Crisis At The Courthouse

The town elders have gathered at the Inez courthouse to talk about what the heck they’re going to do to save their town from its veritable sinkhole of problems—everything from financial disaster to drug addiction to total isolation.


ice: OK, guys. We need to fix this place up. Where do we start? What’s the biggest problem?

Father Ralph Beiting [local Catholic priest and advocate for the poor—pictured on right with white hair]: My feeling is that we are losing the best minds that we have. Our young people get educated and don’t want to come back here. I think we are kept poor as an area because of that. They aren’t here to be leaders, and the reason they are not staying here is that there are no jobs.

So we’re left with an old population. According to the surveys taken by the University of Louisville, we are now the oldest place in America. We have a higher percentage of people 65 and over than anywhere else.

We also have a drug problem here. It’s breaking up so many families. When you don’t have a solid family, you aren’t going to be raising a solid family of your own.

Richard Young [mayor of Inez]: The state of the drug-abuse problem here is severe. Grossly severe. The guy that used to be the sheriff here told me that the guys out here are either buying or selling, and you always know who’s going to be selling if you look at who just had their prescription filled. You don’t get a prescription from some guy down the street. You get one from a doctor. We don’t have enough manpower here—or I’d imagine anywhere else in Eastern Kentucky—to monitor the prescriptions that go through the drugstores.

This same man who used to be sheriff here was asking me, “How do you arrest a guy for driving erratically when you pull him over if he’s on pills he’s prescribed for and he’s got them sitting right there in a legal container with his name on it?”

Christi Kirk [executive director, Martin County Executive Development Authority]: That’s all true. The drug problem is sending a new population into poverty due to addiction. There is also a high percentage of accidents on these roads. That’s because of these coal trucks out here. A lot of people become addicts after they’re injured in an accident. If your family and everyone you know lives in poverty and all that you see is public assistance, then the incentives to change aren’t there. And obviously, that group of people feels excluded. They feel different from those of us who get up every morning and go to work. I feel as though they truly believe that they are different. So there’s insecurity there too.

We’ve also lost a lot of small-business owners because of Wal-Marts opening up.

All of that affects our quality of life. If you don’t have things to offer, people are going to go to other areas.

Father Beiting, you mentioned how our youth are leaving. I was one of those. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I wanted out. I felt like I didn’t belong here. I’ve been back here for two years now. Pride in your community has to start very young. If you don’t have that, you’re never going to consider coming back here. It took me 18 years to realize how important it was to come back here, and it still isn’t easy.

We do have wonderful agencies here that help support families who are dealing with abuse, whether it’s substance, physical, or emotional.

But the poor still suffer from that feeling of not belonging. It’s such a hurdle. There are years of damage to change. It’s hard to feel optimistic. I can’t imagine—if my life and my well-being depended on a check that I was receiving from the government—how that would affect my feelings.

Father Beiting: I do a lot of traveling all over Eastern Kentucky, doing preaching out of doors. I was in Leslie County and I had finished talking and I saw this little boy sitting over on the porch. I went over to him and said, “Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?” He said, “I want to be like my pap.” I said, “What does your pap do?” and he said, “He rocks.” I said, “Does he work for the stone quarry?” He said, “No, he rocks in his rocker and waits for his check to come in every month. I want to be like that.”

The kids’ brains don’t get expanded. We have to get involved, and we aren’t going to end the poverty in these counties without doing that.

Kelly Callaham [county judge]: I think our biggest trouble is the mentality. We must change the mentality of the younger folks for sure.

But I also think we have a per capita problem. The bigger cities are full of poverty too, but it’s packed in more.

This is just my opinion, but I’m usually a pretty straight shooter. I think that LBJ showing up here was the worst thing that ever happened to Martin County. Every year, the anniversary of that visit puts the spotlight on us again. TV crews come out. In ’95, CBS came in and set up lights and cameras in my office. I told them everything they didn’t want to hear. I told them that we were doing great. I told them, “Don’t go to the hollers and find somebody,” but of course they did. It’s still my opinion that there’s just as much poverty out of the rest of Appalachia as there is here.

But when Mommy and Daddy are lying around the house all the time doing nothing, the kids think, “That looks like a pretty good life there. I might as well try that too.” They are actually very intelligent people, if just for the fact that they’ve learned how to work the system. We have a system here where if you can learn the ropes, you can get by wonderfully.

The county has changed a lot since I was a boy. We had a well at home, but now probably 95 percent of the people in our county have water.

I been in the funeral business for a long time, and you see very few families come though my funeral home that don’t have the ability to pay. We’ll go to the house and it may not be in the best conditions that ever was, but when they come in and make arrangements, they pay for their funerals. So it may look like they’re poor, but in actual reality, they’re not.

Vice: So why do people represent poor Southerners as hillbillies?

Kelly: Well, when you’re reading the papers and the magazines, you’ll see that good news don’t sell. Pick up the Lexington Herald. I think they have a drive like a magnet to go up to where people have to shoo the chickens off their porch.

Christi: That’s certainly a part of it. There was a photo of the day LBJ came here in the local paper, back when it happened. My grandparents clipped it out because my father and his grandfather were in it. The photo caption says, “On his poverty tour of the area, the president passed through the streets of Inez, past lines of ragged schoolchildren, many of them wearing hand-me-downs and ill-fitting shoes.” This ran in the Louisville Courier-Journal the Sunday after Johnson visited Martin County. On the 30th anniversary of his visit, the stories were basically the same.

Vice: Well, it seems like there are two populations down here: People who give a shit and are trying to effect change vs. poor people in the hollers who are mired in their living rooms.

Photos by Patrick O’Dell

Connie Necessary [Kentucky Works employment specialist]: In dealing with these people, we have to change the way they look at things. We have talented and skilled people here. They are far from being ignorant. They just need a push in the right direction.

You may have someone that really does not want to go to work, but you just need to keep talking to them and supporting them. I’ll have a single mother come in and say, “I don’t have any skills.” If you’re a mother, you’ve got skills. You can cook, sew, and clean. Those are skills. But they don’t look at it that way. They say, “I don’t have any education, therefore I’m nothing.”

Vice: Do the really poor people here have biases against the townspeople who are trying to change things? I bet some of them do.

Christi: I think it can make them feel more separate. It’s as though they have no part in the changes that might affect them. Often they don’t vote, so they feel like somebody else is making decisions in the county.

Father Beiting: We don’t have consistency. I started Bible schools at two different towns here, where we’d get them for a week and take them out on boats in the lake, do all kinds of things. But then we wouldn’t see them for a year. They’d get back up into their hollers and all the enthusiasm would be drained away. We don’t have anything that continues. We need a yearlong program.

Sometimes our schools put too much emphasis on sports. I had a guy working for me who had gone to school in Johnson County, just next door to here. When I got him, he’d finished high school and had a diploma, and he couldn’t read or write. He was the best quarterback they ever had, so he got through.

David Michael [executive vice president, Inez Deposit Bank]: We started an intern program at the bank 20 years ago. We take students from the county high schools and let them work for us. They earn some money while they work at the bank, but they also get to learn. We’ve had local leaders, the governor, authors, and more come in and talk to the interns.

We also need to work as a region—not just with each county on its own. We need Appalachia to work together as a region.

You can look around these counties and see people who you may put a poverty label on, but not all of them are dissatisfied. Right or wrong, some are happy with the simple life. We want them to do better as a whole, but in some cases they’re doing what they want.

To me, jobs are the key to allowing people to get out of poverty. Still, if you’re offered a service job at minimum wage or slightly above, and you’ve got one or two kids that you have to get to school, maybe you’re a single parent, and if you can go out and make $12,000 a year working—if you compare that to what you might get on public assistance, there isn’t much incentive. It’s a real process to break that family tradition of being on assistance.

Vice: Is it possible to get small businesses to return here?

Christi: I have a friend who’s not from here, but moved to Inez with her family about two years ago. More than anything in the world, she wants to own a café in the downtown area. Something simple with a limited menu like bagels and coffee in the mornings. When she goes out and tries to seek advice on finances or work on a business plan, she is always told, “It won’t work here.” I think the statistics are limiting the people who want to start small businesses here.

Vice: So they’re being scared out of even trying. What about getting big corporations to move to town?

Christi: We would love nothing more than to have a company come in and fill up our spec building and create 500 jobs and put these people to work. But sometimes it needs to start small.

Vice: Maybe the federal government needs to send Appalachia more money…

David: Any of us would say we want more, but is more really the best answer? A lot of people here have a lot of pride, and that needs to be overcome. But is more better? I mean, does it make it easier? People can still learn the system and work it.

But as far as more federal aid? Sure. We could use it to continue building up the infrastructure. Improve the roads and electric and water lines.

Vice: But in non-monetary terms, do you think the rest of the country gives a damn about Appalachia? Just to play devil’s advocate, why should they?

David: We only have one resource here and that’s coal.

Vice: Coal is pretty important.

David: It’s been our backbone for years. We’ve tried to diversify, but it’s hard to do that when you’ve got that mainstay. The number of years in which we can mine coal easily and efficiently is numbered.

Father Beiting: We have to figure out how to produce small businesses here. Agriculture, for example.

Christi: Oh yeah.

Father Beiting: I started some greenhouses in Jackson County and they’re still in business after 30 years there. And what about recycling? What about the timber that’s a byproduct of the coal industry? We should process it into furniture. These are the kinds of things we should do. Maybe they’re only going to employ five, ten, or fifteen people, but boy oh boy are they going to get a spark going.

Connie: Transportation is a big, big issue here. People don’t have enough money to get their own vehicle and they have to depend on others to get around. So the jobs may be here, but how are they going to get to the jobs? I hear that all the time: “You can get me a job, but I don’t have anyone to take me.” The work ethic is here, and they are proud people.

Housing is an issue here too. People who live in low-income housing get a rent increase when they get a job. That leads them to question why they should even get a job.

Richard: It all comes back to the mindset. We’ve got people here who are fourth-generation welfare recipients. I’ve heard the stories too, where these kids say they’re going to do the same as their dad and grandpa did. When they get through school, they’re signing up for welfare. Why go to school at all? If the only inducement is to get that check, why even bother? There used to be an inducement to work. If you didn’t work, you didn’t get anything to eat! We don’t have that situation now. If I don’t have a job, I go down and sign up. After I’m on the check for a while, why should I want to get a job? Especially when most of the jobs are low pay and don’t have nearly the benefits these people are getting for staying home and watching TV.

Vice: Skeeze, you were here the day LBJ came. Do you remember it?

Skeeze Ward [awesome old guy who’s lived here forever]: I didn’t even know he was coming until the day before. The sheriff was out there with a bunch of Secret Service men. But I suppose everything went well that day.

I think we’ve come a long way since then. We’ve made a lot of progress. Everybody that really wants a job can get out there and get one. It may not be $10 an hour, but you can go out and put yourself to it.

But I still think the main problem is that our school system is going down. We have less students. We have to do something to keep the better students here. We’ve got to have some kind of a system.

Vice: Well, that’s that then. Thanks guys.

INTERVIEW MODERATED BY JESSE PEARSON