"Sid Scott, What A Man"

Laying Sid to rest yesterday was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but the service was exceptionally great, especially the words of Sid the Kid and Courtney. Loved it. Sid's death is the end of an era for me. He was the last of a group of a group of broadcasters I grew up with at WANY radio. It is an era that I did not want to see come to an end. Sid was such a huge part of my life and life is not going to ever be the same again. I am not looking for sympathy, but it has been a rough year, with the loss of my aunt Pat on June 3rd, followed a week later by the death of my sister. Sid was in the hospital during the entire month of July. He kept bouncing back, as he had done years before during a previous episode with sickness, but God's will is not always what we wish to happen. Sid came from Lillydale, Tennessee. His family were neighbors to my great grandfather Hige Boles and they were sharecroppers. Both families migrated to Clinton County when Dale Hollow Lake was created. Sid first met my dad during the middle school years and the rest is history. Both shared passions for basketball, baseball and music. But, Sid's biggest love out of those three things was basketball. He would stand on a crate and peer into the small window in the door and watch high school basketball games because he did not have enough money to pay the price of admission. Years later, he would become a local basketball legend. The great Kenneth Conner said not he but Sid was the greatest basketball player to ever play for Clinton County. He got into broadcasting, which led to him becoming the 'Voice of the Bulldogs.' There will never be another like him. For me, walking into Lindle Castle Gymnasium will never be the same. If I was not helping him broadcast the games, which I did for several years before he retired the first time, I was sitting beside he and Sid the Kid at court side. I was drawn to him and I loved him. Yesterday, the preacher said Sid is probably already trying to organize a basketball game in heaven. On the inside I had to laugh, because I knew that Sid's punchline to that statement would have been, "There are no basketball games in heaven, because there are no referee's in heaven." My first real memory of Sid is dad asking him to touch his nose to his chin (one of his early claimed of fame's). I thought, "What a freak!" It was wasn't too many years later that my opinion of him changed to, "What a man!"

In Memory of a Legend

I started in radio in the spring of 1976 and was blessed to work with or be close to many legendary on air personalities and radio executives around the area. People like my grandfather, Cecil Speck, my uncle, Wallace Allred, my dad, Darrell Speck, Welby and Mae Hoover, Elmer Goodman, Ray Mullinix, Eddie Neal, Bob Glover and Eddie Paul Coop. And then, after a couple of decades I started having to write most of their obituaries. Writing obits was part of my job, but what had been routine became difficult when I found myself writing them for the very people I had worked with and idolized. Today, I wrote one more and it was hardest of all. Hard because Sid Scott was like a second father to me. Hard because his passing marks the end of an era that I was not ready to shut the door on.

Georgie's Hole

Howard Hardaway became a writer during his many trips to Canada each summer for a one-day hike. The Louisville Courier called him in and wanted him to write up some of his experiences. He averaged several pieces a year for the journal and some for other publications at the time of this interview. Hardaway referred to himself as ‘The Old Hiker.’ "I’ve learned," said the Louisville, KY native in a May 1959 interview, "that the most interesting places are not right on the road. On the back roads, at the little country stores where the road crews gather for a quart of milk and a moon pie, that’s where you find some real historians." One of the places he wrote about was Clinton County. The following story is an excerpt from an article he submitted to the Courier-Journal sometime during the 1930s.

"Passing northward through a mountain gap at Doc Powers' place. I started down the valley of Koger's Creek by a narrow trail that is passable only by horseback or afoot. "There have been wagons up there," I was told later, "but not for a longtime." And, yet people live up there, and apparently live very well. The farms up in the gap look well-tended and prosperous. In this neighborhood is a cave, a "bottomless pit," known as Georgie's Hole. No one knows the depth of the vertical shaft. Georgie was the name of an old woman who lived hereabouts many years ago. Georgie and her husband "got their backs up" at each other. They couldn't seem to patch things up. One day, out in the pasture, Georgie is said to have maneuvered around so that she got her old man with his back to the hold. A quick shove - and Georgie was a willing widow. Georgie's Hole and its story has served as a warning to Clinton County husbands for 100 years to patch up differences quickly with the wife - or else stay away from bottomless pits."

Howard Hardaway