“Cooney Simms, the grocer, had a big Philco floor-model radio with push buttons and short wave. Neighbors gathered around when Joe Lewis was fighting. And wasn’t he always, this good giant who whipped Adolph Hitler’s man Max Schmeling? Static wasn’t too bad; one could hear Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats if they didn’t come on the same time as the Grand Ole Opry.”

In the late 1930s, folks living on Rattlesnake Ridge, Kentucky, saw signs of trouble. Way off. Men and women talked about news from over the waters; an uneasiness showed in their faces. I heard it from hungover veterans of the First World War who picked up stories from meetings of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars clubs in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, an old Ohio River town with a southern aura; a town where locals recollected past days when packet boats from New Orleans used to put in after a slog up the Mississippi to the Ohio and on up North. Getting off the ridge once a week, men, women, kids, and hired hands crowded into old Model A Fords, shuffled over to Simms Grocery and Dry Goods in Flatwoods, Kentucky, to trade eggs and chickens for sugar and lard, look over new Home Comfort stoves. A worker in the store demonstrated ways to use white oleomargarine, mix it with a yellow powder so it looked like butter. Few were interested. They’d been making pure butter from raw milk all their lives; it was bad enough to fool with ration stamps for sugar and gasoline. Gossip about recent arrests by the constable, new candidates up for county commissioner, and the sweetness of Stone Mountain watermelons passed among the shoppers.