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By Ronnie Blair My family kept chickens in the mid-1960s. They laid eggs in a chicken coop in the barn behind our rental house in Kentucky, but spent much of the day clucking and strutting around our yard, easily avoiding me whenever I approached. One day when I was 6 or 7, I decided for unclear reasons that I simply must capture one of them, using a method I likely copied from a Hanna-Barbera or Warner Brothers cartoon. I found a cardboard box in the house and I propped up one end of the box with a stick. I tied a piece of kite string to the stick and stretched it out so that I could situate myself far enough away to avoid alarming any unsuspecting chicken that approached. I took slices of Sunbeam bread and broke them into tiny pieces, creating a trail of crumbs that would lead my unwary prey inside the box. At that point I would jerk the string, the box would fall, the chicken would squawk, and I could boast triumphantly that I had captured a furious and flapping hen or rooster. I did not have a plan beyond that. Once I laid my trap my excitement grew as, sure enough, one hen became intrigued by the bread and pecked at it, perhaps not believing her good fortune in discovering this delicious and easily accessible snack that had manifested itself long past breakfast time. She gulped down bits of bread one by one, and with each succeeding gulp drew closer to my ingeniously constructed contraption. She arrived next to the stick and her head bobbed in and out beneath the box. I waited. Another step or two and she would stand completely underneath the box and I would execute my plan, exulting in my triumph over my less-than-wily opponent. Suspicion grew in the hen’s lima-bean-sized brain, though, and she refused to cooperate further. She hovered tantalizingly close to where I calculated she needed to be for my mission to succeed, but some force stopped her from taking that final step beneath the box to finish off the last bread crumbs. Had she, despite my cunning, figured out the trap? Did my strange apparatus send some alert through the hen’s version of a cerebral cortex? Did her brain house more sagacity than I had anticipated? What a shrewd creature. By this point my little-boy patience, limited even under the most agreeable circumstances, dissipated and I made a fatal error. The hen poked her head beneath the box one last time. Crucially, most of her body remained outside the box’s shadow. Still, judging that this might be the best chance I would get, I yanked the string, setting the physics of my trap into motion. The stick was dislodged, the box dropped, and the startled hen frantically pulled back her head with a panicky squawk, escaping my clutches. The agitated creature raced away, putting distance between herself and my trap, which seemed less elaborate with each passing moment. Perhaps as I watched her retreat, I recalled that Wile E. Coyote always failed as well. At least, in my miscalculation, I had not plunged in panic from a cliff after momentarily defying gravity. Dejected but not defeated, I propped up the box, scattered another trail of Sunbeam bread, and waited, determined to do it right this time and not get trigger-happy––or kite-string happy, as it were. Lesson learned, I no doubt thought. The hen, wise to my treachery, ignored the bread this time. The other chickens also steered clear of the trap, either because they had witnessed and learned from her flirtation with captivity, or because they were innately more prudent than she. No amount of waiting mattered. The box, the stick, the kite string, the Sunbeam bread, and I were soundly defeated, outwitted by a cautious hen who now understood the risks inherent when scheming boys appear bearing cardboard boxes. Ronnie Blair is author of the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.

By Ronnie Blair When I began writing my memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV, one of my goals was to include elements that made my story universal for others who grew up during the same time period in the 1960s and 1970s. A number of readers assured me I succeeded at this. But a couple of people, including one reviewer, noted that my story was universal not necessarily to what children experienced at that time, but to what white children experienced. This was a fair point. The area of Harlan County, Kentucky, I grew up in had a decent-sized Black population, but my book largely ignored this. The one significant mention of race in Eisenhower Babies is in the chapter that describes my first day of school in 1964, when there were two Black girls in my classroom. I wrote that, though this was a decade after the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that integrated schools, much of the South was still segregated even in 1964. Kentucky was different, and I quoted from a book on the subject that said by the time I started school more than 90 percent of Kentucky school districts were desegregated, compared to 20 percent in the rest of the South. Even this mention of racial dynamics might not have made its way into my memoir if not for my experiences later in life after I moved to Florida. As a 6-year-old I had been unaware that Blacks and whites attending the same school had a controversial past, so the presence of those two girls did not seem extraordinary to me at the time. Even when I grew older and learned some of the history, I assumed that anyone my age had the same experience I did––going to school with African-American classmates from day one. Then in the early 1990s I was in a diversity seminar sponsored by the newspaper where I worked. Several of my white co-workers who were roughly my age said they had never gone to school with a Black person, that separate schools for Blacks and whites existed in their communities into the early to mid-1970s. Not only was I surprised to learn this, but when I mentioned I had gone to school with Black children in 1964, the consultant running the seminar seemed skeptical. So, when I wrote about my school days in Eisenhower Babies, it was natural to mention the significance of Black children in my classroom, even though in 1964 it had seemed inconsequential to me. Beyond that, my memoir did not delve into the experiences of Black children of our Appalachian coal-mining community, which is probably just as well since I almost certainly would have messed up the telling. Fortunately, someone else, William H. Turner, had already taken care of my omission. Turner’s book, which I recently discovered, is The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, published in 2021. Turner grew up in Lynch, Kentucky, the Harlan County town where I was born, which is just a few miles from Cumberland, the town where I grew up. Turner dashes the stereotype of Appalachians as exclusively white with his reminisces about a vibrant Black community of coal miners in a town built by a coal company, U.S. Steel. "In the mid-1960s, the central Appalachian coalfields were popularized as a ‘White’ space in the United States,” Turner writes in his book’s introduction. “Although many parts of the geographic area known as Appalachia were and are predominantly White, the region, like most of the United States, has never been entirely White. The inhabitants of the central Appalachian coalfields have always represented racial and ethnic diversity.” That might be especially surprising to readers of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, published in 2016. Turner addresses Vance’s book in The Harlan Renaissance, referring to it as “the latest in a long line of writing that advanced extremely negative and damaging stereotypes about White Appalachian people.” This wasn’t the first time Turner commented on Vance’s work. Turner’s essay "Black Hillbillies Have No Time for Elegies" was included in a 2019 book titled Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Even with his fond memories of the area, Turner does not ignore the racism African-Americans experienced in Appalachia, noting that "Jim Crow-like segregation ... prevailed in the coalfields of central Appalachia up to the mid-1960s with no more, or less, effect than was the case throughout the American South." “I well remember … when the city council of Cumberland, four miles from my home, chose to fill in the area’s only public swimming pool with concrete rather than to allow Blacks to swim in it,” Turner writes. Yet around the same time, he writes, a community college opened in Cumberland and Blacks were allowed to attend. He would enroll in that college in 1964, the same year I started elementary school. Turner was born in 1946, 12 years before me, so our years of growing up in Harlan County weren't exactly in sync. But we do have shared memories and experiences, including the sorrowful yet inspiring story of Sanctified Hill. Sanctified Hill was a ridge in Cumberland that was home to a number of African-American families. One night in 1972, after heavy rains, a sudden mudslide caused the houses on the hill to break loose from their foundations and to slide down the hill toward a white neighborhood below. Insurance companies refused to pay for the disaster, claiming it was an “act of God,” and local, state, and federal government agencies backed up that determination. The residents, though, claimed the mudslide was the result of neglect; that the tunnels of an abandoned coal mine beneath the houses had collapsed. The homeowners, led by a woman named Mattye Knight, who had been one of Turner’s high school teachers, fought the decision. Eventually, they took their case to Washington, DC, and won federal funding to build a new community called Pride Terrace on a hill behind the Cumberland High School football field, in view of the house where I grew up. Turner writes that the Sanctified Hill saga was “an example of a group of Black Appalachians valuing social justice, resilience, dignity, and self-respect” in much the same way as a mainly white group of Harlan County coal miners who took on Duke Power Company around the same time and whose story was told in the Academy Award-winning documentary Harlan County, USA. Turner’s book is a wonderful history of a people, a time, and a place, and I highly recommend it, regardless of when and where you grew up. Ronnie Blair is the author of Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.

By Ronnie Blair Step into the annual Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg and you enter a time portal for bibliophiles. On this shelf is a first edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. On that shelf is a 1922 biography of World War I hero Alvin York. Around the next corner is a 1930s volume of a Nancy Drew mystery, still in its aging dust jacket, having somehow survived 90 years of potential childhood book-desecration mischief. Antiquarian book dealers from across the country travel to the fair each spring to display their treasures for people seeking military books or poetry collections or children’s chapter books or whatever other type of vintage book someone might deem worthy of collecting. This year’s fair is March 10-12 and, as always, is at The Coliseum, 535 Fourth Ave. N., St. Petersburg. Well, nearly always. In 2020 and 2021 the fair went on hiatus because of the pandemic, but returned in all its splendor in 2022. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 dealers are expected for this year’s fair, which is the 40th. They will bring with them books on architecture, hunting, travel, history and geography. Some dealers are chatty, some businesslike. Some display books on a variety of topics, others are more specialized. All are fascinating depending on where your interests lie. Love books about dogs? About Florida? About Arctic exploration? You will find them. One year I came across a 1937 book titled The Princess Elizabeth: Probable Future Ruler of the Greatest Empire in the World by Eric Acland. This book came out soon after Elizabeth’s father became king and the world was charmed by the little girl princess. Another year I found a photoplay edition of Peter Pan by James M. Barrie, illustrated with black-and-white scenes from a 1924 silent movie starring Betty Bronson as Peter Pan. Sometimes you come across unexpected and unusual finds, such as Noah’s Ark, a photoplay edition for a 1928 movie that was part talkie, part silent movie. The book and the movie are about the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. Sort of. The characters in this strange tale go back and forth between Noah’s day and World War I, which was just 10 years in the past at the time. The Great Flood is juxtaposed against the Great War, an interesting approach and a fascinating addition to my collection. My first visit to the fair happened in 1998 and the first book I purchased was a biography of Daniel Boone published in the 1800s. Boone is quite the hero in my home state of Kentucky so it was an appropriate find and still holds a cherished spot on my book shelf with other Kentucky-themed books. My copy of the Boone biography is not a stunning achievement in the care of antiquarian volumes, though. Over the decades, the text had begun to break loose from the cover, so someone made a repair job. The end papers are no longer original end papers, which may explain why this extraordinary find cost a mere $40. Which brings us to the price of books at the fair. They vary – a lot. You may pull a volume from a shelf and, if you are like me, hastily but gingerly return it to its place after you spy the four-figure price lightly penciled in on the first page. Some dealers keep their more desirable and expensive books behind glass, requiring you to request they bring them out for examination. Don’t despair if you lack Warren Buffett’s bank account. I’ve paid as little as $3 for a book at the fair. This is because the pricing of collectible books is based on any number of factors, and age alone does not result in a fatal blow to your wallet. Is the book a first edition? How rare is it? What condition is it in? Is the original dust jacket still intact? How desirable is the book among collectors? As you peruse the shelves, you will encounter books priced for thousands of dollars. You also will encounter plenty priced at $20 or less. Your wallet. Your choice. Here are the hours for this year’s fair: 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. March 10; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. March 11; and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 12. Admission on the evening of March 10 is $10 and that is good for all three days. Admission for the other two days is $6 each day. The box office is cash only. Ronnie Blair is lead writer for Advantage Media and the author of Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.

By Ronnie Blair On my left knee is a faint scar, put there nearly 60 years ago by Adam West – sort of. He was responsible indirectly anyway. Anyone who was around in the 1960s remembers the extraordinary impact Batmania had on the nation when the TV series Batman debuted on ABC on Jan. 12, 1966. West, in full Batman regalia, even made the cover of Life magazine, which more typically featured luminaries such as Robert Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, or Sophia Loren. I was enthralled the moment I saw the first commercial previewing the upcoming show. Among other things, that commercial featured Batman and Robin bursting from a hollow statue of a mammoth to finally put a halt to one of the Riddler’s nefarious schemes. Soon my friends and I were riveted to our black-and-white TV screens each Wednesday and Thursday nights as we joined the Caped Crusaders on their adventures, trying hard to ignore ABC’s cruel reminders that the show was “in color” on more fortunate children’s TV sets. Like many youngsters, I was an imaginative boy who turned many of the things I saw on my TV into backyard adventures. I could be Roy Rogers, galloping across the lawn on a battered broom that doubled as a horse, or Tarzan, climbing a handy apple tree not far from the back door. In the spring of 1966, when I was eight, it was time to add Batman to my repertoire. As a millionaire with elaborate gadgets at the ready, Batman was more of a challenge than cowboys or jungle lords, but my imagination was up to the task. At the time, my family rented a two-story house that stood on a hillside in our small southeastern Kentucky community. Behind the house was a pasture and at one end of that pasture was a barn. At least, that’s what dull-minded adults saw. Eight-year-old me saw something more majestic: a millionaire’s mansion (the barn loft) and a fully equipped Batcave (the barn’s dirt floor). I raced down the hill to the barn, wasting no time. Who knew? Commissioner Gordon might be calling at that very moment, in dire need of my assistance. I easily climbed to the loft, something I had accomplished before without any Bat Plans brewing. But, like any millionaire playboy with loftier missions in mind, I did not plan to stay there. I needed to get down to the Batcave posthaste. Here was the first obstacle in my elaborately crafted scenario. On the TV show, Batman and Robin used Bat Poles hidden behind a book shelf to slide from Wayne Manor down to the Batcave, somehow changing into their costumes along the way. Unsurprisingly, the barn loft had no Bat Pole – or anything that could even vaguely mimic a Bat Pole. I was a determined young Batman impersonator, though, and so I improvised. I decided I would simply hang from the loft and drop to the barn floor. This could have been a brilliant solution except for one thing. I lost my grip on the loft before I was ready. My body plummeted to the ground and a sharp pain shot through my left knee the moment I landed. I’m not sure exactly what I landed on, but that jarring end to my fall ripped a deep gash in my knee that would require nine stitches. Just like that, Wayne Manor and the Bat Cave reverted to a rather dismal-looking barn. I was a forgiving child, though, so I never held it against Adam West that his TV exploits had led to the unfortunate scar on my knee. To this day, I am ready with an answer when people pose the question about which actor made the best Batman. Michael Keaton? Christian Bale? Ben Affleck? Nope. Adam West. Knee scars and all. Ronnie Blair is lead writer for Advantage Media and the author of Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.

With Eisenhower Babies enjoying its official release date on Jan. 3, I thought it appropriate to provide a glimpse inside to give potential readers a taste of what they will find between those covers. What better way to do that than using this blog to share the book's preface, which lays out in detail what Eisenhower Babies attempts to accomplish? Many childhood memoirs revolve around trauma: alcoholic fathers, clinically depressed mothers, a life-changing tragedy that must be overcome despite extraordinary odds. I do not have that to offer. Many tales set in Appalachia, as this one is, play on stereotypes: hillbillies with guns, hillbillies with moonshine stills, hillbillies baffled by the simplest of modern technology. I do not have that to offer either. Sure, in these pages you will detect an occasional hint of Kentucky’s hillbilly history, but even in the 1960s it was difficult to maintain much L’il Abner ignorance about the world when you were watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on TV, following the exploits of Apollo astronauts, and reading 12-cent Spider-Man comic books. Yes, pretty much what every other kid across America was doing at the same time. Adults, of course, were appalled at us, especially with our TV-watching habits, which they worried would stunt our intellectual and physical growth, not to mention destroy our eyesight if we sat too close to the screen. It was as if adults of the era saw TV as a strange malevolent beast invading their homes, even though it was they who opened the front door and gave the beast a grand welcome. In 1968, a Time magazine article explored the TV addiction of 10-year-old youngsters like me and quoted one education expert who predicted doom for our entire generation: "Kids come into school today and they wait for people to tell them things. Without handling frogs or flying a kite, they lead less of a life. We're moving along in a mold that will produce people I can't even imagine." His words could have proved soul crushing, but we were too busy handling frogs and flying kites to take notice. Of course, that educator was part of a proud apocalyptic tradition among adults fretting about the habits of wayward youth. A little over a decade earlier, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote a book titled Seduction of the Innocent in which he swore it was villainous comic books that would lead to an entire generation’s demise. Around the same time, Rudolf Flesch wrote the bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read in which he led the entire nation in mourning what a sad lot of illiterates schools were producing by teaching children to read through the “look say” method popular in Dick and Jane books. Adults hyperventilated. We kids marched confidently into the future, which one of our TV shows, The Jetsons, promised would involve flying cars and robot maids. Adults really just needed to calm down. So, if not family trauma or hillbilly burlesque that could have erupted from a Ma and Pa Kettle movie, what do these pages offer? You will find various pinches and dashes of nostalgia, history, geography, popular culture, and everyday human foibles and heartaches. Perhaps you also will be reminded that the past does not represent more innocent times, as we so often hear, but instead that most of us were more innocent during those times. Adults bore the burden of worrying about assassinations, wars and labor disputes. We kids built forts, fielded fly balls with a Willie Mays signature glove, and pedaled furiously down neighborhood roads on psychedelically painted, banana-seat bicycles. That some of us did this in California or Maine, while others did it in the back hills of Kentucky seemed to make minimal difference. This does not mean that all of our experiences were the same. I didn’t ride the subway and New York City kids didn’t watch mules plow fields. But in post-World War II America, and definitely by the 1960s, geography had lost some of its power to isolate us. Those who lived in tiny southeastern Kentucky communities like mine were no longer “marooned on an island of mountains,” which is the way author James Watt Raine put it in his 1924 book The Land of Saddle-Bags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appalachia. In Raine’s view, “passable roads” were our ticket to sociological progress, but the introduction of radio and especially television also played a pivotal role. Raine was just writing too early to know that. At its essence, Eisenhower Babies is about a time and a place that are no more but that also never went away as long as any child can daydream about heroic exploits on horseback, scan Christmas Eve skies for evidence of flying reindeer, explore libraries for vicarious adventures, and wonder what new magic lies a day or two away.

For a moment this past week the 1960s were resurrected as NASA’s Artemis rocket lifted into the Florida skies and headed for the moon. This rocket carried mannequins rather than astronauts, as the Apollo missions did half a century ago, but humans will eventually replace those mannequins and the plan is to put the first woman and the first person of color on the moon by 2025. Can lunar excursions regain the attention they drew for a brief time back in the late 1960s and early 1970s? I always considered it fortunate that my childhood coincided with one of the most daring exploration periods in history as the United States and the Soviet Union competed to become the first country to land people on the moon. Space travel and speculation about what the future would be like played a significant role in our lives in the 1960s, and it went beyond real astronauts courageously boarding those rockets. On TV we watched Star Trek and Lost in Space. Commercials promoted Tang, the official drink of the astronauts, or so we were told. Our toys included Matt Mason, a 6-inch-tall bendable-figure astronaut who came with space-exploration accessories and bendable-figure astronaut pals. On the night of July 20, 1969, my family gathered in front of our TV to watch the faint, somewhat eerie image of Neil Armstrong descending the lunar-module ladder to set foot on the moon. “It’s like watching a movie,” my mother said, perhaps in awe of how in her mere 45 years on the planet the nation had advanced from trying to survive a Depression to spending a fortune to land these men on Earth’s only natural satellite. I was 11 at the time and remember thinking that we would soon head for Mars, which in my mind was just a sort hop away from the moon. Clearly, I had no concept of planetary distances and the additional time, effort, and technology a journey to Mars required. What’s just as surprising is how quickly the excitement of that July night faded away. Soon after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin completed their historic walk, many of my friends and I grew indifferent to the Apollo missions. Going to the moon remained cool – just not “oh, my gosh, I can’t believe this is happening” cool. In April of 1972, when I was in eighth-grade, teachers pulled us from our normal classroom work to watch Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke explore the lunar surface. By now the astronauts had an electric-powered lunar-roving vehicle – essentially a moon buggy – that allowed them to drive several miles from their landing site. We jaded 13 and 14-year-olds, raised on rocket launches and lunar excursions, remained unimpressed. One exasperated teacher turned to another. “How can they be so bored by this?” she asked. “They take it for granted.” We could not argue. We did at least appreciate that Young and Duke gave us a momentary reprieve from memorizing historic dates, calculating square roots, and enduring another lecture about the placement of commas.

About three decades ago my father-in-law, perhaps in a nostalgic mood, wrote a short memoir about his childhood to share with his children and grandchildren. He paid a local printer to print 25 copies in booklet form, ensuring that for a least a while after he was gone something would be left behind as a reminder that he had once existed on the Earth. This seemed such a good idea that I approached my mother about doing the same and offered to help, but she had no interest. My father by then was many years dead, so any stories he might have shared were already lost. I made a note, though, that when I grew old, I would create something similar for my sons so they would have a record of at least a small portion of their ancestry. One day I realized I was now probably older than my father-in-law when he wrote his memoir, so I figured I should get busy. Almost immediately I knew my memoir would be different. As a former journalist, I had no interest in simply writing several anecdotes from childhood. Instinctively, I wanted to include context about the time period, about the geography and history of the Kentucky community where I grew, and about how popular culture played a role in my life and the lives of others at the time. Yes, there would be personal stories, but with that broader picture woven into the memoir’s structure. I also knew that the structure would not be chronological, an uninspired checklist of this happened, then that happened, then later this other thing happened. Instead, I would divide the chapters by subject, with each almost a standalone essay on such topics as school, religion, the town, holidays, or the coal-mining industry that dominated everything in southeastern Kentucky. This required research not only to help readers understand the place and the time, but also to help me make sure, as much as possible, that my memories weren’t playing tricks on me. Could tourists really buy baby alligators in Florida in the 1960s? Did it snow in southeastern Kentucky on Christmas Eve in 1966? What economic conditions caused my father to be laid off from the coal mines in the late 1950s? As I answered such questions, it became clearer than ever that this would be my story and my family’s story told in a larger context. The result was Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV. It is my story, but if you grew up in the same time period, or were ever a child at all, it may also be yours.

This past week Patty Loveless and Chris Stapleton captivated the audience at the CMA Awards by performing You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive, which could have served as a theme song for Eisenhower Babies, except that I did leave Harlan County, Kentucky, alive and in good health (thanks for asking) many years ago. But the song and its lyrics do serve as a reminder of the county’s reputation – established in the early half of the 20th century – as a violent place, as well as a region where toiling in the coal mines can take years off a person’s life. The song’s writer, Darrell Scott, has said he saw the title phrase on a headstone during a trip to Harlan County to research his great-grandfather. Certainly, the song’s title can be considered fitting to the place, because Harlan County’s violent clashes between coal miners and coal operators drew national attention in the 1930s. New York Times headlines from that era included: “Kentucky Troops Mobilize in Harlan” and “Bomb in Auto Kills Kentucky Official.” The latter referred to the 1935 murder of County Attorney Elmon Middleton. The violence also caught the attention of literary stalwarts such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson. They and other writers launched a journalistic investigation into the brutal way in which coal companies treated miners and their families, and in 1932 released a book titled Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, which detailed their findings. Anderson, best known for his book Winesburg, Ohio, was especially incensed about conditions in my home county, writing: The eyes of the whole country had become focused on that little spot. It had become a little ugly running sore, workers being beaten, women thrown into jail, American citizens being terrorized, newspaper men trying to investigate, being shot and terrorized. When you have got a disease inside the body it has a nasty little trick of breaking out in little sores of that sort. I did not arrive on the scene until 26 years after Anderson wrote those words, and by then our county was no longer an “ugly running sore.” As a geographic location, Harlan County is central to my memoir, but I must confess that I never felt in danger growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, or spent anxious nights worried I would never leave the place alive. We kids roamed the hills, swam in rivers, and followed the railroad tracks from one end of town to the other, unperturbed by the area’s notorious reputation. Our equally unworried parents would go hours without knowing our whereabouts, grumbling only if we did not arrive home by the time the streetlights flickered on. But pride of place bubbles up when moments happen like the one at the CMA Awards as Loveless and Stapleton sang You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive. Across the country, former Harlan County residents could sing along, putting great feeling into those haunting lyrics, even if they did leave Harlan years ago, more or less serene and largely intact.

My mother had no idea when she squinted through her Polaroid instant camera and snapped a black-and-white photo in 1965 that she would be providing cover art for a book nearly 60 years later. She just wanted to capture a moment in time of her three children – my sister, Shelia, my brother, Ricky, and me – visiting an attraction called Six Gun Territory during a Florida vacation. But that photo, faded and crinkled, survived long after my mother and Six Gun Territory were gone, and now graces the cover of Eisenhower Babies as an appropriate art element inside the image of an old-fashioned television. I like to think she would be proud of her work and the memories her photo kept alive long after that day in the theme park had passed. I was an excited 7-year-old when I learned our vacation that year would include a visit to Six Gun Territory. The cowboy-themed attraction opened near Silver Springs in 1963 at a time when TV Westerns such as Bonanza, Rawhide, Wagon Train, and The Rifleman dominated prime-time viewing. Six Gun Territory was the inspiration of a man named R.B. Coburn, who had enjoyed success with a similarly themed attraction called Ghost Town in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. I had seen TV commercials for Ghost Town and longed to visit. Six Gun Territory served as an acceptable substitute. The park included 40 Old West buildings, an Indian village, and can-can dancers in the saloon. A 2010 Ocala Star-Banner article that reminisced about Six Gun Territory included this description: “The train ride from the entrance … was routinely ambushed. Bank robberies happened daily, followed by shootouts between good guys and bad guys. Digger, the town's comical undertaker, was kept busy.” Admission cost $2 for adults and $1 for children. For a boy who engaged in his own Old West shootouts in the back yard, Six Gun Territory was nirvana. I drank in the ambience, covered my ears during the gunfights, and waited apprehensively to learn whether the train would be ambushed while we were aboard. Near the General Store, Shelia, Ricky, and I clambered atop an unhitched buggy so Mom could take that photograph. Six Gun Territory entertained tourists like us for two decades, but closed in 1984. By then TV Westerns had faded in popularity, and competing theme parks had risen to steal away tourists’ dollars. When my family returned to Florida for a 1974 vacation, we gave the cold shoulder to Six Gun Territory and turned our sights on Disney World, opting for animatronic singing bears over gun-slinging cowboys.