
to me from the beginning (and it still does) that Christianity, which
in one Protestant form or another has had such a deep influence upon
the region, had been of fundamental importance to her; but when at our
first real interview I tried to explore her beliefs I found myself up
against a normally outspoken person who suddenly had become as elusive
as Dr. Godbole, the Brahman in Forster's novel.  (Well, I could
understand the difficulties; as a high school graduate being
interviewed for a college fellowship by a quartet of professors, I
could only say, "I like Christ's example, things like human brotherhood
and the Golden Rule, but I don't believe in miracles" when I was
bluntly asked to reveal my philosophy of life, and today probably can't
do much better.) As a member of a later generation than Cora Stewart's,
Louise attended Morehead Normal only through the third grade,
transferring then to the public school system; and so she was not
generally subjected to a religious atmosphere in her studies beyond the
degree found in public education of the day.  (Rowan County's first
high school was established in 1921, with five ninth-grade students
constituting its enrollment.  By 1924, it was a three-year high school,
with only four of his sixteen pupils for the three grades; students over so
attended the normal school.  The first class to complete four years at
the high school was graduated in 1927.  Louise was valedictorian of the
class of 1930, which had nine graduating members.) As she made
apparent, nothing of the missionary or crusading spirit attaches to
Louise, whatever her service to the rural poor or the effort she put
into the campaign to bring a hospital to the region; nor was she drawn
to medicine out of any view that such work was "in harmony with God."

She ultimately became a doctor because from an early age that was what
she wanted to be, and the fulfillment she has found in her profession
has nothing to do with religious convictions.  In a 1979 newspaper
article about an honor she had just received -a Woman of Achievement
award bestowed by the Kentucky Federation of Business and Professional
Women-she is quoted as saying that what she likes best about her work
is simply the chance it gives her for talking to others," a view
substantiated by some of her patients I talked to.  In
trying to exlain the reason everybody in her family was "'just crazy about
Louise," one woman told me, "She'll look in your two eyes and talk to
you and maybe light a cigarette, though I don't know if she does that
now."

(Actually, she doesn't, but Louise was maybe seventy before she
conquered that addiction.) To amplify what she meant by that, this
woman said that "Louise is never in a rush, you see, and never has
been," which sometimes means, she uise gets added ruefully, that Lo '
far behind 'n her appointments, much like all the doctors in town.

What sets her apart from the others is that Louise "really wants to
know all about the family.

Some residents may see a new Cora @,wart in Louise, but she clearly
doesn't.  Her mot w that famous lady "quite well," and as a child se
frequently "would hear that name" at home and in school.

But Louise never considered the other woman as a role model, even
though once, following a high school speech she had given as part of a
debate, somebody came up to her and whispered, "Another Cora Wilson
Stewart!"  The remark startled her because she was in such a panic that
she couldn't remember afterward if she had been "saying her speech or
not, " but guessed she had said it, since she found herself back in her
seat.

Louise admits that she does not have Cora Stewart's oratorical
abilities, and (except for the auditor at her school debate) I've heard
of nobody who disagrees with the assessment.

She'll give a talk whenever she's asked to, particularly if the subject
strikes her as important; but as one member of the community remarked,
she just says what's on her mind without any attempt to organize the
material into a persuasive argument.

("When you say something you believe is right, I guess you don't think
you need to be persuasive," Louise told me in reference to a long-ago
speech to the Kentucky Medical Association that she said she had
botched.  It concerned certain proposals for the new Morehead hospital
that the association considered socialistic and hence professionally
unethical.) Actually, the whole question of role modelswhether she had
one, or is one to younger womenbores her.  Only two women were in her
medical school class, and she was the first woman to practice medicine
in Rowan County, but such statistics carry no apparent meaning for
her.

judge Hogge says that, as the first woman doctor, she "surely had a
little mountain to climb," but Louise doesn t see it that way.  She
simply set out to do what she wanted to and found it fun.

What she shares with Cora Stewart (other than an optimistic nature) is
the same church and an interest in education that, despite the demands
of her practice, led her to serve two terms, from 1972 until 1980, on
the Kentucky Council of Higher Education as well as to head a
fund-raising drive for Morehead State University.  For years a deacon
in her church, she is now one of its trustees-natural enough positions
for her, since it was the church of her parents and the one she has
attended all her life.  Beyond that, the Christian church's intimate
connections with the county's past are important to her.

(According to the Rowan County News story, the present church structure
stands on the site of the Union Church Building used by all of the
denomi'ons in town during the chaotic years of the Rowan County War;
Frank Button, the first Christian church minister in town, of course
preached from its pulpit.) Louise's attachment to her church has much
to do with the part played by the local congregation and its national
organization in preparing the way for higher education in the region,
and for the fact that through the years many more members of the
congregation than lnez Faith Humphrey and Gabriel Banks have been
affiliated with the college that developed into a university.  For
example, Warren Lappin, the long-standing college dean who made a
majority of the curricular and staffing decisions during my tenure, not
only had been the mathematics and history teacher at the normal school,
but his father, like Frank Button before him, had served both as
president of the normal school and Christian church pastor.

Information of this sort may reveal something about Louise's public
nature and her social attachments, but it doesn't help very much as
insight into what I was after.  To discover the spiritual essence of
another-what an impossible task, when our own continues to elude
us!

Louise might drive a Mercedes and own a house with an indoor swimming
pool and have had a hard time overcoming a nicotine habit while
continuing to hold onto some suspect concepts about the genes of her
Caudill ancestors, but clearly something radiated from that
independent-minded little seventy-five-year-old doctor that was felt by
almost everybody who came into her presence.

One evening, I called her up, as I occasionally did to clarify some
aspect of her biography; I wanted to know on this occasion more about
her work in education, particularly what she had done as a member of
the Kentucky Council on Higher Education.  We agreed with each other
that anybody can waste a lot of time on counsels and committees,
making proposals that nobody pays much attention to-the group being
appointed in the first place so that somebody in higher authority can
claim he (for such authority is usually male) knows about the problem
and is doing all that he 'bly do to solve it.

Anyway, Louise said, you can't possibly talk about the problems of higher
education as if they existed in isolation from everything else; if
she had managed anything in her eight years on the Higher Education
Council, it was to get the members to think of other things-the
problems of the first grade, for example.  The problems begin even
farther back than that, of course; all anybody can do is try to get to
the beginning of them, and then do one little thing after another in
the attempt to solve them.  To work in such a manner might not seem
like much, but she figured it was likely to do more good than anything
that any recent politician in Washington had accomplished for the
nation.  I agreed, adding that to work in such a fashion, while
refusing to admit defeat, 'just possibly might remedy some of the
mistakes they make in Washington.

Our conversation paused.  Then Louise said hesitantly, "Jim?"

"What?"  I asked.

"Listen," she began, "I know you promised to write a book about the
county that would say something about me, but if for any reason you
don't want to, if you don't find it brings you whatever it is you want
The sentence didn't need finishing; Louise was responding to some note
of despair or frustration in my voice and wanted me to know I could
wiggle off the hook of any vow I might have made without lessening our
friendship.

"But I want to write this book, Louise.  Do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because it's fun.  It's fun to think about, it's fun to do."  Not
until I used that word the third time did I remember how frequently she
used it herself, as an explanation for her actions; but it was as true
for me on this project as apparently it was for her in almost anything
she chose to do.  just listening to that voice with its humorous and
half-ironic accents its gentle Ken made me realize once again how much
I enjoyed its sound, and everything I had come to associate with it.

"Well, that's all right, then."

"Yes," I said.

"Good-bye.

4 4

Good-bye, Louise.

just as I was about to hang up, she said, again, "Jim?"

"Yes?"

"What I said about starting at the beginning, and then doing one little
thing after another "Yes, Louise?"

"Well, it's about as much as I can tell you."

"About yourself?"  But that didn't need an answer: it was obvious that
Louise knew what had been bothering me and was trying to tell me the
answer as best she could.

"You just do it, that's all.  The little things you do are mainly
underneath.  Sometimes it's just a kind of talking.  If it's a help,
especially to the little kids, it makes you a better person."

"That's the fun, I suppose."

"I reckon there's more than one kind of fun, but maybe that's the best
kind."

And maybe the more abstruse the question, the simpler any conceivable
answer has to be.  After we hung up, I sat by the telephone, thinking
that she hadn't said that the little things, mainly underneath, which
we do to help others make us fiel we are better persons, a construction
most of us would accept.  She had said they actually make us better
persons, as of such small actions are as tangible as a communion
wafer that the body digests, and that henceforth is held to be part of
our very nature.

Augustine, that fourth-century saint who knew of the importance of
habit and past actions to personality and who also knew that the good
act gives us happiness, would have agreed with Louise, however much he
would disparage (stern figure that he was) all other kinds of fun.

At some level, all of us are unknowable, and I realized that such an
answer was as adequate as any I could find.  Still, in the following
days and weeks I mulled it over, making connections between it and
Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as well as Joseph Campbell's The
Power of Myth, a recently published book that had brought Louise to
mind.  I had bought the book after hearing a rerun of Bill Meyers's
televised series of interviews with Campbell-the interviews that
resulted in the book.

The potentiality that Agee finds in each of us at birth, frustrated
crippled or s into rage and violence as it may be by society and its
institutions, is linked to his view of the nature of God: to a
principle of good that unifies and sanctifies everything within our
universe.  That is to say (if my understanding of Agee is correct), we
are born with the knowledge of that principle, and were we only
permitted to let it develop within us, we would have fulfilling
lives.

Louise, I thought, had managed better than I or the majority of us to
withstand the societal pressures and hence to respond to her innate
potential; the pleasure-the fun-it gave her to do so provided the
radiance that others responded to, enabling them in turn to recapture
something they had misplaced or lost.

To my mind, her example lent the particular kind of credence that
Campbell's nowfamous personal exhortation to "follow your bliss" seems
to need.  Her example demonstrates the connection between bliss and
goodness in each of us, and shows the reason that, as Campbell says,
"If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track has been
there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be
living is the one you are living.

When you begin to see that, you begin to meet people who are in the
field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.  I say, follow
your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will mill open where you didn't
know they were going to be.

So far as I could tell, Louise's own struggle came only in the
beginning, when she was afraid and unsure of her ability to do what she
most wanted to do; and even here she was helped by another, a new
friend who was to become her lifelong assistant and companion, Susan
Halbleib.

But exactly how was it that a woman like this could bring a major
hospital, with its sophisticated and expensive array of modern
diagnostic tools and its large staff of competent professionals, to a
small town in the Kentucky hills?  Having summarized my findings as a
detective of the intangible, I will tell the rest of Louise's story as
concretely and objectively as I can, so that it can stand as part of a
historical record that includes the Rowan County War and the
achievements of Cora Wilson Stewart.  The drama is ultimately that of
the community itself.

THE COMING OF ST.  CLAIRE TO MOREHEAD Claire Louise Caudill was born
August 19, 1912.  Her mother, Etta, was, Louise says, "little," and her
father, Daniel, "big."  (By "big" she apparently doesn't mean "stout,"
but rather that he had a tall and imposing presence.  In group
photographs I have seenfor example, one with family members, another
with a civic group of which he was a member-he stands near the back,
but the viewer's attention is drawn to him.) According to the family
story, Daniel was infatuated with the beauty of Etta, as demure as she
was diminutive, and persisted in the courtship despite her denials and
hesitancies.  The marriage turned out to be a good one; Louise
remembers a stable and affectionate family environment.  She was the
second to be born; "there were two boys, two girls, and one [Louise
herself] tomboy."  Upon the marriage of his children, Abel Caudill,
Daniel's father, normally gave them five hundred dollars; but Daniel
and one of his brothers, William, persuaded Abel to let them have the
money before marriage, to help them through college.  Both sons
studied law at Valparalso University, in northwestern Indiana; Daniel
became the first practicing attorney in Morehead to have a law
degree.

In addition to his major responsibilities, which included a long term as
president of the family bank, Daniel for many years was an
officer and principal stockholder of the smaller bank in Sandy Hook,
and at the time of his death at eighty-seven remained its president-the
position now held by Louise.  Twice elected as circuit judge of Rowan
and neighboring counties, he also served terms as city and county
attorney and was a regent of Morehead State Teachers College.  He was
the son to achieve a statewide professional renown while still managing
to emulate the material achievements of his father.  According to the
article in the local newspaper reporting his death, Daniel ttwas one of
Morehead's largest land owners," his properties including "valuable
land under lease near Morehead State University.  Through the years Mr.
Caudill rarely sold a piece of property once he gained fee simple
title.

Boone was the son who followed him in both law and banking careers; the
other son, Milton, became a dentist in Frankfort and now lives in
Monticello, a small town near Cumberland Lake in the southern part of
the state.  An elderly woman who had lived next door to Dan and Etta's
first home on Main Street, told me that on the night of Boone's birth
she was awakened by Etta's screaming"the most terrible sound I ever
heard"-for Boone was born without an arm.  He is the only one of the
five children not still living.

If the sons were encouraged by their parents to enter suitable
professions, the three daughters, chiefly under the tutelage of their
mother, were expected to be "ladies," that is, young women with tact
and grooming who would find husbands who came from respectable families
and had decent prospects.

Lucille, the oldest of the children, and Patricia, the youngest, both
became ladies in Louise's view; Patricia, who is divorced, now lives in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Lucille is married to a Lexington horse
breeder.  "Now isn't she a real lady?"  Louise said admiringly to me,
upon showing me a picture of her smartly dressed older sister.

Daniel seems to have been an indulgent father, sending his children to
private schools of their choice (Louise says she was the only one not
to go to a "fancy" school unless that word applied to Breckiiiridge, a
grade school once connected to the college, which she briefly attended
before returning to the Morehead public school system).  He also paid
their way through college.  The five hundred dollars Abel had given
Daniel was the only support he received while studying law, which meant
he'd had to find odd jobs and live frugally as a student; he didn't
want his children to face similar hardships.  (Lucille was the one to
test his indulgence through an apparent frivolity toward her studies
that sent her from college to college: she attended eleven schools
before she got her degree.  Her example made Daniel tell Louise she'd
have to stay put in whatever school she entered as a freshman, if she
expected family assistance to continue.) Louise may always have dreamed
of becoming a doctor, but she feels that she easily might not have
become one, for her mother, determined as always that her daughters not
only grow up to become ladies, but never to give their attention to
anything other than "lady things," considered medicine a highly
inappropriate field for a woman.  As a girl, Louise was forbidden to
ride a bicycle.  In high school, she enjoyed physical ri activity and,
despite her small stature, was a good basketball player, but her mother
forebade her to play on the girls' basketball team.  (She was on the
debating team, and that, to her mother, was the extent to which a girl
should engage in competitive activities with other children.) Louise
was a spectator during a basketball game that the Morehead High School
girls' team was losing, and the coach said that she simply had to play,
if Morehead were to win; and so Louise disobeyed her mother by putting
on her uniform and playing in the second half "Did your side win?"  I
asked her, when she told me this story.

"I don't remember which side won," she said.  "All I remember afterward
was that I went against Mama's orders."  While jean and I were staying
with Louise and Susie during one of our visits to Morehead, they had a
dinner party for us.

The other guests were their neighbors judge Elijah Hogge and his wife,
Norma; and Bob Bishop.  jean and I had known him in the nineteen
fifties as the owner of the drugstore in town where we purchased not
only the Sunday New York Times (on the following Tuesday) but
brand-name antibiotics for our cocker spaniel.  Bob would sell them to
us for less than half the price, so long as we promised to take none of
the pills ourselves.  Like Lige, Bob is a lifelong resident of
Morehead, but his friendship with Louise predates Lige's.

Except for a sewing class he couldn't bring himself to take, Bob was
never separated from Louise in studies from the first grade through
high school.  In the evenings, they did their homework together.  As
members of the high school debating team, they practiced their speeches
before each other and went by bus and train for debates elsewhere in
eastern Kentucky.  Bob was salutatorian of the graduating class of
which Louise was valedictorian.  It was to Bob that Louise spoke of her
earliest desires of becoming a doctor; he, on the other hand, told her
he wanted to become a pharmacist who would fill the prescriptions she
and the other local doctors ordered for their patients.  But during
Bob's senior year in high school, his father, proprietor of a drugstore
since 1896, died; Bob and his sister Roberta had to take over the
family business before he could study pharmacy.

Roberta was the one who eventually became a pharmacist; Bob ran the
business with a hired pharmacist while Roberta was studying for her
license.

Upon her graduation, Louise took a job at her father's bank, just to
see if the banking profession might be to her liking.  "If I'd stayed,
I believe I could have made a bundle in that line of work," Louise told
me.  "Daddy set me to sorting checks, things like that.  I lasted four
days before I got so bored I just had to quit."

But she was determined on a career, not on the marriage that her mother
had in mind.  If Louise were going to be a spinster, Etta thought that
teaching was the only suitable occupation.  With that goal in mind,
Louise (after a semester at the local institution, which apparently her
father didn't count in his injunction to her to stay put in whatever
undergraduate school she entered) went off to college-to Ohio State,
where she majored in physical education, a field that Daniel convinced
a reluctant Etta was appropriate enough for one of Louise's aptitudes
and interests.  Upon her graduation in 1934, she returned to Morehead
as the women's physical education teacher at the college while
continuing to live at home.  In summers, she attended Columbia
University, securing, in 1936, the master's degree in education
she would need if she were to devote her life to teaching.

Louise remained a teacher at the college until 1943.

"Daddy," Louise said, "saw at last I really wanted to be a doctor.

He said, 'You can be anything you want to be,' and of course Momma
always agreed to everything that he agreed to."  And so she gave up
teaching to enter the University of Louisville Medical School.

The only other woman in her class is now a psychiatrist in Manhattan;
Louise, loyal to her home community, never wanted to practice anywhere
but in Rowan County, which, as a region without much wealth, had never
attracted enough physicians to meet the demand for medical services.

I've heard it said that by the time we become seventy the memories we
hold most strongly are either of very recent events or of those from
our childhood; the long middle years blur into each other, and nothing
much from them is recalled in detail.  Such a generalization may be
based on extensive research, but it doesn't apply to all of us, and it
doesn't seem to have the slightest application to Louise.  Whatever my
questions to her, I was unable to discover much about her years of
childhood and adolescence.

She recalls the family warmth, but when I asked for details she could
provide only the example of the bridge games she had played on weekends
with her parents-and it turned out that these memories were from visits
home during her college days!  Perhaps the very security of her
childhood years keeps them buried from recall, except for such memories
as I have already presented.  And it seems to me that she began to live
with intensity-that is to say, with fun -only after she began the
practice of medicine, with Susan Halbleib as a nurse and a partner.

She was in her midthirties when she truly began to live the kind of
life that as a child she had confided to Bob Bishop she dreamed of, and
her memories from this point on are the strong and detailed ones.

Susie is a better cook than Louise, and so she prepared the meal for
the party at which jean and I, Lige and Norma, and Bob were the
guests.

It was a congenial affair, as warm (I thought) as any bridge game
Louise might have played with her parents and one of her brothers or
sisters when she was a young woman.  In the previous year, Bob had
retired from the drugstore.  Though it did a fine business (following
the demise of the Eagles' Nest restaurant, it became the chief social
center on Main Street), he had decided to close it rather than sell it
to a chain, for he couldn't bear to see it turn into something unlike
what it had been for generations.  In his midseventles he no longer
wanted to work twelve hours or longer a day, seven days a week; he had
locked the door for the last time one night, and that was that.

Cokes at his fountain had been a nickel when we lived in Morehead, and
(according to an old newspaper account I had seen) they had still been
a nickel in 1979; I asked him if he had continued to charge five cents
for a Coke until the end, and he said-rather reluctantlythat yes, this
was so.  He now owned a farm outside of town and was doing a pretty
fair job of cattleraising, winning prizes and so on.  This was just
the latest of the many things he had done with his life; still, he
figured that after he was gone he would be remembered only as a
druggist too stubborn to raise the price of a glass of carbonated water
flavored with a special syrup.

1 had liked Bob when we lived in Morehead, and I liked him now.  Except
for an increased girth and hair somewhat thinner and streaked with
silver, he seemed much the same.  Though generally more quiet than
Louise, he has much of her tolerant and sometimes selfdeprecating
humor.

Actually, they have come to resemble each other somewhat, at least in
physique, for both are short and Louise is a bit stockier now herself
Both possess the same stubborn resilience.  At the dinner party, the
talk was all of present-day events; Lige and Bob alike told some funny
local stories I thought I would remember, but don't.  (I didn't learn
at that dinner party of Bob and Louise's close companionship throughout
their public school days, but rather discovered it from a number of
old acquaintances of both, as well as from accounts in the newspaper.)
Like Louise, Bob has never been married.  Their affection for each
other is that of brother and sister, intimate enough to read and
approve of much of what goes on in the other's mind.

We drank wine with Susie's meal, and sat talking for hours afterward.

It was a fine dinner party.

2

Susan Halblelb, Dr. Louise's nurse, was born on March 12, 1926, and so
is more than thirteen years younger than Louise.  They became
acquainted in late fall of 1947 at Oneida Maternity Hospital, a
state-run facility in a then hard-to-reach Clay County community on the
Red Bird River in southeastern Kentucky.

Susie, who has three younger brothers and one younger sister, was born
in Louisville, to a Catholic family.  Both grandparents on her father's
side were born in Germany, though they first met in Louisville, where
they were married.

Her maternal grandparents came from Ireland.  Susie says her parents
died "too early": her father shortly after his forty-seventh birthday,
her mother when she was sixty-four.  Two of her brothers have retired,
but the third continues to work at the Louisville General Electric
plant.  Her sister is a homemaker.

One of her aunts told me that Susie's desire to be a nurse apparently
came while she was still a toddler barely able to talk.  She would
point at an adult's leg and, declaring it was "bruk," would wrap
bandages around it.  The aunt remembers that once Susie diagnosed a leg
of the dining room table as "bruk, " and carefully bandaged it, too.

Her family, Susie remarks, was "a normal, hardworking one"; while
everybody was "literate enough," education was never stressed, and she
was the only child to study beyond high school, and thus the only one
to have a professional career.  She attended Catholic schools in
Louisville.  Following her graduation from the Ursuline Academy in
1944, she entered Nazareth (now Catherine Spaulding) College, to study
nursing, and did her clinical training at St. Joseph's Hospital; both
institutions are in Louisville.  Upon completion of her training at St.
Joseph's, Susie had been too young for certification as a registered
nurse, and came to Oneida-one of the few places that would hire her
before certification-as a public health nurse in maternity cases.  She
received certification during her stay at Oneida.

Louise did her internship in Philadelphia at the hospital of Woman's
Medical College of Pennsylvania, following her graduation in 1946 from
the University of Louisville Medical College.  She is frank about all
her doubts and fears as a student and new doctor.  In one of her first
classes at the medical college, "four fellows left when they opened the
lids on some cadavers," never to return to their studies; Louise,
though she felt the desire to leave with them, had a stronger desire to
"stick it out."  Soon after her arrival at the Philadelphia hospital,
she was "handed a scalpel" and told "to open up the belly" of a patient
on the operating table.  "I thought I would drop dead," she told me.

"I had never done such a procedure and really didn't know how."

"Did you do it?"  I asked.

"Of course not," she said.

She remained at Woman's Medical College for slightly more than a
year.

Here she became acquainted with a woman doctor from mainland China, Hal
Mai Chen, who had come to the United States to learn Pap smear
techniques; Dr. Chen, Louise says, was "big in OB, " being head of the
obstetrics department at Shanghai University Medical School.  The
Chinese doctor took on" Louise at Woman's Medical, becoming a friend as
well as a mentor.  Like interns everywhere, Louise "worked around the
clock, hoping for a catnap now and then," glad to gain the experience
necessary for private practice.  But the thought of that private
practice still frightened her: "You're doing all these things in the
hospital, but then you think you've got to do it by yourself later on,
with no protection.  There's going to be nobody else but you-the
thought scares you.  You've got to know what to do when something
unexpected happens."  Realizing that much of her work would be in
obstetrics, Louise decided to gain more experience in that field before
opening her own practice.

She accepted the job at Oneida Maternity Hospital because the woman
doctor on the staff not only ct wanted somebody to come and help her,"
but promised to teach her "all of this big stuff' she still needed to
know.

To Louise, it seemed an ideal situation.  "It was a tiny hospital," she
remembers, "but had everything you wanted, and you could imagine that
from everything you could learn there you would be able to deliver a
baby at home.

" Susie was one of the four nurses at the time of Louise's arrival, and
there were a number of nurse's aides as well.  The nurses administered
anesthesia.

Small as it was, the hospital had a registered dietician.  Everybody
"had to work hard," but that was the way Louise liked it.

The staff doctor, though, had misled Louise.  The doctor was working on
her state board examinations and was looking more for a substitute than
an assistant.  She would disappear soon after Louise came on duty and
be gone for most of the day.  Then she took a vacation, leaving Louise
in charge.  Though not required to do so, Louise, in addition to caring
for the hospital patients, felt an obligation to respond to emergency
calls in the county.  Susie offered to pack her bag for the first of
these calls; almost at once, they became a medical team.

The responsibility Louise had to assume turned out to be what she
needed.

The brief stay in that remote hamlet of Oneida (accompanied by Susie,
Louise was to leave by the first of the year) was crucial to her,
making her "feel grown-up."  There was nobody to defer to; not even the
husbands of the wives about to give birth could be consulted in case a
quick decision had to be made.

The husbands in that rural region customarily @dered their duty at an
end when they arrived with their wives at the hospital door, and they
returned only after they had a washed and diapered son or daughter to
admire.

'It's important to get not only the training, but the belief in
yourself," Louise told me more than once, adding that her new
association with Susie had much to do with her growing
self-confidence.

It is a compliment that Susie, with a disarming frankness of her own,
acknowledges to be true enough.

The two stayed up late each night, reading medical books to know how to
treat each of the patients they had, trying to become informed on every
physical problem that they encountered or anticipated.

"You were still doing that the first time we saw you, when we brought
Larry to your office," I said, when Louise told me that.

"We do it to this day, " she said.  Uudge Hogge later told me that he
was impressed by how Louise in her mid-seventies.  keeps up with
medical advances, studying all the latest journals and books; when
Louise took jean and me to see her clinic, she showed us her desk,
littered with publications that her busy schedule had not yet given her
time to examine.) Of course, patients and parents don't get in on the
studying so much anymore, Louise explained, because today she is more
experienced with the kind of diseases that you can easily find
described in a general medical text.

Louise and Susie both enjoy reminiscing about their experiences at
Oneida, and take turns filling in details about untoward events that
had happened to them there.  One evening, a midwife who had just
delivered a baby at home phoned Louise to say that the afterbirth
somehow had been retained within the mother's womb and she didn't know
what to do.  Louise told the midwife to bring the woman to the
hospital, even though she herself "knew no more what to do than a 'ack
rabi bit."  But she and Susie turned to their books; and by the time
the midwife, holding the newborn baby, arrived with the mother and all
the other members of the family, Louise and Susie "had learned our
lesson.

Still, it was an unnerving moment for the relatively inexperienced
doctor.  Acting as "knowledgeable as they could, she and Susie "got the
mother all draped up" and onto the table.

The family lived in the country and apparently had never been in a
hospital before.  Louise said, "It was a I real thrill to them to be
bringing somebody in, and I reckon they had been shaking the mother
around, getting her to the hospital."

Apparently, all the tossing about had caused the placenta to break
loose from whatever had been holding it within the womb.  In any event,
it came out of its own accord while Louise, her hand on the woman's
belly, was considering her next move.

Sometimes, though, the patients weren) t so obliging in resolving a
problem for themselves, and sometimes the books gave no clear
answers.

Susie said that she and Louise "learned it, if you just want to
Oneida didn't know what else to do."  She had done a lot of waiting there,
she told Jean and me, "just sitting by the patient to see what would
happen.  If she delivers, at least you're there, even if you don't know
what to do."

In response to that remark, jean asked Susie a natural enough question:
"But what if something abnormal ha ened?"

Susie replied, "I had learned enough from the books to know if
something really tragic was gong to happen, an event that apparently
never took place.  "I didn't know much about the normal process,
really.

How long does labor take?  It never takes the same amount of time.  But
I didn't think anything abnormal I could happen with me sitting
there."

What a serene sense of assurance for a newly licensed nurse, twenty-one
years of age!  I transcribed those words of hers from an early
interview taped on an old recorder jean and I had found in our house;
not much more than a toy, it might have been left on a shelf long ago
by a friend of one of our children.

It hummed, and inct.  a soft voice like Susie's was blurred and often
indist' Had my transcription been inaccurate?  I bought an expensive
recorder, one with an omnidirectional microphone, for our return visit,
and asked Susie if she indeed had said that at Oneida she believed
nothing abnormal could happen to a woman in labor, as long as she was
sitting at that woman's side.

"Why, yes, that's exactly how I felt," Susie said.  She is a slender
woman, maybe five feet six in height, and her bearing is both erect and
somehow tranquil.  Like Louise, she has a fine sense of humor, and a
gentleness of response, but unlike Louise's, her voice carries no
self-irony.  "I guess you're surprised at first by how much you learn
and can do.  But I felt I could do anything almost right away."  It
took her some years of nursing experience to realize that she hadn't
been quite so competent in Oneida as she had felt herself to be, but
she guessed it was the feeling of competence, then and as well as now,
that always managed to keep her calm and collected.

In 1957-the year afterjean and I had moved from Morehead-an article
about Louise's competence, as well as her dedication to medicine,
appeared in the Louisville Courier-journal.  In that article, one of
her patients is quoted as saying, "All you have to do is believe in God
and that woman doctor, and so help me, you'll live forever."  As was
apparent from our first visit to her office, she is far more concerned
about an accurate diagnosis than an outward show of expertise-an
ndication of the professional integrity that has imparted confidence in
her abilities to thousands of her patients.  That very integrity,
though, must have made her apprehensive about her lack of experience
when she was thrust into the position of major responsibility at
Oneida; and so Susie's confidence in herself as a nurse was from the
beginning a kind of spiritual bulwark for her.

When I asked Louise and Susie at the long, second interview how
important each one was to the other, Louise said simply, "We couldn't
do it [everything they have accomplished, as well as what they're still
doing] without the other," and Susie said, "I doubt that we could have
done it.  Louise thinks more than I do, but I work a lot."  Louise said
that yes, Susie was willing to work very hard, and took responsibility
even better than she herself did.  "Susie," she said, "makes me
work."

Louise's ability to think, Susie went on, was apparent long ago, "when
measles were popular."  Instead of assuming that a patient had measles
because he or she had a rash, Louise would look for other symptoms as
well, since other diseases can cause a similar rash.  Louise agreed she
was a thinker, if a thinker was one who didn't 'jump to the most
obvious conclusion.

"It's true enough I don't go the easy road," she said.  "I go around
the perimeter."

Both of them dislike certain tendencies in modern medicine.

Louise said that despite the assistance provided by Medicare and
Medicaid, "having greenbacks makes more of a difference than ever in
patient care."  As an illustration of Louise's remark, Susie said that
before Medicaid a doctor could make a call to the county judge and get
an indigent patient admitted to the proper hospital right away, for the
judge would immediately allocate the funds, but that "now there is
much more red tape."

Keeping records has always been important to medicine, Louise said, but
the increase in bureaucracy "has made paper business a good business in
itself"; their small clinic, for example, now has two assistants,
mainly just to keep up with the paperwork.  (Not liking its
impersonality, they have resisted the introduction of a computer into
their clinic, though they realize that medical students now learn about
computers as part of their course work and come to consider them as
necessary to their practice as any other instrument Too, the refusal of
governmental programs to cover the cost of house calls helps to account
for their precipstr@ctly medical standpoint, such calls can have a
crucial chological value.  If a patient 's dying of cancer at PSY home,
treated with nothing but drugs to ease the pain, no program will
pay a doctor to drop by to see that patient, however comforting that
call might be to the person or his family.

(Did Louise and Susie still make such calls?  Yes, whenever they
possibly could.) Susie began to talk about the advertising used by
modern doctors.  "They advertise what they do and how much they
charge," she began, but her aversion to this publicity was such that
she gave up talking about it, summarizing her feelings with a guttural
exclamation, an "ach!"  she must have learned as a child from her
German grandparents.

Louise said to her, "I believe you're more adamant toward medicine
today than I am."  Susie replied, "Yes, you tend to go with the flow
more than I do, " but it was a simple observation, not an
accusation.

And then both of them declared that, whatever their reservations,
medicine in the United States remains better than it is anywhere else
in the world.

For more than forty years, Louise and Susie have lived and worked and
taken vacations together, and so I have spent far more time in each
other's company than havejean and I or any other couple of our
acquaintance.

For a relationship to survive such intimacy, one must assume
the pair would need to merge, becoming almost a single self.  Louise
and Susie are alike in certain respects.  Both are frank and devoid of
pretense.  Louise may be more talkative, but Susie has an equal
friendliness.  As doctor and nurse in a rural practice, they have
cheerfully undergone physical hardships of a sort that many medical
practitioners have never faced; theirs is an identical idealism of
service to humanity.

But their personalities are distinct.  Tranquil and selfassured as she
might seem, Susie is probably less able to control her temper; not only
is she the one more angered by present-day medical tendencies, but she
admits to "stepping on Louise's toes more than Louise steps on mine."

Louise agrees this is probably true, though she adds that if anybody
really steps on her toes, "Brother, you've got something!"  Religion
may play no part in either's attitude toward her profession, but
Susie's Catholicism is as personally important to her as Louise's
membership in the Christian church is to her.  And as I have indicated,
Susie never to my knowledge looks upon herself with the irony that
seems crucial to Louise's outlook.  The handyman and gardener who looks
after their property has his own insight into their differences.

"Dr. Louise doesn't pay attention to anything in the yard but the
trees," he told me.  "As for Susie, her eyes are always on the
flowers."

One has to take Louise's humorous and self-scoffing irony into account
in assessing her remarks about how "scared" she was as a neophyte
doctor, and possibly even about her timidity in opposing her mother's
expectations.  (The same irony toward herself probably accounts for her
remark to me-maybe a half-truththat she returned to Morehead to
establish her practice because "it was the only place I wasn't scared
to go.") Still, it strikes me as likely enough that the independence of
spirit I admire in Louise came at least in part, however paradoxical it
may seem, from the increasing closeness of her relationship with
Susie.

The mutual understanding and support provided by certain lucky
attachments (here I general're from nothing but my own marital
experience) can free us sufficiently to be ourselves and to achieve
whatever it is that we want to make of our lives.  A liberation can
come from the very choice of partner that we make.

In the late winter of 1947, Louise asked Susie to come to Morehead with
her, to help her establish a practice there; Susie, who, except for
those months "way out in the sticks" at Oneida, had never lived in a
small town, "decided to come to Morehead for at least six months of it
killed me."  even And so, during their last weeks at Oneida, they began
to gather the equipment they would need for their Morehead office,
ordering everything, Louise says,  "from a salesman who came
through."

Lacking experience in what they would need, Louise purchased an absurd
number of ammonium chloride pills-one hundred thousand of them.

"Shoot," she said, remembering.  "That was the strongest drug we had,
a diuretic, no longer in use.  But when you know you're going out
there, into the country, you also know you've got to I've the people
something.  That drug surely lasted us, I 9 can tell you."

Thus armed, they set off together for Morehead, to establish the
practice that was to far outlast even such a stockpile of pills.

Not only did Louise's parents welcome Susie as well as their daughter
into their house on Wilson Avenue, but Louise's father provided the
office space for the practice (he owned that building on Main Street)
and her mother helped Susie scrub and paint the rooms.  Louise didn't
join them in this chore; her mentor from her Philadelphia days, Dr.
Chen, was now in New York City, and Louise wanted to see her again in
this brief period of freedom before the office opened.

I was surprised to hear that Etta had adjusted herself so well to
Louise's new profession that she would scrub and paint with Susie.  "I
thought Etta believed that women should do only what Louise calls
'ladythings,' " I said to Susie, when she told me about the work she
and Louise's mother had accomplished together.  She and I were talking
at the kitchen table at Louise and Susie's house one Sunday morning
after breakfast; Louise and jean had gone off somewhere.

Apparently what Etta felt to be suitable for her daughters wasn't
exactly what she felt necessary for herself "Etta was pretty, and liked
to dress up," Susie said.

"She didn't like to keep house, but she enjoyed painting i rooms,
things like that."  And whatever her earlier objections, her daughter
had now become a doctor, and Etta, with her concern for
propriety, wanted the new office to look as handsome as possible.  "We made that
space really shine," Susie said, taking some umbrage at some comments
of mine about the way it looked the first time I saw it.  "That couch
you thought so decrepit .  .

.well, here, look at it," and she marched me into an adjoining room to
see a neatly tailored couch.  "We brought it home when we built the
clinic and had it reupholstered.

It seemed 'n such bad shape to you because a patient's father-" and
here she paused, until she could remember both the name of the child
and the father-"had burned a hole in it with his pipe, maybe only a
week or so before you brought Larry in."  (Both Louise and Susie have a
phenomenal recall, not only of the names of patients treated thirty or
more years before, but of the nature of their illnesses; Susie's memory
of dates surpasses Louise's, and it was from Susie that I learned the
birthdates of all of Louise's siblings.) When Louise began her practice
in late January of 1948, she had newly painted walls and a fine-looking
couch; all that she lacked were patients.  "Not much happened for the
first few days," she admitted to jean and me.  "What we did mainly was
to eat banana splits and chocolate sundaes, brought up from Bob
Bishop's pharmacy."  She mentioned the name of the first patient and
told us of that patient's subsequent life-her marriage to a navy man,
her departure to California, the divorce.

It wasn't long before Louise and Susie had to augment the few chairs in
the office with others on the landing space outside the second-floor
door, and soon people were waiting, as jean and I remembered doing, on
the steps leading up to it.

Louise had bought a gray 1947 Pontiac (the car she still was driving
when I lived in Morehead) for her house calls, but it wasn't adequate
for the muddy or snow-covered roads that led back into the hills, to
the cabins where, especially in the first decade of their practice, she
and Susie delivered so many babies.

(I know something of those dirt roads from weekend trips I took with my
family, just to see what the back country was like: occasional cabins
next to a stream in a hollow, some of the cabins without glass in the
windows, most of them without electricity, children playing next to a
washtub on the porch.

Even on a sunny summer's day, a car could get mired in low areas, or
get its differential hump caught on a boulder between the ruts.  The
twisting roads, some of them barely altered from the cart trails they
once had been, intersected with so many others just like them that a
driver not born to the area could lose any sense of direction.

Once, less than ten miles from town, I became lost and asked a man
sitting on a porch step if he could tell me how to get back to
Morehead.  He shook his head.  "Never been thar, " he said.) Often
Louise and Susie would meet the husband of a woman in labor at a
predetermined point, the point beyond which no car could safely go.

The man would have a horse or a mule (if the terrain was particularly
difficult, a team of animals), sometimes attached to a wagon, but more
frequently to a flatbottomed sled, for such sleds could traverse mud as
well as snow far better than a wheeled vehicle could.  The doctor and
nurse would transfer their medical equipment to the sled.  "It made a
burdensome amount," Susie told jean and me, for they always took along
everything they might possibly need: in addition to their medical bags,
a portable delivery table, which could be unfolded and placed upon a
bed; bottles and other equipment for intravenous fluids; sterile pads,
and so on.

The first maternity case to take them back into the hills coincided
with a heavy snowfall.  On jean's and my initial return to Morehead,
Louise and Susie told us about that day, but I found a fuller account
of it in the 1957 Courierjournal article: Kentucky had 'just had a
record snowfall on Feb.  2, 1948, when she [Louise and Susie Halb elb
... were summoned to a home far back in the hills.

The girls [in 1957, a female doctor in her mid-thirties and a nurse of
voting age still could be called that] were clad in two pairs of
pajamas, slacks, fur-lined shoes, and sheepskin-lined They drove as far
as they could go by car, then were met by a man [in this case,
apparently not the husband] driving two horses hitched to a crude
wooden sled.

The doctor and the nurse climbed aboard and glided back into the snowy
hills.  They arrived at the one-room shack a little past midnight.  The
only heat came from a tiny drum stove.

Beside the expectant mother there were the husband, an old woman, and
two small children, one of whom was very As Susie had learned at
Oneida, the length and difficulty of labor is never the same; on this
and all later rural calls, of course, she had Louise as a companion
while waiting.  They would pass the hours in tidying up a place, in
talking, and in reading (when the oil lamps provided enough
illumination).  On this first trip into the hills, they had the sick
child to attend to, as well as the mother; as they were to discover,
they often had to give medical assistance to more members of a family
than the one to whose bedside they had been summoned.  On occasion,
they attended to more than one family on any sojourn into a given
neighborhood.  On their first excursion, they successfully delivered
the baby at noon the following day.

If that first trip can represent all such trips in snow, another can
represent a number of their sloggings through mud.  In this case,
Louise and Susie, unable to reach their destination by car because of
the mire, were met by a husband who had no sled; perhaps he was too
poor to afford a horse or mule to pull one.  Upon slogging to the house
with him, they discovered the woman was having the baby prematurely and
was hemorrhaging.  They did what they could to stem the flow, but knew
they would have to get her quickly to the nearest hospital.  Louise and
Susie, with help from the husband, carried her in a blanket to the car
through two fields.

"We carried her a good mile, through fields kneedeep in mud, " Louise
says of the incident she remembers as the most physically exhausting of
her career.

Nevertheless, in telling the story, she smiles; for although the baby
for some days suffered from "all these things that most premature
newborns have," both mother and child "did all right."

That September, Dr. Chen came to Morehead before returning to China to
be of whatever help she could in the new practice of her friend and
prot6gee.  She stayed for a month or two, accompanying Louise on her
house calls.  Finally, her visa having expired, Dr. Chen flew back to
Shanghai, leaving Louise and Susie to their own resources.  (Shortly
before she departed, Louise's niece, the daughter of Boone and Jane,
secretly wrote the State Department, begging that Dr. Chen be
permitted to stay, saying that the region had a real need for her
services.  Louise found out about the letter only after an FBI agent
arrived in Morehead to check up on the background of one Susan Caudill,
who 'just might be engaging in Maoist subversion in Rowan County.  Upon
learning that Susan was in the second grade, he left.) Meanwhile,
Louise's practice in town continued to expand.  If people were too sick
to come to them during office hours, she and Susie went to their
homes.

One of her longtime patients remembers the winter day-"it was snowing,
horribly"-that she became suddenly feverish from what turned out to be
an infection.  Her son called Louise's home phone number; Susie
answered.  Much to the surprise of both son and mother, Susie, instead
of saying Louise would come to the house, suggested that he bring his
mother to the office later in the day.  The son said his mother was far
too sick to leave the house in such weather, but Susie remained
reluctant to commit Louise to a house call.  "My son really got mad,"
the woman told me.  "He shouted into the phone, 'All of our lives we've
doctored with Louise, and now that my mother needs her, you can't come
down!"  Susie actually hung up on him, something you can't imagine she
would ever do.  But then she called back, saying they would be there as
soon as they possibly could .  . . Well, I'll have you know they did
come, and only a few minutes later."

"Did you ever find out why Susie acted like that?"  I asked.

"Yes," the woman said.  "While they were here, I asked Louise about her
mother, knowing that she was ill, and she said, 'Well, she died."  It
had just happened, you see."  I think it made this patient, now an
elderly woman, feel better to tell me this story.  "Louise has done man
thin s like that for many people, all her life," she went on.  "No
matter what, she'll come anytime.  Last night, my brother-in-law
died.

During his illness, she kept coming, lots of times without being
called; she'd stop by on her way home for the night.

She's so tender and kind and all that.  She' own in the history of
Rowan County as one of at doctors, I know."

4

In the early 1950s, a bakery opened for business in Morehead, a
memorable event: none had existed in town until then, and this
particular bakery was run by two sisters who made marvelous rolls,
bread, and pastries.  They were in their later years; for decades they
had dreamed of such a business together, and finally had found the time
and courage to undertake its operation.  The line before their counter
was as long as the one on the staircase to Louise's office; indeed,
much like the line awaiting to enter a theater for a popular movie, it
sometimes extended down the block.  But they closed the business only
two or three weeks after opening it, as I discovered the afternoon I
came to buy coffee cake for Sunday breakfast.  Later, I heard they had
been tearful on the last day of their business, and they had apolagized
to the waltilig customers for running out of everything they had baked
that morning.  The business had succeeded so far beyond their
expectations and their energy that they were too exhausted to carry it
on.

Good baked goods were a luxury in that small town, but good medical
care was a necessity; Louise and Susie, who often must have been as
exhausted as those sisters, couldn't quit, even had they wanted to.

The clinic that had been their dream at the time I left Morehead was a
way of coping with their own physical inability, given the increasing
demands made upon them, to continue those time-consuming trips into the
rural areas.  But they wanted the women to come to the clinic for
reasons that went beyond matters of time and the limits of their own
endurance.  A dark and crowded cabin in the hills was hardly the most
sanitary place to deliver a child; and as their experience with the
woman who was hemorrhaging and in premature labor showed, the lives of
both mother and infant could be endangered by a birth in such an
isolated location.

And so, in 1957, ten years after Louise and Susie had met in Oneida,
they opened their clinic on Main Street; it had a delivery room two
labor rooms, an X-ray room, an office, a waiting room, and a small
living area for Louise and Susie.  They had left the Caud'Il family
home to live in the clinic so that one or the other, of not both, would
be available night and day to attend to the women in labor.

In planning the clinic, Louise had recognized that a hospital was what
the region really needed, not only for emergencies, but for laboratory
work.  (The lack of professional laboratory facilities in the town, she
says, caused her to be especially scrupulous as a diagnostician.  From
the beginning of her practice she had X-ray equipment, but the film had
to be forwarded to a radiologist elsewhere in the state, and no local
facilities existed for the examination of blood and other specimens.)
But to establish a good hospital seemed to her at that time it, just
too way out an idea," and the clinic at least "was something I could live
with."  As a birthing center, the clinic was available to all women,
regardless of their ability to pay, but with the requirement that they
schedule visits for prenatal care.  Louise and Susie
hoped through the new institution to change the casual rural attitudes
toward childbirth.  (According to a 1988 feature story about Louise and
Susie in the local newspaper, Susie "acted as disciplinarian in setting
up standards to be followed at the clinic," and was "strict's in
enforcing the rule about prenatal visits.  This suggests that, whatever
her belief that nothing abnormal could happen as long as she was in
attendance, she preferred to take no chances.) Birthing centers have
become popular in recent decades as an option for women who don't want
to enter a hospital; but the pioneer one in Morehead came into being
simply because no hospital was available then.  I asked Susie if state
or national codes concerning a facility like theirs existed in 1957.

"We knew we had to shield the X-ray machine from the delivery room, she
said.  "And we knew that for health reasons there couldn't be an air
conditioner in that room.  But as for codes about operating a birthing
center-well, there couldn't have been any.  If there had been, they
surely wouldn't have permitted us to do what we did, the two of us
living twenty-four hours a day in the clinic and grabbing sleep and a
bite to eat whenever we could."

Though the opening of the hospital only six years I later was a far
more .  significant occasion for them and the whole community, they
remember the happiness they felt on the day they celebrated the
completion of the clinic.  "We had a big party, an open house," Louise
told me.  "Lots of people came, and they brought flowers.  They came to
look at our new delivery table, and at the autoclave-nobody in these
parts had ever seen such a shiny gizmo for sterilizing things."

"I imagine it was quite a relief for you and Susie not to have to
deliver babies in the hills any more," I said.

"We still had to go out there some," she said.  "But it was a relief
not to have to go so often."

On my most recent visit to Morehead I noticed that the little sign that
said "C.  Louise Caudill, M.D."  had disappeared from the lawn in front
of the one-story brick clinic on Main Street.  Though the clinic
remains in operation, Louse no longer wants to draw attention to that
fact; at seventy-five, she is trying to "Cut down" on her practice,
which means, I would guess, treating no more patients than a family
doctor normally would.  (She stopped her practice 'n obstetrics n
December 1981.) When I entered the building, Louise was in the
examining room with a patient; two or three others were in the waiting
room, reading magazines.  What a difference from the line of people I
remembered waiting on every step of the staircase nearly four decades
earlier!

During an earlier stay in Morehead, jean and I questioned Louise and
Susie one night about the patients they had seen that day.  Louise
guessed they had treated about thirty people at the clinic, many of
them children -some of them for preschool physicals, some brought in
without an appointment by a parent because of a special problem or
emergency.  "Things just come on that we handle between appointments,"
Susie said.  "We had a lit@k kid with fever and vomiting, and another
with earache.) And a woman came in who had a sudden allergic response
to something or other; she said she had been sweeping up some sand."

"And then there was that little girl with something more peculiar, "
Louise said.  "A Japanese beetle crawled into her ear, and 'just didn't
want to come out.

"You might have coaxed it out with a mating call, or maybe the kind of
scent they put in beetle traps," I said.

"This little beetle was daid," Louise said.  "It had got all squished
up, way back in the ear, from somebody's finger trying to get it out.  It
took some doliig, to get at it."  The advent of St. Claire Medical
Center brought dozens of doctors to the region, general practitioners
and specialists alike, and so (largely through Louise's own efforts in
establishing the hospital) her patient load had declined to more
manageable proportions long before she took down her sign.

But for the first six years of the clinic's operation it must have been
difficult to id chaos in ' avo its rooms, for babies were being born
there while all the other patients were waiting their turn to see the
doctor and nurse.  A picture from this period that appeared in a later
issue of the Morehead News (the twice-weekly successor of W. E.

Crutcher's weekly Rowan County News) shows Louise and Susie in the
clinic, smiling at each other; each of them is holding a set of
twins.

But four babies born at almost the same time did not constitute a
record at their little clinic; the record was set, as if by Divine
Providence, on the day that Monsignor Charles Towell, director of
hospitals for the Covington, Kentucky, diocese, arrived to investigate
whether or not Morehead really needed a hospital.  "Babies and mothers
were everywhere when he came in the door," Louise remembers, for five
babies-"two sets of twins and a single"-had been born that day.

"We didn't have near enough bassinets," Susie said, "so we
Just lined the babies up on
that couch in the waiting room."

Instrumental as she was to be in bringing a hospital to town, Louise
admits to being initially opposed to one in Morehead.  "For a long
time, people were saying we needed a hospital," she said.  "Everybody
wanted a hospital, but I was against it.  I'd seen so many bad things
done in little hospitals, places that were just for putting patients
in beds.  In little hospitals in the small towns, a surgeon can be
knife-happy, and nobody to stop him or I offer the patient another opin
on."

"What changed your mind?"  I asked.

"Well, there was a man who came through town, a doctor-Dr. Howard
was his name-and he worked for the state in public health.  Nobody had
invited him to my knowledge; he 'just came into my office one day, i
looked at our whole setup, and said, 'You can have a hospital in this
town if you want one."

" "Was he suggesting you could get money for it from the state?"

"Oh, no, not at all.  He just said there was no reason for us not
having a hospital.  I told him I didn't want a hospital unless it was
going to be a good one, and he asked me what my idea of a good hospital
would be.  I said we needed three things to have a good hospital:
enough money for a decent building and the proper equipment; somebody
to run it right, an experienced administrator who could get the
trained nurses and so on; and credibility-that is, a good medical
staff, people who know their stuff, surgeons and other specialists,
radiologists, pathologists.

"And what did Dr.  Howard say to that?"

"He 'just said, 'You can have all that, if you want it.

"But he never told you how to go about getting it?"

"No.  As I say, he just was coming through town and told me that, and
after he was gone, I sat there and thought, he thinks we can do it, and
by granny!  I think he's right."

Neither Louise nor Susie knows much more about Dr. Howard than that,
though Susie, with her better recall of such details, said his initials
were C. C. "Dr. C. C. Howard of Glasgow," she said, remembering the
town he came from at the moment she gave his full name.  (Glasgow is a
town in south-central Kentucky, not far from Mammoth Cave.) "I think he
used to have a practice there."

"Did he ever come back?"  I asked.

"We never saw him again," Susie said.

Unlike the man from Porlock whose knock on Coleridge's door not only
interrupted the poet's transcription of a poem about Xanadu that had
come to him in a dream, but shattered his memory of it, causing the
poem to remain the fragment that has come down to us, Louise's visitor
from Glasgow managed, with his few words of optimism, to build a dream
in her own mind far grander than her earlier dream of a clinic.

"And he was right, of course, " Louise said.  "Three years later-even
less than that, more like two and a half-we had 'just the kind of
hospital he told us we could have.  Now that's something of a miracle,
don't you reckon?"

Louise, who is on the board of directors of St. Claire Medical Center,
arranged for jean and me to be taken on a tour of its facilities.  It
has undergone considerable expansion since it opened for its initial
patient in 1963; having just learned of its existence, t certainly
seemed like a miracle to me.  We were given a demonstration of the
machine that through sound waves can construct an image of what lies
within a patient's body, and looked at the machine-the one that makes CAT
scans; we saw all the other modern radiology equipment.  The hospital
was as advanced as the new hospital in my own prosperous and populous
upstate New York county, and the patient rooms were larger, more
inviting.  I was bewildered by the bright lights, the shining floors,
the nurses in their nuns' habits walking briskly on their errands, the
loudspeakers calling for one doctor or another to report to this or
that clinic or floor-all of this going on in a town that never
conceivably could have supported this facility in my days of living
there, and which despite its recent growth still seemed much too small;
with its 170 beds, St. Claire Medical Center belonged, I thought, in a
metropolitan setting.

I asked our guide where all the patients came from.

He said the hospital's service area covers eleven northeastern counties
with a total population of 150,000.  In addition to the patients who
come to the major facility in Morehead, about 40,000 each year visit
the hospital's primary care clinics in Rowan and three other counties
-Bath, Menifee, and Carter.  These clinics are staffed by family
physicians, nurse practitioners, and certified midwives.  And he said
that the hospital also administers a home health program that now makes
nearly 30,000 patient visitations a year.

In walking through its corridors with a guide, I did think of
Coleridge's poem, and the differing consequences of the visits made by
the strangers from Porlock and Glasgow; for the hospital seemed magical
enough to belong in Xanadu, a place as remote as Rowan County once had
seemed to me.  In the years that the paucity of doctors and lack of
facilities had put the most severe demands on them, Louise and Susie
sometimes had traveled even beyond the borders of their own county.

They had gone into the hamlets and countryside of Bath and Carter
counties to deliver babies and to administer to those who were severely
ill.  With its network of clinics and home services, St. Claire
Medical Center was serving a goal that had been so crucial to the
doctor and nurse-that of helping rural people-and to a degree that the
pair of them, whatever their dedication, never had been able to
achieve.

That evening, having dinner with Louise and Susie at their home, I said
to Louise that Dr. C. C. Howard certainly had put a great idea into
her head, but that I couldn't imagine how everything had come to pass
the way he had foretold.

"He made me believe," she said.  "Sometimes all it takes is the
believing and then everything snaps into place.

It is true enough that in a surprisingly short time after Dr. Howard
spoke to Louise, the hospital-then with but forty-one bedsopened for
its first patient; but it required both good fortune and much
perseverance on her part before things could "snap into place."  The
people of Rowan County obviously wanted a hospital as much as they once
wanted to learn how to read and write; but to achieve the kind of
hospital that Louise desired was a much more intricate task than Cora
Wilson Stewart's campaign to eradicate illiteracy from the county.

What Louise had in mind required far more money, and the support of
other institutions.  Her task was similar to Cora Wilson Stewart's, though, in
its dependence upon others possessing a similar optimism, a similar
idealism.  The earlier woman depended upon the schoolteachers in the
county; Louise upon local community leaders, a Catholic order, and
professionals in her own field at the newly opened Medical Center of
the University of Kentucky in Lexington.  The support of the first @:up
led to that of the second; but only with the assis@ce of the third
could "everything snap 9 into place."  o4Ving a puzzle with three such
interlinking parts, some of which didn't initially want to fit, was an
activity that probably gave Louise more "fun" than anything she has
ever undertaken.  Certainly she smiles, and her eyes take on that
humorous glint she is famous for, when she talks about fitting the
pieces together.

6

Susie remembers that Dr. Howard passed through Morehead in August
1960.  (Recently, I received a letter from a doctor who had known him
at roughly this period and who remembers him as "an influential
physician .  . . a wonderful man with a great foresight," words borne
out, certainly, by what was to happen in Morehead.) According to
Louise, it was only a few days after Dr. Howard's visit that she and
Susie began t'going around from house to house in town, to all the
people who had the most money" to see if there would be sufficient
financial support for the kind of hospital that she envisioned.  (Other
people then were also meeting to talk about securing a hospital, but
Louise and Susie at the time didn't try to contact them, for none of
them had in mind anything more than an unaccredited "lying-in"
facility.) Their canvass sufficiently encouraged Louise to call a
meeting at her office in order to "get this thing going."  For this
initial meeting, held before the month was up, she selected people
"like Adron Doran [the president of the college], J. M. ('Chin')
Clayton [a local businessman who ran the Eagles' Nest restaurant], and
Glenn Lane [cashier and one of the directors of the Citizens Bank of
Morehead, the major competitor of the Caudill family's Peoples Bank of
Morehead]"-the kind of people, Louise said, "who would have influence
on other people.

Louise worked rapidly toward the establishment of the kind of hospital
she, and now the people who had met with her, wanted.  Of her three
requirements for a good hospital, the easiest to accomplish, she says,
was 46 getting the money."  She and Susie, after all, had already
contacted those residents (they remain anonymous) who would be the most
generous individual benefactors, and knew the extent of their promised
gifts.

And already W. E. Crutcher had been using the pages of his Rowan County
News to publicize the need for a local hospital.  (Besides being
concerned about the wellbeing of the community, he knew, from personal
experience, about the difficulties in getting proper medical care in
emergencies: his wife was seriously ill, requiring treatment elsewhere;
she was to die before the hospital opened.) On the day-November 27,
1960-that the fund drive commenced with a dinner, the Rowan County News
issued a four-page supplement about the proposed hospital that
requested communitywide generosity in raising the quarter million
dollars needed from local residents.

Through President Doran, the college became as important to the success
of the fund drive as the newspaper.  @'B'fore assuming the presidency
in 1954, Doran had been a Church of Christ minister as well as an
educator, basketball coach, and politician.  Though he had I been in
office only two years when I left Morehead State College for Cornell, I
knew something about Doran's ability to get things done.  Shortly after
he became president, I was awakened one dawn by the sound of what
seemed a battalion of tanks invading town.

Doran, having heard that the college band, practicing on the football
field in rainy weather, often turned the grass surface into mud, had
managed, through his political influence, to divert much of the heavy
highway equipment' in eastern Kentucky to Morehead, in order to level
a small hill to make a practice field for the exclusive use of the
band.

In the years following my departure, the college under his guidance
prospered as it never had before; and apparently he became accustomed
to having matters proceed according to his dictation.  He was to become
locally famous-or infamous-for one particular act of autocracy, years
after I had left.  Vexed by the decision of the Morehead City Council
to draw municipal water from an inexhaustible new source about ten
miles from town (Cave Run Lake, created by a huge dam constructed by
the Army Corps of Engineers on the Licking River) instead of continuing
to buy water supplied by the college from its lake, Doran shut off the
water to all the town's faucets for one memorable day.

Louise and most of the other townspeople, though, applauded the means
he used to secure generous donations to the fund drive from everybody
on the college faculty and staff.  As I heard from a number of people
in town , he called a special meeting of the employees.

"Ladies and gentlemen, " he is reported to have said during his brief
address, "I am donating five percent of I my annual salary to the
hospital fund, and I expect you to do the same."

An expert from Boston was called n to direct the fund drive, but Louise
and Susie did much of the legwork, knocking on the doors of
citizens they hadn't previously contacted.  By the end of December,
the I and by a generous mar ampa gn had exceeded its goal, gin.  (Forty
percent of the amount came from college employees.) While it is a
considerable sum for the citizens of a small town to
contribute-Morehead had 4,000 inhabitants in 1956.  and
probably no more than 3,100 In 1960.
The $294,000 pledged during the drive wasn't
enough the est' to build a good hospital even in those days; 1mated
amount, which turned out to be several hundred thousand dollars too
low, was $850,000.

Actually, Louise knew that if the campaign were successful, the chances
were good that not only the remainder of the money would be forthcoming
from two additional sources, but that the second of her three
requirements, an experienced aden n'strat've and nursing staff, would
be met as well.  In the days following the meeting she had held at her
office with President Doran and others, she tried to get Baptist and
Methodist support for the hospital, knowing that both churches operated
hospitals throughout the country.  When these attempts failed,
she turned to Monsignor Towell of the Covington diocese of the Catholic
church, who happened to be a member of the Kentucky HillBurton hospital
committee and hence one who could be of service in securing not only
Catholic support in financing and operating the hospital, but federal
assistance through the funds made available by the Hill-Burton
legislation passed by Congress.

Given his influence, Monsignor Towell seems the obvious person for
Louise to have contacted at the beginning; but given the religious
disposition of the area, I can see the reason that she would turn to
the Catholics only as an apparent last resort.

If Cora Wilson Stewart's crusade against illiteracy brought to mind
some passages in Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Louise's attempt
to establish a hospital, complicated as it was by religious issues,
caused me to return to a book that has been compared to Agee's.  Harry
M. Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands is the most impassioned and
eloquent book about the social and economic sufferings of eastern
Kentucky that I know of A journalist and former member of the Kentucky
House of Representatives from Whitesburg (in Letcher County, near the
West Virginia border), Caudill, who died in 1991, probably was related
to Louise (whose grandfather, after all, had come from Letcher County),
though I don't think they ever met.

While Night Comes to the Cumberlands emphasizes the despoliation of
human and natural resources that accompanied the mining of coal, a
ravage that spared Rowan County, he writes also of the history and
general culture of the mountainous Cumberland plateau that includes
Rowan.  "For many years and indeed, to this day," he writes, in a
passage describing the dominant religious attitudes of the area, there
were "hard-shell" preachers, so named because their doctrine was so
harsh.  They preached, among other things, the cruel doctrine of infant
damnation.  To their fanati r@lids it was apparent that if a man could
not enter the kingdom of heaven until he had been spiritually "born
again," even a little child was shut out of the Celestial Kingdom if
death came prior to an age when awareness of sin had brought repentance
and rebirth.  And it followed that if failure to be born again excluded
the soul from heaven, that soul must certainly go to hell.  This
fantastic nonsense anguished generations of mountain parents, nearly
all of whom had seen more than one infant die.

The wellspring of these folk churches was a stern Calvinism which the
Scotch element of the population had carried with it from the dour
highlands.  Without competition from other religious ideas or doctrines
it slowly pervaded the whole populace, and eventually became deeply
rooted in their mores, so widely and unquestionably accepted as to
constitute unwritten law.  And while its adherents might split into a
myriad of disputing minor sects, they were to remain steadfastly loyal
to its basic tenets.  One of these was a hatred for the Roman Catholic
Church and the Pope as nothing less than arms of Satan.  Another was
confession of sins "before men," and a third was the requirement of
baptism.  Still another was an immutable principle that no preacher or
minister be compensated in any way for his time or work.  Their
Biblical hero was John the Baptist, and each church was fiercely proud
to call itself "Baptist," the members insisting that they alone were
true followers of the methods and doctrines of the prophet.  Each
group, also, claimed to trace its origins back through the ages to this
forerunner of Christ.  This curious idea, now a folk notion throughout
the region, resulted in the use of such church names as "Regular," "Old
Regular," "Bed-Rock," and "Primitive" Baptists.  These groups in
subsequent years were to split again and again, like endlessly dividing
amoebae, in fierce wrangles over the very meaning of the word
"baptism.

Such divisions were still going on in Morehead during the years my
family lived there; so many permutations occurred that sometimes it was
difficult for an outsider to discover the original sect.  A radical
group split off from its more conservative parent to build a small
brick churchj@just opposite the juncture of our little dead-end street,
Caudill Court I with Main Street; from our open windows in summertime,
we could hear the preacher of the evening moving from conventional
speech into an unknown tongue, and the waves of emotion his sounds
induced in the congregation.  (One of that church's preachers gifted in
unknown tonguesfor there were several of them-earned his working
as a mechanic for Bob Day's Oldsmobile agency.) I learned that another
sect in town secretly used poisonous snakes in its rituals, though such
use had been made illegal by state legislation.

I first read Night Comes to the Cumberlands in my early years at
Cornell (it was published in 1962), and was surprised to discover how
small a percentage of the rural people belonged to any church: "Not
more than 12 to 15 percent now have church membership or affiliation,"
Caudill writes, "though countless dedicated evangelists have worn
themselves out in proselytizing I labors.  Today the plateau probably
contains the lowest percentage of actual church membership to be found
in any other region of Christendom."

That small percentage, though, carried a potent force.  The few
Catholics in the region kept a low profile.  There was no Catholic
church in Morehead when Susie first came to town in 1948.  She told me
she doubted she would have come, whatever her friendship with Louise,
had not a priest traveled to the town every Sunday to celebrate Mass.

Catholics were considered such an exotic species by educated
people, Susie said, laughing as she remembered it, that Louise's own
mother never could remember whether Susie was Catholic or Jewish.

"Where did you hold Mass?"  I asked.

"In a garage behind somebody's house," she said.

"A two- or three-stall garage?"

she said.  "There was plenty of "No, just one sta room, though.

For me, Harry M. Caudill's description of religion in the Cumberlands
gives drama to an open meeting held on October 7 (soon after Louise had
met with President Doran and others to plan their opening strategy
at the Rowan County Health Center and attended by about seventy-five
people interested in obtaining a local hospital.

They included business and professional leaders, municipal and county
officials, and clergymen.  The only written account of that meeting
I've seen is in an unpublished paper written in May 1968 by a student
in a graduate history course at Morehead State College.  I was given a
copy of it by the present administrator of St. Claire Medical Center,
Sister Mary jeannette, who warned me that she'd been told it contained
some serious factual errors.

Still, the following sentences, based on the minutes of the
organization (the Northeast Kentucky Hospital Foundation) formed at
that meeting, are probably accurate enough: After some time Dr. Caudill
arrived in the company of a ic Cathol' priest, Monsignor Charles
Towell, who she introduced as a priest of the Catholic diocese of
Covington, Kentucky.... As a first order of business Dr. Caudill asked
if the citizens assembled wished to start a hospital association in
Morehead which could act as a non-profit agency to raise money locally,
apply for federal funds, and make other necessary arrangements to get
Morehead a hospital.  The proposal was overwhelmingly approved.

Dr. Caudill was elected chairman of the organization 'just formed and
given power to appoint a temporary planning committee.  Msgr.  Towell
then spoke saying that HillBurton funds for one-third of the cost of
construction of the hospital would almost certainly be I Also he felt
available and probably funds for one-half.

He was sure he could find some Catholic sisters to operate the
hospital.

However, he had no intention of cooperating if any serious
religious prejudice was evidenced.

In speaking with Louise about that meeting, I read those words about it
to her, emphasizing the final sentence.  "Yes, the subject of religion
did come up," she said, but she dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

The hostility toward Catholicism that might have prevented the
successful establishment of a hospital run by a Catholic order
apparently never was of major concern to herno more consequential than
the earlier possibility of sexual discrimination against her as the
first woman to Practice medicine in the county.  (She dismisses as
equally trivial or beneath consideration the question of smalltown bias
toward her for never marrying and raising a family of her own.  When
one journalist or another attempts to pry into her personal life,
wondering why this woman who loves children and has delivered so many
babies never wanted to be a mother in herself, she simply responds, as
an article about her  the January 26, 1979, Morehead News reports,
"that it was so late when she started medical school that she had
neither the time nor the inclination for a family of her own.  ") But I
suspect she has triumphed over convention and prejudice, not so much
from a refusal to admit to their existence, as from the effect her
presence-the glow of a woman "following her bliss"-had on others.

judge Elijah Hogge was one of the executive committee members of the
Northeastern Kentucky Hospital Foundation created at that October 7,
1960, meeting at the Rowan County Health Center; he served both as its
treasurer and attorney, drawing up all the legal documents.  He told me
that the people who came to the open meeting did so not only because
they saw the need for a hospital, but because Louise "had so much
interest in it; they wanted to help her and at the same time help
themselves.  She sparkled when she talked about it," and they felt good
to be "doing something for Louise.  So we started raising money and she
got a commitment from the Sisters of Notre Dame that they would
participate and operate the hospital."

Unlike Louise, Lige remembers the local prejudice to Catholics as
anything but trivial; resistance came not only from "primitive" or
"hard-shell" Baptists but from many other members of the community.

Catholic involvement was a "touchy" issue for the whole town, even
though "everybody wanted the hospital in the worst way."  Even those
who gave to the fund drive had to overcome their reluctance "to give to
the Catholic order."  And he said that "they preached venom from the
pulpits" of certain churches for a time.  That kind of opposition just
had to be squelched, for we could see that it would kill the whole
deal."

Though officials of the Baptist and Methodist churches had already
refused Louise financial or other 1

1 assistance, she and Lige and other members of the executive committee
encouraged all who were hostile toward Catholic participation to
persuade the state and national headquarters of any Protestant
denomination of their choice to support and operate the proposed
hospital- "That offer kind of squelched the opposition," he said, for
everybody soon realized that no other church was willing to meet "the
gigantic problems we would have in creating a hospital here, and
keeping it in operation."  One supplementary benefit of having a modern
medical center 'n Morehead, L'ge said, came from the arrival of the
Catholic order in town.  Meeting and getting to know the nuns became
"part of our educative process;" the whole town learned how "bigoted
and backward we had been."  Norma, Lige's wife, who had been listening
to my conversation with him, agreed with that remark.  "Yes, so many
people had been worried about the area being destroyed by Catholics.

But the sisters of Notre Dame were so dedicated!  They lived on the top
floor of the hospital, and there was no air conditioning then; they
served people who were dying, staying up with them all night long.

Their children would tell other people, 'A sister stayed with my
mother,' and pretty soon the hostility was gone, and everybody was
grateful."

Lige didn't know what had persuaded the Covington atholic diocese to
come to Morehead's assistance.  "It must have been their heed to Dr.
Louise's plea with them, and their reasoning that the area did need
help," he said.  "And I think Louise reached them at an opportune
moment, for the Sisters of Notre Dame had just closed a hospital deeper
in the mountains and so had a trained staff available-administrators
people to look I after the books, to run the kitchen, to take care of
the patients and so on."  (That hospital was injenkins, not I far from
Harry M. Caudill's Whitesburg, and its apparently unavoidable closing
another blow to that depressed mining region.) W. E. Crutcher, chairman
of the publicity committee of the Northeast Kentucky Hospital
Foundation, ran major stories on the groundbreaking ceremony in each of
the three issues of the Rowan County News preceding that event.  If the
final story carried the streamer "Greatest Day Since College
Established" above the headline, in the penultimate issue the streamer
read "The Day We Have Been Praying For."  The article in that issue
begins, "Ground breaking for Morehead's new hospital-Saint Claire-will
be at the site [a natural enough assumption], intersection of 2nd
Street and Fleming Avenue, the afternoon of Friday, Sept.  29

I [1961]," and continues, Announcement of the long awaited start of
construction ... was made this morning following a meeting of the 14
member steering committee composed of Northeast Kentucky Hospital
Foundation, Inc and Monsignor Charles A.

Towell, Covington Diocesan Director of Catholic Hos 'tals....

First spade of dirt will be turned by Most Reverend Richard E.

Ackerman, Bishop of the Diocese of Covington.  The principal address
will come from Dr.  Adron Doran, President of Morehead State College.

Commonh Attorney Elijah M. Hogge will be Master of rues- Also on ii the
program are Rev.

John Conleas or of the First Church of God, who will give the
invocation; Rev.  Thomas Ditto, pastor of the Morehead Methodist
Church, who will render the benediction and Hospital Foundation
President C. P. Caudill [Louise's uncle and president of the Peoples
Bank] who will present [the] Sisters of Notre Dame, who will operate
the hospital; members of the steering committee; and Dr. C. Louise
Caudill for whom the hospital, in a sense, was named.

The ceremony starts at 2 o'clock on the 29th with a downtown parade by
the Rowan County High School.  The band of Morehead State College will
furnish music at the site, and is scheduled for one number during the
ceremonies.

Caudill said that Major William H. Layne and County judge Carljones
will issue a proclamation asking all business places to close for two
hours-from 2 P.m. until 4 P.m.-on the day of ground breaking.  . .

.

Though Crutcher didn't sell the newspaper until 1976, he must have
turned over much of the reportorial work to others at the time the name
was changed to the Morehead News in 1962 or 1963, for the writing style
becomes less flamboyant.  The paper gave wide, but more restrained,
coverage to the June 1963 dedication of the hospital.

Baptist clergymen of even the more liberal sects seem to have been
absent from this ceremony, as they were from the one for the
groundbreaking, for they are not mentioned in the news accounts of
either event.  Prayers were offered by Bishop Ackerman, as well as by
two local Protestant pastors-Reverend Conley of the First Church of
God, joined this time by Reverend Charles L. Brooks, pastor of Louise's
own Christian church.  The major address was by Dr.  William R.
Willard, vice president and dean of the recently established University
of Kentucky Medical Center.  Monsignor Towell, who laid the
cornerstone, gave a shorter speech.  In it, he acknowledged the
effectiveness of Louise's letters and phone calls, which finally
brought him to Morehead on an investigatory trip, and he described the
effect on him as he stepped into her clinic, filled as it was that day
with mothers and their newborn babies.  The Morehead News journalist,
while making more deletions from Towell's speech than Crutcher probably
would have, gives the essence of his remarks.  Referring "to the call
[that had] come from Dr. Caudill, " he said that .  . .it was a
pathetic plea for her people.  . . . We have many such requests .  .

.

but she would not give up and she called and called and pleaded and
pleaded.  . . . So I decided to come to Morehead.  . . . When I arrived
at her offices I saw four newborn babies [had the fifth still been in
the delivery room, I wonder?], and they all seemed to be reaching out
for help.  . . . Then and there I decided if possible, under God, I
would do something for this community.

The article goes on to remark that "the crowd applauded" his remarks,
and "kept applauding when Dr.  Caudill was introduced.

She made a brief, simple speech" in which she referred to the medical
center as a symbol of the united nature of the community and the
diverse faiths that had made it possible.

In the major address, Dr. Dillard told the audience, "The eyes of the
medical profession in Kentucky ... yes, in the United States ... are
looking on you today, and your future planning and progress will be
closely observed."  Dr. Willard was referring to the
almost-withoutprecedent manner in which St. Claire Medical Center will
be conducted.

Sisters of Notre Dame own and administer the hospital.

But, in order to attract doctors and specialists to Morehead, a
"Professional Fund" was created, and a cooperative arrangement
finalized with the ilK center.

(It is believed no other hospital in the nation has such a threeprong
agreement.) If by "the eyes of the medical profession," Dr. Willard
was referring to the American Medical Associationparticularly its state
affiliate the Kentucky Medical Association
such other groups as the Kentucky
Association-or Academy of General Practice, he surely was correct in
assuming they were watching closely.  With the encouragement of Dr.
Willard and the advice and sup isis on the University of Kentucky port
of two ideal' Medical Center staff, Louise had embraced a structure for
meeting her third requirement-a staff of skilled specialists.

The structure, being 'nnovat've, was bound to arouse the antagonism of
entrenched professional organizations.

8

Dr. Willard and the two other doctors from the University of Kentucky
Medical Center who gave particular assistance to Louise in bringing her
"good" hospital into existence have long since left the state.  One of
them, Dr. Richard Segnitz, a pediatrics surgeon for more than thirty
years, is now "a rural doctor, much like Louise, " he told me in a
telephone conversation from his cabin above the Missouri Breaks in
Montana.  He is employed by the Public Health Service and has an office
a hospital adjacent to a reservation; many of his patients are
Indians.  The other, Dr. Edmund D. Pellegrino, who then was professor
and chairman of the department of medicine at the center, is now
director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics aiidjohn Carroll Professor
of Medicine and Medical Humanities at Georgetown University in
Washington, D.C. Of the two, Segnitz gave the greater personal help,
often driving from Lexington to Morehead to confer with Louise about
problems and their solutions, to suggest organizations that might offer
financial support for a hospital, to recommend the names of physicians
for the hospital staff, and so on.  Most of the actual grant
applications were the work of Robert Johnson, Willard's administrative
assistant, another strong supporter of the proposed Morehead hospital.

"Dick Segnitz came up a Million times, " Louise told me.  But it was
Pellegrino, who also made a number of visits, who sug1 the hostility of
gested the kind of structure that, despite the medical associations,
enabled St. Claire Medical Center in its crucial beginning years to
attract specialists with an unusually strong commitment to patient
care that is, doctors not un i like objects herself.

Louise first met Segnitz in- exington in 1961, at a symposium on heart
problems.  Open-heart surgery was a new technique at the time, and
Segnitz, a member of the team that had performed the first such
operation in Kentucky, spoke on the topic.  The story of their meeting
is one Louise likes to tell.  Before the symposium, and during the
intermissions, she talked with him about her hopes for the Morehead
hospital.  At one point, she told him that she "wanted to find somebody
to get us going," and he replied, as she remembers it, 'I think I know
such a person."

" After the symposium ended, Louise says that "she tagged along after
him," wanting to find out the name of the individual he had in mind.

"I asked him, 'Who?  Who is this person?"  'To tell the truth,' he
admitted [and here Louise, in retelling this old story to me,
chuckled], 'I was thinking about myself ' " Indeed, he not only agreed
to be on the staff of the new hospital, but indicated his willingness
to serve as its initial director.  He was intrigued by the
possibilities of a plan suggested by Pellegrino, who had helped to one
at a new hospital in New jersey.

institute a simi At Pellegrino's suggestion, Segnitz, Louise, Susie,
and Sister Mary Edwin (appointed as the first administrator of St.
Claire) traveled to Flemington, New jersey, to visit that hospital, the
Hunterdon County Medical Center, which had been in operation for almost
a decade.  Before coming to Kentucky to help establish its new center,
Pellegrino-much of whose professional life has been devoted, as he
says, "to starting things from scratch"-was medical director and
chairman of the department of medicine of the Hunterdon center, and he
thought that its philosophy and organizational structure, which he felt
to be in keeping with attitudes about medicine he shared with Louise,
Segnitz, and Sister Mary Edwin, could serve as a model for the new
hospital in Morehead.

A book-length "Interim report" on the Hunterdon center, written by its
first director, Dr. Ray E. Trussell, was published in 1955 by Harvard
University Press under the title Hunterdon Medical Center: The Sto One
Approach to Rural Medical Care.  In his acknowledgments, Trussell
expresses gratitude to Pellegrino, 46 the present director of the
Center, who worked so effectively to get the Center under way and still
serves as director of internal medicine."

(Pellegrino, who had come to Hunterdon as chief of medicine in 1953,
left in 1959 for the new challenge at Lexington.) What Louise found at
Hunterdon delighted her.  Two women-Mrs. Rae',Z.) Angell, the county
welfare director, and Mrs. Wllli--am F. Leicester, a local resident
with experience in organization and public relationshad been as
instrumental as Louise in getting a campaign for a hospital under way
and, again like Louise, had held out for a hospital that was more than
a conventional "lying-in" facility.  Hunterdon had been fortunate in
developing a unique relationship with Bellevue Hospital in New York
that, as Trussell describes it, would not only provide to the local
physic' i ians an opportunity for professional development but would
also bring to the people of a rural county medical and health services
of the highest quality.  By this alliance the rural center I would,
in turn, develop into a teaching unit, not only for practicing
physicians, but also for medical students, interns and residents
nurses, and those in the so-called paramedical occupations and
professions.

Probably the most unusual feature of the Hunterdon Medical Center .

.

. is the appointment of general practitioners of the county to the
staff of the hospital.  Under this type of staff organization they
assume the responsibilities of medical care of the local citizens
jointly with the full-time specialists who direct the various departments
of the center.  No record of a previous experimental organization of
this kind has been found in the annals of American medicine.

While Trussell's book provides a clear exposition of the beginnings and
philosophy of the Hunterdon center, which indeed became the model for
the Morehead hosital, I felt it would be helpful to talk with
Pellegrino, p who had been so influential in the Morehead decision.

Besides, the entries about him in Who's Who in America and the various
volumes devoted to medical biographies intrigued me, for he obviously
has played an important role in a number of administrative and
structural innovations that have come to American medicine.

After helping to develop the University of Kentucky Medical Center,
Pellegrino became dean of the new School of Medicine at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook and founding director of the
Health Sciences Center there.  The center includes, in addition to the
medical school, others in dentistry, nursing, allied health, and social
welfare-the largest comprehensive health sciences center "started from
scratch" in the United States and perhaps 'n the world.  He left Stony
Brook in 1973 to become chancellor of the Center for the Health
Sciences, vice president for health affairs, and professor of medicine
and humanities in medicine at the University of Tennessee at Memphis,
managing, in his two year tenure, to institute a statewide program of
clinical campuses linked with the one at Memphis.

1 Then he went to Yale as president and chairman of the Yale-New Haven
Medical Center, his task there to devise a new administrative structure
while serving also as a professor of medicine.

In 1978, Pellegrino was appointed president of the Catholic University
of America in Washington, D.C and a professor of philosophy and
biology, somehow also finding time to be a professor of clinical
medicine and community medicine at Georgetown University School of
Medicine.  He became a professor of medicine and medical humanities at
Georgetown in 1982, and the following year the director of that
university's Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a "think tank" on ethical
issues involving law, business, technology, international relations,
and applied ethics, as well as medicine and biology.  He remains in
both those posts at Georgetown.

Pellegrino has accomplished so much in his lifetime that I wondered, in
taking a taxi to the Kennedy institute in October 1988, if he would
remember much about a smallish hospital in Rowan County that he once
had been interested in, and about a rural doctor there.  It turned out
that he remembers his Kentucky years with remarkable clarity.  Talking
about humanistic ideals brings a shine to his eyes (reminding me of the
gleam in Louise's) and even makes his nose wiggle, when he expresses a
strong feeling, but he arranges his thoughts in a concise and logical
progression.  He is a slender man of average height, in his late
sixties.

"Louise," Pellegrino said, "had the same kind of dedication to quality
that I had encountered in the women of Hunterdon County.  Her
motivations were the highest; her part absolutely essential."  An
outsider can't come in with a plan, he explained; there must be
"somebody on the inside who says 'this is a good plan Louise bought the
idea completely."  The Hunterdon plan that she "bought" had been
developed in a rural New jersey area with no hospital and no medical
specialists.

("Yes, there is a rural New jersey, too," Pellegrino said, remarking
that, at least in post-World War II, the main income for Hunterdon
County's 65,000 residents came from dairy and poultry operations.)
Pellegrino acknowledged that he had a major role in the Hunterdon
philosophy, though, he said, "it would be unfair to say it was mine."

The original concept of affiliation with a university, and of a
hospital with full-time chiefs of service who also would serve on the
faculty of that university, had already been sketched out by a
consultant from the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr.  E. H. L.

Corwin.

Pellegrino had been brought in "to help fill in what all this meant."

Pellegrino essentially set up the program.  "You can is means to
imagine," he said, "what the a thirty-two-year-old guy-to come out to a
rural community and I say what we're going to do!"  He enumerated for
me the features of the planned new program, beginning with its
enhancement of the role of county practitioners.

First, "every practitioner in the county would have de facto hospital
privileges in medicine" and "would have a choice: to Care for the
patient himself under the supervision of the chief of medicine, or to
ask for formal consultation."  In the former case, the practitioner
would "write the orders and arrange for the discharge of the patient,
and so on, " although Pellegrino would 66 make rounds every day, seeing
the patients with the house staff and medical students."  The
practitioner could have an informal consultation with Pellegrino 46 any
time he wanted it without cost to the patient."  Under the other option
the patient would be turned over to Pellegrino for continuing or
temporary care.  Intended to keep a balance between full-time
specialists and practitioners, this system "worked splendidly in the
seven years I was there," Pellegrino said.  "It was something we
haven't achieved in many places: it remains an ideal, and I'm
enthusiastic about it still."  Second, "It would be a teaching
hospital, with doctors teaching doctors" in accordance with the method
worked out by the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center staff
Third, the plan would provide comprehensive care, ranging from "
preventive to tertiary to primary [care], from curative physical
ailments to social work, and so on."

A final feature-"talk about revolutionary principles!"  Pellegrino
exclaimed, his nose giving a little twitch-was that "full-time members
of the hospital staff would be salaried, thus not in competition with
the practitioners."  Since they received a salary, the specialists
would have "no financial incentive to do things not required."  There
would be no unnecessary surgery.  "It was two years before our surgery
department took out a normal appendix!"  he declared, with a smile.

Pediatrician, psychiatrist, surgeon-all were to be paid the same
amount.

In discussing with me her attitudes toward medicine, Louise had
referred several times to the Hunterdon plan as one that suited her
philosophy; it must have seemed to her a confirmation of her own views
when, in visiting the Hunterdon center, she perceived the apparently
successful operation of such a plan.  She liked, of course, the
emphasis on the county practitioner, the one who all along had treated
the patient, and who in the Hunterdon scheme not only was the one who
saw to it that the patient was admitted to the hospital, but could
continue taking care of the patient after admission.  Beyond this,
Louise approved of the salary arrangement.  "To my mind, that's the
right idea," she said.  "You ought to be equally equal.  Here's
something that's always bothered me: the surgeon comes in and makes,
say, two cuts, and then sews everything up.  He makes all the money;
the guy who does the workout, who had diagnosed the problem, who tells
the surgeon what to do, gets much less."  (In recent years, though, she
admits to having changed her ideas a little: "Some of those surgeons,"
she confessed to me, "are pretty darn smart.") Like Louise, the Sisters
of Notre Dame approved of the concept, once it had been explained to
them; Pellegrino said he found it much harder "to sell his plan to the
church officials."  With the sisters who were planning the hospital, he
made separate visits to Bishop Ackerman and Monsignor Towell.  The
latter became skeptical of Pellegrino's enthusiasm for a Hunterdontype
plan at Morehead.  Pellegrino remembers Towell as saying, "Before you
get into all of this, tell me, if you were so successful at Hunterdon,
why did you come down to Kentucky?"  The implication of that remark,
Pellegrino told me, "was that anybody who came to Kentucky couldn't be
worth much," and he responded to it carefully and as honestly as he
could: "I said, 'With all respect, Monsignor, you must appreciate that
I regard the ideas being developed at the University of Kentucky
Medical Center and the possibilities at Morehead to be challenges of
the greatest significance to me personally and to American medicine.

I've always based my decisions on a job on the pursuit of an ideal, and
here in Kentucky I'm in pursuit of the same idealhow to improve rural
health care-that I was in New jersey.

Pellegrino said that he had been distressed upon coming to Kentucky "by
the feeling that somehow the people from the Northeast were smarter.

iveness,
sometimes bravado.

The Medical School at the University of Kentucky was a pioneer at the
time in a whole series of things," including rural health and the
(The hope had been for
a series of them, but St. Claire remains the only such satellite in
the state.) "Yale, Harvard, Columbia weren't doing anything
extraordinary at the time," Pellegrino told me.

"Kentucky was, and that's why I went there."

Louise, that unusually modest doctor, says that her success in bringing
to Morehead the kind of hospital that met, or perhaps even surpassed,
her own concept of a "good" one was wholly a matter of fortunate
timing.  That is, Dr. Howard brought her the belief in its possibility
at the right moment; Monsignor Towell arrived at her clinic when it was
filled with more than enough babies to astonish him; and she met
Segnitz, Willard, and Pellegrino 'just as they were looking for a i way
to achieve something new that would be extraordinary.

9

Excavation for the hospital already had been completed by the time the
Northeast Kentucky Medical Foundation, with Monsignor Towell's consent,
reached an arrangement with the University of Kentucky Medical a
teaching hospital based largely on the Hunterdon plan.  Partly because
the hospital would be owned by the Sisters of Notre Dame, whereas the
specialists would be salaried employees of the local foundation, an
addition to the hospital, providing offices and clinical space for
these specialists, was necessary at once; these were the changes in the
architectural plans that made mandatory the supplementary fund drive.

In its issue of February 15, 1962, the an County News revealed the
story of the "new d pment" that "almost from a clear sky" had resolv
'the staffing problem of the yet-to-be constructed hospital, ensuring
its status as a major health facility instead of a 'lying-in' home."

In the article, Crutcher summarizes the "salient facets" of the
proposal, treating it as if it were already almost a _fait accompli:
The University of Kentucky Medical Center is something more than a
place to train doctors, nurses and dentists.  One of its primary aims
is to bring the fullest, and most modern, health care to all of
Kentucky.

. . . The University Center can, and will, provide at least four
specialists to Morehead-internal medicine, pathology, surgery and
radiology.

Center to make St. Claire These four specialists will be full-time
resident physicians at St. Claire, but will teach one day each week at
the Lexington center.  They will be on the U.K. staff.

. . . The specialists will handle cases referred to them by
physicians.

This means, in a broad sense, from general Practitioners in this area
of Kentucky.

A salary of $15,000 a year for each of the four specialists .  . . was
discussed as the probable contract.

Northeast Kentucky Hospital Foundation .  . . would underwrite the
annual salaries.

All fees and charges by the four specialists would revert to the
Northeast Kentucky Hospital Foundation.

. . . It is conclusive from other places where the plan has worked
successfully [this apparently refers not only to Hunterdon but to
Cooperstown, New York, which had developed a somewhat different
administrative structure, though it was affiliated in a similar way
with a university medical center and its specialists were indeed on
salary] that charges made by the four specialists will meet their
salaries with the possible exception of the first year .  . .

Given such a plan (one that apparently reflected a tendency in medicine
in the early 1960s, that decade which soon was to advance many other
alarmingly idealistic causes), it is no wonder that the medical
associations, as well as individual specialists, would want to disrupt
it.  While the relationship with the University of Kentucky Medical
Center was to remain, the more controversial aspects of the Hunterdon
plad.  lasted barely two yearsthe only defeat that I know of for Louise
in her entire medical career, and one that, when it came, she accepted
without bitterness and, indeed, with considerable grace, of it
constituted an inevitable compromise with the as ideal in this, our
imperfect human world.

10

In the years after Dr. Pellegrino left Hunterdon, the plan there
underwent some drastic compromises much as it did in Morehead.  In both
cases, the medical assocrations were in fierce opposition to a system
in which physicians received salaries and thus were unable to determine
their own fees and profits.

Pellegrino said that even during his tenure at Hunterdon members of the
medical community and organized medicine accused the staff of unethical
practices because we were willing to accept salaries.  They thought we
were exposing ourselves to exploitation.  It's interesting that none
of us felt exploited."  A similar attack on the Northeast Kentucky Ho
Foundation, the employers of the doctors there, from the Kentucky
Medical Association; it was bpi speech to that group that Louise
admitted she had bungled, chiefly from her belief that the virtues of
the plan were so self-evident that she needed no rhetorical gift or
strategy to persuade other members of her profession of its merits.

She told me she received a letter from the KMA cautioning her against
"government medicine," apparently a reference to the link between St.
Claire Medical Center and the University of Kentucky, and another from
the Kentucky Academy of General Practice warning her of "the dangers of
socialized medicine.

Of course I wanted to see those letters, but neither Louise nor Susie
knew where they were, or cared to look for them.  "They were snotty,"
Louise said.

"They made me mad every time I saw them"; and Susie said, "They were
'just awful."

As Louise and Pellegrino separately pointed out to me, the present-day
attitudes of medical associations are less rigid regarding salaries
than they were in the 1960s.  Hospitals and other groups now routinely
employ salaried specialists-for example, anesthesiologists,
pathologists, radiologists, and emergency-room physicians-without
opposition from the medical societies.  But the opposition of those
societies to this major aspect of the plan in Hunterdon and Morehead
carried serious consequences for both hospitals.

Concerning his Hunterdon experience, Pellegrino admitted that "the
threat distressed us," explaining that, for example, the attitudes of
organized medicine "could have negative effects so far as referring
physicians [to us] were concerned.  He believes that it was Hunterdon's
very "success with patients that engendered the invidious allegations
of exploitation."  Too (as seems apparent to me from the difficulties
with the plan at Morehead), the position of the medical societies was
advantageous to individual specialists who for reasons of their own
'opposed a salary arraiigemeiit.

Pellegrino has written more than 350 articles and scientific papers, as
well as a number of books and monographs, some of them in collaboration
with others.  The titles of many of the articles and of a majority of
the books-for example, Humanism and the Physician (1 979), A
Philosophical Basis o Medical Practice: Toward a Philos!f ophy and
Ethic of the Healing Professions (1981), and For the Patient's Good:
The Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care (1987)-suggest his
interest in connecting, or reconnecting, medicine with values that
transcend economics.

"I'm not a socialist," he told me, "but I believe in something beyond
profit.

We're in difficult straits in medicine today because profit is
dominating the scene."  in both his Newjersey and Kentucky experiences,
"surgeons constituted those most insistent upon the profit motive.  In
any debate on the subject, the swing vote was usually in the hands of
radiologists, anesthesiologists, and pathologists.  On fiscal matters
they occupied an intermediate position between the surgeons and [those
in] the surgical specialties on the one hand, and the internists,
pediatricians, general practitioners, and psychiatrists on the
other."

Internal grumblings about the system that converted medical specialists
into salaried employees had occurred at Hunterdon while Pellegrino was
medical director.  "The ophthalmologist said, 'Ed, we have the best
medical care I'm ever going to practice in my life, but I want to see
the color of my money.  I can't work this way."  I said, 'Fine, you
have my benediction,' and I replaced him within a month; you have to
let them go, when they don't find that way suitable to their
interests.

. . . The program was wonderful, we never had difficulty in getting
young people to come.  But you have to get people who are interested in
medicine and patient care.  Greed and selfishness, I think, brought the
program down.

" People, including those on hospital boards, "let doctors intimidate
them, " Pellegrino thinks.  At Hunterdon, the salary system collapsed
after his departure because "the board members lost their courage" when
the radiologists wanted to "remain fulltime and draw their salary and
still have a radiology unit across the street from the hospital," a
demand that was in violation of their signed contract.  "The board of
trustees didn't want to take them to court, didn't have the
resolution.

" At St. Claire Medical Center, the problems with the plan surfaced at
the very beginning, for the chief of surgery at the University of
Kentucky Medical Center refused to send surgical interns to Morehead.

According to Louise, he "thought the interns shouldn't practice in any
way except under him."  Pellegrino "just couldn't understand why the
Sam Hill" the surgical department at the University of Kentucky Medical
Center wouldn't participate.

"He held a board meeting and tried his best to explain," she said, but
it wasn't until major changes in the Hunterdon plan were made at
Morehead that surgical interns were permitted to come.

The impasse over those interns also brought about the withdrawal of
Segnitz, who, according to Louise, had done "more than anybody else in
getting the hospital set up."  Discouraged by the lack of s interns,
Segnitz decided against becoming dire the new hospital and, shortly
before St. Claire opened, also withdrew his offer to serve as chief of
surgery.  (In our telephone conversation, he told me he had decided he
could be of more help to St. Claire by staying at the University of
Kentucky Medical Center, where he might be able to work from within to
convince the chief of surgery there to supply interns to Morehead; too,
he was disappointed that a friend, an internist whose skills he admired
and whom he had hoped would join him at the new hospital, had declined
the offer.) Segnitz, though, worked to obtain a suitable replacement
for himself as the initial director of St. Claire.  Through his
efforts and those of Willard and Pellegrino, Dr. Herbert Hudnut, an
internist in residency at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown,
New York (the hospital with some affinities with Hunterdon and
Morehead), agreed to come as director and chief of medicine.

Hudnut stayed at St. Claire for only two years, but by the time he
left, he had recruited several more specialists, the hospital was
operating at capacity, and plans were under way to double the number of
beds.  Both Hudnut and Louise were gratified by the success of the
hospital's disaster plan in meeting its first major test.  During the
hospital's second year, a school bus slipped over an embankment,
resulting in a number of major injuries.  The hospital had practiced
beforehand for such an emergency.  "In eastern Kentucky, one sick or
injured person is often accompanied by thirty relatives," Hudnut said,
remembering the congestion at the hospital as part of the problem.

"People came from all over to offer blood, to do whatever they could to
help.

We pinned notices on those who had been hurt, indicating their
injuries and the need for X-rays.  Warren Proudfoot [the chief of
surgery] did a marvelous job of i triaging, determining those we could
treat at Morehead, those who had to be sent by ambulance to
Lexington."

Hudnut had accepted the medical directorship at St. Claire because he
liked the Hunterdon plan, which, among other virtues, had the built-in
ability to circumvent the "sticky fingers" of specialists who wanted to
hold on to their patients instead of sending them back to practitioners
"like Dr.  Louise."

But the plan wasn't so advantageous to Louise as it might seem: "I
think it must have been difficult for Louise and Susie when obstetrics
was brought into the hospital," Hudnut said.  "They already had a good
system of care with their clinic.  The new system was much less
efficient for them; but they were willing, because of the overall
benefits, to accommodate to the new concept.

What a sparky person Louise is!  She gets full credit for getting the
hospital going."

During Hudnut's tenure, a greater problem than the lack of surgical
interns came from the surgeons on the staff, who had a number of
objections to the Hunterdon-type system, including the salary
arrangement which gave them no preferment over the other specialists.

The Northeast Kentucky Hospital Foundation made a small salary
compromise in favor of the surgeons, but not enough to satisfy them.

Hudnut, who it saw the writing on the wall," resigned as medical
director and, shortly afterward, as chief of medicine.  He left
Morehead for the University of Rochester, to become assistant professor
of medicine and assistant dean; in 1971, he began his private practice
in Glens Falls, New York.  (Since the imminent failure of a crucial
aspect of the Hunterdon plan at St. Claire meant that he would have to
revert to "the regular kind of practice," he decided he'd rather do
that "regular practicing" in upstate New York.) Several months after
his departure, the St. Claire physicians severed their connection with
the Northeast Kentucky Hospital Foundation.  judge Hogge, a board
member of the foundation, said that specialists had been I attracted to
the hospital by the idealistic nature of the Hunterdonlike proposal,
but became discouraged by the small number of patients they got.

They felt that the few general practitioners who were practicing in
the region weren t making sufficient referrals of their patients to
them.  Soon the surgeons and other specialists began to complain about
further problems with the system.  "It got so that it wasn't very
pleasant," Hogge commented.  "I remember one day they said that unless
the system was changed they wouldn't operate further.

It was what I would call a strike.  We met with three or four doctors
one morning for breakfast, and we had to.  surrender.

To Louise, the general practitioners weren't to blame for the failure
of much of the program.  "The surgeons didn't like to be paid the same
amount as the internists, it was as simple as that," she told me.  The
"strike" occurred while she and Susie were vacationing in the Middle
East.  She continues to feel "a loss" that the scheme failed, but is
philosophical about it-"What you believe, you can't make everybody else
believe"-and she recognizes that St. Claire, operating under,a more
conventional policy (the specialists, fully separated from the Northeast
Kentucky Hospital Foundation, have established two major clinics in
town), has prospered, becoming a model for other areas.  St. Claire
remains a teaching hospital associated with the University of Kentucky
Medical Center, as well as a hospital that has a cooperative arrangement with the general practitioners.  "You find people coming here that
have been in the big places," she said.  "They say they can't
understand a hospital like this in a town like this.  I don't think
there's a rural hospital anywhere that's any better."

The success of St. Claire Medical Center is summarized in an article
written by Sister Mary jeannette, its administrator, and David Bolt,
its assistant administrator of outreach service, in an article that
appeared in the Journal of September 1988 issue of Health
Progress, in the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

(Pellegrino serves on its editorial board.) That article, while
mentioning the two major expansion programs (in 1972 and 1980) that
have raised the number of beds from 41 to its current 170, finds that
"the centerpiece of St. Claire's development" is its home care and
hospice program, its outlying clinics, and its growth in specialty
services: St. Claire, which had a medical staff of three in 1963, now
boasts a staff of 35 active physician members.  In addition, three of
the five private practitioners in the community have staff
privileges.

A majority of the medical staff is affiliated with the two
multispecialty group practices in Morehead.  Morehead Clinic, adjacent
to the hospital, has five internists, two obstetrician/gynecologists, a
pediatrician, a pyschiatrist, an opthalmologist, a family practitioner,
and an oral surgeon in private practice- The Cave Run Clinic, a fourth
of a mile from the hospital, has two general surgeons, two vascular
surgeons, three orthopedists, two urologists, a plastic surgeon, and a
family practitioner.  Other specialties are on a consultant basis at
each of the clinics.

These include neurosurgery, dermatology, hematology/oncology, and
cardiology.  A joint recruitment program between the hospital and
these two clinics targets up to 12 new physician specialists during
the next year.

I have no way of knowing, of course, whether a hospital in a small
town (according to the 1990 census figures, Morehead's population,
excluding university students, is about 8,300, and the population of
Rowan County slightly over 20,000) in the hills of eastern Kentucky
could have attracted so many specialists without the dismemberment of
that part of the original program that not only made salaried employees
of its physicians but insisted upon equal salaries among those
specialists.  But given a whole society that typically equates freedom
and the pursuit of happiness more with material than spiritual
possibilities, it seems unlikely.

. St. Claire continues to expand.  A new obstetrics wing (a portrait
of Louise by a local artist, Christine Barker, hangs there) was
dedicated in the late spring of 1988, and a
two-and-a-quarter-million-dollar cancer treatment center (a joint
venture of the hospital and i clinic physicians that will provide
radiation therapy services) the following year.  Though the 1989
recruitment goal was not quite met, by 1990 the staff of physicians had
increased to forty-four, including specialists in nephrology and
hematology/oncology.  According to an article in the August 28, 1990,
Morehead News, official .  s of the center are completing plans for yet
another major expansion, which will include "a larger emergency room,
an expanded radiology department, a new intensive care unit, and a new
acute patient unit."

Susie may be "more adamant toward medicine today" than Louise considers
herself to be, but she more openly concedes that it was "'just as well"
that the phyi sicians are no longer salaried employees.  Hudnut
believes that St. Claire represents "a tremendous success story": the
Hunterdon philosophy helped it to establish "high standards from the
beginning," and-abetted by the continuing idealism and commitment of
the "hardworking Sisters of Notre Dame," as well as a superb medical
staff-it has maintained those standards.

Pellegrino, the instigator of the Hunterdon plan at Morehead, thinks
that in general it is better to be defeated than to win victory through
reprehensible means that appeal to the selfishness within all of us.

He illustrated the point through a reference to a past presidential
election: "Nondale said he'd raise taxes, and got clobbered; but he oes
down with his reputation intact."  But even Pellegrino sees the
inevitability of some compromise.  He told me, "Even with the failure
of the ideal, Hunterdon and Morehead are better hospitals than they
would have been, " a fact that "fits my view: set the ideal high
enough, and you end up with something better than you would have had
otherwise."

Despite Louise's strictures against federal bureaucracy in health care,
governmental programs have been important to the hospital in Morehead
and its outreac programs.  In their article in Health Progress, Sister
Mary jeannette and David Bolt say that in the eleven counties of its
primary service area, c6unemployment ranges from 7 percent to more than
25 percent," the highest rate being in the "coal" counties of
Appalachia, and that medical assistance programs and Medicare are the
largest insurers" of the patients treated.  These administrators seem
to have but one worry about the future of their hospital; they remark
that "although St. Claire is.  a designated rural referral center for
the Medicare program, future changes in the reimbursement formula,
such as decreasing payment to rural hospitals, could be crucial.  "
Indeed, ominous signs are beginning to appear.  Since the
administrators wrote their article, a number of rural hospitals (much
smaller ones than St. Claire, and apparently of the "lying-in" sort
that Louise deplores) have closed because of a lowering of the
reimbursement rate to rural facilities, which are considered cheaper to
operate than their urban counterparts.  Within the past year, I have
read a number of newspaper accounts concerning the possibility of
further cuts in Medicare assistance.  According to one article, "the
thrust of the approach [so far] has been to cut into the profits of
providers such as hospitals rather than reducing benefits."  Will such
a tendency continue, threatening even hospitals like St. Claire with
bankruptcy?  One official of the federal government's Health Care
Financing Administration thinks that the next round of cost-cutting
will not affect hospitals; rather, he believes that "the next target
will be doctor fees and that the outcry will be intense."

The Kennedy institute of Ethics is only a short distance from the
nation's Capitol, and its director, who has had considerable experience
in such matters, would be one person for the government agency to
consult; another would be a doctor in a small town in eastern
Kentucky.

Her sign may be gone from her clinic, but federal officials could ask
anybody in town where to find Dr. Louise and get the directions at
once.

During my years at Morehead, the college song was based on the tune of
"i Wonder as I Wander, " which, according to a local rumor, John Jacob
Niles had first heard at the bus station in town, while listening to
the blind ballad singer.  Apparently the source of that rumor was Niles
himself, for he wanted the ballad to seem a genuine folk song;
actually, as he later confessed, it was his own composition.  Whatever
its genesis, the melody is a lovely one, the words appropriate enough
to the isolation and religiosity of Rowan County's past culture.

Though I then knew little of that culture, I was aware, as I have
indicated, of a local sensitivity to some aspects of it, its
provincialism as well as its Propensity toward violence, and assumed
that such a sensitivity underlay the college's attempt to replace the
melody of "I Wonder as I Wander" with that of "High Above Cayuga's
Waters," the song of the university I was to desert Morehead for.

Fortunately, a competition for appropriate words to accompany that tune
produced nothing suitable and the proposal was dropped.

That it ever had been made-by people who believed in the authenticity
of the ballad they would replace must seem quaint, if not
incomprehensible, to the curator of Appalachian materials at the Morehead
State University library and the majority of the faculty, as well as
most of the present-day residents of the community.  Morehead's
insularity is now quite gone, and all defensiveness toward what once
was.  (Blind ballad singers are gone, too, not only because the old
culture was connected with the insularity, but because cases of
blindness-that handicap, once almost endemic to the region, which
strengthens the voices of memory-have sharply declined, perhaps through
dietary improvements as well as medical advances.) Though I have
stressed Cora Stewart and Louise Caudill, a history of the spiritual
and material changes that have marked Rowan County since the days of
Craig Tolliver's brutal despotism would have to include the activities
of even more people than the ones I have referred to in this account.

Many federal and state programs developed from the legacies of
individuals like these.

But especially in the years since I left Morehead, governmental
programs have played an increasing role.

County roads have improved remarkably since the days that Cora Stewart
initiated a secondary campaign to improve them.

Federal funds, of course, paid for the construction of Interstate 64,
which, connecting Morehead not only to Ashland and Lexington but to the
whole network of similar highways spanning the nation, ended the
isolation of the region in a way the railroad tracks never had.  In
addition, the Army Corps of Engineers' dam on the Licking River has
increased the recreational facilities, bringing thousands of outsiders
to the county for swimming, boating, fishing, and camping at Cave Run
State Park.

While Medicare and other federal assistance plans have provided much of
the hospital's income, permitting its growth, the state has subsidized
the transformation of the small college I knew into the university it
has become.  According to an account in the Morehead News of November
30, 1990, Morehead State University had a fall-term enrollment of 8,622
students, an increase of over fifty percent since 1985.  (The college
became a university in 1966, three years after St. Claire opened.) The
graduate programs lead to a doctoral degree in education, and master's
degrees in fields as diverse as business administration, studio art,
health, English, communications, vocational education, biology,
psychology, and sociology.

The growth of the university is intimately connected with that of the
hospital:- the university provides cultural enhancements for physicians
who might otherwise hesitate to move to such a small town, while the
presence of a hospital is necessary to attract both a large student
body and a capable faculty.  The two institutions have an academic
bond; the university's nursing program, which includes the licensing of
registered nurses, uses St.  Claire for clinical training.

Like St. Claire, the university has established branch
locations-satellites-throughout eastern Kentucky and now embraces the
regional history, customs, and traditions that it once had shunned.

Not only has it moved "Little Brushy," the first rural schoolhouse in
which Cora Wilson Stewart taught, to a prominent place on the campus,
but according to a Morehead News article on October 14, 1988, the
university theater department staged a production of "First Shots of
Rage," described as "an original play depicting the Martin-Tolliver
feud in Rowan County.

" The nine performances were staged "In the old Rowan County
Courthouse, the site of the .  . . incidents" that were being
dramatized.  And, on September 7, 1990, the premiere performance of
"Miss Cora,'9 a multimedia production based on the life of Cora Wilson
Stewart, was staged in Button Auditorium.

12

Most of the acquaintances jean and I acquired during our six years in
Morehead have either died or left the area.  Bob Day, our the neighbor who
ran the Oldsmobile agency (the building burned to the ground some years
ago) died during the summer of 1988; his wife, Lorene9 appoi minted
to the college faculty shortly after my departure, died only weeks
after her husband.  (Bob's middle name, as I learned from his obituary,
was Button, and his mother was a Proctor, the latter connecting him to
Louise; possibly, then, he was related not only to the clergyman who
founded the normal school as an antidote to violence but to two
families-the Days and the Tollivers-involved in the feud.) Other than
Louise and Susie, the only people we knew at all well who remain in
town are Wilhelm ("Wilek") and Regina ("Gisa") Exelbirt.  Wilek, the
older of the pair, recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday.  A
Jewish couple from Vienna, they had escaped the Nazis to find security
in Morehead, where the erudite Wilhelm for decades served as a history
professor.  A lecture series at the university has been named in his
honor, and in 1990 he was given a Founders Day award for his long
service to the university.  (The front page of the Morehead News for
April 3 carries a large photograph of the acceptance of the award
plaque by Gisa for her husband, who had been unable to attend.  The
caption says that Exelbirt, an authority on Slavic European history,
has been described by author and fellow historian Alex Haley as "a
national treasure.") The little bungalow the Exelbirts purchased on
West Second Street (it now abuts the St. Claire parking lot) obviously
was of crucial importance to the security they found in Morehead.  It
was a place of much warm hospitality for their many friends; in the
early 1950s, jean and I often visited them in the evenings, listening
to opera recordings from Wilek's extensive collection and eating Gisa's
delicious Austrian pastries.  Their generosity was such that, when we
were getting ready to leave for upstate New York, they offered to
mortgage their house in order to buy ours, which we hadn't been able to
sell, so we would have the cash to complete the transaction for another
in Ithaca.  We refused, of course, but the memory of that offer has
remained, a bond with our Morehead past.

On each of our returns to Morehead, jean and I have gone out for lunch
or dinner at the Holiday Inn with Wilek and Gisa and on each occasion
have argued over which couple would pay the bill.

At our most recent meal there, Wilek spoke of the loss he felt at Bob
Bishop's decision to close the drugstore.  Wilek, who is bent by
arthritis and must use a cane, doesn't get out of the house much, but
for years one of his weekly excursions was to go by taxi to the
drugstore; he would buy the Sunday New York Times, look over the racks
of magazines and paperback books, have a cup of coffee at the fountain,
and chat with Bob and other customers.

The drugstore, I suspect, serves Wilek as token for much that is
gone.

At the first Holiday Inn dinner, he went into a disquisition with me,
telling me how fortunate it had been for me, as a writer, that William
the Conqueror had made a successful invasion of England in 1066, for
one of the results of that invasion had been the mingling of Romance
and Anglo-Saxon languages that made English the flexible instrument it
has become, with a vocabulary far in excess of all other major
languages.  On the spot, he constructed a paragraph that used only
words derived from the Anglo-Saxon, comparing it with a similar
paragraph based on words of Latin origin.  It was an agile performance,
a tour deforce that won the rapt attention of most of the diners in the
room, since Wilek's high-pitched voice carries well, particularly when
he is enthusiastic.  On warm spring days when classroom windows were
open, I used to hear that same lecturing voice wherever I might happen
to be, walking across a campus that then was small.  To hear it now,
after the passage of so many years, gave me the same feeling of
poignancy that the voices of Martin Bookspan and Pru Devin have given
me, as I have listened to them in the decades after leaving Morehead
and the spot of land that somehow brought in WQXR as if it were a local
station.  But Bookspan and Devin I knew only as voices on the ether.

Back in Morehead, I was glad to be sitting with jean at a table in the
restaurant of the Holiday Inn, located near the Interstate 64
interchange, with our old friends Wilek and Gisa there before us, noble
presences still.

In February 1988, jean and I received a letter from Sister Mary
jeannette, the administrator of St. Claire Medical.  Center, whom we
had met the previous year in Morehead while collecting information
about Dr. Louise and the hospital named for her as well as for the
actual Saint Claire.  (Sister Mary Borromeo, the head of the Catholic
order at the same time that the Sisters of Notre Dame agreed to run the
hospital, was the one who suggested St. Claire as a name that would
encompass both women.) The letter invited us to attend a community
celebration, on May 13, of "Dr. Louise Caudill's forty years of
practice and colorful life."  It was to be one of a number of events
that St. Claire Medical Center was planning for the twenty-fifth
anniversary year of the hospital's opening injuly 1963.  The program
honoring Dr. Louise would be held in Button Auditorium on the Morehead
State University campus, Sister Mary jeannette wrote, and would include
"school children and friends portraying her early and professional
life, music by jay Flippin's Combo and the Rowan County High School
Touring Choir, and dignitaries making presentations.  Many of her
'babies' will be present that night."

When Cris, our thirty-five-year-old son, learned that we planned to
attend, he said he wanted to accompany us: after all, he was the member
of the family who had been born in Kentucky, and he had not been back
since moving away at the age of three.  Dr. Louise had not delivered
him, for we had decided (as I have said) on a hospital birth-on the
night he was to be born I had driven jean the seventy miles of narrow
and twisting blacktop to Lexington-but he wanted to meet the doctor who
first took care of him, as well as to see the town where he had spent
his earliest years.

Button Auditorium seats maybe a thousand people.  In the early 1950s,
college enrollment had been small enough so that all the students would
fit into two-thirds of it for a weekly convocation that informally
still carried its normal school title of "chapel."

On the night of the celebration for Dr. Louise, the crowd made the
auditorium seem small, and unlike the students and faculty at the
compulsory chapel, the audience was light-hearted and expectant.

(Later I was to learn that originally the celebration had been planned
as a surprise for Dr. Louise-a secret impossible to keep in a town as
small as Morehead; and that when she learned it was to take place, she
gave "doctor's orders" that it had to be "fun," without any long-winded
testimonials.) Most of the seats in the hall were already taken, but
Louise and Susie, who saw us as we made our way toward the front, made
room for us in the rows that had been reserved for their relatives and
the friends from Louise's Morehead public school days who were living
in the area-those whose childhood roles were to be assumed by Rowan
County students in a series of skits.

The issue of the Morehead News that appeared the day of the celebration
carried an illustrated two-page article about the experiences and
achievements of both Louise and Susie and summarized some of the
material that was to appear in the skits that evening.  "No," the
feature writer, Alice Akin, wrote, the actors won't be professionals,
but they will undoubtedly be playing to a friendly audience, a large
section of which is likely to be made up of 'Dr. Louise babies."  And
if only a fraction of the nearly 8,000 babies spanked into life by Dr.
Louise show up for the celebration, it's reasonable to assume the
applause will be ear-splitting."  J. D. Reeder, assistant principal of
Rowan County High School, served as master of ceremonies, introducing
the various skits (all of them written by Ellie Reser, a local resident
and former nurse) and later the speakers who gave the brief
testimonials.  Rowan County Middle School children enacted scenes from
Louise's early years, including a prank in which she, her sister
Lucille, and other chums escorted a pony up the stairs of a friend's
house and into the attic while the friend's parents were away.  Older
pupils played the parts of Louise and her high school companions: in
that scene, "Louise" and "Bob Bishop" discussed their recent victory in
a debate at another school, and "Bob" said that as usual he would be at
Louise's house to study, after supper that night.  Adults played Louise
and Susie at the Oneida Maternity Hospital; in response to a question,
"Susie" said with reluctance, "Yes, I think I'll try Morehead for a
while," a remark that, given the longevity of the partnership between
the two, brought applause, laughter, and cheers.

Next, Susie (known to several generations as the one who ave the
injections was the subject of a song performed by the high school
touring choir; "If you knew Susie, like we know Susie (oh, ouch!), what
a gal!"  the choir sang.  The final skit dramatized the visit of
Monsignor Towell to Louise's clinic to ascertain if there truly existed
a need for a hospital.  For the sake of humor, but in accord with a
Morehead legend that is a pardonable exaggeration, the skit enacted (if
offstage, with the cries of the infants) the birthing of six children
-two sets of twins and two other babies.  At the conclusion of the
skit, the actor playing Monsignor Towell made a telephone call to the
head of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Covington to demand that the
Sisters establish a hospital in Morehead at once.  After listening to
apparent objections, he declared into the phone, "If you can't say
'yes,' I'll have to call Rome, " another line that brought laughter and
long applause.

The skits ended and Reeder introduced Sister Mary Edwin, the first
administrator of St. Claire Medical Center, along with other members
of the Sisters of Notre Dame who had been part of the initial staff.

The extended ovation they received testified to the affection and
appreciation they had gained in the local community.  Sister Mary
Edwin, now in her mid-eighties, gave a brief speech.  She spoke
clearly, with a touch of a German accent and word order; she had come
to America from Germany as a child.  She said, "I can't tell you how
happy we are to be here and to express our gratitude .  Here she looked
over her spectacles to find Dr. Louise in the audience.  "Dr. Louise,"
she said, "@ it took fifteen years for your dream to become a
reality.

I remember so well the day of the dedication of the hospital, and you
were so very happy and you said to me, 'Sister, I think we have the
most beautiful hospital in Kentucky."  Well, this little hospital has
become now a large and important medical area center in the state of
Kentucky.  But really, for what are we so grateful to you, Dr.
Louise?

I think it is because of the forty years of service you have given to
the medical profession and the healing profession.  Nobody knows how
many patients you treated with your love, with your help, and with your
comfort.  I don't know how many babies YOU have delivered, they say
about eight thousand, how many people you have helped from dying.  And
for these services, Dr. Louise, we thank you, and we shall ask the
good God to continue you here for many years to come."

The president of Morehead State University, C. Nelson Grote, spoke of
Louise's service to his own family -she had been the family physician
since 1960, and had delivered their two sons-as well as to the whole
community.  "Her contributions," he said, "can be measured in the
qualities of the lives of all of us."

Proclamations and resolutions followed.  jack Roe, the mayor of
Morehead, and Ott Caldwell, Rowan County judge-executive, declared May
13 as Claire Louise Caudill Day.  A resolution by the Kentucky
House of Representatives honoring her achievements was read to the
audience.  Then Louise was called to the stage for the final
presentations.  A slender young black woman, Joan Taylor, introduced as
a representative of the governor, came to the podium, and, with the
much smaller, white-haired Louise at her side, began her address: "On
behalf of Governor Wallace Wilkinson, it is indeed a pleasure to join
you to night in honoring Dr. C. Louise Caudill.  When we stop to
marvel at this Kentuckian's forty years of quality medical and
community service, we think of all the people she has served and the
difference she has made in the .  lives of all who have embraced both
her wisdom and her love.  Dr. Louise, we love you, and we thank you
for your dedicated, selfless effort to enhance the quality of life for
your fellow Kentuckians, and in appreciation Governor Wilkinson has
issued the following proclamation on behalf of the Commonwealth of
Kentucky."  9

Here Joan Taylor read a proclamation that extended "Louise Caudill Day"
throughout the Commonwealth.  In referring to Dr. Louise's
accomplishments, the proclamation mentioned that her "dedication took
her up the hollows and over the hills by bicycle or with horse and
wagon to deliver over two thousand babies in private homes in her
earlier years, and in later years [she] delivered thousands more in
medical facilities."  This sentence drew laughter from the audience for
its reference to Louise on a bicycle, since nobody had ever seen her
traversing her rural rounds on one, her heavy medical bags and portable
maternity table somehow strapped to her back.  It was the only error in
an eloquent statement, which drew a long ovation.  At this if my
recollection of the events is accurate, Louise began to clench and
unclench a fist, as if she were embarrassed and wished to be elsewhere
doing something useful, like sewing up a child's lip or encouraging a
woman to push her baby from the womb.

But the governor's representative wasn't through; she read another
citation from him giving Louise "the overnor's Outstanding Kentuckian
Award," and then Miss Taylor announced that Governor Wilkinson had
bestowed upon Louise yet another honor-the title that Kentucky
governors freely, and not without humor, grant to those who have met
their favor, that of Kentucky Colonel.  This announcement produced
perhaps the greatest laughter of the night.

After the portrait was unveiled, Reeder told the audi"If Louse had
chosen the traditional life and had ence, had her own family, she might
have reared a dozen children at most, but instead she chose a life of
service to this entire community, and has birthed thousands of babies,
nurtured hundreds of families through their 111m nesses and recoveries
and has stood by all of us in times of death and grief."  Then, as jay
Flippin's Combo struck up the melody "We Are the World," and the Rowan
County High School Touring Choir sang a refrain that had been altered
to make the words more applicable to the occasion ("We are the ones you
brought into the world/And all the ones you've cared for - .  . "),
several hundred men and women, young and middleaged, all of whom had
been delivered by Dr. Louise, proceeded down the aisles.  While they
were walking across the stage to shake her hand, Cris whispered to jean
and me, "If you hadn't gone to Lexington, I could be up there too."

Overwhelmed by the emotion of the occasion, jean and I wished he
were.

Leaving the auditorium, I noticed that everybody was smiling.

I was too, nodding and smiling at people I'd never seen before.

It was the first time I'd attended an event in which I had become one
with everybody there-actors, speakers, audience.  Could a community
elsewhere in the nation have come together in such spiritual cohesion
to applaud one of its own?  I thought about that question later, and
supposed it likely, wherever a person like Dr. Louise has spent a
professional lifetime.

A RAINSTORM The following morning, jean, Cris, and I attended a
breakfast at the Holiday Inn for the out-of-town relatives and friends
of Louise and Susie who had come for the celebration; we Joined the
same group that afternoon for a picnic on the terrace above Louise's
tennis court.  The sky was cloudless, the air mild and so clear that
every tree and flowering azalea and even the most distant hill had its
own sharp definition.  In Morehead, Louise said, the entire spring
season had been lovely like that, but the farmers said they needed
rain.  That kind of weather accompanied us all the way back to Ithaca
on Monday.  Wanting to prolong a happiness the three of us felt, Cris
devised a homeward route that took us over or in view of seven covered
bridges in southern Pennsylvania.

The sun predominated all that summer, accompanied by ever-growing heat
and temperature inversions that occasionally turned it into a greenish
orb; for smog from elsewhere can settle even over the rolling pastures
of the Finger Lakes district.  Drought conditions were far less
apparent at my farmhouse, though, than they were elsewhere in the
nation and throughout much of Europe, as well as (once again) in those
regions of Africa long familiar with the grief and hopelessness such
conditions can bring.

In that community celebration, I felt I had been granted an emotional
finale for my as yet mainly unwritten book, an event that I could use
to mark both the end of a personal journey and the extent of a
community's spiritual progress since Craig Tolliver had terrorized
it.

But the mass of material I had assembledbooks, pamphlets, newspapers,
tapes to be transcribed pages of notes to decipher-was formidable.  I
listened to a tape of one of the interviews I'd made with Louise,
enjoying as always the sound of her voice: the gentle irony, the sense
of fun.  Simply to listen to it permitted me to recapture a feeling for
her spiritual essence, the quality that others, including me, responded
to, as if through her they were recapturing something within themselves
they had forgotten about.  In the attempt to solve human problems that
often seem intractable, Louise had told me, I remembered, "You just do
one thing after another' I ; and she had said, "If it's a help,
especially to the little kids, it makes you a better person."  She had
come to me in a dream as a kind of antidote to my sense of a human
world becoming unreal and this was what she had told me.  I felt like a
little kid, myself.  For the first time in my life I was beginning to
see that my own sense of "reality," of whatever gave substance to human
affairs, was a moral construction, one that required some possibility
of goodness; without that possibility, the world was
phantasmagorical.

In June, I watched the hummingbirds drawing nectar from the mock orange
and honeysuckle blossoms in our front yard and listened to the
bullfrogs recently come to our pond, their diesel-locomotive blare
drowning out the rubber-band twang of their long-established smaller
brethren.  In July I watched the changing patterns of cumulus clouds
that never gathered together in sufficient bulk to produce more than
sporadic flares and a spattering of heavy drops in the dust, never a
drenching rain, and saw the swallows darting just above the grass to
catch insects and the hawks floating in the thermals high above us
all.

I watched and listened to these manifestations of the natural world
that were oblivious to my anxieties, indifferent to anything I felt or
believed, and wondered if I trusted myself and my species enough (look
at the horrors and depravities we commit!) to tell a story of human
goodness that, in transforming a tiny Kentucky county, had implications
for us all.

Meanwhile, I was doing one little thing after another: transcribing the
tapes, completing some onerous obligations that had nothing whatsoever
to do with Louise or Rowan County.  To the best of my knowledge, Louise
(unlike me) had never known despair.  Maybe, I thought, the real
opponent of good isn't evil, but despair-the meaninglessness we feel
when we doubt the presence or efficacy of that good.  Something, some
buried insight, kept eluding my conscious mind.

August finally arrived.  Halfway through that month, jean and I
prepared for our customary vacation in the Adirondacks.  I lashed the
two canoes to the car roof (the larger one for carrying our food and
camping equipment to a suitable base camp, the lightweight smaller one
for portaging between mountain lakes).  As he had on the trip to
Kentucky in May, Cris accompanied us.  We elected to return to an
island on Long Pond in the St. Regis canoeing area that we'd stayed at
several years before; in the interval, the park service had installed
both a privy and picnic table, twin intrusions of civilization upon a
wilderness area that we didn't mind.

We used the lightweight canoe for a number of portaging explorations we
hadn't been able to make before.  The days were hotter than any we'd
experienced in the Adirondacks, but the nights were cool.  After dark,
seated before the picnic table and within the pool of light made by our
gasoline lantern, we played rummy and sipped wine while listening to
the cries of the pair of loons on the pond, whose presence meant that
fish were still to be found there, that the clarity of the water
wasn't a consequence (as it can be in the Adirondacks) of its deadness from
acid rain.

My anxieties began to thin out and disperse, much like the cloud of
black flies that pursued our speeding canoe the only time we had been
unwise enough to head for a wilderness area in June without an adequate
supply of insect repellent.

One night I sat on a rock by the shore after jean and Cris had gone to
their tents; I was at once too tranquil and too alert to go to sleep, a
condition that sometimes comes to me on camping trips 'just before a
major change in the weather.  Everything was still except for the cry
of the loons; the stars were mirrored without distortion on the surface
of the water.  I said to myself, "If the soul is memory 's desire, why
then I have a soul," without understanding what I could possibly
mean.

The following day was humid and overcast.  Long Pond stretches for two
miles or more.  In the afternoon, we were paddling back from its
farthest extent, Cris in the lightweight canoe and jean and I in the
larger and heavier one, when, unaccompanied by even a single clap of
thunder, the weather changed.  The temperature dropped, the rain
descended.  It was the storm whose intensity and size foretold the end
of the drought in most of the eastern sections of the nation; the rain
fell so heavily it threatened for a time to swamp both canoes, for we'd
brought no balls.

That rain blurred my vision, making the canoe a microcosm I shared with
my wife.  Looking over my head-shielding my eyes with a hand, I saw the
shoulder, s i microcosm in which Cris moved as a vague oblong.  In
advance of our canoe swan-i the pair of loons, who seemed to have taken
on the task of guiding us homethey had preceded us ever since we had
started back, diving beneath the water whenever we came too close.

"Now I know what it feels like to be a loon," I cried to jean above the
sound of the downpour.  She laughed and, mimicking a famous sentence by
a Swedish movie actress, cried back, "I vant to be a loon!"  Sealed in
by the hills and clouds and shimmering sheets of rain, the pond itself
was a microcosm containin two loons, three people in two canoes, and a
myriad of fish beneath the surface.  Was it raining like this on the
pavements of New York City, on the corn and oat fields of the Finger
Lakes, on the forested hills of Rowan County, Kentucky?  Each was a
microcosm within another microcosm-the tiny globe bearing its freight
of children (humans and loons alike) that was sailing with its barren
siblings and radiant parent through the dry seas that are the immensity
of space; and at the instant I felt that kind of communion I felt also
how incredible and how perverse it was that I or anybody else could
wonder what goodness was, or doubt its presence within our species.

Probably all revelations have long been secretly rehearsed and are
guided by memory.  They arrive within us as a feeling we
instantaneously recognize as true.  In the next moment, they begin to
take on the shape of an extended and unified thought whose elements all
along had been waiting in the memory for a propitious moment of
release.  In my case, the thought began with the sentence that had come
to me the night before.  To it, my memory added some personal
experiences that had been abetted by some reading I'd done.  As best I
can communicate it today, my thought went something like this: If the
soul is memory's desire, why then I have a soul; and what it wants more
than anything else is that unobtainable happiness in which pure freedom
is to be found -freedom from consciousness, from the prison of my ego,
from my impurities, from my own banal self-, freedom to return to its
beginnings in the natural world, perhaps to its origin in the uncaring
cosmos itself.  Chekhov, the writer I would emulate if I could,
recognized this desire for an impossible freedom as a human constant,
as the happiness for which we are all in search, and from such insight
came not only his objectivity but his compassion and implicit
morality.

Human life remains a mystery our reason can't penetrate, but moral
choices do exist: what is good increases the ossibilities of freedom
and happiness for others as well as ourselves, being actions that
alleviate suffering, ignorance, and social injustice; what is evil
consciously restricts or cancels those possibilities and takes on the
names that make us banal.

The soul that wants release from the human world is inexorably drawn
back to it-in compassion, yes, but also to savor the degree of good and
unity to be found there-as mine had been through a dream in which my
memory saw my wounded son and Dr.  Louise's trembling hand.

In writing this paragraph now, long after that rainstorm, I have been
aided by a smudged and barely decipherable note that I put on a damp
sheet of paper soon after the three of us reached our camp, changed our
clothes, and were sitting under the canopy we'd attached to trees so
that it would shelter our picnic table.  I was trying to hold on to the
feeling for whatever it could offer me and the project I now wanted to
get back to.  Mine had been a reaffirmation that came as a
revelation, I supposed, simply because I had sensed it for the first
time as the truth of my own drenched body.  On that sheet of paper I
jotted down a long-familiar sentence from an otherwise forgotten book:
"Memory is what we now have in place of religion."  But we always have
had that-before religion (that institutionalization of a preexistent
spiritual impulse), before words with their seemingly infinite
regress.

What had happened to me on the pond was little more than an old
acknowledgment that I belonged to the natural world from which I had
come.  Recognizing that, I also realized that I could trust my memory
for the other things it knew.

By early winter, I was nearing the completion of the first draft of
this book.  The December issue of my favorite magazine, Natural
History, contained its regular column by Stephen jay Gould, that
Harvard biologist, paleontologist, historian of science, and engaging
essayist who for years has been following the various channels of his
bliss, one of them being further evidence to document the validity of
his "punctuated equilibrium" theory of evolution.  The basic nature of
the human animal has been unchanged since it first was shaped, he says,
and that nature is predisposed toward kindness, a fact that can be
statistically demonstrated.  The tragedy of our species lies in "a
cruel cultural asymmetry" that permits the rare event-the eruption of
meanness-to constitute our admittedly dark history.  In other words,
one act can topple ten thousand good ones.

evi But history has yet to extinguish us, and common goodness
eventually may prevail over meanness to form a new chronicle of events,
as I believe has already happened-at least for this moment in time-in
Rowan County, Kentucky.  Soon after the community celebration in May,
Louise and Susie left for a leisurely Alaskan cruise; by December they
had been back at work for a long time, doctoring their eastern Kentucky
friends, something they're still doing today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I have depended on too many sources for the material in this book to
acknowledge them all.  I would like to thank those people of Morehead,
Kentucky, many of them friends and patients of Dr. C. Louise Caudill
and her nurse Susan Halblelb, who gave me information and anecdotes
about them and the community.  I owe a particular indebtedness to jack
Ellis, former director of the Morehead State University library, for
the extensive documents he lent me, some on the Rowan County War and
others on Cora Wilson Stewart.  For the chapters about St. Claire
Medical Center, I received considerable assistance from Dr. Edmund
Pellegrino, director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and professor
of medicine and medical humanities at Georgetown University in
Washington, D. C.; Dr. Herbert Hudnut, Jr a Glens Falls, N.Y
internist; Dr. Richard Segnitz, a Public Health Service physician in
Culbertson, Montana; and judge Elijah M. Hogge, a lifelong resident of
Morehead, and his wife, Norma.

I am indebted to the University of Kentucky library and to Willie
Everette Nelms, Jr whose exemplary 1973 master's thesis, Cora Wilson
Stewart: Crusader against Illiterac was alon with Mrs. Stewart's own
Moonlight Schools) a major aid to my understanding of that woman's
accomplishments.

But my major indebtedness is to Dr. Louise and Susie, for being who
they are, as well as for putting up with all my questions.

Quotations from Nelms's thesis and the following sources are gratefully
acknowledged: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker
Evans, copyright 1960 by Walker Evans, published by Houghton Mifflin
Co. The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, copyright
1988 by Apostrophe S Productions and Alfred van der Marck Editions,
published by Doubleday.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands, by Harry M. Caudill, copyright 1962,
1963 by Harry M. Caudill, an Atlantic Monthly Press book published by
Little, Brown and Co. Little Kingdoms: The Counties of Kentucky,
1850-1891, by Robert M.

Ireland, copyright 1977 and published by the University Press of
Kentucky.

"A Success Story in Kentucky," by Sister Mary jeannette, S.N.D and
David Bolt, in Health Progress for September 1988 (vol.  69, no.  7),
copyright 1988 by the Catholic Health Association of the United
States.

Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900, by Hambleton Tapp and James
C.

Klotter, copyright 1977 by the Kentucky Historical Society.

Hunterdon Medical Center, by Ray E. Trussell, copyright 1955 by the
Commonwealth Fund, published by Harvard University Press.

Kentucky Country, by Charles K. Wolfe, copyright 1982 and published by
the University Press of Kentucky JAMES MCCONKEY has taught literature
and creative writing at Cornel University for thirty-five years.  His
published works include three novels, a critical study of E. M.

Forster, the memoir Court ofmemory, and most recently, To a Distant
Island.  He lives in Trumansburg, New York.