I have been writing articles for about 12 years. I wrote for a few years for the Union County Shopper until it ceased publication after it was purchased by the Knoxville News-Sentinel and/or Scripps Howard.
Then my good friend Aaron Russell gave me the opportunity to write for Historic Union County, which is published weekly online at historicunioncounty.com and monthly as a free newspaper.

I was privileged to have opportunity to speak at the August 2024 meeting of the Union County Historical Society. I shared with them the following story about the legendary Union County educator Florence Chesney.

I was having lunch with a dear friend not too long ago. In the course of conversation, the phrase “pearl clutchers” came up. I am always intrigued with a phrase that I have never heard, and this one just tickled my fancy.
It did not bother me one bit to ask what the term meant. My friend informed me it was the gesture that some people make when they hear something unbelievable. The hand is raised in exaggerated amazement or disbelief to the neck, just where the knot in a strand of pearls would be if a woman was wearing it.

It was January of his fourth grade year. Charlie was playing quietly in his bedroom, just he and his mother at home.
He heard his father come home about 9:00 p.m. Charlie knew from the amount of noise his father was making that he was either drunk or well on the way. Charlie had learned over the years that when his father was sober that Charlie was to be seen and not heard. Charlie also knew when his father was “on the sauce” that Charlie could most likely make all the noise he wanted.

I wrote last week about a class I took as an undergraduate at Lincoln Memorial University during Winter Quarter 1985 called In Search of Self. Though I might have trouble finding things on my desk that I placed there yesterday, I went straight to the file cabinet at home and found the notebook I kept in that class thirty-nine years ago.

Remember some of those things we had to do in school that we have never had to do since? I went to college, majored in English, taught in public school and community college and have worked in the Union County Public Schools for many years, but never since high school have I had to conjugate a verb or diagram a sentence. I’m sure that you, Dear Reader, can remember many other things you had to do in school that you have never used elsewhere in life.

There is a wonderful episode of The Twilight Zone that features a hunter portrayed by the late Arthur Hunicutt. The hunter takes his dog and goes hunting, but both drown. The story relates how the hunter and his faithful dog make their journey to the hereafter. The farmer is almost lured by trickery into entering hell (which the gatekeeper tries to disguise as Heaven). The gatekeeper tells the farmer that dogs are not allowed in Heaven, so the hunter says he’ll just keep going down the road. A little further the farmer indeed finds Heaven, to which his dog is also welcome.

Lorrie Morgan once did an excellent remake of an old George Jones song “A Picture of Me Without You”. The song asked the listener to imagine several things.
Imagine with me, Dear Reader, an America:

Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see,
and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein,
and ye shall find rest for your souls.
But they said, We will not walk therein. (Jeremiah 6:16 KJV)

The lines are fallen to me in pleasant places;
yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6 KJV)

I went with my nephew to Subway for lunch yesterday. Subways have a distinctive smell that gets into my nostrils while I eat and seems to stay with me the rest of the day. I have been told this is the smell of the yeast in the bread.

I received an email from a friend last week with the subject line “Anosognosia.” Wouldn’t that be a wonderful word for the National Spelling Bee? The text began, “This is a big word which few can define and fewer use.” Define and use? Most of us would be happy just to be able to pronounce it!

Someone recently stated: “We’re churning out a generation of poorly educated people with no skill, no ambition, no guidance, and no realistic expectations of what it means to go to work.”
In the mid-1940s one Union County teacher in a rural two-room school estimated that he expected 20% of his students to go on to high school. This was higher than a colleague who expected that only about 8% of her elementary students would go on to high school. Interestingly, those teachers had “length[s] of term [of employment] expected” at eight months, one with a monthly salary of $83.

I was a young child. I know this because we lived in one of Jessie Buckner’s rental houses on Academy Street in the “Chinatown” section of downtown Maynardville. We lived there from approximately 1968/1969 to 1971, so I was between three and five years old, most likely four.
My mother made some homemade fried onion rings. I remember still how good they tasted. I just couldn’t seem to get enough.

It was Sunday afternoon. He had been to church, had gone out to eat with his sister and a fellow parishioner. He called his wife and asked what she would like him to bring her home to eat. He stopped on the way home and filled the car with fuel and bought his wife’s lunch. He arrived home and presented his wife with her food. Having nothing pressing to do that wouldn’t wait until the first day of the work week, he sat down in his recliner for a pleasant Sunday afternoon nap.

In the 1900s means for communicating changed drastically. Initially, telephones were one to a house (for those who could afford them). They were connected on “party lines,” meaning that several people shared service. Anyone could listen to the conversations of anyone who had access to the line.
Not only was there no expectation of privacy in this manner, but the phone in a home was usually centrally located in the house where anyone could hear at least one end of any conversation.

I was at the Union County Opry last Saturday. I was there to help sell concessions for the Union County Lions Club. I struck up a conversation with Debra Keck about all the rain we had received the previous week. That rain prevented me from mowing my yards. Now, on this lovely, sunshiny Saturday, I had been occupied all day with preparing for concession sales.

I am sure that if you looked up the meaning of “insanity” in an honest-to-goodness printed dictionary that several meanings of the word would be found. There are some that would say it is insane to use a printed dictionary as it is now so much easier to “look it up on Google”.
One definition of insanity used lots in education and business is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.

If you have children, you’ve probably asked them what happened at school, only to receive the standard reply, “Nothing.” I once received an email that pointed out that more pointed questions might elicit more conversation. The email suggested one hundred questions that parents/guardians could ask their children to stimulate discussion.

I have a neighbor who has many statues of animals in her yard. I jokingly told her one day, “I’m worried about your livestock. I’m afraid they’ll wander into the road and get killed or cause someone to wreck.”
I also expressed concern at what the cost must be to feed all those animals.
I have never been one to try to “keep up with the Joneses,” but sometimes life circumstances just present the opportunity.

I receive many emails. At least half of them are what I call email “e-commercials”. They pretty much immediately go to my trash folder. Today I received one of those emails, and though it went to the trash folder, the subject line did give me something to think about—expectations versus desires. This week’s article will focus on pleasant aspects of expectations.
The King James Version of the Bible has several things to say about expectation. Following are a few to ponder.