Often dirt brings forth thoughts of juicy gossip, but in these few words, I will not go in that direction since talebearer handles that well on their own.
The old adage, "that when a person talks about others to you then they will talk about you to others," is especially relevant. Nor is this a discourse on geophagia where people consume “clean dirt” to satisfy an internal craving, rather it is a glimpse of my experience as a detectorist using an electromagnetic induction instrument to locate hidden metallic treasures such as gold or silver coins. In my vernacular, this is metal detecting.
My Grandmother Johnnie told me that one of her uncles buried twenty thousand dollars in gold coins in the McVille community. This inspired many to dig, but to my knowledge, no one ever found it. The dream of ending just a few stay coins prompted me much later in life to purchase a metal detector. My daughter, April, as achild liked to use the detector so I would follow her with a five-gallon bucket and a shovel to use when the as a sounded. This worked well until we nearly stepped on a large snake. Most of what was unearthed turned a to be fragments of old farming equipment, rusty nails, and cans. Some farmers left their equipment in the field where they last used it, and if they died before spring, then nature over time would conceal most of it. The only thing of note that we found was a round brass button, which had US on it. At first. I thought it was a military item, but most likely, it came from gear on a mule. My Grandmother also used the term, "the brass of an army mule," to describe a very outspoken person.
The hobby remained dormant for a long time after my first detector died, but something prompted me to get another one after I read an advertisement in a coins magazine. I used this one for a while, but once again, I lost interest after repeated failures to find anything of note. I never found a coin, and this reminded me of my daddy saying," That when he was a child, if you lost a nickel then you would hunt until you found it."
During Covid, a small black car drove up at our house and out popped two young men. I went out to meet them, but not before my wife warned me that they might be infected with the virus. They wanted to metal detect on our property, and after, I found out that one of them was Max Burdine, grandson of my good friend, Larry, then it was a pleasure to let them do so. They found a few coins and returned a few other times to look around. I did learn from them the value of a pin pointer, which can zero in on the location thus allowing one to avoid a lot of trial and error. Interactions can develop into relationships, and now Max is a member of our Sunday school class even though by age he is a member of Generation Z.
An elderly man in our community frequently talked to hunters who stopped by his house when they were looking for their dogs. He would tantalize them with tales of places where there was lots of gold. This would fire them up to return with their detectors, but invariably he would be too ill to lead them to the treasure.
Metal detecting is a good hobby, but it requires time, hard work, and a considerable amount of money. Only a few reap more than they sow. It is also imperative to get the landowner's permission before digging or one could be in a heap of trouble. I have more good memories of the process than the rewards, and this is okay.
Jimmy Williamson
A Most
Important Word
What comes to your mind if I ask what a person’s most important character trait is? You might think of I Corinthians; “faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.” I won’t disagree with Paul that love is the greatest of these three, but in terms of relations among beings, I would argue for choosing the trait of TRUSTWORTHINESS as most needed.
I used the term “beings” here because of a feral cat that has adopted us and rid our yard of mice. It has stayed around for several years because we fed him. Even so, he won’t dare to trust us. He watches at a distance as we do yard work, but try as we might to be friendly, he won’t allow us within ten feet. His lack of trust means he struggles to survive in below freezing weather when he could be in a warm house. Even for animals a lack of trust can be harmful.
But, back to humans and trust. When I joined the Boy Scouts way back in 1950, it was required that we memorize (and hopefully follow) the “Scout Law”. It was a list of twelve virtues that scouts should exemplify. It begins with, “a scout is trustworthy” followed by eleven additional moral values. To me it seems that people who are trustworthy would have most of the other virtues listed in the scout law as well. As I have observed my fellow humans over the last 76 years since scouting, the primacy of trustworthiness as a critical trait in a society becomes more and more obvious. Without trust, even truth itself can be questioned as only an opinion. (Think “the vote was rigged”, “vaccines are dangerous”, or “tariffs are paid by foreign counties.” Eek!)
Think of the cultural consequences of untrustworthiness. Marriages without trust in a partner disintegrate. What about parent-child relationships or between friends when lies are discovered? Contracts become necessary between individuals and/or businesses if trust is not present. James Madison famously said “If men were angels, we wouldn’t need government.” If everyone were trustworthy, lawyers wouldn’t have jobs!
Here are a few pithy truisms about trust to ponder.
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens [trust], you can never regain their respect and esteem.” Abraham Lincoln
“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation [trustworthiness], and only one bad one to lose it.” Ben Franklin.
“The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. [trustworthy]” (Jefferson, Summery View of the Rights of British Americans, 1774)
“Contrary to popular opinion, it is [trust in] institutions, norms, and laws – not elections – that constitute a working democracy.” M. Gessen
"Trust starts with truth and ends with truth." Santosh Kalwar
“In looking for people to hire, look for three qualities: integrity, [synonym for trustworthy] intelligence, and energy. But if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” Warren Buffett
Trustworthiness is part of a more general character trait we label as virtue. Daniel Robinson, professor at Georgetown and Oxford, in his course American Ideals: A Republic of Virtue says the founders “understood virtue as [the] formation of character, … Virtue is tied into what one does voluntarily. There can be no virtue without freedom. For the founders there is an inextricable connection among moral freedom, political liberty, and that form of self-cultivation that results in a person of virtue.” (Doing good because you are forced to is not virtue.)
So, to recapitulate:
The Scout Oath: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to obey the Scout Law, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” (virtuous)
The Scout Law: “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”
So, in closing, choose to be trustworthy, and you’re on the road to virtuous. The world will be a better place for us all.
I rest my case!
Jim Hill
Retired
What an ironic and wryly amusing juxtaposition and array of articles, columns, and letters to the editor appeared in the January 22, 2026 Star Herald! One, a front page article “The KAP takes up tourism mantle” is a report on how the director of the Kosciusko Attala Partnership, Mary Katherine Dean, has plans to revitalize the local community using the method of enhancing tourism. This article is the director's paean (hymn of praise and devotion) to the theorized multiplier effect of tourism on local economies. On page four, Les Ferguson’s Message of the Week column, titled “What is My Purpose in Life,” presents his view that Christian readers need to answer a question for themselves, “Why am I here?" In a column on page seven, titled “God chooses who He will use, when, and how,” Austin Bishop suggests to his readers that in a convoluted way they may be the vehicle which God has placed in the lives of others to help those people get to where He wants them to be. Then, on page five in a letter to the editor titled “Tenacity,” Helen Hill ponders and expresses wonder on how an aging pine tree, even though its limbs have weakened with time, continues to have useful purposes in nature, thus speaking steadfastly to her, “Hey! Old Lady! Yes you! Even you can be useful.”
The wry amusement in this journalistic array entirely originates with the KAP article. Since the director of KAP is a native Alabamian, she can probably grasp the implied meaning of a head shaking “What a hoot!” in regards to her scheme to revitalize tourism in the community. The amusement extends beyond just questioning whether the “re” should be removed from revitalize, so that it more accurately reads “vitalize,” as in waking something up for the first time, not reawakening it. While factually I don’t know how old the director of KAP is, I surmise, based on her published LinkedIn creds of having graduated high school in rural Alabama in 2019, obtaining a B.S. in December 2023, and then a mere eight months later in August 2024 being hired as Director of KAP, that she may have barely reached age 25, if her educational steps were normative. Now, nothing is intrinsically wrong with being age 25 or so, or even closer to age 30 if my surmising is incorrect, as that would be ageism against the young. This is true even though studies now show that higher level frontal lobe development of the brain doesn’t fully occur until that age. Still, Donald Trump founded his Trump Organization on inherited money at around age 25. Steve Jobs was 25 when Apple became a billion dollar public company. Albert Einstein at age 26 published five revolutionary papers in physics, one of which introduced his theory of special relativity.
What is intrinsically inappropriate, wrong though, and indeed ageist, is for a person of this younger age to plan that she wants to use old “retired folks” in the community as fodder for her plans to develop tourism in the community. Quotes from her in the article seem to portray that she is almost gushing over her youthfully skewed notion that old retired persons (perhaps in her mind assuming they have nothing truly useful in their lives to do otherwise), could cheerfully serve as a volunteer base of eager aged beavers to help fulfill KAP's newly acquired mission to revitalize tourism. As long as these retired old folks, of course, have the right attitude of “positivity and pride in the community,” she thinks they should gratuitously devote their free time volunteering (that means no pay) to man the Visitor’s Center in a more full time and organized fashion for her and KAP. Their anointed task as volunteers would be that of inducing tourists (hopefully those with fat wallets) to partake of all the wondrous places in Kosciusko to shop, eat lunch and even spend “an entire afternoon, even an entire day.”
Now I know older persons who have or do volunteer to staff the Visitor's Center, and I'm not impugning their choice to do so. What I am calling out is the exploitative attitude of a KAP director who youthfully assumes that older "retired persons" are readily available as handy fodder for her to fulfill her newly acquired tourism tasks. Does she have the slightest clue at all what older persons in this community might want, for themselves or others, or indeed what they very well might actually need! And that includes all the older community, as an abundance of comments on the recently posted picture on Breezy News of the confab by her and KAP to plan Kosciusko's future, including that for tourism, was "how totally white of them!"
The journalistic array in the Star Herald thus all meshes wonderfully together! Dean has her handy ageist answer for any old retired folks asking Les Ferguson’s question “Why am I here?” Tourist dollars! That’s why you are here. What greater meaning and purpose could one have in one’s golden and waning years than helping Dean rake in tourist dollars to Kosciusko. As to Austin Bishop’s observation about God’s choices for people, Dean has a response to that as well. Her inspiration is that old retired folks are here because God has chosen old retired folks as vehicles in her life so that she can fulfill what she thinks must be God’s choice for her new purpose at KAP. The purpose of old retired folks for her is to have them lure Natchez Trace travelers and their dollars into town to help line the pockets of business persons in Kosciusko, a.k.a. "revitalizing tourism." If volunteers can seduce travelers into believing Kosciusko has so many activities to enjoy that they might have to spend the night to enjoy them, that fulfills her design even more. A night spent in town means more tourist dollars! What about Helen Hill’s aging pine tree though? I imagine that if older retired persons stood under it, avoiding the widow's limb and gazing at the vultures and the trumpet vine, they would hear susurrations and whispers from the tree far more profound and respectful than the director of KAP's shout out to them of "Hey Old Ladies (and Old Laddies too!) Yes you! Even you can be useful. Tourist dollars! That’s why you’re here! That is your purpose for me, a lure for tourist dollars!"
Beverly E. Johnson
