Warning Systems, Artisans Gallery And More
Writing with help from her friends
How many lights for your tree?
Western Kentucky University student Meg Copass helped her home town prepare for emergencies this year as part of a 4-H honors project.
Her project to bring an early warning siren system to the community was featured in a national 4-H community action campaign called Join the Revolution of Responsibility.
A native of Monroe County�s Fountain Run, population 250, Copass� challenge was to assess the needs of her community and implement a strategy to meet that need. Since her town was without an early storm warning system, she made that her goal and set about raising funds to put one in place.
Copass raised more than $11,000 by organizing food sales, car washes, silent auctions, game tournaments, and collecting donations. Among those in the community she helped bring together was Tri-County EMC electric co-op, which helped install the system.
Jeff Downing, director for the Fountain Run district on Tri-County Electric co-op�s board, has known Meg all of her life and says no one who knows her had any doubt she would be successful in raising funds for the warning system. Having complete confidence in Meg, Downing made the commitment that Tri-County Electric co-op would install the system when her fund-raising was complete.
�Meg was raised on a dairy and beef farm,� says Downing, �and while her ability to raise the funding for the storm warning system is impressive, it is just the latest example of her commitment to our community. Meg has always had a strong work ethic and I hope she knows that everyone in Fountain Run is very proud of her.�
Art collectors have a place to view and purchase local art in Warsaw.
The Gallatin County Community Artisans Gallery at Shoppe on Main, a consignment shop for artisans, is a popular spot for tourists. Jacquelene Mylor, owner of Shoppe on Main, a home d�cor and resale shop, decided to bring local art into the 1832 Federal-style building.
�The artisans like it because they don�t have to maintain their own retail space�they pay a small percentage from sales. We�re open five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6. I have five women partners and we take turns running the store.�
Local artisan Sherry Needy has seen her business grow through the shop.
�This has been great for me,� she says. �I have had people tell me they have seen my work who have never had the chance before.�
The gallery has a variety of works including: paintings, photography, jewelry, stained glass, alpaca wool items, small quilts, and personalized doll clothes and signs. A series of children�s art classes was held in a working studio space this summer and other classes this fall; more are planned for the future.
You can find the gallery at 106 E. Main in Warsaw. For more info, call (859) 567-2434 or visit www.shoppeonmain.org.
Writing with help from her friends
Like many writers, Cynthiana author Rose McCauley waited several years to be published. Through the process, and through various means including her daily devotional, song lyrics, and her friends, she learned to wait with patience. A surprise announcement during the 2010 American Christian Fiction Writers Conference put an end to her wait as she was awarded her first contract by Barbour Publishing for her story, Nick�s Christmas Carol.
Along with stories by three other authors, Jeanie Smith Cash, Jeri Odell, and Debra Ullrick, McCauley�s novel appears in Christmas Belles of Georgia (Barbour Publishing, $7.99).
The collection centers around four identical quadruplets who were adopted by different families at birth. As the girls approach their 25th birthday, each receives a letter informing them of their quad status and of an inheritance granted only after they meet for the first time to spend their Christmas birthday together. The four stories merge together in an epilogue written by Cash.
�Jeanie wrote the epilogue with all of our input about how we wanted our characters to end up. So, it was easy to do with e-mail, but it did take a lot of working out details together,� says McCauley.
When not writing, McCauley enjoys reading, scrapbooking, and participating in mission trips. She taught elementary school prior to her writing career and has also served as a Girl Scout leader and Mothers of Preschoolers mentor mom.
McCauley is also experiencing the benefit of mentoring from the other side. Her book is dedicated to two women, both age 94, who McCauley calls dear friends.
�Helen Jean Wiglesworth is also a retired teacher…She went on a Christian girls getaway cruise with me and three of my friends when she was 90. I met Ruth Seamands through American Christian Fiction Writers…She and her husband were missionaries in India before they came to Asbury College where her husband started the missions department. I love both their young attitudes and their caring for others,� McCauley says.
McCauley invites her readers to keep up with her writing adventures through her Web site, www.rosemccauley.com
, or her blog www.rosemccauley.blogspot.com.
�Penny Woods
During the holiday season, consider using ENERGY STAR-qualified lights and strands to decorate. They use 70 percent less energy than regular lights and last up to 10 times as long. They also give off less heat, reducing the risk of fire.
We�ve been so successful at reducing pollution that now we�re talking about making incremental improvements at very high costs.
�Glenn English, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, speaking in Louisville on October 19 at the NRECA regional meeting
Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community by Douglas A. Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, is a combination of research and personal narratives. Readers get a window view into 50 acres of a swampy, poor working-class neighborhood, built in the 1800s. This section of north Frankfort in Franklin County, known as �The Craw� or �The Bottom,� was to outsiders a trouble spot riddled in crime, bootlegging, and prostitution, but something different to the people who lived there.
Civic calls to clean up the neighborhood as early as the 1870s only increased until finally, urban renewal efforts leveled the area to make room for the Capital Plaza in the 1960s, displacing 369 families.
Boyd�s chronicle intertwines history with individual interviews and poses thought-provoking questions regarding the contradictions between the prevailing historical record and personal memory that surround a community disdained by outsiders yet loved by residents.
Drawing from a collection of oral histories from Craw residents archived in the Kentucky Oral History Commission�s collection, Boyd�s book reveals the residents� sense of neighborhood. As many colorful town characters and local politicians are unveiled, his study is reminiscent of Forrest Gump�s box of chocolates��You never know what you�re going to get.� Without the work of oral historians, much of our past would be lost pieces of our Western culture. More info at www.kentuckypress.com
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The late Marty Godbey�s recently released biography, Crowe on the Banjo: The Music Life of J.D. Crowe, covers 30 years of compiled notes and interviews of the legendary Kentucky native and many other musicians who have worked with him. Crowe, a renowned banjo player born in Lexington and reared in Jessamine County, has won nearly every award available in his lifetime of public performance. Crowe, who�s known by fans for his right-hand, three-finger �claw� method of �picking� on a 5-string banjo, is also known for innovative changes in bluegrass music. His timing, ensemble work, and way of approaching nontraditional material have been duplicated by other artists countless times. Godbey, a loyal fan of bluegrass music since the mid-60s, traveled every chance she could to listen to local musicians. As a gifted writer/photographer from Lexington (she also wrote for Kentucky Living) Godbey covered the gamut of Crowe�s career in her book�complete with personal conversations, interviews, old-time photos, a discography, and list of additional reading material. Unfortunately, an untimely and unexpected death didn�t allow her to hold the book in her hand. The manuscript, in production at the time with the University of Illinois Press, was completed by her husband, Frank, who finished the processes necessary for publication.
Additional info at www.press.uillinois.edu.
You don�t hear much of Kentucky in Bob Edwards� thick, raspy baritone.
That�s because when he was growing up in Louisville, Edwards wanted to be a voice on the radio and he noticed something: people on the radio �didn�t sound like my Kentucky friends and neighbors,� Edwards writes in his new memoir, A Voice in the Box. �They sounded like Yankees.�
So he worked on his vowels. Losing the accent wasn�t that hard, but, he writes, �I�m ambivalent about it now, because�I feel I was forced to renounce some of my Southern heritage.�
Edwards may have enunciated his way out of Kentucky and into millions of radios across the country, but listen closely to his work and it�s clear that he still feels a deep connection to his old Kentucky home.
Edwards established himself as a broadcast legend through his 24 and a half years as host of Morning Edition, a daily news magazine produced by National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. At NPR, he had 13 million listeners and earned numerous awards. Three months after leaving NPR, Edwards was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
Since 2004, Edwards has hosted The Bob Edwards Show, a daily one-hour interview program that airs on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, channel 121.
Edwards, 64, has done some 30,000 interviews with presidents, preachers, actors, activists, artists, and no small number of Kentuckians.
Author Bobbie Ann Mason lives in Anderson County. Edwards interviewed her when her first book, Shiloh and Other Stories, came out in 1982. Mason says the book focused on the lives of working-class people in Kentucky and recalls, �Bob said to me, �I know all of these characters. They are my people.� He�s interviewed me for every single book I�ve had since then.�
In 2006, Edwards came to Kentucky to produce a special program called Exploding Heritage about mountaintop removal coal mining.
Off the air, Edwards shows his loyalty to the state in ways large and small, like when someone in D.C. decides to tell him a hillbilly joke about toothlessness or intermarriage.
�I blow up,� Edwards says. �To me, that�s as bad as talking about any racial or religious minority. People feel like they have to be superior to somebody, and it�s not politically correct to tell jokes about ethnicities or people of color or religion, so who�s left?� he asks with a sigh. �People in Kentucky.�
As a gift, Edwards, himself a Kentucky Colonel, arranged for the members of his show�s staff to also be named to the Order of Kentucky Colonels. A huge map of the Commonwealth hangs in their offices.
Edwards says, �I�m proud of my roots.� �Graham Shelby
How many lights for your tree?
To estimate how many lights your Christmas tree needs, use this formula: multiply the height of the tree in feet by the width (at widest place) in feet and multiply by 3. For example, a tree 6 feet high and 4 feet wide would need 72 lights.
