Thursday, May 13, 2010Opinion

The Brownsville States-Graphic

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The Brownsville States-Graphic(USPS ISSN 08909938) is published weekly by Haywood County Newspapers

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Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

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Calvin Carter,Staff Writer

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BrownsvilleSTATES-GRAPHICSTATES-GRAPHIC

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Calvin Carter,Rebecca GrayStaff Writer

Sara Clark,Josh AndersonGraphic Design

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Leticia OrozcoReceptionist

Vicky Fawcett,Office Manager

Julie Pickard,Staff Writer

Calvin's Corner

By Calvin Carter, Staff Writer

By 28th Judicial District Circuit Court Judge Clayburn Peeples

If you missed out on Haywood County’s Youth Talent show last weekend—the proper title being Haywood’s Got Talent—then you have my sincere condo-lences.

While part of me wants to rub in your face, the mistake you made by not showing up, I’ll play nice and simply leave you with this quip: “You missed a darn good show.”

It’s an impressive site to witness any of the local youth showing off their talents.

Given the deep musical lake, Haywood County has left, rest assured that last weekend showed that a strong young river of talent, was still pour-ing itself into that lake, in fact, to almost waterfall proportions.

If you get the chance, be sure to give special thanks to UT Extension and Tennille Short for providing such a great opportunity. And if you’re looking for more details on the show, you can look further inside this issue of the States-Graphic. In fact, I encour-age you to go ahead and look.

I’ll be here waiting.…Are we good?

Great!So who was my favor-

ite during the show? Ah, now that would be like revealing my choice for City Mayor. While some would welcome my agreement with a bum-

per sticker and a hearty handshake, others would think of me as a biased good-for-nothing rat. It might actually cost me to show my opinion.

Ok, I’ll play for a bit, but first let me say that all of the competitors were very talented. So please, proud parents, no angry letters about me insulting your talented children. Truth be told, I did not want to be in any of the judges’ seats. Too many tough decisions. However, personally, I got to hand it to Clifton Smith and James Gavin for their performance on the drums.

Not to take away from any of the other perform-ers, but I’m a sucker for instrumental duets, espe-cially on either guitar or drums.

And as my friends usually say after a great concert: “Dudes rocked it like no other.”

In other entertainment news, did anyone catch Saturday Night Live as well?

If you missed it, you also missed Facebook gaining a major victory as far as social relevance.

Many are praising the social site for getting Betty White a hosting opportunity on the late night show, after a group on the website request-ing White as a host was started a while ago.

How did the self-pro-claimed, “88 and a half” year-old actress do?

Personally, I thought

it was pretty good. SNL lately has gotten a bad rep from a lot of people, but to me, it’s been pro-ducing some good laughs these last couple of years. Not to say that they don’t have any comedic flops, but the ratio to funny to unfunny has increased significantly over the years to me.

A lot of that has to do with their Digital Shorts, which is probably half the reason why Hulu—sorry You Tube users, they show no love—was even thought of in the first place. They could make money of the inter-net.

I look forward every week, to seeing what twisted humor they’ve got in store for me.

Even though, I was always more of a Bea Arthur fan, White was pretty funny in her sketches. It was also nice to see some of the past female castmates return at least for an episode. I missed Maya Rudolph’s take on poking fun at Whitney Huston.

Jay-Z as a musical guest, didn’t hurt either, whose performance included a mash-up of many of his hits. In a musical genre, that’s usu-ally regarded as a young man’s game, Jay made many other rappers’ live performances look pretty tragic.

Who said veteran’s can’t outdo the young ‘uns?

It was, pronounced just about every news report I’ve seen, the worst flooding in Tennessee his-tory, and it was indeed a devastating, disastrous flood of historic propor-tions.

But it was not the worst in the state’s his-tory, or even the second worst. The Cumberland River crested last week at 51.86 feet, nearly 12 feet above flood stage, a catastrophic flood to be sure, but it could have been worse.

“How?” you say. Well, it could have kept on raining. That’s what happened in 1927 and 1937, the years of the most serious flood-ing in America’s, and Tennessee’s history. In the Great Flood of 1937, the Cumberland crested even higher, at 53.9 feet. Ten years earlier it had gone even higher (56.2 feet) in what is consid-ered by most historians as the most serious flood in American history.

This past week’s flood-ing came about suddenly, as a result of a very rapid rise in area river levels, and while it was totally unexpected, it was not unprecedented. The floods of 1927 and 1937 were slow-rise floods that began, as most floods do, with rain. The trouble-some weather that result-ed in the Great Flood of 1937 actually began in December of 1936 with a heavier rainfall than usual.

But that’s no problem, usually. Happens all the time, but in January, the rain, sleet and snow kept coming down until every square inch of Tennessee soil was saturated. And it kept on coming until April. Meteorologists now say all that rain was caused by a period of abnormal baromet-ric pressure over the Northern Hemisphere,

which, in turn, produced aberrant weather pat-terns.

In the United States, eastern and western sea-board pressure zones caused moist, southern tropical air masses to move northward where they met northern polar air masses headed south. The result — lots and lots of precipitation.

Here in Tennessee, it rained and rained and rained. In January it rained 21.24 inches, and on January 24, Black Sunday it came to be called, the Cumberland, the Tennessee and the Mississippi Rivers all overflowed in Tennessee and 11 other states. Nearly 13, 000 square miles flooded on that day, and 75,000 homes were under water. Two hundred fifty people died, and hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes.

Along the Mississippi thousands of highway patrolmen, National Guardsmen and volun-teers fought to protect levees, and rescue par-ties were set up from Tiptonville to Memphis to evacuate people when, and if, the levees failed.

They did, and the results were disastrous. Many of those flooded out initially refused to leave their rooftops and makeshift tree houses they had built. They knew the river would go back down, just as it always had.

But this time it didn’t. Refugee centers were set up all along the river, and across the state as well, the largest being at the Memphis fair-grounds where 60,000 flood refugees were fed, sheltered and cared for. Thousands, naturally, became seriously ill. At one time 8,000 were hos-pitalized in Memphis alone. Refugee ware-

houses were set up in Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville, as every river in the state experienced record flooding.

And pretty much the same thing had hap-pened just ten years ear-lier, except that the water got even higher then. In 1927 rain fell throughout the Mississippi valley at more than ten times the usual rate. All through the winter and spring the rains fell, and finally, on April 21, 1927, levies began failing, all along the Mississippi, 145 of them in all. Before the waters went down, three months later, nearly a million people saw their homes under water, in some cases by as much as 30 feet. Twenty seven thousand square miles of land was flooded, an area the size of the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. By May the Mississippi River was more than 60 miles wide just below Memphis, and towns and towns as far as 30 miles away from the river were filled with up to ten feet of water.

The Red Cross set up 154 tent city refugee camps, one in Ridgely, to house the homeless, and their were plenty to house. Some 700,000 people were displaced, for months, by that flood. The waters of the Mississippi River were above flood stage that year for 153 days. The Red Cross stayed till September.

So yes, the Nashville flood last week was terri-ble. Terrible, terrible, ter-rible, but Tennessee has seen worse, and here’s the thing; we may again.

Because sooner or later, nature always gets its way and runs over anyone in the way. We need to keep that in mind.

Five Feet High and Risin’

An entertaining weekend