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10.30.2020, No. 28
“You can vote if you don’t like something?” — Emilia, my first-grader
FIVE.
1. In a letter this week to the Kentucky Prosecutors Advisory Council, Tamika Palmer requested “a competent and capable prosecutor willing to handle the case involving the death of my daughter, Breonna Taylor.” Palmer recalled that in September, after Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron told her that he and his team were only able to obtain a wanton-endangerment indictment against LMPD officer Brett Hankison (for shots fired into an apartment adjacent to Taylor’s), “Cameron and one of his prosecutors then advised me that I should consider finding peace through the Lord and watched as I sobbed uncontrollably.” Anonymous grand jurors have since spoken out, saying Cameron’s team did not present them with homicide charges for the officers involved in Taylor’s death. Palmer wrote, “It is incredible to think that the grand jurors were more compassionate and truthful about my daughter’s case than the state’s highest-ranking prosecutor.”
2. Our friends at the Louisville Story Program have completed their eighth book project: The Fights We Fought Have Brought Us Here, written by 10 Central High School students commenting on segregated swimming pools, immigration, housing insecurity, incarceration and so much more. A virtual launch party is 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17, with the authors reading from their essays. As LSP deputy director Joe Manning says: “Muhammad Ali isn’t the only fighter to come out of Central.”
3. Haiku Review
Always Dreaming
May, first Saturday?
With fans, half capacity?
Rooting for longshot.
4. And now some Burgoo, aka an emptying of the roadkill stew that is the monthly inbox.
Ten20 is a new brewery on Washington Street in Butchertown. The 1834 Lager goes down too easy. // Pappy release is imminent, with more rye this year. But less 20- and 23-year-old — which went into the barrel when Clinton was president. // The James Graham Brown Foundation announced a total of $4.4. million in grants to 24 recipients, including Metro United Way, New Directions Housing Corp. and the Community Foundation. // And the Brown-Forman Foundation announced a total of $4 million in donations to several recipients, including the Louisville Urban League’s Equitable Education Engagement, JCTC’s Rise Together initiative and Simmons College’s Minority Teacher Education Program. // Goodwill is looking for renderings or sketches from Kentucky artists for a mural on the northeast side of its facility on Broadway. // WLKY expanded its lineup of weekday anchors. // Spalding’s Festival of Contemporary Writing next month is all virtual. // The Kentucky Derby Festival and Amazon have started a program called Community Champions, with winners receiving $500 Amazon gift cards. // The salad restaurant Green District is expanding. // The Louisville Ballet’s virtual season begins next month. // Tuna casserole for lunch on Friday. Whoops, accidentally filed my four-year-old’s pre-school menu in with the press releases. // On its Facebook page, the historic Peterson-Dumesnil House in Crescent Hill wants you to guess the date when the leaves will fall from its sprawling Ginkgo tree. // Goodbye, Beer Store. // In a bracket of Halloween candy, the all-chocolate No. 1 seeds are Peanut M&M’s, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers and Twix, with No. 2 seeds Butterfinger, Nerds (the little box you down like a shot), Skittles and Starburst (yeah, yeah, everybody loves scoring two pink, but give me orange or red). Winner? Reese’s Cups, especially so if pumpkin-shaped.
5. I know several newsletters ago I promised to cool it on my MMJ fandom, but I might’ve just purchased this Christmas sweater.
The Eye Care Institute supports this newsletter, and has since I started writing it six months ago. A huge thank you to them.
And now, the “Five. Oh! Too…” version of an eye exam:
Can you read this? Wait, you can? Whoa. You must have super vision or something.
Can’t read it? Maybe get your eyes checked.
OH!
A little something from the LouMag archive.
Nope, not a visual representation of interminable 2020, but the October 2001 cover of the “death tunnel” at Waverly Hills, off Dixie Highway near PRP. (You might see a typo where I see “the” echoing down the chute.) The tunnel existed because the board of trustees at the tuberculosis sanitorium “felt it best that the patients not see the hearses driving up the hill and carting off the dead. So the bodies were placed on small mechanical cars attached to rails cemented to the floor and sent through a 500-foot underground tunnel that extended from the side of the building and ran down the hill to the morgue.”
While searching for Louisville’s scariest place, writer Mike Ransdell and photographer John Nation toured Waverly, where, in the early 1900s, “bedridden and enfeebled patients, often beyond saving, hissed and wheezed as they gasped for air through diseased lungs. It is uncertain how many people ultimately died under Waverly’s roof, but the numbers were considerable.” (Waverly has since become a haunted attraction with paranormal tours, though it is closed this year due to COVID-19.)
Inside the “massive gothic skeleton,” Ransdell noted “thick concrete walls that are scratched, scraped and bruised, as if clawed and beaten by a giant who was trapped inside and trying to escape, and littered with multicolored graffiti: pentagrams, upside-down crosses and other symbols of the occult. The smell of mildew and decay floats heavily through its long, wide, shadowy corridors and desolate dusty rooms.” One security guard told a story about waiting in the parking lot behind the building for a couple of coworkers to return with food. Ransdell wrote, “As twilight faded into night, an old, black hearse is said to have pulled up the drive and stopped next to the morgue. Thinking he was the target of a practical joke, the guard watched as two men in white suits got out of the car, walked into the building and came out carrying a casket. The men loaded the casket into the hearse and, as they drove away, the vehicle vanished into thin air.”
“Wow,” managing editor Mary Chellis Nelson says, “that cover looks straight up like someone’s butthole. I can’t not see it. Little cover lines coming out of it.”
TOO…
Sixteen years too late, but apologies for this October 2004 spread, which we’re renaming “What Not to Do on Halloween.”
Josh Moss
editor, Louisville Magazine
jmoss@loumag.com
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