For more information: Dovie’s Restaurant, 107 W. 4th St., Tompkinsville, KY 42067

Producer: Cheryl Beckley
Videographer: David Brinkley
Editor: Mindy Yarberry

Mmmm ... Burgers

Dovie’s Restaurant

Your cardiologist may not approve of our first stop ... but your tastebuds will thank you for it.

In Tompkinsville, Elizabeth Moore and her employees turn out good old down-home cooking at Dovie’s Restaurant, using methods established by founder Dovie in 1940. The specialty of the house is an unusual variation on an American classic: deep-fried hamburgers. In a town where the population hovers around 3,000, Dovie’s has been known to serve 1,000 of them in a day.

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For more information:
• Rough River Dam State Resort Park, 450 Lodge Rd., Falls of Rough, KY 40119-6100, (270) 257-2311 or (800) 325-1713

Producer, editor: John Schroering
Videographers: Jason Robinson, John Schroering
Audio: Brent Abshear

Roughing It

Rough River Dam State Resort Park

Rough River flows from Hardin County to McLean County, where it empties into the Green at Livermore. As the second largest tributary of the Green (behind the Barren), it was once an important shipping lane for timber and other regional products. But that traffic fell off in the 20th century, and the Rough became better known as a recreational river. (It’s named for a stretch of relatively gentle but scenic rapids.)

In 1938, Congress authorized the construction of a dam on the Rough as part of a flood-control act. That dam was finally built in the late 1950s. Soon thereafter, the state of Kentucky leased some land bordering the resulting 5,100-acre lake from the federal government, and a new state park was born.

Recreation director Shawn Pickens shows us some of the park’s modern-day amenities on this visit. They include boating, a beach, golf, a hiking trail, a lodge, cabins, and even a fly-in aviation camp with a paved airstrip. But of course one of the main attractions is the fishing, which host Dave Shuffett checks out with the help of his son, Willie.

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For more information: Laverne Zabielski, 202 Laverne Lane, Monticello, KY 42633, (859) 576-4625

Producer, editor: Brandon Wickey
Videographers: Brandon Wickey, Dave Greider

Fashionable Art

Fiber artist Laverne Zabielski

With a master’s degree in creative writing and several years of study with renowned fiber artist Arturo Sandoval under her belt, Laverne Zabielski has devoted her energies to creating “wearable art and readable writing.” Kentucky Life visited her in Wayne County to focus on the art part: the colorful jackets, dresses, shawls, capes, and other garments she fashions from strips of dyed silk.

Laverne uses Japanese Shibori dyeing techniques, in which fabric is twisted, stitched, folded, tied, and crimped before dyeing to create patterns. She does most of the work at her Studios Hidalgo on Sage Valley Farm outside Monticello, which she shares with musician, photographer, and piano technician Larry Vogt. The two also grow crops and offer art and writing workshops on the property.

For this profile, we also visit j. studio in Lexington to see some of Laverne’s finished pieces.

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