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Authors: Jerry Bledsoe
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make his way outside the hills. She honed his table manners, required daily readings of Emily Post, made sure that he did his school lessons, and even, over his protests, taught him such skills as crocheting.
By the time Davidson was in high school, playing forward on Oneida Institute’s basketball team and winning a state marksmanship contest, his daddy was sheriff, and Davidson already knew that he, too, wanted to be a lawman. As a small child he had been impressed by the uniform his father wore during the year he was a highway patrolman, before the state police agency was formed in 1948. He enjoyed the company of lawmen who were his father’s friends, and by age thirteen he and his own friends had started a weekend game of cops and robbers that would continue for years and range for miles over the mountains. Even then, Davidson took pride in his ability to catch the bad guys.
Later, he tried to explain why he was sure of what he wanted to do with his life long before he got out of school. “Every movie you saw, every book you read, had something to do with a lawman. It just seemed interesting to me. I thought it would be prestigious.”
After his graduation from high school in 1956, Davidson was staying with his mother in Cincinnati when his father called to tell him about an opening for a state police dispatcher at London in adjoining Laurel County. He came home, took the required test, and got the job. He lived at the post; worked eight hours a day, six days a week, on the radio; and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was riding with troopers, getting experience for the day when he would become one himself.
After four years as a dispatcher, he was admitted to the State Police Academy in Frankfort in September 1960. By then he had married a nurse, and two days before his graduation, he drove nine hours round-trip over snow-covered mountain roads to be present for the birth of his first child, a daughter, Deanna Lynn. He made it back to Frankfort in time to complete his training, and returned proudly to the mountains wearing a trooper’s uniform, his youthful ambitions fulfilled. His first assignment was Post Ten in Harlan, the seat of Harlan County, where he had worked his last year as dispatcher.
Harlan County is a testing ground for many new troopers. The most rugged of Kentucky’s mountain counties, it clings to the Virginia border in the southeastern corner of the state, its mountains underlain with five seams of bituminous coal, one atop another, in one of the world’s richest deposits. Bloody Harlan, it was called, because of the battles fought between the coal companies and the miners for half a century, battles waged by night riders with tommy guns and dynamite, battles that on several occasions had brought the National Guard to occupy the county.
When Davidson came to it as a trooper, Harlan was a county of rickety coal camps, poverty-ravaged hollows, and grimy little towns, its streams sluggish with silt from slag heaps, their banks laden with the stripped carcasses of abandoned cars and appliances, its tortuous roads clogged on weekdays by monstrous, gear-grinding coal trucks and on weekend nights by wild young men sloshed with bad whiskey in overpowered cars. It was a county of independent-minded people, where the first possession a boy longed for was a gun, and where guns were the first things reached for when disputes arose. “That’s just the way they settle their problems, using their guns,” Davidson recalled matter-of-factly. “They don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to talk these things over.”
Some young troopers are quickly broken by the violence, the long hours, the tensions of duty in Harlan County, but Davidson thrived on it, and heeding lessons learned from his father, he began building a reputation as tough but fair.
Troopers in Harlan spend much of their time working traffic, and Davidson had long been accustomed to the carnage that is common on mountain roads. As a teenager,
By the time Davidson was in high school, playing forward on Oneida Institute’s basketball team and winning a state marksmanship contest, his daddy was sheriff, and Davidson already knew that he, too, wanted to be a lawman. As a small child he had been impressed by the uniform his father wore during the year he was a highway patrolman, before the state police agency was formed in 1948. He enjoyed the company of lawmen who were his father’s friends, and by age thirteen he and his own friends had started a weekend game of cops and robbers that would continue for years and range for miles over the mountains. Even then, Davidson took pride in his ability to catch the bad guys.
Later, he tried to explain why he was sure of what he wanted to do with his life long before he got out of school. “Every movie you saw, every book you read, had something to do with a lawman. It just seemed interesting to me. I thought it would be prestigious.”
After his graduation from high school in 1956, Davidson was staying with his mother in Cincinnati when his father called to tell him about an opening for a state police dispatcher at London in adjoining Laurel County. He came home, took the required test, and got the job. He lived at the post; worked eight hours a day, six days a week, on the radio; and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was riding with troopers, getting experience for the day when he would become one himself.
After four years as a dispatcher, he was admitted to the State Police Academy in Frankfort in September 1960. By then he had married a nurse, and two days before his graduation, he drove nine hours round-trip over snow-covered mountain roads to be present for the birth of his first child, a daughter, Deanna Lynn. He made it back to Frankfort in time to complete his training, and returned proudly to the mountains wearing a trooper’s uniform, his youthful ambitions fulfilled. His first assignment was Post Ten in Harlan, the seat of Harlan County, where he had worked his last year as dispatcher.
Harlan County is a testing ground for many new troopers. The most rugged of Kentucky’s mountain counties, it clings to the Virginia border in the southeastern corner of the state, its mountains underlain with five seams of bituminous coal, one atop another, in one of the world’s richest deposits. Bloody Harlan, it was called, because of the battles fought between the coal companies and the miners for half a century, battles waged by night riders with tommy guns and dynamite, battles that on several occasions had brought the National Guard to occupy the county.
When Davidson came to it as a trooper, Harlan was a county of rickety coal camps, poverty-ravaged hollows, and grimy little towns, its streams sluggish with silt from slag heaps, their banks laden with the stripped carcasses of abandoned cars and appliances, its tortuous roads clogged on weekdays by monstrous, gear-grinding coal trucks and on weekend nights by wild young men sloshed with bad whiskey in overpowered cars. It was a county of independent-minded people, where the first possession a boy longed for was a gun, and where guns were the first things reached for when disputes arose. “That’s just the way they settle their problems, using their guns,” Davidson recalled matter-of-factly. “They don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to talk these things over.”
Some young troopers are quickly broken by the violence, the long hours, the tensions of duty in Harlan County, but Davidson thrived on it, and heeding lessons learned from his father, he began building a reputation as tough but fair.
Troopers in Harlan spend much of their time working traffic, and Davidson had long been accustomed to the carnage that is common on mountain roads. As a teenager,
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