The Mountain Eagle
WHITESBURG WEATHER

The way we were

Clips from Mountain Eagle front pages over the past 50 years



 

 

March 22, 1962

Gov. Bert T. Combs has given his personal assurance that Letcher County will be the home of a proposed community college to service the Letcher County and Perry County area. Combs made his assurance and promise in a telephone call to Tom Gish, editor of The Mountain Eagle. Combs told Gish that he had promised Sen. Archie Craft and State Rep. Bill Jordan, both of Letcher County, that the college will be located in Letcher County as long as the leadership of the county wanted it there and “as long as I have any influence over the matter.”

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Whitesburg City Clerk Ina Hunsucker resigned from her job. Members of the city council praised her for doing an excellent job both as city clerk and clerk of the city water commission.

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U.S. Senator John Sherman Cooper proposed a major research effort to find ways to reclaim, reforest and put to use stripped coal lands in eastern Kentucky and the rest of Appalachia.

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The Letcher County Library Board announced that already this year 58,000 books had been borrowed from the library and bookmobile service.

March 23, 1972

Letcher County has been split into two separate state representative districts as a result of a redistricting measure passed in the waning moments of the 1972 state legislature. The plan will leave the county with a minority in both of the new districts. Five Letcher County communities — Blackey, Colson, Fleming, Neon and Jackhorn — are to be combined with Knott and Magoffin counties in a new 92nd representative district. The rest of the county and part of Perry County will become the 91st representative district.

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The U.S. Farm Census shows a drop in the number of farms in Letcher County from 344 in 1964 to 83 in 1969.

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Richard Tucker of Jenkins landed a 17-pound, 10-ounce hybrid bass on a fishing trip to Tennessee. It took him 15 minutes to bring his catch in.

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More than a dozen eastern Kentucky lawyers are making more than $50,000 a year each on workmen’s compensation cases, mostly dealing with black lung disease.

March 25, 1982

Seven “slip-strippers” were arrested by Letcher County sheriff ’s officers this week and charged with destroying county roads and bridges. “Slip-strippers” is the sheriff ’s office term for coal mine operators who “slip in and out of a place real quick.” The arrests were made on the right fork of Craft’s Colly and on Bee Tree Fork at Kingdom Come.

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Removal of a mudslide blocking the Thornton-Camp Branch road apparently will take at least 10 days, highway officials say. The road was blocked after tons of mud and debris from an abandoned coal waste pile slide onto the road from a hillside across from the old Marlowe tipple at the mouth of Camp Branch. The slide apparently was caused by heavy rain coupled with recent construction activity by Golden Oak Mining Co., which is constructing a coal preparation plant in the area around the slide.

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Hundreds of eastern Kentucky coal miners will have short work weeks — or be out of work altogether — for several more weeks because of a broken barge unloader on the Ohio River which occurred March 1 at the Ghent Power Plant of Kentucky Utilities Company. About 825 employees of South East Coal Co. are working only three days a week since the break occurred. South East had expected to ship 66,000 tons of coal to KU during March but has shipped none because of the barge unloader problem.

March 25, 1992

Less than six months after a new section of US 119 was built, parts of the $5.5 million stretch of road are hanging off Pine Mountain. Fill dirt placed on steep slopes below the road has cracked and is sliding over the mountainside, threatening a community below.

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Teachers Billie Jo Bates Caudill and Mahala Reynolds Craft have been elected to the school-based decisionmaking council at West Whitesburg Elementary School.

March 27, 2002

A Cowan couple have pleaded innocent in the robbery and murders of Timothy L. ‘Blister’ Cook and his 4-year-old son, T.J. Jerome Boggs is charged with two counts of capital murder, first-degree robbery, first degree burglary, possession of a handgun by a convicted felon and trafficking in less than eight ounces of marijuana. Boggs is also indicted on a charge of being a persistent felony offender. April Boggs, his wife, is charged with two counts of complicity to capital murder, complicity to first-degree robbery, complicity to first degree burglary, and complicity to trafficking in less than eight ounces of marijuana.

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The Letcher County Board of Education will spend an estimated $4.3 million to buy property at Ermine and prepare it for a new high school building.

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The Whitesburg Education Development Foundation and the City of Whitesburg have signed two of the three deeds required to allow construction of a new building on the Whitesburg campus of Southeast Community College.

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A Perry County man on his way to work in Whitesburg was killed Monday when his vehicle collided head-on with a school bus. There were no children on the bus at the time of the accident.


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