November 9, 1947 Lester Pross (In 1947, Lester Pross was a new professor ofart and a dormitory director at Berea College. We are pleased he has shared with us this heirloom letter to his parents.) Last weekend's trip to South America was something out of a storybook , a thing you read about but never do. Now the doing of it is still hard to believe. So you don't get the wrong impression at the start, "SouthAmerica" is a few square miles down in the southwestern corner of Bell County, Kentucky, and according to all reports, the toughest part of the state, even including Harlan, so far as primitive lawlessness goes. It's practically inaccessible, and the place is so deep in the mountains that, as the saying goes, they have to "pipe the sunshine in and the moonshine out." And they do. But it's not so bad as it used to be about twenty years ago—before Brother Frakes came, converted Bill Henderson, "King of the Moonshiners," persuaded him to put away his gun with its eighteen notches, to become a farmer instead of a manufacturer and donate his sixty-six acres to the cause of education. More land came, and more money, and the Henderson Settlement School was built, twelve grades of it, with all the advantages of modern civilization. It's a model school now, with close to 300 students, dorms for those who live too far away to commute, its own farm, chapel, store, and post office—Frakes. Brother Frakes himself is still there, running things with an iron hand, playing each end against the other, out for all the publicity he can get, no matter whom it hurts. In spite of the good he's done, there's been unpleasantness. But back to the weekend. Two of Bill Henderson's sons, Wilburn and Hiram Rufus, are freshmen just down the hall, and Rufus invited me home with him "to see the place" and to meet his sister Mabel, who used to be an art major here at Berea and is now teaching English at the school. So I packed me some comfortable old clothes and we took off via Greyhound for Middlesboro, that wide-open town. The bus had to stop several times, always on a curve, while the driver and a couple of men removed a few logs blocking the road—a traditional mountain Halloween prank. It was an eerie moon thru the fog up there. In Middlesboro, eighteen miles from Frakes, we stayed at the Cumberland Hotel, reputedly the best of the many dozens. That's a matter of opinion. The bellhop, like all good Middlesboro bellhops, asked politely, "Anything else, boys?" Started out early Saturday, a cloudy, cold, windy morning. Local bus thru Notown, past coal tipple after coal tipple, all comin' out of holes up on the mountain side, some truck-loading, some rail roading, all small, all in the middle of a pile of black slate. They let us off at Galmeda, the town at the foot of Log Mountain, the end of the line. The Galmeda mine employs about 5000, three shifts, five days. Half of them live in the long, low, gray houses in Galmeda, very precariously perched. But down in the valley so low, so low from on top we walked. "Only eight miles," Windy said. Around and up and around and up. The wind pushed, and my leather jacket felt mighty good. Then we were opposite the mine, across the valley so narrow, spilling its slate down the so steep side for so far, being just a hole in the side of the mountain, a little black hole in the red and yellow and ochre trees. "Perfect day for squirrel huntin'." An empty coal truck took us in itsbed the mile or so around Hairpin Curve to the top of Log Mountain, and we looked down below and saw Galmeda so gray and so tiny. Got off at the top, and took off again on foot. Not a chance for a ride the next six miles. All of them that's comin' out has come and they won't be comin' back till this...