Pikeville in the good old days

I’m at that age now where it’s fun to sit around and think about my life. I now live out in the county where everything is a bit slower and the pace more comfortable for an old-timer such as me, but when I was young, being the daring fellow I was, I made the move to the Big City of Pikeville.

Well, you have to understand that this was back in what now passes as the good old days. That would have been around 1975 or so and Pikeville wasn’t quite the impressive metropolis it has since become.

I lived in an apartment then overlooking Deskin’s Motors. This was when railroad tracks ran through that part of town that is now Hambley Blvd. In fact, the railroad that went through town was still called the C&O. I had a two bedroom apartment, utilities paid, including a $5.00 per month cable TV fee, fully furnished, for $125.00 a month.

I worked at South Central Bell’s Second Street offices. I was temporary, part time. This meant that I’d come into repair where I helped get info for anyone who had a complaint. I worked three weeks and was off a week.

There were still a lot of 8 party lines then. The 633 exchange didn’t exist. This meant that whenever one subscriber took their phone off the hook, the other seven called repair. How much fun was that?

I’d walk the railroad to get to work. There were still coal cars on that track. They actually served to let me know that I’d had too much to drink at the Christmas party the phone company threw in 1975. On my way back, I couldn’t quite make out the letters C&O unless I closed one eye.

You wouldn’t believe how many people worked there then, even operators. Remember the people you could get by dialing “0”? This wasn’t an option, either; you couldn’t make a long-distance call without them.

There were still real service stations all around town in those days, too. You’d drive up; they’d pump your gas and check under your hood, just like Goober.

Groceries I got from the only Velocity Market opened in those days. I think there’s a pizza place there, now. In town, you could go to G C Murphy’s and buy, well, pretty near anything.

I didn’t drive in those days, so having a lot of time on my hands, I used to walk around the berg to see what I could find. You’d had to have seen the scenery to have believed it.

If you went towards Goff Furniture, you’d get to the Upper Bridge, but if you stayed in town, you ran across a real, honest-to-God dirt road. I used to love to walk out that way.

There was an actual illegal garbage dump before you ran across what passed for housing. There were real tar paper shacks out that way. You could find the same thing on the other end of Pikeville near Poor Farm Hollow.

From the top of Peach Orchard Mountain, you could see the work being done on the cut through. If we’d only known what was coming.

Yes, Pikeville has so much more now, but it seems like there’s a lot less, too.

Hemphatic Support Needed

It’s not been too terrible a year to be a supporter of industrial hemp in the Bluegrass State. We did, for example, see a new Commissioner of Agriculture, James Comer, sworn in who just stood up and endorsed this marvelous plant.

There’s also been one state official who’s been trying relentlessly to reintroduce industrial hemp in Kentucky, mostly without a lot of help, and that would be Senator Joey Pendleton (D) Senate District 3. Well, anyway, that’s where he was prior to redistricting.

The truth is that while the bill introduced by him this last legislative session didn’t get out for a vote in the Senate, Kentucky has already passed a bill that would allow its farmers to grow industrial hemp.

The big roadblock is the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while they may not be convinced of the fact that hemp and its cousin, marijuana, really belong on the list of schedule one narcotics, this doesn’t mean they won’t stop enforcing this idiotic inclusion.

This list, by the way, includes opiates, opiate derivatives, depressants and stimulants and psychedelic substances. If you look, you’ll find one little substance in that last grouping, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, and it’s this that industrial hemp has in such small quantities that it couldn’t even get a fly high.

What can industrial hemp do? C’mon, get real. This plant has over 22,000 uses (maybe considerably over) so it’d take a lot more than 550 words to list them all. But more than that, better than that, even, is the possibilities of the jobs it would mean, not just in Kentucky, but all across the U S, if we could just get the feds to drop hemp prohibition.

For the record, by the way, we aren’t the only state that has passed laws concerning industrial hemp. Here’s some info included in an e-mail I got from an organization I am a member of-Vote Hemp: “To date, thirty-one states have introduced hemp legislation and seventeen have passed legislation; nine (Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont and West Virginia) have removed barriers to its production or research.”

Sadly, no state law will ever trump federal law on hemp. And it is from this unenviable position anyone whose aim it is to see renewed hemp production in the U S must start.

Yes, there is presidential aspirant, Ron Paul, R., TX, who reintroduced his bill that would exclude hemp from the list of schedule one narcotics. It’s in the same position the bill that was passed over in Kentucky was; it was assigned to a cold and unfeeling committee (House Judiciary Committee) where it was left to languish.

And until very recently, no one would co-sponsor that bill in the U S Senate, not even Rep. Paul’s son, the transplanted Texan we elected to that august body, one Rand Paul.

But we did get word a while back that Senator Ron Wyden, D. OR, has introduced Senate Amendment 2220 to the Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2012, S.3240.

This amendment is Rep. Ron Paul’s bill, H. R. 1831. Now hemp supporters must contact Members of Congress to urge them to vote aye. So I urge you all to call or write (snail or e-mail) them.

This may be our best chance ever.

Kentucky Fried Extinction

Firstly, this title was borrowed from an e-mail I got from Greenpeace, an environmental group whose goal is to “ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity".

This e-mail brought up two very important issues. One would be the deliberate destruction of rainforests, and two could be the extinction of the Sumatran tiger as a result of lost habitat.

Yes, I know it’s just such stuff as this that brands people as tree huggers, but what do I care? Trees and humans have had a symbiotic relationship for so long. We each survive on parts of the atmosphere the other cannot use. So as long as trees are helping to make the atmosphere conducive to life, I won’t apologize for wanting to live in a world where they are included.

Oh, and in our part of the world, trees also help disperse water from a heavy rain so it doesn’t cause a flash flood and needlessly destroy houses and upset people’s lives. It’s when forests are clear cut that these natural disasters occur. But those who live on Harless Creek know that.

But back to the title of this piece: Kentucky Fried Chicken is doing business with a major contributor to rain forest destruction; it gets the paper for its packaging from Asia Pulp & Paper (AP&P).

This destruction takes place throughout Asia, but AP&P is hitting Indonesia particularly hard. Not only are they destroying this nation’s invaluable rain forests, they are destroying the habitat of the last remaining subspecies of tiger found here.

It was as recently as 80 years ago that Indonesia was the home of three such subspecies. Two are now extinct, and the one remaining subspecies, the Sumatran tiger has been classified as on the brink of extinction. One reason for this is that 93% of the tigers’ habitat has already been destroyed. And without their natural habitat, those few that are left cannot survive for long.

Why does Kentucky Fried do business with AP&P? Possibly because it’s a cheap source of paper for their packaging. It’s just too bad their need for packaging material for body parts of a dead chicken that have been coated with 11 secret herbs and spices and deep-fried is allowed to endanger Sumatran tigers and their habitat.

Of course, a much better source for that packaging paper would be available to Kentucky Fried if the U S hadn’t outlawed a superior source of paper and categorized it as a schedule one drug.

It has been pointed out in this column many times that one acre of industrial hemp will provide as much paper as 4.1 acres of trees, without the chemical pollution produced by the process that turns wood pulp into paper. And hemp can be ready for more production in a much shorter time. In fact, in Kentucky, when it was legal to do so, a good farmer could get several crops of hemp in, in a single planting season.

Trees by comparison take around 20-30 years to recover.

Well, this was done before we were made aware of the fact that hemp is a dangerous drug that needs to be listed with narcotics such as heroin and cocaine. Of course, when that was made known, we all happily abandoned the idea of ever using industrial hemp again.