A Journey From Slingshots & Marbles To Bottom Lines

My overall objective in writing this book is to show how a boy, raised in one of the poorest areas of Kentucky, with a limited education, average looks and intelligence, and from a broken home, could become his definition of a successful man.

Success does not necessarily equate to how high one climbs the corporate ladder, or how much wealth one accumulates. Rather, it is how well one has attained his own understanding of success.

In my mind, success is defined by hard work, honesty, finding a mate you can respect and love, providing a nice home for your family, being a good father and a good neighbor, remaining trustworthy, having concern for others, paying your debts, having a good job that you enjoy, and becoming a born-again Christian.

I may believe that I have achieved some or all of the above, but ultimately my family, my friends, my business associates, and my Creator will make that determination.

It is my belief that who we turn out to be depends largely on who we associate with, who we emulate, and how our parents raised us, including the examples set by them. It is not enough to tell children they shouldn’t drink while screwing the cap back on a bottle of whiskey, or insist they not smoke while inhaling a draw from a favorite cigarette.

I think of life as a relay race. The baton was passed to my generation, and we in turn hand it to our children. How well we do, and how well our children do, depends to a large degree on how well the ones before us did.

I had little control over what position my family held when I was handed the baton and entered the race. But it was my responsibility to prepare my children to be ready to receive the baton and run the race, when at last they entered.

The first thing for me to do was to find a loving mate who would also be a good mother. I found that person in my wife, Phyllis. It was then our responsibility to provide our children with a solid family environment with Christian moral values, provide them with an education, and encourage them to run a strong, smart, and honest race. This we did.

Phyllis and I raised our children as Christians, attending Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville. They all made professions of faith, and each received a college education. All three have honorable and prestigious jobs. Larry is a journalist and edits a newspaper. Jennifer is a school teacher, and Nancy is in law enforcement. I think they are ready to take the baton and will run well with it.

I am aware that success is a subjective term, meaning different things to different people. For example, owning a nice home, as I do, is quite an achievement for me, whereas to someone who was raised in a nice home, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

But my childhood home was somewhat different. My bed was upstairs in an unfinished room. I awakened some mornings with a skim of snow on my covers. In those circumstances, I never dreamed that someday my wife and I would, say, spend a week in Maui, because until I was about 14, I had not been outside Adair County. My wife’s 1970 trip to Europe, during which she visited France, Egypt, England, Italy, and the Holy Land, was something that, in my youth, I associated only with rich people.

I want to share with you what it was like to grow up in the Millerfield community of Adair County, Kentucky, including the triumphs, defeats, joys, and sorrows I encountered along the way and my struggle to leave a place I loved so much in my pursuit of success.

I was raised in the small community of Millerfield, which is located about 15 miles east of Columbia, Ky., the county seat of Adair County.

When I was a boy growing up in that wonderful place, there were no paved roads, just dirt. In the winter the mud would get so deep that trucks could not make deliveries to the lone grocery store. Doctors could not make house calls (which they did in those days). Someone with a team of horses would have to meet them out on Paved Road 206.

In the summer the mud would turn to dirt, then dust. When the occasional car came along, it would raise a cloud of dust that would drift into the nearby houses, including ours, because all the windows were open due to the hot weather.

Electricity had not come to our little village, therefore we had no air conditioners, no refrigerators, or even electric lights. We kept our milk and perishables either in a spring house, if a family was lucky enough to have one, or, in our case, a dug well. We would set the milk, butter, and other food in a bucket used to bring up drinking water, and lower it into the cold water in order to keep the food from spoiling.

There were about 45 houses overall in our village, but only about 8 or 10 around the business area, which consisted of a grocery store, a mill, and the school, which doubled as our church.

There was a horseshoe pitching court across the road from the store, where the men would pitch horseshoes on Saturdays and Sunday evenings. There was also a place where the boys would play marbles for fun and for keeps, and also play a game using big stone marbles called euchre. It sounds like a very primitive place, and it was. But it was a great place to be raised...especially as a boy...a very protective place where most everyone knew and cared about each other.

My dad, Olie Barnes, after serving in World War I and being discharged from the Army, left Adair County to find work up north. Lola Foley, my mother, after attending Lindsey