(See Cover)
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.
The mountain mothers spread their olympian "dinner-on-the-ground" in the groves of scrub oaks around the graveyard. The kids darted among the weathered tombstones and their rednecked fathers gathered to smoke and discuss politics and family ties. The Adams clan was distinguished by red ribbons, the Webbs wore yellow, and green ribbons identified the Crafts. By high noon, 600 cousins were on hand.
Magic & Ballads. The program got under way at 10 a.m. at a wooden speaking platform under an enormous frame shelter. There was room for 300 fan-waving listeners under the shed, and a public-address system rigged to a station wagon kept the rest of the ridge informed. A magician performed for the small fry, and Pleaz Mobley, the Eighth District's Republican candidate for Congress, sang the old English ballads that the hillfolk love.
Because of political differences in the families (some Webbs are Democrats), the speeches were "nonpolitical."
The featured speaker of the day, the junior Senator from Kentucky, arrived late, after a chartered flight across the state and a hard drive up the mountainside. The day before, after a busy week in Washington, John Sherman Cooper had flown to Owensboro on the Ohio River for a busier day at the state VFW encampment. That night Republican Cooper and the Democrat who is running against him, grizzled old Alben Barkley, had spoken at a sweltering, shirtsleeve banquet (the 106-degree temperature, said a native, was not as hot as hell; it was as hot as hackydam —four miles below).
The Mayking reunion was tailored to Cooper's measure. As he mounted the platform he looked every inch the mountainman he is. His 14-minute speech was packed with platitudes ("I hope that in these times of trouble we can, like the ancient Greeks, draw upon the wisdom, the heart and soul, of those who went before us"), which the sophisticated Cooper could chuckle over later, still recognizing and reverently respecting their basic truth. Afterwards, Cooper drifted among the patches of family groups, diligently shaking hands. He ate a huge helping—fried chicken, cornbread sticks, deviled eggs, stringbeans and bacon, two kinds of cake, watermelon. Then he flew off again, for a brief look-in at a tobaccomen's convention in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., and a $100-a-plate campaign fund-raising dinner in Louisville. This week, after four days of duty at his Washington desk. Cooper will go back to Kentucky for another big weekend of campaigning and speeches.