Edward Farris, In His Own Words: Farmer, Student, Hitchhiker, Soldier, Father, Politician, Lobbyist, Traveler, Kentuckian.

By Chad Evely

"I am attempting to start on an extended investigation and reporting of my past and my present."

With these words, Ed Farris began a fascinating 7.5-hour autobiographical audio recording: growing up in rural Kentucky in the 1920s, doing his part to liberate France in WWII, serving closely with two governors and so much more. Part 1 of this book contains Ed's wonderful story in his own unique voice.

Marching across France towards the end of WWII, Ed was involved in many engagements. Part 2 contains the thrilling first-hand accounts of the two most significant of these battles.

As executive secretary (now termed "chief of staff") from 1948-1955, Ed was intimately involved in the inner workings of Kentucky state politics. Part 3 contains all of his rich stories.

He loved. He lost. He fought. He learned. He traveled. He raised four children and was beloved by eight grandchildren. Come take a journey and experience the unique, interesting story of this charming man's life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evely Publishing
• Release date: May 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732322820

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Edward Farris, In His Own Words: Farmer, Student, Hitchhiker, Soldier, Father, Politician, Lobbyist, Traveler, Kentuckian.

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Edward Farris, In His Own Words

Farmer, Student, Hitchhiker, Soldier, Father, Politician, Lobbyist, Traveler,

Kentuckian.

Compiled and Edited by Chad Evely (2018)

Copyright © 2018 by Chad Evely

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

The memoirs and interviews upon which this work are based were unquestionably done in good faith and, to the best of Ed’s memory, factual. Though efforts were made to fact check where possible, memories being fallible – for Ed as it is for all mankind – it is possible that there are some inaccuracies in this work. 

First Printing: 2018

ISBN 978-1-7323228-0-6 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-7323228-1-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7323228-2-0 (eBook)

Chad Evely, 111 Lone Oak Dr., Nicholasville, KY 40356

[e-mail]

Preface

I was first introduced to Edward A. Farris (Papa) late in his life, having married his granddaughter when he was 87 years old. At that time his mobility was betrayed by knees that – as he would often explain – were worn out from marching across France and he would occasionally struggle to find the perfect word when telling a familiar story. But the vibrancy and energy with which he lived his life was still very evident, as was his natural curiosity and sharpness of mind. I can recall one of the first times I ever talked with him, he asked me what magazines I liked to read. Upon telling him I liked Science, he began to accurately describe an article he had read many years prior in great detail. He enjoyed talking about all manner of topics and over the years I picked up bits and pieces of the interesting life he had lived.

Later in his life Ed lived for upwards of a year at the Thomson-Hood Veterans Center in Wilmore, KY. This being minutes away from our home, I was able to visit him more often during this period along with my wife, Molly (Ed’s granddaughter), and our three young daughters, Allison, Abby and Annabelle. I am very thankful that our girls were able to get to know him a little better and it initiated some conversations about how different the world was when he was growing up and the sacrifices he had made in fighting for our country in WWII. Demonstrating a remarkable understanding, my five year-old put it as only a five year-old can: Ed fought to save the world from that mean guy that wrecked everyone.

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Ed with my family (Allison, Molly holding Annabelle, Abby) on his 96th birthday [2016]

Knowing that Ed had lived a fairly public life and born from my own curiosity and desire for my daughters to get to know the full picture of their Great Papa, in late 2015 I decided to undertake a small research project, intending to dig up a few newspaper articles with a 7-day trial to a website for searching newspaper archives. While I was successful in this initial endeavor, my curiosity soon expanded the search, leading me to the real find: The University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, where I discovered digital recordings of six different audio interviews Ed had given. In my opinion the best of these interviews is when Ed, over a four and a half hour interview with a retired army colonel, goes into great detail on the two most significant battles he took part in during WWII: the crossing of a bridge across the Moselle River near Flavigny, France and a battle in Achain, France where he was ultimately injured by German artillery fire and knocked out of the war. These two thrilling accounts make up Part 2 of this book. The other five interviews center around the prominent political figures Ed’s career intersected with. These were merged together to form Part 3 of this book, which details his time working as chief of staff to Governors Earle Clements and Lawrence Wetherby from 1948 to 1955.

In addition to these publicly available interviews, I was also made aware of the source for what became Part 1 of this book, a 5-tape audio recording (~7.5 hours) Ed made and distributed to his family in the early 2000s chronicling the story of his life. He made these tapes, as he describes:

At the insistent demand of the three McGaughey girls (Molly, Becky and Caitlin) and the Farris clan generally (Linda, Larry and Cathy) and with the microphone and recording device furnished by Mrs. Beth Gardner, my dear friend, I am attempting to start on an extended investigation and reporting of my past and my present.

I found these audio recordings to be fascinating both for the depth they added to my understanding of Ed’s life and for the historic insight they offered. However, given their length and sometimes poor audio quality, I recognized that it was not very easily digestible. And so, I undertook the more-time-consuming-than-I-realized-at-the-outset project of transcribing both the WWII interview and his personal memoirs.

2008 - With McGaughey Girls

Ed with the three McGaughey girls, his granddaughters Caitlin, Becky & Molly [2008]

Upon completing the raw transcripts, I realized that this format had its own significant limitations. The WWII interview is full of interjections by the interviewer which serve to draw more details out of Ed’s stories but also makes it a bit disjointed to read. The personal memoirs are impressive in how organized they are and serve as a testament to just how sharp Ed’s mind still was as he approached and passed 80 years old, but they also include a good bit of jumping around in the story, searching for the right word or going back and correcting himself. They are organized more or less chronologically but there are a lot of instances where Ed either has trouble with the tape recorder (what he calls the machine) or otherwise misses including a section of his life, which he will include later in the tape, explaining – in one of these instances:

So, as I continue with just a brief interruption here and I may have let the machine run a little bit without me trying to talk into it. So I hope too much time hasn’t passed, but you’ll find all kinds of probably gaps and other little strange oddities connected with this project, me working this machine, failing to work it and so forth.

Another of these instances consisted of a five and a half minute gap of silence in which Ed needed to fit a section of his life. With the tape queued to the correct position and presumably with a timer of some sort set, he began to fill in this gap. This will probably surprise no one that knew him, but he actually took eleven minutes to tell the story and in so doing overran the blank period and recorded over the beginning of the next section, which then needed to be added even later in the taping. Another section right in the middle of it all is an impromptu Q&A session with his granddaughter Carrie wherein Beth Gardner secretly started recording while he was telling some family stories. The tapes conclude with stories spliced in from before he even undertook the project containing some lively storytelling as Ed makes Beth Gardner laugh uproariously. Through all of these twists and turns, Beth’s deft hand is evident in ensuring that everything Ed wanted to include about his life made its way onto the tapes somewhere.

The project ultimately stretched over three years, between April 1999 and July 2002. Ed speaks to some of the methods Beth and granddaughter Caitlin used to motivate him when his dedication flagged:

As you may note, at least I will note for you, that this is July the 8th, 2002, meaning several months if not almost two years has lapsed since I last was on this project. And I resumed because of two people. Ms. Caitlin McGaughey has threatened to quit loaning me money from her excessive payments earned by babysitting and taking care of dogs and cats and horses for neighbors. And Mrs. Gardner has threatened to quit baking these cakes, chocolate cakes and other goodies and taking care of the flowers and cleaning the house if I didn’t resume. So I’ve been coaxed with these two threats to resume and I’m gonna try to be diligent and carry this forward so that I can finish the project as I’ve promised previously.

Despite the richness of the raw recordings/transcripts, the limitations inherent to what at times was a just a jumble of stories caused me to decide that constructing a cohesive narrative would be a worthy final goal of this project and would serve as a digestible account that I hope will encourage my daughters and others to learn about the life of this interesting man. I am not a historian by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I an editor, a publisher or even an English major (should the ‘E’ even be capitalized? I don’t know). But I have done the best that I could in organizing Ed’s recollections and have taken great pains to do as little modification to his words as I possibly could. I have modified verb tenses, removed segments where he changed his train of thought, did some minor tweaks to sentence structures, and reorganized with a good bit of cutting and pasting. But I have sought above all else to do the absolute minimal amount of editing so as to preserve Ed’s unique and charming voice. Truly it was remarkable how one way or the other he managed to connect the dots between the different periods of his life so that after enough cutting and pasting they seemed to come together like puzzle pieces. With the exception of a brief introduction/explanation that I have provided for each part, the chapters themselves are all Ed’s words in Ed’s voice.

Chad (me) & Molly (granddaughter) Evely with Ed [2007]

I think Ed would have approved of this project as he twice laments in the memoirs that he wasn’t able to write his account instead of recording it:

I had originally – when I finally agreed that I would do this – thought that I would write my kind of summary of my memoirs. But it didn’t work out that way and so I am having to just sit here in a chair, look out my back yard here and reflect on years past.

I will say that this would’ve been much more interesting to read than it is to listen to me but it wasn’t so that I could start writing at this point so I’m doing it verbally.

Though it is mostly lost in this narrative version, one storytelling construct Ed makes use of is that long after he is finished with describing a period of time, he will revisit it and add some more detail to a story or tell another story to add further color to a period in his life. He refers to this often as backing and filling, a term which ties together two prominent aspects of his life – farming and politics – and which I will let him describe:

[It]’s a country farming expression but it’s also a political expression. It means that you go around a field with a team and make a round or two with whatever unit of equipment that you’re working with. Then you turn and go back the other way, just the reverse. So that’s called, in farming terminology, backing and filling. Well, in the political realm – the two of course, politics and farming are quite unrelated – you hear an individual, a candidate for instance, speaking about his opponent with the opponent attempting to deal with a complicated or highly controversial subject so you might charge your opponent with – instead of saying straddling the fence or not seeing everything in black and white, instead of charging him with viewing it as a gray, he might be charged with – just doing an awful lot of backing and filling.

In learning about Ed’s life, it struck me that this term also serves quite well as an analogy for his life in the way he backed and filled his way over the rich soil of Kentucky (and United States) history. He was a farm boy in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression, then a city dweller in the small town of Greensburg. He graduated high school in the larger city of Lexington, then walked across France as a member of Patton’s famous Third Army. He escaped certain capture or death with a daring midnight swim across the Moselle River only to be knocked out of commission by a German artillery shell almost 200 miles away. He was plucked from the obscurity of the Kentucky revenue department to become the indispensable chief of staff to two governors and was involved in almost every major election in Kentucky for over twenty years. He served as a lobbyist for the half-billion dollar empire of Garvice Kincaid before joining Kentucky’s Alcoholic Beverage Control board, first as a member and then as commissioner. He even provided advice to Bill Clinton during his first presidential campaign by way of a chance encounter with Clinton’s mother and step-father.

He loved. He lost. He fought. He learned. He traveled. He raised four children and was beloved by eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. I hope this book can help you appreciate Ed’s life and give some insight into his vitality and richness of spirit. I will leave you with his closing words from his memoirs.

I’ve had a great life. [I] don’t want anybody when I’m gone to regret anything ‘cause while I’ve had my ups and downs certainly I’ve overall enjoyed it thoroughly and made the best of it under adverse circumstances when the circumstances were adverse. As someone said, they saw a tombstone once and it said Here lies John Brown. He did his damndest. And I think that kind of applies to me. I’ve done my damndest and I’m proud of all my children and grandchildren.

Chad Evely

Nicholasville, KY

Spring 2018

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The Farris Clan Generally & Beth Gardner Back: Cathy (daughter) & Chuck McGaughey; Natasha & Larry (son) Farris; Linda (daughter) & Bob Beasley  Front: Beth Gardner & Ed Farris [2010]

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Ed Farris [2010]

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Ed Farris on his way to his granddaughter Becky’s wedding in Florida [2008]

Part 1: Memoirs

The source for Part 1 was five 90-minute Maxell audio tapes of varying sound quality that Ed created between 1999 and 2002 with significant assistance from Beth Gardner. The various sections have been re-arranged somewhat to follow a linear path, some verb tenses were cleaned up and various ands, buts, etc. have been removed or added to make it more readable. However, first and foremost, an effort was made to keep Ed’s words intact to maintain his unique and charming voice. The preface (above) contains some additional insight on this section.

2017 - Tapes

The tapes containing Ed’s memoirs

.

Introduction

This is Edward Farris, 312 Ewing Street, Frankfort, KY. This is a task that I have neglected doing for many years but at the insistent demand of the three McGaughey girls (Molly, Becky and Caitlin) and the Farris clan generally (Linda, Larry and Cathy), I am attempting to start on an extended investigation and reporting of my past and my present and with some lament expect my future to be rather limited.

I want to point out that over the last several years, the aforementioned people have convinced me to do this through gentle persuasion and otherwise subtle hints. One of the aiders and abettors of this, of course, is Mrs. Beth Gardner – my dear friend – who has been intrigued with some of my past experiences and rather long life. She even resorted to buying a small General Electric recorder. It’s very small: three inches by five inches or something like that and it’s almost idiot proof, this being the only kind of device that I could operate.

She was here over this past weekend and gave me instructions and lessons on how to work this little instrument and I will say it’s simple and if I don’t finish this task it won’t be because of the machine – because I can operate the machine – it’ll be through my natural proclivity to procrastinate in doing these kinds of things. So, kids, be understanding of my hemming and hawing. When I finally agreed to do this, I had originally thought that I would write a kind of summary of my memoirs, but it didn’t work out that way and so I am having to just sit here in a chair, look out my backyard here and reflect on years past. Many of these things I have passed over and forgotten while others I recall and want to include in these remarks. So be understanding of my hemming and hawing and hesitation and if I reach some point in my talk that I feel like too much time is passing, I will try to punch the stop button. Then when I sit down to do it again, I will remember to resume it and push the recording button without thinking that my machine is malfunctioning. I’ve just got to remember all those little details. Alright, I will go back to the first part of what I want to say to you.

Some of Ed’s notes on his family history

Chapter 1: Early Memory of My Life (1920 - 1934)

I will limit this first section to what I think will be referred to as The Farm. Home. My Early Memory of My Life. That’ll carry me through the day I was born, on December 19th, 1920. I don’t intend to indicate that I remember that, certainly, but I remember events back early on after I was at least four or five, six years old. I begin to remember them and recall them very, very clearly. In doing all this let me point out that I shall try to portray things as they were and not color ‘em either favorably or unfavorably, just indicate what I think to be the facts and truths. I will not exaggerate, nor will I underestimate things just to make the record look good or bad. I’ll just do the best I can to portray the kind of life that I was brought into this world living until the 7th grade in school and the point at which there was a break in my life because my parents took us five kids and moved all the way to Greensburg. But that’s for another story so let me get back to living on the farm in Adair County.

My great-grandfather, William Farris, came to Carroll County, Kentucky initially and then on to Adair County around 1850 from Abington, Virginia. I was born in a tenant house on what is now termed Farris Road in Adair County. The tenant house and much of the farm actually lies in Green County but my great-grandfather had successfully gotten a special bill passed in Frankfort declaring our home to be part of Adair County. I’ve always suspected that he just got tired of having to go to Columbia, Greensburg and Campbellsville to pay taxes and do routine business. So we considered Adair County our home and our post office address was Coburg which is at the very edge of Adair County, real close the Taylor/Green County line. All of this is right on the merge line of Green, Adair and Taylor counties. I emphasize the counties because the county was a significant geographical identification when I was growing up. It has remained so throughout the history of Kentucky but the moderns have begun to try to get away from it. I don’t know why but they have I’ve noticed. Anyway, I was born and raised at the edge of Adair County.

Act declaring Farris tenant house to be in Adair County

We had cows, sheep, horses, mules and hogs. That was the livestock on the farm. From my earliest memory I can remember all these different livestocks and the way you handled them. We milked cows, so by the time I was five or six years old I was sent to the field to drive in the cows at night for milking. My mother generally had chickens and turkeys and geese. The house was a small, picturesque, badly-weathered, boarded house but may have had log innards, I just can’t remember. But it was heated by a fireplace and stove. I remember both of those elements. There was no electricity.

Roads were muddy and terrible in the winter. It was dusty and hard and harsh and dry in the summer. Now we’re talking about the ‘20s. Transportation was by horse or wagon, drawn generally by two mules and not easy to ride in. There were no springs and one farmer in the community was known to be an expert wagon driver because he could drive from in our area to Columbia and the wagon wheels would never miss a single mean, harsh, hard rock on the trip. Therefore you got the full benefit of a vehicle without any kind of cushion or springs of any sort. Anyway, that’s the way we were: very few people in the community owned automobiles and we did not have a car. As a matter of fact, during my first ten years there I don’t recall any of our neighbors that had automobiles; there were a few cars around about but none immediately. I remember seeing – back my earliest memory – trucks with a solid rubber wheel rather than a balloon type tire. These were just round steel wheels, wheels with rubber attached someway and they weren’t much better than road wagons. But they were used to haul heavy stuff, particularly from between Campbellsville and Columbia.

Buggies and horseback were the accepted way of people getting around. A trip to Columbia (the county seat) was about six, seven, eight miles at most but it was kind of considered an all day trip by the means of transportation. Remember I’m living in the ‘20s. The farm economy was struggling throughout the South and this was a section of Kentucky that was living pretty much as the rural South lived, in my judgement. Times were hard. Money was scarce. Farm produce, when sold, brought pitifully low prices. It was difficult for people to live.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that there was a shortage of food, Lord, no. We had great food. We had a garden, produce, beans, corn, tomatoes, cabbage. Our food was quite different from food we have now. We did not live out of cans in the ‘20s; bought canned goods were hardly an element in our daily food component. It was brought from can jars, fruit and vegetables that my mother had canned during the summer or from the smokehouse. We killed a number of hogs per season and the hams and shoulders were cured. That is, they were cured with salt and then ultimately hung up in the smokehouse. The smokehouse was a key building on the farm in those days.

* * *

By the time I was seven or eight years old I was helping my dad milk cows. I was always an outdoor kid and I was a hard worker and pushy and ambitious to do things. If we were driving the team in the wagon I would inveigle my dad to let me have the reins and drive for a distance. I remember doing all those kind of things. I was an outdoors individual. I was active and I learned to milk early on. I learned to feed the livestock. I did everything like that, but I was not very good at helping my mother in the house.

Now let me explain. I’m the oldest of five children. There was Garnett, Marvin, Virginia and Jesse. I was the oldest. I was, as I say, determined to be doing things out with the livestock and helping my dad to the extent that I could or he would let me. Marvin and I were the roustabouts and Garnett was the little gentleman. So if I got into trouble, Marvin followed and tried to do everything I did even though he was a little younger. I want to add that Ed Bridgewaters was a black farmer who my dad and mother helped out for all of his life and, from the time when I first have recollections, he lived with us upstairs in the attic. He didn’t have any other place to go, no real close relatives, and he and my dad were great, great buddies so he just lived with us.

By the time I was eight or ten years old I was assisting substantially on the farm. I remember we cut and stacked hay. My dad would have a team of mules pull a mowing machine that would cut the hay. Then a team of mules would pull the rake that would rake it up into a windrow and then the windrow was stacked manually in little small shocks. They could sit overnight and then you could put a chain around the bottom – just loop it around the bottom of that little pile of hay – and it would scoot over that freshly-mown hay field. It would scoot and not lose any and you could take it right up to the stack of hay and then it would be thrown on the big stack of hay and preserved that way. It would develop water resistance in a peak, cone-shaped, large stack. I remember doing that and I’m sure that I wasn’t over seven, eight years old. I could do that and was doing it.

Anyway, we sold cream. Later on a milk route was established but that proved not very satisfactory. In the first place, there was no way for the milk truck to get in our territory during the winter. Listen, automobiles and trucks could not travel in the winter over our roads because they were mud and automobiles still can’t travel in mud. So we had a separator, that’s a machine that you pour freshly-milked milk into