Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1927 a barber from Corbin, Kentucky carried his banjo across the mountains to a makeshift studio in Bristol.

Appalachian Figures Born in a railroad town on the Tennessee and Alabama line, Robert Hitchcock Spain entered the world in 1925 as one small line in a county birth book. Long before he became a United Methodist bishop, an author, or a chaplain in Nashville, he was simply “Robert Hitchcock Spain” in the clerk’s hand at Lawrenceburg, the son of two public school teachers in Loretto.

Appalachian Figures In one often shared photograph from the Thacker coalfield, a teenage miner named Vito Ragazzo stands in a coal car at Aflex, Pike County. The caption notes that the picture was taken in 1944 and that the young man in work clothes would someday play college and Canadian professional football and then coach at Virginia Military Institute and Shippensburg. That single image holds several stories at once.

Appalachian Figures Corbin, Kentucky, does not usually appear in histories of Motown Records. On paper it is a small railroad town on the Whitley and Knox county line, remembered more often for a 1919 racial expulsion and for Colonel Harland Sanders than for rhythm and blues.

Appalachian Figures Most people who grew up with the Blondie movies or the Blondie radio show remember the sound first. A crash, a yelp, and then Dagwood Bumstead tumbling into the mailman again, arms and legs everywhere. For mid twentieth century audiences he was the most famous flustered husband in America, sprinting for the streetcar with his towering sandwich, forever late for work and forever forgiven at home.

Appalachian Figures Lois LaVerne Williamson came into the world on July 9, 1923, in rural Pike County, Kentucky, the daughter of coal miner Joseph Williamson and his wife Hester. Like many mountain families along the Tug Fork in those years, the Williamsons lived close to the seams that fed the postwar coal boom and just as close to the insecurity that came with it. From the start, music was the family’s other livelihood.

Appalachian Figures On a weekday morning in Corbin the traffic along Roy Kidd Avenue tells its own story. School buses swing into the Board of Education offices at 108 Roy Kidd Avenue. Parents turn in toward the Corbin Educational Center and elementary school, both listed at the same address.

Appalachian Figures When people talk about the old Tug Fork coalfields, they often end up talking about a place that is gone. For forty years the Red Robin Inn sat just above the river at Borderland, West Virginia, a neon roadhouse filled with homemade banjos, antique guns, and stories.

Appalachian Figures On a cold December afternoon in 1940, the Chicago Bears humiliated Washington in the NFL championship game by a score of 73 to 0. Somewhere in the blur of blue jerseys and leather helmets, halfback George McAfee took an interception and sprinted thirty four yards into the end zone, one more score in a game that still stands as the most lopsided title contest in league history. Sportswriters liked the spectacle.

Appalachian Figures When Ohio historians talk about Madam Lizzie Lape, they usually start in Marion or Akron or Stow. They talk about the White Pigeon, about raids on “houses of ill fame,” about an early test of the Winn Law and the Married Women’s Property Acts. Very few start where the paper trail actually begins, in the hill farms of Whitley County, Kentucky, with a girl the census takers called Amy or Elizabeth Rogers.

Appalachian Figures If you stand at the mouth of the hollow where Packard once sat, there is no marquee and no sign that an Academy Award winner first opened her eyes there. The coal tipple is gone. The company houses are gone. What remains is a quiet Whitley County hollow above Big Patterson Creek where, for a few decades in the early twentieth century, several hundred people tried to make a life in the shadow of a mine.