Word: appalachia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...power plants might be eliminated from densely populated areas. Why not generate electricity at the fuel source-distant oil or coal fields-and then wire it to cities? On the other hand, industrialization must not be taken to distant places that can be better used for other purposes. Industrializing Appalachia, for example, would smogify a naturally hazy region that settlers aptly named the Smokies. The right business for Appalachia is recreation; federal money could spur a really sizable tourist industry...
...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...
...neither cynics quick to ascribe political motives to Kennedy's one-man investigation nor the little girl who thrust a scrawled note into his hand pleading "Bobby, please run for President" could soften the facts of east Kentucky's poverty or blot out the reality of Appalachia's misery statistics. Some 5,000 of Wolfe County's 6,500 people exist beneath the poverty line, able to afford little more than a dime for each meal; federal food stamps account for half or more of the mountaineers' victuals. "Whenever you get another kid to feed...
...house in ten in Wolfe County is sound; up to 30% of mountain folk are functionally illiterate and condemned to idleness because their meager skills as coal miners have been obviated by the huge strip-mining machines that rip apart Kentucky's hillside seams. Federal aid to Appalachia, totaling $450 million since 1965, has done little to alleviate their plight. Industries that could bring work have shunned their ravaged landscape...
...boon and bane, strip mining gouges out a third of Ken tucky's coal production, which last year reached 93 million tons worth some $500 million. The strip miners use bull dozers to flay great strips off the sur face and get at the veins beneath. This scars Appalachia's hills and flatlands with ugly detritus called overburden or spoil. As the spoil shifts and slides, the hills resound to the awful rumble of landslides shuddering down the slopes...