FROM OUR ARCHIVES: In Memory of Other Days

The Beattyville Enterprise   
Friday, December 1, 1893
By: J.W. Williams – Editor

     Poor dog! He doesn’t know that ground hog is my conventional meal for Thanksgiving neither knows he the reason why.

     Had he not been only a bird dog – skilled only in flushing a covey or swallowing a steak – he might have been with me last night over in the wild, lonely, haunted forests of Miller’s Creek, on the lands of Kentucky’s Atty General, where the moonbeams quiver through the crowned oaks, softly lighting up the den of in the g.h. in the neolithic caves. He might have been in at the finish, and shortly thereafter might have smelled the trange ordor of the roasting as it spread off through the laurels and rose up where a sleepy owl blinked on a spruce bough.

     As the flickering flames of my campfire rose and fell, he could have learned from that old owl – who alone knows the secret – that my annual g.h. is chosen, not for his tenderness – 

“He’s tough; not for his fatness – He’s lean; not for his flavor – He ---- well, he don’t smell good, no Sir!”

     I’m right glad the dog wasn’t there to find out that this use of ground hog is solely a memento of the days when I was a young editor and therefore too poor to get anything but ground hog.

     Blesse, not with growing country in whose borders dwell peace., soberness, and work; surrounded with influences that urge us to better effort and nobler; life; remembering the many mercies, temporal ad spiritual, that have blessed us, deep in our hearts we each can way with the poet, “Praise God form whom all blessing flow.