I’m having a hard time turning loose of 2023 — so please indulge me while I backtrack once more before we head into the promise of 2024.
The “In Memoriam” story that we ran last week to remember interesting and influential people who died in the past year prompted several Hoptown Chronicle readers to call and email with their appreciation.
As a writer, I’ve spent years looking for ways to eulogize. It is often my motivation for writing a story. I’ve eulogized many people in the past 30 years, but also schools, buildings, traditions, food and even my favorite dog. After I reported a story earlier this year about The Phoenix building’s last day standing in downtown Hopkinsville, my colleague Julia Hunter asked me if I realized that I’d just written an obit for a building. I did.
The feedback we heard from readers about the “In Memoriam” vignettes helped me see that the act of remembering is important for many of us. So you can expect this to become an annual year-end ritual for Hoptown Chronicle.
Of course, there will always be more people worthy of remembering than we have the time and space to feature. Which brings me to a couple of people I want to go back and recognize — one from 2023 and one from 2022.
Kenneth Bates, a former county magistrate who hosted gospel music programs on local radio stations for more than 40 years, died at his home on Feb. 14. He was 71.
“He was an icon. He was Hopkinsville all over,” Bates’ cousin Willie Canty told Hoptown Chronicle shortly after his death.
Bates got some well-earned attention in his hometown when he played with the Fabulous Equinox at the Alhambra for a concert benefitting tornado victims on Jan. 8, 2022. Then, several months after his death, the community center at Second Street Park was named for Bates.
Now to a name that I saw in a 2022 obituary but failed at the time to explain her significance to our readers.
Mary Damron, who died March 4, 2022, at the age of 92, was the subject of a story I wrote for the Kentucky New Era in the summer of 2006. It was part of a series called “Street Stories” that ran weekly for a year in the newspaper. Damron’s story was about her fierce protection of the Catalpa trees that lined Catalpa Drive off Lafayette Road near the railroad tracks.
As Damron told it, a utility crew showed up one day, probably around 1990, and made preparations to cut down 14 Catalpa trees on her street. The workers told her the tree branches were getting too close to electrical lines. She wasn’t having it and soon got her city council representative, Melinda Pepper, involved.
Damron made her argument for the trees, which grew in a line along the section of Catalpa Drive that runs parallel with Lafayette Road, and they were not toppled. Instead, the limbs were trimmed back.
I think it helped that Damron knew the history of her street well. She and her husband, Webb Damron, had purchased their house in 1956 when all the houses along the street were new. The trees were already there, planted by Herman Reese on his farm before he started selling lots for homes, she told me.
Catalpa trees produce big heart-shaped leaves. They have white, bell-shaped blooms in the spring.
Unfortunately, in recent years all the Catalpa trees on Catalpa Drive have disappeared. I’m not sure if they aged out or if they were cut down because of their proximity to power lines and the Hopkinsville Greenway pedestrian bridge, which was constructed in 2020. It could have been a combination of factors. I wish I’d been paying better attention when there was still time to save some of the trees. Maybe in the spring a new Catalpa should be planted for Mary Damron.
Until then, here’s hoping you’re getting the best out of 2024. I’m trying to catch up.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
