Reprinted by permission of Edgar Miller.
(Webmaster's note: This was originally printed in the Catholic Standard, Washington, DC in the mid-eighties. I thought readers of this web site would enjoy it as much as I did!).
After reading a recent column, Standard staffer Mary Conway asked me, "Is Jellico a real place or just something you imagined to illustrate your stories?"
Yes, Mary, there is a Jellico.
To find it you take Interstate 75 north from Knoxville and take the Jellico exit. It's the one right after Stinking Creek Road exit.
Jellico is the only place in the world, as far as I know, with this name. The Brazilians recognized this when they put on my driver’s license as my place of birth "Jellico, North America.” That's really all you need.
Jellico is nestled snugly between Pine Mountain and Indian Mountain and sits astraddle the Tennessee-Kentucky border. In it's heyday in the first part of this century, it was a boomtown serving the surrounding coal and logging industries.
JELLICO IS NOT A DOGPATCH, as many visitors have found to their surprise. It is a blend of many things, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" and maybe even a smidgen of Peyton Place.
Many Jellico natives have achieved success, fame and fortune in many fields, but none is more famous than opera singer Grace Moore whose career was ended at its peak in 1947 in a plane crash.
I REMEMBER JELLICO as a gentle place even though I grew up during a period when bloody violence raged across the southern Appalachian coalfields.
Coal was king when I was a youth but by the time I finished high school, the industry was faltering. I and most of my classmates had to leave to seek our fortunes elsewhere. It seemed that Jellico would become a ghost town.
But Jellico didn't die. It survives and today and once again seems to be flourishing.
Much has changed in my hometown since I left there 33 years ago. But more than you might expect is still the same.
Dick Creekmore still runs a grocery store on Main Street, but he now also has a supermarket a few blocks away. Culver's shoe shop is still there near the intersection of Main and Fifth Streets.
Mr. Jake McCleary is still at the bank and Harold Moon still sings bass in the choir at Jellico Methodist Church. Mrs. McCleary still plays the organ every Sunday at the First Baptist Church. Mrs Kate Wirtz, a pillar in the Catholic Church, still writes about the goings and comings and doings of Jellico's citizens in the Advance-Sentinel.
The house where I was born is still there but the road out front is paved. The yard seems smaller and the coalhouse and chicken yard out back have been torn away. The honeysuckle and hollyhocks that perfumed the summer evenings of my youth also are gone.
Grace Moore's old home, where my Aunt Esther and Uncle Hugh lived in later years, has been torn away and replaced by an apartment building. The Central Drug Store is still on Main Street but the Gay Theater where Saturday double features were nine cents is no longer there.
Pickup trucks have replaced the mule-drawn coal wagons whose tailgates provided convenient, if not swift, transportation for lads such as myself.
Fast food places abound in the Crouches Creek area where the interstate goes through and Tannery Hollow has become the fashionable place to live.
Many people have left. A few, such as Dean Rodeheaver and her late husband Clyde, returned to spend their retirement years there.
Above all, Jellico is still a place filled with "dear hearts and gentle people," who indeed make me feel welcome every time I return.
And, though it is indeed a real, living place, Jellico is, for me at least, a state of mind. It is there that my roots lie and it is from there that whatever I have become got it's start. It is my measuring stick for values because I have never found any improvement on the values that were taught there.
And no matter how far I travel or what I see and do, I know that I always have to go back to Jellico to put it into perspective.
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