Photographic Memories

The latest craze on Facebook has been to post a current photo of yourself beside a photo of you in high school. It seems everyone has been doing it and it’s been fun to see which of my friends has changed a lot and which ones haven’t. I always love to look at photographs, and also take them, so this has been a fun trend designed to break all the daily drama that plays out on the website. So I decided to play along and I’ve really struggled to find a photo of myself as a child. I always remember thinking that I really didn’t belong to the rest of the Burke’s, most of them are tall and thin. I often thought that maybe wild Indians dropped me off or maybe I was abandoned by a traveling carnival. When I would look at old pictures there were baby pictures of Jeanne and Vicki, but none of me. I guess as I got older I realized that by the time parents have a third daughter, they really don’t pull the camera out of the closet much.

So now we are in the Iphone age and every parent walks around practically with a camera attached to their hand. Today’s parents are taking selfies with their child at the ballgame or snapping photos of their kids at the park. This has caused me to think of a commercial that played a lot a couple of years ago. The commercial featured a boy doing a cannonball into a pool. In mid jump the video stops and the little boy, turns his head and looks at his mom and says, “I’ve been stuck in your phone for 3 months!” And so the ad reminds us to print our pictures. So it’s true that modern parents do take more photos of their kids; doing funny things, participating in sports, sleeping or making a mess eating spaghetti with their whole faces. But do you print your photos? When your children are grown ups, are they going to have photo albums to sit and reminisce with?

Here’s what I do and maybe this little trick will help you. There are several different online companies that will print your uploaded photos. You can choose many different sizes and even add messages or cute borders and the company time stamps the back of the photo with the date. Shutterfly is a great one that I often use. But there are many others websites. Shutterfly will also act as a virtual storage of photos because they don’t delete your photos. If I take an Iphone photo of the grandkids that I love, I upload it to Facebook, save it to my hard drive, then upload it to Shutterfly and print it. I have several photo albums for Ryan and Delainey that I’ve compiled over the years. Recently I’ve added some Iphone photos of them. Delainey loves to get my phone and text her Pop. They have funny conversations, sitting 3 feet away from each other. She loves to use emojis and so I sometimes print their conversations. At Christmas she always looks forward to her elf, Quazie, who comes before Christmas to watch over them and he is always doing such crazy stunts. Jennifer takes photos of Quazie almost each morning as he has made a mess or has managed to get himself into some terrible predicaments. So I’ve printed all of those Quazie pictures and I imagine one day she will remember and laugh at that silly elf. Also one day this past fall, Ryan wanted to use my big camera to take photos of Delainey playing soccer, so we had a quick photography lesson. I noticed him framing his shot and shooting, so I took a great Iphone picture of him.

So while I think it’s great that everyone is taking more photos, complete the step; print them. Our phones grow obsolete, our computers crash, memories will fade. Give your kids the best gift you can give them; take their photo often and print them. Make them photo albums and scrap books. They will love you for giving them a tangible memory they can hold on to.

The Hubble Telescope Exhibit

The East Kentucky Science Center in Prestonsburg will be hosting The Hubble Telescope Traveling Exhibit for the next several months. The exhibit begins on Saturday, January 21, 2017 and we were treated to a preview of the exhibit on Friday night. The President of Big Sandy Community and Technical College, Dr. Alan Scheibmeir, welcomed a rather large crowd to the evening’s festivities. Local attorney, John Rosenberg, recalled the history of the science center. He recalled a time 20 years ago when local professors taught aerodynamic using a fan and a roll of toilet paper. John told of a grass roots group that started about 20 years ago by grant writing and gathering local political support and by 1998 the group succeeded in getting funding to build our science center. The ground breaking was held in 2002. Now Prestonsburg is the site of a state of the art planetarium, one of the best in the United States. As a photographer, I am always looking at other people’s work, but I must say that my long lens cannot compare to the Hubble! The exhibit showcases photographs taken with the Hubble telescope. One of the exhibits said that if you had the ability to have the telescope on earth, you could look through it in New York City and see fireflies in San Francisco!

The exhibit came to Prestonsburg on Tuesday, loaded on 3 Mayflower moving vans and it took a great group of local students and volunteers to load the displays into the Science Center. Working long hours each day, the group worked furiously to get the exhibit functioning for all of us to enjoy. Steve Russo, Director of the East Kentucky Science Center spoke to the audience about how excited he is to present this exhibit to the students of eastern Kentucky. “After the moon landings, Hubble has always been my favorite object that has been launched into space, the technological advancements are amazing. I’m like a kid waking up on Christmas present waiting to open up the presents.” Steve was proud to introduce Nasa representative Maurice Henderson who said of Steve, “I am happy to be in the room where there are two of us living out our childhood dreams.” Maurice gave a wonderful presentation of the history of the Hubble Telescope that educated us all with interesting facts and wonderful examples of the photography that it can show us, we have so much to learn.

The East Kentucky Science Center and Planetarium is open Tuesday through Friday from 1pm to 4pm and on Saturday from noon to 4pm. This exhibit is so interesting and educational, I encourage everyone to visit the science center and view it in person. We are very fortunate to have an exhibit of this magnitude so close to home.

Learning to Trip the Light Fantastic

Community Methodist Church has always been a lighthouse of comfort for me since I was a little kid growing up in Blackbottom. I spent many, many days there, going to Bible School and Sunday School. Don and I raised our family and took them to church at Community on Sundays where we shared our lives, our ups and downs and our hopes and dreams with the other couples who also found a church home there. We’ve had many pastors and their families and we’ve laughed and cried together through the years. We have become a family. For the past few years the men have planned, cooked and served a Valentine’s Day dinner for the ladies. We’ve always had good food and a great time. Last year the men performed a little dance for us and we laughed at their clumsiness and lack of rhythm. So this year Pastor John Carwell had an idea. He wanted to do something different that would bring couples together. A few weeks ago he messaged all the men of the church and he told them to come to the church at 6:30 and bring a basketball. At the appointed time, the confused men of the church showed up and found quite the surprise. Local attorney, and ballroom dance master, Mickey McGuire was there and he was going to teach the men how to foxtrot! So on that first night back in January the men learned to dance with basketballs and the ladies were completely in the dark about the plan. The following week the women were asked to come and our dance lessons began. Since then more couples have joined the fun and now there are about 15 couples coming each Thursday night to learn the steps and have a whole lot of fun. Local legend, Print Ball, has been coming and wow, can he dance!

Mickey explained to me that the foxtrot is an American dance and is typically danced to the beat of the big bands of the 40’s and 50’s. Mickey’s dance knowledge is extensive and evident as he explained so much to me about competitive dance. Mickey competed for about 8 years all over the United States and was a national champion in 2007 and 2008, competing in Baltimore, Maryland. He also competed twice in Europe, earning 3rd place in the world in Belgium and a World Champion title in Sweden. Let’s just say that Mickey is more than qualified to lead our little left footed group in our attempts to learn the foxtrot.

I’ve read so many stories about the generation who grew up during the big band era, and I know that dancing was mastered at an early age. After all, going to the frequent dances at the high school or country club was a very popular thing to do. Popular styles were the foxtrot, the Lindy, jive and west coast swing. Growing up in the 70’s we did the bump and the funky chicken, but for Don and I, dancing has never been a part of our lives. Actually, it’s always been a big fear of mine so I approached these lessons with a great deal of doubt and fear. But my fears were unfounded and I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned that learning to dance is not a destination, it’s a journey. I’ll never be a national champion dancer, but I’ve danced with my husband and I’ve watched the faces of my dear lifetime friends as they dance with their spouses. I’ve seen love glow in their eyes as they dance and laugh and share their evening in a way that is so much more intimate than watching the tv or sharing a meal. In a couple of weeks we will have our traditional Valentine’s dinner. We’ll get all dressed up and the men will cook for the ladies. The ladies will be greeted at the door and be escorted to our seats and we will get a beautiful rose. The meal will be fabulous, as it always is. We will laugh and share and love and give. And then we will dance the foxtrot. It won’t be perfect but it will be perfect for us.

The 1934 Cat Trial

I remember a popular episode of The Andy Griffith Show that was called “The Case of the Punch in the Nose”. It involved a 19-year-old court case between Floyd and Charles Foley and a shave that wasn’t paid for. Because of the dispute, Charles punched Floyd in the nose. Barney found the lawsuit misfiled in the filing cabinet and wondered what the outcome of the case had been. Andy warned him not to stir up a hornets’ nest, but naturally he does, and all the parties in the case come to blows in a naturally funny way. Now, I hope that Aunt Jean and I aren’t stirring up a hornets’ nest, but Aunt Jean’s been telling me about an eighty-three-year-old case in Prestonsburg that was lovingly referred to as “The Cat Trial”. I went to PCC, because it will always be PCC to me, and looked up the details of the case and it’s purrfect!

Now a lot of us live in neighborhoods and suddenly out of the blue a cat will appear. Naturally, we never want any living thing to go hungry, so we feed it and then we get attached to the cat, maybe give it a name. But what if another neighbor also starts to feed the cat and names it? Most of the time situations like this heat up and then cool down and the cat peacefully lives in the neighborhood grabbing a meal or 3 at different houses. Likely this would have been the situation in 1934 if cooler heads had prevailed, but alas it wasn’t like that. Here are the facts of the ‘cat’astrophe.

In 1934 a dear woman by the name of Beatrice Rogers, who lived in West Prestonsburg, brought suit against a neighbor, another dear woman, Anna Hale. Mrs. Rogers claimed that she was the rightful owner of “Exhibit A”, a female yellow and white cat who she haphazardly named “Tom”. She claimed that Mrs. Hale had “swiped” the cat. The cat was also known at the Hale house and when in residence there then “Exhibit A”, was named “Yaller”. The court case drew a large crowd to the courthouse, about 500, and they watched as Tom or Yaller made her appearance in court. It is reported that she did everything a cat is supposed to do, she meowed, she purred and she spit. I also imagined she shed all over the courtroom and that the judge’s black robes were a sight to be seen. Many neighbors of West Prestonsburg were called to testify to determine just when and where the cat came from. One neighbor claimed he had brought the mommy cat home from Middlecreek with 3 kittens and this was one of the kittens. The plaintiff’s mother, Nola Miller, testified that the cat had been given to her daughter by another neighbor and that it always stayed in the house. Then one day “Tom and the dog ‘fit’ and the cat ran over to the Hale’s back porch and Anna grabbed it up and took it into her house” Beatrice Rogers testified that before Mrs. Hale “nabbed” the cat; “I kept the cat 90 days on each of which I fed Tom a quart of milk, sweet milk fresh from the cow!” Mrs. Hale’s young son, Billie, watched the testimony with keen interest, he wanted his cat Yaller back!

Closing arguments were made as both attorneys in the case made fervent and passionate pleas. Hillard H. Smith argued voraciously for the defendant and County Attorney, J.P. Tackett argued in a forceful and eloquent manner for the plaintiff. County Judge W.L Stumbo presided over the proceedings and many times had to ask people to hold their guffaws and laughter down. Even the Judge and other court officials struggled to keep straight faces during this most unusual case - The Cat Trial of 1934.

After a short deliberation the jury handed down the following verdict. “ “We, the jury, do agree and find the cat to be stray property, therefore adjudged that it shall be turned over to the County Judge, provided that said County Judge or Commonwealth will pay to Nola Miller, one half of the food bill of $5.63 and if they or either of them fail to pay said bill, the cat is to go to Billie Hale” When the court and Commonweath refused to pay the feed bill, the court ordered that the cat be adjudged the property of Billie Hale and Yaller was returned to the young lad. The paper reported, “Billie, her little son, got the cat and his happiness counteracted all bitterness growing out of the case”. Upon the reading of the verdict, Mrs. Hale fainted and amid screams of shocked women, the cries of the young son and the murmur of hundreds of witnesses. Judge Stumbo ran from the bench and rendered aid to the fainted woman. You see Judge Stumbo was also a physician and it was reported that he successfully revived her with difficulty. As a postscript, the jurors in the case asked that their names be published into the record of this unusual case as they were quite proud to be part of The Cat Trial.

And so Yaller went home with young Billie where I imagine he lived a long milk-filled life. My Aunt Jean told me about the case, she remembers it well as other may remember it too. I researched and found on microfilm the original newspaper stories and have attempted to tell the tale of the cat, or the cat’s tale. And so the Cat Trial came to an end in March of 1934, thus ending litigation over a cat, a trial that attracted more attention in Floyd County than any other case tried at the courthouse up to that time. Oh, that all of our court cases could be so simple!