Frontier Nursing Service moved upland and took their stained glass window with them

There are riots in Hyden, but not about the police. Instead people are taking to the streets to protest the removal from their little chapel on Hospital Hill of a 15th-century stained glass window. At first it was thought that Indiana Jones had taken it, but come to find out, the rare local treasure was spirited away in the middle of the night to more civilized country, Versailles, by the board of directors of Frontier Nursing University, as a symbol of the abandonment of the founding purpose of their outfit — to provide hands-on medical care to mothers and babies.

So when the board of the legendary Nursing Service decided they could best serve the mountains by not being in them, but by going back to the Bluegrass where Mrs. Breckinridge came from and where it doesn’t flood or land doesn’t slide and where the people speak proper English and wear tweed and ride horses with no horn on the saddle, they hauled off to Versailles and took their stained glass with them. Instead of birthing hillbilly babies in the uplands, the Nursing Service now calls itself a flatland university and last reported a profit of a little less than six million dollars a year, something it will not spend on prenatal or postnatal health care.

There was quite an outcry from the Hydenians, thousands of whom were spanked to life by one of the tough old midwives of the nursing service, who rode horses through wilderness to help mountain mommas bear yet another baby.

The board of the Nursing Service defended their removal of the window by pointing out that they had replaced it with a four-ply plastic Glad bag, and fully intended to produce an exact replica of the window, only 500 years newer, and perhaps unstained. They explained that Versailles was far more appropriate for a fancy window than a suburb of a place called Thousand Sticks, just as it is a far more suitable place for the management to live. Just because you want to help the mountains doesn’t mean you have to live there. Versailles exemplifies the haute couture of Central Kentucky. Leslie County merely produced George Wooton and the Osborne Brothers, who along with the Louisiana couple who wrote it, popularized the Tennessee state song. Let Tennessee buy Leslie County a window. Besides, people in Leslie County called it a ‘winder’.

It would be different if Leslie County needed those 250 jobs which were reserved for Woodford. There is plenty of work in Leslie County and everybody is doing well and will continue to do well unless the candidate they all vote for wins and then they will have no health care at all.

But Leslie County will vote for the Donald. If he were not the President right now, we might be having riots in the cities.

They were right. They told me if I voted for Hillary Clinton we would have riots and unemployment. They were right. I voted for her and we did.

Larry Webster is an attorney in Pikeville.