Appalachian Figures On a summer night in 1964, the United States House of Representatives rushed through a joint resolution that would change the course of the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution sailed through the chamber with a recorded vote of 416 to 0. Yet the roll call did not tell the whole story.

Roy “Dixie” Walker’s story begins a long way from Heinemann Park and the old Southern Association box scores that sometimes still list him only as “Walker, p.” It starts in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, in 1893, with a boy who grew up between a small county seat on Jackson’s Military Road and the industrial neighborhoods of East Nashville, then spent the next three decades trying to control a fastball that had more life than he did.

Appalachian Figures High above the traffic in downtown Hazard, a small hillside burial ground still looks out over the bend of the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Locals know it as Graveyard Hill.

Appalachian Figures On the edge of the main academic quad at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, a glass fronted performing arts complex carries a Kentucky name. The Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts began life in 1967 as a new Fine Arts Center, built with a six hundred seat theater and practice studios. When the college president who had championed it retired in 1970, the trustees renamed the building in his honor.

Appalachian Figure When the 1990 Tony Awards broadcast cut to the cast of Grand Hotel, viewers saw a small, balding man in a rumpled tuxedo fling himself across the stage in a frantic Charleston. As Otto Kringelein, Michael Jeter turned a dying bookkeeper into the emotional center of a big Broadway musical.

Appalachian Figures If you drive across Cumberland Gap on U.S. 25E today, the road feels inevitable.

Appalachian Figures Most viewers who remember Julie Parrish see her framed in Technicolor. She stands in a helicopter beside Elvis Presley in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, or leans against a kitchen counter on the 1967 sitcom Good Morning World.

Appalachian Figures In early 1959 Harvard students opened their campus paper and met a new dean in a faculty profile titled “Governmental Engineer.” The article introduced Don K. Price Jr as a tall, friendly man whose voice still carried the gentle drawl of his native Kentucky, a veteran of New Deal agencies, wartime science boards, and the Hoover Commission who was only then settling into his first full time academic job.

Appalachian Figures On a summer morning in 1982, patients arrived at Mud Creek Clinic and found only ashes. The small community clinic in Grethel, Floyd County, had burned during the night in a suspected arson fire. Instead of closing the doors, Eula Hall dragged a picnic table under a willow tree, called the doctor, and started seeing patients in the yard.

Appalachian Figures On the night of August 11, 1950, a right handed pitcher for the Boston Braves walked off the mound at Braves Field with his teammates crowding around him and Brooklyn Dodgers hitters shaking their heads. Vern Bickford had just thrown a no hitter against a lineup that included Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider. For a moment he was one of the brightest stars in the National League.

Appalachian Figures Appalachia has long been a place where national arguments about crime, punishment, and poverty arrive wearing local faces. In the spring of 1997, one of those faces belonged to a fourteen-year-old boy from Pike County, Kentucky. His name was Jason Blake Bryant, and his life became tied forever to one of the most haunting crimes in modern East Tennessee history: the Lillelid murders near Greeneville.