Mark White

Did I ever pick a good time to leave Kentucky and go on vacation, or what? COVID-19 rates have pretty well skyrocketed recently in Whitley County. My wife, Cecelia, and I recently headed south to the Outer Banks in North Carolina for a week, then we headed over to the Maryland-Delaware border where we checked out two islands with a lighthouse and a nature preserve. As an added bonus, we got to watch the Atlas rocket launch Friday night from behind our hotel, which was sending a payload to the International Space Station. So, what does a guy, who takes pictures for his job, do while he is on vacation? I got...

September is suicide prevention month, and it is more prevalent than most people probably realize. In Kentucky, one person dies every 11 hours from suicide. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in people ages 15-34, and the fourth leading cause of death in people ages 35-54. Suicide enters the top 10 leading causes of death starting at age 10. I daresay there are few people, who haven’t been impacted by suicide in some way or another. My first real experience with it came a few years back when I bumped into a friend that I had made through work, but we hadn’t seen each other in a quite a while. As...

It was sad to hear about the cancellation of the Williamsburg High School football game on Sept. 11 for multiple reasons. Every year students across the state bust their butts to get ready to play a game they love. As Head Football Coach Jerry Herron noted a few weeks ago, his players have done everything that coaches and administrators have asked of them in order to be given a chance to play this year. If this were a regular season with lots of games, then the cancelation of the season opener wouldn’t be a big deal, but it is very doubtful in my opinion that the entire fall sports season gets...

A few months ago, I wrote a column explaining what some of the more commonly used court terms that appear in the newspaper mean in layman’s terms, and I mentioned that I might write a second column on the subject. While this column doesn’t involve court terms as such, it does address a commonly asked question by people, which is, why do court cases take so long to get resolved? What got me thinking about this column is a message that I got from a lady a few weeks ago complaining about delays in the court case of a woman, and she wanted me to look into it noting that every...

Rest in peace Cpl. Billie Joe Hash, who was killed during the Korean War, and finally got to come home to Corbin last week after 70 years. Hash was laid to rest Saturday at Worley Cemetery, which is close to where his family used to live. It was an honor to be on hand Friday and Saturday to see Hash’s family finally get some much deserved closure. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands of people, involved in locating Hash’s remains, getting them identified, and then transporting his remains back to Corbin after so many years. I know it was their jobs in many cases, but all of them still deserve a...

Several years back, I still remember my one and only meeting with Tony Turner, who was the longtime WYMT station manager and news director. Tony was a legend in journalism here in the mountains. He was well respected and well-loved for good reason. The day I met him; Tony was in Williamsburg covering layoffs that then Whitley County Sheriff Ancil Carter was making after losing the primary election. I remember Tony saying something to Ancil that will forever be etched into my memory. “God has a plan for everything. We may just not know what it is at the time.” Tony stayed in Williamsburg to do a live broadcast at 6 p.m. that...

It’s amazing what you can find when you clean out a desk drawer, and/or a whole desk and several filing cabinets for that matter. As most of the you know, due to COVID-19 about five months ago the News Journal shutdown our Williamsburg office and consolidated operations in Corbin. After working in that office for 25 years, suffice it to say it took a while to clean out pretty much every drawer and filing cabinet and so forth, not that I would ever accumulate any junk in my office mind you…LOL. At any rate, by going through 25 years worth of memories –  (OK and some junk) – I did run across one...

There is a lot of truth in the old joke that people choose a given profession just so they won’t have to do math. While this wasn’t the reason I choose to get into journalism, I will concede that it was a plus…only partially LOL. Truth be told, I have done a lot more math in this profession than I would have thought when I got into it. In recent days, there has been a lot of debate in Washington, D.C., about a second COVID-19 relief package and whether to reinstate the additional $600 per week federal unemployment benefit as House Democrats want. The president recently issued an executive order to...

Every winter, Poplar Grove Baptist Church Pastor Bobby Joe Eaton tells the same story about a time many years ago when he was on the staff at Central Baptist Church in Corbin when it was a snowy, slick Sunday evening. Despite the weather, the church decided to still hold services figuring that many of those, who could make it there safely, would still come, and the rest wouldn’t. There was a devout little old lady, who lived relatively close by, and was always at church anytime the doors were open. (Thankfully, nearly every church has one or two of those, who set the example that the rest of us should follow.) On...

Across the country, statues of confederate leaders are being moved, removed or vandalized and torn down, including a statue of Jefferson Davis, which was recently removed from the Kentucky State Capitol. For those who don’t know, Davis was president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Although not everyone agrees, there is a valid argument for removing statues of confederate leaders, who many would rightly argue were traitors to their country. There is also a sizable contingent in this country, who want statues honoring past presidents like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson removed because they owned slaves. Again, whether you agree, it is a valid argument. In a vacuum, it would be...