BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
GLASGOW NEWS 1
A celebrity himself, Glasgow native Bill Goodman came home over the weekend to speak as a guest of the Barren County Historical Society about four people in his family tree who acquired various levels of fame, some from the time of our nation’s birth, and some from modern times.
Goodman, perhaps best known for his work on Kentucky Educational Television, is currently the executive director for the Kentucky Humanities Council, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
“It’s indeed an honor to be back in my hometown,” he said at the South Central Kentucky Cultural Center.
Just like one of those relatives he referred to later who had also spoken it many, many times, he said, “I’ve always, wherever I’ve been – whether it was in Nashville for a while or in Houston, Texas, when I worked down there or back to Kentucky in Lexington or all over the commonwealth as I traveled and now in Kentucky Humanities – I have always told people that I was from Barren County and from Glasgow, and I’m so proud to be a native of this fine city. I never hesitate to identify myself as someone from Glasgow.”
Goodman also took the opportunity to publicly thank Sam Terry, current president of the local historical society, for his work as “the real father and the person who gets all the credit” for the “Think History” segments Goodman records that now being aired on Western Kentucky University Public Radio and most of the other public radio outlets around the commonwealth.
He said Kentucky Humanities was looking around for something that related to history, and he distinctly recalled a conversation that took place between two distinguished professors of history about how concerned they were about the lack of knowledge of the history of Kentucky and how it’s no longer a requirement, or even an option, in some schools.
The chairman of their board and one of those aforementioned professors, Tom Appleton, was familiar with the “Sam Terry’s Kentucky” page on Facebook, so he reached out to Terry for permission to look at some of his material, and from there, negotiations took place and they began to gather some of that literature.
“Tom began to write some of those. We’ve now hired a historian out of Louisville who puts them all together. Our editor for the magazine in our office, Marianne Stoess, does all of the audio editing. I’m just the fortunate one who’s handed the script and asked to go into our very small podcast studio at our Kentucky Humanities office on Maxwell Street and record those,” Goodman said. “We have pretty close to 800, if not more, of those recorded now.”
They were originally aired on the Eastern Kentucky University public radio station a few years ago and others have since joined, with WKU Public Radio adding “Think History” spots to its lineup in June, he said.
“If you haven’t listened to them, they’re all on our website. They’re catalogued and archived there but they’re also on WKU Public Radio,” Goodman said.
As he later shifted gears into speaking about some of his relatives, he emphasized: “I am not a historian. I am not trained in the scholarship. What I have cobbled together for you today is something that I’ve done from pieces here and there, and I’m going to give as much credit as I possibly can to the rightful authors of a lot of this information.” He cited them as he went along. Goodman also said his niece, Beth Barton, also a native of Glasgow, should be credited with the genealogy research that shows that family its connections to Walker and others.
Thomas Walker
Thomas Walker, a physician, government official in the fledgling commonwealth of Virginia and explorer, is often overlooked as the first white man to come through what Walker named the Cumberland Gap, Goodman said. Walker had associates in high places, including a second cousin of his wife’s, George Washington, and he had some connection to Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark Expedition fame.
With his background and a vision of westward expansion, he was called upon in the 1700s to take a group westward, Goodman said.
“Walker kept a detailed journal of all of the travels that he took throughout his life,” he said, and he described the land that became Kentucky as rugged and wild with steep, rocky terrain in the Appalachian Mountains. He discussed the game they hunted or killed from necessity such as bears, and more.
Stephen Trigg
Stephen Trigg, who lived from 1744 to 1782, was a brother to Col. William Trigg, a direct ancestor of Goodman’s, he explained. Unlike with Walker, records from Stephen Trigg’s life are more scant until the time of his “infamous and tragic death,” Goodman said.
He was an active citizen of the new government of Virginia, a parish representative, and member of the militia. He was involved with the precursor of what would become the Declaration of Indedpendence and was often “at the table” with treaty discussions and decisions.
Stephen Trigg was also called upon to begin to look westward and go into the new expansion of what is now known as Kentucky, and he, Daniel Boone and others established Fort Harrod in what is now Harrodsburg. He was asked to take up residence there, and he was awarded 1,000 acres about four miles north of there and established Trigg’s Station.
“He was also involved in a very aggressive move against a tribe of Native Americans who were with the British, created a battle at what is present-day Bryan Station outside of Lexington,” Goodman said. “It was in February of 1782 after the battle at Bryan Station, there was an incursion in the Blue Licks area of Kentucky, the Licking River,” Goodman said. “He was at the time, had been made a lieutenant colonel. He left that area with a troop of 135 militiamen. The other sector that were the fighting forces was led by Daniel Boone and a couple of other military generals. They were ambushed at the Battle of Blue Licks and within five minutes, Stephen Trigg was slaughtered and killed. Israel Boone – Daniel Boone’s son – was also killed.”
“The Blue Licks State Park is dedicated to that battle, which is said to be the last battle of the Revolutionary War,” Goodman said, adding that monument there lists among the names Stephen Trigg’s.
Julian Goodman
Bill Goodman asked one of the numerous cousins he has from the line of his family tree sharing his surname, local attorney Charley Goodman, who was among the audience members Saturday, whether he knew Julian Goodman’s middle name, because that was one tidbit that had eluded him. Charley Goodman told him it was “Byrne,” after a man who was a good friend to Julian’s father and Charley’s granddad and happened to be a used-car salesman in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Local attorney Charley Goodman, a cousin of Bill Goodman’s, center, tells a story about how a family member was named, as his wife, Peggy Goodman, and local historian Sam Terry react during Bill Goodman’s visit at the South Central Kentucky Cultural Center on Saturday. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
Julian Goodman, born in Glasgow in 1922, attended to Western Kentucky State Teachers College and then had a stint in the U.S. Army. He later got an economics degree from Georgetown and went from there to NBC Radio and began his work there.
“He’s best known for a number of accomplishments in broadcasting,” Bill Goodman said. “Starting as a radio newsman at that time and running into people like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and later putting that program and those two people together – much later than when he just ran into them in the newsroom – was an accomplishment in itself. But Julian is also very much responsible for the coverage that NBC put together on the [John F.] Kennedy assassination, the funeral, the great debates of 1960 with Kennedy and [Richard] Nixon.”
Bill Goodman said there’s a lot of resources online with Julian Goodman talking those events and describing what it was like to be over NBC News and then the president of the entire network.
“So Julian was certainly somebody that we all look up to,” Bill Goodman said.
With Charley and his brother Bob’s having been able to get summer jobs as pages with NBC, he said he didn’t see any reason why couldn’t do the same.
“I took a Greyhound bus to New York, stayed at the YMCA, made my way up to 30 Rockefeller Center,” Bill Goodman said.
The elevator opened to his office, if he recalled correctly, he said, and Julian asked what he could do for him. He told him he’d been to WKU and had been studying broadcasting and journalism thought maybe he could go to work there.
“He said, ‘The best advice I can give you is to get right back on that Greyhound bus and go right back to Western Kentucky University and get your degree, and then you can come back up here and see me.’”
Bill Goodman said it was good advice, but he never made his way back up to New York, going to Nashville instead. After a couple more humorous stories from Charley Goodman, the primary speaker for the event thanked Terry again for inviting him, because it had prompted a lot of reflection on his time growing up and the annual Goodman family reunions in Fountain Run, and looking at people like their parents as people they wanted to grow up and be like because of the ethical integrity and other standards they set.
Julian was that relative he mentioned in the beginning, he said, who never denied this rural upbringing.
Joe Dudley Downing
In beginning his discussion about this relative, Bill Goodman read an excerpt from his book, “Beans, Biscuits, Family & Friends: Life Stories,” about his and his sister’s speculation – at ages 10 and 7, respectively – about what their artist cousin, Joe Dudley Downing, might wear when he came home from France for the annual family reunion to which they were on their way. They had seen a photo of him in Time magazine in which he was wearing “some kind of dress or nightshirt similar to the one the father wore in the illustrations in ‘The Night Before Christmas.’”
Barren County native Bill Goodman speaks Saturday at the South Central Kentucky Cultural Center as a guest of the Barren County Historical Society. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
His reading continued with further detailed description and his mother’s remark that artists in France dress that way, plus Dudley was “flamboyant” and had “a certain flair about him.”
“It was 1956,” Goodman read, “and every fourth Sunday in May since I could remember and many more fourth Sundays before that, the Goodmans gathered for a family reunion in Monroe County at a small cemetery where our forefathers rested near the Tennessee border. For generations, this land had been celebrated as our homeplace. A couple of miles down the road from the cemetery was a dilapidated farmhouse where our great-great-great-grandfather had gathered – uh, had fathered, gathered, too – 32 children. He was probably the most famous relative in the family until we learned more about our cousin Dudley, who was coming all the way from France and promised to be the highlight of this year’s celebration.”
Goodman went on to list the fried chicken, deviled eggs, potato salad and sweet tea his mother was taking to the event; the road they drove along through Austin and Tracy; and the attire cousin “Dud” actually wore that wasn’t quite as unusual as they had thought it might be but nonetheless stood out among the local crowd.
“He wore sandals, with no socks!” Goodman read, with the inflection of his reaction back then.
Dudley, whose siblings included Dero Goodman Downing, former WKU president, was born in 1925 in the Fountain Run area near the site of that reunion.
“In a sense, all of us had been born here,” Goodman read. “If you followed the winding highway from the cemetery, past the feed store and the only cafe in Fountain Run, to a crooked, bumpy dirt path that only a few of the Goodman elders could still find, you arrived at the very spot I mentioned earlier.”
In the excerpt, the author spoke his father and his traversing that route to the old homeplace, of which little was left in an overgrown field.
“On that visit, I was a little bit antsy and ready to get back in the car,” Goodman read, “but I do remember, when I caught my father gazing through the imagined structure beyond a rusty, falling-down barbed-wire fence and had the sense, just for a few seconds, that this place had meaning for him. That was the reason Dudley had traveled thousands of miles to this family reunion. It was home.”
Many of Joe Dudley Downing’s works of art are displayed in Bowling Green at the Downing Museum at Baker Arboretum.
NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, this writer is not closely related to the speaker but does share as a common ancestor the person Bill Goodman mentioned as his great-great-great-grandfather.
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