Expert Testimony?

In the bowels of the Federal Court House at London, KY rests a document unique in its certification of a witness. The certification itself is not unique, but the area of expert testimony is another story....

Bruce Bennett is the local Alcoholic Beverage Control agent, a job that in earlier days was known as Revenuer.
Some years ago Bennett and other law officers conducted a raid in Bell County in which a still was seized and the moonshiner arrested. The raiding party discovered the whiskey making apparatus by relying on Bennett's nose - He literally smelled the mash (A fermented mixture of corn, yeast and sugar.) from several hundred yards away and sniffed his way to the still site.
In due course the moonshiner wound up in Federal Court and Bennett was on hand to testify against him.
The moonshiner had had his still located in a hog pen, hoping to disguise his operation. His defense was to be that the mash was not what Bennett had smelled; rather it was the droppings in the hog lot.
The prosecuting attorney planned to introduce Bennett as an expert in mash and moonshining and have him describe how he had smelled the 'shine operation. The judge, however, questioned Bennett's expertise in that area, wanting to know how - by smell alone - he could determine the substance was mash and not the droppings in the hog lot.
Bennett explained to the court that he was just a good ol' country boy from the Right Fork of Straight Creek; that he had grown up around hog lots; and that he knew what a hog pen should smell like.
So...the judge certified him as an expert.
But not as an expert in mash.
Bennett, by order of a Federal Judge, is certified as an expert in hog manure!

-- September 6, 1990

Can I Update My Mugshot?

Can I send the Bell County Detention center a new photo of me? Just wondering....

Stumbling Short

Otis "Buddy" Cox, Jr. was sheriff of Bell County in the mid-1970s.
Originally his dad had filed for the office but had to withdraw from the race because if illness. When this happened Buddy ran on the Democratic ticket handily defeated Republican favorite, Bob Madon (who later became Mayor of Pineville).
Buddy took office about the time the move "Walking Tall" was released. "Walking Tall" was based on the life a Tennessee sheriff, Buford Pusser, who was shot, beaten, stabbed, bombs, etc. during his tenure in office. Buddy always said that if he'd see that movie earlier he wouldn't have run for sheriff!
After that I began to call him Stumbling Short.
Sheriff Cox ran a fairly decent office although there were some accusations of payoffs by bootlegger. Eventually his Chief Deputy was sentenced to prison because of these accusations.
Certain instances of Buddy's term as Bell County's chief law officer stand out in my memory:
-- When he took office, the former sheriff - as was the usual custom - had not left much in the way of office or police equipment. Buddy's comment was that when he came into office all he had was legal pad and a pencil!
-- At one point in Buddy's term of office the Bell County Fiscal Court refused to pay the insurance premium on the department's cruisers. Buddy's solution was to park the cars - all eight of them - on the Court House lawn. There they remained, in a neat little row, until the matter was resolved a couple of weeks later.
-- In another dispute with the Court (The gist of which escapes me for the moment.) Buddy and his entire department came down with a case of the "blue flu." At the time I was working for the local newspaper and Buddy called to give the story of the dispute and walkout. To illustrate the article we took deputy "Pap" Taylor's gun belt and ivory handled .45 and hung them on the door knob of the Sheriff's office. The headline above that photo? "They've Hung Up Their Guns."
--Buddy phoned me at the newspaper office one day and asked that I come to the Court House--and bring a camera. Thinking he wanted photos after the fact of a raid, I hastened across the square. When I walked in his office he and local Alcoholic Beverage Control Agent Bruce Bennett offered my a choice: go with them on one of several simultaneous raids they had planned, or stay at the office locked in a windowless, phone-less closet until they finished.
After looking over the list of bootleggers to be "hit" I opted to go with them. I had bought from everyone on the list and was hesitant to go until I saw one name I didn't recognize.
We, accompanied by additional law officers, proceeded down KY 92 to _____'s place of business.
When we got there it was apparent that someone had "tipped" him to the impending raid. It was also apparent that he had tried to drink most of stock before we got there. What he couldn't drink he poured down the drain or in the floor.
Bruce and Buddy went to the from door to serve the search warrant. They were met by a 300 pound plus ______, heavily intoxicated, with a beer in each hand. He was standing ankle deep in a liquid mix of beer, vodka, wine and whiskey.
The photographic result for that week's paper was a shot of ______'s bathroom awash in booze. The focal point of the picture was the toilet - seat up - adorned with beer cans and whiskey bottles!

--September 5, 1990

Changes

(Note: The first few entries here will be from a notebook I kept in the 1990s. Once they have been entered I will begin some new compositions and essays. - T.C.)

Pineville (KY), although it appears to be stagnant and suffering from arrested growth, like all towns both large and small is constantly changing.
The town I knew in the late 1950s and early 1960s is not the one I stroll through each day in the 1990s.
Around 1960 I would walk with my grandmother ( After she was assured here slip wasn't showing and her hat was properly aligned.) from Oak Street to Pine Street where she did here grocery shopping. The town seemed to be a bustle of activity - people filled the shops and streets.
We would walk to Kroger's which use3d to be located on Pine around the area now occupied by Cardwell Furniture. After she had made her grocery selections Which she usually carried in a round wicker basket on her arm. She sent my Aunt Irene back for the "heavier" items.) Nannie would sometimes take me to Newberry's - always a treat!
The store seemed to be alive with women milling through the dry goods section or looking over a vast array of household items. I always ended up in the toy department.
Pineville in those days boasted several restaurants including The Kentucky Cafe, The New York Cafe and The Hub Grill. There was also Andy Rego's Pineville Ice Cream Shoppe where one could saunter up to a window facing Kentucky Avenue and order a cone of chocolate mat or a round, home-made ice cream sandwich!
House on the bottom floor of the Masonic Temple were several business that were a source of amusement to a small boy.
Facing Walnut Street were The Sport Mart and The City Market.
The Sport Mart was owned by Arnold Faulkner and had displays that would set my eyes a-goggle. Here were basketballs, footballs, baseballs, bats, tennis rackets and more. The counter that most attracted my attention held a wide variety of rubber fishing worms. Never had I seen so many colors and lengths of worms!
Next door was The city Market, owned and operated by Ralph VanBever.
A jovial, white haired man in a starched white apron, VanBever was the atypical shopkeeper of a bygone era. His store was always clean; the meat counter displaying an array of chops and cold-cuts; the shelves behind the counter heavily laden with canned goods, the labels all neatly facing the same direction, the products in perfect rows.
Today empty store-fronts may be seen around the court square. Kroger's no longer has a store in Pineville. Newberry's recently closed its doors for the last time. Most of the restaurants are gone, although Andy Rego's niece runs The Pineville Ice Cream Shoppe at the same old location - but the window service is a thing of the past. The Sport Mart and The City Market have given way to Farris Drugs.
Yes, Pineville (as do all small towns) changes; yet in our memories it somehow stays the same.

-September 5, 1990

Elzie Byron Cornett, Sr
- A Tribute -

If this were being written for Reader's Digest it would inevitably be tiitled "My Most Unforgettable Character."
Truly unforgettable is my grandfather, Elzie Byron Cornett, Sr.
He influenced my formative years and teen years, providing my with found memories of growing up.
Of average height and slim of build, Pappaw was none-the-less a giant in my boyish eyes. I believed then ( and to major extent, now) that he could answer any question or solve any problem. If the answer wasn't readily available he would mull the situation over and offer a solution.
In my early years I spent many hours at his house being tended to by my grandmother (and Pappaw's wife), Nannie. During those years he worked at the mines - probably for D.D. Stewart - and I got to see him only in the evening and on the weekend.
They were joyous and mischievous moments for he took delight in making Nannie fuss and fret by allowing me to join him in enjoying an evening smoke - a Roi Tan cigar! If Nannie fussed too much we retired to his bedroom to enjoy our smoke, after he secured the door by placing a cedar chest across it. To a boy of four or five, this was fantastic!
As I grew older I began paying more attention to the stories he told of his youth and of the fine sense of pride he had in the things he did.
Eventually growing too old to work at the mine (Although he was weighing coal for Wheeler Boone's operation when he was in his 80s!) he went to work for Robert "Bobby" Boone. Boone was a local attorney who owned the Continental Hotel in Pineville and also maintained his office there. Pappaw served as manager of the hotel and what I now see as an adviser to Boone, wh also had several coal interests.
The Continental was an imposing three-story brick structure which filled a half-block at the intersection of Walnut Street and Virginia Avenue. Now, in 1989, the site is home to a post-modern building housing the Total Care Medical Clinic.
In its heyday the Continental was home to fancy sit-down dinners and grand balls. It had been lavishly furnished and served a "better" clientel.
The Continental I knew was on it's last legs, having given over to office space for an accountant, an optometrist and Boone. It was also a semi-retirement hotel for several. including Miss Alva Tandy, a former teacher in the Pineville City Schools. I began frequenting the hotel when Pappaw went to work there in the mid 1960s. By the early 1970s it had been raze3d, making space for a municipal parking lot.
As I remember it, the lobby was a mismatch of styles - the ornate furnishings of the '20s and '30s either having been replaced or just appearing drab by the 1960s. Here were assorted writing desks whose varnish had either darkened with age or had been covered with black paint. Here too were worn, cracked leather settees and over-stuffed chairs. Flanking the front desk, on the inside of a pair of square plaster columns, were two heavy brass floor lamps, dull with age, sporting brass shades with beaded fringe.
Dimly lighted, dusty and dingy though it may have been, the Continental was never-the-less a haven in the early afternoons after being dismissed from grade school. There I would head to visit with Pappaw and share my day's activities with him.
In the little room behind the front desk we would sit and talk.
It was there I can first remember him telling me how he came to injure his left hand. It happened when he was a youngster, growing up in the coal camp town of Peach Orchard, KY, in Lawrence County.
As Pappaw told it, he was about five or six years old at the time, placing the year around 1896 or 1896. He had found a object laying in the road.
"I thought it'd make a good fishin' float," he told me over 70 years later.
"I put it on a flat rock and got a hammer and nail to make a hole in the center of it," he said with a grin flashing through his sky-blue eyes. "I hit the nail once and it bounced off! The second time - it bounced off!"
"The third time I hit it, it blew up!"
The object was a blasting cap, which blew up under his left hand.
He told me the camp doctor wanted to amputate bu his grandfather said "NO" and bandages the wounded hand himself. He then took Pappaw, on horseback, for an overnight ride into Paintsville, KY where another doctor saved the hand.
Years later the only indication of the accident was a slight curve to his fingers. Also, the fingers on that hand were about and eighth of an inch shorter than the ones on the right hand.
Another facet of our afternoon visits was stories and songs.
Puffing on a Roi Tan Perfecto, he would tell me tales of Frank and Hesse James or Samson and Delilah. Or - through a cloud of blue smoke - he would warble "Frankie and Johnnie" pr "Red Wing" (his favorite).
(Mentioning blue smoke recalled for me Pappaw's unusual remedy for a head cold, or stuffy nose. He would smear a cigar with Vick's Vap-O-Rub and merrily puff away. It usually opened his nasal passages, but left the entire house smelling as if it had recently been fumigated.)
It was at the Continental, in the breeze way behind the hotel facing the alley, that Pappaw instructed me in the "art" of cracking a bull-whip.
He made the whips himself, plaiting gour strands of supple leather he had truimmed to the correct size. The whip-stock was a hammer handle he had painstakingly shaved to the right dimensions with a hawk bill knife and a piece of glass. The handle tapered toward the middle to provide "flex."
We spent many long hours behind the hotel while Pappw patiently taught me how to make that braided leather "crack like a .45!" The first week or so of practice my earlobes stayed bloody where I let the tail of the whip come behind me and flick me my head.
Memories of Pappaw's last few year revolve around a cat, a dog, a dogwood tree, the top of Pine Mountain and Oak Street.
In his twilight years Pappaw would sit in the dusk in a lawn chair at his house on Oak Street. Just he and his oldest daughter, Irene, lived there - Nannie having died several years before.
Gently petting his dog - Lightnin', a bench-legged, black and white mongrel - he would quietly smoke and watch the world go by. Or, he would watched contentedly as Sputnik the cat stalked birds under the dogwood.
When I stopped by to see him in the evenings he would - at least once a week - ask me a baited question about the radio and TV aerial atop the mountain.
Peering intently at the mountain with eyes older, dimmer and weaker than mine he would ask, "How many antenna's do you see there?"
With my younger, almost 20/20 eyesight, I could count four. He'd laugh and say, "There's five! See that little one down to the right?" If I squinted I could just see the outline of the tower.
Thoughr dead for many year now (almost 14) a part of him is with me each day; I carry hime with me in my love of animals; my enjoyment of the old songs. At times I find myself wondering if I'm handling a job or a situation in the same manner he would.
And yes, I can still make a braided piece of leather and a hammer handle sound like a gun shot....

September 29, 1989

Sketches-Recollections-Thoughts (including the occasional apocryphal story)

Forward

This blog contains articles about various people and places I have known. The basis of each essay lies with my memories, therefor some details are not "factual," per se.
The human memory tends to forget some points salient to a situation and embellishes others. This is as it should be, for as we grow older (the gods willing, gracefully) our memories of past events are sometimes fonder for the recalling.
Each of this essays is dated. The date is the one on which I completed it and not meant to indicate that is was completed in as single setting. Some I have written in my mind over a period of months. Others in just a few hours.
Although these essays may have been "written" jn my mind, they were actually composed as a I committed them to paper - the first entries here, anyway - therefore there may be some errors and revisions - making this blog a working draft as opposed to a finished work.