Coming up on Kentucky Life.

Lights, Camera, Paducah!

This Western Kentucky city is aiming to become a major player in the motion picture industry.

We'll introduce you to the round-leafed sundew, a rare carnivorous plant that's now been found in our state.

We'll check out the setting for this week's show, John James Audubon State Park.

We'll examine the history of the Tobacco League, a Kentucky community baseball league from the 1950s.

And we'll visit the collection of a Louisville photography company that provides a window into life there more than 100 years ago.

All that's next on Kentucky Life!

[music playing] Hey, everybody, and welcome to Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

As we've been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the state park system here in Kentucky all this season, we've been to a number of parks, but the one we're in today really does stand out as being different.

Welcome to John James Audubon State Park in Henderson.

The renowned wildlife artist painted what he saw here in these actual woodlands where Audubon roamed from 1810 to 1819.

There's a museum here as well that interprets Audubon's life through his art and personal memorabilia, along with a nature center that features a wildlife observatory leading to secluded boardwalks and trails.

We can't wait to get out and explore here today.

But first, Paducah, Kentucky, has a reputation for supporting the arts, and one of those arts has been getting a little extra attention lately.

With Kentucky's film production incentives, producers are taking a closer look at our state, and Paducah has a lot to offer.

From the rich history of the Columbia Theater Movie Palace to an upstart production company, this Western Kentucky town is ready for its closeup.

[music playing] The Broadway Street Corridor holds a special place in the history of downtown Paducah.

In 1927, the city welcomed its first cinema, the majestic Columbia Theater, and this is where Paducah's passion for film was born.

With the Columbia Theater, that was the first opportunity for people here in Paducah to see film.

A lot of people talk about seeing their first film at the Columbia and remembering that moment because it really is special.

The first date I had with a young lady who is now my wife of 42 years was here in the Columbia.

You know how first dates are.

You never really know how that's going to go, but I will admit to you, I had an air of confidence because for me, even back then, the Columbia was a special place.

Columbia is film history whenever it comes to Paducah.

People forget that the Keiler family were one of the first investors of Columbia Studios back in the silver age of cinema.

Keiler family's Paducah.

Leo Keiler, in 1927, opened the Columbia Theater and he had every intent to build the finest theater he could possibly build at that time.

In fact, the Columbia Theater was the first air-conditioned building in Paducah.

The first movie that played at the Columbia was Paramount Pictures' silent film "It", featuring Hollywood starlet, Clara Bow.

The Columbia Theater quickly became a focal point of downtown Paducah in spite of challenges like the Great Depression and the historic Ohio River flood of 1937.

When Leo's son, Jack, took over the business, he continued the Columbia's close ties to Hollywood.

Back in the 1950s on a fairly regular basis when the Columbia was premiering a film, the stars of the film would come to Paducah and help to promote that new film.

As the industry shifted toward big multi-screen theaters, the Columbia could no longer compete and the Keilers shut the doors in 1987.

Now, a nonprofit called Columbia Art House owns the theater and is working hard to restore it.

Right now, our primary goal and our primary need is to restore and essentially save the building.

We're excited about an opportunity that we have with the city of Paducah who has agreed to a matching grant of $500,000 that will really move us forward to complete phase one and then get us into that next, that phase two when we can look to preserving the interior of the structure and re-imagining it as a venue.

Paducah's love for film was born in the Columbia Theater, but it reaches well beyond the venerable walls and has found a new voice at the fiercely independent Maiden Alley Cinema.

Maiden Alley Cinema started in 1991 when a group of like-minded people came together and said, "You know, we wanna get together and watch films and we think that other people here in Paducah would like to do that too."

And they would print a program with all of the films listed for a year and invite different people from the community to come and participate.

Maiden Alley not only screens independent films from around the world, but it also brings filmmakers to the River City.

This continues the Columbia's tradition of bringing together audiences and movie makers.

The River's Edge Film Festival is an international film festival that is the longest running here in the state of Kentucky and the only film festival here in Western Kentucky.

We've been doing it since 2006 and we accept submissions from all over the world.

With greater access to technology, regional filmmaking has exploded and everyone needs a place to show their films.

There's a lot of people that are doing films here.

There's a lot of people that are, you know, doing short films or working on features or doing what they can with the resources that they have.

Maiden Alley is a huge supporter of those folks.

And you don't get much more local than Brett Woodall.

He returned home to Paducah to make films and set up shop in his great grandfather's old construction business.

He even uses it as a film set.

[music playing] You don't see Berber carpet on walls anymore.

There's pieces of tile that are worn down.

That's from my grandmother's heels whenever she was, you know, sitting in the secretary desk.

By leveraging the state's film production incentives, Brett's company, Commonwealth Creative Entertainment, is able to produce films with first-rate talent and production values.

I don't plan on my impact on Paducah Film to be just bringing in filmmakers from out of state or out of region.

I also want to help grow local filmmakers and help give them the resources that they need to do work that they're proud of.

I think that the Paducah Film scene is really going to explode.

And so, in five years, maybe we'll have a local filmmaker screening once a month.

That would be incredible.

Obviously, there's a lot of excitement for the future of film in Paducah right now, but no one is forgetting where it all started.

The Columbia's history, I think, really serves as a great foundation, a platform even for the burgeoning film industry here in Paducah.

In fact, it's an important piece of the puzzle as we look at the current film situation in Paducah.

The round-leaved sundew is an interesting plant for a couple of reasons.

For one, it grows in remote, wet environments like somewhere hidden on the side of a mountain.

And secondly, it's carnivorous, so it eats bugs like a Venus flytrap.

The Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves recently and unexpectedly discovered this plant for the very first time in Kentucky.

And with their help, and in as intensive an adventure I've been on in a long time, our Kentucky Life crew got the chance to go find it for ourselves.

Botanist Devin Rodgers and Toby Shea were in the Daniel Boone National Forest in November of 2023 when they came across a remarkable find.

The round-leaved sundew can be found throughout the Eastern United States and Canada in bogs or environments with mossy crevices or damp sand, but it had never been seen in Kentucky.

So, the day that you made this discovery, what were you doing that day and walk me through that eureka moment where you came upon the plant and realized what it was?

I always have my eyes out for things that, you know, could be there and, you know, like it could be very unlikely things.

But this creek had all these indications that there was a high possibility for significant discoveries.

And basically, it didn't seem like very many biologists or botanists had ever been there.

So, you looked at the area, you thought, "Maybe this is it," and you walked over to check it out, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, Toby and I walk over together and he just points down and sure enough, there's a sundew and there's just hundreds of them.

I mean, I was like immediately started screaming.

I was so excited.

And then a couple seconds later, I was like, "Wait, like this isn't any known species from Kentucky.

Like this is something different that we haven't documented before."

That had to be a remarkable experience to have happen.

It was.

It's really special.

It's special anytime you encounter like a state record, which is the first time somebody's documenting a given species for a state, but for it to be a carnivorous plant and like, we love our carnivorous plants, all of us nature lovers or just plant lovers in general, they're such fascinating organisms.

So, yeah, it was quite a discovery.

So, we of course wanted to go see the sundew.

Now, Devin warned us ahead of time.

It was a 3-mile hike in a remote area of the forest that really didn't have trails.

We were going to go several hundred feet down into a gorge and the last quarter mile was through a rocky creek bed.

And that's not to mention who might be there waiting for us.

You have to be more concerned about the ticks and stinging, biting insects and black bears.

I'm sorry, bears?

Did you say?

That's right, yes.

Okay.

Okay, so there's bears there.

Yeah, we've got some bears in Eastern Kentucky.

There's not as many in Mercer County, but they're definitely down there and I've definitely seen some tracks on some times that I've been there before.

And after the long trip there, we finally got to take in the discovery.

Oh, there it is.

Oh, wow.

And how does the plant eat?

What's the mechanics of how that actually works here?

Yeah, so each one of these little leaves is covered in these sticky hairs.

Right.

And what you see that looks actually like dew, that's actually these complex sugars that are very sticky and a bug will land on the leaf and get trapped by those glands.

And then the leaf will curl in on itself to get the bug closer to the center.

So, the question remains, how did the plant end up there?

Devin thinks it may have been there all along and just no one found it.

He thinks it could have existed all the way back into the ice age, millions of years ago.

As the glaciers retreated and the climate warmed, some of the plants hung on, but only in what he said were the luckiest and coolest microclimates, much like where the plant was found in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

So, the theory is it didn't get deposited there miraculously.

It may have been there literally for millions of years, just never left and we're just now finding it.

Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, that's correct.

There are still discoveries to be made, but it says something that it took us, you know, up until 2024 to actually have the first confirmed documentation in Kentucky and yeah, it is really neat that it presumably could have been there for a really long time.

The plant is now officially listed as endangered in Kentucky.

That affords it a number of protections, and you can rest assured Devin and his crew are already back in the woods looking for whatever else may be out there just waiting to be discovered.

[music playing] From 1949 to 1955, hundreds of folks in Kentucky came together on Sunday afternoons to enjoy organized community baseball.

These small-town teams played against nearby rivals and crowned regular season and playoff champions.

One of those leagues existed in Central Kentucky and called itself the Tobacco League and thanks to a former player and his camera, the memories of this era are being preserved by his son.

So, the Tobacco League emerges between the Second World War and the Korean War, and it included teams from the cities of Lexington, Richmond, and Berea competing against teams from very small communities like Wildie, Waco, Ravenna, Bearwallow, Kirksville.

The Tobacco League Constitution stipulates the hierarchy of the league.

There was a president, a vice president, and a secretary treasurer.

The president was a young man named Fred Engle and he was 20 years old when the league began and he really was a key organizing force for the Tobacco League.

I think he had a vision for what he thought the league should be and how it should operate efficiently and effectively.

This wasn't exactly triple A level baseball.

It was highly organized and you had a lot of good baseball players but in many cases they were playing on somewhat primitive fields.

The field itself was a cow pasture.

It was a rather large field.

The center field part of it was dry.

The areas on the left field side, when it came a large rain, water stood there and it was play ball just like it wasn't there.

Right field fell off kind of at a slope and it was wet and muddy in that area.

My dad got to play right field so he would come in with mud all over him.

There was admission and from what I could tell, the admission was 25 cents a person.

That money was then used by the managers to buy equipment.

The players brought their own shoes and gloves but the teams paid for the bats and the balls.

And I really felt honored to be a part of that team because that team meant so much to the community.

I didn't get to play much at start because, you know, I was 13 or 14 so I knew that my time would come.

So, I went to all the games, I practiced and once in a while I would get put in a game if the game got a little one-sided.

But then, the next year, I improved some and I got to be a regular starter on the team.

14 years old, I became the shortstop of that baseball team.

On Sundays, the two biggest events when we had our ball game was church and the ball game.

Most of them went directly from the church house to the ball field, dressed up in Sunday dress.

I mean, everybody in the community attended the ball game.

We were country boys and we had played mostly from the time we were five years old in school.

Every school recess, you know, was a ball game.

So that's where we learned the game.

Our first team, it was made of people from my age which was 17 to at least 40 and maybe more than 40.

There were not many cameras, there were not many photographs.

My brother, Billy, was very interested in the recording.

So, he took a lot of pictures.

My nephew, Willie, has put together an exhibit with all the photos and brings back a lot of good memories.

My dad purchased a Mercury II camera sometime in the late 1940s.

He was not a professional photographer but I think that as a documentarian at heart, I think first and foremost, he really wanted to tell stories about this community in which he had grown up.

Putting the archive together, what I see is that this is a community that's really on the cusp of tremendous change.

And one of my favorite photos is the group of players sitting on a bank with a barbed wire fence behind them.

And it just seems like this incredibly romantic and poignant photo of this community that is sort of stranded in time.

But really what I see in looking at that is quite different.

This was a community that was about to face tremendous disruption.

Not only was the Korean War really heating up and players from Wildie would be called into service in the Korean War, but also the decade of the 1940s was a period of large out-migration from the Appalachian area.

A few hundred thousand Appalachians left the region in the 1940s in search of jobs and opportunities.

You know, young men and young people were leaving the region.

But what I see is just this moment in which tremendous change is coming to this small central Kentucky community.

But I think with the outbreak of the Korean War, Wildie lost its picture and catcher to being called to serve in Korea.

And you add in sort of out-migration and the changes that are coming to these communities, and I think that it was probably next to impossible for the Tobacco League to maintain a full slate of games in 1952.

I am the last survivor of that team at Wildie.

It may seem like a small kind of event, but looking back at that time, the Wildie baseball team was very important.

I was the youngest person on the team.

Now they're all gone, and I'm the only spokesman they have left.

I drive by the place sometimes, and now the field is not there, but I drive by the place sometimes, and I just stop and look and see, you know?

And I can picture everything how it used to be.

And I can tell everyone that listens to this that the people that were on that team would appreciate what you're doing.

To get the word out again, out of something that's been long gone, and preserve our history.

And you're doing a great service by doing that.

Sometimes life throws you a curve, you gotta be ready for it.

Photography is a practice that, like many, has changed and evolved with constantly improving technology.

It became widespread in popularity during the early half of the 20th century, which is the setting for our next story.

James Caulfield and Frank W. Shook came together in the 1900s to form a photography company, appropriately called Caulfield and Shook.

Throughout their lives, they captured thousands upon thousands of images of Louisville's businesses, events, and landscapes.

They were masters of their craft, and thanks to their work, we're now able to observe how Kentucky's largest city has changed through time.

[music playing] Caulfield and Shook probably met just as different photographers in the downtown core of Louisville.

There were so many at that time, and their studios weren't that far from each other.

James N. Caulfield was a photographer here in Louisville who began his career in the late 1800s.

He started a studio with his brother-in-law, Alvin Gordon, and was one of maybe 20 different photo studios in the downtown core of Louisville.

Caulfield and his brother-in-law had a disagreement, so Frank Shook bought out Gordon's share of the business, and they started their own firm in 1903 called Caulfield and Shook.

And their motto was, we photograph anything, day or night.

So, that's literally represented in the collection of photographs that we have.

They photographed people, events, businesses, buildings, scenery, locations, landscapes, you name it.

It's represented in the collection.

Most of Caulfield and Shook's income came from their stock photography.

These photos have ended up in the University of Louisville's collection and have become a great resource in showing the changes the city experienced during the 20th century.

Together, Caulfield and Shook documented key events and places throughout Louisville's history, like Camp Zachary Taylor, a World War I training camp, where they took photographs of troops and activities.

Another event that they photographed was the 1937 flood.

And in one story, Frank Shook talks about how the mayor had contacted them to be ready to take photographs for documentation and identification of victims of the flood, but it turned out that there weren't any.

So, they went around and photographed the scenes and the flooded streets and buildings.

And that's, in fact, when they lost a large portion of their stock photography collection.

Frank Shook talked about spending the night before the waters really came up high, moving all of -- or as much as he could, the stock collection from the basement upstairs.

And what he couldn't move has been lost.

So, a lot of their early work is not in the collection.

In 1924, Caulfield and Shook became the official photographers for the Kentucky Derby, a position held by the firm until its closing in 1978.

Frank Shook talked about employing a number of freelance photographers, hiring photographers from other studios just to document the Derby, because it took so many of them, sometimes up to 18 photographers stationed around Churchill Downs to photograph what was going on Derby Day.

One of my favorite photographs by Caulfield and Shook is a portrait of seven young African American boys standing outside the Prentice School property, holding saws and other tools, and next to a wood fence that presumably they had just built.

Another one of my favorite photographs is a simple street scene that was taken at the intersection of 25th and Main Streets in 1930.

And I've gone to Google Street View to see what's still there, how does it compare?

And the buildings are still there, and you can see exactly the same scene that was shot in 1930, and really it's a lovely example of seeing the changes that Louisville's gone through.

So, Caulfield and Shook sold their shares of the business to two photographers that worked for them, Ned Tanzel and Dick Duncan, in 1960.

And it was in 1968 when those two men decided to donate a large portion of the photographic files to the University of Louisville Photographic Archives.

Caulfield and Shook is one of our most accessed collections, so not only by students in the university community, but we're open to the public.

And anytime somebody is looking for pictures of their house or their street or their school or their business, it's often the Caulfield and Shook collection that they're finding those photographs in.

Elizabeth says the Caulfield and Shook collection is around 80 linear feet, which translates to about 47,000 nitrate negatives and more than 230,000 acetate negatives and prints.

Processing of the collection began when it arrived at the University of Louisville in the late 1960s and continues to this day.

I think everybody loves the photographs of Caulfield and Shook today because they show Louisville at a time at which nobody around today remembers, and it gives us a really good glimpse into the past of the city that we live in.

I hope that people who are looking at the Caulfield and Shook photographs learn something new whenever they look at these photographs.

I know that I do.

I often teach students to look closely at photographs, look closer than you're used to looking, like take a magnifying glass and look at the details that you're not usually paying attention to.

How is life different now in Louisville than it was when it was photographed by Caulfield and Shook?

Look at the street signs, look at the buildings and the advertisements, and look at the traffic lights.

Everything was different, and it's all documented in these photographs.

We've had an amazing time here today at John James Audubon State Park in Henderson.

After going through the museum and walking these lands, you can just imagine what it was like when Audubon walked here himself.

He was here before photography was invented, so his amazing works of art truly are a window into what he encountered right here.

Now, if you've enjoyed our show, be sure to like the Kentucky Life Facebook page or subscribe to the KET YouTube channel for more of what we like to call Kentucky Life Extras, where you'll have access to lots of other great content.

Until next time, I'll leave you with this moment.

I'm Chip Polston, cherishing this Kentucky life.

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