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Interview with Lon Carter Barton, November 29, 1990

1990-11-29 Interview with Lon Carter Barton, November 29, 1990 Leg001:1990OH306LEG21 02:14:46 Kentucky Legislature Oral History Project Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries Legislators -- Kentucky -- Interviews. Mayfield (Ky.) High school teaching -- Kentucky. Kentucky. Legislative Branch. Lobbyists -- Kentucky. Mayfield (Ky.) Clark, Thomas D Combs, Bert T. Chandler, A.B. (Happy) Collins, Martha Layne Keeneland, John egg law Clements, Earle teachers lobbyists campaigning Key Legislation: egg law Term/District: House (1958-1962), 3rd district Graves County (Ky.) Lon Carter Barton; interviewee Jeffrey Suchanek; interviewer 1990OH306_LEG021_Barton 1:|12(7)|21(5)|27(8)|33(7)|42(6)|50(4)|59(4)|84(12)|96(6)|105(7)|115(7)|128(1)|136(3)|148(1)|157(6)|172(8)|189(1)|197(1)|216(2)|237(7)|252(5)|266(2)|276(2)|286(7)|310(1)|321(12)|330(3)|340(6)|352(12)|364(12)|376(4)|396(8)|415(12)|426(5)|451(6)|459(6)|468(1)|476(6)|487(1)|500(7)|516(8)|529(10)|547(6)|562(11)|571(5)|597(1)|604(1)|624(5)|635(14)|646(8)|658(1)|667(4)|675(9)|686(5)|695(9)|704(9)|714(11)|726(4)|750(5)|762(7)|770(5)|783(6)|792(8)|802(5)|813(7)|824(11)|854(1)|867(12)|877(13)|890(9)|900(2)|909(11)|923(5)|943(6)|954(3)|966(9)|978(1)|987(10)|1008(10)|1020(7)|1035(1)|1046(2)|1056(7)|1070(9)|1079(10)|1092(5)|1103(1)|1118(1)|1136(7)|1168(15)|1177(2)|1196(6)|1206(12)|1222(10)|1233(6)|1243(8)|1269(3)|1278(11)|1292(4)|1309(14)|1325(1)|1336(2)|1347(11)|1366(5)|1398(2)|1411(2)|1423(4)|1437(9)|1449(13)|1462(3)|1473(2)|1482(2)|1504(5)|1516(12)|1526(3)|1535(6)|1543(2)|1550(10)|1558(10)|1568(5)|1577(9)|1586(5)|1600(5)|1619(2)|1631(11)|1652(12)|1664(13)|1672(2)|1683(13)|1698(4)|1710(6)|1720(13)|1737(4)|1750(2)|1766(4)|1794(2)|1809(10)|1820(6)|1829(6)|1839(2)|1850(3)|1859(5)|1872(3)|1887(13)|1910(9)|1920(2)|1928(1)|1938(5)|1966(1)|1988(8)|2003(6)|2014(11)|2025(4)|2037(9)|2057(1)|2077(3)|2103(4)|2141(15)|2173(13)|2183(16)|2211(6)|2243(4)|2256(13)|2269(4)|2279(5)|2296(3)|2305(8)|2326(1)|2346(3)|2372(10)|2397(7)|2409(8)|2417(12)|2427(4)|2443(5)|2454(13) audiotrans Legit interview SUCHANEK: The following is an unrehearsed interview with former State Representative Lon Carter Barton, who represented Graves County in what was the 3rd District from 1959 to 1964. The interview was conducted by Jeffrey Suchanek for the University of Kentucky Library Kentucky Legislature Oral History Project on November 29, 1990, at Mr. Barton's home at 420 South 7th Street in Mayfield, Kentucky at 2:00 p.m. [Pause in tape]. Okay, this afternoon I'm talking with Mr. Lon Carter Barton. Mr. Barton, could you tell me when and where you were born? BARTON: I was born in Mayfield, Kentucky, September 18, 1925 which places me just beyond the 65-year mark. I was reared in Mayfield. I've been a lifelong resident of Mayfield, attended Mayfield city schools, and graduated at Mayfield High School. Incidentally I lived in, as I'm living now, in the same location, in the same house, which happens to be the second oldest standing house in Mayfield so far as I've been able to determine. After I had been graduated from Mayfield High School, I attended Murray State, graduated at Murray State with a degree in history and English with a rather strong emphasis on journalism which was then catalogued under the English Department, following which I began teaching history in Mayfield High School, teaching students who were not too much younger than I was at the time. In 1951 I was called to the army, drafted for service during the Korean War and left, took a leave of teaching, and spent the next two years mostly in two places, one in Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, where I had basic training and where I remained for a short time as permanent party, and then the next year, from 1952 until 1953, I spent in Korea some five miles or so short of, south of the 38th Parallel. And having completed my military duties in Korea I was discharged in May of 1953. Returned to the classroom the following September and remained in that position until 1957, at which time I made a race for representative to the General Assembly and was successful. However, I should point out this also, Jeff, that I had made a previous race. I had run in 1955 for the same office and was defeated. I ran against a very strong opponent, a gentleman who was involved with the county school system here. It was sort of a city schools versus county schools, actually. Mr. Howard Reed was the principal of Wingo High School, and had been before that principal of Lowes High School. All this time he had lived in Symsonia in that rather large voting precinct in the north part of the county, so he was quite well known in the county. On the other hand, I had, as I mentioned, been in Mayfield schools and in the City of Mayfield all of my life and I had more contacts, I guess you'd say, in the city than he did, and so it wound up at the end of the election with Howard taking all the county precincts and with me taking all the city precincts. We just broke even. The only thing was there were about twice as many county precincts as there (both laugh) were city precincts so I sat out those two years. And in 1957 Howard decided, meanwhile, not to run again, and I was able to work it out, as I said, to take a leave to make the race and did, and that time I came out on top. I guess maybe here in this county, which is, you know, is one of Kentucky's largest, probably 550-something square miles in this county, it almost demands or requires a race, but you run the real gamble of losing in order to set the stage for a later race that has some better chance of winning. You have to get your name on the ballot, at that time especially. Now, this was before extensive TV campaigning and I very likely would not have used it if I had had it. I did do a good bit of newspaper advertising in the local paper and, but my major, my major effort was directed at meeting people and visiting stores in the country and going into people's houses and knocking on doors and gathering at the outdoor, outside doors of the factories and passing out cards and putting up posters and doing the old-time traditional type campaigning. So I won that one and served in this 1958 session and- SUCHANEK: If I could go back before- BARTON: that is probably more than, more than background than you really had anticipated in the question. SUCHANEK: No, that's fine (laughs). BARTON: Well- SUCHANEK: (Laughs), in fact, you eliminated a couple of questions. BARTON: (Laughs), okay. SUCHANEK: Okay. Just a couple of follow-up questions. BARTON: Right. SUCHANEK: Can you tell me your parents' names and what they did for a living? BARTON: Yes. Yes. My father was Reese Barton and he was a native of Graves County, a little town south of Mayfield called Cuba, which one of its greatest achievements, I guess, the Cuba school, was winning the state basketball tournament- SUCHANEK: Yes, Cuba's colorful clowns (laughs). BARTON: against all kinds of opposition, the Cuba Cubs. Anyway, he was born there in Cuba and came to Mayfield when he was probably in his early twenties and went to work in a clothing store here, a retail men's store. And then in 1917 he went to service and was in France during the First World War for about a year, and when he came back he married my mother, who was Jean Carter. Her family had also moved to Mayfield from down in the state line neighborhood down close to the Tennessee state line in eighteen and ninety-eight, her father built some, along with his two brothers, built some business houses on the south side of the square, and after my mother and father were married my father opened a men's store there on the same side of the square in one of the Carter buildings. He managed and owned, operated that men's store, Barton's, until his death which was in 1977 at the age of 91. He never did really retire. He became a little more relaxed in his schedule. He didn't try to go quite as often to the store as he had, of course, but he was there some almost every day. He was also interested in the new bank in Mayfield, the Liberty, what is now the Liberty Bank and Trust Company, the largest bank in town, as a matter of fact, today. And was a charter director of the bank, and one of his claims to fame, as he called it, was the fact that he had never missed a director's meeting in those years between 1956, I believe was when the bank was started, and the last one that he attended which was only about six weeks before his death. At any rate, that was pretty much my background. As I mentioned while ago, I was fortunate enough as a kid to have lived in the same house, under the same roof not only with my parents, but with my grandmother on my mother's side, my maternal grandmother, who was born here in Graves County two years before the Civil War. And as I remember quite well, as a high school student I developed, I guess, an interest in history as much from my grandmother's stories of various and sundry things, events in her early days, in her early life as from my classroom instruction in American history in high school. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did because I, I really felt that this was the, sort of the grassroots from which I had come. SUCHANEK: What was your grandmother's name? BARTON: Her name was Sally Williams Carter, and she was in her early nineties when she died, and so I had the, I had the intergenerational opportunity there to really pick up a good bit that I'm afraid that high school students, students of that age group today have much less opportunity to get due to mobility and due to transfers of parents to various parts of the country, and due to the general shift in family unit dynamics and the whole thing. I, I don't know of too many students that still have the opportunity to converse on a daily, almost hourly, basis with someone in their home who's reached the age of 80, 85, 90. But I felt privileged that I had that chance and so that's pretty much my folks and my background on that. SUCHANEK: Did your mother ever work outside of the home? BARTON: No, not except in volunteer types of things, in church work. She was pretty active in the First Baptist Church here as long as she lived, as my father was too, and so she was pretty well kept busy with the First Baptist Missionary Unions and the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Women's Club and different sorts of activities seemed to kept her pretty busy. I was pleased that she did one thing particularly. From about 1940 until she became confused before her death which was in 1976, she and my father both died when they were 91 years old and they only died six months apart, but my mother, until about 1974 or 1975, kept yearly diaries, and all kinds of things went into those diaries. Much of it was trivial, sort of personality things, "I did this today. I had Lucille to go to the grocery for me. I did this or I did that." But she also kept up very closely with current events, especially when I was in Korea, and I have gone back and reread some of those diaries and have got a great deal of, not only pleasure, but information. I've really had to check back for, on occasion, to determine when I got my first paycheck from the high school, for example. When I retired they gave me sort of a send-off and I wanted to find out just when it was that I got my first check and how much it was (Suchanek laughs), and I knew if I could find it anywhere I could find it in her diary. And I did. I found that she said I brought home the bacon. I think that's the way it was expressed, that "Lon brought home the bacon." Well- SUCHANEK: How much was it for, do you recall? BARTON: (Laughs), it was, it was not much bacon (Suchanek laughs). I think that it amounted, the best I remember, to maybe for a month of teaching $121 and, I guess, maybe at that time considering my experience which was zero, that was about as much as I could hope for. But at any rate, I did appreciate the fact more than, I'm sure, she ever realized I would, the fact that I have those twenty-two or twenty- three diaries here that were kept very faithfully for a long time. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. Now, you mentioned that your maternal grandmother lived with you. BARTON: Yes. SUCHANEK: Did you know your other grandparents at all? BARTON: Well, my father's grandparent, my father's parents were in, over in Henry County, Tennessee. His father, who lived in Graves County until he was up in years, I think, until he was in his fifties or sixties, and then he moved to Henry County, Tennessee, where his father had lived years earlier. So I didn't get a chance to see very much of him. In addition to that, he died when I was only about nine or ten years old, and his wife had already preceded him in death. In fact, he lost two wives. His first wife died when, my father's mother, died not long after daddy was born, and then his father's second wife died before, before he did. I guess it's-I don't know whether this is genetically good or not, but I guess I've been pretty fortunate in having at least near relatives, parents and grandparents, who had fairly long lives. As I said, my parents lived to be 91, and his, his father lived to be in the middle nineties and my mother's mother lived to be in the nineties, and so I've sort of been surrounded by people that had some longevity, on that. But I really, I never did know my father's parents quite as well because they were, not only not in the house, but they weren't in town. They weren't in the state. SUCHANEK: Yeah. BARTON: They were about forty-five miles from here. SUCHANEK: Do you remember what he did for a living? BARTON: He was a farmer. Farmed all of his life. SUCHANEK: How far back in Kentucky do your roots go? BARTON: About five generations I guess. On my mother's side the, the family came to Graves County in the late 1820s, which was about as early as they could've come and still made it to Graves County because the county was not formed until 1823, and my mother's, one of my mother's lines came here in, I think, 1826. I've never really done as much genealogy work as I guess I should have, but it's an interesting subject. I've learned a good bit about the family just from listening, to these folks all talk about them. But I've not done any amount of, great amount of research as such, like most professional genealogists do. You know, that's become an industry now. SUCHANEK: Sure. BARTON: It's really, it's really something. SUCHANEK: Well, how many people were in your immediate family as you were growing up? BARTON: Well, just the ones that I mentioned that lived here. I have no brothers and no sisters. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: My parents and my grandmother and I were, were it. Now, I have a cousin, first cousin, who is a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia. Has been over there ever since he graduated from Mayfield High School, my mother's brother's son. But my mother's brother is gone now. In fact, he died in, in the '60s and- SUCHANEK: Did he live here in Graves County? BARTON: He lived here in Mayfield. He was a pharmacist, and his son is one of the leading lawyers in Richmond as well as now being on the city school board in Richmond. SUCHANEK: So you at least had some kinship network here? BARTON: Some, some kinship, right. Then I have another cousin on my father's side. This fellow is a retired university president, a junior college president rather, from Missouri and has moved back to Mayfield, and his mother and my father were double first cousins. Brothers married sisters. So it compounded the family relationship there somewhat, and this cousin's mother is still living and she's ninety- four and she's still rather active and gets around pretty well. SUCHANEK: Do you remember who some of your teachers were when you went to school at Mayfield? BARTON: Ms. Florence Wyman comes to mind, and I daresay, Jeff, that you could ask any graduate or even any student who was enrolled at Mayfield in any of the years that Ms. Florence taught English there, who their-what name rings the quickest bell, not necessarily the teacher they liked the most or the teacher that they remembered in some lesser way the most, but just instantly, I think you'd find about 90 percent of them saying Miss Wyman and I would say about 90 percent of them would say that she was a very favorite teacher. She was, taught English to seniors. And I suppose nearly every high school has a, some one teacher that kind of stands out in students' memory, and a lot of times for some reason I think that's an English teacher. Mayfield was very, very fortunate to have this person. She was a wonderful teacher. She, she really did a great job. She taught lots beside English Literature, that was her specialty, and she could not be surpassed in her handling of the subject, but that was just one thing she, she did. She taught us literature and, and back then, and I'm not sure about but what in some places they do a lot of this now, but I have an idea it's not as much as we did it, memorize poems, memorize speeches, memorize quotations, memorize events. And I don't know that that was the, necessarily the only way to do it, but I do know that it gave a lot of kids an exposure to literature and, not only to poetry but to prose such as Lincoln's Gettysburg address. I doubt if there's a student from Mayfield High School, who graduated in the years that Ms. Wyman taught who today can't say at least a part or maybe all of the Gettysburg address. It's just that well embedded in our, in our memory. You either, you either learned these lines or else you just stayed there till you did (both laugh). There wasn't any middle around. There wasn't any way of saying I know half of it and they'll pass. You didn't. You learned it all. That- SUCHANEK: What was- BARTON: Pardon me. SUCHANEK: would you say English or history then was your favorite subject? BARTON: I, I would lean toward history because I really did, as I said, I think I picked this interest in history up, apart though, from what I had in high school, although I had a good history teacher. I had a fellow by the name of Mr. Ross, Ray Ross, and there never was a better fellow, I don't guess, on the faculty other than Mr. Ross. He was not only a outstanding teacher but he was a good man. He was connected with the athletics department. He was a football coach. He was principal for a while. He taught not only history but also mathematics, which is not always a very common combination. You don't find a lot of people that are equally skilled in math and in history. SUCHANEK: I know I'm not (laughs). BARTON: It's usually one or the other. Well, I'm not either. I set records in math that my math teacher, who still lives right up the street from me, could testify were the basement levels. I mean they went, my grades determined the floor (Suchanek laughs). But at any rate, this history teacher was a, he was a fine fellow and he is the man whose place I took when, when I started teaching history at Mayfield, it was after the death of Mr. Ray Ross. SUCHANEK: What year was that? BARTON: That was in 1950. And the, the thing I remember most about Mr. Ross was the fact that he made us get up every day, and a lot of this was during World War Two, and give reports on the news, what we had heard the day before on the radio. When we listened at six o'clock to Gabriel(??) here or to some other analyst of the, of the war news, and Mr. Ross would assign everybody an oral report and they had to rise and present their report every day for about three minutes. And this was really the only introduction that most of us had to public speaking. We didn't have to do a lot of reciting of these memory lines to Ms. Wyman. She let us do some of them on paper and some of them for the sake of time, the value of time usage, individually to her. But Mr. Ross made us get up and present these reports orally to the class, and it, it was a pretty scary experience for a lot of us, including me. But we finally got over our stage fright, and I think that probably helped me even more than it did to the people that I talked to about what was going on in the Pacific and Europe, or wherever. I think I got the benefit from that sort of thing as much as anybody else. But I did develop this interest in history not only from class, not only from his teaching but, as I said, from informal connections, family and friends who knew that I was somewhat interested in collecting relics and who would tell me about a particular old musket that was available or, or even better still bring me one and give it to me. I've got quite a few items that I've still held to from those early days in the way of, especially Civil War material. I got some pretty good Civil War stuff here yet. So it was more of a combination my interest in history turned to a kind of a, almost as a hobby before it became an academic discipline for me. SUCHANEK: Did you ever have a civics course? BARTON: Well, yes. We had, we had civics, I don't remember too much about civics but we had it and we had world history. We actually had, I believe, more history in our curriculum when I was in high school than we have now as a, as a required subjects. We had to take, I believe it was four units as, just as we did in English and in social sciences, which included civics and geography and United States history and world history. So we, and sociology, we had sociology, too. So we, we had a pretty strong, pretty strong social science department. As a matter of fact, Mayfield, permit me to boast a little here. The Mayfield City Schools from top to bottom, I mean by that from first grade right on up, but particularly I remember very well the high school programs were strictly rated highly. We were received our first accreditation from the Southern Association in the 1920s, which was before a lot of schools that now are members were ever even thought of, and we've maintained it ever since. SUCHANEK: Now, I forgot to ask you if you had any ancestors who fought in either the Union or Confederate armies. BARTON: Yes, I had enough ancestors in the Confederate army to probably outfit a company, on both sides. In fact, back to the 1860s you branched out into about, now here is where my math shows up, about eight different lines, I guess. And all of them that I know of were in the Civil War. All of that I know of that were in the Civil War were in the Confederate Army, most of them from right here in Graves County. My father's own uncle, as a matter of fact, my great uncle, was killed at Shiloh. He was a captain in the 3rd Kentucky, and on the second day of Shiloh he was killed, and I have his sword. He had two brothers in the same company, and he was not killed instantly. He lived about three or four hours after he was shot, and in that interim time he, he asked for one of his brothers to come to the tent where he was and he gave him his sword and told him to carry it with him and bring it home if he survived the war, which he did. So he brought it home and I've got the sword and hanging on the wall in here, in the next room I've got the sword and a picture of Captain Emerson holding the same sword that was, that was later turned over to this brother. The picture was made at Columbus when he had, just had joined the army. So I- SUCHANEK: Columbus, Georgia? BARTON: I had, I had a lot of them. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. That's Columbus, Georgia? BARTON: No, Columbus, Kentucky. SUCHANEK: Oh, Kentucky. Okay. BARTON: Right, right over here, yeah, when they, when the Confederates were in possession of the place where, you know, they put the anchor and the chain and the big guns and- SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: the Lady Polk and all that stuff. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: Well, anyway, then on my mother's side, as I mentioned a while ago she was quite an active member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy because her grandfather and several of her uncles had been in the war, and one of them was killed. So it was, it was pretty much if there were any Union soldiers in the family, I never have tracked them down. It could've been that there were because there were some Union soldiers from this area, of course, but I believe all of mine that I know of at that period of time were, were rebels. SUCHANEK: Did you have a favorite book when you were growing up? BARTON: Beyond the Bible? Just a secular book? SUCHANEK: Any book. BARTON: I, I would rate the Bible as a favorite. I don't know near as much about is as I should, as I'd like to, but I don't know, Jeff, I've always been pretty much of a heavy reader of non-fiction and just about any book that dealt with history or autobiography or biography or any such work as that, I really got a lot of, a lot of pleasure from. I don't recall any particular certain book that I would say was a favorite. Books relating to the Civil War have always fascinated me. And I guess one reason-yeah- SUCHANEK: Do you want to get that? BARTON: Want to cut that off. SUCHANEK: Yeah, we'll pause. [Pause in taping] BARTON: Now, I enjoyed that- SUCHANEK: Carl Sandberg? BARTON: Yeah. Uh-huh. I, I don't know- SUCHANEK: How about- BARTON: of any particular one certain book that I really would've considered a favorite in high school period of time or for that matter in college. But I did, I did do a good bit of reading. It was, it was necessary, really. SUCHANEK: How about a favorite historical figure? BARTON: Well, in American History primarily. I think I have two, and I expect a lot of people would share these same two so there's nothing original about it, but I think personally I have a great admiration, maybe that's the best way to put it, for Lincoln on one hand, and as a sort of counterbalance to the Lincoln period, Lee, on the other hand. I think both these men were right outstanding in a lot of different ways, and I have enjoyed reading, as I said a minute ago, I've enjoyed reading about Lincoln, has been more of a, of an inspiration. Although I think Lincoln was a perfectly appropriate figure for his time. I mean by that, I don't necessarily think that Lincoln belongs on a pedestal anymore than I do that Lee belongs on a pedestal, but I think there were some qualities about both men that a person would not be going too far wrong to try to emulate in the way of character and in the way of leadership and all of that. I have in this room in here, where I mentioned a while ago some stuff that I've collected, I have a playbill that was posted telling about the play at Ford's Theater the night Lincoln was there and was killed, the American Cousin, and I've collected or tried to collect, I've got a little derringer pistol that looks a good bit like the one that killed Lincoln which is, at the time that I saw the original was in Chicago in the historical society museum there. But this, this pistol is a, is a reasonable facsimile of one like that. But, of course, there have been so many people that I've enjoyed reading about. But I expect I'd have to say that they would come as close to my impression of what I would like to be like as any other two ready well known men in American history. SUCHANEK: Do you think, can you think of any teacher in particular that made an impression on you or perhaps helped you to start you to form your own political philosophy? BARTON: Well, I don't-I've had a lot of, as I said a while ago, I had, I had fine teachers in high school and I had fine teachers at Murray. I went to U.K. and did graduate work at U.K. and had Dr. Clark, whom I'm sure you had dealings with. He was a great teacher. And I had a fellow, not as a teacher but just as a friend there on campus at U.K., that gave me some pretty good advice from time to time about state government- SUCHANEK: Who was that? BARTON: and his name was Bennett Wall. Bennett now is, if he's not retired, I think he is retired now, but he is in Athens, Georgia. His last teaching assignment was in the University of Georgia. He went from, from Lexington to New Orleans, Tulane, and was there for some time, and then went to the University of Georgia, and as far as I know he's, he's done a fairly definitive history of EXXON. The last time I knew about him, was last year. I hear from him at Christmas every year and he, he had just about finished, I believe, the one, a volume that he was doing on the oil company. He wrote but never got around to publishing for some reason a really interesting account of William Goebel, and I don't really know why he didn't finish it up, but as far as I know he never did. I suppose he still has some manuscript but so far it's, as far as I, as I say, as far as I know of, I don't know it's a publication. SUCHANEK: What kind of advice did he give you? BARTON: Well, I don't know that it was advice so much as it was simply information. How the legislature put together, what it, what it did, how he saw it. SUCHANEK: Where did he get his information? BARTON: Well, he drove over there and watched them. He was a very careful observer, you see, of what was going on in Frankfort, and he had two or three students, former students, who were in the `56 session, one of whom was John Breckinridge from Lexington there. SUCHANEK: Sure. BARTON: He thought a lot of John and, of course, some of these same fellows were back as, in `58 when I was there for the first time. But in between, and that was about the same time I was at U.K., too. I sort of combined my being away from teaching here to serve in the legislature with my being away to attend the grad school at U.K., and so it all sort of blended in together. My contacts in Frankfort and my contacts in Lexington were sort of at the same time. SUCHANEK: So he helped you understand- BARTON: He did, he- SUCHANEK: what was going on? BARTON: he gave me some right valuable information on the, the way the thing ran, the way it was organized and things that, really, I hadn't made any particular study of. Actually without somebody's assistance like that, Jeff, I expect it's pretty much true today as it was then, a legislator just going in, never having been in anything like it before, takes a while to really get the hang of procedures and to really get sort of a inside savvy of what's going to take place next. SUCHANEK: How long did it take you? BARTON: Well, it took me, oh, probably I'd say a month or such a matter to get just the basics. I'm not sure I ever did get the full story (both laugh). I expect, I expect I missed a few points along the way that I should've gotten at all, but I did. I was a-I got some help from, as I said, from Bennett Wall and from talking- SUCHANEK: Was that, was that W-A-H-L? BARTON: No, it was W-A-L-L. SUCHANEK: Oh, okay. BARTON: He was the Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association for years. I don't know whether he still is since he's retired or not, but he, he was, he was a real astute observer of Kentucky politics. He couldn't have written this book on Goebel if he had not been. He had as much, he had as much information about Kentucky politics from a historical standpoint, that was his major course, I think, at that time was Kentucky history and with a specialty in the latter nineteenth century, say, from the Civil War up to Goebel's death. And he had done some very extensive research in the Courier-Journal files and in other newspapers, and so it was, it was like a course in Kentucky history just sit there and listen to him for a while. And he was always willing to talk and to talk and to tell and to, and be able to get this expertise in an informal conversational pattern was just really a delightful thing. SUCHANEK: Let's turn this over just for a second. [End of Tape #1, Side #1] [Begin Tape #1, Side #2] BARTON: I don't know. SUCHANEK: Okay. Now, you mentioned that you had attended the First Baptist Church- BARTON: Baptist Church, right. SUCHANEK: here in Mayfield. BARTON: Right. SUCHANEK: Do you think your religious upbringing had any influence on the formation of your political philosophy? BARTON: I expect so, maybe not consciously. I mean by that, I don't know that I just, you know, set out to do certain things or vote certain ways that would be a direct relationship with my church background. But being in a pretty strongly religious family and going to attend church and other things, training unions, and young people's groups, and Sunday schools and all of this, I suspect that it may have influenced some things, yeah. As I say I can't think of any conscious reason to say that, that is I can't think of any definite tie-in there off the top of my head, but I expect it would be hard not to have a, at least sort of a inner feeling about things as they relate to, to government, very likely. SUCHANEK: Now what year did you graduate from college? BARTON: I graduated in `49- SUCHANEK: From Murray? BARTON: From Murray. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: I stayed out of college two or three years, not two or three years, two or three semesters. One of those times I taught here. They had a, sort of an unexpected shuffle in the, in the faculty and a job opened up in teaching world history, the only time I've ever done anything with world history, and the superintendent here knew that I was, I guess at that time I was in my junior year, I'm not sure, sophomore or junior year at Murray. And he knew I was interested in history and was taking a history major so he said, "Would you like to take off a semester and come over here and fill out the rest of the year for us?" So I did. And I really was in the classroom then with my peers because that had not been long after my, after my graduation from high school. But I thought that was a very good experience. That gave me the benefit of seeing the good side of teaching, and also gave me the opportunity to see the other side of teaching before I ever even did any student teaching or before I ever even taught about teaching as a fulltime career. And then another time I had an opportunity to stay here and work on the newspaper, on the Mayfield Messenger, and since my interest in journalism had been pretty well generated over at Murray, I thought that was a right good opportunity for a shot at what the real world was like when it came to putting out a newspaper. So I wound up working about a semester, I guess, in terms of a, of a school calendar I guess about a semester and a half for the, for the Mayfield Messenger doing local write-ups and features and covering the sports and just about anything they happened to have need to sent somebody to do. In addition to going and getting the mail every morning, I guess I did better that than I did anything else. But, at any rate, I got some experience from an old fellow that was, well, at that time he wasn't old either, editor, who was one of the, however, he was one of the old-fashioned type. He wore the green eyeshade and he pecked out his stories with two fingers on the typewriter which was as old as he was, and he used a blue-grease pencil pretty freely, and I learned a lot of real honest-to-goodness practical news writing from, from Mr. Jess that I never really put into practice a lot because I never did really continue nor pursue the journalism except to teach it. I taught it for seventeen years along with history, but I never did work any further on, on newspapers. SUCHANEK: Do you notice any difference among students now as opposed to when you first entered the teaching profession? BARTON: Well, in a way I do. It seems to me that in the '50s, and even if I go back to this other interim experience in the '40s, students were-well, of course, today they're good students and then there were good students. Today there are poor students, then there were poor students. But I do believe that students today are better informed. I think they have more opportunities to learn outside of class, from the TV among other things, but I guess primarily from TV, that kids in the '40s and '50s, of course, had no opportunity to take advantage of at all. So the students today, say in the 11th grade, probably to me, now this is just a very off-the-top-of-my-head impression, it seems to me though that students today are better informed, they know more, they are capable of discussing things that an 11th grader thirty-five years ago would've not known thing-one about. So I'd say that in that respect students today have it much-have it over their, their parents and their older relatives. But on the other hand, I'm not sure but what students in the '40s and '50s, maybe it was a more serious generation following the Depression. Some of them had lived through some of the Depression and most of them had lived through World War Two and Korea, I'm not so sure but what, they were a more serious minded bunch that really seemed to understand what the school program was all about in the sense of getting the very maximum value from it than students do today. SUCHANEK: Are you saying it's harder to motivate students? BARTON: I think it is. I really think that the motivational factor has become more of a, of a difficult thing today. It used to be you can tell students about-in history, for example, you can tell students things about like, oh, we'll say the struggles that, that Nathan Stubblefield over here at Murray had in trying to perfect his invention called the wireless telephone, which later becomes the radio, and trying to impress on them what, what sort of advancement he made in the field of communications. And tell them the actual facts about what he did and what he had to sacrifice in order to do what he did and some of his problems that later kept him from getting the patent and all this sort of thing, and it would impress them. Well, today I'm not sure that, I mean they have, they have seen so many things on television that have so much more of a dramatic impact than that would have, that when you try to compete with some of these good programs, I don't mean the trashy programs but the good ones, the 20/20 programs and all of that, it's harder to do. They think, well, it's, that's just his bad luck. We know of some cases that are much more impressive than that. And this is just a sort of a random illustration, and I think that they're more worldly-wise, and I don't mean that necessarily in a pejorative sense like taking dope and things like this, but they just, they just have a much broader frame of reference than kids used to have. And it's, it used to be a relatively simple matter to get their attention and to then follow up with something that you felt like they needed to know. And today I'm not sure that it is that easy anymore. Well, of course, like I said, you had four-point students back then and you have four-point students today, and you had the ones that were totally uncaring and totally indifferent then and you have them today. So I guess if you averaged it all out, I don't know whether there'd be an awful lot of dramatic difference or not, but that's one, that's one difference that I've seen in the, in the teaching and especially in history. I'm not sure that would applicable to math or chemistry or of anything else, but it seems to me that's one difference. You know, we used to have, and they still have, of course, I retired, I don't think I mentioned this on tape before, but I retired a year and a half ago after spending about thirty years in teaching, and we had, and as I said I'm sure they still do have, one night a year of parents-open house for the parents of students, and the parents go through the schedule that their child follows in the, in the day. And it used to be, I would, I would get a- these programs are run for a couple of hours, and some teachers felt like that it was sort of an imposition because it was on their own free time that they were going through all this sort of thing. But I always really looked forward to them. I enjoyed them because a good many of the parents of the kids that I had in class at that time were themselves former students and they would always ask the same question you just asked, invariably. There would be different sets of parents in different years so it was always sort of a repetitive process, but they'd always want to say, "is Johnny or Sally," or whoever their kid happened to be, "do they do as well as you remember I did (both laugh)?" And I have to really be pretty- SUCHANEK: Pretty diplomatic. BARTON: diplomatic. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: I'd have to use all the tact that I had because occasionally the present- day student would so far outshine what I remembered, and that was really my best, my best escape hatch, my memory- SUCHANEK: Couldn't remember. BARTON: my memory is just not really that great. I don't, I recall you and I recall you being in my class and all of that, but when it comes to whether you passed with a 76 or failed with a 69, you know, I just can't possibly keep all that sort of thing in my mind and I- SUCHANEK: But you, you knew. BARTON: Yeah, a lot of times, for the ones who asked the question it seemed like they were usually in one of two classes. Either they were, groups, they were either remembered because of their excellent work or they were remembered because of the work, like I said, I did with my mathematics teacher. She can remember today, I'm sure, how terrible I was in math. And I could remember over the years how terrible some of these people, now parents, were in history. But even then I tried to, you know, avoid a disappointing kind of a reply, and I would give them pretty much the same thing I've just said, that I thought that the motivational factor was in their favor, I thought the informational factor was in their kids' favor. And I generally satisfied them. Occasionally they'd want me to go a little further than that though, and say specifically, just "us" and "him" (Suchanek laughs), "what about that?" So I, I did think that it was good that they asked the question. I thought it was a good question. And I think another thing that's different today too, though, I don't have any sort of a record to back this up so this is totally off the wall, I guess. But as I recall, it seemed to me that students then were not as-well, I, I don't want to say confrontational because that sounds negative. I don't, I don't mean that. But students then accepted what you told them because you were the teacher and they understood that there were certain privileges and certain responsibilities and certain authorities and certain degrees of discipline that came to you because you were the teacher and they were the students. SUCHANEK: It's called respect. BARTON: Respect, that's right. And I wouldn't say as a blanket reference now, one minute that this is lacking because I never, I never did see it. But I've heard other teachers bemoan the fact that some kids that were apparently just, I don't know, maybe they had problems of some kind, were just so hard to teach. They just refused to accept the classroom environment, structured situation, and this would, I wouldn't have lasted a, I don't guess I would have lasted ten years if this kind of thing had been true a long time ago or when I started. I think that students today tend to have more assertiveness, I guess you could call it. If you give an assignment and they don't see the point of doing it, I don't think they would be reluctant to say, "No, I just didn't do that," and not even try to make some sort of an excuse up legitimately, or what they thought was legitimate, which I think they used to do if they didn't get something done they'd have some reason, and that may not be a bad change. I mean that may be just pure outright, aboveboard, straight-out honesty. But I get the impression that, that a lot of times it's just because they feel like that they have the perfect right to say "No, I don't want to do this." And I think some of this, Jeff, stems from the '60s. I can't help but believe that the overflow or the residue or whatever you want to call it, of the mindset of students, so many of them, back in that period of history, and not to say that some of them weren't highly motivated because I'm sure they were. But I think they sometimes in that decade failed to understand that in order to be, in order to be educated that you had to have order, you had to have a degree of discipline, you had to have these things that structured a classroom. You couldn't just fly off in all directions. And I think a lot of them really got sort of turned around in that decade and maybe some of that, as I said, some of that residue might still be around, I don't know. Now, I'm not applying this to Mayfield per se, but I'm just saying that from what I have heard other teachers say and what I've read, this does seem to be a rather growing problem. But I'll repeat what I've said also, that I haven't seen it to any great extent. Of course, you can't expect high school kids, 11th graders, to act like adults. I mean any teacher that goes into a classroom expecting it to be just like a adult learning center is pretty naive. That's just not the way the ball bounces for kids that are sixteen, seventeen years old. But in some schools today I've read that it's almost reached the point of being sort of a dangerous thing. I had a friend that retired from teaching in Fullerton, California, a year ago. Taught there thirty years, and one of the things that convinced him to retire was the fact that one day last spring, or last spring a year ago, his last spring semester, a girl was on her way to his class, apparently that school had a complex, a campus with several buildings, and she was going from building to the building where he was and some guy pulled up on the sidewalk outside the campus and pulled out a pistol and shot the girl. Didn't kill her, it did wound her. She was out of school for a while, but Melton said, "I decided after that"-but that was just one incident that followed sort of a string of things that had, had happened. Well, if I remember correctly we had some tough kids in the '50s, and I don't think there is any question about that, but I don't remember, and we never had have any incident like that here either, thank goodness, but I doubt very much if they had any incidents like that in Fullerton, California in the, in the '50s either. So I don't know. It's a, there are some differences. Some of them, I think, have been great advances, and I don't whether all of them have or not. SUCHANEK: Okay. Well, the last- BARTON: That really beats you around the bush on that question (laughs). SUCHANEK: Well, the last question I have, basically, about your background is, and I couldn't find this out by my research, were- BARTON: Right. SUCHANEK: you ever married? BARTON: No. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: No, I have been single from the beginning. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: I've done my share of dating, but so far, I don't know whether I even should say so far or not, that sounds like there might be a possibility that I might get married which, at the moment, I doubt if, if I would. But I really found that my folks needed me more than anything else when I came back from the legislature. My mother particularly was sick and got sicker before she died, and I felt really like I was needed here and that probably put a crimp in my plans, if I'd ever had any real serious plans for marrying. But I'm certainly, I'm certainly not anti-marriage by any means. SUCHANEK: Well, I guess we can start talking about your political career then. BARTON: Oh, that's, that will be something else. SUCHANEK: When and how did you begin to get interested in politics? BARTON: Well, academically I was interested in politics back when I was, as you suggested a while ago, taking some civics classes. But one of my students put the idea in my head to run for representative. Just, I think, rather a casual comment. This fellow from the county that I mentioned a while ago, Mr. Reed, had announced, and this boy, who was a good student but he, he was a average student, stopped me and made a rather bombshell statement one day. He said, "Mr. Barton," he said, "why don't you run for the legislature?" And I said, "Why, I never had thought about it." "Well," he said, "you think about it." Said, "I think the students will really help you." I said, "John, they might do that, and on the other hand, you know (laughs), they might really hurt me, too." "Well," he said, "don't worry about it." Well, as I say, that was in `55 and I did decide, after giving it some thought and talking to a few people that were a lot more politically mature than this student- SUCHANEK: Like who? BARTON: Oh, I don't know. Let's see. Who-well, I talked to this boy's father for one, whom I knew pretty well and who knew me pretty well, and I talked to Ms. Florence Wyman, who I mentioned a while ago, the English teacher that we all went to for advice on-it was kind of funny, I called out to make an appointment to come and talk with her about doing this, and I didn't tell her on the telephone what I wanted to talk to her about. I just said, "I have some advice I'd like to get from you. I value your counsel." She had two old maid sisters and she was an old maid, all three of them. So I went out. "Oh," she said, "Lon, come right on." So I went out. She ushered me into the room where the three sisters were sitting just in a row, she and her two sisters, and they motioned to me to sit down over there. She said, "What is it that you want us to advise you about?" And I said, "Well, Ms. Florence, I want you to tell me whether you think, if I should run for the legislature, I would be better off taking a leave of absence from my job here or just cutting off connections and in effect resigning and hoping to get the job back two years from now if I should win." "Oh," she said, "that relieves me, Lon." She said, "I thought maybe you were planning to get married and wanted some advice on that" (Suchanek laughs). So her sister spoke up, her sister was the saddest looking soul that I've ever seen in my life, even when she was just full of joy and just as happy as a June bug she looked like she'd lost her last friend. She just couldn't quite make it to smile, much less laugh. She looked over at Florence and she said, "Florence, you know Lon would not come to us for that sort of advice, don't you (Suchanek laughs)?" Well, that was all I could do to just keep from busting out laughing right then but I didn't. Anyway, I talked to her and I got their thinking, and I made the rounds of, the fellow that was the county judge here then who I respected politically, although I didn't ask him to give me his support or anything, I just said, "What do you think might happen? What do you think I might be able to do?" So I got fairly positive responses and- SUCHANEK: Who was the county judge that you asked? BARTON: It was a fellow named Easley, Vernon Easley. I believe his name was Vernon. He was the brother of the fellow that lived across the street over here, and so I got pretty good feedback, I thought, and I decided then to go ahead and file. And, and the rest I've already told you, that I got all the city and Howard Reed got all the county, and there were twice as many county precincts so Howard got just about twice as many votes. SUCHANEK: Before we get any further- BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: had anyone in your family ever been involved in politics before you? BARTON: Well, not in an elective sense, no. My father was very interested in politics and in government and talked a lot about it and I'm sure helped a lot of candidates, but he never had any elective position or appointed position for that matter. SUCHANEK: Was he a powerful influence here in Graves County? BARTON: Well, he had a lot of friends. I doubt he talked very many of them who had already decided to vote for the other party to vote for me, but people that were not, in fact, I think he approached it like that, "if you're not committed, if you don't have a reason to vote for Mr. Reed, if you don't have some primary obligation already made, I'd appreciate it if you'd help my boy." Things, you know, things like that. And I'm sure that that did some good. It did more good in the next race than it did in the one I lost but, anyway, the fact that he'd run this clothing store downtown there and was a well known merchant and people had traded with him, you know, and the store had a awfully, awfully good reputation here, that helped. So, and then another thing, I talked to this cousin, excuse me, the cousin that I mentioned a while ago who's a double cousin really, I talked to his father who was on the school board, Mr. Benson, and he'd made some school board races here, I guess, by that time, I don't remember, really, two or three, some of these names and some of these timeframes are a little bit hard for me to just specify right now. SUCHANEK: Okay, sure. BARTON: But anyway, I think he'd been in office maybe two or three terms and, you know, Jeff, in Kentucky, I guess it's still this way some places, it's not quite as bad here as it used to be, school board races are some of the most, shall we say, rambunctious. People can get more worked up over electing a member to the school board than they can the President of the United States. So Mr. Benson had been in the kind of, you know, in the trenches when it came to hot elections because he'd had opposition and he'd won and all this. So I went to see him. I said, "Bernie, what would you think if I told you I had decided to run for representative." "Oh," he said, "I think that'd be great. Run, it's a great way to live" (laughs). I said, "Yeah, I'm sure you, I'm sure you'd know." Well, that was pretty much the, I don't remember anybody just flat out saying, "You're stupid. Just forget it." I don't remember any of that response. But as it turned out, these people were very helpful, and my biggest error, I guess, my biggest mistake was that I, that I didn't really pay as much attention to the county as I should have. I was, I was trying to build up my base so well in the city that it didn't make any difference what the county did, and I ignored it more than I should have. And on top of that I was teaching and I think I could not get out at, and do the work in the county, although that was back when we had the August primary and I did have from June when school was over till August, and that's when I did my work in the county primarily. But this other fellow, as I said, he was a well-liked, popular administrator. He had had contacts with hundreds and hundreds of parents and students in three different schools, two different schools, and lived in a third school district. So he was the ideal candidate to beat me and he, he did. And I don't imagine I would've run against him if he had chosen to run the next time. I mean I expect I'd have just said, "Well, I've tried it and I liked it, I'll forget it." But soon, when I found out that he was not going to run, I don't know whether he got disenchanted or whether he just felt like that it was more than he wanted to fool with. At that time you wouldn't get rich at all, and I don't guess you'd get rich now, but our pay was rather pathetic to consider the distance from here to-I didn't take- SUCHANEK: No, you're fine. BARTON: considering the distance from here to Frankfort, you know. SUCHANEK: Sure. BARTON: It's not like from Lexington to Frankfort, but- SUCHANEK: Well, it required that you stay in Frankfort, is that right? BARTON: And we certainly had to stay in Frankfort. And one of the people that gave me an awful lot of help in Frankfort was a gentleman by the name Hickman Baldree, he was the fellow that I lived with up there. They lived right across, just, I guess it's just west of the Capitol, a little street that's got four houses on it, Tanner Court or Tanner Drive, I, one or the other. They lived right over there and they were from here. They were Mayfield people. He'd been the county school superintendent, and he'd lost his job here as county school superintendent and he'd gone to Frankfort and, and had gotten in the Vocational Ed. Department in the state Department of Education, and I stayed with him and his wife and they were just absolutely lovely people. They're both dead now. Mrs. Baldree died just a few months ago. He'd been, he died some years back. But anyway, he was one of the kind of people who had a very philosophical approach to government. It was more than just nuts and bolts, in other words. He, he looked, he was a great Jeffersonian. He believed in a very strict construction of the Constitution and, of course, that's where I was coming from pretty much, too. And so we would have just endless talks after the sessions were over. I'd come home and I'd be sort of played out and worn out and I'd go out to eat. They didn't provide boarding but there were several of us that lived there. Art Schmidt lived there, I think he's still in the legislature. Art is in the Senate now- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: but back then he was in the House and Lambert Hehl lived there, as I said a while ago. And in 18--, 1958, Jim Newberry lived there. Well, sometimes there'd be a group of us in the living room and the den, sometimes it'd just be me because I had little more connection with the family since they were from here too, and we'd talk politics and what had happened that day and what might happen the next day. And Mr. Baldree inevitably would get it back into this philosophical stream. And I, I really felt like that I got a tremendous amount of help. A while ago when I said Bennett Wall gave me a lot of help, I may have said or I may not have said that there was another fellow there in Frankfort that, that did the same way, and that was my landlord whose name was Hickman Baldree. Very highly respected, very honorable fellow. And his folks here were that way, and so I feel like I got a real good introduction to politics from Bennett Wall in one sense of the word, the, what you might call the mechanics, the nuts and bolts and from Baldree, who was more interested in the philosophical and the, and the theoretical approach, but the two blended. And I got, I think I got the, a good bit of my own personal political thinking from talking with both of them. SUCHANEK: Okay. Now, when you ran for the General Assembly, what was the local political situation like here in Mayfield and Graves County? You know, by going back through the newspapers one gets the impression that there was more interest in local public offices like judgeships and the sheriff's office. BARTON: Um-hm. SUCHANEK: What was-was there, was there a "Doc" Beauchamp type of figure here? BARTON: Yeah. Oh, yes. There was a fellow here who was extremely influential. Well, I've already told you one in a totally different, in a totally different context, the banker, Mr. Gardner. He had the bank and he, he had along with it he had political influence and he knew how to deal with people. And a lot of folks, I'm sure, a lot of folks in Mayfield and Graves County, and for that matter his influence extended outside of just these, you know, this county, went to the polls to vote like Mr. Gardner wanted them to vote. Now, that wasn't to say that it was a bad vote. Many times it was a good one. But I'm saying that he had that kind of influence. And then we had a fellow here for years who was the president of the Merit Clothing Company that had a tremendous amount of political clout. His name was Willy Foster, and Willy employed, I guess at peak time, now, of course, this-a man's suit manufacturing company would have seasonal ups and downs in employment, they'd have layoffs between fall and summer production and so on, but I think maybe at a peak Willy employed twenty-two, twenty- three hundred people at the Merit, which is a big plant right over here in the edge of downtown on the east side. SUCHANEK: Yes. BARTON: Willy did a great deal. He, somebody could really do a fine monograph sometime on the advanced thinking of the Merit Clothing Company and, for that matter, the Curlee, which was his big rival right across town over here in West Mayfield, which didn't employ near that many but it was a, it was a big, big company. They distributed all over the United States. But both of them and esp--, but especially Willy, did things for the people that worked over there that in that day nobody else in industry, I'm sure around here, ever even thought about doing that. It might've been that up in your part of the country where industry was a big factor this was done, but around here the Merit and the Curlee were unique. Now, they had, for instance, at the Merit, where Willy was the top guy, they had a library of something like two or three thousand volumes. They had a clubhouse. They had a dining room. They had a daycare center, which is still something that not all industries have picked up on completely. They took care of the kids that the parents worked there, you know. They had a softball team that used to win national championships. Played in New Orleans and Pensacola and Chicago and, I don't know, everywhere. They had a softball field, one of the finest softball fields in the country that was put up by the Merit Clothing Company over here. They had a band. They had a Glee Club. What, Jeff, what I'm saying is, it was more than just a place to go to work and turn out so many pants and so many coats and so many vests, you know, a day. It was, it was really a community. And he hired people from all over the county. He ran his own bus system. Now what I'm saying, he, I guess I'm really saying, the Merit Clothing Company, there was a board of directors naturally that ran it but- SUCHANEK: Sure. BARTON: but Willy was the, he was the key man. He was the top man and he was interested in politics although he was very down to earth and very plain and very unassuming and all of that, he, he had lots of money and he had lots of friends and he had lots of power. Consequently he pretty well determined how things were gonna go, you know, in local races. SUCHANEK: Would you say that he and Gardner were on opposite sides of the fence? BARTON: No, no, they weren't. They were, it was an alliance. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: And so, he was Senator Barkley's, now, I'm trying to think, when Barkley ran for the Senate the last time, that was in the 1950s but I don't recall the exact year, maybe '56 or 7, somewhere along in there- SUCHANEK: Yeah, Barkley died in '56 or '58, I think. BARTON: I believe he did. Well, when, when did he? He ran for the Senate just before that and got elected-of course, he was vice president until '52- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: and then I think he ran-the years that I was over in Korea, at the time that I was over there I really didn't keep up that closely with what was happening in the government but I think it was about '53 maybe or 4 when he ran for the Senate. Willy was his statewide campaign chairman, that's how much faith Barkley had in Willy's- SUCHANEK: I see. BARTON: ability to deliver the votes. And then in '55-you want to change that? SUCHANEK: Yes, we have to change tapes here. [End of Tape 1, Side 2] [Begin of Tape 2, Side 1] BARTON: (Laughs) if there is anything I can- SUCHANEK: This is, this is tape number two of the Lon Carter Barton interview. BARTON: Well, I hope you'll edit it very carefully (Suchanek laughs). SUCHANEK: You're doing fine. BARTON: Well, I'm, I'm having to recall some things off the top, off the top of my head, I'm not at all sure I'm getting it right, but the, the thing I was gonna say, Willy in '55 when I was running for representative that year, that was the governor's year as you know, "Happy" Chandler and the Bert Combs. Well, well, Willy had up to this point in time been pretty close to the Clements-Beauchamp and now Combs- Wetherby side. All of a sudden he, before the primary, Willy switched and went to "Happy". And, of course, this, this was strong "Happy" Chandler area, this, "Happy" I don't expect ran any better anywhere in the state than he did in Graves County and these adjacent counties. But anyhow, Willy was very instrumental in getting "Happy" some, a big part of his vote in the purchase and especially here. So, back to your question, I guess, it was, were there any figures around here that did exert political influence? Those two were extremely important. SUCHANEK: Did they help, did either one of them help you get elected in '57? BARTON: No. They really didn't. I didn't run against them but the fellow that ran against me was one of the fellows that worked at the Merit and he was a very strong opponent. I suppose that was- SUCHANEK: That was Pete Bennett? BARTON: Pete Bennett. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. BARTON: I suppose that was written up as an upset. In fact I'm sure it must have been an upset because Pete had the, had the machine, if you call it a machine. I use that word respectfully, I don't mean to say it's a negative connotation because I never, I never disliked either Mr. Gardner or Mr.-in face, my father sold Willy's suits all his life in his store and was very close to Willy in a lot of different things but, and of course, he was close to Mr. Gardner. Anybody had to be close (laughs) to Mr. Gardner that expected to be in business around here very long because they had to borrow money from him. But to, just to say that, that Pete was one of Willy's very closest friends-in fact, was one of his kinfolks and worked for him and had worked for him a long time. And Pete was an ideal candidate. He was just really great as a, as a campaigner. About that time they had moved the primary to May and that doubled my problem because I was still teaching and trying to get out and, and make the contacts I knew they had to be made and teach and as I recall the date of the election was the same day that I gave my last final exam. It was a real, it was a real mess, the timing of it I mean. SUCHANEK: Well, with all of that against you, how did you win? BARTON: Well, I, I had a lot of people listening. I think the students probably, you see, Pete, let's just say it like this. Pete had the employees at the Merit- SUCHANEK: Which was a lot of people? BARTON: which was a lot of people and a lot of families unless these employees had kids that I'd had in school. That discounted a fair percent because I had, I had people tell me years later that their kids came home and said, "If you even think about voting against Mr. Barton we're through" (Suchanek laughs). And, of course, I appreciated this kind of support. I think basically that's where it came from. It was not from the political, it was not from the political figures because I think it would be fair to say that most of them were lined up with Pete because Pete was pretty obviously the favorite and I've always been very proud of the fact that, that the kids did so much work for me in that election. And it as, it was a definite surprise to everybody that I had managed to win-but then another thing, Pete had never run for public office. This was his maybe disadvantage. Pete never had his name on a countywide ballot and I had. As I said a while ago, you nearly, in a county this size and if you want to conduct a campaign the way I had to conduct mine and the way he had to conduct his, the name recognition meant a lot of votes. Even though the people may have voted against you the first time they recognized your name and they might think, "well, I might as well vote for him because he's trying again." And so I thought some of it was due to that. And then I guess, maybe I was able to appeal to the fairly good number of independent voters. Now, I'm talking about little "i." People that had seen the first Chandler session pretty well go along with anything the governor said, do, "this is what we want, we want to take the tax off of Keeneland." "Okay, we take the tax off of Keeneland." "We want to do this or we want to do that," it was done, it was- SUCHANEK: That was the pari-mutuel- BARTON: Yeah, it was- SUCHANEK: betting, right? BARTON: Right. Yeah. It was, it was a pretty well, it appeared to be a pretty well cut-and-dry type of thing. SUCHANEK: Which is how things ran back then. BARTON: Which is-that's exactly right. And the first session of any governor's term tends to be more of a honeymoon anyway, just general, general principles. But anyway, I think that there were a lot of people, maybe not, I shouldn't say a lot because I didn't win the race by a lot. I won it, I think, by maybe three or four hundred votes or in that neighborhood. SUCHANEK: Four hundred and forty. BARTON: Was that, you know more about it than I do (laughs). Anyway, there were at least four hundred and forty people that voted in that race that agreed with my advertisements in the paper and I said very plainly that I felt that the job of the legislator was to use his independent judgment and to vote as he felt the people that elected him wanted him to vote when he could. And I said I will not be under the domination of any group, pressure group, interest group, governor's group, anybody else and I said by that I do not mean that I am going to be an obstructionist and being a professional "aginer" (a person generally against everything) because we had two or three of those in Mayfield and if I'd ever lined up with them I'd been shot dead politically, maybe otherwise. I said I'm going to go to Frankfort completely unobligated to any group, any people, any person. Well, I think that, as I said, at least four hundred and forty people agreed with that view and that did not reflect at all on Pete's character, on Pete's reputation. He was a gentleman of, in every way. And I'll say this, I'm glad it is too, that considering all the so-called negative campaigning that we've heard so much about neither I nor my opponents ever saw fit to get into that sort of thing at all. SUCHANEK: No, no mud slinging? BARTON: We, we stayed, right. We stayed on a level that today, one of my very best friends is Walter Apperson over here at Murray who publishes the paper, he was my opponent in 19 and I guess fifty- SUCHANEK: '61, I believe. BARTON: '61 I guess, one of my best friends. He was a former student, as a matter of fact. SUCHANEK: Was that right (both laugh)? BARTON: Yeah. But anyway, he did a, he did a hard campaign. He did a very strong, very active campaign and he hit hard but it was on the record, what my votes had been on some things that he thought were pretty bad. And that was the way it should've been because I would've done the same thing if the situation had been reversed. If you've got a record then part of the, part of the territory is that you've got to either run on it or you don't run on it and if you chose to run you just automatically run on it. But at any rate, neither one of us had a record, Pete or I, either one. And all I did was just simply say I'm gonna be using my own independent judgment and, and I'm going to vote the way that I feel that the people that elect me and send me there want me to vote when I possibly can. And, but it was considered an upset, Jeff, it was, it was an upset. SUCHANEK: What did you family think about you getting involved in politics? BARTON: Well, they kind of, my father was all for it. He just thought it was great. My mother was not as enthusiastic about it. She thought I was getting out of line. She thought I should stay here and teach and that was the main reason, I don't think it was politics per se. I think if I'd said I want to go to Frankfort to work or to Lexington to a school or if I wanted to get out of Mayfield, it would've been all the same for her. She wanted me to stay right here and teach and-however, she would, she was very excited about this, about this election and she did, she went out with her particular, you know, nearly everybody's got a constituency and with her particular group she did some pretty hard- line campaigning for me. And as I said a while ago, my father went out and he was just great on talking to people. Of course, he knew near everybody in the country. And my mother's father must've been, I never knew him, he died before I was born, wasn't a year I believe, but if there ever was a politician that was a shrewd one in the, in the sense of lining up help for people, he never ran for anything himself, but he ran a grocery up on the square and he fed about two thirds of Graves County every Saturday on cheese and crackers. He just literally gave it away and people had come in there and they'd get cheese and crackers and then they might buy some other things too but maybe they wouldn't. He sold everything, even sold casket s up on the top floor (both laugh) and so I was named after him. Lon Carter is not a real ordinary run-off-the-mill name. I doubt there's, I've never known more than five or six Lon's and no other Lon Carters but that was his name. So I would give out my cards with my name on it and especially out in the south part of the county where he had come from, where he'd been in business before he moved here. They'd take a look, these old people would take a look at this card, "Lon Carter, Lon Carter, you any kin to Lon Carter who used to be in the grocery business?" "Yes, sir, I'm his grandson and my mother is his daughter." "Ginny is your mother!?" "Yeah, she's my-." The last time they'd heard of Ginny was when she was a little ten- year-old girl running up and down the road but" I knew your granddaddy. He was the finest man that ever was." And I have no reason to question one way or the other, I didn't know. But anyhow, that's what they thought. Well, apparently it was by, it was the opposite to guilt by association, it was, it was support- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: by association. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: And, of course, now Pete had that same advantage. His folks had been in this county as long as mine had nearly and he-however, he didn't have the advantage of having their name. You know, that has a lot to do with how you come across, whether your name is connected with some familiar figure of other days. If his middle name had been Overbey, probably he'd had gotten a couple of hundred more votes. I've, I've often wondered about it but anyway, his mother's people were Overbey's and they were old, old settlers out here east of town. But he, he didn't have that advantage- SUCHANEK: There was an Overbey- BARTON: it was just Pete Bennett. SUCHANEK: Yeah, there was Overbey that served in the legislature. BARTON: Yeah, oh, from Murray. SUCHANEK: George, I- BARTON: George. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: Right. So, I don't know. You know, looking back there's lots of little sort of pieces of the puzzle that fit together sometimes but at any rate, I think my father just, really just rejoiced in my, and I know my grandfather would have if he would've been here, it was just, I don't know whether he could've stood it or not but (laughs)- SUCHANEK: Well, let me ask you this. BARTON: Yes sir. SUCHANEK: And this is a three-part question- BARTON: Okay. SUCHANEK: what professional qualifications, personal qualities, or personal experience or knowledge did you feel that you had that qualified you for the General Assembly? BARTON: Okay. Now, the first one was just knowledge of the business. Well, I, I guess, I answered just about three of those without appearing to brag in the, in the announcement notice in the paper. I said something to the effect, I have taught history and government or civics in the high school for ever how many years that that was and I have maintained a very keen interest in political affairs in the city, in city government, in county government, on the local levels, in other words, and I had done my work at Murray State as a, as a history major. I gave history as much plug as I could, and that I gave as a, as a qualification. And then on the next one-well now, personal, what was the question, Jeff? SUCHANEK: Personal experience. BARTON: Personal, I really couldn't point to any personal experience in practicing in politics since this was my first race but you see, that didn't give Pete much advantage because this was his first whack at it too. We were playing on a level field. Now, if that had been Howard, like I said, I don't expect I would've run because he would've come back and said, "I was there, I, whether you like it or not, I knew what I was doing, I learned the game. Send me back." Pete couldn't do any of that. So, I don't know that I tried to say anything about experience other than just the, the knowledge standpoint. And- SUCHANEK: How big a factor is, and it sounds terrible to say this- BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: but how big a factor does ego play in it? BARTON: Well, for a person that's kind of inclined to be egotistical I'd say a pretty big amount but I just never did care to get into that. I didn't, I didn't say it, I said, I didn't say anything that I really intended for anybody to interpret as being bragging. Some of the things that I said, I, you know, might have sounded like that to some people but I just pointed out that I had always had an interest in government, local level, state level, that I had taught for x years and that my teaching had been in the field of history and government and that I had graduated at Murray State with majors in history. And that just about took care of it. But now, there, there was a third part of the question that I don't remember what it, besides the qualific--- SUCHANEK: Personal, personal qualities. BARTON: You can't do much on that without sounding egotistical whether you want to or not. I think here's what I said though, I said, "my life has been spent in Mayfield, it is an open book. Almost everyone who has known me can testify to the fact that I have tried to do what I thought was right in every situation." And that was about it. I mean it, I don't like this idea, and I still don't like this idea, of parading your piety and your goodness and your qualities of noble character around, you know. I think that's, sometimes it's hypocrisy, that's even worse, but even if it's not, it sort of leaves the wrong taste in my mouth somehow or another. SUCHANEK: What did the school administration think about you running for- BARTON: Well, they, they were neutral on it. They said, if you want to do it we'll be glad to let you take a leave or separate. And I separated, that was a mistake. I just told them I didn't want to be, I didn't want to burden them with the idea of filling my job for two months out of the nine-months school year and I said rather than do that I'll just come back and hope that there will be a, hope there will be an opening. And that's the way I did it. Of course, I didn't come back just two years, it was another several years before I did but, I later found out that I just lost a whole lot of retirement benefits that would've accrued had I stayed on the payroll and contributed to the retirement system while I was in the legislature. But that was water under the bridge by that time. But the school people were very cooperative. They, they were perfectly willing to do it. I did, I did confine my campaigning to Saturdays and to weekend, I mean to Saturdays and to nights and afternoons. And frankly, Jeff, just between us I'm pretty sure I didn't do the job in the classroom that final semester before I, before the election that I had done and, and should've done because even if I, even, you know, I didn't miss any schooldays, I don't believe, may have missed one, I don't recall, but anyway, even if, even not missing any days in class I was preoccupied for at least six weeks before the election which, as I said, was on the very day I was scheduled for a final. And that just wasn't good from the school's standpoint. SUCHANEK: That's understandable. BARTON: I had my mind on where I was gonna go that afternoon, what I was gonna try to do the next day, who I was gonna try to see in that precinct, where they were, you know, it, it was just a difficult thing. And that's another reason that I decided that I wouldn't return to the job after one term I thought, now if I do run again I'm not gonna- [phone rings] there's my telephone, can I get unhooked? SUCHANEK: Sure. Let's go ahead and pause. [Pause in tape] BARTON: wear you out. SUCHANEK: Okay. Whoops. BARTON: That same thing didn't fall off, did it? SUCHANEK: No, no, this is something different here. Okay. Okay, describe for me then, Lon, the ethnic, you've already described a little bit of the, of the economic, but also some of the religious makeup of Graves County and your constituents. BARTON: Hmm- SUCHANEK: That was the ethnic and basically the religious and economic, there might be other things. You've mentioned the clothing firms here. BARTON: Well, the economics here is, has been, based on agriculture primarily and within that, tobacco primarily. Tobacco production was the very lifeblood of Graves County before the Civil War all the way back to the time when Graves County was started. In fact, the very first case in court in Graves County was decided when the plaintiff, I believe it was the plaintiff, was given a 150 pounds of tobacco in lieu of a fine of so much money. And tobacco has been a big item as far as farming goes since then. But, of course, there is a fairly large degree of industry here now, the textile industry is, has always been, or least ever since 1900 or before, has been a part of our local economy in Mayfield and now the largest General Tire Plant and their system is located just north of here a few miles. We have an Ingersoll-Rand air compressor unit company here and we have several smaller industries that have a combined payroll of a good many million dollars a year. So, from the economic standpoint we're fairly diversified. From the ethnic standpoint I guess, we're fairly diversified too now. The old original Anglo-Saxon- Scotch-Irish stock that came in here at the beginning has been added to by folks that have moved in from other parts of the country and, of course, we've always had black citizens here, the black population has sort of gone up and down according to the decade but right now I think about, oh, possibly 9 or 10 percent of Mayfield is colored, not so much in the county any longer, that's probably a demographic change from earlier times. There was a time that an awful lot of the, of the black farmers lived, of course, in their county homes but for one reason or another they have moved into town, or their descendants have moved into town, and so the black population in, outside of Mayfield is not all that great any longer but in Mayfield it's somewhere close to 10 percent probably. And as far as the religious, well, before I get to that, there is not and never has been a particularly large foreign constituency here, more now than in the past of course, but still probably in the very lower percentages of, of the total population, maybe, oh, less than 1 percent or certainly not much over 1 percent of people that were born in places like England or Germany or Russia although there are a number of, a number of young fellows from here married overseas when they were in World War II. Consequently, a good friend of mine's wife is a German girl and another one is from Scotland so there have been some immigration from Europe. The Hispanic population is, I expect, even below that of European here, with the exception of a fairly large number of Hispanic migrant farm workers, I don't know really but one or two families. I do know of a few families that are either Spanish or, or of Latin American descent. The religious breakdown here I suppose would be, well it's overwhelmingly Protestant to start with although there is one community in Graves County, which is a fairly well known place because they have this big, big, big picnic here, Fancy Farm, which is a political event of its own, is nearly totally Catholic and it was started in the 1830s by a group of Catholic settlers that moved down here from around Bardstown who themselves had moved to that area from Maryland even, even earlier. And so you have a large number of Catholic people living in the west part of the county and you have a fairly sizable Catholic group in Mayfield now with the arrival from other places to these plants that I mentioned, a good many of those folks have been Catholic. And among the Protestants I would suppose that probably the Baptists would be the most numerous. I believe there are forty-two or forty-three Baptist churches in Graves County. And then the others would come along like the Methodists, and the Church of Christ is very strong here in this area, and the Presbyterians have several churches, all of them but one is a Cumberland Presbyterian Church though, and the Christian Church, Disciples, has a strong church here in Mayfield. I don't think there is another one in the county. So, it's, I have really no idea of the percentage breakdown between the Protestant and Catholic but it's a, it's pretty much what it has been all along, there's no great change I don't believe in this respect over the, over the years. Jewish people are here to some extent but not nearly so much as they were fifty years ago. We just lost a prominent Jewish lady this week and also a couple of weeks ago a very well known young man, a Jewish fellow, died and with these two deaths in that particular community, the total population of the, of the Jewish people here has dwindled down to only about a couple of families. And I recall quite well that forty or fifty years ago there were at least a half dozen Jewish merchants downtown, each of them having fairly large families and now it's down, I think, to just about two. So, there has been a change with the, with the Jewish group but- SUCHANEK: And politically this is Democrat country. BARTON: Pardon me? SUCHANEK: Politically this is a Democratic- BARTON: Very Democratic. We have not gone Republican but just a few times. The first, the first time that Graves County went Republican on a presidential election was in 1972 and, of course, that wasn't terribly surprising because most of the country went that way then. And I believe that, I believe that Ronald Reagan either carried Graves County in one of his elections or just did miss it was very narrow. As a matter of fact, neither, neither of the elections that Reagan was in either in '80 or '84 did the Democrats do as well here as they normally did do, as they used to do. But then in the last election with, with Bush and the Dukakis thing, Bush did not win the county but, here again, he ran a relatively close race. SUCHANEK: Now, in the '57 primary, I mean the '57 general election you didn't have any opposition? BARTON: No. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: No, I was lucky enough to get by without any opposition in November in any of them. And I didn't have any opposition in the primary a couple of times. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: But although I enjoyed the luxury of running without having to be so tensed up most of the time and spending money to travel from one end of this big county to the other in an election year and to do all of that-although that was helpful to me I missed a little bit the plain old, I guess you'd say, thrill of making the race with somebody or against somebody and- SUCHANEK: That gets in your blood, doesn't it? BARTON: It really does, it really seems to. It becomes a sort of a thing that you miss when you, when you don't have it. But even when I didn't have opposition I tried to make the rounds pretty well to let people know that I was interesting in what they were thinking and what they thought I ought to do in the next session and all of that. SUCHANEK: Well, before we get into your actual participation in the General Assembly- BARTON: Um-hm, um-hm. SUCHANEK: I'd like to ask you a couple of philosophical questions if I may. First of all, before you went to Frankfort for the first time as a member of the General Assembly- BARTON: Um-hm. SUCHANEK: what did you think the role of government in society was? What function did you think government was supposed to perform in society? BARTON: I was a very strict constructionist. I guess that came from both reading Jefferson and hearing people talk about Jefferson. My father was that way. Consequently, I guess, you might put me down as a conservative in that particular sense. I, of course, recognize the fact that 1800 was a long time ago and the times changed and you have to change with them, but I had, I had pretty much a basic view that government had some very definite responsibilities on the national level-now, this is more the national than it is the state because I didn't apply the Jeffersonian thinking to the state level quite- SUCHANEK: Why not? BARTON: so much then. Well, I mean then. Well, I really wasn't thinking too much about state politics enough so to put it in that framework but on the national level it appeared to me that Jefferson was more right than he was wrong in believing that the power ought to be put in the hands of people in a way that they could handle it and supervise it or control it in the easiest way and that government that got too remote and got too distant and got too strong in the sense of being the-centralized, really the centralized authority, over centralized I should say, was pretty risky thing. So I have always been pretty much a believer in the idea of less government as opposed to more government. And I think today that, and in fact I guess over the time I was in the legislature, I suppose I inclined to that viewpoint on the, on the applying it to the state, to the state level. And, of course, I know that you can't today take this sort of nonchalant attitude in government toward every day activities that you say, just let anything go, no regulation is necessary, no control is really necessary. Now, that's not the, that's not the point. But I think there are some generally broad areas that cities, counties can work out as well for themselves as they might be worked out for them by various experts in Frankfort. SUCHANEK: So you favor home rule? BARTON: So, that's what I'm coming to. I think, I think home rule although apparently by the vote last month on the, what was it, the third amendment question? Not many people agreed with me, but I do think- SUCHANEK: Maybe they didn't understand it (laughs). BARTON: Well, those to me were terribly, terribly poorly written amendments. I don't know that they could've been written any differently but they were confusing, even the one that passed was confusing. But anyway, I think that the, that the more that people can do on their own as interested citizens on a local level as possible the better. And as I said, this doesn't overlook the fact that there's a lot of things that are done on the state level that must be done on the state level and should be done on the state level. But just as, well, just as the state is to the national government, the local community is to the state government, as I have, as I have always seen it. Now, I may change my mind completely on this some time but as of now and as of the time I was in the legislature I really felt this way. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. Well, when you first went to the legislature, Lon, did you have a legislative agenda that you wanted to accomplish? BARTON: Not in a specific easily stated one-two-three-four fashion, no. There were some things that people had brought up to me that I was very glad to listen to, that involved some things that they thought needed to be done and I had a good many different ones to call and come and write and make contact, and it was not all about fixing this road or getting this bridge repaired-this is a big part of the game, I found that out. It really doesn't matter a great deal about your record per se in voting on issues if you can get roads fixed, if you can bridges fixed, if you can get things done for people, if you can be of help to them in their, in their contacts with offices in state government, if you're, in other words, if you're a good servant of the people that goes a long way towards helping you win races. Not to say that you can just cast out any kind of a, of a reaction from your voting record because I'm sure you can't do that but I did find that that's not as important and apparently in the judgment of a lot of people as doing things that they needed to have done for them. SUCHANEK: Things that they can see and feel and touch? BARTON: Things that you-yeah, right, things that are a part of their everyday lives mean a whole lot. Which-and I say that not critically at all. I think that's as it should be, but that was a little bit of a difference from what I had anticipated when I went in. I had the idea that people were gonna just take my voting record and look at every bill and every resolution and every parliamentary move and say he did that on this, he did right on this, this is terrible, this is awful, this is better. I don't think they did. I think when my next door neighbor that lived across over here, wanted a county road fixed for half a mile or gravel put on it out here on the, off the Farmington Highway, he was on my front door step every time I came back from Frankfort for a solid month wanting to know if I had heard anything from the Highway Department about getting his road fixed. Finally was able to tell him that I had and that if he just be patient and just wait a little while longer that the Highway Department had assured me that they would get it just as early as the spring, the spring weather would permit them to work on it, which satisfied him. Now, he didn't know whether I, he didn't know whether I voted to move the Capitol to Prestonsburg (Suchanek laughs), and he cared less. I don't think it would've made a bit of difference but he was so interested in that, in that road. Another fellow was so interested in getting antique automobile license plates authorized that he called me regularly, every weekend. He was a retired teacher and he didn't, I don't believe, of course, I never asked him, but I don't believe that he would have been as upset if he had known that retired teachers' pensions had been cut than if he had known that the governor had vetoed his antique automobile license plate law which he did. SUCHANEK: Which you helped sponsor, right? BARTON: Which I helped sponsor because of him. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: And strangely enough and coincidentally enough that old fellow who talked to me the weekend before the session ended called me when the session did end to ask what had happened to the bill the next week when I came home. I said, "The bill went through, it was almost unanimous, we've got it all fixed, you can rest now without any more trouble." And lo and behold, in the paper two or three days later after we'd come home, I saw where the governor had vetoed the bill, and I called the old fellow to pass on the bad news and the day the governor had vetoed the bill he'd a heart attack and died. He was no longer alive but he'd lived long enough to find out that at least that the bill had passed and was awaiting the signature of the governor. Well, at any rate, now this is kind of the thing I said I was gonna stop talking about, all this kind of reminiscing is just- SUCHANEK: (Laughs) that, that's what we want. Let me just turn this over again real quick. [End of Tape 2, Side 1] [Begin of Tape 2, Side 2] BARTON: some time come together. SUCHANEK: (Laughs) okay. BARTON: Ya'll can, ya'll can be a good team. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: But anyway, is that fixed? SUCHANEK: Yes, it's fixed. BARTON: My thinking was when it came to an agenda that I'd try to follow what I thought people here wanted although there was times that they wanted some things that I really didn't particularly agree with. That puts you in a sort of a bind. For instance, at that time there was a lot of support for a law that would make the county school superintendent elected by the people- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: instead of being appointed by school board members. As I said a while ago, a school board race could be a terrible hot thing and sometimes people got the impression that school board members were elected because the county school superintendent went out and politicked for them and they in turn would give the school superintendent a contract for another four years and it was an unending process where you never got a new school superintendent and you never got new school board members and in some places there was a lot of dissatisfaction about that. This was one of them. There were a lot of people that talked to me about a bill that would take the superintendent out of politics. Well, to me when you make a direct election here, a set up, you might run as great a risk of keeping a job in politics as taking it out of politics, but I introduced some legislation along that line, a little bit different from just having the superintendent elected by popular vote like we did back years ago and it really didn't pay off too much then. I, I used my, whatever value my information on history had to me in this where we at one time did have that situation but it wasn't the reason they changed it was that it didn't work too well. But anyway, I did introduce a bill in response to this request down here that county board members should run at large just like city board members do and there was less opportunity then for gerrymandering of districts to be done. The board members would have a little broader interest than just the interest of their own district. Now, they'd be interested in the schools county wide to a greater degree than they would, I think there was some rational points behind this, the fact that it did never get out of committee is another question. But at any rate, this was done because, not so much that I wanted to see the system changed drastically to give the, the direct vote to the people for the school superintendent as it was that I felt like it was my obligation to carry out what obviously was a strong feeling in this county. I went to the fiscal court in order to, in order to get a judgment on whether I was just getting one side of a very one-sided, lopsided view or not. I would go a lot of times to fiscal court meetings and I just poll these guys that came from every part of Graves County and said, "What do you think your people think about this or what do you think that they would do with this?" Now I don't believe you can legislate very responsibly by running polls, I don't believe that but at the same time there are some questions that you might not be able to get the pulse of the community any other way except to take a poll and I thought that was about as reasonable a poll as I could find as far as the individuals were concerned because the fiscal court was made up at that time of eight magistrates. They represented separate districts, they represented all factions. They would not get anymore mileage out of saying that this was the case than they would saying this was the case. And I made it clear to them that I was just seeking information. I wasn't trying to put them on the spot, I just wanted to find out if they could honestly tell me. I found that to be useful sometimes to do that. But on the other hand, sometimes you have to use your own judgment because after all when they vote for you, this is what Florence Wyman told me one time, she said, "When the people vote for you to go to Frankfort they are voting for you to use your own best judgment to do the job as you think best based on what you know, and based on what you have been able to find out that they don't know and based on what you are capable of concluding using your own brain power, if you have it, and your own mind and your own rational thinking and then people won't, won't complain." And I think in a lot of cases that's exactly right. You can't, you can't run a representative democracy by a plebiscite very well. And still, at the same time I would the last person on earth to say that when the people's will is expressed in such a way that there is no reasonable doubt about what they want to, just flaunt that will and say, "the heck with you, I'm gonna go the way I want to go whether it's like you want it or not." I think that is irresponsible too. That, that's a tough call though, Jeff. That was probably the toughest calls I had was trying to decide if, as I said you can't run back and take a survey every time you have a thing to vote on- SUCHANEK: Right. Plus you have more information. BARTON: Plus I had more information. And I had an opportunity to get as much from all sides as anybody else. But even so, you like to feel like when you came home for the remaining two years before the next session (both laugh) that you were fairly safe when you went to the coffee shop and went downtown- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: the job didn't pay enough to be a martyr. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: And consequently-but beyond that I honestly have always felt like, let me go back to my original position here that, that as long as people had a voice in who they send to the legislature they should also have a voice in what that legislature does. And if you can listen to the people and apply what they feel to a statute or to a bill, if it does not violate the whole concept of good government, I think it's pretty incumbent to consider that very heavily. SUCHANEK: Did you ever have a situation where a piece of legislation came up that was beneficial to your constituents but perhaps- BARTON: Not beneficial- SUCHANEK: detrimental to the commonwealth as a whole? BARTON: That's another, that's another tough call, yeah. I don't know that I ever, I don't remember any given example of that but I know what you're saying. For example- SUCHANEK: I'm thinking about perhaps some environmental legislation that- BARTON: Okay, let me give you- SUCHANEK: perhaps that didn't happen in your term. BARTON: let me give you, let me give you though the example here. This was, I don't remember really which year, '60 or'62 but it was one or the other I think. The Kentucky-Tennessee clay mines that have big operations down here and have many people working, still do at Pryorsburg, mined at that time, and I suppose still do, mined their clay by strip mining. Now, that's not the strip mining that has defaced the eastern coalfields, it's a different, it's a different technology, it's a different way of doing it. They do things to get the clay out differently from the way they do to get the coal out and I don't remember enough about the details to begin to describe it. But the, but it is by the strip mining process. They just strip off layers. And I don't know, I voted to exclude, I think I introduced this, there's one other place in Kentucky, there are only two counties in Kentucky that have clay, ball clay, ceramic clay. Graves is one and one of the counties in Eastern Kentucky, I believe that's Lewis County, somewhere up there on the Ohio River is the other one. Anyhow, I attached an amendment which I got through to a bigger strip mine bill that would exclude the Kentucky-Tennessee clay because they, they said that if they had to do their technology on the same basis that they coalfields had to do theirs under this strip mine law, it would just be more than they could handle. This wasn't such a terribly big problem because this was the only county that was affected except that one up there. But say there'd been, say there'd been thirty-five or forty counties that this amendment would've excluded the stripping of clay, I don't know whether I would've been as interested, even considering the economics of it to my home county, if half the state had been affected adversely is what I'm saying. I don't know really, I can't say one way or the other but that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are some rare instances where what you do for you county and your constituents is great but that same exact thing applied to Floyd County up here maybe, or somewhere else, would be very damaging. Then, I think, you've got to-that's why I say I think in the long run maybe home rule is a, is a good way to go because there are some things that can be done locally that don't necessarily have to be applied statewide. But at any rate, I can easily follow your question because, and I expect I could think of some examples but not just offhand. I've- SUCHANEK: Well, what's been in the news lately is the Union Underwear Company Plant. BARTON: Oh, yeah, at Jamestown? SUCHANEK: At Jamestown and, you know, how legislation to perhaps stop that or- BARTON: Right. SUCHANEK: or allow it- BARTON: Right. SUCHANEK: might benefit that particular community- BARTON: But it, but it might do away with the lake. SUCHANEK: it might, it might open the floodgate throughout the commonwealth for people to, or companies to pollute other areas. BARTON: That's true. That's true. I hated that kind of issue really because you, it was a no-win deal. If you, if you voted one way you felt like you were supporting some people but you were hurting others, a lot of others, and if you voted the other way you felt like maybe you were not doing any good for anybody, hurting everybody. Sometimes that's sort of the way you have to look at it, I guess if, even if you, even if you hurt some people, if you help some at the same time it's maybe- SUCHANEK: A wash (laughs). BARTON: better than to hurt everybody. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: And (laughs) so I don't know- SUCHANEK: Yeah. BARTON: there's, you know, Jeff, there's a lot of rationalizing going on in government, a lot of, a lot of, I don't say excuses exactly, but a lot of justifications about things that may or may not be good, solid. I don't, I don't think there are very many at the moment. Like you said though that's a good example, the Union Underwear business and I'm sure there's very sincere people on both sides of it and nobody would accuse anybody of being a, sort of a fraud or anything else for feeling like they do on either side but still it's, it's one of those troublesome questions that goes with the territory and if you don't want to accept it, it's kind of like Harry Truman said, "If you don't like the heat then get out of the kitchen." Now, that's not why I got out of the kitchen exactly but that may have had something to do with it subconsciously. I might've been tired of these, one way or the other- SUCHANEK: Stick ______(??) questions- BARTON: The, you know, the kind of questions that I always hated to tangle with, because I really didn't, I really didn't know, it was ignorance on my part more than anything else and I knew I think as much as the other guys did because I had talked to the lobbyists from both sides and all of that, were questions that basically regarded two professions against each other or two, two kinds of work groups- SUCHANEK: Like doctors versus paramedics. BARTON: doctors, doctors and chiropractors. I never really, I never really did like any of the bills that ever came up between doctors and chiropractors because I can see good on both sides of the line here, I can see some bad things about both sides, and I just always really did hate to get dragged into the middle because that's what it was. We were really being the referee in a sense deciding whether chiropractors ought to be eligible for workmen's comp and whether the chiropractors ought to be accepted in the UMW Hospitals as being a claim that would be fully credited, all that kind of thing. I just always felt like that, that being neither a chiropractor nor a doctor, but having great respect for both, it was putting me on a real hot spot. And I say this, no groups that I believe I recall lobbying in the legislature including the biggies like the teachers and the veterans and all of them, I don't believe that any of them carried on as, any more intensive lobbying than the-every time we saw a bill come in that was gonna be doctors versus chiropractors (laughs) we would say, "Well, here it goes. They'll be on us like ducks on a June bug." And of course, that's what they were supposed to be, they were paid to do that, lobbyists for both of them. And lobbying is an interesting thing too. I had the idea when I went to Frankfort, among other false notions, that there was something kind of negative, there was something kind of sinister about this lobbying. I'd rather, and here again, in my, in my history courses about how the lobbyists used to trade off and buy votes and how one of them, I believe, said Huey Long alone was in Louisiana, some lobbyist said in that Long period that, he could, he could buy the whole legislature for a sack of potatoes or something like it, some crazy remark. SUCHANEK: Well, there were charges during that '58 session by- BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: "Banjo" Bill Cornett- BARTON: Yeah. Yeah. "Banjo" Bill made those charges on the floor. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: You know, he had a heart attack in that session and died, or was it the next session? One or the other, he died right there in the House, in the Capitol. He was a good old guy, always respected and he called it like he saw it and he publicly said, you know, that there were lobbying being done that went against the law. But anyway, I had that impression of lobbying, but I found out that lobbyists were very helpful. You didn't want just listen to one, I mean, on a given issue. If you talked to a lobbyist on the AF of L side you wanted to get the lobbyist from the Chamber of Commerce, or vice versa. And you wanted to line up their arguments and try to come up with some kind of a decision. But as long as you, as long as you listen to both sides, equally, attentively and ask questions of both sides equally, responsibly I found that the lobbyists were more than willing to help you without any inducements or without anything that would be considered illegal. Gah, I learned to change my opinion of most-of course, some lobbyists worried you to death but that went with the territory too. SUCHANEK: You mean by pestering you? BARTON: Yeah. You know, you turn around and here they'd be, two or three of them and finally you get to know the ones that were just nothing but nuisances. But- SUCHANEK: Well, how about- BARTON: but they didn't usually last very long. SUCHANEK: how about wild Bill Cornett's charges then? BARTON: I really don't remember until you mentioned it just and I had, I had forgotten about that incident but I remember it now. I don't know now even what the question was or the, or the discussion was or anything about it but I remember he got on the floor and he was very angry and he-now- SUCHANEK: Well, that was, that came up during the debate on the administration bill designed to rip State Treasurer Henry Carter- BARTON: Um-hm. SUCHANEK: of his power to choose which bank state funds would be deposited in- BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: and wild Bill said that there's a lot of turkey being passed around. BARTON: Well, that was a code word, you know. Turkey was, anytime you had turkey on the table you had money. I'm sure that- SUCHANEK: Maybe he wasn't talking about money because he was, I mean actually cash, because he was talking about administration pressure- BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: you know, maybe what he was talking about was roads in his- BARTON: Oh, yeah. SUCHANEK: you know, or you know- BARTON: Things that, things that could be- SUCHANEK: construction projects- BARTON: things that could be treated as inducements. SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: That was about the only piece of legislation, this comes from the little rechecking I did since yesterday, and I had, I had not remembered all of this, but that was about the only piece that was major legislation that Chandler lost in that second session after all of the uproar and the hoorah and- SUCHANEK: It took twelve roll calls in five hours- BARTON: and all the five hours of oratory and speech making and- SUCHANEK: And he barely lost. BARTON: Barely lost. SUCHANEK: I think it was 46-44. BARTON: I think it was. It was a close one, I know that. SUCHANEK: How did you vote, do you recall? BARTON: How did I vote? SUCHANEK: Yeah. BARTON: I voted with Carter. I was one of that group of rebels in the House- SUCHANEK: Okay. I don't know if I want- BARTON: that caused so much trouble. SUCHANEK: Yeah, I don't know if I want to talk about that now because well, we have, we have some time left (Barton laughs). Well, why don't we talk about some other things first- BARTON: Okay. SUCHANEK: and we're gonna save that for the next time I come down- BARTON: Okay. SUCHANEK: and that'll, I think that'll- BARTON: Well, let me, let me add one thing- SUCHANEK: Go ahead. BARTON: to what I just said. This doesn't reflect or didn't indicate any personal feelings of animosity towards Mr. Chandler at all, I guess I voted for a lot of his ideas but I did vote against the budget and I did vote to amend the budget about twenty times- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: and I did vote against the Force Accounts Bill and against the Ripper Bill and I voted to restore the Keeneland race track. Now, those were, those were things that "Happy" really went all out on. And I simply I couldn't see him. I know one night I ran into "Happy" in the lobby of the Capitol on my way home and he told me, he said, "You boys aren't helping me out much up there." And I said, "Well, governor, there is no personal, personality clash at all, I'm not doing this because of any reason to oppose you. When you have, when you have a bill in there that I really can honestly support and go back home and live with I will certainly do it." I said, "My views on some of these things simply don't coincide with, with the administration view. And you have every reason to have your views and I'm sure you respect my reasons to have my views." And so we left it at that and I, I hope- "Happy's" got a pretty long memory and I hope that- SUCHANEK: (Laughs) he's famous for that isn't it? BARTON: Yeah, and I hope that today he, he doesn't feel that I had any personal vendetta. I think he kind of figured that some of them did, but he used some pretty plain language in referring to some of the rebels too. He said, "the little fellow from Madisonville," referring to Ed Arnold who really, I don't think, had that coming at all. SUCHANEK: Oh, he referred to Henry Carter as the, an adulterous, drunken old man- BARTON: I didn't know that (both laugh). But anyway- SUCHANEK: but I could tell what (laughs), what Carter's reply was on that, but this is on tape so we don't- BARTON: No, better not, better not go beyond that. SUCHANEK: You can read it in John Ed Pierce's book- BARTON: That's right- SUCHANEK: Divide and Dissent. BARTON: Oh, okay. But anyway, I just, I just felt like that there were times in that '58 session that the rebels were more right than they were wrong and that was it. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. BARTON: And I felt that way with Combs and with Breathitt. I was, I was never, you might say a rubberstamp, for either one of them and I liked both of them. Breathitt I'd known, he's got personal tie-ins with Mayfield, you know, his wife was Mayfield girl. SUCHANEK: Oh, I didn't know that. BARTON: Yeah, Francis- SUCHANEK: Is that why you appeared- BARTON: Francis Holleman. SUCHANEK: on the platform with him at a Combs rally in '59? BARTON: I don't know. It may have been. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. BARTON: But anyway- SUCHANEK: I was gonna ask you if that, if that was because you were a member of the Combs' faction? BARTON: Well, I never, I guess in a loose sense when you compare it to the Chandler faction that's where I'd be put but I never considered myself really to be tied in with either the Combs or the, or the Breathitt factions as such. I saw things in both administrations that I felt like I couldn't go along with just as I had in Chandler. But, of course, there's a difference in being an honest independent who sees things in a, sort of an independent way and being one of these just real obstreperous sort of, "aginer" that you just want to be against everything. It's always easy go back home and explain an "against" vote because people are basically, a lot of them are negative, but I know I voted for some things that I wished later I had voted against. SUCHANEK: Anything come to mind? BARTON: Very definitely. The worst bill I ever voted for, I thought time and again that Walter Apperson would beat me on that one issue as a lot of guys did get beat on that issue, the Egg Bill, the marketing of eggs. Now that'd be a very non-controversial sounding sort of thing, and a lot of guys from the House apparently figured it that way because it passed by, I don't know, a big majority. But the way it was enforced, the way it was carried out. Lead farmers and the little storekeepers all across the state they just raised all kinds of Cain, and they raised it with the legislators that came back to ask them to vote for them the next time, they didn't raise it with the bureaucrats that wrote up the rules and they were the fellows that, for the most part they had really caused all the uproar. And I had a, I had a close one-Walter, as I said a while ago, he did exactly right. I didn't ever complain about it. He wrote every day in the paper a little ad, "Have we had enough bills like the Egg Law (Suchanek laughs)? Have we had enough legislation like the Egg Law? I'll vote to repeal that law." I tell you that put me on the defense better than anything ever could have done in the world. You can't imagine the uproar that came as a result of the way that thing was, was written. And it, you know it was presented as something that, if you did not vote for it,you'd be almost guilty of saying to innocent Kentucky housewives that went to the grocery to buy their eggs, we don't care whether you get rotten eggs or whether you don't and therefore we need a bill, I mean we need a law in this state that will protect these poor innocent housewives from being ripped of by rotten eggs that come into the state from Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, all these states that had this high standard of egg marketing. Well, I guess we should've seen it but a lot of us didn't- SUCHANEK: But that was an administration bill, right? BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. BARTON: And my friend at Murray over here, Otis Lovins was the representative from Calloway, and Otis had voted for it and the guy beat him on that account. And we had a special session after, after that regular session. We were all together again and the Egg Law was prominently mentioned and Otis got up on the floor and made one of the funniest speeches I ever heard anybody make. He said he had voted like most of us for the Egg Law and like most others us he had sunk in defeat as a consequence of that ill begotten vote (Suchanek laughs). He said, "I tried to explain to my constituents in the great county of Calloway that I was only one of a number of eighty-two or three or whatever what it was, who supported the Egg Law in its passes," and he said, "Mr. Speaker, do you know what my constituents then told me?" He said, "They said, Otis, to us you are the legislature" (both laugh). He said, "To them I was the whole legislature and any bill that came out from the session that I was in would be a reflection, for good or bad on Otis Lovins, and," he said, "this one could've been worse." So, the guy beat him. And that was true all over the state. We went back the next time, this was '64, I guess, and amended it very sharply. We didn't repeal it but we amended it very sharply to permit these country store keepers that had been retailing eggs for hundred years, I guess, to go ahead and do it without all of the expensive machinery that they had to get to cradle and stamp the grade and candle and- SUCHANEK: I think there was a quantity limit on it, wasn't it? BARTON: Quantity? SUCHANEK: Yeah. BARTON: Yeah. We raised the quantity, I don't know how many dozen boxes a week or something like that. But it really was just, it was a terrible bill but a whole, a whole lot of us thought we were doing the right thing. SUCHANEK: Um-hm. BARTON: And that's the way it works. Sometimes the things you think are, are right turn out to be just about the pits. And on the other hand sometimes a bill that you vote against and work against and feel very negative about, once it's passed it's not all that bad. So I don't know whether legislators are gifted with much foresight or not (both laugh). Sometimes it appears they're not. SUCHANEK: In about the last ten minutes that we have for today- BARTON: Okay, let's wind it up and _______(??) then, and go eat- SUCHANEK: Yeah. If I can just ask you before we really get into the legislative part the next session, before you actually began the regular session in '58, did you attend that pre-legislative meeting where the party elected its legislative leaders for the upcoming session? BARTON: Was that at the Dam? I went to two at the Dam over here, but I believe that the one for the pre-'58 session was over in Eastern Kentucky somewhere. If it was I didn't go. SUCHANEK: Cumberland, Cumberland Falls? BARTON: I didn't go. SUCHANEK: Okay, you didn't go? BARTON: Unh-huh. SUCHANEK: Alright. In general during those pre-legislative sessions- BARTON: Um-hm. SUCHANEK: how was the leadership picked? Who did the picking? Was that a, it's been written that that's, the governor controlled that process. BARTON: The governor certainly had a pretty big hand in it. The, the legislative leaders, that is the speaker, I'm talking about the House now- SUCHANEK: Right. BARTON: of course, in the Senate you had a little different setup. The speaker, the majority leader- SUCHANEK: The caucus chairman- BARTON: and the caucus chairman, pretty well worked those things out ahead of time and the governor. I'm not sure, since I never was involved in any of these discussions, I'm not sure who made the proposal and who made the suggestions about who ought to actually be put in these jobs, but- SUCHANEK: But you were required to vote on the selection, right? BARTON: Right. But- SUCHANEK: But the slate was already presented for you? BARTON: The slate was presented, yeah. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: The slate was, of course, that didn't, that didn't cause, that didn't- SUCHANEK: Prevent. BARTON: prevent a member from making any nomination they want to make when the, when the caucus met on the first day of the session, but it was, it was pretty generally agreed that the legislative leaders and the governor, and I would just guess, and this is a pure guess, but I would guess that between the legislative leaders on one hand and the governor over here that the governor probably was the one that did most of the proposing on these particular jobs. Most of the members simply went along with whoever the slate turned out to be. Now, I don't know, I don't know whether the Republicans operated that same way on their side or not. They had, of course, a minority spokesman and a minority whip and minority caucus chairman, I guess they did. But I'd say this, not many things happened, until I'd say maybe John Y. Brown's administration, in Frankfort during and before the legislators were scheduled to meet, that the governors were not very, very actively involved with. Now, that varied maybe in degree some. SUCHANEK: Were you- BARTON: I was never there under Earle Clements but I always heard that Earle Clements had a, had a very personal interest in, in these things, in these kinds of things and sometimes would go to the meetings of the legislature himself. And I'm sure other governors did the same thing because after all, Jeff, the, the constitution puts the administration of the state in the hands of the governor, and I can understand why a governor to exercise leadership and carry out what the constitution tells him to do, for the good of the state and the good of the people, I can understand why he would feel like it was his duty to do this kind of thing. I really had a little trouble not understanding the kind of laid-back attitude or the kind of seemingly indifferent attitude that John Y. had toward the legislative arrangements, and to some extent I think Mrs. Collins probably had about the same, same attitude. Now, there's a vast difference to me, and this is back to philosophy, and I don't know where this line is, but somewhere or other there's a line between leadership that is responsible and effective by the governor and leadership that is dictatorial. And I think that the, I think that the genius of a governor's administration lies in his discovery of that line and his stand as close to it as he can. I don't think you can say, "okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw up the ball like a starting a basketball game out here and I'm gonna let them fight over it for sixty days and go home." I don't think that works at all. I think that's chaos. On the other hand, I think the idea of the governor sitting up there in the gallery checking off your votes when you cast them and then saying, "okay, that guy doesn't get a thing from my administration for the next two years because he went against me." SUCHANEK: That's been, Earle Clements was reported to do that. BARTON: I think, well, I'm sure that more than, more than Earle have. I've heard that. Anyway, I, I think that's, that is not true leadership in the sense that you're persuading the guys on the floor that this a good program. I think, in other words, I think a program that's good enough to go into operation ought to be good enough to be sold on its own merits and if it's not good enough to be sold on its own merits under some pretty tough questions and under some pretty intense examination and public hearings and things like that, I don't think it ought to be voting for it the governor notwithstanding. I think any program ought to stand on its own two feet. Now that was my whole, my whole philosophy as far as a, as a voter in the, in the legislature was concerned. Sometimes that found me in a minority (laughs) of a relative few but on the other hand there were lots and lots and lots of times that I was in there with eighty-nine others or ninety-five others or ever how many there were. So, it's, it was all a very learning experience for me. I think I did a better job teaching, especially government, after I got back than I had done before I went, really. SUCHANEK: Well, I think this might be a good place to stop and we'll- BARTON: Excellent. SUCHANEK: we'll pick this up then and, and get into the, your actual administrative experience- BARTON: This is what I probably don't remember much about. SUCHANEK: your legislative experience and- BARTON: Yeah. SUCHANEK: in the next session- BARTON: That'll be fine. SUCHANEK: in a couple of weeks, okay? BARTON: Well now, whenever you say. SUCHANEK: Okay. BARTON: Do I sign something? SUCHANEK: Yeah. [End of interview] 1 Barton (House 1959-1964, 3rd district, 2nd district; Democrat) discusses his early family and educational history in Graves County (Ky.), his many years as a high school teacher in Mayfield, as well as his initial campaign for the House. Barton concludes this interview with his views on government and lobbyists. Part 1 of 3. Kentucky Legislature

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