For more information:
• The Ohio River Valley Artist's Guild has an information page about Marjorie Sauer, including photos of her work.

Producer: Tom Thurman
Videographer: Jason Robinson
Editor: Dan Taulbee
Audio: Brent Abshear

Outsider Artist

Marjorie Jordan-Sauer

Folk artist Marjorie Jordan-Sauer lives in rural Lewis County, where almost everything around her assumes a potential role in her creations. Newspapers, old plates, chicken wire, and even her outdated TV satellite dish become paints for her palette, and she approaches her varied works with enthusiasm and originality.

A self-taught artist, Marjorie began her work in earnest in the 1990s, after raising two children. A member of the Ohio River Valley Art Guild, she specializes in papier-mâché and mosaics.

Her work is often whimsical. She used papier-mâché and dead ladybugs to create "Help!", a figure of a woman in black boots throwing her arms up in despair. That piece was part of the "Lost And Found Again" exhibition at the Kentucky Folk Art Center. She used a T-shirt to sculpt "Worry Woman on Stand."

Her paintings and mosaics capture scenes from the Bible, nature in its glory, and contemporary events like the Sept. 11, 2001 attack. "The Twin Towers" was in a traveling 9-11 art show. Her largest mosaic, "Jesus Is Baptized," is displayed at the Stone Lick Baptist Church.

For more information:
• City of Scottsville

Producer/Videographer: Dave Shuffett
Editor: Dan Taulbee

Our Town—Scottsville

Scottsville, located in rural Allen County on the Tennessee border, offers a friendly, small-town welcome to visitors. The Chamber of Commerce says it's "Naturally Inviting," and that's what you're likely to find.

Springtime in Scottsville means Jacksonian Days, scheduled this year April 17-24. The annual festival features all the good things you'd expect from rural Kentucky: a bass tournament, a quilt show, a street fair, and a beauty pageant. The highlight of this festival, however, may be the much anticipated Grandest Olde Opry, where local singers and musicians portray the regulars at that other Opry 50 miles down the road in Nashville.

The Scottsville Antique Mall on the historic Public Square has more than 80 booths. The Mennonite Country Store offers everything from hardware to baked goods.

For more information:
• Ashland, The Henry Clay Estate, 120 Sycamore Road, Lexington, Ky. 40502, (859) 266-8581

Producer: Valerie Trimble
Videographers: Amelia Cutadean, David Dampier
Editor: Jim Piston
Audio: Roger Tremaine

A Passion for Peonies

Henry Clay's Ashland

Every year right around Derby weekend, the magnificent peonies at Ashland, the Henry Clay estate in Lexington, come into bloom.

The 18-room mansion, home of Kentucky statesman and three-time presidential candidate Henry Clay, has been open to the public as a historic house museum since 1950. The Garden Club of Lexington created a formal garden on the grounds at that time.

The peony garden, however, was created in 1986 when Bobbi Van Meter, the daughter of longtime Garden Club member Alice McIlvain Prewitt, donated the shrubs in her mother's memory. The peony garden is located to the rear of the main garden, and delights visitors with its fragrant reds, pinks, and whites each May.

For more information:
• "Face Boss: The Memoir of a Western Kentucky Coal Miner" is available for purchase online through Amazon.

Producer/Videographer/Editor: Brandon Wickey

Face Boss

Mike Guillerman's Coal Memoir

Now retired, Mike Guillerman spent 18 years as both a union miner and a salaried foreman, or "face boss," at a Peabody Coal Co. mine in Union County. "Face Boss: The Memoir of a Western Kentucky Coal Miner" is his book about those years in the mine and his tribute to the workers who labor underground.

He gives a candid account of his first day on the job, his initial fears and the teasing by the veteran miners, then the descent into the mine—"I immediately liked it," he writes. He offers a complete picture of the work from the back-breaking labor to the camaraderie and the horseplay of the miners. He handled explosives on his second day on the job.

Mike's book covers a lot of ground: the intricate process of coal mining, women in the mines, race relations, labor relations, the big mine fire of 1984, as well as the trials associated with being face boss during the 1980s, when, he writes, the United Mine Workers of America was at the peak of its power. In the book's preface, he says he hopes his memoir will be helpful to those considering work in the mines, "though it may prove a deterrent."