Life with a Polemicist

Abstract

Life with a Polemicist Anne F. Caudill Left to right: lames K. Caudill (son), Anne Caudill, Harry M. Caudill, Harry Frye Caudill (son), Diana Caudill (daughter). 1964 It was 1945. The war continued and I was soon to graduate from the University of Kentucky. Then I met Harry Monroe Caudill, just taking up again his college career after being badly wounded in Italy and discharged from Army hospitals. Already he was outspoken and controversial . One of the first conversations we had was at lunch in the student center. I remember it vividly. He pointed to the huge photographs of After Harry's death in 1990 Anne struggled valiantly to get her life together again, to close her house in Whitesburg and move to New Albany, Indiana. She is still busy carrying out some parts of the work they had started together. Kentucky scenes decorating the walls and said, "Look, all tobacco and horses and agricultural scenes. There is nothing to indicate that Eastern Kentucky and its industrial powerhouse is a part of the state. The university ignores the eastern third of the counties." This was a new concept for me, as I had grown up in central Kentucky and like most of my associates was only dimly aware of the eastern coalfields myself. Then he went on to tell me about the poverty, the lack ofroads, schools, health facilities, jobs. And he told me of the government planning before the war to turn vast stretches of the Kentucky mountains into national forest lands as had already been done in Virginia and the Carolinas , moving people out to the cities to find industrial jobs. He believed there were other solutions. Here, I thought, was a man with ideas and vision, no longer a boy with idle interests and conversation. And so, not long after, I agreed to marry him, and when he finished law school we returned to his mountain homeland to build a home, a family, a law practice. Harry laughed. He relished the ridiculous and the absurd. He observed humanity and he chuckled. And he made us all laugh, for he was a master teller of tales about people, their foibles, their inconsistencies, their peculiar strengths. And he laughed with the children. As they rode to school each morning he sang old songs, making up silly doggerel to fit the melodies as he drove along. Sometimes for days at a time nearly everything he said came out as amusing rhyming couplets, an expression of his joyous exuberance. And he walked in the woods, determined to strengthen his shattered leg. He walked for hours on the soft forest loam, often alone, but glad of the company of family and friends. Across our pastures and through the little gate we entered into an almost endless woodland. Sometimes on longer expeditions we camped and hiked to beauty spots in the Pine Mountain woods, the Red River Gorge, or the Smoky Mountains, accompanied by friends, the children and their friends, pausing often to loiter on a fallen log and listen to Harry telling a tale of the olden days, or expounding on the magnificence and fragility of the landscape before us. This was our cherished and preferred entertainment. After the children grew up and left home, their friends remembered and sometimes came to talk with us by the fireside or on a shady summer porch. Harry talked. His inquiring, cogitating, philosophical and restless mind was expressed in a constant flow of commentary, interspersed with humor, recollections, all in vivid language. His everyday speech was a unique combination of phrases from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and the classics, mixed with mountain colloquialisms. He talked of 10 growing up in the Depression years in the coalfields, and of his war experiences. Both had a deep and abiding effect on his life. As an infantry soldier he scrambled up the slippery rock-strewn, eroded slopes of the Italian mountains where he was eventually wounded and crippled for life. He was haunted by the remains of villages he saw there, abandoned generations before because the mountains had been completely denuded of their forest cover and then grazed to the bedrock. He saw how easily the same...