A Seed is Planted in Eastern Kentucky

My father was born in Pineville, Kentucky in 1928, the son of the town drunk, in the poorest town in Eastern Kentucky, which is to say the poorest town in the United States.

Pineville is still dirt poor, with a median household income of $12,435, as compared to $17,270 for the rich folks in Harlan, or the truly rich of Middlesboro ($19,565).  For comparison's sake, I live in a zip code where the median household income is $163,000.

During the 1930s, unemployment in Appalachia was as high as 40%, the roads were muddy and often impassable, and over 30% of eastern Kentucky was illiterate.

To try to turn things around, the Work Projects Administration, part of FDR's New Deal, created the Pack Horse Library Initiative which hired local women to ride horses or mules up into the mountains to deliver books to people living "up in the hollers".

Carriers rode out at least twice a month on long routes of 100 to 120 miles. Nan Milan, who carried books in a daily eight-mile loop around the Pine Mountain Settlement School, a boarding school for mountain children whose families were too poor to raise them (and where my father was once ensconced), joked that the horses she rode had shorter legs on one side than the other so that they wouldn't slide off of the steep mountain paths. Riders earned $28 a month — around $495 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

From Smithsonian magazine comes this window into that world:

In 1936, packhorse librarians served 50,000 families, and, by 1937, 155 public schools. Children loved the program; many mountain schools didn't have libraries, and since they were so far from public libraries, most students had never checked out a book. "'Bring me a book to read,' is the cry of every child as he runs to meet the librarian with whom he has become acquainted," wrote one Pack Horse Library supervisor. "Not a certain book, but any kind of book. The child has read none of them."

"The mountain people loved Mark Twain," says Kathi Appelt, who co-wrote a middle-grade book about the librarians with Schmitzer, in a 2002 radio interview. "One of the most popular books…was Robinson Crusoe.” Since so many adults could not read, she noted, illustrated books were among the most beloved. Illiterate adults relied on their literate children to help decipher them.

My father ran away from home at 14, never graduated from high school, enrolled in the Air Force, got his GED, attended Princeton University, married my mom, joined the U.S. foreign service, taught himself two languages (French and Arabic) and several instruments (trombone, piano, and bass), and traveled the world, living at various times in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Mali, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. He built a custom house and several apartments on Dupont Circle, taught himself to sail, and owned and drove a 1937 Bentley through Europe and North Africa. He ran the American Association for the Advancement of Science's climate project back when no one was talking about global warming.

In short, he rolled a long way from Pineville, Kentucky, and books were what made the journey possible. Without books my father would have never known there was a world beyond the crushing poverty of the mountains.

Books shaped by mother's life too. She was the daughter of a refinery worker in a small town in Kansas who feasted on the romantic travels of Richard Halliburton.  Oh to see Turkey and the Nile, Paris, and Khyber Pass! And, of course, she saw all that and much more, from Japan to the Amazon, from Alaska to Petra, from Tikal to the Fjords of Norway.

It all started with a few books, a little imagination, and a lot of drive.  Plant a seed and see what it might grow into.  FDR and Andrew Carnegie did that, and the world is forever changed as a result.