Welcoming Remarks

Daniel Hall
Board of Directors, Chair, Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center

Good morning. My name is Dan Hall. I am the Chair of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center Board of Directors. On behalf of the Board of Directors, I am delighted to welcome you to this seventh annual conference of the Center, today focusing on Challenges for the Next Century. This year’s conference is exceptional in several ways. This is the first time we’ve held our conference in northern Kentucky and we are especially pleased to have our conference in this modern, beautiful convention center. Also, this year, the center had several partners in planning the conference. The Kentucky Leaders for the New Century were responsible for putting together yesterday’s outstanding session on Kentucky and the New Economy. Also, KET worked with the Center to plan this morning’s panel discussion on Kentucky’s future. And the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation organized this afternoon’s panel on Creating an Entrepreneurial Economy in Kentucky.

I would like to thank Mike Childress, the Executive Director of the Center, and his superb staff for organizing what promises to be an outstanding conference. I want to thank each of our speakers and panelists for coming to share with us their knowledge on important issues affecting Kentucky. And, lastly, I would like to thank each of you for coming to participate in discussions on how to keep Kentucky moving forward in a rapidly changing, technology-driven economy. The fact that you are here today, I think, speaks well for the future of the Commonwealth. So, let’s give our speakers, in advance, applause and let’s give ourselves applause for being here. (Applause)

I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize in the audience members of the Kentucky General Assembly who are present this morning. Without the General Assembly, the Center would not be in existence because it’s through the support of the members of the General Assembly that the Center came into existence and also is funded through the appropriation process. So for those members of the General Assembly, if you could stand and be recognized, please. (Applause) Representative Nunn is the Vice Chair and the incoming Chair of the Center’s Board as well, so I am pleased to have him here.

I guess one of the great honors of being the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center is to present the recipient of the Vic Hellard Award. So it is with great pleasure this morning that I have the honor to announce and to present to you the 2000 Hellard Award recipient. Our recipient really needs no introduction and, for those of you who were not fortunate enough to know Vic, he was the head of the Legislative Research Commission. He did a fabulous job. Vic Hellard, Jr. was a beloved figure in Kentucky public life who worked tirelessly on issues and causes to enhance the quality of life for the Commonwealth citizens. Thus, in Vic’s honor, this award recognizes an individual for their demonstration of long-term vision and innovation, championship of equality and dignity of every person, efforts to enhance the process of a democratic society and approach to work distinguished by commitment, caring, generosity and humor.

I can think of no other Kentuckian who exemplifies this criteria better than this year’s winner of the Hellard Award. He was instrumental in forming Kentucky Leaders for the New Century, an effort to identify some of the state’s most promising leaders and to engage them in actively working for the betterment of our Commonwealth. He served in Washington as federal Co-Chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission for Presidents Carter and Reagan. For 25 years, he was Chairman or Vice Chairman of the Shakertown Round Table, as you know, a public policy forum of the Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Inc. He is a past Chairman of the Kentucky Arts Commission, a former President of the Kentucky Press Association, and one of the founding Directors and Chairman of Leadership Kentucky. He was a co-founder and first Chairman of the Kentucky Oral History Commission, which is now in its 25th year. In the area of education, which all of us care so dearly about, he has served as a member of the Prichard Committee for Educational Excellence, chaired the Governor’s Council on Educational Reform, and was Vice Chair of the Council on Higher Education in the 1980s. He was on the founding Board of the Governor’s Scholars Program and Forward in the Fifth, a program which we know focuses on improving our schools and the economy in eastern Kentucky. He is a former Trustee of Berea College, a former member of the University of Kentucky Hospital Council of Supervisors and has served as an adjunct teacher in the Political Science Department and the Appalachian Study Center. He holds honorary degrees from three Kentucky colleges or universities. He is a veteran journalist, who is the host and producer of Comment on Kentucky, which, by the way, was aired from this very facility last night and was broadcast live over KET, which is now in its 26th year as Kentucky Educational Television’s longest-running program. In addition to television and radio work, he has been in the news business for over 50 years as a reporter, editor, and owner of newspapers. Please join me in recognizing this year’s 2000 Vic Hellard Award winner, Al Smith. (Applause)

Al Smith

Thank you very much.

Daniel Hall

Al, in case you’re wondering about the legitimacy of your selection . . .

Al Smith

I am.

Daniel Hall

Let me assure you of three things. First of all, we did not use butterfly ballots in the selection process. Secondly, 19,000 votes, presumably for the second place winner were not thrown out. And, finally, there was no need of any recount, mechanical or manual. So you are the legitimate winner of the Hellard Award this year.

Al Smith

Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you. Is this when I accept?

Daniel Hall

Yes. This is your acceptance speech.

Al Smith

And, keeping my promise to Mike Childress to get the program on schedule, I thank you all very much and I appreciate all of you for having abandoned your breakfasts to come over and be present for this rewarding moment. I first of all would point out, about that generous introduction, that my wife, Martha Helen, says that if it’s something I don’t know anything about, I can meddle in other people’s business, it doesn’t pay, and I can be the Chairman, then that’s my line of work. (Laughter) And it is to me kind of an interesting moment, too, because of the recognition of the program for the young leaders, several of who were here yesterday. I want to share the recognition for that program with my dear Pam Luecke, the Editor of the Herald-Leader, who valiantly really put most of that together. I had the idea for having a roundtable about the future and Pam had the idea about drawing the young people into it. I was so happy to have her support and she won over the support of the other major newspapers in this state.

I also would point out that the program that we saw last night was the Kentucky Tonight program. The Comment on Kentucky show runs on Friday. Now what we really do, Dan, is like bookends. I do the entertainment on Friday and Bill Goodman does the serious work on Monday and that’s the way it’s worked for us. Forty-three years ago I came to Kentucky, on a Monday, court day, in January, 1958. I had been in Kentucky since being in the Army, leaving Ft. Knox in 1946. I walked over to the Logan Courthouse and I met the former Lt. Governor of Kentucky, who was the Democratic Party Chairman, Emerson “Doc” Beacham, and I met the Chairman of the Republican Party of the County, a man named Lawrence Forgy. I met Beacham’s bagman and highway contact guy, Jesse Rayburn Smith, who as Ed Prichard said, had a head like a skull, looked like a skeleton.

He was the best. I’ll tell you how good a vote counter he was. Bert Combs told me that, when he was running the second time for Governor against Harry Lee Waterfield, he sent Rayburn of Logan County, who had driven Combs all through western Kentucky, to Louisville to teach the Jefferson County precinct workers how to watch for vote fraud. Bert said he thought Rayburn knew something about that. They were having a fight at the courthouse over who would be the County Road Foreman, reorganizing the county government. Beacham’s candidate for County Attorney had lost the election. The guy who used to count the votes for him was with Rayburn and so there was a factional fight. It was very interesting. The Democratic majority, which controlled most of the Courthouse, was attempting to get one man in as County Road Foreman and the Democratic minority was trying to get another man in as County Road Foreman.

This was the first day I went to work as a journalist in this state and the Republicans, of course, were making book, as they say, with the minority Democrats. They held up the whole county government for three months arguing about the appointment of the Road Foreman. Twenty-two years later, I left Logan County, which by that time had sobered me up. I mean, I was there originally because there was no place else to go. I drank my way out of New Orleans. There was nothing left but the Russellville News Democrat in my life. I was 31 years old and I thought it was the end of the trail. The advantage of Russellville was it was not on the family farm where I had gone to dry out in Tennessee a few miles away and it was close enough for my parents to come and get me when I got so despondent I could hardly work. Twenty-two years later, Kentucky’s politics, culture, aspirations, and struggle against its past, had all worked their way into my head and turned me into a believer in life, community work, and the grace and saving solace of civic life tied to family life. I had really learned that every county in Kentucky is a microcosm of the state of Kentucky. If you learn that and if you learn what Martha Helen taught me in our marriage that it’s OK to live in small communities, it’s fine. You can have a great life, beginning with your family and your neighbors. It’s OK as long as you don’t let that sign that says city limits or county limits circumscribe your life.

I went to a party in Logan County, on the last day of the month of December of 1979, and Judge Ed Johnstone, a great Federal Judge from western Kentucky, came over and put on his robes and swore me in in the law office of my friend Granville Clark. That office was the site of the Confederate Convention in Kentucky back in 1861. I got on a jet and left Logan County from the Nashville Airport and flew to Washington and walked into the Oval Office the next day and met the President of the United States. He said he wanted me to take care of the people of Appalachia, the other side of the state, and 12 other states, and work with the TVA. He wanted me to help these people with their schools, their health care, their roads, and so on. I was pretty anxious. I really didn’t think I was up to the job, although I didn’t, of course, act like it, as Chairman of the Appalachian Commission. But I left the White House and got in a cab and went back to my office and I got to thinking about what I really knew about Washington and about Logan County. I got to thinking about the people who had already come to me with bickering ideas about what we should do for the roads of Appalachia, the schools, and the politics. I got to thinking about that first day in Kentucky, watching Beacham and Forgy and the other Democrats and Republicans struggling over the county Road Foreman. And I realized, just as I finally realized that Logan County was a microcosm of Kentucky, that Washington was a microcosm of the people of the United States.

The big struggle was about who gets the rock, with the rock being a metaphor for how we distribute the resources of our country, our community, and what decisions we make. What are the good decisions that we can make despite our natural human greed, our human lusts, and our selfishness? How do we prevail over the old Adam in us and do the right thing? How do we do that? I saw the Congress of the United States as a Kentucky fiscal court or a city hall, the President of the United States as some kind of county executive or governor, and that there are finite limits to what we can do. I realized that the government of our country was, in a way, like one big Kentucky courthouse. I thought about what’s worked in Kentucky. I can just suggest one thing. As you go down the escalator, down to the main floor of the great Northern Kentucky Convention Center, you see such a beautiful expression of what we’re all about. It is a testimony to regionalism. And what it said was that “this building memorializes regional cooperation with a mission to foster economic development through tourism.” The key words here are “this building memorializes regional cooperation with a mission to foster economic development.” It could be through tourism. It could be through an understanding of health resources. It could be through an agreement through the area development districts that we will build an airport or a community solid waste system, or a bridge over here and we will work together.

That marker downstairs offers the names of four county judges: Bruce Ferguson, Clyde Middleton, Kenneth R. Paul, and Kenneth R. Lucas, who is now in Congress. Mr. Lucas went to Congress, I might note, as a Democrat, but is an extremely conservative Democrat and he was re-elected. He certainly in part got there by understanding the people that he knew in his community and by attempting to convey their conservative values. That’s why, in the middle of a basically Republican region, he has been sent back to Congress. On the other hand, I think about some of the great Governors I have known in this state, who have taken a vision of Kentucky and moved almost against the tide to turn it and to persuade people to follow their vision of a better future. I mean the kind of future that we work for here in the Long-Term Policy Center and other community and regional organizations. I think about, of course, Bert Combs and the sales tax and Ned Breathitt following through with that, the money and the program that Combs had initiated. And I think about Louie Nunn. Back in Logan County, I was telling Steve earlier today, we used to scare children to sleep by telling them that the the Republicans would come get them. But one of the greatest governors for Logan County was Louie Nunn, who raised the sales tax. He used that tax as he used to say while they were calling it Nunn’s Nickel, to fund progressive programs that were developed by Democrats in their administrations, but who left the treasury bare for him when he became Governor, running on an antitax platform. I know, I don’t get an agreement from some of my fellow editors, but I’m going to tell you that somewhere in the bickering and the acrimony between the legislature and Wallace Wilkinson, Wilkinson bit the bullet and we changed. We couldn’t have done it without the legislature and, where some of my anti-Wilkinson friends in the press won’t agree with me, we couldn’t have done it without the Governor, either.

We raised the taxes to fund Kentucky Educational Reform. I don’t believe Mr. Wilkinson will ever be Governor again, and we know the verdict of history on Combs, Breathitt, and Nunn. To all practical purposes, their elective careers were finished because they did the right thing. That’s what we want to do in Kentucky. We’re going to get over this lack of citizen involvement and participation in elections very soon, in my opinion, because we’re going to have a recession.

We’ve had here, at the end of the longest period of prosperity in American history, apathy and a turnoff about politics. We worry about why our young people aren’t interested. We worry very much about why the poorer people are not voting the way we think they should. Well, two economists from Eastern Kentucky University chatting at the reception last night were unanimous in their view that we’re going to have a recession pretty soon and I think that’s going to turn our politics around.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1958, before my horrified eyes, Doc Beacham, I think, stole a Congressional seat in Congress from the incumbent Democrat and arranged for it to go to a Democrat of his faction, the anti-Chandler faction. Now I didn’t really see it happen and I didn’t really count the votes. I do know that when it was all over in May of 1958, Frank Stubblefield of Murray had beat a wonderful man named Noble Gregory of Mayfield by just a couple of hundred votes and they fought over that election for several months in court hearings in Calloway County. At the end of the day, Stubblefield prevailed and Beacham, who told me it was never personal and that he just wanted to send Happy Chandler a message, was on the way back to power. Shortly after that, we adopted voting machines all over Kentucky and Beacham complained to me that what we really needed now was not more precinct workers, but more mechanics.

I first met, and this is the end of acceptance, I first met Vic Hellard and Ellen at George Boone’s house in Elkton. They were celebrating the beginning of their own legislative careers in the House. Vic was there and Nick Kafoglis, who was a freshman legislator, and George Boone of Elkton, whose sister-in-law, Evelyn, is a member of the Long-Term Policy Center Board, and it was a great evening. Boone was famous for his mint julep hospitality down there in Todd County and, shortly after, as a matter of fact, Boone was elected because of some Logan County manipulations that I engineered but we won’t get into that too much. Beacham had died and he committed before he died to supporting a guy in Todd County, a nice man named Hayes Hampton, but I saw it as a chance to send a super guy, George Boone of Todd County, to represent Todd and Logan. I went around and persuaded Beacham’s pallbearers, who were all his key men, that they ought to support in Logan County the Todd County guy and they did reluctantly, and we got Boone in for what turned out to be just one term. He was really just too good for that legislature. But, at any rate, he had a hell of a run while he was there for two years. The press corps voted him the outstanding freshman legislator.

And so there we were with Vic Hellard and Nick Kafoglis and David Karem, I believe, and also Bobby Richardson, having a good time. And a year later, when I was Chairman of the Press Association in Kentucky, I called Vic and I hired him as attorney for the Kentucky Press Association. A couple of years later, he had left the legislature to practice law and make a little more money and so we hired him. He went back to Frankfort, or to Versailles, and I went back to Russellville and he called me the next day and he said, “This is Vic Hellard and I’ve got to resign as your attorney.” I said, “We just hired you yesterday, Vic.” He said, “I know, but I got a better offer.” And I said, “What was that?” He said, “Bill Kenton just called me and offered me a job as Counsel to the House of Representatives. I think I’m going with Kenton.” And I said, “Well, that’s a great idea. Go to it.”

So in the years that followed, I watched Vic Hellard in his soft-spoken, humorous, good-humored way preside over the development of the Legislative Research into a powerful resource for good government and for progress in this state. I watched his wife, Ellen, become a valiant soldier in the cause of literacy before we used the word too much. What we used to talk about was building libraries and Ellen was one of the great librarians, supporters of books, and soldiers for books for the common man, the common woman, getting them out there. I would rank her along with Mary Bingham and Margaret Willis. And then I became a member of their river rat society with great parties on the Kentucky River at the Hellard home, where people of different political faiths and different journalists could meet together and talk about the people who weren’t at the party. We’d leave a little bit tipsy at the end of the day, but vowing to do better by the people of Kentucky. Vic Hellard did well by the people of Kentucky.

It’s really intriguing to think about his last two memorable “performances.” All who knew him enjoyed his platform way. He loved the theater. He loved the stage. In his last two memorable performances were interpretations of the life and times of Edwin, Ed Porch Morrow, a Republican, who became a Republican Governor, and later of Irvin Cobb, who was a legendary journalist when I was a very young kid. Irvin was one of the best-known writers and personalities in journalism in the United States. Morrow can be remembered as a man who, at the end of a very close election––he was a Republican––conceded to his friend, A.O. Stanley, the opponent who had the slight edge, and gave him the Governorship of Kentucky. Four years later, nobody could stop Ed Morrow from becoming a Republican Governor of Kentucky. Irvin Cobb had a great way of writing about politicians and deflating the pomposity and the pretentiousness of the political life. The statue of Goeble, the Governor who was shot, is right there in front of the old Capitol. It’s got that statement about the last great words of the Governor. As he’s dying of a gunshot wound, he said, “Tell my friends to be faithful and true to the common man, carry our message forward, always remembering the good of the people of this Commonwealth.” Irvin Cobb covered the assassination and the lingering, the swearing in of Goeble, who may have been dead when they swore him in. It was a Democratic day, you’ll remember. It’s Irvin Cobb now who was interpreted by Vic Hellard in the days just before his own death. Irvin Cobb said, “What I really think happened was that Goeble, knowing he was dying, asked for his favorite food and they brought it to him and he consumed a good bit of it. Then he began to really sink fast, they called in the doctor, and Goeble’s real last words were, ‘Doc, that was a damned tough oyster’.” The fact that Hellard could bring us together and see the humor, the generosity and the ambition, the fruitful, productive ambition in our politics, is, again, a reason why we remember him and why I’m so honored to have this award. I accept it in the name of all the people in this state who have worked in their own way for good causes outside their own ambitions and who have realized that, when we rise above personal ambition, we can triumph in the name of the common good of this Commonwealth. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I’m not coming back for another speech. I’m coming back to get my award. (Laughter)