Sherry Chandler

It’s Inauguration Day here in Kentucky. Today we get a new governor, Democrat Steve Beshear, with all pomp and circumstance, and a few hijinks. Jack Brammer of Lexington Herald-Leader’s Frankfort bureau has some tales to tell:

FRANKFORT — “Yes sir, Inauguration Day is always special in Kentucky.”

That’s what the 91-year-old woman Kentuckians endearingly knew as “Mama Chandler” said 16 years ago to reporters on the day Brereton Jones was sworn in as the state’s chief executive.

Mildred Chandler, the wife of A.B. “Happy” Chandler, who was governor in the 1930s and 1950s, was right. Inauguration Day, with its pomp, pageantry and surprises, is special in Kentucky.

On this day when Steve Beshear becomes the 61st governor in the Commonwealth’s history and gives Democrats control again of the executive branch, the Capital City will gussy up and try to behave as if royalty were coming to visit.

…

“I had a lot on my mind that day,” said [former governor John Y.] Brown. “Two hours before my speech and after watching the parade, I had a splitting headache. Steve Wilson, an aide, brought me over to the Mansion to get a shot of whiskey or bourbon and it got rid of my headache. That’s never been reported.

“Dr. Thomas Clark and other historians said it was one of the best inaugural speeches ever.”

When Brown’s term ended in 1983, he left a personal note taped to the door of the governor’s office for his successor, Martha Layne Collins. It said, “Everything was working when I left. JYB.”

Maybe Bill Clinton should have left such a note for George W. Bush.

John Y. Brown won’t be attending Steve Beshear’s inaugural. Hard feelings from old races.

I have attended inaugural parades in my day, mostly as a school child when we’d be bussed to see the show. I ’spect I was there when Bert T. Combs replaced Happy Chandler in 1959. Maybe for Chandler’s second inauguration in 1955. His first term was in 1935 and I hadn’t been born yet.

When Paul Patton came in (1995), my sixteen-year-old son carried a tuba and marched in a moon boot because he had a broken foot. He says about all he can remember is that they forgot to break step on the bridge across the Kentucky River. That shook things up a bit for the Paris Marching Greyhounds. It took an extramarital affair to shake things up for Patton.

Meanwhile, Mama Chandler’s grandson, who was defeated for governor by Republican Ernie Fletcher, in part because of Patton’s philandering, is representing Kentucky’s sixth district in the United States Congress.

To quote James H. Mulligan:

The song birds are the sweetest
In Kentucky;
The thoroughbreds are fleetest
In Kentucky;
Mountains tower proudest,
Thunders peal the loudest,
The landscape is the grandest-
And politics—the damnedest
In Kentucky.

Here’s a holiday tradition you might like to share. It’s The Scotsman’s Haggis Hunt:

The temperature is plummeting. The frosts of winter nestle on the moors. And the steam is rising from massed ranks of the haggis hunters.

At haggishunt.com we are reviving a fine old Scottish tradition: the hunting of the haggis.

The American Heritage Dictionary (how would it know?) says a haggis is:

A Scottish dish consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal.

Not so, says The Haggisclopedia:

The most common mistaken belief about the haggis is that it is some kind of pudding made from sheep innards. This somewhat macabre idea dates back many centuries. Its origins lie in a Pictish fertility ceremony which featured a parade of creatures known to produce large numbers of offspring. The haggis was one such animal. However, as hunting techniques were not as sophisticated as they were then and - for reasons explained in The Haggis in Scotland’s History - haggis numbers were low, the Pictish priests often had to make do with a model for these ceremonies. Said model haggis was made from an inflated sheep bladder, hence the myth.

To facilitate the hunting of the haggis, The Scotsman has mounted ten web cams in places like Loch Ness (you might see Nessie, too), Princes Street in Edinburg, Leicester Square in London, and Times Square in New York. So now you can hunt the haggis in your pajamas. When you spot one, report it and your name will be entered into a drawing for prizes like a weekend at the Gleneagles Hotel (think golf) or a full line of Haggis merchandise.

Tired of hunting, you can play haggis games, like Farquhar’s Revenge (Shockwave), otherwise called bash the haggii, and Drop the Haggis (Flash), in which you have to help Farquhar catch the falling haggii while avoiding the drops of rain.

Or you can just have fun watching the web cams.

I stole these neat graphics from the haggishunt.com