Misery at Vortex

POVERTY Misery of Vortex Bathed in the unforgiving harshness of massed TV lights, Senator Robert F. Kennedy pounded a table to still the chatter of shabby, tieless white folk crowded into the one-room schoolhouse at Vortex, Ky. The New Yorker, lowest-ranking Democrat on the Senate's Labor and Public Welfare Committee, had come to assess the plight of once proud Appalachian mountaineers who rank today among the poorest of America's poor.

For two days last week, Bobby and a caravan of 36 cars crammed with out-of-state reporters, committee staffers and electronic gear burned up the dirt-topped back roads of eastern Kentucky's poverty-blighted Wolfe, Breathitt, Knott, Harlan and Letcher counties, halting in hidden hollows at weather-bleached wood and tar-paper shanties sagging with neglect. And in spavined one-horse communities named Neon, Grassy Creek, Mousie, Fisty, Jackhorn and Cody, ragged, slack-eyed men and women and listless children with bellies taut from hunger spoke of their need. Why,

Kennedy was asked in the township of Pippa Passes, was a man reared to a multimillionaire's comforts concerned with the plight of Kentucky's poor? "I can't answer that question," Bobby confessed. "Sorry."

Watering the Gravy. Yet neither cynics quick to ascribe political motives to Kennedy's one-man investigation nor the little girl who thrust a scrawled note into his hand pleading "Bobby, please run for President" could soften the facts of east Kentucky's poverty or blot out the reality of Appalachia's misery statistics. Some 5,000 of Wolfe County's 6,500 people exist beneath the poverty line, able to afford little more than a dime for each meal; federal food stamps account for half or more of the mountaineers' victuals. "Whenever you get another kid to feed," advised Cliston Johnson, 48, a partially disabled miner struggling to raise 15 children on $60 a month, "just add a little more water to the gravy."

The result, says Harlan County Pediatrician Doane Fischer, is that 30% of the children he treats are undersized, half are infested with worms and intestinal parasites, and over 60% have rotting teeth. Not one house in ten in Wolfe County is sound; up to 30% of mountain folk are functionally illiterate and condemned to idleness because their meager skills as coal miners have been obviated by the huge strip-mining machines that rip apart Kentucky's hillside seams. Federal aid to Appalachia, totaling $450 million since 1965, has done little to alleviate their plight. Industries that could bring work have shunned their ravaged landscape.

"Welfare's not the answer," rasped Bobby. "It's jobs. It is a basic responsibility of our society to give every man an opportunity to work." The poor people of Vortex cheered loudly. Even the cynics among the watching reporters were moved.

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