Beyond the Margin

By Joe Spear

Kentucky kindness and missing Mitch

As the weariness in Washington droned on, my plane descended on the Huntington, West Virginia, airport.

It’s a small airport where you get off on the tarmac and Fox News is the cable channel of choice on the single television in the small waiting area.

Getting closer to wheels down, a Huntington native sitting next to me points out the side of the hill where “that airplane crashed.” The Huntington airport is in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains and the airport is on a small mountaintop.

Sports fans will remember this is the site of the largest sports team plane crash tragedy in the U.S. history where, in 1970, 75 people including “Thundering Herd” players, coaches and prominent boosters of the Marshall University football team died when their plane clipped some trees and crashed two miles short of the runway.

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My business trip takes me to Ashland, Kentucky, long known for the headquarters of Ashland Oil until the company moved to Covington in 1999 and eventually sold most of its refining to Marathon Oil. It eventually became Ashland Global, now based in Wilmington, Delaware.

The refineries remain big employers in Ashland and so are the hospitals. Kentucky has the second highest rate of opioid overdose in the country, just behind Louisiana.

An early steel industry was one of the first in the world to make so called “pig iron,” forged steel pieces that looked like small pigs and could be shipped for final melting at steel mills along the Ohio River.

The Venus, Genesis and Vulcan sculptures on the Ohio River in Ashland pay tribute to the area’s natural environment, its faith community and its steel industry. An anonymous local benefactor paid world-renowned artist Gines Serran-Pagan to produce the mythology structures at 32-35 feet high, making two parts of the structure the largest in the U.S. with Venus being the largest in the world.

As consulting editor for the Ashland Daily Independent, I wanted to find out a bit about this state whose people for decades elected one of the most powerful men in U.S. government, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Political winds are blowing his way, and he may be the majority leader again after the midterms.

When I talked to the people of Kentucky, none reminded me of McConnell or had an ounce of his tone as the disruptor in chief of U.S. government, the fixer of appointing U.S. Supreme Court justices and the hypocrite of filibuster fights, a description created by opponents with glee and that McConnell wears like a badge of honor.

I’m told the people of Kentucky mostly hate McConnell but vote for him anyway. I guess they figure the devil you know is better than the one you don’t know.

No. People of Kentucky seem kind.

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In Kentucky the waitresses call you honey and the bartenders call you sir.

Down at Fat Patty’s on Winchester Avenue you can get a burger and fries for about $6.50.

The homeless can sit during the day at Fat Patty’s and have some water. As a man pulls up to the bar during happy hour, the bartender, a 29-year old transplant from Green Bay, greets the man by name and says he can get the man a cheeseburger and “won’t charge you for it.”

The offerings across the street at the Delta Hotel Winchester restaurant are more varied and pricier, but the people are just as kind. The Bourbon Bar at the Delta offers 147 varieties, including the Rumpelstiltskin brand for $371 per 1.5-ounce shot.

When Casey the bar manager hears I’m from Minnesota (so is he), he offers some rare bourbon samples, which I politely don’t turn down.

Kentucky can make better bourbon than most places because of the water and the climate. In a fine report by liquor.com, Pinhook Bourbon founder Sean Joseph explains it.

“Large beds of limestone in Kentucky naturally filter iron out of water (iron creates unwanted flavors in whiskey), and the limestone enriches the water with calcium and magnesium, minerals that add complexity of flavor during fermentation of the grains,” Joseph says.

The wide range of Kentucky temperatures in the summer and winter expand and contact the bourbon in the barrels giving them unique flavors.

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Surprisingly to many, Kentucky was not a Confederate state, though it was south of the MasonDixon line.

While it was a slave state that did not secede from the Union, it has a long tradition of preachers and others harboring former enslaved people in a strong abolitionist movement.

Kentucky historian and son of slaves Carter Goodwin Woodson, (1875-1950), founded the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and in 1926 founded Negro History

Some of the largest mythology sculptures in the world stand on the banks of the Ohio River in Ashland, Kentucky. This one depicts Venus, Vulcan and the book of Genesis. Week, the precursor to Black History Month.

The abolitionist movement included Cassius Marcellus Clay who led the fight for freeing slaves, and who Muhammad Ali was by birth named after being close to the story as a Louisville native.

Freedom fighters.

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On my flight out of Huntington, the baggage check people learn I’m a little worried about transporting a special bottle of bourbon and advise me not to store it in my soft-sided checked bag.

They give me an old Fed Ex box from the backroom and put the bottle in it surrounded by bubble wrap. No charge.

I would share this bottle with them if I had the time. Back in Minnesota I will toast Kentucky and its generous people, but probably not Mitch McConnell.

Joe Spear is editor of Mankato Magazine. Contact him at jspear@mankatofreepress.com or 344-6382. Follow on Twitter @jfspear.