Project Dateline

Photos By Charles Bertram

CBERTRAM@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Story By Amy Wilson

AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

EIGHTY EIGHT –

A small herd of caramel-colored cows stands stock still in a cool pond just off Ky. 90 in Western Kentucky. Suddenly, if anything a cow does can be considered sudden, a bull appoints himself leader and begins to mosey east, back toward Summer Shade. That’s Summer Shade — as in the town back thataway that spans Metcalfe and Barren counties — and summer shade — as in the big tree, considerably closer, that casts a wide curtain of cool on the edge of Bobby Richardson’s property.

All the other cows follow the Head Cow, a row of pure-bred Limousins lining up to quietly toast their town on its signature day, 8/8.

It has been a while since this stretch of homes and businesses on the road to Glasgow got its proper due. That was in 1988, when “the town got a little wild,” says then-postmistress Donnie Sue Bacon. There was the big parade that closed down the highway, the extra postal folks from Bowling Green coming up to sell commemorative T-shirts and stamp voluminous postmarks, and Good Morning America showing up to ask Donnie Sue about life in the numerically aligned cosmopolis of (then and now) 150 souls.

In fact, it was Bacon’s husband, Joe, who reminded her just this morning what she was doing precisely 18 years ago. That is, “running all over town all day.”

Donnie Sue remembers that it was the Class of 1988 from some place on the West Coast that had mailed her a letter early in the year asking for the “8/8/88 Eighty Eight” postmark.

The townfolks hadn’t thought of it before. So Donnie Sue and Rose Mary McPherson decided a little parade was in order, and, well, the craziness ensued. Before you knew it, a couple was arranging to come through that day to be married on the eighth step of the Church of Christ. Thousands of cards floated in begging for proper postmarking. And Donnie Sue — from her little outpost in her family’s grocery store on the only road through town — obliged.

“It was two days of action, then everybody left, and it was a dull as it could be,” Donnie Sue says now, admitting she was “give out” by the whole ordeal. It was a day worth remembering even now. Donnie Sue says she might go back and look at her videotapes and thumb through her scrapbooks just to relive it.

There’s only one other time she can recall that Eighty Eight made national waves. That was during the in 1948 presidential elections, when — this is the truth, she says — 88 of the town’s residents voted for Thomas Dewey and 88 voted for Harry Truman.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not so verifies.

Donnie Sue’s Richardson kin — her parents and her aunt and uncle — ran the store and the garage with the two gas pumps back then. They have, in fact, run the Eighty Eight store since the town was, postally speaking, referred to as just “88, Kentucky.”

Uncle Brett and Uncle Robert Richardson still meet early morning at the post office (now in the shop next door to the old store) and wait for the mail — even if it takes hours.

The Richardsons stopped storekeeping a few years back, and several other owners have tried, and failed, to make a similar go of it. Times, they change.

“It was booming before that,” says Ralph Taylor, now owner of the old shop-garage, currently an antique store, among other things. “That was back before Wal-Marts, and then farmers weren’t working in factories and the wives stayed home.”

Taylor, like just about everybody in town, laments how things are just so different now. Why, there are people whom they don’t even know who are building houses here — we counted six.

(Still, it seems like folks know plenty. Tim Doyle, the guy from Indiana who just bought and reopened the old Eighty Eight Grocery, knows that Brett Richardson has gone to town this morning and will be back in the early afternoon. He also knows about Brett’s war service and how he spent a lot of the war in a tank in 20-below temperatures. In town only a scant few months, Tim can relate information about when the aforementioned tank, with Richardson in it, got unbearably hot under the armor.)

Now traffic just speeds through town. “If you catch somebody going 35 mph, run them down and give them a medal,” Ralph says.

Do they notice the town’s unusual name? No time for that, Ralph says. Maybe no interest.

Too bad. We’ll tell you anyway. Seems two stories exist to explain the town’s naming.

One has it that the town is 8.8 miles from Glasgow — which it, indeed, appears to be — and hence the moniker. The second story is that in the 1860s, a fellow named Dabney Nunnally was given the task of naming the town. Because he had 88 cents in his pocket at the time, voila. (Theory One seems to be the most earnestly held to by Eighty Eighters.)

On this day, Jess Wilson of Clay County is celebrating his 88th birthday — born Aug. 8, 1918 — in town by “coming to this little crossroads and sitting a while.”

Such visits aren’t that uncommon but, for the real scoop, Ralph, the shopkeeper, suggests a good long talk with native sons, the Richardson brothers. Then he mentions that he knows for a fact that the Richardsons had some business to attend to and will be back in town after lunch. In the meantime, all the people you need to know are in the cemetery.

Dillard Rigsby takes care of the town’s cemetery, which is centrally located right there on the cows’ side of the highway. He can’t claim to be born in Eighty Eight like Donnie Sue Bacon, but he says he will likely be laid to rest here among the Knips, the Goods, the Hunts, the Chenoweths, the Huffs, the Hammers and the Depps.

The Depps?

Yes. There lie Thomas and Mary. There lie Elmore and Fannie. Nettie Depp alone on the right. Lizzie Depp. Tipton Hanson Depp. Joel.

And, have mercy, there’s John. Born in 1845, died in 1927, faithful husband to Mariba.

Told there’s a famous actor named Johnny Depp, Dillard absorbs the information without comment, not exactly surprised but not exactly noticing that it matters one way or the other.

He makes no claim, on behalf of Eighty Eight, to such urgent popular currency. There is no anxious running toward celebrity. No anxious running from it either. No nothing.

Then Dillard perks up and suggests we talk to the living Richardson brothers, who, he notes, won’t be at home right now as they’ve gone to town.

We heard.

“They had some business in town,” Dillard says.

We know.

“Back early this afternoon.”

That sounds about right.

“Should have caught them this morning at the store. They’re there every morning.”

We know. Real news, like the traffic, travels fast in Eighty Eight.