Throwback Thursday: Happy 10 years of Throwbacks!

Ten years ago this month, we tried something new at WNKY. The idea was simple: every Thursday, take a few minutes to look backward to uncover a person, place, event, or story from our past that helped make south central Kentucky what it is today. We called it Throwback Thursday. No one imagined we’d still be doing it 10 years later. Since October 2016, I’ve researched, written, and voiced more than 500 Throwback Thursday stories.

Think about that for a moment. There are only about 520 Thursdays in an entire decade. If memory serves me correctly, we have only re-ran three stories. That’s new stories every week in 10 years, minus three weeks. We’ve spent every one of them together, digging through old newspapers, photographs, archives, family collections, and sometimes some strange corners of Kentucky history.

We’ve traveled back to the days when Bowling Green was known as “Little Chicago,” when bootlegging, gambling, political battles and even bombings earned our city a notorious reputation. We’ve explored the oddities and legends surrounding the ruins of Middle Bridge, haunted Western Kentucky University buildings, and the eerie Richardville Road Bridge, where generations of Warren Countians told stories about mysterious lights, stranded motorists, and ghostly encounters.

We’ve remembered when streetcars rolled through Downtown Bowling Green, when Barren River was one of our most important transportation routes, and when the arrival of the railroad, highways, and interstate completely changed how this community grew. We’ve gone back to 1981, when Corvette production moved here and helped transform the identity of this city around the world. We even pretended to travel to 2050 in the future, reporting on the community from years that haven’t yet passed. We’ve recalled restaurants and businesses that generations grew up with, places like Murray’s Restaurant, where countless families shared meals for eight decades. We questioned why some unfortunate incidents plagued our history and we wondered if the mafia, a serial killer, or even notorious outlaw Jesse James should receive any blame.

We’ve discovered things that sound more like fiction, like the summers of 1975 and ’76, when thousands of customized vans descended on Beech Bend. Or 1954, when a woman named Elsie Norris Hamilton there was buried alive six feet underground for two weeks as part of a publicity stunt. Or how the alligators at the zoo accidentally got loose in the Barren River. We’ve gone underground at Lost River Cave, remembering the tourist cabins that once welcomed travelers, and the underground nightclub that entertained visitors during an entirely different era of tourism. This was an ideal examples of roadside attraction and lodging in Duncan Hines travel guides.

We’ve met people like the singing Hilltoppers and Gemini bands, WKU students who went to the national music charts and the Ed Sullivan show; Otis Blanton as the voice of southern Kentucky radio; Sam Bush as Father of Newgrass; and even connections of Shake Rag district legends like Father of Ragtime Ernest Hogan and African American jazz artist and producer Porter Parish Grainger. We’ve remembered soldiers, veterans, business owners, musicians, educators, politicians, pioneers, and ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

Sometimes we’ve just gotten weird. Because after ten years, longtime Thursday viewers know that I have never been able to resist a historical mystery or a wonderfully bizarre Kentucky story. I’m not sure anything will ever top the day in 1876 when chunks of meat inexplicably fell from the sky over a Kentucky farm as The Kentucky Meat Shower. 150 years later, we’re still trying to figure that one out.

When I look back over more than 500 stories, the ones that mean the most aren’t necessarily the strangest. They’re the stories that made somebody watching at home say, “I remember that.” A story airs about an old restaurant, and someone tells us their grandmother worked there. We show an old photograph, and somebody recognizes a parent, a neighbor, or a childhood friend. Someone remembers something differently or finds another photograph. Someone calls and says, “You know, there’s another part of that story…,” and suddenly, we have another Throwback Thursday.

Over the years, many of you have opened your scrapbooks, photo albums, family collections, and memories to us. You’ve trusted us with stories about people you loved. You’ve helped create something much larger than a weekly TV segment. Together, we’ve been building a record of this community’s memory.

Sometimes that’s included my own family. I found my Grandmother’s teenage diary and used her own words to show what everyday life in Bowling Green looked like in 1943. There were movies at the Capitol, Diamond, and Princess theatres on Fountain Square and school homework for a teenage girl living an ordinary life while the world was at war. History isn’t always presidents or dates in textbooks. Sometimes it’s what movie you saw on Saturday night, where you ate dinner, the road you drive, the store where you bought your first pair of shoes, the factory where your grandfather worked, or your favorite childhood hangout spot. Those little memories become the history of a community. If we don’t preserve them, eventually they disappear.

None of these stories happened because of one person. For 10 years, historians, museums, libraries, archivists, historical societies, businesses, and families across south central Kentucky have helped us tell them. The Kentucky Museum and WKU Special Collections Library have been incremental. WNKY anchors, editors, and producers have helped turn stacks of research and old photographs into the stories you see every Thursday. Most importantly, you’ve kept watching, challenged us, corrected us, and told stories we never would have discovered otherwise. Somehow, the list of stories isn’t getting shorter. When we started Throwback Thursday in October of 2016, I never imagined I’d still be saying these words a decade later.

The real treasure is in the people who still remember it. To everyone who has watched, shared a photograph, opened an archive, suggested a story, or simply stopped me somewhere around town and said, “I’ve got a throwback Thursday for you…”: thank you. You’d think by now we’d be running out of history, but we’re just getting started.