Mark White

Goodbye and good luck to two friends of mine, who have recently retired from working in emergency services. I’ve known Danny Moses pretty much as long as I have been at the News Journal, which is close to 30 years. I first got to know Danny when he was a member of the Whitley County Board of Education, and then got to know him better when he served as an auxiliary sheriff’s deputy for several years and worked as a volunteer firefighter. At the time, Danny’s day job was being assistant manager at IGA in Williamsburg. If I needed to get hold of Danny back in those days, I would usually just...

When you are an editor at a college newspaper, you have staff writers that turn in all kinds of stories with varying levels of quality. Some prove to be memorable and not for good reason…LOL. You usually had one or two staff writers, who were pretty darn good and you didn’t have to do much, if anything, to their stories. Then you had some that reading their stories made your head hurt. One story in particular that stood out was a feature story a staff writer wrote about a dancer at a new “Gentlemen’s Club” shall we say that had opened in Richmond. The subject of the story wasn’t as memorable...

The 2023 Whitley County Fair is upon us, and from the sound of things, it should be a good one this year. My inner Star Wars geek can’t wait to see the 40’x40’ bounce house that the fair will feature this year, which looks like the iconic Millennium Falcon from the classic films. I first saw Star Wars when I was in first grade, and have been hooked on science fiction ever since. The fair will take place starting today, July 12, through Saturday, July 15. It kicks off this afternoon with a special sensory event that will take place today from noon – 3 p.m. The sensory event will still feature...

So, did you ever hear about the time I got shot by these guys target shooting at an outhouse? FYI – No, I wasn’t in the outhouse at the time…LOL. (It’s OK to laugh. I do. Well, I do now anyway.) Saturday will mark the 40th anniversary of the occasion. The day was July 1. I was 12 years old and had just finished playing in what would turn out to be my last baseball game. I had just broken out of a long hitting slump with a double and beat out a bunt at first base for a single. I was in the car with my mom and we were on...

Sometimes, when people reach a certain level of prominence or what they see as prominence, they think they are too good to do menial tasks. You probably know the kind of people I am talking about. I think all of us have known a few of them over the years. Outgoing Williamsburg Superintendent Tim Melton certainly isn’t one of those people. Let me share a portion of a letter to the editor that ran in the News Journal in August 2018. The letter was from the project manager on the Williamsburg Independent School renovation project, Debra Strehl. At the time, Melton was school principal. “Mr. Tim Melton is the first and only principal...

Few things in life are sadder than a new born baby dying. The first time I had to write about such a thing was in college at Eastern Kentucky University. I was working at the school paper, The Eastern Progress, and writing a follow-up story on a cold case involving a dead newborn baby. It had been found dead in a nearby landfill, a year or two earlier. A worker at the landfill saw what looked like a baby and went to check on it. He picked up the deceased infant, carried it to a different place and covered it up out of respect for the child. Because police weren’t really sure...

When I started my career as a professional journalist, I never really gave any thought to how long I would be doing this for a career, but here I am 30 years later and still going. On Friday, May 14, 1993, I had my first job interview with the London Sentinel Echo just a few hours before my friends Richie and Karrie Faison got married. The high school sweethearts are still going strong in case anyone is wondering. A week later Publisher Darrell Hathcock brought me in a for a second interview and offered me a job as a reporter at the then three days a week publication. I was so...

Over the last 20 years, Whitley County High School (WCHS) JROTC instructor Master Sergeant (MSG) Don Gross is a guy that I regularly bumped into when I was covering things after hours for work. There were Friday night football games where his cadets presented the colors during the national anthem. There have been events, like the Whitley County Fair, where his cadets helped direct parking in the past. There were numerous Memorial Day ceremonies at the Courtyard of Champions on the WCHS campus and at the veteran’s monuments in front of the old Whitley County Courthouse in Williamsburg. I’ve seen him on Saturday mornings supervising cadets, who were picking up trash as...

Election Day is coming on Tuesday, May 16, but if you want to avoid lines at the polls remember you can vote early Thursday through Saturday at the old courthouse in Williamsburg and in the old district courtroom in Corbin, which is located in the old city hall. One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic (other than maybe most of us learning to how wash our hands properly…LOL) was the move to allow early voting in Kentucky and elsewhere. Whether its younger voters, older voters, Republican voters or Democratic voters, I have yet to speak with anyone about the subject who doesn’t like the early...

Whitley County lost a great man this week with the passing of Keith Decker Monday. In addition to being a senior pastor at Black Oak Baptist Church, Keith was the founder and president of Cedaridge Ministries, which celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. Cedaridge traces its roots back to a fundraising yard sale in 1990 to raise money to buy a youth center for the Mount Zion Association Youth Ministry. On Feb. 18, 1992, God gave Keith the word “Cedaridge” as the name of the ministry. “We didn’t know exactly what that word was going to mean going forward. We just knew that it was a lot shorter than Mount Zion Association...