Our young Blue Devil football team was far too inexperienced to match up with Williamsburg as we had hoped. As I off-handedly predicted last week, the Yellow Jacket passing attack was just too much for us too cope. They also had the total offensive package, combining passing with a very good running game and with an ideal field general at quarterback.

But our team consisting of 23 freshmen and sophomores never quit and even the die-hard Williamsburg fans predicted much better things for Jellico within the next two to three years.

Chairman of our Jellico Veterans' Monument Committee, Herman Heath, has informed me that Congressman Lincoln Davis is expected to be here for the ceremony when the name of Staff Sergeant Barton Siler will be added to the Monument. SSG Siler was killed in Iraq and very deservingly will have his name displayed for this and future generations. We must never forget his sacrifice or the sacrifices of all those who have lost their lives in defense of our liberty.

It is my understanding that the ceremony will very appropriately be held on Veterans Day, November 11th and that possibly other notables have similarly been invited to attend.

As I have written before, the loss of SSG Siler has bee especially meaningful to me due to so many personal ties. I know Barton's father; had Barton as a student when I served as principal at Jellico High School; have his wife Jenny on the staff at Boston Elementary School; his beautiful daughter Mikka who possesses a smile ten miles wide, attends our BES pre-school; and I and several locals have served in Barton's National Guard unit, the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, that has suffered so many casualties in Iraq.

As I am sure that my readers have noted, I love to write about our former students at Jellico High during the period that I served as principal that have gone on to become contributing citizens in their communities in a multitude of ways and vocations. I am proud of all of them! And one of whom I am certainly extremely proud is Lisa Blue from the Tackett Creek community. Lisa graduated in the class of 1979 as valedictorian (although she only attended JHS three years) and went on the graduate with honors from the University of Tennessee School of Engineering in 1983..

Lisa began work almost immediately with the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) following her graduation from U.T.. She has since risen to the present position of Deputy Branch Chief of the Flight and Ground Computers Division, Marshal Space Flight Center, Huntsville (Alabama) Space Center. Her meteoric rise with NASA has been based upon the fact that she has been a contributor to so many of our nation's most advanced space programs including the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, experimentation for development of major components for the Space Station, ground check-out procedures for the Space Shuttle's main engines and countless other projects.

I often mention former graduates who are worthy of the annual JHS Alumnus Award presented each year at homecoming. And Lisa is another outstanding potential recipient of that award who has made extremely significant contributions of which our alma mater can be very proud..

I also have been writing about other towns and cities that have been making improvements in their downtown areas - especially Knoxville. And I have just received correspondence from Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam in which he cites the goals for his administration including "an energized downtown: everybody's neighborhood" - basically what I have had as one of the main goals for Jellico during my entire administration. I firmly believe that a town without a vibrant downtown is actually no town at all.

In his correspondence, Haslam also described what is currently taking place in the downtown: "Downtown Knoxville is a great place to be. Someone said to me just today, isn't it great to walk down the street and see so many people. The jewel of downtown, the Tennessee Theatre is reopened and we have a plan for the Historic Bijou. By this time next year, we'll be planning the grand openings for both the movie theatre and the Mast General Store. We'll be opening the Market Square Garage in a matter of weeks. Best of all, more and more people are living downtown, residential sales are booming."

Later I contacted Mayor Haslam by phone and complimented him on the tremendous improvements that are being made there and informed him that we too are attempting to bring back our downtown - but of course on a much smaller scale.. He stated that the next time he is up this way, that he will try to drive into Jellico and take a look at the work being done here.

Mayor Haslam ran in Knoxville's inaugural Marathon. I too once dreamed of running a 26 miles marathon and was training to do so. But one day after school while I was principal at Jellico High, I ran to Williamsburg on Highway-25 W and when I got there (just half the distance of 13 miles), my legs felt like they weighed 200 pounds each. I ended up hitchhiking back to Jellico and that ended my dreams of ever successfully completing a marathon - although I once went all over East Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky to run in numerous mini-marathons of 10,000 meters or 6.2 miles. In fact I ran the inaugural Expo 10,000 meters in Knoxville and several thereafter and still have the certificates of participation and order of finish in my possession. But suffice it to say that I never won although I usually did finish in the top one-third of my age division and I was proud of that fact. But my greatest kick out of running was taking some members of the football team with me to Lafollette Hospital to run the Cumberland Mountain 10,000 meters to Jacksboro Middle School and finishing ahead of all of them. I still remind some of them of that fact including Robert Day - another outstanding JHS alumnus now on the staff of Eastern Kentucky University.. But in fairness, they had played a football game the night before and were banged up and sore. (I had the advantage - and of course I took advantage!)

The article in last Sunday's edition of the Knoxville News-Sentinel concerning Rarity Mountain with my comments immediately followed my contacts with Mayor Haslam and I expect e-mail to begin coming in to my office concerning that article.

But I received an e-mail last week from a lady in Jonesboro, Georgia (e-mail and U.S. Postal address available should anyone want to contact her) who stated that she found my articles on the Internet, reads them religiously, appreciates how I communicate with our citizens and wants to know if I will agree to becoming the adopted mayor of that town.

I have had to run for election both terms and never expected to be "adopted" as a mayor anywhere else. But next to Tennessee, Georgia is my favorite state. My daughter and family live there and both she and my son-in-law took their doctorates from the University of Georgia. And my granddaughters name? Georgia! What else? (I do sincerely appreciate the compliment.)

I have twice before mentioned the 40 Days and 40 Nights Christian Youth Center and on one occasion I visited the Center and partnered Allen McClary in a game of billiards with a couple of the young boys. And it was quickly evident that I had lost any skills that I might have acquired in my younger days when I sometimes frequented Bill Proffitt's Pool Hall, Sam Abrams Pool Hall and Ed Powers Pool Hall. (Pool rooms didn't have too good of a reputation in those days although I always thought their bad reputation was basically undeserved. And I vividly remember the first time my father caught me playing pool. I wanted to get under the pool table and hide. But it was too late!) In more recent times, Wally Carroll opened a nice pool hall here but the lure of computer games and other new fangled gadgets was just too much to overcome.

Regardless of its reputation though, the town pool room was once a common part of our American culture that has now basically disappeared from the landscape. One of the last popular pool halls of which I am aware (along with the Royal Pool Room in Lafollette) is closing down.

The Pad Pool Room in Corbin that opened 72 years ago is no more. According to the Corbin Times Tribune, that pool room down through the years was often visited by Keith McCready who played Grady Seasons in the movie "The Color of Money". "One Eyed" Tony Howard, Knoxville's Eddie Taylor (who served as inspiration for "Fast" Eddie Felson, portrayed by Paul Newman in the movie "The Hustler" played there as did many very good local area players.

Corbin once had seven pool halls and the Pad is the last to go! Good or bad?

It's amazing how a set of coincidences sometimes come together to verify a word of mouth story that has been around for many years. When I was a boy my father, who had only one eye and part vision in the other, used to tell me how disappointed he was that he was disqualified for service in World War I due to his visual handicap. So during the war, he was one of a few young men who were available to work on the new system of hard surface highways brought about during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. In fact he ran a "mule and scraper" (that day's version of the bulldozer) in preparing the "Dixie Highway" from the Canadian border to Florida that was later given the designation of U.S. Highway 25-W. (The section that my father helped to prepare that ran through Fairview, Boston, Saxton, and Mountain Ash is now Kentucky Highway 1804 since the "white bridge" was constructed in the late 1940's and U.S. 25-W highway straightened out to Pleasant View.)

While grading the road bed, he dug up the remains of a man who reportedly had been lynched several years earlier. And he and other workers reburied the remains on a hillside above a section of the road just after Kentucky 1804 turns off the present U.S. 25-W.. (According to my father and local banker Clarence Baker, the remains were one of three lynched when the conductor on a train leaving Jellico saw blood flowing from a culvert just as the train slowly passed in front of the present Davenport property. The conductor stopped the train and he and the fireman investigated - finding the body of a twelve years old girl with her throat slashed and stuffed into the culvert. )

Darla Crawford a few days ago gave me a copy of some historical information that she had found on the Internet entitled "Miscellaneous Newspaper Articles: Murder and Mayhem in Campbell County".. The information came from a story in the "Daily Advocate", Newark, Ohio dated December 8, 1892 and gave details of the murder and lynching.

"Two negroes and one white man were lynched yesterday morning, at 3:30 o'clock by a mob from Jellico.. The men were taken from the custody of the sheriff and hanged to trees. They had outraged and brutally murdered, a white girl named Mildred Bryant near Jellico. They cut her throat and threw her body into a culvert, where it was found".

Lynchings in this area were apparently fairly common place in our "wild and wooly" days and the articles taken from the Internet by Darla give details of several instances of mob "justice" - Jacksborough (Jacksboro), Buckeye, Elk Valley, Jellico, Williamsburg, etc.. Although not mentioned in the articles, I have always heard that at least one, and possibly more lynchings took place in the Newcomb area. And one story that is not cited that I heard discussed many years ago by old timers dealt with a lynching in Proctor Hollow. Pete Bray and others also showed me that tree that was later struck by lightning where they said that lynching took place. It sure was a frightening sight for a young boy to see - especially late in the evening just about dark!. In my child's imagination I could see the "guest of honor" as the victims were sometimes called, hanging from the tree. Thank goodness we do not have mob justice today! But some of the horrific crimes that we see daily in the news makes one wonder what is suitable punishment!)

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