By Deborrah Yetter
Kentucky Lantern
Masten Childers II, Kentucky’s hard-charging and sometimes controversial secretary of the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services under former Gov. Brereton Jones, has died. He was 75.
Friends said Childers, who had been diagnosed several years ago with Parkinson’s disease, died Thursday in Lexington following a decline in health.
“He was the perfect secretary of human services,” said Ruth Ann Palumbo, a former state representative from Lexington who said she had known Childers for decades and worked with him closely in the mid-1990s while he was cabinet secretary.
“He did so much for the commonwealth,” Palumbo said. “He did a lot of good for this state.”
Tim Veno, a former top official at the cabinet, said Childers pushed key reforms in juvenile justice, nursing home and day care oversight, adult and child welfare and Medicaid — all housed within the sprawling agency he ran until December 1995.
“He had a lot of accomplishments over the years,” Veno said. “Obviously the reforms didn’t last but they lasted a pretty good while.”
Childers told the Kentucky Lantern last year he was very proud of a 1995 consent decree he helped negotiate with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform the state’s problem-ridden system of centers for juvenile offenders and was deeply disappointed to learn federal officials were again investigating reports of abuse of youths that had resurfaced in recent years.
“If our consent decree had been followed, we would not be talking about this,” he said in the 2024 interview.
An ‘intense individual’
While credited with shaking up operations at the state’s largest agency and enacting important reforms in human services, Childers, a lawyer who had worked in state government through several administrations, was known for his table-pounding, shouting, mercurial style around staff.
The Frankfort State Journal once reported that Childers “throws the best fit in Frankfort.”
“He was an intense individual and sometimes very hard to work for,” Veno recalled. “I quit on him a couple of times.”
But Veno said Childers would implore him not to leave the cabinet, once showing up at his apartment to make the request in person.
“I would get over it,” said Veno. “I’d go back to work and he’d treat me well for a while but there were some wild times. He would throw staplers, kick trash cans.”
Some outbursts, Veno said, were born of frustration over the nature of the cabinet’s work which generally was lurching from one human service crisis to another — sometimes involving death or injury to children and adults under the cabinet’s watch.
“He in many ways inherited a cabinet that’s on fire,” Pat Mulloy, who served as finance secretary in the Jones administration, said in a 1994 interview in the Courier Journal. “He’s got to put the fires out and figure out how to rebuild.”
But despite the conflict, his top staff formed a close bond and continued to meet for lunch occasionally in the years after Childers left the job as secretary when Gov. Jones term ended in 1995.
“That team we had in place, he thought we had a close connection, and we did,” Veno said. “He was a great leader, smart as a whip, was very passionate and did a lot for the people of the commonwealth.”
Frankfort ‘hillbilly’
A cigar-smoking, suspender-wearing afficionado of Brooks Brothers suits, Childers — a native of Pikeville — persisted in referring to himself as a “hillbilly” and “country lawyer.”
Veno recalled reports Childers occasionally lit up a stogie at work — despite a ban on smoking in state buildings — prompting an inquiry from a reporter as his tenure as secretary was winding down at the close of the Jones administration.
Childers had a ready response for the reporter, Veno recalled.
“He said, ‘We are doing an investigation as we speak. We are close to identifying a perpetrator and I can assure you he will no longer be here on Dec. 12,’” Veno said.
(Dec. 12, 1995 was the day Paul Patton was inaugurated as the next governor, succeeding Jones).
Childers said he became a Democrat in 1977.
Before becoming CHFS secretary under Jones, he held several government jobs.
Childers served as deputy finance secretary under former Gov. Julian Carroll and chief of staff for Martha Layne Collins when she was lieutenant governor.
After earning a law degree in 1983, Childers served as a law clerk for former state Supreme Court Justice James B. Stephenson, Childers’ former neighbor in Pikeville, according to the Courier Journal profile.
He first joined the health services cabinet as general counsel in 1992 before Jones named him to the top job as secretary.
After he left government, Childers returned to private law practice, Veno said.
But he stayed in touch with friends and former colleagues, most recently at his 75th birthday party in July at the Lexington Club, said Palumbo, among those who attended.
By then, Veno, who also attended, said Parkinson’s Disease had taken its toll on Childers’ health, commenting, “Now he’s not struggling and suffering.”
Childers was preceded in death by his son, MacFarland Childers, and is survived by Masten Childers III (Jennifer), Judith Cornwell (Graham), Havana Childers, and six grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Visitation for Childers will be held from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 27, at Milward’s-Broadway in Lexington.
This story first appeared in the Kentucky Lantern, a part of the nonprofit States Newsroom, as is reprinted here under Creative Commons license.