On the morning of March 12, 1925, a bit of musical (and women’s) history was made on the Hill when a new tune rang out at chapel assembly. The song College Heights was the winner of a competition between members of Macon A. Leiper’s English class. The students had set out to create a poem that, when paired with a musical score, could serve as the school’s anthem.
Freshman Mary Frances Bradley of Franklin, Kentucky took first prize with her memorable lyrics:
College Heights, on hilltop fair, With beauty all thine own, Lovely jewel far more rare Than graces any throne!
Bradley brought an extra advantage to the contest: her
father Ben J. Bradley, an accomplished musician and composer, contributed the
melody.
Not long afterward, another songstress, Bessie Swartz
Cherry, the sister-in-law of WKU’s first president Henry Hardin Cherry,
conceived another musical tribute. The Red and the Gray referenced the
school’s official colors prior to the change to red and white in 1956.
Both The Red and the
Gray and College Heights became
fixtures at commencement exercises in the 1930s and 1940s, but the latter eventually
triumphed and has now become a familiar chorus for generations of WKU
graduates:
College Heights we hail thee, We shall never fail thee, Falter never, live forever, Hail! Hail! Hail!
“Without Nancy, there would have been no Governor Reagan, no President Reagan,” said aide Michael Deaver when Nancy Reagan died on March 6, 2016. Like many other First Ladies, she was a behind-the-scenes adviser, lightning rod, and icon in her own right.
Two collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections fall at slightly different points on the spectrum of opinion about Mrs. Reagan. As we have previously blogged, the Reagans inspired Logan County native Betty Kathleen Hall to write a kind of joint biography in the form of a narrative poem. As hagiography, her 184-page work has no peer. Here’s Nancy at Reagan’s 1967 inauguration as Governor of California:
The inaugural ball was stylish and gleaming, and Nancy was first in the mystical haze: She wore a white, one-shouldered gown, by Galenos. all beaded with diamond-like glass daisies.
Nancy’s worshipful gaze at “Ronnie” whenever he spoke also earned notice:
while others applauded Nancy transfixed into a pure adoration.
But Nancy was no shrinking violet, as Hall made clear in her evaluation of the sources of Ronald Reagan’s success:
And towering high with an eagle eye, Nancy’s antennas scan political sky.
In 1982, at the request of a Kentucky cousin, Frank Kavanaugh recalled his interactions with “Some First Ladies and Their Husbands” beginning in 1967, when he arrived in Washington as a documentary filmmaker associated with George Washington University’s Department of Medical and Public Affairs. His most vivid memories of Nancy Reagan related to the March 30, 1981 attempt on the President’s life and a subsequent TV film that recreated the assassination attempt and its aftermath. As Reagan recovered in hospital, he wrote, Mrs. Reagan was “the strongest force in that building. She was aware of every activity or plan surrounding the president, seldom left his side, and could make life miserable for anyone who was not contributing to President Reagan’s chances for recovery and comfort”—a role that, Kavanaugh realized, was “not too unlike the role she took throughout the president’s life.” In her determination to preserve Reagan’s image as the “good guy” and “the great and charming communicator,” he observed, Mrs. Reagan “could be vicious.” Even though she, like her husband, had acted in films, she never saw the highly praised documentary about the attempt on her husband’s life. “To her it was a nightmare that she wanted to avoid reliving,” said Kavanaugh. The President, on the other hand “loved it. He was back in the movies.”
Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections. For more of our collections about political women, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.
The surrender of Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan on July 26, 1863, marked the end of the “Great Raid,” his 18-day charge from Kentucky into Indiana that veered east into southern Ohio. There was “a great scare here,” reported infantryman Aaron Stuver in a letter to his sister from Cincinnati, “and we had to turn out in full strength” as the state militia scrambled to defend the area against Morgan and his raiders.
Morgan ultimately brushed past Cincinnati—“or we might have had an interview with the rebels,” wrote Stuver. Splitting up his troops, he then caused havoc as he charged through southern Ohio ahead of a major battle in Meigs County, at Buffington Island on the Ohio River. The largest Civil War engagement in Ohio, the battle memorably witnessed the death of Major Daniel McCook, one of fifteen in his family who saw service with the Union. The patriarch of the “Fighting McCooks,” as they were known, was buried in Cincinnati after a large funeral in which four companies of Stuver’s regiment participated as escorts. During the ceremonies, both enlisted men and officers, wrote Stuver, stood up to a soaking rain “like good soldiers.” McCook, he observed, “was a Paymaster in the Army, and went voluntarily after Morgan, he was 60 years old.”
While the Great Raid accomplished little lasting good for the Confederates, it succeeded for a time in siphoning off Union forces from important offensive measures in east Tennessee. It also caused fear and uncertainty among civilians in Indiana and Ohio, many of whom suffered loss and damage to property that had been seized by Morgan or otherwise caught in the crossfire. Eight months later, the Ohio legislature created a commission to assess claims, and in April 1869 authorized the payment of compensation. The final cost Morgan extracted for the Great Raid was the printing of special forms for “Morgan Raid Claims,” on which farmers like Asahel Skinner of Meigs County certified their losses. Skinner received a total of $220 for two horses, bridles and other provisions, and for the death of a colt.
The “Great Experiment” began on January 17, 1920, the day the Volstead Act took effect in the United States. Better known as Prohibition, it banned the production, sale and transport of “intoxicating liquors” and instantly turned many thirsty Americans into outlaws. Thanks to an enterprising Iowa whiskey maker, it’s now designated as “National Bootlegger’s Day.” Even better, it’s also the birthday of Al Capone, boss of the “Chicago outfit” of gangsters who made his name in the bootlegging business.
The history and folklore of bootlegging and moonshining (or, as we more delicately catalog it, “illicit distilling”) is well represented in WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections. In addition to books and historic photographs, research projects created by students are housed in the Folklife Archives. For example:
A 1970 paper by Mike Harmon profiled the moonshiners “Google” and “Red.” Both took pride in the quality of their homemade whiskey, although Google, who never drank, professed to be much better at his craft than Red, who did. A commercial fisherman, Red set up his still on the Ohio River and transported his materials there by boat. He recalled fishing on the river one day and glimpsing as many as a dozen working stills along its banks.
A 1972 paper by Virginia Antonini gave a portrait of “Jim,” an Indiana farmer who made moonshine to supplement his income. While running some of the moonshine to a farmer’s market in Louisville, his wife was stopped by the “revenue men,” but talked her way out of trouble by explaining that selling “shine” was the only way she could buy shoes for her children. Virginia also talked to her own mother, who recalled making “home brew” from malt, water, sugar and yeast, and learned of the technique of a Louisville restaurateur who added food coloring to moonshine to pass it off as aged whiskey.
A 1972 paper by Joe Griggs profiled E. Y. (“Uncle Yegi”) Hurt of Todd County, Kentucky. Living in a house built on blocks allowed him to set up a still underneath, accessible though a hole in the floor of his dining room (the same room where the preacher came for dinner). He also told of Prohibition-era bootleggers, such as the woman arrested in a car with 60 gallons of whiskey. The confiscated evidence was “put in the basement of the Court House where it mysteriously evaporated” before the trial.
A 1994 paper by Michelle Jackson included an interview of Clay County, Tennessee sheriff Jerry Rhoton. Interestingly, he observed that illegal stills in his jurisdiction were now more likely to be dismantled and preserved than destroyed, and some were even put on display during civic celebrations as part of the region’s heritage—a testament to the interest in moonshining of folklorists and students of material culture. Like other student writers, Jackson also outlined the process of distilling, a low-tech enterprise that required only “a few barrels, some corn mash, sugar, copper tubing, yeast, and a fresh water supply.”
Click on the links to access finding aids for these materials. For other resources about distilling (legal and illegal) and Prohibition, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.
In the pocket notebook of William Henry Gough (1826-1910) were many of the things that occupied the mind of a young man: money matters, his lessons at Mt. Merino Seminary in Breckinridge County, Kentucky, and later his duties as a surveyor and sheriff of Meade County. But given its intricacies, he also devoted two pages to the workings of “Love’s Telegraph,” the rules regarding transmission of one’s intentions in matters of courtship and romance. Most valuable was the way one could avoid any need to explain oneself in words–those awkward stammerings, repeated entreaties, apologies, and other messy emotional declarations that go with the business of finding (or avoiding) a potential mate. Here was the tutorial:
If a gentleman wants a wife he wears a ring on the first
finger of the left hand, if he be engaged he wears it on the second finger, if
married on the third and on the fourth if he never intends to be married.
When a lady is not engaged she wears a hoop or diamond on
her first finger; if engaged on her second, if married on the third and on the
fourth if she intends to die a maid.
When a gentleman presents a fan a flower or a trinket to a lady with the left hand on his part and overtures of regard should she receive it with the left hand it is considered as an acceptance of his esteem but if with the right it is considered as a refusal of the offer.
Thus by a few simple tokens explained by rule the passions
of love are expressed and through the medium of the Telegraph the most timid
and diffident man may without difficulty communicate his sentiments of regard
for a lady and in case his offer should be refused avoid expressing the
mortification of explicit refusal.
For many travelers, the first step of a journey involves navigating a busy airport. During World War II, passengers faced additional stress when civilian air travel took a back seat to military priorities. This was doubly true for airline employees, who coped with challenges that went far beyond the ordinary joys of dealing with the public.
One such employee was 25-year-old Kate Hopkins, an American Airlines ticket agent in 1943 at Detroit’s City Airport. Her letters to boyfriend Thomas Tichenor, a Kentuckian serving in the Navy, give us a unique perspective on wartime air travel through the eyes of a clever and observant young woman.
Kate often found herself on the overnight shift–an assignment that, while wearying, gave her an opportunity to use her people-watching skills. After one such night, she wrote poignantly to Thomas about “the little sailor and his girl who sat locked in each others arms for a full forty minutes before his flight left, while his mother very quietly sat beside him, waiting to bid him good-by; about the little girl–she couldn’t have been much more than nineteen–who was going out alone to meet her husband, a Ferry pilot, in Spokane–and her family who came to see her off.” When the flight was announced, “her Father said ‘Well Ruthie–’ with all the pride and eloquence and love that only a Father could put into those two words, because what else could he say?”
Ferry pilots–members of the Air Transport Command, largely made up of civilians who flew aircraft from manufacturing plants to training facilities and ports for shipment overseas–were frequent airport patrons. Some of them, Kate observed, “are nice–others tough–some, surprisingly young and all very interesting.” One of them “came in last nite with an enormous plush Easter bunny–its long white ears protruding from a paper sack–He’d brought it back from Wilmington for his little girl.”
Kate grew accustomed to watching irritated Ferry pilots call the nearby base to complain when their ground transportation was not waiting. On other occasions, she became the object of customer ire. Determining that a passenger was too drunk to fly, she feared “he was going to hit me” when she declined to ticket him. She “finally eased him away from the counter” by inviting him to spend his unscheduled six-hour layover trying “some black coffee at the airport restaurant–that I knew was vile enough to cure or kill him.”
On still other occasions, the drama escalated. In the middle of one night, Kate received a message asking to have a cab waiting for an incoming flight “to take a Lieutenant and his eleven day old premature baby to Ann Arbor.” To her disgust, she could find no driver interested in the life-and-death mission unless they could also find a paying fare for the 40-mile return trip. As negotiations continued, the plane landed and “the captain himself escorted the Lieutenant and the baby, which he was carrying in a cardboard carton not much larger than a shoe box, to the cab.” The captain also grew furious with the cab driver, “especially when he’d flown at 2,000 feet all the way from Buffalo because every time he went higher the baby turned blue. . . . We finally got things arranged,” Kate reported, “to no one’s satisfaction.”
More often than not, however, Kate maintained her equilibrium. After checking in a line of difficult customers, she ticketed a young corporal who “was on an emergency furlough trying to get to San Francisco to see his six months old son who he’d never seen.” The baby was sick, as was his wife, exhausted from trying to run their ranch and summer camp by herself. But the soldier never lost his smile, and “was such a big person about it all,” wrote Kate, “that I felt awfully silly after all the minor irritations I’d had that day.”
“Incoming mail censored shall be opened by clipping with scissors on the shorter side of the envelope.”
Every special collections library that holds war materials has them: soldiers’ letters vaguely addressed from “somewhere in France” or “somewhere in the Pacific.” They might also show more revealing words or lines deftly excised with a sharp blade, and their envelopes may bear a stamp indicating that the contents have been inspected prior to delivery to waiting parents, wives or sweethearts. The reason, of course, was that the letters were censored to keep potentially valuable intelligence from falling into the hands of the enemy.
During World War II, the task of censor fell to Calhoun,
Kentucky’s Thomas Tichenor after he entered the Navy and received his officer’s
commission in 1942. As a convoy
communications officer, he was handed the censor’s stamp and a lengthy booklet
of regulations governing both outgoing and incoming military mail.
Tom Tichenor, Navy censor
Under the regulations, Navy personnel were permitted to send mail in six ways: by letter; “urgent letter” (an expedited communication arising out of an emergency); V-mail (short for “Victory mail,” in which specially designed letter sheets were microfilmed to save space and the reduced images printed out and delivered to the recipient); post cards; Navy post cards (with preprinted, pre-authorized text and fill-in-the-blanks options); and Parcel Post. Most of the censorship rules were easily justified: no photographs of a military character; no writing in a foreign language; no details of ship locations or strength of forces, munitions and equipment; no disclosure of casualties ahead of the official publication of same; no detailed meteorological data; and no criticisms of the “morale of the collective or individual armed forces of the United States or her allies.” Other communication restrictions barred the keeping of diaries and the transmittal of personal recordings to or from Navy personnel.
The regulations also provided detailed instructions to censors tasked with inspection of the mail. Outgoing mail came to the censor unsealed, but incoming mail was to be “opened by clipping with scissors on the shorter side of the envelope.” All mail was to be read with an eye to prohibited content, with additional attention paid to the possibility of “secret writing”—even to a message written underneath the stamp—or “any unusual sign which might be a prearranged signal for a secret message.” Other things to watch for: differing ink colors; seemingly “pointless” content; traces of liquids or pastes to be harvested for invisible ink; and code in the form of letters, numbers, drawings, indentations or pinpricks above, below or through the writing. Photographs, of course, came in for the same scrutiny; nevertheless, the regulations advised, “Censors should use care in suppressing private prints, particularly in view of their value as keepsakes to personnel.” In addition to shears and razor blades, the weapons available to the censor included ink, prepared according to a special formula, for obliterating unacceptable content. Censoring ink, however, was to be used “only where deemed particularly advisable for casual indiscretions” in letters home.
“Someone sent me ‘Beauchampe,’” wrote Sallie McElroy in her
journal on October 26, 1857. The
anonymous gift she was referring to was a book by William Gilmore Simms—a
reboot, actually, of his 1842 work Beauchampe;
or the Kentucky Tragedy: A Tale of Passion.
Ann Cook
The volume was a novelized version of a true story that began on November 7, 1825, with the fatal stabbing of a man in Frankfort, Kentucky. The victim, former state attorney general Solomon P. Sharp, had allegedly fathered a stillborn child whose mother, Ann Cook, was now living in seclusion near Bowling Green. Sharp, however, had not only denied paternity but had shockingly claimed that the child had been of mixed race. The disgraced Ann then fell in with Jeroboam O. Beauchamp, a young law student 15 years her junior, married him, and convinced him to kill Sharp to avenge her honor. Just before Beauchamp was to hang for the crime on July 7, 1826, he and Ann attempted a double suicide in the jailhouse, but only she succeeded. They were buried together in an “eternal embrace,” as they had requested.
Beauchampe was a
rather unusual gift for 23-year-old Sallie, then teaching at a female academy in Bowling Green and boarding under the
rather Puritanical eye of its headmistress.
As Sallie knew, tradition demanded that women be shielded from such
scandal lest it send them to the fainting couch, or worse, to a life corrupted
by the taste of forbidden knowledge. One
of her male friends, in fact, seems to have had her debating the wisdom of
opening the book’s cover.
Sallie McElroy
But she did not hesitate for long. Well-read, wryly observant, and Bible-literate enough to slice and dice the sermons of local clergymen, Sallie understood the double standard behind such male hand-wringing. “Yes, I will read it!” she wrote in her journal. “Men are extremely anxious to preserve uspure as saints—we must know nothing of the stream of pollution which ‘flows down our streets like a river’ for fear we shall be spattered a little by the spray as it dashes on in its headlong course!” True, there was the old saying, “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise,” but a “man wrote that,” she observed, “& I’m suspicious of the wholeof‘em! At least in this instance, I had rather have the wisdom than the bliss, as dear old mother Eve chose before me!”
So read she did, and emerged unscathed. Disappointed in the style of the book and its divergence from generally accepted versions of the incident, Sallie nevertheless found it “a most thrilling tale.” She was somewhat forgiving of Ann Cook—“a most extraordinary woman” who fell victim to “pride & ambition” and whose relatives still lived in the area. But Beauchamp was “a ninny of a fellow,” his reason captive to his passion. Sharp, too, was “a monster.” The bottom line, she concluded, was that “All three met only a just fate.”
The town of Perryville, Kentucky, from Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 1, 1862
Everyone seems to agree that the
most haunted town in Kentucky is Perryville, especially the Civil War field
where, on October 8, 1862, some 7,600 Union and Confederate soldiers were
killed or wounded in a battle that ranked as the second bloodiest in the
Western theater up to that date.
While some 36,000 troops actually fought each other, twice that number were in the area at the time. One of the soldiers who narrowly missed the fighting was John H. Gray of the 101st Indiana Infantry, but his impressions of the battle’s gruesome aftermath can indeed make us think about the paranormal byproducts of such carnage.
Gray had arrived in Perryville exhausted and hungry, having subsisted for several days on virtually no rations. He and his comrades had lived off handfuls of wet cornmeal fried in a skillet (“corn kake”) some “fat meat” of undetermined origin, and a “coffee pot full of honey,” said to have been bought but more likely stolen. Gray’s constitution was not the only one to collapse on such a diet. He found the road from Springfield to Perryville “well perfumed,” as many of the men “had the ‘quick step.’” Gray himself, weak with diarrhea and vomiting, rode the last few miles in an ambulance.
As his regiment straggled into Perryville and collapsed to recuperate, Gray described the scene in two letters to his parents and siblings. “The horrors of War are apparent everywhere,” he wrote. He was particularly shaken at the sight of a “dead rebel this morning lying on the ground,” his face blackened with decay. “O how horrible,” Gray exclaimed, “a man left upon the field to rot unknown & uncared for.” Gray was “in a comfortable house attended by a good Doctor,” but all around him were other houses filled with wounded and dying men. He visited two hospitals, one treating Confederates and the other Federals, and was appalled by the “awful agony the intense suffering and the inexpressible pain of the occupants.” Those able to rise from their beds were “lame & wounded hobbling about as though this was a world of cripples.”
Accompanying the men’s physical pain was mental anguish. Gray spoke with Confederates who cried that they were tired of war, and were ready to vote to “lay down their arms and be as they were.” Some of these men, no doubt, died with Gray’s sarcastic observation—lovely war—on their lips. They may or may not haunt Perryville today, but they surely haunted the memories of the men, like Gray, who survived.
In 1899, his work as a surveyor took Lee Fisher away from his wife and young children in Iowa and into the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. In a series of letters, he shared with wife Adah his impressions of the area’s agriculture, living conditions and people. Fisher found much of interest in the environs of Floyd County’s Calf Creek, including the prosperous farm of a local fruit grower and beekeeper. Even more noteworthy, however, were the tales the farmer told him of a nearby gulch—“Bugger Holler”—that was said to be haunted.
Among the spooky stories:
A man walking through the hollow one
night encountered a dog that “turned its head towards him and its eyes began to
shine like two balls of fire then it opened its mouth and a light blue flame
came out of its mouth,” allowing the man to see “at least 20 feet [!] down the
throat of the dog.”
A man riding through the hollow
one evening “saw what appeared to be a horse but instead of having a head like
a horse it had a head and body like a centaur.”
The man’s own horse “turned around with a snort and trembling in every
muscle it ran several hundred yards before he could be stopped.”
A man coming up the road toward
the hollow one night “saw a woman standing by the side of the road wrapped in a
cloak but without any head on and no matter which way he went she always
followed him and it was sometime before he could shake her.” The experience left him so rattled that he
did not “know enough to speak when spoken to.”
An elderly woman passing through the hollow late one night “saw two women standing by the road neither one of them having any head.”
All of these nocturnal travelers seemed to have ignored the conventional wisdom since, Fisher wrote, “it is very rare anybody will pass there at night if they can avoid it.” He and some of his curious coworkers, however, decided to try some ghosthunting themselves. They ventured into the hollow after nightfall, “when it was so dark you could not see the road,” but had no luck seeing or hearing anything supernatural.
The farmer who told Fisher these stories was himself skeptical about their veracity, but hastened to claim that his own house was haunted. Neighbors had warned him that constructing such a large house for his small family would invite a paranormal presence, but everything remained quiet—at least for a few years. Then, one night “he heard the most awful noise as if someone had rubbed a stick hard upon a dry goods box and then something like a cannon ball had fallen upon the upstairs floor.” The pattern repeated itself, and no amount of investigation could reveal its source. Frustrated, the farmer called for a curse upon whomever or whatever was causing the ruckus, a response that seemed to shame the poltergeist into silence. But every once in a while it would reassert itself—for example, by causing a bedroom door to spring open and thump against the bed of the unfortunate occupant.
