Xtucky

[mikefmich]

Hermod & Jiminnm.........tell me more about this Paducah/Mayfield/Jackson Purchase busline.

Hermod you were stating the bus would take off on Fridays and return on Sunday evenings.......which era are you talking about? To make that run prior to the interstates & BG Parkway in that space of time would be nearly impossible.

Made that run in the summers starting in 1955 from the eastside to Mayfield...and other points in the JP area. It was a bear of a drive, pre interstates.

[claireianthelibrarian]

I hadn't heard the -tucky suffix before moving here, but it's charming.

A lot of places seem to have something like this, the stereotyped backwoods foil to that place's self-labeled civilized nature.

Texas has their Okies and their Oklahoma jokes. What does a tornado have in common with an Oklahoma housewife? They both get that trailer house in the end!

In St. Louis, if you want to indicate that somebody is that special breed of white trash, you call them a hoosier. It has been coopted a bit by hipsters and reclaimed here and there, but generally that word can really sting in the right context.

I tried to avoid saying hoosier for years, feeling that it was a little too classist for my taste. However, after I lived next to a household of people who did cockfighting [[so awesome, roosters crowing before 4:30am), whose one dog killed the other dog and bit my then-boyfriend's mom, who had a relative named Hooch who they constantly swore at and once hog-tied in the back of their pick-up truck, and so on.... I just felt like hoosier was a handy abbreviation to explain these charmers who were a part of my daily life. Hoooo-wee.

[jiminnm]

Hermod & Jiminnm.........tell me more about this Paducah/Mayfield/Jackson Purchase busline.

Hermod you were stating the bus would take off on Fridays and return on Sunday evenings.......which era are you talking about? To make that run prior to the interstates & BG Parkway in that space of time would be nearly impossible.

Made that run in the summers starting in 1955 from the eastside to Mayfield...and other points in the JP area. It was a bear of a drive, pre interstates.

Can't tell you much about the bus line, as I was a little young at the time. Mostly, I remember dropping off and picking up boxes and relatives from the Harper station. As I remember, the bus may have made a stop in Michigan some where outside of Detroit and didn't stop again until southern Illinois.

My mother moved to Detroit from Mayfield, although most of the family was [[and still is) in the Fulton area. I couldn't count the number of weekend trips we made from Detroit to Fulton when i was growing up - yes, in the pre-interstate days when four lane highways weren't real common. We'd hit the road Friday afternoon as soon as my dad was home from work [[or me from school) and drive through. That usually got us in at 7-8 Saturday morning [[14-15 hours if I remember correctly, longer if the weather didn't cooperate or an accident had the two lane bollixed up). We'd hit the road back before noon Sunday and get home in time to catch a few hours of sleep before Monday a.m. I think my dad knew every highway thru Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky [[and occasionally Illinois), and how to avoid all the bigger cities in between [[Toledo, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Evansville etc.).

When I-75 opened, that cut the trip down to 11-12 hours, and the Purchase Parkway shaved an hour or so off of that [[the last exit at the time was a mile or two from my aunt's house). I made that drive, in the modern era, in about 9 1/2 hours.