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Interview with Herbert "Herbie" Deskins, May 18, 2004

2004-05-18 Interview with Herbert "Herbie" Deskins, May 18, 2004 Leg001:2004OH079 Leg 081 2:47:45 Kentucky Legislature Oral History Project Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries Legislators -- Kentucky -- Interviews. Friend, Kelsey. Equal Rights amendments -- Kentucky. Educational change -- Kentucky. Postsecondary education -- Kentucky. Kentucky. Governor (1971-1974 : Ford) Kentucky. Governor (1979-1983 : Brown) Kentucky. Governor (1987-1991 : Wilkinson) Kentucky. Governor (1995-2003 : Patton) Wilkinson, Wallace G. Kentucky. Education Reform Act (1990) Patton, Paul E., 1937- Coal mines and mining Workers' compensation Ford, Wendell H., 1924- Apportionment (Election law) Gasoline Taxation Democratic Party (U.S.) Equality before the law Stumbo, Greg Cyrus, Ronald Ray, 1935-2006 Dawahare, Hoover, 1928-2004 Blume, Norbert L., 1992- Collins, Martha Layne Roads Lungs Dust diseases Insurance companies Education Mothers Against Drunk Driving (Organization) Postsecondary education Roberts, Lee Kenton, Bill (Boom Boom) equal rights Natural Resources and Environment Committee Breaks Interstate Parks Mountain Caucus Eastern Kentucky Wester, Bill coal severance tax Little, Clayton N. black lung Pikeville College University of Kentucky Jones, Jones redistricting BOPTROT Pearman, Virgil L. Overstreet, Raymond logging industry Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) Kentucky Equal Rights Amendment Insurance Sunshine legislation community college legislation surface mining law HB 44 Term/District: House (1976-1994), 94th district Counties in District: Pike County (Ky.) -- Floyd County (Ky.) Herbert "Herbie" Deskins; interviewee Eric Moyen; interviewer 2004OH079_LEG081_Deskins 1:|12(1)|27(12)|37(10)|47(2)|61(4)|71(6)|80(10)|91(1)|99(1)|115(8)|125(7)|138(5)|148(5)|158(10)|168(6)|182(7)|195(4)|202(7)|214(7)|225(1)|240(1)|248(4)|264(9)|275(5)|289(3)|306(1)|332(7)|353(2)|362(1)|372(5)|390(4)|399(9)|409(4)|423(12)|437(3)|449(13)|471(5)|480(6)|496(12)|505(9)|522(10)|537(14)|556(5)|571(7)|589(11)|619(8)|635(4)|651(7)|668(2)|695(7)|707(4)|727(12)|754(1)|779(10)|796(6)|812(11)|833(10)|845(3)|856(8)|874(7)|891(14)|905(12)|920(9)|943(9)|961(13)|976(3)|990(9)|1003(2)|1016(10)|1030(6)|1043(3)|1058(6)|1081(3)|1094(5)|1111(10)|1133(8)|1144(14)|1164(1)|1175(10)|1186(2)|1200(7)|1221(2)|1237(10)|1247(16)|1265(9)|1280(3)|1298(11)|1308(13)|1328(10)|1346(2)|1363(1)|1372(6)|1381(8)|1406(2)|1425(3)|1440(2)|1460(13)|1479(1)|1492(2)|1513(9)|1533(1)|1562(3)|1589(5)|1597(10)|1617(6)|1627(7)|1645(6)|1656(4)|1663(10)|1677(11)|1686(12)|1698(7)|1714(6)|1733(11)|1746(2)|1762(12)|1775(2)|1790(10)|1806(7)|1818(7)|1833(4)|1842(9)|1853(10)|1861(11)|1872(11)|1882(1)|1895(4)|1906(4)|1917(11)|1936(12)|1954(5)|1975(12)|1983(9)|1994(10)|2005(4)|2017(4)|2028(4)|2044(1)|2052(11)|2071(4)|2085(10)|2095(5)|2113(4)|2135(4)|2146(11)|2164(7)|2180(11)|2190(11)|2208(11)|2218(1)|2232(3)|2254(8)|2265(4)|2276(4)|2296(12)|2310(5)|2325(7)|2347(2)|2360(4)|2376(3)|2392(9)|2410(11)|2429(9)|2443(10)|2457(3)|2474(1)|2487(1) audiotrans Legit interview MOYEN: All right. When we left off we were talking about your decision to run for state office in 1975. Can you tell me a little bit about that decision and how you set up your campaign? Did you have a platform? Was there an issue or two? DESKINS: Yeah, there was a platform, an issue or several issues. And I had originally planned to run for state representative at the end of my second, my first term as county attorney. However, the challenge of a political race against a senator's son and that that we had some unfinished business in the county kept me in the race. And I won that race quite handily and against all odds as far as the school board being opposed, the establishment in the Democratic Party being opposed, and what I ran on was the union support and a very populous campaign that I beat one-man rule which was related to Sen. Friend and also that, if you believe like I believe-- picked up off of Wendell Ford and his campaign--if you believe like I believe that no one man is bigger than the Democratic Party, then you need to vote for me on election day, and if you believe like I believe that every man is as important as any other man within the Democratic Party, or any other woman, then you need to go and vote for me on election day. So I won that thing and it in-- MOYEN: You talked about your jingle as well on your last interview. DESKINS: Yeah, "I'm going to vote for Herbie Deskins." That's right. Jimmy Woodford sang that jingle for me and I don't know if we talked about it on the last interview but Jimmy Woodford sang that jingle when Hubert Humphrey came to West Virginia campaigning against John Kennedy. And it was, "I'm going to vote for Hubert Humphrey," and Jimmy came to my office during that '72 reelection campaign and--or, the '73 I guess, '73--and we talked and he agreed if I would pay for the musicians that he would go sing and record the song that "I'm going to vote for Herbie Deskins." So he did and we played that to the point that people were going down the streets singing that jingle. That was a fun time. But after I was elected in '70, reelected '73, and I took over for second term in '74, we got a real decent budget that we had secured over four years of some grants for the county in the field of actually water districts we gave them to get them started and I decided that it was time for me to pursue other means, that I didn't want to be county attorney for the rest of my career. I didn't see any office in the county that I cared to aspire to, a commonwealth attorney or a judgeship so I decided to run for state representative because I had an office right in the middle of Pond Creek which was the Democratic stronghold in Pike County and also I had made my peace with Senator Friend and we were actually working together then. The night of the election when I defeated his son I walked over to his office across the street and put my hand out in front of me with Senator Friend sitting at this desk and I said, "Senator, let's be friends." And he stood up and shook hands and he said, "We will be if that's what you want." And I said, "Well, that's what I want, we need to be friends to put this Democratic Party back together again and in order to get things that are good for Pike County. I want to work with you." So that unfortunately or fortunately, either one, Senator Friend had backed a candidate for state representative in the ninety-fourth district and he name was Lee Roberts. And Lee had actually lived with Senator Friend in Frankfort during his term in office. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: And I had gone down to the legislature on many occasions and stayed with them and actually played small poker games with them that they had. Kelsey had a big house and he liked to entertain and one of his entertainments was small poker games, it wasn't anything outrageous and I would play occasionally, wasn't a very good player and didn't expect to win much and I didn't lose much. So, but Lee was in that crowd and I told Senator Friend on the last occasion that I had to go down there that was in before the election that I expected to run against Lee Roberts. And he said, "Well, I wish I could have you both down here." I said, "Well, Senator, you can't have us both but it is my commitment that I'm going to announce when I get back to Pikeville that I am going to seek the Democratic nomination for state representative." And I felt good about it because Lee Roberts had been a very ineffective representative. He had very, his legislation that he introduced was nearly, he didn't introduce any that ever got anywhere and his interest in the legislative process wasn't just what I thought it ought to be for the people of Pike County and the way that the county was progressing. So my biggest fear was that Senator Friend would then back Lee Roberts and there I was back again the way I was in 1973 facing the senator and his friends and going it sort of alone myself with the help of then County Judge Wayne Rutherford who was my friend and still is. But we came back and the senator called me one day and said, "Are you still going to run for representative?" And I said, "Yes, I am." And he said, "Well, Lee is going to run too and I guess as a good Democrat I ought to stay out of it, shouldn't I?" And I said, "You certainly should." So both Lee filed and I filed and the district at that time was, Pike County was the ninety-fourth district and the district was heavy in Democratic especially over the way that I have an office at Belfry and I had an office in Pikeville, of course, practicing out of Pikeville as county attorney. But Floyd County was a different situation. There was about, not thirty percent of the vote down there but there was a substantial Democratic vote and Lee's brother Dewey was the magistrate. It was under the old magistrate system. I knew I was in good shape in my district, I mean in the Pond Creek District. But I went down to what we call Mud Creek and while the people met me and I didn't get insulted anywhere I knew that I wasn't going do well down there so I concentrated my efforts in Pond Creek and in advertising in the city of Pikeville and won a big victory in that race and there's where I went to Frankfort in 1971 and in '75 and then went to Frankfort in '76. MOYEN: Okay. So when you were elected after your election, I guess that was the same time Julian Carroll was elected governor? DESKINS: That's right. I went in with Julian Carroll and I had actually traveled through Pike County, as illustrated by a brochure that you and I have looked at, with Governor Carroll and actually one of the pictures that's in the seven, the eighty-six brochure that I have is a picture of Julian saying, "Best wishes to the number one young Democrat in Kentucky." So, Julian and I were real good friends and that's another reason I decided to run because I knew I had a friend in the governor. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: I also, it was rumors that Bill Kenton wanted to be the--he was already in the House--that Bill wanted to be speaker of the house and he had actually called me, he had found out that I was interested in running and said, "Please do, I need another vote." And so I--uh, hold off (walks away from recorder)--so and then Jim LeMaster, a good friend of mine, he was, decided that he was going to run. Bobby Richardson who I had been in law school with was already there and I talked to all these people and found well, you know, this will be I think a lot of fun to go especially with the Governor. And in the meantime I, getting back to what we were talking about, I realize now one of the reasons that there was that Senator Friend did not take a part in that primary was because that he in his long vision had an idea for Pike County that somebody needed to be the governor of Kentucky from Pike County. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And whether it was going to be me or someone else, and he had someone else in mind if I had decided that I wasn't going to go out of the House and that was Paul Patton. He had befriended Paul Patton and Paul was one of the few coal operators that was sort of acceptable with a portion of Democrats in the county. It was pretty well divided between working people and coal operators and coal operators generally came down on the Republican side and the workers and the unions sort of came down on the liberal side and but Kelsey knew that and he saw in Paul I think a potential candidate that had lots and lots and lots of money. And the senator understood the mother's milk of politics about as good as anybody. So after '70, I went down in '76 and, of course, Kenton was elected speaker of the House. We had our meeting down in Western Kentucky and I met with Speaker Kenton and the leadership, some of them I didn't know then. I think maybe Dwight Wells but the other people I didn't. Jim Dunn from Louisville and they had it spaced around the state. And Kenton told me, he says, "I want to give you some pretty good committee assignments." And I said, "Well, what?" He said, "Well, one of the big issues is going to be ERA, Equal Rights Amendment--see, you know, Kentucky ratified it under the Ford administration--and there's going to be a move to repeal it." Well, Bill didn't know that I was going to be for the repeal (both laugh) but he appointed me to Constitutional Amendments, and Banking & Insurance at which I have stayed as a member for twenty-three years, and another, Labor & Industry which I wanted because that was my first pick because I wanted to be on Labor & Industry. Of course, Labor was so strong then in that I was just another vote, I wasn't an influence, I was just another vote. Banking & Insurance that was cut and dry too in that committee. But Constitutional Amendments was a committee that we really enjoyed. It met four or five times extra a month while we were in the session considering ERA and the testimony of Equal Rights Amendment both pro and con. And it eventually got down to Thelma Stovall, then the lieutenant governor the leader of the forces not to repeal ERA and then some real active women that were for the repeal of the ERA. And I was more in line with them at that time because they were coming from the church that I was well-doctrined in and that was the Church of Christ. I didn't realize there was a big influence in Western Kentucky of the Church of Christ but anyway I found friendly ground with those people. Since if I had those votes to do over I would probably not have voted to rescind ERA. MOYEN: What was your thinking at the time? DESKINS: My thinking at the time, that the state acted without enough information and that's what the rescinders were talking about, that under the Ford administration I think he called a special session and bam, bam, bam, passed it and but what it was it just was up and Ford pushed it through. And Ford was a powerful governor and it got through. And these people wanted their day and their hearings and they didn't get that, they didn't feel, sort of an emotional issue about like abortion came along, you know, no matter what you do there's that. So that was a learning process for me. But going back to Kenton, Kenton and I had talked. I said, "Bill, I want to be a committee chairman, I won't sit down here for six or eight years and just to be a yes-man on the Labor & Industry because that's all I am." Al Bennett was the chairman then (pounding noise in background), an electrician from Louisville, and Banking & Insurance was Jim Bruce who's still there, the oldest member that's ever been, I guess. And then Constitutional Amendments, I think they did away with that commit--I didn't want to get back on it any longer, it was fun but it was gee, it was, it tired you out. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: So, and I put him on the spot because Bill Kenton wasn't a very good counter so when it came up for his reelection, he had actually promised more chairmanships than what he had. Well, that's one time that I didn't go along with Speaker Kenton. He called me up and said--this was later on in the, you know--he said, "I want you to serve on Rules." The second this--I'm sorry I don't remember back--the second session of the legislature which was in '78, Speaker Kenton told me, says, "If you'll serve on the Rules and you can get off that Constitutional Amendment thing--and I believe I did--I want, let you serve on Utilities, and Banking & Insurance, and Judiciary Courts, we need somebody on Judiciary Courts." I was actually serving on four. He said, "It'd be a big help to me and there is a chairmanship in your future next term." And I said, "Okay, I'll do that." Well, the next term came and Kenton had over-counted again and wanted to put me on A&R as a member, that's Appropriations & Revenue. I said, "No way, Mr. Speaker. I don't want to be on Appropriations & Revenue, I had enough of the budget figuring out budgets for Pike County, and I want somebody else to figure that out and then let me sit down and look at it and vote on it rather than trying to figure it out and have all these people coming at you from different ways." And he figured out two or three scenarios but none of it was a chairman and I said, "No, I want to be a chairman." And he said, "Let me think about it." I said, "Speaker, there is nothing to think about, I've been one of your most vocal supporters from the largest county in the state, one of the biggest Democratic organizations. Now, if you're going to file on for governor, I think it's in your best interest that not only myself but Clayton Little be chairman of a committee." And oh, I put him on the spot and he didn't like to be put there when he got--but at any rate, being the great compromiser and everything, he just went back to the, said, "We need some additional committees." And my thought was that I would like to be chairman of Judiciary because there was a fellow from Western Kentucky, Charlie Wible, Representative Wible who had been chairman and Charlie didn't, I don't think he was going to come back or he'd run for the Senate but anyway, that was going to be up but I didn't realize that Kenton had already promised it. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: Yeah, that was to another lawyer friend of ours. So I'm sitting in my office my day and I get this call from Speaker Kenton and he said, "How would you like be to the champion of the environment?" I said, "Well, I would, I've always been the champion of the environment, that's been one of my things." He said, "Well, we're going to create a new committee here called Natural Resources & Environment and it's going to be, we're going to have to take this federal law, this federal surface mining law and make it applicable to the states and let the state run the program rather than let the federal government run the program. It's called primacy." I thought he was conning me, you know, and he had conned me before, once burned twice shy. I said, "Let me think about it, send me up the jurisdiction of that committee." Well, unbeknownst to Kenton, he gave us jurisdiction of Natural Resources which included surface mining, underground mining, oil and gas because oil and gas was under mining, tourism and tourism took in parks and agriculture because he'd done away with the Agriculture Committee to create two committees, Small Business & Agriculture and Natural Resources & the Environment. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: So he, and I looked at it and I said, "Well, okay, that looks pretty good to me." So I did that and spent probably twenty years, I forget what year it was that that happened and that was-- MOYEN: Seventy-nine, I believe it was. DESKINS: Okay, most fulfilling time I've ever had because we did everything. We did the environment, we did parks, and I was chairman I got to bring people to Breaks Interstate Park. And at one time, when Clayton Little was the chairman of Transportation and Ron Cyrus was the chairman of Labor & Industry and Senator Nelson was chairman of Education, we all decided to call a meeting and bring everybody to Breaks and we almost had a majority of legislators at Breaks Interstate Park. And that's actually what brought the Breaks Interstate Park that people got to see it. And when we get out and would speak on the floor, we could, they could relate, oh yeah, that's the most beautiful park I've ever been in. And that actually helped us there, we went from seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar state appropriation to four or five million and then it's up way up there now. It was called sort of the mountain mafia in the House (Moyen laughs) and we did those chairmanship well. Going again in a scatter gun, during all this Senator Friend was the very powerful senator over in the Senate and that enhanced my position especially because Representative Little even though he was chairman of Transportation wasn't associated as closely with Senator Friend as they associated me. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: Because I actually was at his house and played at his little poker games. I still occasionally did that although I was very busy then. But and I would go down and talk with him and everything and many times if a bill went down from the House that was bad I could go to Senator Friend and it would find its grave in the Senate somewhere. And on occasions he asked me to do the same thing and we have spilled some blood for one another and that built up a special relationship and that's what led to, I guess when Paul Patton while we were doing all this in Frankfort Paul Patton decided that he was going to run for county judge executive against Wayne Rutherford who had been my buddy and ally. MOYEN: Until '86? (laughs) DESKINS: Well, that's this was after--oh yeah, until '86, right. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: But Wayne and Paul ran. Kelsey was out big for Paul, he organized for Paul. At that time Wayne and I were a little estranged because he had jumped in to run for lieutenant governor and had been soundly beaten. I don't know if you remember that campaign but he had a (chants), 'Rutherford, Roothford, Roothferd, Rootford, how do you pronounce it? Rutherford. This is Wayne Rutherford.' He ran against Bill Cox who was a good friend of mine from Madisonville. Thelma Stovall beat him real good. That was, she taught him, you know, a lesson and she was secretary of state and we don't have time to do it, that's another thing how Julian maneuvered around so that she could call a special session but-- MOYEN: Which led to the House Bill 44. DESKINS: Right. MOYEN: Were you had mentioned earlier being on Utilities, were you off Utilities by that time? DESKINS: I was off Utilities, I think about-- MOYEN: By that time around? Okay. DESKINS: Yeah. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: Yeah, which led to House Bill 44 which, I guess, in some ways has worked but in a lot of ways has been a disaster which eventually led to the courts declaring the educational act unconstitutional MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and but all those things I'm glad to say I was up there in probably two decades of the most intriguing times for major things to happen. MOYEN: Um-hm. Um-hm. DESKINS: KERA and the severance tax-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and being able to form the group of legislators who were totally devoted to a cause and that was the mountains and it caused the Mountain Caucus. As I've mentioned just a few minutes ago there was a Ron Cyrus who was chairman of Labor & Industry and who was the friend, whatever they call it, of AFL-CIO. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: So he was a powerful chairman. We had Greg Stumbo who had elevated himself and incidentally beat my good friend Jim LeMaster for majority floor leader. And I almost lost my chairmanship over that race but I stuck with Jim LeMaster and told Greg Stumbo that I couldn't vote for him, that I couldn't vote against the man that I had slept many nights in the same bedroom that he was in because Jim and I have been rooming together, Jim LeMaster, Bobby Richardson, a representative named Bob Jones who was on Appropriations & Revenue and Gross Lindsey who was, Gross left and then he comes back and he is now I think chairman of as we speak in 2004, May eighteenth is chairman of the Judiciary. But Kelsey had gotten (coughs) to the point that he wanted to promote Paul, Paul ran for county judge and Paul won. Paul did something, I didn't particularly like Paul Patton then and don't particularly like him now but I went from cold to hot to cold again so (both laugh) but he defeated (coughs) Judge Rutherford and he did something that was bold that I thought that probably led to him being governor. He proposed county-wide collection of garbage which I had done that when I was county attorney and I thought this is going to get me beat. And we actually did when I county attorney that was one of the things we worked on, we franchised the county but we didn't mandate it, you know, and to me that was like giving a baby a cold cool water when they needed a hot meal for that, at any rate we did, we started that. And Paul came along and says, "I going to mandate garbage collections out in the county, everybody is got to have their garbage picked up." I said that's a man I can rely on. I like that! MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And people laughed, it will get him beat and I said, "No, I don't believe it will. I believe if he gets it passed in fiscal court and they implement it and everybody sees that their next-door neighbors having to pay for their trash to get picked up and everybody is in the same boat and you not got this one guy is going to the top of the hill and throw his trash out every day. It will make him more popular." And sure enough it did. And from that then Paul and I sort of warmed up a bit with Kelsey's help and Paul came to Frankfort quite frequently-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and stayed at Kelsey's house or was always there and we had social events there and then he ran again against and Rutherford ran against him again for reelection and that race was a pure romp for Patton and then Paul became sort of the poster boy for Eastern Kentucky. And on one occasion Kelsey and myself and Paul were down he asked, Paul asked me if I had any political aspirations and I said, "None other than to promote Eastern Kentucky." And he said, "Well, I think I'm going to run for lieutenant governor." And I said, "Well, if you do, you can count me in." That was a hard decision to do that because he still had the image of a machine, gun-running, coal-operator that went through the picket lines and, of course, my friends were all with labor. Kelsey's friends were mostly with labor but and that's where we started I think on his whole conversation how this thing got together and then sort of with Kelsey going out and speaking to his friends and me speaking to my friends in labor especially Ron Cyrus it sort of loosened up that image of Paul being a coal operator with a big machine gun going through shooting up everybody. And that, those friendships led to, you know, he got beat that first time. Bad race; he had got some bad posters, he looked like a plastic man up there in those posters, you know. Those white teeth shining and the--but you couldn't tell him anything. There was a bunch of us said, you know, Governor, who's your PR man? He, I think Wester might've been his PR man, a good friend. He said, "Oh, everything is fine, everything is fine," he said, "we're doing okay." Well, what he was listening to was these PR people standing there taking polls and he was doing well. Well, you don't put yourself out of a job when you go in-- MOYEN: Right, uh-huh. DESKINS: and taking polls, say, "oh, governor, we're--not governor but, you know--we're doing--" I think that was Bill Wester. I'm pretty sure that it was. And oh, Jones just trounced him. And then he came back and revamped and retooled. By that time he was been able to make a pretty good political speech. When he first started he was an engineer, pragmatic and cold and jerky and by that time he was able to make a pretty good speech and then, you know, he got appointed chairman of the Democratic Party and made some inroads there on organization and then there for a brief stint in the Brown he was Rural Transportation Commissioner and-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: I guess he and Brown had the same personality, neither one of them could be wrong at the same time or right at the same time and so he departed there. But anyway, he made, he laid his foundation really well and that I think--as we started this conversation probably forty minutes ago--was part of the making of Paul Patton from Senator Friend's foresight that he was going to be a candidate and from actually tune it up and Patton did well in doing his part. He is a tenacious person and when it came down to the gubernatorial race he was ready to, he had prepared himself well. MOYEN: Could you explain a little bit about we're talking you know, we started in the Julian Carroll era and then got into John Y. Brown's term, those were important years dealing with the severance tax, could you explain the issues surrounding the coal severance tax and what your position was and who in your case the enemy was what you were trying to fight against or for? DESKINS: Okay, in '74--and this is taxing my memory a little bit going back to some notes that I could probably-- in '74 when the severance tax was passed it was not passed as a tax to promote Eastern Kentucky-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: or the coal fields-- MOYEN: Just general fund. DESKINS: it was a tax that was passed to make up for the tax that was repealed on food and medicine-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and that's what it was for and that's what Ford meant it to be. Well, it started generating just all kinds of money and I guess people familiar with the severance tax remember in '74, or it might've been a special session anyway between '74 and '76, Hoover Dawahare getting thrown out of the House of Representatives for demanding that they get some of the severance stuff and made an impassioned speech and Norb Blume threw him out of the House, had the sergeant-of-arms remove him from the floor of the House and that's actually probably what started the demise of Norb Blume as the, looking back on it, as the speaker of the House because Julian was intent on getting rid of Norb Blume and, of course, as I said that he had picked, Julian had anointed my good friend, Bill Kenton, who was referred to affectionately as "Boom-Boom". And well, and in '76 Julian was a strong governor and he saw the severance tax stuff, I mean started on the uphill and he had during his campaign made some promises that he was going to make sure that if severance tax revenues kept up that we, that the mountain counties, the coal producing counties would share in it. Now, he didn't set down any formula, he just made a general statement, okay. In '76 then we started taking, okay, what money is it us going to do we have to have to replace the revenue that was lost by losing the tax, by taking the tax off food and medicine. And we set that as the ceiling and said, okay, from this amount-- MOYEN: A hundred and seventy-seven million. DESKINS: Yeah, ----------(??) from this amount and we're going to share in it. And we fought for years over a formula-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and then it was give and take. Who were the enemy? Uh, who the enemy finally figured they was the Chamber of Commerce, the State Chamber of Commerce and the Associated Industries of Kentucky, uh, for selfish reasons, they didn't want Eastern Kentucky and Western Kentucky getting back a special part that looked like of money. We finally in order to get that it took years and it took the Mountain Caucus working together with the power that they had within the caucus, the majority floor leader, the chairman of Labor & Industry, the chairman of Natural Resources & Environment, the chairman of Transportation, and then we had several members that had worked up their way to on Appropriations & Revenue and it took us all together to form this Mountain Caucus, this they called it the Mountain Mafia. We had I think fourteen solid votes that we were going to vote no matter and that then gave us as much power as Louisville as far as De--we're all Democrats. We didn't have, we weren't infiltrated with any right-wing Republicans at that time and so Stumbo had made lots of friends in Louisville, that's how he beat LeMaster. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: Don Blandford became our natural friend because he had run with Stumbo and he had upset Bobby Richardson. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: So we all sort of buried our hatchets and long knives and started saying, let's work with Jefferson County toward the severance tax thing and we aren't going to get what we want unless we get a substantial amount of votes from Jefferson County. Well, along came people like Jerry Bronger and just Al Bennett and making friends and making it in a sense that, hey, you know, we may have this very important issue, what's your important issue? And then when they came to things like appropriating a whole lot of money for the theme park down there and the center, the exhibition center, building another wing on that they were talking about big money. Well, we are not talking about big money then we bring them in and say, okay now, we're talking about some big money too, we're talking about us getting fifty percent of our severance tax, well so fifty percent of the severance tax above this level back, we think we deserve it. And, of course, they said, "Well yeah, you know, it's not, we'll help you." So it, we just chipped away. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: In the meantime we always had a governor that didn't want to give up any of the power of the severance tax and we had to put strings on it to where the governor could still pull the strings so that it didn't look like--and actually one time we sent back a whole lot of money to the counties and they built swimming pools with it which I it didn't bother me to build swimming pools but when it made the papers that Martin County was building swimming pools and Pike County was paying magistrates 37,000 dollars a year and all that stuff, then we took a, that was one round we didn't lose. We had to back in the corner and go out with another game play. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: But we did that successfully and through Senator Friend's influence, mainly with Martha Layne Collins, we finally got the law passed that fifty percent, up to fifty percent of the severance tax above and beyond, I guess it's 176. I think that number still kept creeping up. MOYEN: Yeah, going up. DESKINS: Yeah, it had a built-in factor. MOYEN: You did at one time, in some newspaper article that I was reading, you had mentioned or were concerned about that limit what if coal revenues shrink? What if and that did become an issue, didn't it? I think-- DESKINS: Oh, yeah, that always was, what if we don't reach a 176 million and fortunately, that hasn't happened. And I think that we have changed that around and I think to the, Governor Patton did it in such a way through different little pieces of legislation and what-have-you even if that were to happen the counties are still going to get back a portion but that was what the big thing started was the replacement for the food tax and no one would ever admit that especially our local Chamber of Commerce and these people. That's our money, you know. Well, what if those people down there, the tobacco people say, well, that's our money and we don't get any of it back? MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And you can go and show them all these charts that we're getting more money back than what we're sending now. Oh well, you can't make them believe that stuff, no, no, no, no, that's our money. And we finally convinced them that the redneck approach was not going to work. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And we finally abandoned that approach. I wouldn't go to the Chamber of Commerce meetings for the last six, seven years I was in office and by then I was thinking that I just didn't feel like that they were going to get anything of what I said and I certainly wasn't going to get any votes from them. (Moyen laughs) I sort of grin, at one time I had--we've got a notorious Rotary Club here and they're Republicans but we got a lot of people that are registered Democrat that are Republicans in philosophy but that race that I was running against Wayne Rutherford, he was running against me in '86, tough race, and I voted for a five-cent increase on gasoline-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: during that race. I thought it was the right thing to do and I did it and I didn't have any qualms about it. In fact, I had told the caucus since they twisted so many arms to get 51 votes they didn't have to twist mine. Blandford didn't have to twist mine, I told him, I said, "I don't care, I've got opposition and I'm going to vote for--" I insisted that we go at least seven and a half to ten cents that they're going to get just as mad at you over a dime as they are a nickel. Oh no, five cents is all we can afford, we should have gone to ten cents-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: but we didn't-- [Tape 1, side 1 ends; side 2 begins] MOYEN: --about the 1996 election-- DESKINS: Nineteen eighty-six-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: Just, I was just reflecting back ----------(??), shock ------- ---(??) but in that race I came back in April, I voted for the five-cent gas tax, came back and faced 'little nickels, Herbie's nickel', being passed out all over, had to go back and get Jimmy Woodford sing that song again and it was a fun time but it was a, I won by 170 votes. The first poll we took coming back showed that my opponent had fifty-seven percent and I had something like thirty to thirty-seven. And it was an uphill battle up-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and I, I reversed it. Turned it around about four days before the election and then all of a sudden it started in a torrendous [sic] rain, cold weather and actually the people that stayed away from the election were those people, my strongest, in my strongest areas and that were older retired union people who thought the race was in the bag anyway and a lot of them didn't go vote. So it turned up, hinged on two precincts, actually three precincts that I won big enough to offset all those precincts that we evened up. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: And but going back to what I was ----------(??) about, the Rotary was having this poll. I mean they were going to vote. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: Well, they asked that both candidates come and speak to the Rotary and I went. I out spoke Wayne Rutherford, but I couldn't out promise him and I couldn't out demagogue him so there was three people there that promised me they were going to vote for me, and I, and they took the vote and lo and behold I only got one vote, one or two, I didn't get three. And so it just happened that--we got this barbershop down here below where we're talking right now here on Division Street- -about a week later I just, I came by the barbershop and I looked in and lo and behold there were the three people in this barbershop at the same time that had promised me they were going to vote for me. So I thought, well, I can't make them mad, you know, they're going to, obviously two of them are going vote for me. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: I got two votes and so I went in and I shut the door and I said, "I don't know who it is but one of you is a liar in here." (laughs) Of course, none of them admitted and I didn't press the issue but that was a, that was sort of the thing because a couple of us had talked about, I think one switched over but he's got three feet of dirt on him now and I'm not going to say anything bad about him. (both laugh) MOYEN: Let me try and get back to a little bit the chronological approach here, how would you, there was a lot of talk about when John Y. Brown came in legislative independence-- DESKINS: Um-hm. MOYEN: Could you compare contrast the Wendell Ford, I guess you weren't there yet-- DESKINS: I wasn't there in Wendell's time. MOYEN: but the Julian Carroll-Wendell Ford that strong governor to-- DESKINS: Oh, oh, difference in daylight. MOYEN: to John Y. Brown? DESKINS: Difference in daylight. Brown detested working with the legislature. He couldn't remember people's name. He couldn't remember my name on all four years. All he could remember was black lung and that's how he would refer to me when I would go to functions, a few functions that they did have before they condemned the governor's mansion. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: He couldn't remember my name. He couldn't remember anyone. All he was interested in is serving his time, showing off Phyllis and the heck with everything. He just made those general cutbacks and those of us who are very strong Democrats by philosophy actually really fell out with him. When Ron Reagan got reelected and Brown was one of his first callers congratulating him and saying that he had done a great job and deserved reelection so the people that were there that were Democrats certainly didn't feel that Brown was a Democrat and he did not want to do the elbow work necessary to get even a halfway decent relationship with the legislature in a legislative process. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: He turned it, Frank Metz was a fellow there that ran the show, all he knew was money, money, money, money, money, money. Who's going to give me five thousand dollars, you know? What's this next fund raiser? And that was a, in my years there those four years were the best years for the legislature because we, the power that we gave up we went and got and we actually--I believe during those four years we had enough gumption to stand up and pass and appropriate money to build new legislative offices-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and actually did some things for the legislature. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: People was afraid to vote for their own raise. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: And people were afraid to vote to increase pensions and that galled me because I always thought if I had an employee that didn't think they were good enough for a raise and didn't think they were good enough for me to set up a pension or reward them in some way for being a good employee, I didn't want them. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: And if you will remember, I think it might've been during Brown's administration, was that group over at Winchester that got on the legislature for passing the law that upped our pensions. MOYEN: I'm not sure I recall, I remember the vote that the pensions were raised-- DESKINS: Yeah. MOYEN: but I'm not sure about the group. DESKINS: I forget what they were called but I what they called themselves, 'Citizens for something', whenever you get a group of people that's a 'Citizen for something' you better watch out. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: It's a redneck group generally no matter what: the Citizens for Decency, Citizens for this, Citizens for that. If you're in office, you know that they're coming at you and it's not with a democratic view, it's with a view that they want you to do something, they don't care what you do anything anyway. MOYEN: Right. Um-hm. A lot of legislatures would say and I'd be interested to know if it was this way with you. DESKINS: The Greed Bill is what they called it. MOYEN: Okay, that's right. DESKINS: Greed. MOYEN: That essentially, until the mid-nineties, anyway most legislators were losing money to serve. DESKINS: Oh yeah, yeah. You sit, my income, I have my CPA who is a good friend of mine called me in one time, he said, "You sure you want to keep on doing this?" I said, "What?" He said, "Look here at your income." Now, my income was up during the years I was in the General Assembly, those years. It was down the next year because I'm always a year behind. MOYEN: Right. Okay. DESKINS: And he said, you, I said, "Well, this is my hobby , not my hobby but this is what I want to do and I'm going to keep on doing it until I get ready to quit or the voters retire me, either one." MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: But that wasn't--it was to me, it was hypocrisy for people to serve in that situation. You take a hundred and thirty-eight chief executives in--well, we started out at a billion dollars and ended up I think when I left it was six billion--you take a hundred and thirty-eight executives in a billion-dollar corporation and try to pay them a hundred dollars a day? Why, you'll not find anybody that will work there. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And I didn't see, if they wanted to run a business, wanted the government like a business then let's pay like a business, you know, but we finally got some, actually I think Bill Kenton in his last years got us to pass the pension bill which kept a lot of people there because it was a decent pension then, it's not now but it was a decent pension then. MOYEN: When Martha Layne Collins decided to run for governor--I'm just thinking off the top of my head, I don't have this in my notes--did Greg Stumbo run as well in the primary? Grady? DESKINS: Grady-- MOYEN: Yeah, Grady in '83, I believe, as well as I think Harvey Sloane from Louisville ran in that? DESKINS: I'm not sure but I don't think Martha Layne was the, was maybe the second choice up in this area but she became really a good friend of-- She ran, she won for the Court of Appeals, then she won for lieutenant governor and then governor. I'll have to get a chart, also I could sit down sometimes and figure it all out. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: But-- MOYEN: Twenty years ago. DESKINS: Yeah. MOYEN: Now, could you tell me about Martha Layne Collins and what you thought of her job as governor and also like, if you look at general histories of Kentucky a lot of times or the legislature, her first session in particular was considered not very successful. She really wanted to push this education governor and didn't get a lot done, why was that in your estimation? DESKINS: Money and taxes. There is no doubt that your educational system is directly proportionate to how much you're willing to tax for it. I don't care who, what they say. Wilkinson sold the lottery for education but it doesn't make--you look down and see what correlation to education and you'll see that it relates to taxation. People in Kentucky wanted to talk a good education program but they didn't want to pay for it. They wanted, they just couldn't stand the thoughts of raising taxes and that's where you're at. But you look around and I remember making a speech on Sen-- on the House floor that we were a bunch of, not cowards, I don't think I said, cowards but I said, we just don't want to face up to the facts that that was it and then pointed to these things. Look at Paintsville, great school, the city Paintsville has passed taxes. Bellevue, all the better schools especially in small districts that those students could get out there and compete with AAAA and all these people are communities that are willing to go to their pocketbook and put it in the classroom. Kentuckians, as an overall group of people, want to talk about it but they don't want to go to their pocketbook and put it in the classroom and that's one reason that we had to go to the overall educational bill of KERA and just remodel the whole thing and then hoped that we could find enough money to pay for it. And incidentally one of the things that we started in on this, on the second interview, you said did I have some things in the legislature I wanted to do? Yeah, there was three or four things that I promised in '76, I mean '75, during that campaign and they all got, thank goodness, I got them all done in the time that was allotted, I didn't get them done as quickly as I thought I could get them done but I did get them done. And the first one was, an equal education for every student no matter what color they are, no matter what economic background they come from, and no matter what environment they're in. And we did that with KERA, and I think people at Phelps now can get just as good an education as the people at Paducah or Louisville and a lot of it comes from the internet. And okay, an equal education and then secondly was a return of fifty percent of the severance tax. And we did that, in a roundabout way-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: we got it all back. And the third one, the one that caused me the most problems-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: was the completion of a four-lane highway east-west, north- south through Pike County and it's just now being completed but it was in the six-year road plan when I left and Paul Patton didn't have a damn thing to do with it. It was all there before and it was all appropriated before he ever, it was all in the six-year road plan before he ever got to be governor. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: Clayton Little made sure of that before he left in, when he left the legislature in '96 maybe, every foot of the authorization for the roads that we have, north-south, east-west was in the six-year road plan. Not all of them were fully funded but it's hard to take a road out of that program especially when you've got a segment built in front of it and a segment built behind-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: so we knew that it was going to get there, all we had to do was get it in and we did. MOYEN: Uh-huh. Okay. DESKINS: And see, that's another thing we did, the Mountain Caucus, up until we got a little power, the governors didn't have, the governors could move the roads anywhere they wanted to when they got in. So Clayton got to be the chairman of Transportation and he was interested and Clayton was interested in the job and he attended some southern legislative transportation committees which the other people hadn't attended prior to him being chairman. The next was--excuse me--a national committee he came back and called me one day and he, up here in Eastern Kentucky sometimes we have a habit of if you got something important to talk to somebody you call them by their last name instead of their first name. "Deskins," and I knew that Clayton had something important. I said, "What do you need Representative Little?" "I have a plan," he said, "that will, we going to put it to these governors." And I said, "Well, I'm all for that." He said, "It's a six-year road plan." And I said, "What is that?" He said, "Well, let me come and explain it to you." So one of these states, South Carolina or Mississippi or one of these out-of-the-way states in order to keep their governor in check with promising roads had said the legislature, it shall be a legislative program. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: The legislature shall set the road program for the six years and the executive branch shall implement that program and the legislature will fund that only as the executive implements it. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: So I believe we passed that during either Jones or (coughs) we couldn't have done it under Julian Carroll-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: I don't think, because he was he would have knocked it in the head. It was either Brown or one other when we got that legislative six-year road plan passed and I believe it was Brown and that's why, you know, the legislative independence, in that way the governors couldn't go out here and start promising a four-lane road from here to here to get votes, it has to be in that plan-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: That's how we got everything. MOYEN: Okay. We had mentioned this briefly before, the House Bill 126 in 1986 which was the gas tax. Could you explain to me or, I don't know the reasons why, maybe you do, why when you drive up here to Eastern Kentucky from Central Kentucky or wherever else why is the gas-- DESKINS: Higher? MOYEN: ten cents more basically across-- DESKINS: It's basically because we don't have any competition-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: there's and basically I think just greed on behalf of some of these oil companies up here. I introduced a bill one time to investigate that. Unfortunately, Coleman Oil--which was the big distributor here then and was robbing people and they eventually went bankrupt because of bad management--found out about it and before I even got back home--that was when the internet just first started and they were one of the people that had it-- and as soon as LRC had printed the bill and it got into the hopper. I introduced it on a Friday evening and they knew about it on Saturday morning and we got stopped because they said that was inter-state commerce. Gasoline is interstate commerce; our committee had no jurisdiction over it. The gas companies had a big say-so in the legislature because they contributed a whole lot of money to a whole lot of candidates, so I think Ron Cyrus was on that bill with me-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: and even though we were two committee chairmen we never got to the point that we could ever muster up enough authority because we knew the attorney general had ruled that we can't do anything so I guess we decided that we would go somewhere else with our efforts rather than trying to put our eggs in that basket. MOYEN: Right. One other bill that you sponsored, House Bill 769 in 1986--there was just a little blip about it in the Herald Leader article about the Insurance Sunshine bill--do you recall anything about that? It passed the House but not the Senate. There were no details on what that was about or just tell me what some of your concerns would've been about insurance at that time. DESKINS: 1986? MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: That's when I was so mad at the insurance companies, and still am but I was getting real mad at them then for one, that was I think- -and I may be a little bit off base--but that was to see how they set their rates especially in medical malpractice and in malpractice for professionals to see what the pay-out was, to see what was happening and also the rates in hospitalization. I think the Sunshine was that they had to show what their pay-outs was actually and not what some accountant or actuary was going to say that they had paid out. And that all came from when I first went in the legislature and learned a good lesson that insurance companies do have a lot of power, probably the most powerful legis--probably the most powerful lobbyists in the legislature in, when you get it all together, Farm Bureau and State Farm and all the big companies, Anthem and all those people that they not only had their finger on their lobbyists but they will over in lobbyists that were lobbying for other things-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: they actually have the insurance company's interest more at stake than they do with people. But back in the '70s when workers' compensation claims for black lung were awarded and there was hundreds of them been awarded back then, that was a big liberal time. Louis Nunn had set up the best workers' compensation board there's ever been down there as far as plaintiffs were concerned and big black lung. They would award these people 425 weeks of benefits and then say, okay, they can collect 3,500 dollars worth of medical. Well, I got into the black lung business and actually that's how I actually got a foothold in it and I started thinking, well, what in the, where in the world is thirty-five hundred dollars going? I know I represented hundreds of people. We never collected one cent so I dug around and found out that indeed there was no pay-outs for the thirty-five hundred dollars. And the court had said there is no cure for pneumoconiosis and therefore the insurance companies didn't have to pay for it so I decided, well, these insurance companies are over-charging on their comp rates because they were all going up so I went to the governor, Julian Carroll at that time and this was probably '78-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: and voiced my concerns and said this was a concern and I had went down and at that time we didn't have the LRC staff that we have now where you go and write your bill request out, somebody writes it and then you correct it. At that time you did most of the bill writing yourself and then you, the LRC would help you in getting the final draft and getting it printed. But oh, it was hundreds of thousands of dollars that that thirty-five hundred dollars had accumulated but I found out something more dastardly than that. It's not they projected this thirty-five hundred dollars over a period of eight years and put interest on it and then when they come up to set premiums the next year they had all that projection on there so it was, looks like when you're setting your premiums that all these medicals had been paid out when in fact not a penny had and they were taking that thirty-five hundred dollars and invested it in things like Enron and places like that. Well, I thought that I had me an issue, that I was just going to set the insurance companies on fire with until I went down and talked to the governor and he said, "Son--" not son, he said, "Herbie," he says, "cool it." I said, "What do you mean, Governor?" He said, "That bill ain't going to see the light of day, let me tell you that," said, "it'll never see Jim Bruce's committee, it'll never get out of Rules." Well, at that particular time I had a lot more going and as I said to fall on my sword for that so I let it go. But that's what happened and then by '86, I think I filed that again and that's what it is, showing their actual pay-outs instead of their anticipated pay-outs. MOYEN: This kind of follows along with what I was going to ask you next which is, can you talk a little bit about the '87 session, once you did win your reelection bid in that close election, there is a special session to deal with workers' comp, what did you think of what came out of that special session? DESKINS: As I remember back then we ba--that's when we first started our backup, the plaintiffs lawyers, we started giving in, we should never given an inch, we should've stood up and screamed and hollered for all these miners and everything but we started backing up then. We relented some. Now maybe we went and cut back on some benefits to lower the premiums a little bit. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: And that was the demise of workers' comp and Patton finally killed it in '96 but we should, that was the first step, sort of like the organized labor giving up on the Comptroller's union when Reagan got in and, you know, they backed off the comptrollers and then in Reagan first year and it ended up, when he ended up in for eight years and then they were no longer a national force so-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. DESKINS: that's what-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: that's what I remember. That's the first backup. MOYEN: Alright. And that special session took place although Martha Layne Collins was still governor she was a lame duck in that Wallace Wilkinson had been elected. What were your interactions with Wallace? DESKINS: Well, they did all that. I thought that was awful and that's one of the reasons I--they did that because anybody that didn't get reelected or didn't run for election they were fair game. They could be not bought but they could sure promise them something that they could get their vote real easy. I know like on workers' comp the big one that we really got whammied on was Jim Maggard from Breathitt County was a lame duck in December and we had it lined up that Patton wasn't going to get his way, that we were going to fight it and fight it to the nth degree and we come up with this Mountain Caucus and lo and behold a couple three of our members said, No, we are going along with Patton. I said, "How could you go along with the governor? This is going to kill black lung; this is going to kill workers' comp. It's going to kill injuries. It's going to put money in the insurance." Well, I didn't get an answer but I found out later on in January he got about 45,000 dollar-a-year job as a consultant now at the district office over in Jackson or somewhere. I never did like those special sessions that were called when someone had been relieved of the pressure of the electorate, it was, that's--you'll see a lot of them in December and that's why they did that. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: Wait till after the election, call it and you got eight or ten people that you can go out there and put the pressure on and they don't have any pressure on them. MOYEN: Okay. Could you tell me a little bit about the dynamics of the legislature when Wallace Wilkinson comes in? By this time both the House and the Senate have really begun to assert some authority that John Y. Brown gave up and it doesn't appear like Governor Collins tried to reclaim that anywhere near at least what Wallace Wilkinson-- DESKINS: No, all she was interested in eventually after she'd tried that education bit and it didn't play out, then along came Toyota-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and you could get about anything you wanted out of the Collins administration for the promise that you were going to support the Toyota plant in toto. MOYEN: Okay. Did you support that? DESKINS: I, yes, I did. MOYEN: Uh-huh. Was that hard to explain to any constituents here that might be saying, hey, it's, you know, in Central Kentucky-- DESKINS: In a lot, in some people questioned the support of spending all that money to get Toyota but in the end I think I explained it in a away, that, hey, instead of people having to go to Dayton, Ohio to find a job they can go to Georgetown and people pretty well understood that. There's going to be lots of good jobs in Georgetown. We're going to spend a lot of money and I said, "Well, why don't we spend money to develop the industry up here?" And finally it dawned on me that the simple answer was that you can't move coal around. You know, you can move a Toyota plant from Kentucky to Georgia but you can't move that coal out of that hill over there, so we're sort of stuck with it but when it does go it goes and then it's going to be, well, it's going to be a bust or like it's going now, economy is getting real good now, the severance tax returns are coming back up. But you can't move coal. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: You just can't move it. MOYEN: Now, when Wallace Wilkinson did become governor could you explain at least what you witnessed with his dynamics either--obviously more with Don Blandford and less with Eck Rose but there was friction there on at both Houses with what the governor was trying to do especially with gubernatorial succession? Do you recall having any conversations with the governor about that or anything else? DESKINS: No sir, I tell you what I, a lot of people thought that Wallace- -they called him "the weasel," I think, you know, and I got along with Wallace Wilkinson. He was a good friend of mine. He, I didn't have that. Now--let me go to the bathroom ----------(??) [recorder pauses] MOYEN: Yes, we were talking about Wallace Wilkinson and you were talking about your interaction with him as opposed to other people. DESKINS: He was, Wallace and I got along as well as I did with any governor with the exception of Julian during his administration and Paul Patton for the first ten months of his administration. MOYEN: Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. DESKINS: And but Wilkinson to me, if you sat down and take all the governors he was the most friendly to rural Kentucky and if it helped rural Kentucky and you could show it, Wallace would bend over backwards to do whatever you wanted to do or help middle-class and underprivileged people to get a break. You know, he took on Ashland Oil one time, Wallace did. And I think he was going to try to buy them out or something and I was on, that's when I was on Banking & Insurance and we voted him down or he didn't get to do what he was going to do. It was very technical about Ashland Oil. Wallace got mad but he never held that against me and I actually went to bat for him when Bobby Richardson and Jim LeMaster started the effort to get rid of Caldwell. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: He was a nemese [sic] to the legislature but everybody else had been too, you know, so he wasn't and I sort of liked Wallace's style. He told it like it was. "I'm going to be for lottery, by god, and some people who vote for the lottery may not be going to church every Sunday but their vote counts just as much on Tuesday as the old drunk out here does so I'm pitching people the lottery." And Caldwell sold it, that it was going to be salvation to education. And I always got along with him. And I enjoyed listening to him talk. Bobby and them couldn't stand any type of criticism and, you know, Caldwell didn't have any, he didn't back off his criticism especially in the House of Representatives. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And the harder he got, the harder the House got. Now he met somebody just as hardheaded as him in then Bobby Richardson-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and at that time Richardson had been elevated to speaker and he was bound and determined to get rid of Caldwell and we eventually did because I think that he and the governor actually had words that Wilkinson said, "You going to do what I want to do." And he said, "No, we're going to do what I want to do. And oh my god, I tell you, you don't have a vote on the House floor. Not one vote on the House floor do you have." And if you'll remember Caldwell up and left and then the legislative program Wilkinson had moved including the lottery. MOYEN: Okay. Okay. DESKINS: So that was a, I don't think Caldwell would have been satisfied staying as an advisor to Wilkinson anyway. MOYEN: Right. Right. DESKINS: But they staged it as that, you know-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: Caldwell said, "Well, I'm it appears that the governor can get his programs passed easier without my help than he can with it." So he left. MOYEN: Left. Obviously one of the biggest legislative overhauls, well in Kentucky legislative history was what we talked about with KERA, the education reform, when did members in the House, when do you recall people beginning, was it not until the Supreme Court said, this whole system is unconstitutional, that people started saying, hey, this is our chance to really revamp that? Are there any key instances that you can think of where you realized, wow, this is going to be a big change? DESKINS: Well, I don't think, to answer your question, anyone, well the Supreme Court decision obviously gave us the opportunity to move in an area that we had never been able to move before and that was, we were mandated to change it or the court would change it. So we had to act. There was a bunch of us that were interested before the KERA to do something about funding of education and then along came House Bill 44 and just it seemed like every time that you would get something going, that you could see just over the horizon then something else would come along and finally the court decision was that opportunity for the legislature to actually move and do it without saying, hey, we're going raise your taxes, like we talked about a while ago. We had to do it at this particular time. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: And so it's okay to vote for some taxes or okay to go into an area and allow a school district or some, to do something that they ordinarily haven't done before. But had it not been for the court decision I don't think we would have ever--the legislature would have ever gotten around by piecemeal to do what we did at one time with KERA but we gave up a lot and we gave it to people that have proven I think over the years that are not totally competent to deal with the situation and that's our educators. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: They have screwed KERA up and with the testing and all this stuff and there's been--while we kicked out ninety percent of the politics with KERA, the ten percent that was left there was just as bad as the ninety percent we kicked out, you know, and eventually it's crept back in, crept back in, crept back in not as much as it has been but it's been politicized I think since '92, what four? MOYEN: Ninety-two. DESKINS: Ninety-two, yeah. And we've gone through all these people who thought they were, well, Stumbo got in a fight with some woman down there, remember that? MOYEN: I don't recall reading anything. DESKINS: She was over the educational-- it might not have been, yeah, it was the lady and she finally resigned not over that but she was there when they had found out that some schools like Belfry were allowing students from West Virginia to come in and go to school without paying tuition and likewise we were allowing some and people down on the borders in Western Kentucky so she raised a big stink about that and wanted to indict all these people and do all this stuff and Stumbo showed her where the money came from, so just cut off all of her funding, wouldn't let any of her funding bills go anywhere and she finally got the idea. MOYEN: Were you involved in one of the--I guess the three big areas here, the finance, or the governance, or the curriculum reform? Was there one area that-- DESKINS: Well, actually I wasn't a main player in any of those things. I thought there was others that could do it better-- MOYEN: Yeah. Yeah. DESKINS: Moberly and some of the other people, Jody was an educator and the people that had been on the Education Committee ----------(??) so I didn't try to get involved with it. I kept informed but the big thing I lost in KERA that was a twelve-year effort on my behalf and that is, I had just passed a bill in 1990 or in 19--I believe it might've been in 1988 and I was just about ready to implement it that "government" had to be taught from kindergarten through twelve every year there has to be a government class. And I introduced it and introduced it and it wouldn't get out finally I said I guess in '86 after I got back and saw how close it could be to get, well, I said, the hell with it, I'm just going to go ahead and push this thing and did and expanded a bunch of energy in appearing before the Education Committee in the House and the Senate and facing up to these legislators, not legislators but educators who would come in and say, We don't need any more mandates in education. And I agreed with that but we were putting out college students, not, we were putting out high school students that didn't know the three branches of government, didn't know how many people was in the House of Representatives and how many people was in the Senate-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and the difference between the General Assembly or the Congress. And I thought that's awful, if you don't know anything about your government you don't really know anything about constitutional rights, the first amendment and what in the heck is Brown vs. Board of Education all about and all of this stuff, you just think the government is up there just doing bad things to you all the time, you know-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: So I introduced that bill and got it passed and, boy, did I meet resistance over there with those bureaucrats. And I had to stay on them all the time and finally they were implementing a program and the first program I remember they said, How do we something for kindergarten? And I said, "Well, you get down to kindergarten's level. What would they understand?" I don't know what they'd understand about government. I said, "I know what they don't understand about the government they understand the buildings of the government, different buildings that we have and who lives in that building and why are they there?" So we had a coloring book--I wish I had saved some of them they first came out with--for kindergarten students they had this coloring book and it had the Capitol-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: Who lives there? These thirty-eight senators and one hundred representatives. And who lives over here to the side in the governor's mansion? The governor. And who's the governor, you know, and all of this and down at--it had the Supreme Court, of course, we don't have a separate Supreme Court building-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: but it had, you know, something about the Supreme Court. And then what is this? And it had a picture of the floral clock and just all sorts of things, some good edu--and then when KERA got passed we had to agree all hundred of us sort of that we would take out all the legislative mandates and out went my "government". And to this day I regret it. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: Because I taught when--I taught for twenty years I guess at UK and Morehead, the extensions here and my first class in state government would be, I'd had to give a handout, people finally learned about it and some of them sandbagged me a couple of times but asking all those questions and I bet you ten percent of them wouldn't get fifty percent of them right. So, and that's another thing about Wilkinson, he, whether you believe or not you're sitting right now in the biggest community-college campus in the world and that's Pike County, of course, after the Patton mandates. But the Prestonsburg Community College is in Prestonsburg and this Campbell down there, I can't remember his first name, he's, but he was the president, President Campbell decided he wanted to come to and give satellite classes in different communities. Well, UK got so paranoid about it that they passed a law that you couldn't give satellite classes past so many miles (ringing in background) and that included Pike County because it was out of the range of Prestonsburg Community College. So I got together with Senator Nelson Allen who was on Education and Clayton was on Education--chairman of Transportation and Education--and made up a plan. I introduced the bill on Thursday evening making Pike County three hundred, I mean five hundred and how many miles, square miles it is, satellite campus to Prestonsburg. We introduced it on Thursday night, passed it out on Friday, Nelson Allen came in had a special meeting on Monday, passed it out, we passed it through both Houses and came back and got concurrence back Tuesday before Pikeville College or UK found out about it. [Tape 1 ends; tape 2 begins] DESKINS: --Campbell had done it without-- MOYEN: A guy in their system. DESKINS: kissing their hind-ends, you know. And Pikeville College was, they were just absolutely adamant that that was going to shut down Pikeville College so the next day after we passed and had concurrence on-- it didn't have to have concurrence, it was identical bills and therefore there was companion bills that had been passed and we didn't have to have concurrence, it's the quickest you could get a bill passed-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and they started complaining and then the spokesman they sent from Pikeville College guess who that was? Governor Patton. And the spokesman that they sent from UK was Wethington. I believe Wethington was then. It was either Wethington, or--Tony Gates was with them, you know Tony don't you? MOYEN: No. DESKINS: Tony was the big, the legislative liaison-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: at the University of Kentucky. If you wanted something Tony Gates would get it for you. Well, they set up a meeting with the governor to veto the bill. The governor called me and by that time it had gotten down to a personal thing. I'd gotten calls at home and everything and they sent in their big hitters: Patton, the president of the college, Charlie Baird. Charles Baird had raised money for them and all this stuff but they was going to have a meeting with the governor and he called me, he said, "Are you serious about this bill?" I said, "Serious as I can be because there's a great need in Pike County. Those people that are going to go to that community college aren't going to go to Pikeville College, it's too expensive and Pikeville College if they want them can give them scholarships, this is going to serve a great need. Plus if we can have some higher education, I mean the goals of the hospital and those places could be met by sending their people back for new education forces." And he said, "Well," he said, "you know, if those big boys are hollering that loud there's bound to be something good about it." So Patton and the president and five or six more people and the Board of, and UK people came over and they all met with Wallace and Wallace listened to them and he said, "I'm not going to veto that bill, that's a good bill." And they left and it's still the law. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: So I always admired him for that, he could have made many many- -but I come to find out Pikeville College is saying since that's the best thing that ever happened because we're getting the good students-- MOYEN: Good transfers. DESKINS: Yeah. And then, of course, Patton did away with it in '96, '97, January of '97 did away with the community colleges. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: And made it Patton University, that's when I quit teaching. MOYEN: (laughs) We'll get to that. Any other important legislation during Wallace Wilkinson's term that you could think of that you sponsored or ----------(??) voted on-- DESKINS: Gosh, I don't know. It got down to sponsorship--I sort of got out of the sponsorship business when I took over as chairman and found out that it was a lot better to get a few, not to be on so dang many bills because you didn't have to stretch yourself out so thin and have to go to committees and testify, find out what you wanted to be for, put your name on it as a co-sponsor and you can get so but I wasn't one to try to have twenty-five bills-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: like Representative Palumbo. She had to have a Chinese calculator to keep up with how many bills that she had going any one day. I wasn't that way. I tried to--and that's not saying that's not a good legislator but I thought that you could be more effective by having very few bills and trying to have, put your influence in what you could whenever you needed it instead of having and to go over-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: to the well so many times. MOYEN: What are your thoughts on Brereton Jones and his role as governor and how he did, particularly because, you know, he is a, was a West Virginia Republican-- DESKINS: Republican. MOYEN: and then a Kentucky Democrat and what were your thoughts on his time in general and then I'll ask you a few specifics? DESKINS: Uh, I'm ----------(??) sort of hot-cold and lukewarm with Jones. He did some good things, he did some bad things and most of his administration was not more than just a figurehead. He took care of the coal, he took care of the horse industry very well. I really blame him for part of the demise of the Democratic Party when he vetoed the redistricting deal, actually vetoed it after we had passed it-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and I heard about the veto when I was driving back home and that-- MOYEN: Can you give me some, or give the tape, some background on that, what the redistricting bill after the census of 1990, right? DESKINS: Right. MOYEN: And what were the issues involved? DESKINS: Well, the, we had met in special session to redistrict. MOYEN: Are you talking about the congressional-- DESKINS: I'm talking about con--we, I think maybe, I mean get my, I think maybe we had done the congressional bill and then we had to meet in special session or maybe that was done in a special session too because he called so many special sessions. He was evidently a lonesome governor because he loved to have the legislature back in town. Now, but he called so many special sessions and the one that I remember was that we went down on a legislative--this was the House and the Senate, the General Assembly, redistricting and we'd probably already done the congressional, you do them separately. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: You don't do them together. And he called us down and we met and absolutely had--and redistricting is the most bloodletting that you'll ever have. You have got to screw your fellow next to you to get an advantage. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: And we did that and had just a brutal bloodletting, not only Democrats but Republicans to get the redistricting bill passed and daggone if he didn't veto it on our way home and we had to go back and do it over again, re-let all those and then people found out how they'd been, what they'd given us-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and maybe screwed them a little bit or something like that. And then the second time we were down there it was just, just brutal. And it's hard too. It's hard to do something to your fellow Democrat and well, I never could do anything to Greg and he never did anything to me but to see fellow Democrats going at each other for an area like-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: down in Magoffin County, you know. There was two or three areas there nobody wanted and nobody and to see what people would-- Russell Bentley and Hubie Collins and fighting and different things. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: It's just a tough time and you don't like to face up to your-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: (phone ringing) well, not like to face up but it's hard to meet them eye-to-eye and say, "Now, I've got the vote," and they'll maybe take your job away MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: (laughs) but that's the way it's got to be. Thank goodness, as we always said, we're in Pike County and it's bordered by West Virginia and Virginia you can't give us any of those places, it has to come out of Pike, you know. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: So we were sort of at an advantage when it came to redistricting. And that's-- MOYEN: So, in what ways-- DESKINS: Oh, I have all the time so, I was just looking for-- MOYEN: Sure. Now, in what ways did you feel like that, because as you mentioned, help bring about some demise in the Democratic Party? What, how would you tie that in with what you were talking about? DESKINS: Well, we had adequately screwed the Republicans. MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: Okay? And that was one of the things that we said we were going to do, if we had to do anybody in let's do as many Republicans in and as few Democrats as we can. MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: And actually in the Senate it was the same way. When we came back then in another session and redid the boundaries that met constitutional muster, then we gave the Republicans an edge in several senate districts that eventually proved that the majority switching over didn't do that much to the House because it's so heavily Democratic but it probably cost several House members especially in Jefferson County and Fayette County and probably some in Northern Kentucky too. It didn't do much to rural Eastern Kentucky but it certainly made a big difference when you got, went back down to redistrict the Senate districts came back that met Jones' constitutional muster-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and then from there, of course, it went downhill. People changed their votes so ----------(??) sixteen--oh, we only got eighteen senators I guess now, sixty Democrats, twenty-two Republicans, just sort of started switching around then. MOYEN: Also very unpleasant during Brereton Jones' tenure the BOPTROT-- DESKINS: Oh yes. MOYEN: the FBI investigation breaks. Can you tell me what that was like in April '92? DESKINS: It was awful. Let me tell you, it was awful. I think we were just adjourning that day and all of a sudden Raymond Overstreet--my good roommate, an attorney--was sitting next to me and he, and somebody came in to him and whispered to him and he turned and he said the FBI is on the floor. They couldn't come in the chamber but they were on the floor of the House waiting to serve us subpoenas. I said, "Raymond, what we need to do if this is true we need to call a caucus immediately, they cannot come in the caucus and advise the people in the caucus that they if they need an attorney that they need to ask for an attorney before they submit to any questioning." And so I went up and talked to, well no I went back and talked to Greg Stumbo. I believe we had a caucus and I know, I think Raymond, I think the Republicans had a caucus too and after that meeting with, I advised that those people especially Blandford's chief guy who used to be in the House--and I can see him right now but I cannot think of his name. He got elected down in the old fifth district down there and served a couple of terms and then got defeated and then went to Blandford--for those people not to discuss anything until they had adequate counsel. They didn't and it cost some of them indictments. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: Senator Smith, a Republican from Cold-- MOYEN: Springs. DESKINS: Cold Springs, see, he got interviewed without counsel and then he got up there and said, "Well, I told them something wrong," and came back and said, "No, I didn't tell you that right." "Well," they said, "okay, we're going to indict you for lying to the FBI and we'll let you out of it if you'll resign your seat." Ronny Layman did the same thing, he talked with them before having counsel and Senator LeMaster who was a lawyer, he who represents himself has a fool for a client, he talked with them without counsel and ended up they seriously charged him with all sorts of briberies and stuff and didn't ever convict him on that, they convicted him on lying to the FBI which in some jurisdictions is a misdemeanor but it has to happen in the sixth circuit it's a felony under the RECO Act, that the Supreme Court has never ever determined the penalties in RECO as being a national penalty, they sort of left it up to the circuits to determine whether or not it will be a felony or a misdemeanor and the sixth circuit, of course, has adopted that giving false information or to the FBI is a felony rather than a misdemeanor. That was an awful time. We, it brought about over-sensationalism especially the conviction of Blandford was uncalled for. You got to know the circumstances that Blandford took the donations from lobbyists and said, Well, thank you. You know, you couldn't buy Don Blandford but Don was a, sort of a good spender when he went out to a bar or somewhere and he put it on his expense account. So he told--what was his name? I picture him now. "Thank you, God bless you," when he gave him that donation and that's what was on BOPTROT, the, this guy that set him up, the lobbyist had set him up. A good friend of mine--shoot, what was his name? You can't remember? MOYEN: Let me ask you this about the investigation, did you ever have ever any suspicions that, you know, there were a lot of people who, a lot of legislators who were essentially tarred and featured over really petty things but other things that were going on that shouldn't have been. Did you have any idea at the time, suspicions that once all this came out you could say, yeah, maybe I thought that was going on or maybe these different things were going on or did ----------(??) a surprise? DESKINS: Yeah, well you knew. You knew just like every apple, a bushel of apples there's a bad one generally somewhere and you knew there was some people that were that weren't doing things or accepting things that ordinarily you wouldn't do. But you take a guy like Virgil Pearman, Senator Pearman, he was over in the House and there was no finer individual than Senator Pearman. Unfortunately he hated lawyers and we didn't get along that way, he just hated lawyers and he chose not to have counsel. Of course, he took a five-hundred-dollar contribution or a thousand-dollar contribution from a buddy Adams's brother who was a lobbyist and didn't put it on his expense account. Now had he talked to a lawyer probably the lawyer could have told him a way to unwind that with. But he didn't and unfortunately he had already incriminated himself when the FBI and those people talked with him and he had to give up his seat also but there is no way that a thousand dollars could have influenced Virgil Pearman to vote one way or another. He was as hardheaded as he could be. I think he was in the construction business, he had some wealth and there was no way that, you know, that little money that you, Hey here's you a thousand to put in your campaign--don't do that. Yeah, that, it went awry, the whole investigation just went too far. It was sort of a McCarthy investigation and a lot of people went to prison that ordinarily shouldn't have had they talked with lawyers or got legal advice and I don't see if you take the most atrocious of acts that somebody got convicted on that it was worth putting anybody and costing the taxpayers probably millions of dollars to investigate and then to incarcerate people like ----------(??) Blandford that cost them hundreds of thousand of dollars. MOYEN: At some point in the wake of what went on during the ethics legislation you criticized the Herald Leader I think for sensationalizing, do you remember criticizing the press or being frustrated with the press? DESKINS: I remember, I remember thoroughly giving them every chance I could to get up and criticize the Herald Leader. The Courier Journal didn't sound to me as bad as the Herald Leader, they were just, they would just picked on the legislature and picked on the members and enjoy it. And yeah, every chance I got, and I've had some highly charged speeches against the Herald Leader and invited them to come to Pike County and campaign openly against me, that I invited that. And they gave the legislature a bad press but also they gave Eastern Kentucky bad press. I know they always wanted to print it seemed to me stories that was derogatory toward the mountain people rather than printing stories that was, that would actually take the Hatfield-McCoy heritage and say that it was something good rather than something bad. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: I rather enjoyed those speeches too (both laugh). I have a copy of them somewhere if I can ever find it. MOYEN: Can you tell me a little bit about healthcare reform during Brereton Jones' term and what were your concerns? DESKINS: I want to be real honest with you-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: in case somebody listens to this, that absolutely lost me. We got lost in that. The legislature got lost and we were like leading lambs to the slaughter and I don't think anybody knew what we were doing. We were getting all these sets of facts from everyone else and let's go to the single-insured person and it will be cheaper and then we're driving all these small companies out and it's going to make the rates go up and it was just a mess. I don't think anybody really ever got a grasp on healthcare and still haven't, because we messed with it so much. We never gave anything that we ever did a chance of really working. Until we came back in and took another sworp [sic] at it and generally whatever we had done that wasn't working we undid and started on a whole new program. So I think that's one of the--if I had to say, was there a failure in the legislature during the two decades that I was there? I would have to say yes there was and yes it was the failure in the legislature to deal with the healthcare crisis. MOYEN: That links in here with one of my last question of the best and the worst votes-- DESKINS: Yeah. (both laugh) MOYEN: but, and it is complex. How, I mean, how does the legislature, how does a state legislator get his hands or mind around something like as complex as healthcare? DESKINS: Well, as I say you don't. See, I consider myself to be capable of absorbing about as much as any ordinary person can, maybe a little bit more, but I sit in those hearings in Banking & Insurance and we took most of the testimony and I was utterly confused. I felt like that I, if I was on a jury that the witnesses in front of me had been such good lawyers that I couldn't make a decision either way. You get these people coming and say, you know, the only way that you could solve this is through a single insurer and we went that way, that route. What was it, Kentucky KARE or one other program? And then we drove all the small insurance companies out and then the rates went plumb out of sight and so, okay, you got to pass legislation to bring these insurers back and then you got to group these people and then you can't, then we're going to have insurance for these real healthy people but what are you going to do with these people that have, well, we're going to put them in some kind of pool and make these other people pay for that. I mean it was just mind-boggling. We finally said what in the world can we do? And then someone would come along with something that sounded halfway decent and you'd grab on to it just to get through sort of like an argument in a bad argument in a marriage, let's just get through this thing and maybe tomorrow it will be a better time, you know. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: But that was a, one area that I wasn't in the least bit satisfied with our efforts as the legislature and also my efforts as a legislator to ever grasp the issue maybe, it was just too big for me to grasp and maybe it was just too big for the legislature but nobody ever had got a hand on it. MOYEN: On a lighter note, a number of the articles that I found that mentioned you during the same time there's a lot of this is going on, deal with you, and wearing your, I think purple suit with Ray, you know, with the bet with Raymond Overstreet and then discussions of a gunslinger bill, can you tell me about some of the lighter moments especially, apparently with your seat mate I guess? DESKINS: Raymond Overstreet, one of the greatest people I've ever met, one of my best friends, and a Republican, you know, that's because they always considered me a strong--and Raymond, a very strong Republican in principle but a moderate Republican, not a right-winger. And I don't know that, I was just thinking about the other day that when I looked through this magazine and thought of Raymond. One night we had a real serious conversation. He said, "Herbie, do you know what the real threat of America is?" And I said, "No, Raymond, I don't, I guess it's Russia and those missiles," that was before--He said, "No, it's not. It's the radical rights," he said, "and they will prove to be the downfall of this nation if we allow their agenda to become the agenda of this nation." That said for posterity. Yeah, we did have a good time, Raymond and I. That's part of I think of me enjoying the legislature as much as I did is that I had a good time doing it and Raymond was part of that. I know the purple suit; Raymond and I went to a convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Raymond was representing the Republicans and I was representing the Democrats. It was a Southern legislative conference meeting dealing with probably with, both of us were on Banking & Insurance and maybe it was a Banking & Insurance Southern Legislative Conference meeting or it was it Raymond and I were both on criminal, on Judiciary one time, it was, it may have been one of those. But anyway, he was the designated Democrat from Kentucky and I was the designated Republican. We always had a good time so we got out one afternoon and Raymond said, "Let's drive around Charleston, let's hire one of the-- MOYEN: Carriage? DESKINS: carriages. And I'll probably tell something on myself here that I shouldn't but Raymond and I said, "Okay." And it was a real nice warm day and we went over to a liquor store that was there and bought us some beer and iced it down in a case and this guy came over says, We want to hire you not for one hour but for the rest of the day, will you? He said, "Oh yeah," he quoted us a price and we said, "we'll meet that and then some." So to make a long story short, we toured probably eight hours that day and had the guy and we stopped at a place and had lunch and he wouldn't go to any lunch with us not because he was black but because I guess that was just a code that they couldn't go in but Raymond and I had a nice lunch on this outdoors, just having a really a good time and got to know this fellow pretty well and he said, "Well, I don't want to go back to the hotel," said, "let's go back and I'll show you where I live, where my people live." And we said, "oh that's fine with us," and we didn't have any fear, not that anything there was to fear. But we go back and all of a sudden we turn this corner and this is in the black area, middle-class probably, it was nice and we see this clothing store and on this mannequin in this clothing store was this bright purple suit with a white hat. And I said, "Raymond, look at that suit." He says, "Boy, isn't that a pretty purple suit?" I said, "It sure is." And he said, "Herbie, would you like to have that suit?" I said, "Not necessarily I would like to have it," I said, "Raymond, would you like to have it?" He said, "Well, not necessarily." I said, "Well, I tell you what, let's go in here and whichever one it fits, the other one has to wear it on the House floor and the other one pays for it." He said, "It's a bet." Now, I hope, oh don't let it be a forty-two, please, don't let it be a forty-two. And Raymond was about, he could wear, he was smaller than I and we go in and, lo and behold, it was a 42. (Moyen laughs) So he bought it for me. That guy in there, the salesman boy, he was really excited. And I said, "Well, let's just do it up right if we're going to get that," and I bought me a pair of shoes and sort of a ruffled shirt and a purple tie and I wore it the first day of the legislature the next day back. And the gunslinger bill, well Raymond and I were both from rural areas and we both considered that carrying a concealed weapon was way overrated a crime in rural Kentucky and that was in cities, we ----------(??) city life was all about so and we tried our best to get legislation passed each time for carrying a concealed weapon and we came up with three or four straight-out bills and they'd get beat. They just beat them and so we decided there's no way that we're going to get this thing passed straight up so we're going have to go into gorilla warfare. So we would, every bill every time we would catch a bill that at that time the rules provided that you could file amendments from the floor and not have to go through all this processing. And that's one of the reasons that they finally passed all those rules to combat Raymond and I filing those things. We would find a bill that would fit the and would file it in disguise and the whole meaning of them would be that people could carry a concealed-deadly weapon especially people working at convenient stores and stuff like that, late at night. And it got to the point that the speaker would have somebody trail our amendments, anything that we filed especially in the House and the Senate. Finally Raymond came up with a bill that dealt with the grasshopper and we drafted that bill and got it passed. That actually provided carrying a concealed-deadly weapon and it got to the Senate before they ever found out what it was. And it did some defining of terms and then it defined that the grasshopper had a right to defend itself and in certain circumstances but we got, nobody knew what it was and they looked at it and Raymond had a good explanation for it and the House voted it out and they caught it over in the Senate. ----------(??) that's when the Lexington Herald jumped on us and called us the gunslingers. And there was an editorial in the L--in the paper and I don't know if it was the Lexington paper or the Frankfort. It was in the same time that we had filed the gunslinger bill a drunk driving bill had come up. And Raymond and I both had been defense attorneys and the bill being filed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving we suspected it anyway that it was something that was probably unconstitutional-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and so we tore it all to pieces in the committee, the Judiciary Criminal Committee, and came out with a piece of legislation that was constitutional, amendments. All those Mothers Against Drunk Driving were just livid. I mean they were just absolutely, they didn't care anything about the constitution and nobody wants people driving drunk but still there's--if you don't abide by the constitution (laughs) don't need anything else, you know, it just get you--but the press picked up on that and they had Raymond and I in this convertible driving down and the speed limit bill come up at that time and we fought the speed limit bill and I introduced the bill and it passed and made perfect sense that the speed, that a person ought not to be get any points if they was breaking the speed limit on a legal, that used to be a legal speed and had reduced because of energy, because they weren't violating the safety rules they were actually violating energy policy rules and that passed. It was perfectly legitimate and so that, those three bills came up about the same time. And it had this Raymond and I driving down this big, in this big convertible with six guns along this way and the speed limit go as fast as you want and something depicting that we was probably drunk as bears going down this road but we got a big kick out of it. But that's part of having, I think, of enjoying yourself is having fun. Some people never, some people took themselves and I think the whole process too seriously, the process is government and government is people and people generally have fun and we did that and I think he enjoyed the sessions ----------(??) as much as I did. MOYEN: Individuals who I have interviewed who didn't leave until a few years after you did said that about 2000 or 2002 that the tone had really changed. It changed really-- DESKINS: It was changing when I left. MOYEN: did you notice that? DESKINS: Oh yes, it was changing when I left. There was people that--it had gotten more somber. Not unlike the legal profession, the legal profession has changed. I would not want to be coming up in he legal profession now, there's too many people with long knives and willing to put it in your back for any for reasons. And you can't trust people's word now or you couldn't, the last two or three years that I was there, you couldn't trust their word. When you can't place trust in somebody it, it's not fun working with them. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: Yeah. Very seldom in the twenty-some years that I was there that I had a bill that somebody made a commitment to me, that they changed their vote without coming to me and saying, "Representative Deskins, I've promised you I'm going to vote for this bill, I signed off as a cosponsor but I want to tell you why I cannot do it." And you say, oh that's fine, you know, file your bill, get off as co-sponsor or what-have-you. And you would do that for other people but the last session that I was there, '98-'99 I found that there wasn't that type of cohesion among the members that they were willing to go to -------- --(??) like President Bush said, we'll let them go it on their own, when you needed allies and there was more individuals down there than there was allies. MOYEN: Um-hm. Let me, let's kind of transition into the other thing that my guess is that that led to your decision not to run for office were a lot of the developments with Paul Patton. DESKINS: Right. MOYEN: Can you tell me what your expectations were and what your thoughts were when he was--when you had a Pike Countian, someone from Pike County in the governor's office? DESKINS: My, well, my expectations were that we would get that it would be the best thing that ever happened to Pike County as far as the development of the county and I'll be very fair with you that I think Paul Patton did do as much for Pike County as any other governor has done as Wendell Ford did for Daviess and-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: as Carroll did for McCracken and Wilkinson did for Casey and Collins did for Versailles, I guess it was Bourbon-- MOYEN: I don't know-- DESKINS: no, ----------(??)-- MOYEN: Woodford-- DESKINS: Woodford, yeah. So, but here is the, here is how I went in to the Patton governorship, my dad and I were very close and he was an organizer of the United Mine Workers, he was a strong union man and my mother was a strong union woman. And I got to be for Paul Patton, strong, in '94, no, in '95 when he ran against Forgy over my father's objection and this is what happened and this is why I became so disappointed in Paul Patton, it wasn't as much I guess for what he did but for what had happened ----------(??). In that primary Patton was running and I got on board one hundred percent. My dad and I had never, never ever parted in politics. And I'd always been for who he was for and he'd always been who I was for and so in early May of '95 I went down to my dad's house and I had a big Paul Patton sticker in the back of my car and I took it out and I didn't think I had to go in and ask my dad to put a Patton sticker up in his yard and I went out and hit the Patton sticker, a big Paul Patton yard sign. My dad came out and said, "Son, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, I'm putting up a Patton sticker." He said, "You're not putting that guy's picture up in my yard." I said, "Well dad, he's from--" He said, "I don't care if he is from Pike County or not. You get that picture out of my yard." So I took the picture out, put it back in my car, went in, still have--that set the tone. Daddy wasn't going to be for any guy that ran through a picket line with a machine gun--and, so I didn't discuss it anymore and there was no need for, you know, my mother sort of gave me the--and they both-- she had to have help to go to the polls, they both went to the polls in May of '95 and voted against Paul Patton and I voted for him. They both died in June. My dad died of an aneurism, 87-years-old, never voted for a Republican. My mother died two weeks later and she was 83-years-old and never voted for a Republican. Now, Paul Patton wasn't a Republican but he was a Democrat they wouldn't vote for. So I am carrying that burden, you know, saying, you know, I wish that never happened. God, I wish that had never happened, you know, and so then you go down there in '90, and in '96 and I get up on the floor and then all these speeches for Paul Patton, what he's going to do. Not only great expectations for Eastern Kentucky but great expectations for the Democratic Party, great expectations for the working people, we finally got a governor that understands and you got to understand that in the fall of that year Ron Cyrus and I got really active and got Billy Ray Cyrus to come in to campaign for Paul Patton and we also got the president of the United Mine Workers to come in, Rich Trumka and make a last minute streak through Eastern Kentucky, I think it started at Boyd County and went through Eastern Kentucky, ended up at Paducah for Paul Patton and he won by 14,000 votes, 14,000 or something like that. Anyway, Labor was what put him in. And then he didn't say a word. He didn't say a word to Kelsey Friend or myself during that whole session that he was going to call a special session on workers' compensation after the election was over. And to see him stand up in Ashland, Kentucky and praise Bill Clinton for all he had done and then one month later--and see, this state go for Bill Clinton, against tobacco and against the Chamber of Commerce and against the Associated Industries of Kentucky and then see the governor back up in December and undo all of that. It wasn't so much as it was personal to me but it was, to me it made a sort of me was a hypocrite, if my family could still be living. But also I brought about that same sense, if you couldn't believe in this man how can you believe in anything? So I decided I had a kid getting in medical school and one that was about to finish law school to come back here and because I knew the workers' compensation days were numbered. MOYEN: Can you explain that to me exactly how that special session in the legislation that was created destroyed, was it the limit on the days or I'm not sure-- DESKINS: How it destroyed workers' comp? MOYEN: Right. Um-hm. DESKINS: Oh, well, it took black lung out of the field of doctors, family doctors, doctors of pulmonary medicine and put it in solely in the hands of b-raters who are the most conservative doctors out there. And it wasn't the man couldn't offer the testimony of his treated position now, that he was having shortness of breath and all this stuff, it had to be whether that guy at the University of Kentucky or at the University of Louisville read an x-ray positive. So that bill passed, I went back to Stumbo, I said, "Buddy, the horse we rode in just got shot. We might as well get out of here." And then on injuries they set up, they did away with body functional disability and set it totally on impairment as set by the AMA. So in other words, the illustration, if a banker gets an arm cut off and Liberace gets his arm cut off they both get the same money. But poor Liberace he's without a profession but the banker can still count money with one hand but Liberace it'd sure take him a hell of a lot to learn to try to play the piano with one hand. So that's the same way it did with the workers. MOYEN: Okay. And then in the wake of the workers' comp in that special session was higher ed reform-- [Tape 1, side 1 ends; side 2 begins] DESKINS: That came in January, that was, I didn't stick around for the Triple Crown. (both laugh) That was '96 I guess-- MOYEN: Ninety-seven. DESKINS: Ninety-seven, January of '97. Everybody knew that Patton had a plan for overhauling higher education, he just never told anybody he wanted to do away with the community college system and we actually had that bill beat. We had counted that bill and we had fifty-two votes. And if you can remember that's when Stumbo stumbled. He called Wethington in and the governor in and they met through the night-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and the next morning then Stumbo changed his mind. Even though with the majority floor leader changing his mind I think they only beat us a few votes but, hell, your leader has changed-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: but that in my opinion killed community spirit. He could've done a bunch of things, changed funding as he did but to change the whole name, do away with the community colleges and leave, and the, to me the insult and the kick in the butt to all of us was leaving LCC as a community college in Lexington on, say, within a throwing distance of the University of Kentucky and doing away PCC and Owensboro and just different places and making them technical schools. And why I thought that's so bad was that Ron Cyrus and I went through that battle, that the University of Kentucky tends to be an institution in itself when it comes to the university and they treated these community colleges as if they were red-headed stepchildren. You would go to Ashland Community College or Pikeville Community Col--or Hazard Community College and get a, say, you're outside in Biology or something and then you go to UK and you want to major in something and they'll come back and say, well, you'll have to take your Biology over and it just don't fit in your category and-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: lots of kids were going down there and losing ten or not losing the hours, they just had to overwork themselves-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and go into another field. So Cyrus and I got the bill passed that I got if you if they gave it to you on the PCC campus it was good on the UK Campus and that just made a whole bunch of people down at UK just antsy as they could be. But they still were against the PCC College. When they changed that I knew it wasn't going to be long until these people of these technical schools were going to be in the same situation and they are right now. They will go through their program up here and then they'll transfer to UK and they'll say, "Well, you know, you went through that program up there but really and truly it's not really the program that you need and you're going to have to take x, and x, and x, and x in order to get into our program that you really wanted to come for, that you thought that you were studying and that you were going to be able to ----------(??) here." MOYEN: Right. Um-hm. DESKINS: So I knew that would happen and it has and to me that's, I know I would've been livid if I had gone to the University of Kentucky and graduated from PCC program and then some person said, well, you are going to have to repeat all of this stuff-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: it'd cost me a semester or something like that. MOYEN: Did you feel like the removal of the community colleges from UK that that was conceived as a good plan to kind of mer--to work on this merger or was it that this was a political UK had become such a political force here's the way we can break away. DESKINS: I believe it was Patton who wanted to break UK. I think he saw that he wanted--now, he had long-term plans, yeah, you had to give credit to the son-of-a-gun, he's got, had far reaching plans and he was tenacious enough to carry it out. And I think he did fully understand that UK probably did need to be spanked a bit and it was sort of about like the workers' comp, he used too big a paddle and hit them too many times and now I think we're paying for it. We don't nearly, they use North Carolina all the time, they are bringing, oh, this model in North Carolina but Kentucky is not North Carolina and maybe North Carolina has is still working as good as it did when we were considering that bill in '97 but certainly-- MOYEN: They started pumping the money in a hundred years earlier. MOYEN: Yeah. Yeah. That's just what I'm telling you-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: the whole thing goes back, are you willing to pay for it? Heck yeah, you can take an old jalopy and put enough money in it and you make it run a hundred miles an hour but if you don't want to put any money in it you can't make it run any faster. So with those two strikes I knew I wanted to run again and they tried their best in '98 to find a candidate up here. I mean they went out and they searched and I just sort of challenged them. I said, "Bring it on, let's go, let's--." And they didn't want to do it because they didn't want to get beat-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: you know. I urged them to, I cussed the Patton people on my radio program and all this stuff, I said, "Bring it on, Paul, come on, get you a candidate, let's go with it, let's just get out of here and slug it out." And Skipper Martin called me one day and says, "Hey, Herbie, how are you doing?" I say, "Fine, Skip, how are you doing?" He and I had been good friends since--he said, "I just wanted to tell that the governor is going to be for you in this primary." I said, "What in the hell have I done, you know?" He said, "Well, you may--." (laughs) I said, "I've done something awful bad to get that son-of-a-gun on my side." And he was calling, telling they were, they was calling off their dogs because he had contacted Leonard Lawson and all the money people and said, "Now, we're going to get this candidate, we're going to beat Herbie up there in '94." And I was just that's one place that my district at that time was not a Bible district, you couldn't buy Pond Creek and you couldn't buy Jones' Creek and you couldn't buy the city of Pikeville was not for sale and that's what I had and I, that's just, that's what I told him, I said, "Just go out there and get your candidate, bring it on." Now, I had already told everybody after '98 that as my last hurrah I was going to do something for the tobacco industry and we had all these reports about what all was going to happen to the tobacco industry. So I sat down with my staff member who had been with me about ten years and that's Brooks Tally, I said, "Brooks, I want to do something that will be memorable for agriculture and I think what we need to do is to go to all these universities and review their programs, make recommendations that to how these small tobacco farmers can survive, what's going to happen to them when the tobacco goes." MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: And we did that. We went to all the universities, found out all their overlapping programs, made the recommendations to do away with it and came up with all the solutions and the proposals for the funding mechanisms for them to do it. And one of them was to start growing shrimp, aquaculture-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: like they do it at Kentucky University and we had a big meeting there and had those shrimp that long, you couldn't tell them from saltwater shrimp and catfish and another one was catfish ponds. Kentucky can have a viable sheep industry if we wanted to do it and we gave all these alternatives and actually had some of the schools to revamp their agricultural program because they were overlapping with the University of Kentucky and they could do more. And, but I wouldn't tell anybody I wasn't going to run, I evaded the question but I had already told the people that I was, that that was it, that '98 was going to be my last one. So they came back and had a frantic search, found a candidate that was willing to run. And I told, I said to one of my friends, I said, "You watch this." And they, they'd set up a website and making all these preparations and making preparations for a gigantic fund raiser and I had this press conference and announced I wasn't going to run. That candidate immediately came off and they canceled the fundraiser (laughs) and caused that fellow a new car that they promised him so I won't never mention his name but I was satisfied with the twenty-three years that I had spent there, that we had done some good-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and I guess the last thing that we did, we got into a big fight over and I don't know if it's finished yet, and had a lot of fun in doing that, it was fighting the hogs fighting those big gigantic hog farms down in Western Kentucky that they were bringing in. And we passed legislation to adequately deal with the hogs. And I don't know if, I don't believe they brought those big hog farms in. They had a plan, they was going to make a hog farm out of West Kentucky-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and it was just awful that's what happens when you bring those hog farms in-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: especially (laughs) especially in flat land where the-- MOYEN: Run off-- DESKINS: yeah, well, I was laughing about it and I tell this one more Hubie Collins is one of my best friends and I, but Hubie sometimes gets off, that's what I'd accuse him. I said, "Hubie, you're going off on me, now, come on, come back, come back." That's when I was, of course, he is chairman now for Transportation and we arranged for that when Clayton quit but Hubie, they he was on Agriculture & Natural Resources, I mean Natural Resources & Environment with me and they came in with all these specs and figures of how much money these hog farms were going to that they can produce. Oh, it was something else that, you know, you grow the hogs and the spin off on it with selling the feed and the tractors coming in and all that mumbo-gumbo that they give you, how all this generate. And Hubie got plumb convinced that it would be good to consider locations for these hog farms on these abandoned strip mine lands. And one of them was over in Martin County, Mount Pontiki and Mar-- there is a big flat back up there, I bet it was bigger than the city of Pikeville, bigger than, oh, it's just an enormous mine back there. Hubie got it in his mind that he would like to consider to putting one of those hog farms there. And I said, "Hubie, you're going off on me." "Oh yeah," he said, "that'd be great." And this is what got him, I said, "Hubie, if they were to put one of those hog farms up there on that strip mine and all that stuff that comes from the hogs, the hog manure and all that stuff, washed down into the Tug Fork over there those doggone German carp will get to be the size of alligators. (both laugh) So we backed off on that but that was, we stopped that. And the last bit of legislation you was talking about there that I introduced and got it passed was something the governor helped me to do. And I don't know if he did it out of a sense of let's do this together or out of a sense to and that was to regulate these doggone logging trucks and the logging industry. And we worked on that. I don't know if you - not you, ----------(??) press - but those, his secretary, Bickford was one of my favorite people and all of the secretaries that they'd have Eugene Mooney was probably my favorite person because he was my old law school instructor and we took on the bottling industry and on the bottle bill-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and fought a pretty good battle. We just didn't, was just like the South, we just didn't have enough troops to-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: they just, they beat us. But Secretary Bickford was really interested in the environment. He'd been a general in the Gulf War, is from Harlan County-- MOYEN: Okay. DESKINS: and he, he took a special liking to my committee and I think to me and I took a special liking to him even though I fought the Patton administration as much as I possibly could on every front that I could after '96. But we got together and this is the first time I've ever heard this, the phrase "skunk works". He said, "We'll do the skunk works approach to this." I said, "What in the world is that, Secretary? I've nev--." "Skunk works is military, when you get down and you start out worse, get all the people together with the worst scenario, smells as bad as you possibly can smell and you work from there. That's skunk works." And we worked it out. Finally got a bill that created the situation where you had to have a master logger-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and, of course, the all the loggers got mad at that, said that was government interfering and typical reaction by a small business that doesn't realize that you're trying to help them and not hurt them and but Patton came in and got on that bill and it was, we that the Republicans had it beat in the House and they knew if they beat it in the House they could be in the Senate-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and I was out there chairman, sponsoring it and answering all their questions, they filed all these awful amendments on it and I went to Stumbo, I said, "You're not going to believe what I am going to do right now." And he said, "No," he said, "I wouldn't doubt anything that you might want--" I said, "I'm going to get up and move that we adopt every amendment on this thing." He said, "What?" I said, "Yeah," I said, "as far as I am concerned they're so silly that none of them will taken will hurt because it gives Secretary Bickford the right to implement the regulations." And so we're getting ready to, to really go and "Woody" Allen--have you interviewed-- MOYEN: I have. DESKINS: Butler Co--Butler-- MOYEN: Ohio? DESKINS: Ohio, from Butler County. Oh, excuse me, they were primed--are we still-- MOYEN: We're on now. DESKINS: Okay. "Woody", "Woody" Allen he was just, you could just see him primed, just ready to get and had all these silly amendments, horse and carriage were exempt from it and some person going out to saw firewood was exempt from it and if you're going to cut fire, a post for your farm you was exempt from all this. So they would go in with all these exemptions to make it ----------(??) and then we were going to go against the bill and I just got up and I said, "I've studied all these amendments and the sponsor has no objections to all the amendments being adopted." And we adopted every one of those amendments, passed it through the House and they did some stuff to it at the Senate but it went out to Bickford and Bickford made a pretty good piece of well, I don't think we had enough penalties in it but he made a pretty good piece of legislation out of it. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: And we left, that's how I left the House on a Bickford gave me a plaque of being the most responsive legislator from to the environment, more sensitive than most. But he did the presentation and the governor came in on the picture, the governor didn't do the presentation, Bickford did the presentation and that's how l left. I didn't go back. MOYEN: Did you, when you left what type of emotions did you have? Were you relieved? Tired? Sad? All of that? DESKINS: I was sad. I was sad to leave the House. I had a real nice office and was enjoying myself and but I was relieved to get out of that atmosphere that was being created. It's sort of like being in an army that the general has sent out the crack troops and got them all killed off, that's how I said how Patton the leader of the Democratic Party has put Labor out here and the crack troops of the crack troops and got them all killed off and there's no need really to try to follow this army because it's not going to go anywhere where I want to go. MOYEN: Right. Um-hm. DESKINS: And well, I'm telling this, that's the thing that we have back here and we came back and he ran for reelection and we decided that we would, couldn't beat him but we could do enough that he wasn't going to carry the county and he did not get 50 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary on his bid for second, for reelection. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: He got forty-three I think, forty-four percent and I think that gave him a little message-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: that he certainly was the governor and certainly the head of the Democratic Party but he wasn't, he couldn't walk through the, through this county on a white horse and had people on each side cheering him (laugh), may be a lot of people that are jeering him too. MOYEN: Uh-huh. So, looking back what would you say, you talked about one of the, you didn't call it the worst vote but not adequately dealing with healthcare, what would you say in hindsight was the best vote, maybe really difficult or you weren't sure about it at the time but you can say, "yes, this was, this is what we needed to do." DESKINS: KERA. MOYEN: Okay. Um-hm. DESKINS: I think it was the best thing that we did down in the legislature. And, of course, that's statewide and that's for all the people. The other thing was the hard work that we did to get that severance tax and put it in place. I don't think, you know, there's a lot of people who have said that Fletcher is going to try to take severance tax away when he got in. I think Representative Little and some of us came to the conclusion that if he were, if the governor were to try to take all these programs away now it would actually be so chaotic that it probably couldn't be done. MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: I mean it's not only Democrats but Republicans in Bell County and Martin County and Johnson County and those counties that he'd love to do it, I'm sure if he could from Pike and Floyd, he would love to jerk every penny out of here because he but if he did does that he's also got to do it to Martin-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and Johnson and Bell and some of those counties down there in that old fifth district that have coal in it so it's pretty well a program that probably is going to take some hits and be scaled back some but as far as it being a trigger mechanism for industrial growth in coal counties and coal impacted counties I think it'd stay intact and that was an important vote for this region. MOYEN: Thinking about things we've discussed today what have we missed? What else would you want to say about your time in the legislature? MOYEN: I guess we've about hit everything in sort of a shotgun measure, you know, we dealt, myself as chairman of the Natural Resources we addressed the problems of the environment both surface mining, underground mining, and other environmental things like the hog farms-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: and the chicken farms and what-have-you. I think going back to your question and this and that just brought it up, one of the things I'm most proud of is that we completely overhauled the safety regulations as it dealt with underground coal mining and my name is on every bill that dealt with that. It came through my committee, the committee which I chaired and we--Kentucky has the most comprehensive and the most effective mine safety regulation as it deals with coal miners and their safety of any underground mine state in the Union. So and we and it reflects that we reduced all these deaths down and the accidents down and I was the one that did that and I'm proud of that. My dad would be proud of that if I was, if he were still alive and he was on much of the legislation that we passed, you know. When we got there in 1976 it was archaic and Skolske had just happened-- MOYEN: Right. DESKINS: so I started out with that and then when I got the chairmanship of the Natural Resources & Environment I found that we did have mining then we started, not piecemeal but taking areas and having hearings with the United Mineworkers and independent coal operators and all that stuff to deal with the safety issues-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: and I think we've done that if they're enforced-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: now, that's the problem, about getting them enforced. And I noticed that's one of the problems that we have is, if when you cut back on in services to government generally speaking one of the areas that you had to cut back on is safety to people and that's whether it is children, underground coal operators, miners or bus drivers, or what we tend to slack off on safety when we start with a tight budget. I just hope that that doesn't happen but it might. I'm glad I thought of that, that was one of my things back in '76, underground coal mining, to revamp underground coal mining because Skolske had just happened. And I remember my father telling me on several different occasions that he'd been trapped in an area of the mines because of ventilation problems. I didn't understand it but when you got down to where you brought coal miners and especially union safety teams and company safety teams they all understood it-- MOYEN: Um-hm. DESKINS: about ventilation systems and how you can do it better to ensure that if something happens at the mouth of the mines that men back here can be better protected by certain ventilation ways and certain ways that you run the coal mines and everything. And we did all those things. I couldn't say I was an expert in mining but we took expert's advice-- MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: and came up with the best system that's going. MOYEN: Uh-huh. DESKINS: It's a lot better than Pennsylvania or West Virginia and Ohio, so and that's four big states so we did some good. MOYEN: Uh-huh. I cer-- DESKINS: I'm about talked out. MOYEN: I certainly thank you for your time-- DESKINS: Oh-- MOYEN: It's been a pleasure. DESKINS: It's been my pleasure, yeah. [End of interview] Deskins (House, 1976-1994, 94th district; Democrat) discusses his decision to run for office in 1975 and the campaign strategy he employed, his relationship with Senator Kelsey Friend, Friend's influence on Paul Patton, Deskin's views on the Equal Rights Amendment, wrangling for committee appointments, his appointment to the Natural Resources and Environment Committee, and his race against Wayne Rutherford. He reflects at length on Paul Patton's rise to power, the coal severance tax, John Y. Brown's administration, education and taxation, Martha Layne Collins' administration, his Insurance Sunshine legislation, his impressions of Wallace Wilkinson, his idea for K-12 education, the 1990 redistricting, BOPTROT scandal, Paul Patton's push for higher education and elimination of community colleges, Deskins' opposition to hog farms in Western Kentucky, his efforts to regulate logging, and his work on underground mining safety regulations. Part 2 of 2. insert here

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