Eastern Kentucky University - Milestone Yearbook (Richmond, KY)

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well-being; for his untiring efforts to estab- lish within us a sense of the aesthetic. N If

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DEDICATION To JACOB D. FARMS, a. m., a. b., m. d. We, the members of the SENIOR CLASS of Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College, dedicate this issue of the Milestone with deep gratitude and sincere admiration for his faithful work as guardian of our physical

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THE There is not a section of local color in America more colorful than the local color about us in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Our people have lived before us (our native blood) for centuries. They have wrestled with the rocks and the thin earth to make a meager living, but they have found enough to eat. They have owned their brains. They have been a free people — free as the wind that blows through the sawbriars and across the corn patches The earth that fed our native kin through life, usually holds them in death. Our people are born of mountain clay, live from the fruits of mountain clay, and the mountain clay drinks back their blood in the end. We belong to our mountain earth. Therefore, we should rise (our singers should) and sing of our mountain earth and its contents thereon. These people, our people, have a tradition of stories behind them. In many parts of the hills, and the hollows, we are still leaving tradition behind us. There are more stories and poems among us than we can ever write. Stories are as abundant as dead leaves on the trees in autumn. They are our stories. They are about the people who have lived among these hills and earned a meager daily bread from the rugged slopes. We should write them. We do not have the right to pass a tradition of our own and try to write things we have not lived and things we do not know. We are on the inside looking out. We have a better outlook on our own people than the writers who live so far away and come to our hill country to catch the pictures of us anyway they want to arrange us. It is my honest belief that there is enough fiction in the hills of eastern Kentucky for a Sir Walter Scott to write; enough poetry for a century of poets (they cannot get through singing of a land filled wit.h story and song as beautiful as eastern Kentucky is); enough legend, folk-lore, and fairy talcs for a William Butler Yeats to write. This patch of mountain local color seems, to me, similar to Scotland for its By Jesse Stuart