Society

The Number 6 seed Murray State Racers celebrated Selection Sunday yesterday by getting ready for their first NCAA tournament opponent, eleven seed Colorado State.  The Racers will play the Rams this Thursday at Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center.  MSU Head Coach Steve Prohm says he’s glad the wait is over, so the OVC champions can concentrate on preparing to play Colorado State.  Tip off is set for 11:15 a.m. Central, on Thursday.
 

The Racers have re-written the record books this year, and as Murphy ’s Law would dictate that has thrown a wrench in the operation of Racer Basketball Legend Bennie Purcell and former MSU Sports Information Director Jimmy Wilder, who are behind a book called “Banner Years” Chronicling the Racers 85 year basketball history. WKMS' resident sports buff Tracy Ross speaks with Purcell and Wilder about the book and some of the Racers greatest ball players.

Kentucky lawmakers and their staffs have raised more than twenty thousand dollars for disaster relief this week.

Members of the Kentucky General Assembly had set a goal of ten thousand dollars to donate to the Red Cross in the wake of tornadoes that struck eastern and northern Kentucky last week.

House Speaker Greg Stumbo's office handled the donations. Today, Stumbo announced to his chamber they had surpassed their goal.

My grandmother was the quintessential American pioneer. In 1891, when she was 17, her family left the comfort of their home and heritage in Marietta, Ohio to seek their fortune on the American prairie. Her father, Frank D. Booth, was the son of Horatio Booth, a boat Pilot on the Ohio River, and the grandson of the first Mayor of Marietta, James Mather Booth, an 1804 immigrant from Manchester, England. For over 23 years, Frank Booth was a pilot of the 138 ton J. H. McConnell a side-wheeler passenger steamboat that ran from Parkersburg, West Virginia to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This is a family story, a story of loss and exile, and of the intersection of personal history with large historical events.  It is also a quintessentially American story of arrival, and of a second chance.  This is a story so close to me I seem always to have known it.  It is the story of how my father came to America.