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Bill Clinton came to town. In Washington, D.C., New York, or Little Rock, Arkansas, that may not be a big deal. In Flemingsburg, Kentucky, that’s a big deal. We all knew Bill was coming to Kentucky, to speak in Maysville and Morehead, and we were wondering how he’d get from one town to the other. The road from Maysville to Morehead comes through Flemingsburg. We were thinking about camping out on the bypass just to watch the Clinton motorcade drive past. But then came an embargoed e-mail from political consultant Dale Emmons, a Fleming County native and old family friend from our days at the Tilton School. There would be a very important visitor stopping at the Dairy Queen between 4:30 and 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25. A call later that night confirmed just who the visitor would be. We normally send our newspaper, the Flemingsburg Gazette, off to the printer early Tuesday afternoon, but we got permission to literally hold the presses. Until 6 p.m. This is a small town, so news of Bill Clinton’s visit leaked out, though some discredited the news as a rumor, and by 3 p.m. the crowd started gathering. Strangers to Fleming County may not understand the choice of the Dairy Queen, Around here, since the early 1950s, the DQ has been a family-owned icon, a teenage and youth sports hangout, the one place every single person in the county knows how to find. The Sims family has owned the DQ from the beginning, and now is into the third and fourth generations. Where else would a former president go? Our office is two doors away. We were part of the early, excited crowd that gathered. By 4:30 at least 400, maybe 600 people were waiting. At about 4:45, we got word that the president was not coming after all, that the Secret Service had decided to stay on the bypass and go straight to Morehead. Dale Emmons was in a truckbed trying to tell the crowd the bad news when the presidential motorcade pulled into the parking lot. Clinton himself had over-ruled the Secret Service, turned the motorcade around and come into town. He shook hands with most of the crowd, went inside and made an ice cream cone, the Gazette photo that has been all over the world already, and left a few minutes later with every heart in the area pounding lots harder. What a day! We don’t get a whole lot of celebrities here, and never a U.S. president before unless a young Ulysses S. Grant drove a team of horses through when he was a teenager, and Bill Clinton carried the county by a huge majority in both elections. We’re proud of our county, which is exactly why Dale Emmons wanted to bring Bill Clinton to visit, and the former president had a blast. He loves crowds, the crowd loved him, and he got to eat some DQ treats. Through the magic of digital photography, computers and e-mail, we met our press deadline and had a front page picture of Bill Clinton in Wednesday’s Gazette. It’ll be while before the buzz dies down in Flemingsburg. Bill Clinton came to visit, the whole world knows about it, and we were all right in the middle of it. It doesn’t get any better than that. |
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Shown above on the steps of the family’s mountain home, the author was introduced to a class as “the most Appalachian person I know” by a professor, and the description fits. Barker is the third of nine children of a farmer and carpenter, and he grew up working, reading, roaming the woods, and learning about his past and present culture. He has written three short story collections: Fire On The Mountain, Mountain Passage & Other Stories, and All Night Dog, plus a novel, Copperhead Summer, and a book of poetry, Bitter Creek Breakdown. |
