Some Love Letters to the Friendliest Town in America

Before we get back to regular programming around here, here’s one last Substack in which I’ll share some Inktober stories. Inktober supplies a one-word prompt for each day. The traditional way to participate in Inktober is to make an ink drawing for each prompt. Influenced by my friend, Jonathan Rogers, I used my ink to write stories instead— very short stories, short enough to fit in an Instagram caption. I shared some of them on Instagram on my writing account: @elizabethharwellwrites

This morning I’m sharing a collection of the stories which feature my lovely hometown of Murray, Kentucky. I hope you enjoy them! And I hope you’ll share your own stories with me in the comment section.

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October 14: Roam

If you are keeping track of such things, you will know that my hometown of Murray, Kentucky has been voted The Friendliest Small Town in America. Several years ago, a team from Rand McNally teamed up with USA Today to #roam the States and find the Most Beautiful, the Most Fun, the Most Patriotic, the Best Food, and the Friendliest town. Which sort of feels like they said of Murray, “But she’s got a great personality,” but she does. She really does.

Our crosstown rivalry, however, was not so friendly. I went to school in Calloway County, and we were the Lakers. Murray’s city schools were the Murray Tigers. The Tigers were the city-folk—if there can be such a thing in Murray, Kentucky—and they thought they were better than us farmers: smarter, better-dressed, more sophisticated. We Lakers thought the Tigers were snobby and self-important. Fifty years before I came onto the scene, some derogatory nicknames were thrown around and a couple of them stuck. The Lakers started calling The Tigers “Cream Eaters” because of their tendency to hang out in the Dairy Queen parking lot on Friday nights. The Tigers started calling the Lakers “Swamp Rats.” I don’t know why, I guess because that’s the worst thing that they could think of coming out of a lake? 

Around my senior year of high school, Calloway was starting to think about changing their mascot. A sailboat is a hard thing to represent at a basketball game. They wanted a mascot that could perhaps walk upright—maybe have some facial expressions? Do you know what was at the top of the list? Swamp Rats. I loved them for it. I was so proud to be from the school that could take the joke. That’s some swampy resilience right there, something those cream-eating city-folk can’t know nothing about. 

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October 12: Remote

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have phone apps or Alexas to tell us what the time or temperature was. We had to find out the hard way. No, I don’t mean by walking outside or looking at a clock. Nor do I mean picking up a #remote and turning to the weather channel. I mean, we had to pick up the home phone and dial the number for Murray Time and Temperature. The Time and Temp recording gave us the most accurate time in town, the current temperature, and the next day’s forecast. I called it nearly every day, sometimes several times out of boredom or habit. Maybe it’s what teenage girl’s thumbs did before scrolling Instagram. 

The word around town was that some girls were giving out this number to boys they didn’t want calling. I never understood this strategy, because all the Murray boys already knew the Time and Temp number and would see straight through your ruse. 

But once, in high school, I accidentally joined the Future Farmer’s of America club. That is a different story for another time, but the relevant point here is that I was in a neighboring town for a FFA competition. A future farmer from another school must have been impressed with my cattle judging skills, because he came up to me and introduced himself. I was not likewise impressed with him. He wanted my phone number. I hesitated for a moment, not wanting to be rude, and then realized with delight that there was a protocol for this. “My number is 270-753-6363*.” He thanked me and tipped his hat. I walked away with a sense of freedom, and not an ounce of guilt. He would get the accurate time, after all. He could set his watch by it. 

After this memory came back to me, I wondered if Murray’s Time and Temp was still kicking. Who could possibly still be calling, when we now carry computers in our pocket? I called the number. “The time and temperature is coming up, after this!” A peppy man answers on a recording.

“A commercial break?” I thought. “This is new.”

And then: “Are you prepared for emergencies in your home? A simple alert device from Life Alert means you can live alone without ever being alone!” 

*You can call it yourself and set your own clock by it.

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October 2: Discover

In grade school we all learned who #discovered what: the Wright Brothers invented the airplane; Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; Henry Ford invented the Model T car. At North Elementary in Murray, Kentucky, we were also taught who invented the radio. I’m sure that if you went to a school of academic integrity, you were also taught that Murray, Kentucky is the birthplace of radio, and that a melon farmer, named Nathan B. Stubblefield, was the first to invent it. 

Stubblefield was playing around with magnetic waves before Marconi was even crawling. He gathered an audience of farmers to show them how he could make the arrows of a compass spin through underground currents from yards away, and he theorized that those same currents could carry the sound of the human voice and even music.

On New Year’s Day of 1902, Stubblefield held a demonstration in Murray’s town square. He stood in front of a large crowd, including a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, to show what his invention could do. The reporter received Stubblefield's messages from a mile away, through magnetic waves in the ground and into a wireless telephone. Stubblefield played a song on his harmonica. The reporter said he could hear it all with “extraordinary distinctness.” 

As the story goes, Stubblefield, out of suspicion and perhaps paranoia, waited too long to get a patent. As a child, I got it in my head that the Italians stole plans out of Stubblefield’s briefcase on a train ride. I probably made that part up. 

In any case, I bet the kids of Bologna, Italy really think they’re from some place. They’ve got the oldest university, the best lasagna, and they think they produced the inventor of radio. But they live under a revisionist history. They don’t have the gift of knowing that the first human sounds riding the magnetic waves of God’s given earth were from a humble farmer in Murray, Kentucky, blowing into his harmonica.

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And what about you, Reader? Do you have any stories of hometown heroes, or future farmers, or crosstown rivalries? I would love to hear about them in the comment section!