Midway, Kentucky High School 1914
Driving up to Lexington, Kentucky last week to teach what turned out to be an absolutely delightful memoir writing workshop at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning, I stopped at the little town of Midway, once the oldest “train town” in the state when a line ran from Lexington to the capital, Frankfort, now transitioned into a tourist town—the saving of so many depopulated small towns in this country. For reasons having to do with an aging population and increasing prosperity, many of us are on the road, wandering from place to place, in search of something authentic—an old way, an old time.
Because of devoted local volunteers, these transformed towns are often centered by small museums that preserve the humble paraphernalia that would otherwise have made a quick trip to the dump: high school photographs and athletic awards, ancient newspaper stories about historic floods and fires, bits of railroad china, ancient bonnets and runover shoes.
Among this welter I discovered this photo of a high school girls’ basketball team long before girls were siphoned off into cheerleading. Because I had reconnected in Lexington with old friends who still call themselves feminists and still fight the good fight, I found these long-ago girls’ faces inspiring.
No, we haven’t always striven to be pretty and agreeable, often the tale that is told about “back then.” Even when we had to wear corsets and hoopskirts, even when we had to wear bras, garter belts, and “hose,” even when we more recently had to wear pantyhose, there were still a lot of us who preserved the fierceness of our early girlhood, the “I won’t” that dismayed our mothers, long broken to the wheel, the determination that sent us out into the woods, the mountains, the creeks and the rivers—and to playing basketball, fighting to win.
I saw this same determination in some of my students, particularly in the toothless, stone-deaf woman who disappeared after the first class. But she had been there, and as the others labored over the beginnings and middles of what will become potent proofs of our particular lives, I felt more hope for our future as individuals and as a group than I have for a long time.
Yes, we always wanted to win. And sometimes, we do.
Thank you for this. I have SO much to learn from you. About writing. About life.
Thank you for a great seminar. I learned a lot from you and from the other amazing participants.
The Kentucky Derby is run the first Saturday of May—today, in 2024. Bard-AI advises: “It seems like there is no publicly available data on the number of mares that have participated and won the Kentucky Derby races.”
I have long looked at photos of girls and women who lived before my time and appreciated the strong beauty of their un-made up faces and their seriousness of expression. That didn’t mean that girls and women weren’t as crushed as present-time females by sexism, but I do feel sad when I see the cosmetics-polished, smile and look sweet and pretty, standardized faces in photos of recent years. What character showed in each face in the older pictures. Character and beauty which needed no “aid” to look “beautiful”.