Kentucky by Heart: Drive through rural NKY offers nostalgic journey through fond childhood memories

By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune columnist

I enrolled at Eastern Kentucky University in the fall of 1971, and except for the summers spent at home with my parents while chasing my bachelor’s degree, I’ve never returned to live in my native southern part of Campbell County. In fact, I’ve stayed southward a couple of hours away, living in Winchester, then Lexington, and for the last eight years, in Versailles.

But that doesn’t mean my Northern Kentucky upbringing lacks significance in my everyday thoughts. It does, and sometimes I need a nostalgia fix to remind myself of all the parts that make up what’s considered my whole.

So, when my wife and I traveled observantly on Highway #27 to Butler last week to visit and decorate family grave sites, the fix was on . . . and in a good way.

Cynthiana has been mentioned many times in this column, but that’s because it continues to spur distinct thought recall of younger days. Besides passing through the town hundreds of times on my way and back to college at EKU, there is the tobacco connection I had as a child. The town’s large burley warehouse on the north side of town was always a late fall destination for the Flairty family after crops were stripped. (In later years, we switched to the Erlanger market.) After a few hours in the large building where our tobacco was carefully and neatly placed on wooden platforms shaped like upside-down flying saucers, we would soon be ready to receive payment for the uncountable hours spent bringing the crop to harvest. Many of those dollars would go toward my brother’s and my college education.

Steve Flairty is a teacher, public speaker and an author of seven books: a biography of Kentucky Afield host Tim Farmer and six in the Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes series, including a kids’ version. Steve’s “Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes #5,” was released in 2019. Steve is a senior correspondent for Kentucky Monthly, a weekly NKyTribune columnist and a former member of the Kentucky Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. Contact him at sflairty2001@yahoo.com or visit his Facebook page, “Kentucky in Common: Word Sketches in Tribute.” (Steve’s photo by Ernie Stamper)

I learned at an early age to read my parents’ body language to figure out if they were happy with the price paid for the tobacco crop. I didn’t say much to them about it. I miss those moments, though they weren’t always pleasant.

But on this day of travel, the nostalgia train was just starting down the track.

Nearby in Cynthiana, there was the Pine Villa Restaurant, and if we were lucky, our family would eat there or, at least, have one of their delicious chocolate milk shakes. And speaking of ice cream, another treat was the Dairy Queen on the other side of town, where the Flairty family often stopped while passing through town on day trips. As I muse about the past, those small goings-on were big stuff. I know that’s true because–some six decades later—those remembrances seem like they happened yesterday.

And when my wife, Suzanne, and I stopped for brunch at the newbie restaurant on Pike Street called The Sweet Boutique, we sat next to a large window and gazed at the places and activities along Pike and discussed what the area was like back in the 1960s. Suzanne spent her first few years of life in nearby Bourbon County and her family often shopped in Cynthiana. “When I was really little, I ran across the street and Mom had to catch me,” Suzanne remarked. She also shared that the building in which we were sitting, the old Ben Franklin Five and Dime Store, was across the street from where her mother bought her chocolate malt balls weighed and put in a white paper bag, which, she said with a grin, “I always managed to drop the balls on the floor.” (Note: Her husband presently drops dishes and has been banned from emptying the dishwasher after cleaning those valuables.)

It’s possible we might have seen each other around town as children, but I guess we’ll never know. On this day, the two of us were bonding nostalgically.

And then it was back on Highway 27 toward Butler, but first we drove through Falmouth, a place where a damaging flood and later a killer tornado hit back in the 1960s. Though my family lived north of there in Campbell County, my recollections are that we took a drive through the town after the flood in 1964 and also in 1968 when an F-4 twister hit. What do I remember about seeing the damage, first as a ten-year-old and later at age 14?

Quite a bit.

I saw houses in Falmouth a few days after the flood receded and people were shoveling mud off their floors. Not sure how many were able to return to those homes, but someone who was a part of it probably has an idea. As a child, seeing the results of the tornado on the outskirts of town was scarier than the flood; it was eye-opening to see people’s possessions haphazardly strewn across yards and nearby fields. That, and I knew several souls had perished from that bad case of nature going wild.

But on our recent drive, the evidence was all around—Falmouth came back from the disasters, even after another destructive flood hit the town in 1997. That’s a kind of nostalgia that is bittersweet but informs a part of what I am, and others so affected, are today. What a resilient bunch of Kentuckians there are in Pendleton County!

Leaving Falmouth, we traveled to Butler and the Butler Cemetery. Mom, Dad, and my brother, Mike, are buried there. Suzanne and I met my sister-in-law, Theresa, and we spent a few minutes adding four solar light artificial flower arrangements to my parents’ gravestone. Less than a mile away along Highway 27, the stone house on the hill is the location of the Pendleton County Historical and Genealogical Society, formerly the home where Mom was raised. I’m proud about that, for sure.

Theresa invited us to her house for a “catch up” conversation and during our short stay, we talked about family members, health issues, and especially life without the ones who have passed. It was good to be back on familiar ground–a nice sort of fix for all of us.

On the way back to Versailles, Suzanne and I stopped at the Dairy Queen in Paris. And why not the one in Cynthiana? That place was torn down and moved to another location in town. Poetic justice would not be served, so I guess we wanted to start a new memory in Paris.

One of these days, I’ll probably look back nostalgically for the fix I’ll get from seeing this column. But whatever, I hope your memories spur YOU to appreciate your personal heritage.