Episode 20: Politics, Journalism, and the Cornbread Mafia with Al Cross

In this episode of Mildly Amusing, James sits down with Al Cross, longtime political journalist and former reporter for the Courier Journal. Al shares how he got his start in journalism, beginning at the Southern Kentucky Bureau in Somerset before it was relocated to Bardstown in 1979 and became the Central Kentucky Bureau. Assigned to a region he knew little about, Al recalls his brother's description of the area as the "land of priests and whiskey."

During his years covering Central Kentucky, Al found himself reporting on one of the most fascinating chapters in local history, the Cornbread Mafia. He reflects on what it was like covering the story and why this area became such an interesting place for a young journalist.

The conversation also explores Kentucky politics, Al's 26 years as a political reporter for the Courier Journal, and his belief that journalism should provide voters with the authoritative information they need to make informed decisions. Al spent 20 years directing the Program for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, which was built on the idea that rural communities deserve the same quality of journalism as anyone else.

James and Al discuss how newspapers and journalism have changed over the years, the challenges facing local news, and what the future may hold for the profession.

It's a fascinating conversation about Kentucky history, politics, media, and the vital role journalism plays in our communities.

🎶 This episode's song is Cornbread by Lee Morgan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome back everybody. I'm James Spraggens, and this is mildly amusing. Um I think this might rise slightly above that. Uh my good friend Dennis George, the sponsor of this episode, um rode up to Frankfurt with me, and we sat in the lovely courtyard of the lovely home of Al Cross. Um most of you, I think, will know who who that is. Al Cross for was for a long time a politics uh reporter for the Courier Journal. Um as part of that he ran the Southern Bureau out of Somerset, but then Barstown. And uh a lot of that was uh a lot of that reporting took place in Raywick. And he got to know a lot of the characters in Raywick at uh Squire's Tavern, the Fifth Wheel, got to know a lot of people there, and did a lot of uh reporting on what the game, the cornbread mafia situation. Uh he knows a lot of those guys, and um he's just a really interesting talker. I think you're gonna love this. Um one thing I love about having Dennis with me is that I have a lot of gaps, and Dennis easily fills in those gaps. He has um uh historic knowledge that we all benefit from, and I'm grateful to him for uh being willing to go up there with me. I think he had a good time, though, but I also appreciate him sponsoring today's episode. Thank you, Dennis George. Um so I think you guys are gonna enjoy this episode. Uh Al Cross is great, and um grateful to him as well. So um uh sit back, relax, and listen to our conversation. I'm James Braggins, and this is mildly amusing. Al Cross, thank you so much for agreeing to sit down with us. We are sitting in the courtyard of your lovely home in downtown Frankfurt, just a stone's throw from the Capitol, which is I see still sheathed with uh uh construction equipment and whatnot.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

As it will be for years. Glad to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah, well, thank you so much. Um one thing that uh I started doing this podcast. This is the second podcast I did uh that I do. The other one was more like a history, local history thing, Marion County stuff, and and that kind of petered out, but net then I started doing uh this one, which is a little broader, it's just we get into a little history, but it's also just anybody I run across who I think is interesting to me, uh record them. Yesterday I recorded a guy who runs a pizza truck out of Springfield uh and had a great time talking to him about food service, which used to be my background too. So uh, but um one thing is we would get together, I was telling you about this coffee group that I'm part of, and we meet every other week, and I would say, you know, there's as our media is local media is just kind of crumbling, it it's not because there's a lack of things of interest going on. We always find interesting things to talk about, but it's less and less represented in like our local newspaper, which is just a shadow of its former self. And I'm not not that I'm trying to be a journalist, but they're just interesting things to talk about. And I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

Well, I like to say that every American has the First Amendment right to commit journalism.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

To commit journalism, yes.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

And I use that verb advisedly because it implies a certain responsibility, you know. If you're gonna cloak yourself in the uh honor of journalism, you have certain responsibilities to uphold.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

That is true. But to be clear, I don't consider myself a journalist. This is just conversational stuff and getting stuff on the record and whatever.

SPEAKER_02 4:04

Oh, that's journalism.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

That's journalism? Okay, all right. Well, maybe they'll give me the Al Smith Award one day. I kind of doubt it. Um so I I think most people who will tune into this know who Al Cross is. Uh you um uh are as prominent uh a statewide uh journalist, mostly in print, as anybody I know. Um and uh I would always see you commenting at things like fancy fancy farm and things like that. Uh comment on Kentucky, things like that. Give me a little bit of your bio. What's uh where are you from? What got you into journalism?

SPEAKER_02 4:41

Well, I was raised in Albany, Kentucky, and uh went to Western Kentucky University and was very lucky that I was able to uh work for Al Smith, uh the best weekly newspaper publisher in the state in uh Russellville and Lichfield, and uh led to me working for the Courier Journal for 26 years, uh 15 and a half of them as the chief political writer. But I started out at the uh Southern Kentucky Bureau in uh Somerset, and then uh that bureau was moved to Bardstown in uh January of 79 and became the Central Kentucky Bureau, and uh uh Marion County was uh uh the uh busiest county I had except for Nelson. What were those years? I was there from 1979 to 1984.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

And that is the one reason, and I have been remiss in not uh mentioning that we are also joined by a friend of the podcast, my friend Dennis George. We are we are good friends, right? Okay, my friend too. All right. Then I have a lot of gaps, and Dennis is does a great job of filling in my gaps. Uh I can tell you're wanting to interject something, Dennis. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 5:51

Did you was your office at the GBA building there in Bargetown where you live?

SPEAKER_02 5:56

My successor had the office at the GBA building.

SPEAKER_04 5:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

Uh my office was in my home on uh South 6th Street.

SPEAKER_04 6:02

Okay, okay. I I knew there was a connection to GBA. Um when you came to the area, did you know much about it?

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Very little, actually. I uh uh I told my brother I'd been reassigned, and he said you're going to the land of priest and whiskey. Well, that's about right. That's about right. We're from Clinton County, one of the three remaining dry counties in Kentucky, so that was a natural contrast for him to draw.

SPEAKER_04 6:28

But you were also coming to Catholics and Democrats.

unknown 6:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 6:32

You may not have been in the city. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Oh, I I mean I'd had uh plenty of experience with Catholics and Democrats, but uh I I frankly did not know that much about uh the central Kentucky heartland.

SPEAKER_04 6:43

So, if I might no please go ahead. You're there in 79, and I'm sitting there looking at your scrapbook, and September 9th, 1981, changes complicate weeding out states pot trade, and it's showing all the marijuana fields that were raided by the state police, and there's almost as many in Marion, Washington, Nelson counties, and the rest of the state. So that might be a good opportunity to lead into some of that.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

Well, that's that's why I brought the scrapbook. Uh 1981 was uh sort of the breakout year for uh uh coverage of uh marijuana. Uh you know, the industry had uh become big before that, but it was uh largely clandestine. But uh once the police started finding these huge fields, then it became uh a much uh bigger thing in the uh public perception uh and in the uh uh you know and the industry itself, you know. Uh it's uh uh it was a great crossroads uh uh for the industry for a long time.

SPEAKER_04 7:52

Talk about covering that. I mean you and and Steve Lowry were known reporters to the people in Ray Wick who were growing, friends with the, you know, knew the state police officers. Just talk about covering that.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Well, Steve was the editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, and uh uh he and I were uh uh you know pretty much cut from the same cloth. Uh he applied to work for Al Smith right after I did, and uh, if I hadn't if I hadn't gotten the job, Steve probably would have gotten it. And uh as the local editor, uh he had a uh tough job in uh holding up his institutional responsibility to tell people what was going on and not just what gets reported at a meeting, but uh what's really going on. And uh I had uh a responsibility to uh cover the news in my territory for the people of the state uh and beyond. And uh uh you know we frankly would not have undertaken any sort of investigation of the uh marijuana industry uh if it hadn't been for these uh big busts uh that you referred to. Uh Steve didn't do that many takeout stories because he had uh you know a story just about every week uh in some fashion. And uh I thought uh as this thing got so big in the summer of 1981 that we really needed to do a uh uh a long deep look at the industry and how it had developed. So uh in the scrapbook you'll find in October there's uh a uh uh a three-day series uh starting on Sunday, front page of the Courier Journal, uh, about uh uh Kentucky's marijuana industry, and uh most of the datelines on those stories were from Marion County. Um as you might guess, this uh uh caused a little tension uh down at Squires Tavern where I like to hang out. Um but I'll always be thankful to uh J. E. Bickett and his son Charlie. Uh J.E. was the squire and Charlie ran Squire's Tavern. And he was also the mayor of Ray Wick. And I had gotten to know Charlie because I had done a story several months earlier about how Raywick had revived its city government so that it could get federal grants. It died uh out uh decades earlier uh because uh uh people wouldn't pay their taxes and nobody wanted to collect them, and they just said the hell with it. Well, when federal grants came along, they needed a city government again, and who became the mayor but Charlie Bickett. So I did a story, and I think Charlie was always uh uh grateful for that story, and uh I became a welcome uh customer at uh Squire's Tavern, and J. E. Bickett and I had a uh great time talking about politics and geology and uh uh characters and so on. Of course, J. E. was a great character himself. And uh I think that's what enabled me to keep going back to Squires Tavern after I had uh uh done those uh big stories about the marijuana industry. Uh I got some bad looks from people, but I think uh Charlie uh made sure that uh nobody roughed me up and uh I was uh even welcome at the fifth wheel as uh the time went along.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Was Squires right next to the fifth wheel? That's a parking lot now, but is that uh there might have been a little building between them. Okay, all right, and that's what later became just it was just called Bicketts, right?

SPEAKER_04 11:32

Well Bickett's was on the Bickett's was on the corner.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:35

Then there was like like a vacant building or something, and then the fifth wheel was a relatively modern brick building over to the right of it. Yeah, that's where the hamburger joined.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

And that's the only thing left there, yeah. Um and by the way, Raywick in the last year or so has started the process of decommissioning itself as this as a city.

SPEAKER_03 11:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

I mean, seriously, there was I forget it was like it was too more trouble than they were than it was worth. Right. Whatever those federal funds are, I guess they dried up for them. Right.

SPEAKER_02 12:06

No more revenue, Sharing.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

No more, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 12:08

Um was that an interesting time for you to cover some of that?

SPEAKER_02 12:13

That was one of the most interesting times I've ever had as a journalist. I mean, uh you got to know people uh very well, um and some of them didn't want you to know them very well, uh so I didn't get to know them, but you you know, uh you knew enough about them, and this is a fairly small community where you know you didn't have to hang around too long to uh understand what uh really made the place tick. And uh I had had uh a lot of experience in the rest of Marion County covering what was going on with uh Lebanon city government and so on, uh industrial development there, and uh uh I felt at home there and uh I think uh people uh generally uh welcome my presence.

SPEAKER_04 12:54

Was um Jimmy, Joe Keith, Bickett, Johnny Boone.

SPEAKER_02 13:00

Um I only remember seeing Johnny Boone uh once, uh it might have been twice, but uh you know Johnny did not want uh uh to be known to the uh courier journal reporter. Johnny was a smart enough guy to know that. And uh uh but I was familiar with uh uh Joe Keith and uh and Jimmy and uh uh all the rest of the uh Bickett clan. And uh uh when uh I moved to uh moved my uh work to Louisville in 1984, I still lived in Bardstown uh for another two or three years and uh would still go down to Squires Tavern. And I remember the 1986 Kentucky Derby. Remember who won that derby? I do not. It was Ferdinand. And do you remember who rode the rode the shoemaker rode Ferdinand? That's right, that was Shoemaker's last derby win. So there was uh there was a bookie at Squires Tavern uh paying track odds, and there were lots of people at Squire's Tavern laying big money on Bill Shoemaker and Ferdinand, a lot more money than was being laid down at Churchill. Uh-huh. So when Shoemaker brings that horse home, the bookie doesn't have the money to pay. And he had to go to uh the cornbread mafia to get the money. I think the Ruby Bank had already closed by that time. Yes, it had.

SPEAKER_04 14:33

So how do you separate now?

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Being down among all that, knowing probably more stuff than you could print, or is there a separation well you have your you know, there's times when you wear your official hat. Yeah, and for me that was having a notebook in my hand. Right. Or maybe even in my back pocket. When I went to Squire's Tavern, normally I wouldn't take a notebook in because I wasn't working. I wouldn't want people to think I was working. Would you call that getting background? Not really background. I mean, I just uh enjoy going down there and uh uh uh being with the folks. And heck, my my wife even threw my 30th birthday party there. Is that right? Yeah, it's it's in the it's in the cornbread mafia book. Uh, you know, it's uh uh it's just a great little story. All right, and go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 15:26

Well, uh I shouldn't have interrupted because you were and all that you didn't get an invitation to the documentary uh on the cornbread mafia?

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Uh yes, I did. Elmer invited me, and I was unable to come. Had had a conflict.

SPEAKER_04 15:40

Okay, well, I mean you would have enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

As did I, but you were there, Dennis. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:44

It was it was interesting.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

So And some of the characters in it were there.

SPEAKER_04 15:48

Oh, most of it, yeah. Uh Bobby Joe, Jimmy, and Joe Keith.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

I mean, well, I went to the Cornberg Mafia reunion uh about two years ago, and you know, uh Johnny was there, and Bobby Joe was there. It was one of the last things that was late. Yeah, that I think that may have been Johnny's last true public appearance.

SPEAKER_04 16:08

But I'll tell you what was interesting about that documentary is they interviewed state police officers, they invited uh Graham, Grime, uh the uh prosecutor, and they were all part of the documentary, which made it interesting because the guy was just saying, hey, they were these guys were geniuses.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Well, that's a true documentary then, and I look forward to seeing it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

I guess they're still trying to get a distributor, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:36

Um so anyway, you didn't want to talk just to Al about uh cornbread mafia in the right way.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

No, but that's a big part of it, because uh we you know, most of the people listening will be from that area and want to know about this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 16:47

Well, it's the most interesting thing you can talk about, frankly. You know, and that the whole cornbread mafia uh mystique has been uh maintained by James Higdon first with his book and then with his business, and now the Vickets have their own books and their own business. Right. And uh they're uh uh fighting again. Have you read them? I I've read uh Joe Keith's first book, yeah, and I thought he did a great job. Okay. That's I've heard that it's yeah, considered very reliable.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

I consider it uh to be uh uh the most authoritative book because I mean it comes from the guy who was uh in at the center of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:22

All right, from from handling that um bureau for the courier, how did you end up morphing into being a political writer?

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Well, when I covered uh central Kentucky, uh one of the most interesting aspects of it were the courthouses and the people who occupied the offices in those courthouses.

SPEAKER_04 17:45

And I see a lot of the kind of stories in here.

SPEAKER_02 17:47

Yeah, uh, you know, uh you had uh uh John Henry Smith, wasn't it, who was uh Henry Smith, who was uh county judge in Marion County, and his son Jack Smith was U.S. attorney. And uh there were interesting characters in all these courthouses, and in 1981, all these offices were up for election, except Circuit Court Clerk, which has a six-year term. And uh I thought it would be very interesting to go around and do stories uh county by county about the uh contested elections in both the primary and general uh for these local offices. Because let's be frank about it, the local newspapers don't like to get into that. It's difficult to write about uh uh people in a political context that you're covering primarily in a government context, and there's a lot more at stake, and it's easier to make them mad and uh you know some of them may be advertisers. Well, uh yeah, but we want all of them to advertise with you, but uh you know, you just take the path of least resistance. And even when I worked for Al Smith, we did not do comprehensive stories about, say, the judge executives race. Now we might do a column about uh, you know, the politics uh and who was with whom, uh, but we really wouldn't have a news story, and the theory behind that was well, people know all these people anyway, and that we don't they don't have to have the newspaper to help them make up their mind. Well, I just think that's stupid.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Um it's an excuse. Uh, you know, there's the old uh uh uh saw about small towns, everybody knows everybody else. No, everybody does not know everybody else. You get up, you get above uh three or four thousand people in a town, and you know, that's just a silly thing to say. Yeah. Now, you know, you're more likely to run into somebody you know than in a town of 40,000, but uh the thing is people need to have authoritative information about uh people running for office so they can make an informed decision and pick the best people. And I thought that uh maybe in my small way uh at the Courier Journal, I could uh do that and also give the rest of the state a little sampling of the color uh of these courthouses and the people who worked in them. Uh I remember I had a lead from uh Breckinridge County that uh talked about how uh Shorty Stennett, uh longtime uh judge and sheriff there, had uh uh itched his name into a piece of concrete and uh back when they uh remodeled the uh courthouse or something, and uh noted that uh you know the Sorty uh uh has uh uh been uh in or at the courthouse in many ways for a long time. And I even extended this idea of uh getting people to uh uh or you know trying to get people uh good information about candidates to my home county. Uh, you know, I have a home in Clinton County where I was raised, and for the Clinton County News last month, I did a 5,000-word piece, largely interviews with the six candidates for judge executive, but preceded by a summary in which I said we've got the strongest uh set of candidates for judge executive of Clinton County since they added the name executive to the name. And we really did. Yeah, and uh we uh wound up uh nominating uh for the Republican Party, and that's tantamount to election down there, a former school superintendent, Mickey McPhall. And very few times in this state has a former school superintendent been uh elected judge executive. Uh Woodford County did it, and there's been a couple of counties in western Kentucky, and uh that uh worked into a piece I wrote for the Kentucky Lantern about how uh the county had uh uh allowed the school board to impose a heavier tax to build a new high school, and this is one of the most undereducated counties in Kentucky. Kentucky, only two percent of the population have a college degree. And it's one of the poorest counties in Kentucky, but it's got a lot of assets. It's right between Lake Turmerlin and Del Hollow Lake, and has a lot going for it, and has never quite made enough of its assets. And there's some other encouraging things going on down there, and uh so I wrote a story for the Kentucky Lantern about it. I told somebody I was uh you know uh back to my roots in uh uh two different ways. I was uh you know doing journalism about my hometown and uh still uh uh trying to uh uh do that kind of regional reporting, you know, uh uh of local stuff to a statewide audience that I did uh back in the days we've been talking about. How big is Clinton County? 9,000 people.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

9,000. So about half the size of Marion County. But will it ever go wet?

SPEAKER_02 22:50

Probably. It only failed by 108 votes last time.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Uh but uh nothing is certain. Uh and uh we'll just have to wait and see.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

It would be hard to for them to capitalize on whatever uh adjacency they have to the lakes without being.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Oh, there's been plenty of lake traffic and lake business, but it has tended to uh draw people who uh don't uh uh make ready access to alcohol a priority. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_04 23:17

When when did you become the courier political writer?

SPEAKER_02 23:23

That was in 1989. I had worked for the city desk in uh 84, uh the end of 84, and then 85 and 86, went to the Frankfurt Bureau in 87, uh, and uh then became political writer in uh 89.

SPEAKER_04 23:40

So when you were in Frankfurt, were you covering the legislature primarily or well I started covering the legislature in 1980.

SPEAKER_02 23:46

Okay, so if you remember, uh there was a big controversy with uh leasing land uh for oil sale in Marion and other counties uh that have the black sale, and uh uh that led to uh uh some activity in uh uh the John Y. Brown administration and uh to regulate it and in the legislature. So I volunteered to help come cover the legislature in 1980. Uh my father had been in the legislature one term and I was always interested in the politics. So uh uh my idea of volunteering for two or three days a week turned into a uh a whole week assignment. I was up here in Frankfurt for three months in 1980, and uh I've had a uh uh media credential for every session of the General Assembly since, except last year when I thought I was gonna get out of that.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Let me I just want to ask one quick a little bit about background. Well, not today. Uh I'm just running the equipment today, and I'm the driver. Um uh Al Smith was somebody I was always interested in. I loved it when he ran Comment on Kentucky. And uh one time I happened to see him at a a restaurant at lunchtime in Lexington, and I said, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go say hello to him. And and I just said, uh you don't know me, I'm James Spraggins from Lebanon. And whenever I say that anywhere, they'll always say, Oh, are you the banker? No, that's my cousin. That's my cousin. But uh, but he knew he knew that much. And um I just said, you know, I just have always enjoyed your radio show, your TV show, and whenever I see your byline, I like to read it. And he said, and he gives him his pocket, he gave me his card and he says, Hey, I'd love for you to call me. Let's talk some more about me. What was it like working for him and what'd you learn from him? That was probably pretty valuable.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

It was it was a great blessing. I would not be sitting here today if it hadn't been uh uh uh if I hadn't worked for him. Um he uh uh he kind of rescued me from uh uh a uh uh doomed enterprise in Monticello. My uh friends in Monticello had started a newspaper there in 1974, and I uh uh chose to help them that summer instead of uh apply for a courier journal internship, and uh they kind of ran the paper into the ground, and I uh uh they wanted me to come back even before I finished school, and I said, no, let me finish school, I'll come back and help you out. So I went back and as I told uh people many times, it was a second paper in a one-paper town. Uh not very large town, right? The Wayne, the Wayne County outlook uh had been really bad, and then Stuart Simpson, uh who's now my good friend, came back from UK with his buddy Joe Conn, and they made it really good. So there wasn't any point to have the reporter, my newspaper. And uh when one of our big advertisers uh uh pulled his ad, I uh uh decided uh we had to close the paper. And uh Smith had been trying to get me to come work for him for two months. What did you know about him? Well, he was the president of the Kentucky Press Association, he was the host of a statewide talk show, uh, he had been the subject of a courier journal cover magazine profile. Uh he was just a really interesting character.

SPEAKER_03 27:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

And uh he had been an alcoholic. Well, you know, once an alcoholic. Always an alcoholic, but he's he he overcame it. He was a recovered alcoholic and a great example to a lot of people, and uh took leadership roles in uh AA and other causes, and uh, you know, just uh uh a guy who uh set many great examples in uh journalism and otherwise. Uh so uh I I called him up and uh said, When do I come to work? He said I I spoke sort of grudgingly. So I started work there uh uh day after Labor Day, 1975, and uh uh went to Lichfield uh April 1st of 77. I had married uh a woman from Lichfield, uh to whom I'm still married, uh Patty Hodges Cross, and uh I became the general manager at Lichfield after having been uh assistant managing editor at uh Russellville.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

And at at how old?

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Well, I was 21 when I went to work for Smith uh the first time. Yeah. And uh uh then uh uh uh the uh the competing paper in Lichfield uh saw that uh they uh were gonna have uh a much harder time with me than they had had with uh Al's other other editors. Uh being married to a local woman uh uh probably made a difference. I'll tell you a story about that. Uh Smith uh uh gave me uh one order that I disobeyed. He said, When you go up there, I want you to register as a Democrat, because I'm a Democrat, and the Litchfield Gazette has always been a Democratic newspaper, and we're just Democrats. And you've been registered Democratic here in Logan County, but that was only so I could vote. Right. There were any Republicans running. I'd come from a Republican family, and I always thought of myself as an independent anyway. So when I went to Lichfield, I thought, hmm, there are more Republicans than Democrats in this county, it's about three to two. And there's two Republican factions, and Jimmy Allen, who's running the competing paper, was a member of one faction, and my wife's grandfather, who was a magistrate on the fiscal court, was a member of the other faction. Where do I need to put my stake? Well, it was pretty clear I needed to register as a Republican and, you know, sort of ride the family coattails, or the in-laws' coattails, the auxiliary coattails, uh, if you want to use Latin.

SPEAKER_03 29:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

And after about uh three weeks, uh uh uh especially after I got uh his banker to start advertising with us again, uh Jimmy thought uh he needed to sue for peace and he got a pretty good deal out of it. He became uh a part owner of Al Smith's company and uh still the boss of the paper in Lichfield. He was the publisher, I was the editor, and Smith liked to say we were like two scorpions in a bottle. That sounds like him. I I went to speak to the Bowling Green Rotary Club uh a few years ago and uh uh arrived to find out that the president of the club was no none other than Jimmy Allen, my former competitor. And I told the crowd, I said, uh glad to see uh uh Jimmy here. He and I taught each other several things about the newspaper business way back when. Yeah. So I was editing this paper uh under duress, basically, and uh uh being had a couple of instances of disrespect, and I let uh Bob Sulman, the old media critic from the Louisville Times, who had been a uh was a friend of mine, let him know that if he heard of any jobs I might be interested in, to let him know. Well, he mentioned my name to the managing editor of the Courier Journal, Mike Davies. Okay, and they were looking for a reporter uh in Somerset. So on April 6, 1978, I got a call from Frank Hartley, the state editor, who I knew through telephone conversations, and they said, How come you never applied to work at Courier Journal? I said, Well, Frank, I guess I just want to be a big fish in a small pond. And he said, Well, we opened a bureau in Somerset like you to run it. I mean, basically they'd made the decision without even interviewing me because uh Frank knew me from uh uh talking to me on the phone about stories, and uh they needed to fill this position or it wasn't going to get filled. Come to find out that Larry Dale Keeling, who was working for the Herald Leader, uh had been approached about the job, and he decided he wasn't gonna take it because it would take him too far away from his mother, who lived at Willisburg. Mm-hmm. Watch the We were just talking about him. So, you know, six months later they moved the bureau to 15 minutes away from Willisburg. Right, right.

SPEAKER_04 31:59

Um when you talk about Bureau Chief, are you the only person in that office when you were Yeah, bureau chief is kind of a misnomer, but I tried to make it.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

It looks good on a business card. I I I tried to make it real because I used stringers. Okay. In in about eight of the uh major counties, I had people, usually uh radio news people or maybe somebody at the newspaper who would uh let me know what was going on at uh government meetings or if it's some other big news. And I had a stringer in Marion County, he was my best, Philip C. Winslow. Oh my gosh. Yes, yes. I was in Squire's Tavern uh one afternoon uh and uh met this guy who claimed he had worked for the Toronto Star. And I thought, you know, it's just uh somebody had somebody who's this guy. He went out to his trunk and showed me his clips.

SPEAKER_03 32:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Philip and his wife had uh uh you know joined the Back to the Land movement, and uh they'd uh uh had a uh uh a place down in the Rolling Fork Valley, and uh he was getting that journalistic itch again, and uh he wound up uh doing uh several stories for the Courier Journal. In fact, he did a page one story for the Courier Journal about uh a huge marijuana bust. They just found a field they didn't bust anybody. Um and I happened to be running the desk that day, the regional desk, and uh uh managed to uh get his story on the front page with a byline because I vouched for it. I said, you know, uh he's he's doing this through me, you know, it's all on me. And uh rarely has any uh uh stringer like that uh gotten uh a uh uh a byline on the front page of the courier journal. It just uh doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Now didn't you you perked up when he said that? Did you know Philip Lindslow?

SPEAKER_04 34:01

I know who he was, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:02

I knew who he was.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

I never knew him. Yeah, but one of my podcast episodes was with a guy who was we talked all about the back to the land movement in Marion County, yeah, and that name popped up. And I've always heard of him, and I think you'd every once in a while you'd hear him, he was reporting for NPR or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Well, I uh he uh decided he wanted to get back into journalism full-time and he got a job at the Somerset newspaper. And what he really wanted to be was an international correspondent, and uh I think he went to London and uh started looking around for jobs, and uh ABC said, Well, we need some equipment hauled to Libya, to Tripoli. Uh, will you uh uh you know just be our man to take care of the equipment? He goes to Tripoli, and that's a that's when we bombed it. He immediately became a correspondent, right? And he went on to uh write a couple of books and uh he worked for the uh uh United Nations uh in Israel and other places, and uh he uh did a lot of reporting from uh Burma, which uh the uh junta there would like to call Myanmar. And was basically run out of Burma and now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I was gonna say, when's the last time you heard from him?

SPEAKER_01 35:14

Heard from him just last week. Oh my gosh. Wow, wow. So what's he doing? Is he retired? He's retired. Okay. Uh one thing I wanted to get to is uh Mitch McConnell. We passed by the Mitch McConnell building on the way to your home. Um he's obviously a seminal figure in Kentucky history. Uh at this time, um he's not really uh so much getting his flowers, as they say, uh, although he may get a statue in the Frankfurt Capitol rotunda.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

He is going to get a statue. I'd be very pleased with that, I must say.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Okay, all right. But uh Dennis and I were just talking after all he has done, and absolut is probably as much as anybody responsible for putting the Republican Party in Kentucky where it is now, and also what he did for no thanks for our current president, uh, got booed at the last the last time he spoke at CPAC. What do you what do you think about uh I'm sure you've had lots of interactions with him. What do you think about him? What do you think about kind of the thankless work he's he's done and kind of where he is now? What's his legacy?

SPEAKER_02 36:21

Well, anybody who spent 50 years in public life, as Mitch McConnell has, is a complicated person. And you cannot summarize him in a hundred words or less, uh, unless you put a lot of thought to it, and I'm certainly not going to put a lot of thought here off the top of my head, but I have been thinking about it because I am writing a long essay on him for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society that's to be published uh uh in December as he's leaving office. Do you think that might be expanded into a book? Well, there have already been four books about Mitch McConnell, and I I'm writing a book about uh Earl Clements, another great Kentucky senator. Yeah, and after that experience, I'm not planning on writing any more books. Okay, well go finish what you were saying, sorry. Um McConnell, just to summarize what I'm uh saying in the uh in the register piece, has been one of the most consequential Kentuckians. You know, that means he made a difference in many ways. And you can argue that uh uh no Kentucky politician has been as consequential except Henry Clay, who kept the union together three times. And uh McConnell likes to be thought of in that uh uh kind of uh uh Hall of Fame. But the consequences can be positive and they can be negative. Uh, you know, uh Republicans uh look at uh what he's done for the party, and uh I think it's absolutely certain that this state became a Republican state uh more quickly than it would have if not for him.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

I mean the South was going in that direction anyway.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

Yeah, but Kentucky only has eight and a half percent black population. Uh race and civil rights have never really been the animating factor in the state that they have in states to the south. Um Clemens himself is a good example of that. Uh he was a moderate on race, he would have voted for the civil rights bill if he'd still been in the Senate.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

And um I lost my train of thought. Um uh McConnell.

SPEAKER_04 38:43

Yeah, obviously McConnell, but uh Kentucky as it is going to be.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

Oh, yeah, the and the acceleration uh of the uh of uh Kentucky's Republican trend. Yeah. The Republican trend began when Kentucky voted for Ronald Reagan uh in 1980. Now you have to go back a little bit farther. This is gonna go beyond the Mitch McConnell subject today. Um before the Depression, Kentucky was, to use terminology not used then, a purple state. Uh and really more Republican than Democratic. We had two Republican U.S. senators, uh, we had a Republican governor uh to start the decade. Um in the Depression, Kentucky became more democratic. Um under Roosevelt, you had lots of federal programs that people liked. Farm programs, uh uh dams, uh the tobacco program, um, and uh the labor unions were able to organize under the Wagner Act of 1935, uh held up by the Supreme Court in 1938. Uh so a lot of these mountain counties that have been Republican became Democratic because they were UMW counties.

SPEAKER_03 40:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

And that had a spillover effect into uh some other counties where the union wasn't quite as strong. Um lasted a long time. And Democrats were uh, you know, their programs were popular. Uh Earl Clements put together a faction that uh ruled this state for 16 out of 20 years, from 47 to 67. And uh uh but yet in 52, Kentuckians uh started a Republican trend. Eisenhower only lost Kentucky by 700 votes, and truth be told, he probably didn't really lose it. Okay. In 56, he carried Kentucky so strongly that Earl Clements was caught up in the landslide and lost to Thruston Morton. Happy Chandler being against him was the biggest factor, but uh uh that was a big factor too. And uh then uh we voted for Nixon in 1960, but when Goldwater came along, that was a bridge too far. Yeah. Kentuckians voted for Johnson. They voted for Nixon in 68 and 72. Uh McGovern lost big, but D. Huddleston got elected senator despite uh this uh uh Nixon landslide. And Jimmy Carter comes along in 76, and he's Kentucky's kind of guy and uh uh locks it up early and only lost it by about 18,000 votes in 1980. Uh Carter still had a great following year, but it was that election of Reagan and the presidency of Reagan that turned a lot of Democrats in this country into Republicans, and there was no exception with Kentucky. In 84, McConnell would not have been elected had it not been for Reagan's coattails. Uh McConnell likes to dispute that, but I think it's uh he's just you know it it's a it's a uh uh not wise to make that argument. He only won by uh 4,500 votes, you know, about one vote per precinct. Um but once people start voting for members of the opposite party, they become more open to the arguments and the principles of that party. And Kentucky voted for George Bush in 88, McConnell gets re-elected in 1990, and in 1994, when Bill Natcher died, McConnell engineered the election of Ron Lewis over Joe Praether in that second district special election.

SPEAKER_04 42:30

Was that a surprise given Praether's statewide name recognition?

SPEAKER_02 42:36

Well, Praether thought he had a lot of statewide name recognition, but he really didn't. You know, all these Frankfurt politicians, these guys in the legislature, think, oh, I see my name in the paper every day, people know who I am. That's not really true. And and Joe actually found that out when he tried to run for governor in 87. He gave it up in 86 because he just couldn't get traction. Um he was a great public servant and you know went on to uh uh uh be transportation secretary under uh Steve Bashir and he was finance secretary under uh Burreton Jones. And uh uh there's a little backstory to uh Joe losing that election. Uh Grady Stumbo was the party chairman at the time. And uh when Natcher died, Stumbo knew that there were uh enough social conservatives in the second district uh and Reagan voters that uh Democrats were not guaranteed that seat. So he wanted to hold the election as soon as possible, which would have been two weeks before the primary. And Jones, ever the parsimonious sort, said, No, no, we don't need to spend money on another election, let's just have it the same day as the primary. Well, two weeks before the primary, they had a special election in Oklahoma, in which An open seat was won by Republicans, surprising the whole country. And it made Republicans and potential donors realize hey, we could do the same thing in Kentucky. That's when the money started coming into Ron Lewis in a big way. And he had this uh uh really clever ad in which uh Praether uh morphed into uh Clinton and uh back into Praether, and uh Praether didn't carry a county uh because there was an anti-Clinton feeling out there, you know, sort of a buyer's remorse among some voters. These special elections tend to have low turnout anyway, so uh praether uh loses, and uh Ron Lewis becomes congressman, and at that point, Kentucky had America's two most unlikely congressmen, Ron Lewis and Tom Barlow in the first district, who had upset Carroll Hubbard in '92 because Hubbard got involved in the bank scandal at the House. Yeah, I forgot about that. So Ed Whitfield with McConnell's help beats Tom Barlow, and uh he flipped two congressional seats. Then uh uh Jim Bunning beats uh Scotty Basler with uh McConnell's help in '98, and the state senate goes Republican through two party switches in '99.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

You say with McConnell's help, what was McConnell able to do? Was he a great fundraiser?

SPEAKER_02 45:20

He was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Okay. And he was not about to lose a seat in his home state. And uh he was more or less the campaign manager for Jim Bunning in both 1998 and 2004, even though he had his own people on the ground taking care of that. Uh he uh just did about everything uh that there was to do uh for a campaign.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

Uh other than Mitch McConnell, to me, another fascinating uh uh character in politics is of course our current governor, Andy Bashir. And really his father as well, who was successful and well-liked and elected. Um what do you what are your thoughts about Andy Bashir? Uh what do you think is the how do you account for his appeal? I mean, he's a very friendly, well-spoken fellow, and uh also I think a pretty smart politician. And he doesn't fall for a lot of traps.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

Yeah, he is a smart politician and he's a very disciplined politician. Um, you gotta be uh fair and say in 2015, if his name had been uh uh Wilson and he'd run for attorney general, he wouldn't have gotten elected. But his name was Bashir and his father was governor.

SPEAKER_03 46:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

And uh he uh uh was able to uh uh beat Matt Bevin in 2019 for two main reasons. Bevin made a lot of uh stupid statements that turned people off, particularly the teachers. Oh, yeah. And and uh about half of teachers are Republicans. And Bashir ran a very disciplined campaign. He did not get distracted by all the daily crap that Bevin or whoever would throw at him. He had uh a simple message, and you know I can't even remember what the message was, but he got elected by about 5,000 votes. And Republicans thought, well, you know, this is just a fluke. Uh it was Bevin's loss, not Bashir's win. Uh we'll put up with four years of Bashir and then we'll have a Republican governor again. Well, they were about to stick it to him at the end of the 2020 legislative session when the pandemic hit, and not much else got done in the session. And Bashir became a familiar figure in the homes of most Kentuckians through TV and social media. You know, Facebook Live, 5 o'clock with Andy.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

People were stuck at home?

unknown 47:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:00

People caught- we called it bourbon with Bashir.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

Exactly, yeah, exactly. And you know, you'd you'd have a little uh game if he said, You can't be doing that, take another drink.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 48:10

That's exactly right. People developed confidence in Bashir's leadership ability during that time, and no Kentucky governor has ever had such a presence in the homes of so many Kentuckians. And this is a state that's divided by ten television markets, and most of those markets focus on other states Tennessee, Ohio, West Virginia, and he was able to leapfrog that, and he was able to confirm or to solidify that opinion they had with his performance in natural disasters. Right. Um, you know, those things are uh they can be easy to screw up. Absolutely, you know, sometimes it's not your fault, but uh uh either through his uh luck or skill, and probably some of both, uh he came through those with the public thinking, you know, this is a guy who's on top of the game, he knows how to be governor, and 2023 came along and uh they thought we see no reason to turn him out.

SPEAKER_01 49:20

And Kentucky's governor is constitutionally kind of a weak position.

SPEAKER_02 49:25

Used to be strong, but now it's weak because the legislature has so much authority.

SPEAKER_01 49:29

That's exactly right. And they're not in any mood that because they're separate different parties, they're not gonna help him any way they can. But it seems like he's done a good job of in some ways, frankly, taking credit for some of the things that maybe they did. Like he's there at every ribbon cutting, but so what? That's good politics.

SPEAKER_02 49:46

That's fundamentally his strongest suit, other than uh handling crises, is economic development. Uh, the state has had more economic development and jobs announcements uh under him than any other previous governor, even adjusted for inflation. And the Republicans would argue well, that's because we have these uh more business-friendly tax policies, and we have a right to work law. Well, there's something to that, but you cannot quantify it. You have to say that it's the whole set of policies. Uh Albashir goes about recruiting uh and doing deals with uh people who want to bring jobs, uh, and the legislative policies that have been set. Uh not all people who want to bring jobs to a state are uh scared of uh income taxes, for example. You know, we've we've done fine at uh recruiting industry for a long time, even though we had a six percent income tax. Now it's going to be down to three percent, and we're still recruiting them. Uh Tennessee has no income tax, which is always uh uh held up as uh the great uh comparison, but Tennessee has a lot of other things going for it that we don't.

SPEAKER_01 51:00

It's actually a more urban state than people maybe they think we're just like them, but we're really not a mere reflection of Tennessee.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

And we don't have a uh uh a poor coal field that drags down the rest of the state. And they mine some coal in Tennessee, but it's just kind of the tail end of the Kentucky coal field.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

Right, right. Um, in your time, some we've mentioned some leaders inside and outside of politics. Who are some of the things when you think about in your time covering this state and thinking about this state, who are some other leaders? I think of somebody like Ed Pritchard. Does that I know you probably knew him?

SPEAKER_02 51:35

He was never elected to anything.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

No, no.

SPEAKER_02 51:38

Although he very much wanted to politically active, but uh well, we could spend a whole afternoon talking about uh Edward Fretwell Pritchard Jr. That's right. Uh suffice to say, he was uh uh a friend of Roosevelt and a lot of the New Dealers in Washington. Came back home thinking he was gonna uh run for Congress. Catherine Graham at the Washington Post. Yep, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:59

Everybody thought he was gonna be the next be president one day.

SPEAKER_02 52:01

Yep, governor, president, senator, whatever. Yeah. But he comes back and uh there's a uh seat opening up in Congress in 1948 because Virgil Chapman is running for the Senate, and uh Pritchard thinks, uh, well, you know, my daddy's in the legislature and I know all these people, and I'll just uh slide right in there. The courthouse politicians did not like Ed Pritchard, and he got no traction. So they think he was an egghead or sort of. Yeah. And then he tried to prove himself by stuffing a ballot box in Bourbon County and wound up going to prison.

SPEAKER_03 52:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:34

So he he comes back with the help of uh Earl Clements and Burt Combs and becomes a great uh advisor uh to the uh Clemens faction of the Democratic Party, which uh uh Clements bolted because he fell out with Combs. Uh but that faction continued to rule the state for a long time, and uh Pretchard continued to advise other Democratic governors until he died in 84, I think it was. So he was a uh a very perceptive uh uh student of personalities, politics, uh the way the state operates. I remember the first time I met him, I told him where I was from, and he said, all those counties down there, they're all a little bit different. And what he meant was, unlike, say, Bourbon, Scott, and Woodford counties, which is a judicial circuit, uh, Clinton, Cumberland, and Monroe counties are not homogenous. There's a lot of differences in those counties, not so much like the Bluegrass counties. And that that's one reason that southern Kentucky has been you know hard to define as a region. There's no you know uh clear, overwhelming character about it. Um but uh uh that was an example of how Pritchard understood the state. He knew somebody in every county, yeah, and uh he was uh a great thinker and philosopher and uh uh true New Deal liberal.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

Absolutely. I don't know if you ever saw it. Sometime before he died, he was nearly totally blind. He went on firing line with William F. Buckley just.

SPEAKER_02 54:21

Yeah, that was the night that was 1980.

SPEAKER_01 54:23

1980. Yep. And it was fascinating to see uh William F. Buckley, who didn't mind you knowing how smart he was, would start a quote from Shakespeare. Well, Pritchard would finish the next sixth tenses of it for him.

SPEAKER_02 54:36

Yeah. It was an intellectual feast.

SPEAKER_01 54:38

Oh my gosh, it was, it was, yeah. And they debated the New Deal and all this stuff. It was it was pretty interesting. Uh, anybody else you can think of who was like you think were some, you know, one or two seminal figures that didn't stand out in your state.

SPEAKER_02 54:54

We've talked a little bit about Clements because uh he uh uh I'm writing this book about him and he founded the faction that ruled the state for 16 out of 20 years. Um but the governor who most often gets uh uh the lion's share of the credit uh in that faction is Burke Combs. And Burke Combs was a very progressive governor, um and uh uh I think uh uh an honest, forthright governor. It's a tragedy, really, that uh he and Clements fell out uh over uh uh something they should not have fallen out about, too involved to go in here. Read the book. Um and then you know, combs tried to come back in 1971 after having been a federal judge, and Clements worked to beat him and did beat him. He finally got his revenge. And the winner of that race was Wendell Ford. Uh if you look at the the governors of that period, Combs, Ned Brethett, Louie Nunn, and Wendell Ford, uh, all of them did important things that advanced the state. Um Clements uh uh started a true rural road program, modernized state government. Umbs uh uh got the uh sales tax and expanded the park system, lots of other improvements. Uh under Breathett, there are a lot of uh social legislation and uh environmental legislation, uh really progressive governor. Then Nunn runs against uh uh Henry Ward in 1967 after having almost beaten Brethett in 63, and he's campaigning as a conservative, you know, the typical Republican not going to raise taxes. He gets in and sees he's not gonna be able to do much of anything as governor unless he does raise taxes. And he got the legislature to raise the sales tax from three cents to five cents. He could have just asked for a penny, but his his slogan or his his rationale was uh well uh you're gonna uh uh get uh punished as much for uh stealing a goat as he gets uh punished for stealing a kid. So you just might as well get the goat and and do more with it. And you know, Kentucky Educational Television started under Louis Nunn because he got that tax increase. Wow. Um and there were lots of other uh improvements under Nunn, uh mental health and so on. Uh he really ought to be ranked among the progressive governors of the 1960s, even though he was elected as a reactionary.

SPEAKER_03 57:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:36

Uh, you know, you do things to get elected and then you have to govern. And then as a result, Louie Nunn was never elected again. He ran for Senate in 72 and got beat by D. Huddleston, for governor in 79 and got beat by John Wy Brown, and Nunn's nickel uh was always Nunn's nickel. So you you have to uh give credit to those governors. And Ford uh was really, even though he was governor only three years and senator for 24, uh he was the great democratic political figure uh of the last third of the uh 20th century of the state. Um ran a very strong Democratic Party uh with a ruthless chairman named J.R. Miller and uh uh set a lot of other set a lot of other people up for their political careers, including uh Steve Bashir. Um after Ford, um you had Julian Carroll, who served five years and uh was the last governor who had a lot of money to spend. John Y. Brown was elected in 79 basically because the Carroll administration had run into a scandal, and Brown had married Miss American. Right. Um but Brown came along at just the right time for the Democratic Party because it was just about ready to uh run out of gas. Uh you'd have the uh the scandals under the Carroll administration. Uh that was the beginning of the federal investigation of both Ford and Carroll uh that resulted in some people going to prison. And um the Democrats uh might well have lost to Louis Nunn in 79 if they hadn't had a fresh face like John Wy Brown Jr.

SPEAKER_01 59:28

Who had all the charisma in the world.

SPEAKER_02 59:30

He had marvelous charisma and uh he arrived in uh in the governorship uh without much money to spend, and he wasn't about to raise taxes, so he was essentially a caretaker governor, yeah, but he had one of the best cabinets any governor has ever had. You know, Bill Sturgeil, who had interest in Marion County, right, was energy and agriculture secretary. And W. T. Young, the great uh financier investor from Lexington, was uh uh uh economic development secretary, I think. Uh he just had a great group of people around it.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:06

Was I'd always kind of heard that the state would have been in big time trouble if John Y. Brown hadn't been the governor during those years given the financial crisis and someone to shepherd it through the way he I think there's a lot to that.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:25

Uh, you know, they uh instituted efficiencies in state government that were needed. Uh they had a uh uh a clear management uh format, uh, you know, six by six, uh, you know, uh nobody answers, uh nobody supervises more than six people, and you don't have more than six levels of uh bureaucracy and so on. It was it was a thinking administration, and it was all about efficiency because they were running out of money. Revenue was not coming in, and they were gonna have to cut, and did make cuts, but uh it would have been a lot worse had it not been for the efficiencies that Brown had, and because he was anti-patronage, uh, you know, was not into doing favors for political friends. That's what his father, John Y. Brown Sr. had run against uh all those years. The guy ran ten times for statewide office and never got elected. And Brown's absence on the political front opened the door for Martha Lane Collins, who was, even though she was a female, she was the most traditional of the candidates for governor in 1983.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:29

In a lot of ways, her election was kind of unlikely, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:32

Uh well, she ran against two liberals. Yeah. Harvey Sloan, who tried to make himself less of a liberal, and Grady Stumbo, who was more of a populist. And if Brown had endorsed Stumbo a week now two weeks before the election instead of a week before, Stumbo might have won that premier. Um but Collins won it uh by uh uh like about 4,000 votes, I think. And uh she went on to be a good governor after some uh early uh slips. Of course, her husband went to prison for his peddling influence, and that uh probably kept her from ever being elected to anything again. And unfortunately, I think it also kept uh the most talented woman I've ever known in Kentucky politics, Crit Lew Allen, from being anything higher than lieutenant governor.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:23

Uh a job to which she was appointed after by Patton or by Steve Baschear after uh Jerry Abramson went to Washington uh to work at the White House. Um Crit's husband, Lynn, uh just passed, had had uh been involved in uh introducing uh Bill Collins to uh uh these uh uh bond dealers uh who uh uh got him into trouble. And you know, Lynn was a witness for the prosecution, but Crit was always afraid that uh Lynn's involvement in that would be brought up in uh any major campaign she made. So uh she was state auditor, uh, did a good job, and uh was uh uh Patton's uh uh uh uh cabinet secretary, uh did a good job, always did a good job in uh government, and she is the only politician I have ever told if you run, I'll be for you. This is long after I stopped being a reporter, I was just a columnist.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:26

Yeah, but uh uh you know that's uh she had a lot of people similarly in her ear, I think, yeah, to do that. And yeah, uh I did not know that connection with uh Bill Collins and all that, but um she is as good as and also just a good person from what I could tell. And has some Lebanon connections, she's related to the Grundys. Used to come to her. I didn't know that. That's right, that's right. And used to spend summers as a girl at the Blackburn house. They were related to her somehow, and anyway, uh always very nice whenever I run into her, as if she remembers who I am. But um uh talk a little bit about Rocky Atkins. He's an interesting guy to me. Um did not win in his campaign for governor, but uh patched up anything that may have been between him and Andy.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:11

And got a great consolation prize, you know. He is senior advisor to the governor, right? Which means that he's at the governor's side for most of these ribbon cuttings and presentations and whatnot. And um he came to the Cornbread Mafia uh documentary. He did. Yes, he did. Well, you know, he's been assumed to be running for governor, right? But Jacqueline Coleman has gotten off to such a fast start, uh, especially with the Teamsters local 89 endorsement on the day of her announcement, that it's made some people think that you know maybe Rocky's not going to run after all. That uh, you know, she just may have uh too much of a lead, and that the Democratic Party no longer has as many conservatives or moderates that are Rocky Adkins kind of voters. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:06

So even though he may be stronger in a general, he might have a dip more difficult time against her in the primary exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:12

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

Um, and I don't see him, some people say, well, maybe he'll run against Rand Paul. I don't know if he would want to leave Kentucky. That's not the plumb assignment he got to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:24

I can't can't see that. And uh Rocky's 65 years old. Yeah, yeah. Uh, you know, he's still uh still a pretty uh rangy and nimble 65 for sure. He is 65.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:34

Yeah, yeah. Um sometimes I think about how you Kentucky did, and I've in this book that I read about Ed Pritchard, which you probably read, called Short of the Glory, a guy named Tracy Campbell wrote it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and he talks a little bit about the progressive era in Kentucky, and but it did not last as long as a state and say like um like North Carolina. Um why did the progressive era? Era kind of peter out, I guess the voters would got tired of taxes and where it might have worked in some other states like in North Carolina, but well, I don't know that we invest like we should into our say our higher education. Um are there some missed opportunities you see, or is there a reason that Kentucky's been missing opportunities for a century more?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:22

Yeah, yeah. You know, we uh at the beginning of the 20th century we were satisfied uh to be uh uh the best state in the South, or uh, you know, by whatever measure, or the gateway to the South, because the South was so bad off. Yeah. Well, after World War I, uh states like Virginia and North Carolina uh began uh their economic development efforts and uh putting uh real assets into higher education. And Kentucky um did a lot of the same things, but we had more ground to make up. Okay. You know, we were uh uh down in the uh West Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas category in terms of uh education and per capita income and so on. And while we've made great strides in the last 75 years uh since Earl Clemens was uh well 80 years since Earl Clemens was elected, uh it we really haven't kept pace. And you can see that from the fact that we lost a congressional seat in 1950, and we lost another one in 1960, and another one in 1990. You know, we used to have as many uh members of Congress as Tennessee did.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

Now we have six and they have nine, and they are forecast to go up one next census.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:51

So uh we just had a lot of ground to make up, and it's been very difficult. Um I'd have to really uh put a sharper pencil to it to uh uh assign uh uh credit or blame, but uh uh my curbstone opinion is that uh uh we've been trying to dig ourselves out of a very deep hole, and uh the hole's just been too deep. So we've got to keep trying. Got to keep trying.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:19

I want to touch on a couple of things that you have done uh in the last 20 years or so. You uh went to UK and started, am I correct, started the Center for Rural Journalism?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:32

Well, Al Smith really started the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues with his uh good friend Rudy Abramson and the help of people at UK, and uh he recruited me to leave the courier journal and uh uh run that program, and that's what I did for 20 years. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

What was that like? What was it, what were your duties?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:53

What uh well it was the program is designed uh to help rural journalists uh do the same kind of job for their audiences that metropolitan journalists and national journalists do for theirs. You know that the the underlying principle is uh the belief that rural people deserve the same quality of journalism as everybody else. Yeah and they generally don't get it because the news the counties are too small, the newspapers are too small, uh, the expectations are too low. So what we've tried to do is uh raise the level of expectations and exalt good examples. And one of the first things I knew I wanted to do um was create the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity, and tenacity in rural journalism. The publishers of the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg.

unknown 1:09:56

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:57

Uh they are uh were my bow ideals of uh uh good local publishers. And then we started the Al Smith Award for uh public service through community journalism by Kentuckians, and Stevie Lowry was uh one of the uh winners of that award in 2018.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:15

Um, you know, she uh followed in her father's footsteps and uh was just a great uh local editor.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:23

That effort is a little bit like put pushing a boulder up a hill.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:29

Yeah, you know, as soon as I arrived there, I said, uh I'm an extension agent for rural journalists. Yeah. Um and I know that a lot of my seeds are gonna be uh scattered in uh barren furrows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, uh, but you gotta find the fertile furrows and you gotta nourish them.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:52

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:52

And I think that uh the institute has done that and it's continuing to do that under Benji Hamm, my successor.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:59

Now, was that part of the journalism department at the UK? Okay, you were just a branch all for another.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:04

Well, I I'm I was a faculty member who had my own project to which I devoted 80% of my time, uh, 20% of it teaching. And uh that teaching part uh involved uh having students cover the little town of Midway. Um we did that for 14 years. And uh that was a really great experience too. You can still find the Midway Messenger online if you look hard enough. Okay, we'll do that.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:30

Let me if I if I you do this to improve journalism in the rural areas. Right. Obviously, technology, social media, and all those things have impacted rural journalism. And then that for someone who's worked for some a daily paper and some weekly papers, I don't see that they do themselves any favors by holding a story up from a Thursday to the next Wednesday's paper by not by not having more of an online presence. What is there anything these papers can do isn't there examples to survive, or what was your blueprint in telling these guys that there is a future in rural journalism?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:24

Well, I didn't have a blueprint for telling people anything, what I because people don't like to be told what to do. That's especially true of local newspaper editors and publishers. Uh even though I had been one, you know, it'd been 30, 40 years since I'd done that kind of work. Uh, but I kept up with it, and uh what I tried to do was spot trends and find best examples. And one of my principles was every market is different. You know, what might work in Lebanon might not work in Campbellsville uh just because they're different kinds of places. And I started telling uh these newspapers uh uh 15 or 20 years ago that uh they needed to think more about online than print because that's where the world was going. You know, once smartphones became a big thing about 2007 or eight, uh it was pretty clear uh that people were going to expect to get information when they wanted it, right? And on their terms with instant updates, which was usually free. Right. So, how do you make money uh in the newspaper business or even in broadcasting? They're now having trouble in broadcasting, trying to uh keep their advertisers. Well, you make sure that you are known as the most reliable source of necessary information. Now, information that's necessary to one person is not necessary to another, so you have to provide different kinds of information, but the most important kind of information you have to provide is about government and politics, and you have to hold people in government and politics accountable, and if you don't do that, you're in the wrong business. You're just plain in the wrong business, and there are a lot of newspapers published in this state today that uh aren't doing that. Uh they're ghosts of their former selves, and uh uh I'm not sure what the solution is to that.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:29

When you look at the Courier Journal, and you look at the Lexington Herald, will they be here ten years from now?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:42

Yes, I think so in some form or fashion. Uh they may be weekly magazines with an online presence. Um I don't know why more uh newspapers haven't uh gotten into the magazine business because people still like magazines, you know, they like that uh slick, high-quality uh presentation with color photos. And uh there's some newspapers in this country that uh you know, small town newspapers that try to do that. Um it doesn't make them a lot of money, but uh it it keeps their foot into the market and it appeals to a segment of the market that would not be buying their product if not for that. And I think diversification is a real uh imperative. Uh newspapers uh some of them have uh uh started cafes. You know, it's interesting, and it's not just a place to make money selling coffee and cake, it's a place to meet people and find out what the news is. What's going on? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:49

Like when we drink our coffee. Like when we drink our coffee, that's right. Let me ask one more question. Yeah. With the attacks on whatever mainstream media is today, and with the money individuals are putting up to purchase broadcast media right now, for example. Does it scare you where the attacks on the press and what it does to society overall?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:27

Yeah, it does scare me. Because uh the Ellisons uh succeed in taking over uh Warner Brothers Discovery, you know, they have both CBS and CNN. That's right. And it's clear that uh the Trump administration uh uh wants uh uh CBS and CNN uh to uh uh stop uh uh their accountability journalism. Um Donald Trump uh is an autocrat who uh uh doesn't like to be held accountable, and he just is the antithesis of what a president ought to be in that terms. So uh I'm just thankful that uh uh he's only got a little more than two years to serve. Uh because we'll it's gonna be a long two years, and he he will he'll make it a long two years for us, and we may have some uh unprecedented difficulties uh between now and then, but I am pretty confident in the ability of the country uh to survive him and get back to basic principles uh of uh responsibility and accountability uh in government.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:33

But it's gone there's been such a split that uh and uh obviously you and I may have some different political leanings, but it's okay to say bad things about people, and it's okay to do things that growing up we would have never considered. How do you come back from all of that?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:52

Who have to have a you have to have a president who sets a good example, okay. And I think that's one thing Andy Bashir is trying to uh uh uh do, and you know it seems to be part of his strategy in running for president. Uh you know, he's he is critical of Trump, but he's not uh well he doesn't castigate him.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:15

He's not a fire breather.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:16

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:17

More about his policies and how he's doing things rather than personal attack.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:21

From a perspective of I'm a church going, you know, I'm a from a Christian ethos.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:26

Exactly. Uh the Christian ethos is important.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:29

Yeah, yeah. Um to kind of wrap this up and thank you so much for all this time you've given us, uh talk a little bit about the Kentucky Lantern. I don't think I'd ever heard of it, maybe five to ten years ago, but it's something I'm increasingly hearing about.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:44

It's only been around for three years.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:45

It's only been around for three years.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:47

All you everything you learned was in our conversation, meeting about J.B. Luke and some of that coming up.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:54

It's actually been around for a little over three and a half years. Okay, okay. And uh the lantern is part of a 50-state collective, collaborative, funded by philanthropists who saw, according to reliable research, that the coverage of state government news had greatly declined in most states in this country because newspapers just weren't staffing state capitals the way they used to, primarily, and broadcast stations weren't either. So uh the Lantern uh has an office uh uh ironically uh uh in the same building uh set of buildings where the Courier Journal Bureau and the Herald Leader Bureau used to be. Uh uh, the barracks over here on Shelby Street, and they have uh a staff of four, three reporters and an editor, uh Linda Blackford, who's just come over from the Herald Leader, but they also have uh people like uh uh me who uh writes uh columns and uh uh Tom Loftus who uh still investigates campaign finance, and Debbie Yedder, yeah, who uh covers uh health care and uh related uh issues. Uh so uh it is uh uh a robust news organization and one that's uh developing uh a following around the state.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:20

Do they have like a program uh in any that's in any way uh uh uh like an apprenticeship program, an internship program where they're trying to nurture younger ones?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:30

Do you I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:31

Yeah, I think not that that needs to be part of their mission, they're doing good work already.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:34

I think I think some of these outlets around the country have been uh part of uh Report for America, okay, which takes uh young journalists uh uh usually fresh out of college and uh puts them in a newsroom. Okay. Um but that hasn't happened here. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:50

When I look at Debrietta, Tom Loftus, outcross, and and not to be stroking your ego, but it's almost a hall of fame of writers.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:01

That's what I was thinking, too.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:02

And you know, in in in a an organization like that, but they also have is it McKenna Horsley and some other people who also contribute?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:12

Well, McKenna Horsley is the staff writer who covers politics.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:16

Okay, so you have other writers.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:18

And Liam Neemeyer covers uh the environment and other matters, and uh uh you have Sarah Ladd, uh former student of mine who uh covers uh health uh and uh uh related issues.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:33

So were these people did they work for the paper media also?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:36

No, no, they just worked for the lantern before this though. Oh yeah, uh uh uh yeah, they had they had worked for uh uh other media. Uh they didn't come uh to these jobs right out of college. Liam was at the public station at Murray, and uh uh McKenna was working for the Huntington Paper.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:55

And uh Sarah was in Tucky today or something?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:58

Um I forget what Sarah was doing uh before she came to the Lantern. Oh what but she worked for the Courier Journal. Okay. Uh and uh uh I think uh it was a uh marker of uh the lantern's uh standing and potential that she went from uh the state's uh once the state's largest newspaper to uh uh the lantern.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:22

I mean, you're taking instead of senior citizens like me or you and Tom and I'll include myself and Deborah, you get you got young people coming into that. Right. Which is to me is attractive.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:37

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:38

Yeah, and uh I think in Linda they have an editor who's uh going to help them improve their skills. She's excellent. And uh uh do a good job for the people of the state.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:49

You know the previous editor used to work at the Latin editor.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:52

Yep, Jamie Luke. She was a great founding editor when the people at State's newsroom uh called to see who they might recruit. Uh I gave them one name. That was hers.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:03

I'll be there. What is its business model? Is it a nonprofit?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:07

It's a nonprofit, it's funded by philanthropy. And um the uh uh it's unclear just how long it can last because it's dependent on the people writing the checks. To keep writing checks. That's right. But you know, they have created something substantial, which uh philanthropies like to point to and say, you know, we did this. And uh uh they've also uh developed a sort of audience that ought to enable them when they need to to start charging for a premium product. You know, Politico, uh the great uh uh political and government uh online news source is free, but they offer premium products uh that uh uh the insiders uh uh want and sometimes need, and uh they they charge uh heavy fees for those. So I I have to think that at the state level there's still uh an opportunity for these uh newsrooms to have premium products for which they can charge subscriptions.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:23

I I have contributed to the lantern and I expect you to do likewise.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:27

And so have I.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:29

I will, I will. They don't have a it's all online, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:32

It's all online, no, no, no print product.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:34

Okay, absolutely. When I get something from the Herald Leader that says donate to us to help us continue our mission.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:45

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:46

What would stop a deep pocket individual from writing them a check? Is the newspaper not then become beholden to people like that when they start?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:02

Well, that's a problem with any uh news outlet that takes donations.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:06

You know, if you're gonna take big money from people who have particular interests, then you have to have an understanding with them that you're not taking the money to advance their interests. Right. You're taking the money to do journalism and you do it without fear or favor. And I worry as news outlets become more dependent on their subscribers for their revenue, that they become too interested in doing stories that those subscribers want. Uh, and that leads to uh a selection bias. Right. Uh, you know, you you can't cover every story, you have to pick and choose stories, and you know, maybe because uh your audience or your givers are uh of one uh uh uh predilection, you're gonna uh cover uh this story over that story.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:59

In some ways, the Trump years have been a boon to journalism in some ways, but you gotta keep feeding that Trump rage, and that gets less and less useful, uh Franklin.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:08

Yeah, it was it was good for journalism in the first okay Trump term. Yeah, but uh after Biden beat Trump, uh there was sort of a collective uh and the pandemic was going on, sure, and that added to uh the problem too. Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:26

Compare New York Times subscriptions online going up, Washington Post dropping the way it has, and I think to me the post is easier to read, but you know, after what Bezos did, I'm not gonna support his organization. Compare those two and why one went up and one went down.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:48

Well, I agree with you that the post was easier to read. Uh I would read the post more often than I would the Times, and I subscribed to both. Um its reporting seemed to be a little more accessible and down-to-earth, um, and more focused on government politics. Uh so maybe that's why I liked it. But uh Jeff Bezos, uh, the Amazon uh magnet, uh bought the post and greatly improved it, but uh finally decided he wasn't going to uh uh take all these losses, and he also wasn't gonna take uh the heat from Donald Trump who he needed favors from. That's exactly right. Yeah. Those kind of people don't need to be in the news business. Right, right. Yeah. So I think when when Bezos saw he faced that conflict, he should have tried to sell the post or put it into a nonprofit and taken the tax deduction. Uh, you know, trying to maintain the post as a shrunken uh enterprise uh is not going to work. Yeah. Uh it'll You know, the Post will still be valuable and it'll still be an alternative to the Times. It'll find stories that the Times doesn't have. I mean, they break new stories every week. It's still a good paper. And I did not abandon the Washington Post uh after uh uh Bezos started caving to Trump uh because they were still good journalists then it was still worthy of support. You know, too many people cut off their nose to spite their face.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:26

Yeah, you know I did too.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:30

Uh and I I I argued with my friends who did that. I said, you know, don't do that. You know, they they need your support in order to continue the good things they're doing. Right. You know, you can't make the perfect the enemy of the good.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:44

I can subscribe to the Times, I can subscribe to the Post for half of what it would cost me to subscribe to the courier or the Hell Leader.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:52

Unless you call up the courier and say, Can you give me a deal? And they'll give you a deal.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:56

You know that?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:57

I did not know that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:58

Well, but I can't get anybody to talk to them.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:00

Well, that is it can be a problem. Somebody's got to pick up the phone. Yeah. I mean, these legacy newspaper companies are having a very difficult time maintaining their old platforms. And uh that's why I think that uh you know they may wind up being magazines uh in ten years. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:17

Um we need to uh not keep you uh tethered to this chair much longer.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:23

You don't need to keep your audience tethered any further.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:25

No, no, this is gonna be two shows. This might be two shows. That's okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:29

I gotta take my wife out.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:31

That's right, that's right. This is his anniversary. Uh let's wrap up. We don't know how good we had it uh when we had the Bingham family, in my opinion. No, we didn't. Uh well, actually talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:43

I mean I worked for the Bingham's for eight years. Okay, and I worked for Gannett for eighteen. Now, the first eight years under Gannett was really under Bingham era management, so there was a transition there. But once Gannett management, you know, management with the Gannett pedigree came in, uh things really began to change. Uh, you know, the bureaus in Hazard and Paducah were closed. Uh later the other bureaus were closed. Uh there's no longer a Frankfurt bureau. They tried to cover uh uh Frankfurt by sending reporters over from Louisville. Um and uh the Binghams set a great example. Uh they didn't have to do the things they did. Um they wanted uh influence, uh, and they had a newspaper, and they didn't have to circulate that paper in all 120 counties, and they didn't have to have bureaus that covered the whole state in order to do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:52

But they did it because they wanted to do a good job and do right by the people of the state and treat people in the far reaches of the state the same way they did the local people. You know, Kentucky has had a problem seeing itself as a unified polity in the age of big media because of television. You know, people get their news from TV, and it may come from Cincinnati or Nashville or Huntington or uh Evansville or whatever. So uh the Bingham's tried to knit the state together, and I've all I've long wished that uh they had taken Al Smith's advice and bought a few papers around the state and had printing plants that could have produced uh regional editions of the Courier Journal. Oh wow. Uh and uh not had the transportation problems that uh they've had uh delivering the paper from Louisville. Of course, now you know where the paper is printed? Nope. Knoxville. Uh is that right? Did not know that. Yeah, most Gannette papers in this region are printed at Knoxville because they've got the biggest newest plant. I'll be darn. I'll be darn.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:53

All right. Let's wrap it up. Al, thank you so much. This is uh this has just been great. We've been trying to organize this thing for probably a year since I ran into you at least at the uh Track County picnic in Fredericktown last August. Uh and uh we chatted up a little bit. Uh thank you so much for your time. This has just been great.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:12

Been glad to do it, and uh best wishes to all my old friends in Marion County. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:20

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SPEAKER_01 1:32:43

I told you you were gonna enjoy that. Uh that was our conversation. My conversation uh uh with Dennis George and Al Cross in Frankfurt, Kentucky at Al's Home. Uh I knew you were gonna like it. Uh and uh it was everything that I thought it would be and more. Um again, so grateful to Dennis George for sponsoring this episode. Uh we'll have more to come soon. Thank you all for tuning in to this mildly amusing podcast with me, James Braggins.