By Dee Davis

Emancipating the Jockeys

editor — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 21:14:24 -0700

Rolled up & ready to ride
Photo: Roxanne Weber

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." -- Thomas Jefferson

My short career in journalism began at age 24 as a paperboy. The Louisville Courier-Journal hired me as a rural carrier. Some guy in a starched white shirt just showed up at my place and offered me the job. My responsibilities were 1) to drop off bundles of morning papers to eleven-year-olds out to earn their own cigarette money and 2) to drive the town route to homes on the back streets around the Peter's Peak, Walkertown, Wabaco, Du-ane, Darfork, Bomber Ball Park, Airport Gardens, and Frogtown sections of Hazard, Kentucky, my hometown.

The job paid a hundred bucks a week, back when that wasn't much money. But I was between gigs, as they say, and newly married to Jenny, the somewhat understanding granddaughter of the former editor and publisher of that very same crusading, Pulitzer Prize winning Courier-Journal. Call it kismet. (And here by “somewhat understanding granddaughter” I mean to say that she did not mind my spending my afternoons in the poolroom playing $5 Rook with guys called Bige, Basso, and Little Doc or my nights carousing with a more prosaic set of pals, but she did think paperboy was just too good a career move for me to turn down at that juncture.)

All I had to do was put an alarm clock in a pie plate for reverb, roll off the mattress at 5 a.m., and motor off toward my appointed rounds. What could go wrong?

Speak Your Piece: Men’s Achievement Hour, Adieu

editor — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:14:31 -0700

Stephanie Whetstone demonstrates hair farming on Dee Davis, host of The Men's Achievement Hour/Human Potential Show ~ WMMT, Whitesburg, Kentucky
Photo: Courtesy of Mimi Pickering

The thing about surprises is that you don’t expect them. Through a series of emails this week I was informed that WMMT (Whitesburg, Kentucky) has planned a new morning line-up and that in the plan there is no place for The Men’s Achievement Hour/Human Potential Show, and no place for me.

I’ve never been fired before, except if you count the time when I was just married with a little baby and making $75 a week. My buddy put me on his bridge construction crew for a month just to get an industrial wage into my household. I wasn’t great shakes as a bridge builder. And when the month ended and he had to look at me and say, “I’m going to have to lay you off,” it hurt him more than it did me.

It was before the invention of email. Before you could dump your girlfriend in a text message. Maybe human contact has gotten a little underrated.

Truth is this dismissal stings. Not that twenty years in a volunteer radio job isn’t enough. Sometimes I get tired of hearing myself myself. You got to pity the poor listeners.

Speak Your Piece: Bitterness is Tricky Business

editor — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:43:35 -0700

The candidates have chosen up sides on the amount of bile in rural America.
Play ball!
Photo: The Daily Yonder

In the Kentucky legislature there’s an insider’s rule for those who want to stay elected: Don’t make your Frankfort speech back home, or your back-home speech in Frankfort. That is to say, the speech you make when you are out campaigning in small coal field towns or in the tobacco patch about how we are not getting our fair share and about how the city people in Lexington and Louisville get all the advantages isn’t the speech you make at the state capitol. In those halls, a more sophisticated discourse about restraint and responsibility wins over your colleagues -- and in the end gets you the bacon you need to bring home.

(Republican consultant Bill Greener III, manager of the Republican National Convention in 1996, responds to Davis's column. Click "read more" below.)

Barack Obama thought he was making his out-of-town speech to the right people, but the folks back home on the hustings got wind of it, too.

Speak Your Piece: The FEMA Trailer Choice

editor — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:39:55 -0700

Wilbur Pitre moved to a FEMA trailer in Erath, LA, after five months without a home following Hurricane Rita
Photo: Shawn Poynter

In two years of documenting the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the rural expanse of the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast, I have seen a lot of trailers. Makeshift government-built towns lined out in row after row of eggshell white mobile homes. Small FEMA-issued campers dragged up against gutted frame houses undergoing transformation. And the privately owned “manufactured homes�? that were twisted and spat out along the hurricanes’ path.

What comes to mind is a buried Jimmy Buffett line: “They’re ugly and square, they don’t belong here. They looked a lot better as beer cans.�? But not everyone is at liberty to choose the cold beer, or the shape of their shelter.