Oh, Kentucky

A double rainbow over the West Carter football field this evening during the team's picture day. pic.twitter.com/YFVJ7Mnnqz

— John Flavell (@jxflavell) August 3, 2017

McDowell Elementary students are headed to Hi Hat. "Who wouldn’t be excited about a brand new school? And it’s going to be state-of-the-art. ... It’s going to be an awesome thing going to a school that can’t flood. It’s going to be hard, but change is good."

Kentucky for sale ("NEW YORK—Battling for the National Invitation Tournament Crown, three players are caught in ballet poses as Roger Hicks, left, of West Virginia University, shoots from far out in the court as Buck Sydnor, (77), and Don Ray, (96), both of West Kentucky State, reach vainly for the ball. West Virginia won, 47 to 45 in the closing seconds at Madison Square Garden March 25."):

The Paducah Sun is hiring in La Center and Kevil ("6 nights a week pay up to 1800 monthly"). And Page Trucking is hiring for “Local and Regional work out of Morgantown, KY and Bowling Green, KY (TOP PAYING JOBS $240-300 PER DAY)."

Bad jobs news from Coppers Creek, Debord and Lovely.

"The very day they put the tavern in," indispensible Gina Kinslow reports in the Glasgow Daily Times, the owners of Magaline's Antique Mall decided to sell their Cave City business of 25 years.

HP SPECIAL REPORT: The 1942 Heath High School Yearbook Is Online

This just in to the Kentucky desk, who is so excited that it keeps having to go back and correct typos as its fingers trip over one another trying to type this sentence ... the very, very awesome West Kentucky Genealogy Facebook outfit has posted 34 photographs of the 1942 Heath High School yearbook! I hope the--seriously, it's very, very awesome--West Kentucky Genealogy Facebook folk don't mind if we include one here:

The yearbook, which at some point became known as the Pirata, was then known as Heath Review. More in the comments as this rapidly coalescing story warrants ...

Steve Sabol, 1942-2012

Everything I might've said about today's passing of Steve Sabol is covered in this good sentence from Michael David Smith at the ProFootballTalk blog:

Few people are able to turn their passions into a great professional legacy like the Sabols, who loved football, filmmaking and family and managed to combine them all into one when Ed and Steve started NFL Films together.

Also, I learned today that Steve Sabol is the one who actually wrote the epic "The Autumn Wind is a Raider" verse. I hate the Oakland Raiders, but, man, I love that "old ... man ... Willie" Brown Raiders movie in which this poem is featured:

The Autumn wind is a pirate
Blustering in from sea
With a rollicking song he sweeps along
Swaggering boisterously.
His face is weatherbeaten
He wears a hooded sash
With a silver hat about his head
And a bristling black mustache
He growls as he storms the country
A villain big and bold
And the trees all shake and quiver and quake
As he robs them of their gold.
The Autumn wind is a Raider
Pillaging just for fun
He'll knock you 'round and upside down
And laugh when he's conquered and won.

Rest in peace, Mr. Sabol, and thank you for your work.

A Poem for Thanksgiving

There are not as many great poems for Thanksgiving as there should be, because America's most talented poets have spent the last 100 years or so complaining about America. But, for all its problems, the United States was not as bad as Nazi Germany, and the years of World War II saw an upsurge of patriotism among America's intellectuals unlike anything that we've seen since.

One of those intellectuals was Robert Frost, who was 68 years old in 1942, when he wrote "The Gift Outright," one of his last great poems. In 1961, Mr. Frost was supposed to read a new poem he had written for the Kennedy inauguration. But it was a bright, sunny day in Washington, with snow all over the place. Dazzled by the sun and snow, Mr. Frost couldn't read his own manuscript. But like a real trouper, he saved the day by reciting this poem, which is better than the one he had written anyway.

Like many of Mr. Frost's poems, "The Gift Outright" appears to be very simple and straightforward on the surface while actually containing very subtle wordplay. Notice, for example, all of the different ways he plays with the concept of ownership and possession. It is a great work, and one that would have seemed even poignant to a country preparing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its sons:

The Gift Outright, by Robert Frost

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.