Project Dateline

August 10, 2006

Story by Jamie Gumbrecht
Photographs by Tricia Spaulding

PLEASUREVILLE — The real pleasures here are easy to find, as they should be.

Cute houses and green lawns poke up just off a long, winding road that leads to an unannounced yard sale in the middle of the week, where they’ll recommend picking up a burger at the pool hall, where they’ll point out the flowers that the beautician next door brought by, just because.

That’s no fewer than five pleasures already. Such is life in Pleasureville, in Henry County, snug against the Shelby County line. The U.S. Census counts 888 people, but most people know it simply to be a bit bigger than all the other small towns nearby.

It’s a true town, not just a slice of road; on a state map, it’s the slightly larger letters, but not the bold ones. It’s got a bank, church, florist, hair salon, barbershop, city hall and two places to grab a bite. It’s got a festival, Pleasureville Day, coming up September 16. And the real coup: a post office.

The Pleasureville post office opened in 1828, even before the depot (that came in 1858). Dorothy Wood kept busy after her kids went off to school by working at the post office for 22 years. She retired in 1982, but recalls how so much mail for Pleasureville, ZIP code 40057, wound up in Pleasantville, N.Y., ZIP code 10570.

There are, sometimes, unpleasant things that happen in Pleasureville, Wood points out. Businesses closing, friends dying. And just regular old rowdy things.

“Just a few nights ago, some boys threw a can of beans through a woman’s window and scared her to death,” Wood says, sitting outside her neighbor’s impromptu yard sale. “It was 3 a.m. and she and her daughter were sleeping. That was uncalled for, but I guess some boys feel they have to cause trouble.”

Once upon a time, Marc Bond might have been one of those boys. The 22-year-old University of Kentucky student grew up in Pleasureville and returns every summer to work on the family farm. But he says there’s not much for young people to do except sit in the backs of their pickup trucks. (Bond’s own trouble-making streak hasn’t passed yet. Plenty of family friends can tell when he speeds through town, tempting the day a police officer arrives.)

Bond calls the transition to UK and Lexington “fun,” but won’t say more than his sly smile lets on.

Grabbing a burger at the pool hall, one of those old family friends teases that the boy has “never been kissed,” although Bond just mentioned girlfriends.

“That’s Lexington life, this is Pleasureville life,” Bond says, proclaiming his innocence. “We don’t mix the two.”

See, you don’t get every kind of pleasure in Pleasureville.

But the ones you get are good. Inside the pool hall, Sue and Owen Bond — Marc’s aunt and uncle — are cooking burgers to sell for $2.10 plain and 20 cents more with cheese. Today’s special pleasure: thick slices of red tomato, brought in from 86-year-old Sam Perry’s garden.

The pool hall has been here since the 1930s, and the Bond family has owned it since the 1950s. Sue and Owen have been in charge only for about a year — “I retired from Ford Motor Company and went back to work,” Owen jokes — but they couldn’t let the family tradition lapse.

“I got a phone call from someone asking if I wanted to advertise, once,” Owen says. “I said if anybody don’t know it’s a pool hall, they never will.”

Yes, business has changed and dwindled. The pool hall and The Depot Inn restaurant across the street do all right, but it’s been a long time since Pleasureville’s heyday. Of course, plenty of people in town remember when North Pleasureville and South Pleasureville merged in 1962. They remember how the high school used to make the town a hangout for young people, and how they used to be able to buy groceries and candy at stores in town instead of driving so far to find a Kroger.

Tommy Robinson, 63, remembers coming downtown on Saturday nights to watch free movies — “all kinds, westerns, romantic-type things” — projected on a sheet hung on the side of a building. You’d see a few hundred people then, he says.

After years in a one-room schoolhouse with his sister and cousin, he came to school in Pleasureville in third grade.

“I was scared to death,” Robinson says. “I didn’t know there were that many people in the world.”

Now, he says, it’s nothing special to take a trip to Louisville, with all its thousands of people, to take your wife to dinner or buy a part for your tractor.

He couldn’t leave this area, though. He lived in Louisville for 12 years, he says, “and never was happy, not for one minute.” On exceptionally sunny days or rainy days, he still comes down to the pool hall to see his friends or grab a burger.

If necessary, he’ll swing by Kem Holthouser’s barbershop next door to get a trim, or just to admire her photos.

Holthouser, a third-generation Pleasurevillian, opened her shop about a year ago. A haircut goes for $9, but she’ll do it for free if you bring her an antique photo of the town.

At 37, she’s the unofficial town historian.

“I would love to see somebody open up a little museum,” she says. “I’m just the person to do it, but I just don’t have the room. Maybe someday.”

Maybe someday. After all, the walls of her barbershop are already filling with old photos. Some of her waiting chairs are from the 1940s, when another barbershop was in the building.

It was her kids who finally convinced her to open the shop, although she expects they’ll move away to other towns soon enough. (Well, maybe not her sons, because they’re mama’s boys.) But she’ll be here until she retires, counting all the pleasures around her, from weekdays cutting hair to Sunday dinners at her parents’ house a few minutes away.

“I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else,” Holthouser says. “I moved to Shelbyville right after I got married and I was back in, like, three months. It would be like Andy Griffith leaving Mayberry.”