My parents enjoyed their lack of local history and began severing relations with their own families. I grew up without direct benefit of cousins, uncles, aunts, or grandparents. Relatives were what other people had, not us. Mom and Dad scorned our neighbors as ignorant and unsophisticated. They taught my siblings and me to consider ourselves better than the families who surrounded us, the children with whom we played, and the culture we came to identify as our own. My experience was similar to that of children of career diplomats from the colonial era—we lived in the big house, we had extra money, we mingled with the locals but never fit in. We even spoke a different language, what my father called “the Queen’s English,” instead of the grammatically incorrect dialect of the hills. Other kids learned to hunt and fish; I learned to speak properly.
The surrounding hills held rich veins of dense, flinty clay, ideal for manufacturing sturdy firebrick to line blast furnaces for steel mills. In 1903 Lunsford Pitt Haldeman founded the Kentucky Fire Brick Company and hired men to lay narrow-gauge rail for mules to haul hand-dug clay to the brick plant. Business flourished through the 1920s, with the brickyard being the largest employer in the region, producing sixty thousand bricks per day, each stamped “Haldeman Ky.” The company town had brick roads, a public garden, a barbershop, a baseball diamond, and a train depot. There was a tennis court, several horseshoe pits, and a neatly cropped field for playing croquet. Workers were paid in a combination of cash and scrip, a form of credit against wages that could be exchanged only at the high-priced Company Store.
In the 1950s, General Refractories purchased the old brick factory and converted its kilns to manufacture charcoal. This was accomplished by burning railroad ties that were heavily soaked in creosote, an oily liquid obtained from coal tar and used as a wood preservative. The resultant char was sent north, chipped into briquettes, bagged, and sold for summer barbecues across the nation. The constant heavy smoke increased Haldeman fatalities among the elderly and infants. Everyone coughed. At night the humidity produced fog that blended with the smoke to create an opaque smog that car headlights couldn’t penetrate. Dad walked ahead of the car with a flashlight to illuminate the way for Mom to drive. Storekeepers in Morehead could identify us by the acrid smell of smoke on our clothing, and they used it as a means to discriminate against us. Haldeman people were at the bottom of a pecking order that didn’t start very high. Plus, we literally stank.
The factory stood two hundred yards from the grade school. Smoke drifted through the air as I walked to school, obscuring the woods like a lethal morning mist that never lifted. In 1968 my parents organized a small group called Struggle Opposing Smog, or SOS. To get attention, they withheld their children from the first week of school, drawing national media coverage for the unique boycott. Special devices were fastened to the smokestacks to measure the amount of particulates spewing forth. After two days every gauge broke, with their final readings listing higher pollution rates than those in Detroit. The charcoal factory shut down. Some people admired my parents for their effort, while others resented the loss of employment. None could deny that the quality of air had improved.
Most rural childhoods are very isolated, but due to Haldeman’s past as a company town, people lived in clusters along creeks and ridges. The culture of the hills had long maintained the vestiges of the eighteenth-century pioneer mentality: self-sufficiency, hunting game for food, and a disregard for conventional law. Ten boys near my age lived within walking distance through the woods. We roamed the hills on foot and later on bicycles, careening our battered bikes along game trails and footpaths, plunging down steep hills. We were reckless and ragtag, fearless and rough, perpetually cut and bruised. Cheap army-surplus shirts from the Vietnam War were ideal for the woods. The tightly woven fabric repelled water and thorns. A couple of us were always limping, our unprotected faces bruised and cut. Occasionally I had two black eyes, a source of pride, since anyone could have merely one.
We found junked cars from the thirties with trees growing through the windows, foundations of houses filled with garbage, and dozens of empty holes in the ground. The woods were full of bricks, all stamped with the name of our community. We ate in one another’s homes, helped with chores, and shared gloves in winter. Our lives knew no boundaries save the distance we could travel on foot and still be home by dark. We loved one another in a pure way that none of us was loved at home.
I grew up in the shadow of a complex history mythologized by the faded glory days of a lost town. The popular story is that L. P. Haldeman did everything in his power to take care of his workers. He made sure that even the most poverty-stricken children living in dilapidated company shacks received a Christmas gift of fruit. One story that demonstrated his compassion was about a man who died on the job, leaving a family with no means of support. The oldest boy was thirteen. Mr. Haldeman directed that a special stool be constructed for the boy to stand on so he could work in his father’s place all day.