PatriciaMHatfield.txt

-n -n -n Okay, today is April the 16th, approximately 11 o'clock Eastern Standard Time in Grundy, Virginia interviewing Patricia Music Hatfield, director of the Buchanan County Public Library in Grundy, Virginia. [BLANK_AUDIO] First, what I'd like to ask you is, this is being done for the Kentucky Historical Society. [BLANK_AUDIO] Take the tape. [LAUGH] If you could, there's some biographical stuff we need to get out of the way. If you can tell us who your grandparents were, where they're from, their names, and how, where they've been in the region or out of the region, or both sides of the thing. Well, briefly, I'll give the music grandparents. My grandfather, Albert Music, was a barber in Grundy, and my grandmother Music was a cox, and she was from Carroll County, and she was a school teacher who came here probably in the early 1920s. She came as a school teacher, worked in the county for several years, and then at the age of 40, married my grandfather and started having children. So the first son was born when she was 41, and the second one when she was 42, which is quite unusual, I think, for people to marry and start having children at that point in life. And where did she come from? She was from Carroll County in Hillsville. And he was from? He was from, he was living here. He was actually originally from Russell County. But the Music family is an old family. They've actually been in Southwest Virginia since the 1780s or so. My D.A.R. ancestor was massacred by the Indians on Big A Mountain in 1793 or something like that. So they go back a long way in Southwest Virginia. What kind of work did your grandfather do? He was just a barber, and he had a little shop in Grandie in the early '20s and '30s, and was not particularly well educated, but made a decent living, and then she supplemented the income with teaching. And she was the major influence on my life because from an early age, she was a person who loved books and reading. And I think I grew up with tales of Borrabbitt and Beatrice Potter's different squirrel nut cunn and all the characters, because she was such a person who loved books that they were always a part of her life. She would have been a much older lady. Yes. When you got to know her since she had started having children. So did she live to be raw? No. Well, I think she died when she was like 76 or so. I was only eight years old when she died. And that's why I can understand now that even though I was just a child when she died, she had such a major. Your grandmother, and was her, you suppose, the idea of telling you stories and her love of books, is that where you got the idea to? You know, I don't think I realized it for a long time because I went through a period of, I taught school for 11 years, and I really enjoyed that. But always in the back of my mind, I was a person who loved books and I was attracted to books because at an early age, I knew what wonderful stories they had in them. And I didn't necessarily pick that up in school because school, you know, it's Moby Dick or it's something, and that's not the reason I read books. I shouldn't pick on Moby Dick, but I don't like Moby Dick. But I knew from her this great, wonderful realm of fantasy and literature that was out there. Storytelling. That storytelling that was so exciting. And that's what, she fostered that in me at such an early age that it came back to me later because my parents were, my father. My father's name was Calvin Stinson Music and my mother's Virginia Looney. And he was a Marine during the war and World War II. It was in the South Pacific. And when he came out of service and they got married, they were struggling and they probably, well both of them had high school education, but they didn't know to read to their children. They didn't know to spend all this quality time because everybody was trying to, I can remember growing up in the 50s that my father had a service station and it was a struggle to make a living because, you know, I don't like to bring politics into it, but there was a period of time after the war that things almost went into a recession and things were kind of tough. So they were struggling. And your mother was? My mother was not at that time working in the 50s. She was not working. She had gone back to school and that's why I spent so much time with my grandmother. My mother had gone back to take bookkeeping and typing classes and I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Who, by the way, also when I was a child, we had an orphanage in the vicinity and on Saturdays they had a television set. Through the mission? Through the mission. Yeah. It was huge. And she had a television set and on Saturday morning she would invite the boys from the orphanage, the mountain mission school, to come in and watch cartoons and different programs and I can remember as a selfish child being so resentful that we had this house full of boys and I couldn't tear up the cushions on the sofas and tear the house up because there were boys sitting everywhere watching TV and I was almost jealous of having to share my grandmother with these orphans, which was really a terribly selfish thing to do. But she was such a wonderful person, such a kind person and it would never have occurred to her not to just open her house and just invite these children in to spend Saturdays with her. But that came back to me later after I had gone to college and actually have a master's in English education. But I was never quite happy with what I was doing and I think I was maybe 30 when I decided to go back to library school to the University of Tennessee because the book thing was still with me and I was an avid reader and I can remember even in college that I was living on, I was living in an apartment and had maybe 10, 15 dollars a week to live on and I was being half of it on books and unfortunately my college work sometimes suffered because instead of doing what I should have been doing, I was reading some kind of a novel or some kind of junky murder mystery or some such thing as that. So I think what was plain and early in my mind by her almost had to come full circle to come back to me to the point that when I was offered the job on the condition that I get the master's of library science. It just was a wonderful opportunity for me to do what I had always done and that was to work with books. Let me ask you this, to get back to chronology a little bit. Your mother was going back to school taking business courses, your father was running a gas station, which I imagine was an exciting place. It was, it was. And I'll bet you got free coax. Yes, and actually I think I was this chubby little girl who probably ate too much candy and drank too many coax because it was excessive. It was there, I forget. How many brothers and sisters? I have one younger brother. Okay. He's seven years younger than I am. When I read Lee Smith and I love Lee, she's a very close friend of mine, but I sometimes have other librarians approach me with the idea that we were all poverty-stricken and Appalachian outcasts or whatever when we were growing up. And it simply wasn't the case because people in the neighborhood, of course I live close to Grundy in town, there were swimming pools in the neighborhood. We all had good facilities as far as. So the idea that my generation, especially the baby boomers growing up in the late 40s and the early 50s, we had normal childhood experiences that were very much aware of being in the cold fields and very much aware of being. I grew up with stories of my father telling about the great mine explosions. He was. Where? Where? There was a, I'm not sure that I fully understood. Was there a big one at Grundy? Well, no, there was one at Oakwood where there were, where there was great mountains of, I'll just say red dog because I think it was slag, it was slag heaps. And we had one of those winters, I suppose, or springs where we had a lot of rain and the mountain broke loose and it broke loose over top of a coal camp. And the whole mountain came down and there were some people trapped in houses. And I know my father, I want to tell this accurately. Right, the mudslides and Rio and places like that. Right, or like Buffalo Creek or something like that. But he used to tell the story about being at the funeral home when the call came in for this mountain that had coal and slag that had come in on some camp houses. And I know there was a woman who was trapped behind a stove in the Oakwood area up there in the camp. And the water was coming into the house so quickly that they only had a few minutes to react. And she was begging them to cut her legs off to get her out. But they simply could not get to her to get her out and they more or less just had to let her drown. And it always bothered him so. But I know there was nothing they could do. There was nothing that could be done to change the way the circumstances happened. But it was a horrible experience and it was just part of what it was like to grow up and be around the mines and to know that you lived with constant threat of disaster. Death and destruction. Death and destruction. But other than that, you know, it was... Did they have any of those kinds of things while you were growing up and in high school and in grade school? Did they have any big events here where it really affected the community? Nothing. I don't think when I was growing up or if it was, I don't remember that much about it. But I know when I was young and married and living in Hurley, I was teaching over there. We were often... I was teaching seniors in high school. And I was often losing former students to roof falls and, you know, a couple of... One or two at a time. One or two at a time or electrical accidents. I know I can recall probably five or ten students that I taught who either were electrocuted or one boy I know was a roof fall. And it always bothered me so because some of these young men had such potential. They were good students, they were smart and died so young. But that was constantly with you because it was... But it was a part of the whole thing we'd all grown up with. And if you made that decision for the money to go in the mines because the income was so good, then you had to live with that threat. You accepted it. You accepted it. Exactly. When you were... You went to high school here in... Right. Right. Grundy. I was in senior high at that time. Okay. Graduated here and then went to... What year's graduated? I graduated in... Now, I probably... I still am puzzled by this, but I must have been ambitious in an early age because I took a lot of summer classes and I graduated when I was sixteen years old. Graduated a year early. Went to Pytnall College. Graduated a year early from Pytnall College so that when I actually started teaching seniors, I was only... I was nineteen. I was nineteen. And some of them were that old probably. Some of them were older than I was. Exactly. So, you got your degree from Pytnall College and... Would have been in 1969. I graduated from high school in 1966 and I graduated... Should have graduated in '68. '67. Should have graduated in '67. And I graduated from Pytnall in '69 and started teaching at Hurley. Taught over there probably eight or nine years and then I moved to Grundy Senior High. Taught there for three or four years and... When and where did you meet your husband and get married? I met him when I was still in high school. And he was... He's six or seven years older than I am. And he was actually teaching, had started teaching when we met and started dating. But we didn't get married until I was a junior in college, which still I would have only been eighteen years old or so. So I've actually been married to him twenty-six years. And children? No, no children. Let's see. Okay, getting back to college then you went to Pytnall and graduated with a degree in education? English education and elementary education. It was not my inclination to teach elementary education because I was always a person who I think I like to deal with teenagers and older students and the English literature. I think I probably want to be a history teacher and my husband said, "You won't ever find a job as a history teacher." So I did a double major thinking with the idea that it would be easier to find a job in another field because I love history and probably was a mistake. And then you went back and got your master's? In '72 I went to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and got a master's in English education. I understand that's supposed to be the prettiest campus in the world. Oh, it's beautiful. Oh, it is. It's beautiful. It's got a fieldstone line and around benches and I've heard it's just a lovely place. It is. It's a wonderful campus. It's a small town and absolutely fantastic staff and library. It's very good. Then you came back and taught. And I taught for another probably eight years and that's when the opportunity came about for the library job. We had lost a library director and she was certified with an MLS and it was going to be hard to find someone. MLS degrees at that time were pretty hard to come by and I had, because I've always loved school and I love books and I thought, "Well, I don't mind going back to the University of Kentucky or the University of Tennessee, whichever kind of worked out to get this library degree." I did it in two summers and it was pretty extensive. It was like 54 hours or something like that I had to have, but I doubled up. I carried summers. I carried 18, 21 hours. So you taught during the year and then what? No, I worked at the library. I was actually employed here by the library board while I was working toward that degree and then I went to school during the summers. And one winter, actually took one day a week, drove to library school, took two classes and did this crazy thing of coming back and spending, like traveling on the road till midnight, getting up the next morning, coming in to work. Then that would cause me to have to work like on Saturdays. So that was not a happy experience for six months, but I survived it. I've always kind of thought I was a survivor, a survivor of all this. And I graduated, I started in '80 and I think that degree maybe is '82, so it actually wasn't, but it was two years later that I got the library degree. So growing up in the cold fields then you had a real positive experience. You feel like as part of the baby boomer generation here in Grundy that things were pretty normal for a comparative. You know, the wonderful thing about it is, I talk to people who don't have a degree. I have this experience, but everyone I grew up with, everyone I was in school with in high school, we are now like this closely knit family. And I keep, I travel in Europe with a couple of girls I went to high school with. When we have reunions every five years or so, it's like one big family, it's like an extended family that gets back together. But you have to realize that these people, we started first grade together. We have gone all through school together and then there were years, probably 10 or 15 years that none of us, when people were raising their children, that we weren't close. But some point in middle age we've all kind of come back together. And while I have a close friend in Princeton, New Jersey, and I have one in Orlando, Florida, we keep very close contact because we're still these mountain people who want this clan or want this extended family that kind of has to stay together. I don't find that in other regions. I don't find this closeness among people that grew up together. You kind of, everybody wanders off and they're- Sean Leaps said in France they don't even have high school reunions. You know, it's like, you know- It's like that's it. Yeah, yeah, we're out, we're gone by, see, and that's not that you don't care about the people, it's just that it's not a- It's not a cultural- Right, not a thing to do. And we were talking about that as a matter of fact, last night. So it is, it's- It's a mountain thing or it's a clanish thing. I don't know. I'm not certain it- Maybe it's the last holdover of the clan. Yeah, and that's sometimes it's what I think it's, it is a thing that is culturally- The tribe. Yeah, the tribe that we can't let go of the tribe, that we're trying to still hold that tribe together. We were, we were, we're amazed of course, the things that we've noticed, of course, going to southeastern Kentucky and western or in southern West Virginia and then to western Virginia is there's very distinct differences between the people in those three places, even though they're within five miles of each other. And it's really incredible the, the, some of the things that we've noticed in terms of how the, the attitudes and the- Well, I have like first cousins that I know I'm closer to than a lot of people are their brothers and sisters. Because we just, it's like it would be unheard of not to love your brother or love your sister. Because we were raised that that was a part of it and you had to, you don't want to say you had to, but you accepted them for whatever faults they had and you loved them. And so consequently, you know, I'm always shocked by the, the fact that not everybody lives that way or thinks that way, that there isn't- When you go other places. When you go other places, right. Yeah, and there's, I think too there's a connection with the land here that doesn't exist in other places. Oh yeah. You know, that, and one of the things too that amazes us as we travel around is where we find it's like when wherever you get plopped down on the earth, that, that place seems to mean so much to me. Right. And you know, regardless of what kind of place it is. Exactly. Exactly. And but one of the things that we had talked about earlier that I wanted to get to was the idea of stereotypes and where did you, when did you become aware of stereotypes and what kind, what kinds were you aware of and how did you react to them and those kinds of things. I suppose the first awareness I had of stereotypes would have been when I taught school and some of the young people had to deal with the preconceived notions if they traveled to other, even other areas of the state. They were labeled as mountain people or rednecks or hillbillies and you were trying to build positive self-image in those teenagers. And so you struggled with every way possible to give them the type of self-confidence that they needed. I know the last few years that I taught I used to take student groups to Europe and we did a lot in, especially in England and Scotland, we took groups. But the experience was that when those kids came back they had a sense of self-confidence in themselves and they'd been in the world and they'd been almost around the world and they saw that they were able to manage, they were able to succeed and that they survived. And it was not that the more you showed them the world the more they realized that the world is in your head and you can do what you think you can do. But you cannot allow the rest of the world to label you as such as some kind of less than average. You can't let other people define you. Right, you cannot let other people define you. And so we were working very desperately to try to make these children realize that the world was their oyster and all they had to do was go out there and know that they could do it. In a few cases I know I succeeded. I had a young man who was a very poor student. He would work from the time school was out until midnight. He didn't have time to go back and build the basics of some things that he lost along the way. And I know one of the coal companies sent him on one of our trips overseas. And I noticed a change in him and when he was getting ready to go to college and he ended up at Berea College. I said to him, "Jim, your background is really weak." And I said, "But you can do it. You can pull out that background." And I said, "You have such a wonderful personality and you do so well with people that you can do it. You have that potential if you will just go for it." And he ended up at Berea. He was an honor student. He really did overcome that weak background. He brought his English up to par, which is what I was concerned about. Ended up now that he's a hospital administrator in the Midwest and he makes over $200,000 a year. He's making a fortune. And he came from absolute abject poverty. But when you find someone like that and you're able to say, "It's a mental condition," if you just will realize how much potential you have and don't let the world define you. So in a sense, what we're hearing here is, I think, that perhaps poverty is kind of a mental illness in a way. The way that, or the results of poverty. This miasma that comes out of poverty. Right. And poverty is, in a sense, like a mental illness. Now, that's one of the things that I really want to look at, particularly with you and with Grundy, this town, where you all have produced these eight state championships in a row in wrestling. And now you're talking about these kids went out and traveled. When were you taking kids on trips and who was going and how many were going? We were taking back, I guess, 78, 79, 80 before I left the job, or before I took the library job. And we were taking maybe 15, 20 young people to one trip, I know, was at Easter. And we went to Scotland and we did the tour of England. And then on the other trip, we just did, I guess we just did England. Since then, I've been back several times. I go over a couple of years on my own. And did the early kids still point out on this trip? Well, yeah, the kids do a lot of the Spanish and the French classes. They will do French-speaking countries or Spanish-speaking countries, and they still do a lot of traveling. And what I'm trying to get at here is it's unusual for somebody to win eight of anything. And the thing that John Philipp and I are really attracted by is this, the thing that disturbs us that we see over in southeastern Kentucky is this poverty of the spirit of like there's nothing I can do. Right, right. I can't succeed. I can't accomplish things. And of course not everybody, but I mean, you know, that spirit is there. And yet right five miles across the line, here you've produced eight state championships and there's nothing here that I detect that they could say, well, there's 12 million bumblebees coming to mind that say, well, what are we going to do to take care of it? It doesn't matter. You know, there's a real sense of community self-confidence and pride. And I'm trying to figure out where does this come from? You know, what I'm saying is if we can bottle this with it was it and the thing I was getting at is was it coming from the travel and the kids going out and the idea that we can succeed and then they brought that back and they translated that into these, you know, I think some of that is, I think you had a commitment by a group of men to build a facility that was like a it's like a wrestling club and they committed a lot of their funds into making this facility available to bringing in people. But then part of it was the travel and the getting out and giving these kids experiences. Oh yeah. And the community goes out and as I understand it, there's nobody in Grundy in February for like about three weeks, whether or not off at the tournament. Right. Right. And everyone goes to the tournaments and follows these kids and now the tradition is early, very early that they start with these kids in kindergarten with the wrestling. We were there this morning, of course, with the and maybe maybe that's it. Maybe it isn't important whether it's wrestling or chess or football or in the community has one thing that they can point to with pride and say, "This is our thing and we are good at it and the whole community participates." So maybe that's the secret to self-esteem is finding that one thing that the community, if it's Tiddly Wings. Right. Right. If you're the national Tiddly Wings champion, think about where everybody... Well, and you've got to realize too that life has always been hard in the mountains. I don't think it's ever been easy. And I think while you do run into it, a lot of people who've just maybe lost their spirit, you run into those who have had to be so tough to survive that they... Obstacles don't mean a whole lot to them because they've faced them all their lives and they're just continually... It's another challenge. It's another challenge. So you run into, I think, two distinctly different types of people. Those who have given up, but those who are... Those who refuse to quit. Those who refuse to quit, that's right. A lot of the wrestling program is built on children from real low-income families, not all of them, but a lot of them are low-income families. But yet that is the one thing that is a way to succeed for these children. And from early on? Right, from early on. Well, I tell you, I'd love to see wrestling catch on at home because it's big in Nashville and it's big in Chattanooga, Macaulay and Baylor and all that. That's the interesting thing about it is, at home it's a rich man's sport, wrestling is. But here, it's exactly the opposite. And I think that... And it's not like that you don't have to go out and build a coliseum. No. You've got six mats or so and higher the ramperees in your bag. Exactly. It doesn't take a lot of support. But getting back into the stereotypes, I think I dealt with stereotypes then here at the library so strongly when we had the incident with Roger Coleman and we were dealing with the media a couple of years ago. The media... First tell me about the Roger Coleman event. Okay. Well, in 1981, actually I'd been on the job six months maybe. And in January of that year, one night we were closing, no one in the library, me and another staff member. We look up and we see this man coming through the door masturbating. And he was in the library just a few minutes but it was obvious to us that we were dealing with someone with a severe mental problem, sexual problem, whatever. And that was in January. And we were able to identify him after he left and figure out who he was. But I was told by the local police that that type of incident would have only been a $30 fine or some other minor offense. Not worth the effort of prosecuting. And so we just kind of knew who he was and so forth but nothing was done. And I feel like that I still am not certain there couldn't have been more done but I'm not certain it would have made any difference in his personality. But anyway, a couple of months later he raped and murdered his sister-in-law. And so the library incident became important because we were witnesses to the fact that he was a sexual deviant. And of course he had previously attempted rape on a lady and had served some, actually a two-year, supposed to have been a two-year sentence and he was released early. So we had to get involved in the case again. The prosecution in the actual murder trial when the charges were brought against him for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law decided not to use us because they simply said, "We don't need you all to come in. We don't feel like we need you all." Later we were told that was a big mistake. They should have used us. But I guess they really wanted to spare us having to go through the gruesome details of everything that had gone on down here. And as it ended up they didn't need our testimony because they had the previous history of sex crimes. And a lot of evidence against him, they had DNA, not DNA, they had a lot of semen samples and hair types and all that kind of stuff. So actually for 10 or 11 years we dealt with different things that would come up with, I would get calls over the years from all the, Roger was doing a lot, in prison he was doing a lot of talking about trying to talk to young people and trying to, I think he really kind of launched his own media campaign about what a portal innocent victim of all this he was. But when the execution date drew near within a year or so everything focused back on Grundy and his case was taken up by a law firm in Washington, Arnold and Porter. And they're quite famous, they take pro bono cases for the publicity. And they decided the best way to defend Roger was to attempt to say that Roger was a victim of this little Appalachian town that wanted to railroad somebody. It wasn't, you know, that they had to label somebody as a murderer and get the case over with. And they picked on this young boy and kind of railroaded him into this thing. Drug him out of the church house. Yeah, drug him out of the church house. And of course that simply wasn't true. He had a history of obviously phone calls, he had attempted rape on a woman, he had the library incident and a long history, a deviant behavior. Even when he was in high school he, I shouldn't tell this on the tape but I will. He was the statistician for the basketball team and he would sit in the back of the bus and masturbate all the time. And you had cheerleaders on the bus too. One would think at some point in his career somebody would have said, "You know this is rather bizarre behavior and we might ought to do something about it." It goes to show you, if you really know the circumstances, everybody in the community gave him every opportunity to get help or to get over it or to grow up or whatever. And I think they really gave him an opportunity. Nobody wanted to believe that he was as sick as he was. But in the end the town was made by this law firm to be this hick town that I think we were described in a couple of magazine articles as dirty little coal town or, I can't remember some of the terms they used. All of them were derogatory. All of them were derogatory. All of them were stereotypical. You had railroaded this poor little coal miner and I knew that nothing could have been further from the truth that people really wanted to catch the right person. But that circumstances in a small town when everybody knows everybody else and you have someone, even if it's locked in a juvenile record and you have someone who for years has been making obscene phone calls to women, you know, various women. It's not a secret, you know. It's not a... And when... I think one of the things too, I want to deviate to the side just a little bit and then come back to the central thing that we're talking about here. In terms and we've not dealt with this in any of our other interviews. And I think you're the first victim of a criminal act that we've interviewed and certainly the first victim of a... Or that's talked about it, the first victim of a sexual nature. And I think one of the things that I would like to get at here is when something like this happens to a woman, does it... Do you look at this individual like, "This was Roger Coleman and he's a really sick person." Or do you look... Does it have an effect on how you look at men in general? And do you see what I'm getting at? Is it a... Is it a... I think in my case, I have... Well, people tell me I'm a very strong personality. And I think in my case, I probably went through some real difficult times dealing with why me. You know, why did this thing have to happen to me? But at the same time, I am strong enough and I have a strong enough personality that he made attempts at intimidation. He came in here a few times with the... I think the idea that if we had to testify, he would kind of stare us down and intimidate us. And the other lady that was with me ran into him a few times in the grocery store and he had been known to try to intimidate his former victim, the one who he had attempted rape on. But I'm strong enough to the point that nothing would have intimidated me. I would have spoken the truth, no matter what the circumstances, because I felt like, you know, if I don't speak the truth, if I don't stand up for what happened, somebody else is going to be a victim too. And it's bad enough to have to go through it yourself, but you certainly don't want to live with the guilt that you could have stopped it or you could have done something to prevent it from happening again. You know, I often think I even have a little guilt over it. I feel guilty about one to even because I often felt like maybe there was something that could have been done. For the first library incident. Now the better side of my rationale says no, you can't predict criminal behavior. You know, it's crazy to feel guilty. Certainly you can't stop something that's gone on for 15 years. Exactly. And you can't change someone. If someone's a psychopath, you can't change them. But I often wonder what if they had roughed him up or what if they had called his parole officer and tried to, that's kind of useless thinking, I know. But maybe that's what made me so determined to see the thing through and to say, don't try to tell me. I didn't see what I saw, this deviant behavior from him and nobody else because I even received letters from Roger from prison. And yeah. And what kind of letters would he send you? I mean, I've got it. And if you want to look at it, but it was, it was a, it was really a strange letter where he tried to convince me that it wasn't him that came in the library, but it was another boy, the one who'd streaked through town. And what he didn't realize was the one who tried to blame it on was a boy I'd gone to high school with. I would have known him. I would have known him and he came through the door. And I simply stood up even in the press conference, clipping that out. And I said, you know, he can't tell me that it was Paul Guffey that came in the library because I know Paul Guffey and it wasn't him. And so I don't know what it is about a criminal mind that they can divorce themselves from their actions or try to convince you. But that was a useless proposition. And I was simply not going to be intimidated by any of that. I think I would have, I would have testified if, if had needed, I would have done anything to make sure that it didn't happen again. So then we got down to the point that his execution date was near and the governor had a hearing and you had to go to the governor's and he had had DNA testing and it, by then it, it had proven that he was guilty. He was guilty. Right. But pretty much beyond the shadow of the day. Exactly. And the, he had to pass a lot. He had to take a lie detector test, which he failed. Right. And so then ultimately he was executed. Ultimately he was electrocuted and a young lady that I had taught in high school who was a reporter for Bristol paper was actually in the room when he was executed. And I am a very religious person. And I always hoped and I had often thought if there was anything I could have, would have liked to have seen happen. I would have liked to have seen him admit the crime and maybe at least at some point asked God to forgive him or seen some kind of remorse. I'd like to have seen some kind of remorse, but I think she said he went straight to the chair with this hostile go to hell attitude thinking that he was going to, he was still selling himself almost to the media at the point he even entered the chair. And creating the image of Roger Coleman rather than. Right. Right. And you know, he made, which made me in a sense is why he was as sick as he was. Exactly. Because there were two Roger Coleman's. There was the one that he wanted to believe existed. And in fact, the one that existed. Existed. Exactly. And he was both of those. Right. Right. Or he was one of them. I could feel sorry for him on the one hand to know that he had a unfortunate childhood and he had problems in his background. But I also knew that unless something drastic happened to that personality that he always would have stayed the same that he wouldn't have ever been a person with a conscience for their deeds. You know, that it was like there was no remorse for killing a 19 year old girl. And that's what always bothered me that he couldn't because the case was real involved and we won't bother to go into it. But there was even points that he admitted to certain people that he had done various things. He admitted the library incident to certain people. And oh yeah, I did that as a joke. You know, he told them. But then, you know, when you get, you get somewhere in front of media, you know, oh, they're mistaken. It wasn't me and it's that and the other. But we dealt with the idea of the Appalachian image so much with that because it was coming through one of the things I wanted to be sure and talk to you on tape was there were the people that were these image makers. You said major national magazine. Oh yeah, major national. You know, people that were in here. I worked with I had a real positive experience with ABC prime time. They they they tried to do a thorough job. And I think the the piece got cut because of I want to think there was an earthquake or something in Los Angeles that kind of messed up the slot. But time and Newsweek did a real hatchet job on everything I feel like I mentioned earlier you felt like they came in here with a set of preconceived notions and tried to find things to prove it. Exactly. Because I had just about him but about the region. Well I had the New York Times to call me and start asking me, you know, about the Hatfield McCoy feud and it had no bearing on the case at all. It was like, well, tell us, you know, are you really related to the Hatfields and blah, blah, blah. And I thought, you know, I thought we were talking about this case. But then it was more like, well, couldn't you be mistaken about and I said. Couldn't you be mistaken about who came in the library and I said, you know, it's a small town, not that many people look alike. And there's not that many people floating around who have the same height, the same weight, the same. Yeah, I don't think I think all these guys that are stuck in these cities with these major they don't and surrounded by millions of people. I don't think they have an idea of like in Pleasant Hill where I live. They're 350 people. Yeah. If I don't know them, I certainly know everybody what they look like. Well, and I can understand inner city. You probably do run into when you're just passing people on the street. You see a lot of people that look alike. But I had taught school. I had also been attempted to be somewhat of an artist. I got a sense of facial characteristics of height and weight. And it was surprising. We did when the police people came after the library incident, we did an identity picture. And when I look at that even now, I am shocked how close it comes. And when I brought it out to recently, there was a man doing a book on this case who was in here and he had been hired even by Arnold Importer who got into another big lawsuit because they tried to pin the murder. But they tried to put doubt in the minds and kind of say, well, actually this other boy is the murderer. And now he's suing them. Exactly. And that was going to be a big. Oh, was it this? Was it the picture with the guy that did the streaking? No, no. It's another one who lived close in the neighborhood and he had a bad reputation. And I think he was he and actually that said that suit has been settled. And I don't know how much Arnold Importer had to end up paying him. But because it was settled out of court and it was sealed and nobody knew how much money. But they almost named him or they did name him. And I want to think it was a Newsweek article as being the actual murderer. And I thought to myself the time I thought you all have messed up big time. You don't put you don't point out someone. There was not a shred of evidence against the other boy. They were just trying to create a smokescreen. Exactly. And how did you feel about. I've got this sense of you as this. And then you realize like so many of us do that. That's facts. English classrooms aren't necessarily the best place in the world to convey a love of books. Well, that's right. As much as I loved it, you know, it was kind of like force feeding a baby. And the wonderful thing about this job, people come here because generally they come here because they love books and they want books. And they get so excited when they talk about something they've read and it's not like having to force it on somebody. And you know, high school students give you a lot of resistance to your great enthusiasm and your wonderful ideas. So it was a it was a. They're all draftees and the people. Exactly. They're volunteers and I mean they go to the front lovingly, you know, ready to die for the college. Here's my book. Right. And I was high school student. But I missed that because I think anybody who's ever worked with kids. Well, you still get to work with them here. But then you we see you coming here to now you have all the books in the world. Right. You know, you're surrounded by books. Exactly. And I guess now the place in the interview where I'd like to go to now is what do you see for the future here for for Grundy for the library for yourself? You know, what kind of personal future do you see? What kind of community future do you see? Eight more state championships in wrestling? Well, I think that's possible. I think that's eight more states. Probably if you could if there was one thing that we found that we could bet on happening it would be that there's going to be some more state. That's right. Now, I kind of like to think that information and and the fact that computers and networks and fiber optics are going to make even Appalachia accessible to the world, you know. And so I'm fighting so hard to get the technology in the library that will allow our children to have access the same access that everybody else has. You're totally computerized here at Hookton. Are you on this Internet? Yes, we are on the Internet. Has that made a big difference in terms of? Well, we've not been on it enough to really get a total impact. But we do we do interlibrary loan. In other words, we can borrow or we actually loan to the whole southeastern United States. And you'd be surprised the request that we get for books from our collection from all over the country or all over the southeastern United States. So in a sense, we are on the network in the fact that it's it's not so much the Internet. It's actually we're on a solar net, which is a southeastern library network type thing. They actually borrow the books or do they borrow computer texts at the book? No, what we pick up is a request for an actual book. We actually, as a matter of fact, should actually come in. And then you send the actual book there. Yeah, you know, in our computer, we'll get a request that we send somebody something. It just it's just we go in and see what we've asked to borrow, whether or not it's been sent or they're going to send it to us. But we also go check and see if there are requests for us of things that we have in our collection that we will send out. The turnover time is like just a day or two that we get things out. The thing that I'm amazed with is we've got this thing called Info Tractive Home Station. Yeah, I'm familiar with it. And all it's geared into is magazines for the last few years. But a lot of it has the actual text. Full text, exactly. And I just go in and print it out. And I did a I did a paper on Sarajevo and on comparing Sarajevo and Warsaw Ghetto for a PhD program. I'm starting to fall by the way in Bowen Green State University American Culture Study. And I'm sure that at the library there, they have probably did not just magazines, but with books for it. And I like that. I don't do you see that as a coming thing where instead of borrowing the book, I'll just call and they'll say, oh, yes, we've got that on computer and they'll modem it to use a whole thing. Right. And it's kind of I'm trying to think what they call that it's a it's called full text but I think it probably is a way in other words, you'll download it and print it yourself rather than have to have the actual document. And then you're you're it makes your accessibility. Like say, for instance, in Crossville, we've got this small library. And in a sense, it could make everybody at home with a computer and a and a and the ability to download something. They're all library, right? You know, and I see that as a real hope for Appalachia for for each school. Right. And you have the access through the and you wouldn't even need a satellite. I always thought the satellite this was going to be the key to success. Yeah. Actually, I think the phone right is because it'll bring the computer line in the word. You can just do everything. We have fiber optics at our prison site here as far down as their prison site, but that's going to make the transfer of information a lot faster and a lot quicker when that completely comes into the county. But now we are home hooked up to are you hooked up to Blackstone because I know they're going to be the first community. Right. Not that virtual reality, whatever. Yeah. I just wonder if John Philippe would want to do her pictures while we're talking. I'm hoping already has. Oh, OK. Yeah. OK. We're about that. Let's do this. And then we'll begin. OK. Well, go ahead. One thing that I wanted to ask is, but you got I've got all this stuff about computers and stuff. We you got all that down in my memory. I didn't interrupt you. No, no, right. OK. Because that's that's future stuff. Right. What do you see? So you see, well, let's let's get back to it just for a second here and tie it up. You see then information and the accessibility of information as a way to to tie us into the day to day reality of everything that's going on out there. Right. And and bringing us up to speed. Well, we've got to compete. I mean, we know we've got to compete. And the only thing that the only the only real drawback that I see in Appalachic is is the is inaccessibility and isolation. Right. So if we can overcome that through fiber optics and information technology, then the only real drawback that we have will be able to bridge that for the future. Right. Now, which gets us to what you're talking about about competing. We've got to compete. And you know, the real danger is we don't want to lose the sense of of our culture. And I really think that's the most the greatest gift that we all have is this this sense of the Appalachian culture. And we don't want to lose that. We don't want to lose this sense of our attachment to the land and into the people because I even have people people coming here working in the coal industry from the Richmond area. They will say to me this one one man said to me, he said, you know, he said, you don't know how much I love these people. He said they have such he says they're so they're such characters are so interesting. They're so open. And he said, I don't find that in my area. I don't find the people. And he said, I love these people. And I said, well, I've always known that I've always known what wonderful people that they're greatest resource. So you've got to be in the global village or global environment. But if there is a way to hold on to who we are and to this sense of community, the sense of attachment to the mountains and the land and the culture, we want to retain that. But I guess like a lot of other minorities in this country, you I have a fear that. You know, we've got to figure a way to balance the two to balance who we are with what we want to be what we want to be exactly and where the future is for us. But I think it has to be you cannot give up one for the other. You cannot give up the culture for the technology, but you can't fail to communicate or will be left behind in the world. I think that's to me that's why the printed word or the the information age that we're coming into is so important. Because as a librarian, you see books disappearing. You know, as a teacher, I talked to I know that I know that the kids are really. Clue in the video, you know, that the video tech movies and that type of tech. It's something that they've been raised with and they're very comfortable with and they like it. The way that it operates. Yeah. And I've been, you know, as a writer, I I've talked to other writers and I said, I said, hey, man, I said, for all we know in 20 years, they may not even have books. Well, you know, I don't know. I can see that information. The packaging is changing the total packaging. And so when I'm reading email on the network, I know that everything is compacted and you know, you're not having these beautifully written novels and long stories because everything has to be condensed. And maybe that's the world we're moving into where the packaging is different. I like to think there will always be the place for the Thomas Wolf or the Randall Norris or that person who can turn that beautiful phrase and has an appreciation for the English language. See, I have always felt like we have this real sense of the English language here that maybe translates from our English Scottish ancestors that we love. We love the language because I love Lee Smith tells a story about how, you know, in the south you go to the post office and you want some simple directions and somebody starts telling you the story of their life. But that's because they love the story. They love the language. And it's not just this is I think there are two parts. I think it's the sense of the language, but it's also the sense of story. We're very story oriented. Right. And it's like it's really hard. My son is a better writer than I am. And he has a tremendous sense. And when he starts telling the stories, I said, Charlie, I said, I want the short version. The one that includes you. Right. The one that you were there, not this story that's real long where you were standing over here having church while all this was right. Right. And I think that sense of story comes to us. That's the thing that's right. And that's exactly. And that's part of the last thing that I want to do is if you had to sum it all up, put it all together, your life, your library experience, your marriage, the town, the world, whatever. This is your one chance. What would you say you want to leave us with one major? That's so overwhelming. Now I've lost all the. Well, it's the sense of the potential of the people that you don't want it to be lost. You know, I think I have a lot of potential and I don't want to lose that. But maybe part of my potential has always been working with the people and giving people the opportunities that they should have for, you know, for appreciating this whole sense of self. I'm into a lot of personal reflection, I suppose, on life. And I really think to reach where we all want to be, we don't so much find it in ourselves. We find it in other people and our sense of being able to see accomplishment in other people. I like Scott Peck's work so much. I don't know if you know Scott Peck. He does the road less traveled. But he continually reflects on the fact that to be too concerned with self is not where it's at. It's not where it's at for any of us. But to transcend that and to reflect on helping the other person and to see our lives in the way we can help other people and we can bring happiness, I suppose, to other people. That's maybe what about... To achieve happiness for ourselves. Through other people. Exactly. Not through some kind of selfish pursuits. And I think books give you that. I think information can be used that way. It's all in feeling good about yourself. But in feeling good about yourself, it's the sense of care and concern for other people too. That's it. [end of transcript] [BLANK_AUDIO]