REMEMBERING AL SMITH

Many poignant memories have been shared over the past week following the death of Al Smith and deservedly so.  Al meant as much or more to Kentucky as any elected official.  He was the conscience and crusader for many of the progressive changes that the commonwealth desperately needed and still needs.

I first met Al in the 1970s when one of his projects was to fund and expand oral history research in Kentucky, not just at colleges and universities but also through a network of public libraries across Kentucky.  Working with John Ed Pearce they convinced Governor Julian Carroll of the need and back then that was all that was needed to procure state funding.  They established the Kentucky Oral History Commission, the only one in the United States, and over the years the Commission has funded hundreds of oral history projects.

I always felt fortunate to spend time with Al.  We once met for breakfast at a local restaurant for reasons I do not recall.  But I do remember sitting there with Al trying to absorb the rush of ideas and topics he went through seemingly without taking a breath.  As the clock moved from morning towards noon, our server stopped by our booth and asked, “Would you like to see a lunch menu?”  Breakfast and lunch could often bookend a meeting with Al.

When Al and Rudy Abramson decided that the University of Kentucky needed an Institute for Rural Journalism, there was no turning back.  They secured $50,000 in grants to begin planning and establishing the groundwork for the institute.  They then convinced UK President Lee Todd to get behind the effort. 

Al and Rudy recruited the distinguished Appalachian scholar Ron Eller, Journalism professor Roy Moore, and me to manage the grants.  We used the seed money to hold information and listening sessions across a broad swath of Appalachia including Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina.  Not only did Al seek the support of scholars, activists, and civic leaders, he sought to convince them that the institute should be at the University of Kentucky.  Of course, Al and Rudy made the institute a reality, hired Al Cross. and the rest as they say is history.

Al wrote all of his adult life but before he began his two volume memoir I thought he should do a series of oral history interviews about his life and career.  It took some time to convince the seemingly ever moving Al to sit for two hour interview sessions, but he finally acquiesced.  Know far and wide for his ability to talk at length, when I told people I had begun a series of interviews with Al the inevitable refrain was, “Do you ever get to ask a question?”  I always replied, “Yes, I get to ask one question at each interview session.”  Then I would be asked, “Well, how do you choose the question to ask since you only get one per session.  I said, “Oh, it’s always the same question.  Al, can you wait until I turn on the recorder?”

I told that story innumerable times in Al’s presence and he always seemed to enjoy it as much as my audience.  Al was that way.  He was serious about issues and did not hesitate to stand atop a bully pulpit.  But he was also a humble, sincere, kind, and gentle man.  We do not get many like Al Smith and that is why we will miss him so much.  Here is hoping that others will take up his crusades in such a way that Kentucky continues to make progress and that the life and work of Al Smith will be both remembered and honored.

 

A BIG HEART AND A HELPING HAND - FRANCES JEWELL MCVEY

Frances Jewell McVey seemingly tried to look out for everyone.  For example, Clifford Amos arrived on campus from Pike County, Kentucky in the middle of the Great Depression.  A first generation college student, he had grown up in a coal camp and began college at UK with no more than a few dollars in his pocket.  Clifford found a job waiting tables and took on a paper route among various other part-time jobs.  He remembered working up to 75 hours a week as a student just to survive.

Clifford Amos

One November afternoon in 1938, while walking along Limestone Street near the campus, Clifford fainted on the sidewalk, a result of hunger and exhaustion.  Frances Jewell McVey, heard about Clifford’s misfortune and immediately sent word for Clifford to meet with her at Maxwell Place.  After some conversation, McVey offered Clifford a place to live on the second floor of the garage in back of Maxwell Place to save money.  Three other boys already lived there.  Clifford’s only payment for his room was to do a few chores each month. 

Clifford lived in that garage until he graduated.  He told me years later in an interview for the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History that “Mrs. McVey saved my life.  I was too young to fully appreciate what she had done.  I was just trying to survive.”  Clifford fondly remembered that McVey would often walk out to the garage and ask, “Clifford, have you eaten yet?”  She would then invite him into the Maxwell Place kitchen for a meal.  Clifford admitted, “There I was just a little mountain boy, who didn’t know straight up!  Mrs. McVey always asked me how school was going and if there was anything else she could do to help me.  She was a leader without personal ambition.  She was always there to help those in need and never seemed to be in a hurry.  She was as down to earth as anyone I ever knew.”

From Our Rightful Place: Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1945 (University Press of Kentucky) 2020

Also see oral history interview with Clifford Amos, December 5, 1991 in the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, UK Libraries (1991oh408_af459).  https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/    

A BAND OF OUR OWN

Until World War II the UK band was all-male.  But in the spring of 1927, UK band director Elmer Sulzer casually mentioned to some women students that they should one day have a band of their own.  Without further encouragement, forty-five women students met to form a brass band.  

Reporting this phenomenon in the Kentucky Kernel under the headline "Males Again Retreat," Katherine Best wrote: "Weep, men, at your loss of prestige.  No longer will ye olde brass band (male) strut down the field of honor with roses and hollyhocks strewn in its path; no longer will hats be raised to welcome 'the greatest band in Dixie.'  No!  Its rival has appeared!  And on its own campus, too.  We fear the results!"  

Best added, "The only requirements for membership are a speaking acquaintance with music, and the rather restrictive quality of being a girl!  Therefore, if your momma calls you daughter and you can read music, report to practice Tuesday, state your preference as to instruments, and automatically become a member."

From Our Rightful Place: Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1945 (University Press of Kentucky) 2020

UK's FIRST WOMAN FACULTY MEMBER

 

In December 1901, the college employed Florence Offutt to serve as Assistant Physical Director of the Gymnasium in charge of women's instruction.  Offutt was a cousin of Henry Stites Barker, future president of the University of Kentucky, in whose home she spent a great deal of her youth.  After graduating from Louisville Girls' High School in 1896, Offutt studied physical education for a few months at the University of Chicago before completing a two-year degree in Physical Education at the highly regarded and coeducational New Haven Normal School of Gymnastics.

Florence Offutt

 Offutt recalled that while living in Lexington with her Uncle James and Aunt Ella Offutt Pepper in 1901, she waited for her chance to “uplift” the public with her “specialty” which was new to Kentucky.  She also made note of the recently completed “handsome new gymnasium” at UK that had no woman director of physical education.  Offutt secured a meeting with President Patterson to discuss a possible teaching position.  Patterson told her "courteously but firmly" that "no vacancy existed or would."  However, only six months later at the December 1901, meeting the board voted unanimously to hire Offutt as the Assistant Physical Director of the Gymnasium in charge of women’s instruction at a salary of $800 per year.  Offutt took great pleasure in pointing out that, due to illness, President Patterson missed the meeting at which she was hired, thereby losing the opportunity to argue against her employment. 

 Soon after Offutt’s appointment to the faculty she “happened to see” a letter written by President Patterson to the board harshly criticizing her employment.  But Offutt did not shy from a possible fight and noting that, “she loved his courage,” she went to see Patterson.  She recalled that since she and the president were both Scottish, they each “liked a good fight for something we believe in.”  She eventually won the president's grudging respect and support despite telling him at one point, “I love to think of your being older than my grandfather.”  According to Offutt, the elderly president replied to such remarks "with a lack of enthusiasm."  She also noted that Patterson worried about her first appearance before the faculty senate's "solemn enclaves" since "no weak female" had been there before.  Offutt admitted that she "enjoyed" her "scraps" with the other faculty which were at times "quite colorful, if a little strenuous."  She considered such skirmishes "inspiring in the extreme.." 

LEONORA HOEING - WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

 

        

        Four years after women first entered UK, eighteen-year-old Leonora Hoeing became the first woman recognized at commencement when she received her Normal Department certificate.  A newspaper reporter noted that the 1884 ceremony had a "new and extremely pleasant feature to it" in that, "one of the graduates wore a white dress and a blush that was as daintily pink as the inside of a sea-shell from the Indian Ocean.  Yes, one of the graduates was a young lady, and when his Excellency Governor Knott handed her diploma to her he looked as if he wanted to welcome her into the ranks of the wise with just a touch of his gray mustache to her velvet cheek."  Highlighting the greater access that UK offered to white women from the working class, the reporter added that Hoeing was "none of your bilious blue-stockings either…."

        This first generation of women students at UK were the daughters of some of central Kentucky’s most elite families, but most were the daughters of shopkeepers and trades people firmly rooted in an expanding middle class in Kentucky.  For example, Hoeing’s father, Joseph, and mother, Rebecca, both emigrated from Germany.  Joseph worked in Lexington as a silversmith and Rebecca was a hairdresser.  We may never know the multitude of factors that motivated these families to support their daughters’ educations, but we know the role their daughters played as educational pioneers and that their lives were changed.  But to dispel any notion of higher education’s negative impact on women, the correspondent concluded that Hoeing “was a fresh, healthy young woman, with an eye as full and bright as a dove’s, and the head of a Greek Venus on a neck like a lily-stalk” and was “a happy, wholesome, appetizing creature, with an expression of frank good-fellowship about her, well mingled with a becoming and maidenly modesty.”

         Finally addressing Hoeing’s academic accomplishments, the reporter wrote that she “had taken a double course of study this year, but it seemed to have agreed with her.”  He also noted, even though she was awarded a normal certificate and not a Bachelor’s degree “like they did the boys,” her accomplishments are “…all the same though, for she knows as much as the others, has taken the same course, won the first prize in mathematics over every rascal of them, and if she is not a ‘Mistress of Arts’ she is the first woman I ever saw that wasn't.  The boys didn't seem to be envious of her at all, but cheered her every chance they had with hearty good will."

From Our Rightful Place: Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1945 (University Press of Kentucky) 2020