Word: letcher
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...have just read your article on Bobby Kennedy's pilgrimage to Appalachia [Feb. 23]. I would love to be in Harlan or Letcher to hear the chuckles and knee-slapping guffaws about that peculiar-talking outlander with the sissy haircut. Doesn't Bobby know that the ancestors of those deprived mountaineers left the crags of Wales and the glens of Scotland while his forebears were still sharing the parlor peatfire with the pigs? Their English may hark back to Elizabeth I, as do their music and customs, and they may live on poke salad and fatback...
...days last week, Bobby and a caravan of 36 cars crammed with out-of-state reporters, committee staffers and electronic gear burned up the dirt-topped back roads of eastern Kentucky's poverty-blighted Wolfe, Breathitt, Knott, Harlan and Letcher counties, halting in hidden hollows at weather-bleached wood and tar-paper shanties sagging with neglect. And in spavined one-horse communities named Neon, Grassy Creek, Mousie, Fisty, Jackhorn and Cody, ragged, slack-eyed men and women and listless children with bellies taut from hunger spoke of their need...
...solemn, 17-year-old boy said a few polite words to the President of the U.S., then gave him the lapel pin worn by 40 finalists in the 18th annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Minutes later, unflustered by the company he had just kept, John Seymour Letcher Jr. sat jackknifed in a bus seat, lost in a scientific diagram he was sketching. Next day Letcher, who had won his Washington trip by building a particle accelerator, learned that he had won again. His prize: the $7,500 top award in the Westinghouse contest...
...John Letcher of Lexington, Va. had no trouble deciding where to spend his scholarship money. He is headed for Caltech (three of the other four top winners also want to study there), hopes to work after graduation in nuclear physics or rocket research. He knows an impressive amount already about both subjects. At the Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he built the accelerator, he and a research team of schoolboy scientists hope this summer to fire off a stratospheric rocket with a 20-lb. instrument payload. The first-prize winner also plays chess, wrestles on the varsity team...
Early on a hot, clear Sunday morning this week, members of the three families began to arrive at the mountain hamlet of Mayking, in Letcher County, Ky. They parked their cars around the schoolhouse and, laden with hampers and bulging boxes of food, made their way up the hogback ridge to the old cemetery. It was the annual reunion of three fertile and ancient mountain clans that go back to the beginnings of Kentucky, There, and throughout the nation, the alfresco political season was beginning. With the Fourth of July weekend the season would be in full swing...