Banker Labors to Staunch Appalachian ‘Brain Drain’

The hills of Martin and Lawrence counties tend to smother a young person.

To someone 17 or 18 and sharp as a plow blade, the layered Appalachian shale seems a trap, a symbol of hardscrabble farms and pitch-black mines where the coal is running out. Ambition, sophistication, worldliness and wealth appear reserved for citizens beyond the stony peaks, in Lexington, perhaps, or Louisville, Chicago or New York.

Small wonder, then, that when Katrina Woodward graduated near the top of Sheldon Clark High School’s class of 1990, “I vowed and declared I would not come back to Martin County.”

Tracy Runyon dreamed of escape to Montana, “where there were no hills to hold you in.” Valarie Hardin, a valedictorian at Lawrence County High, just up Highway 3, mapped this plan: “Live in a big city, hopefully with a high-paying job.”

All three remained, however, and by choice. A pair of rural teachers and a country lawyer now, their presence testifies to the effectiveness of a small-town banker who has spent 19 years binding youthful minds and hopes to east Kentucky roots.

“I want to stem the brain drain,” said Robert M. “Mike” Duncan. And to that end, he runs an internship program more akin to adoption than a mere summer job. With 53 of 73 college-educated former interns living in and around Inez, the Martin County seat, Duncan is helping to energize the hollows and the hamlets, fighting an image of backwardness and despair.

His graduates run an insurance agency, the local country music station, the pharmacies at Wal-Mart and Rite-Aid. They volunteer at abuse centers, the United Way, the March of Dimes. In the pipeline are students who aim to practice law, counsel families, open a physical therapy practice.

The banker offers challenging work, individual counseling, career contacts, seminars and outings--for as many years as each student needs, through high school, college and beyond. In return, he asks “the pledge,” summed up in the notes he scribbles for his yearly welcome speech: “Give something back. Return the favor. Get involved. Help you find your way back home.”

Duncan’s is by far the most successful of a handful of projects throughout Appalachia, each aiming to staunch an exodus of intellects from a region that sorely needs their help. (The norm for alumni of various efforts hovers around 50%, said Ronald D. Eller, director of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky).

Duncan believes that his approach can be replicated in any poor American community yearning to hold onto its most promising children--an asset that is key, he says, to any turnaround. “It could work on an Indian reservation,” he said, “or in an inner-city neighborhood.”

The need to anchor young talent has not been lost upon Carlos Cassady, Martin County’s economic development director. Just this past year, he said, an aircraft manufacturer considered constructing a facility in these parts. Plenty of people would have lined up for jobs; about 44% of the labor force is unemployed.

But the company questioned whether the local populace had the necessary technical skills. “The numbers,” Cassady said, “just didn’t work out.” In the end, the deal fell through.

Smart, motivated kids do grow up in Martin County. “They just don’t stay,” sighed Inez Mayor Winnie Munzy.

For the most part, no one really asked them to. In the mountain precincts of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia and Virginia, educators toiled for decades under a system that “regarded it as a failure if you didn’t get the students to move out,” Eller said.

“You’ll be better off gone” is still an oft-heard refrain. “Look for greener pastures,” a former resident who moved to Florida advised in a recent letter to a weekly newspaper, the Mountain Citizen.

Duncan preaches the opposite. It may take a little extra creativity, he tells the interns, but it is possible to earn a living and lead a satisfying life in the hills and valleys of home.

Then he shows them how.

Lesson No. 1 is the power of networking. Crystal Tucker enrolled at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., to learn to be a paralegal. When she needed work, she called upon the attorney who represented Duncan’s bank. She soon became the first paralegal ever hired by the Inez firm of Marcum & Triplett.

Duncan also intervenes directly. When Valarie Hardin, 30, got her University of Kentucky law degree, Duncan hired her as counsel for the bank. She and a partner started their own practice this year, within sight of the bank’s drive-up window.

For five months after graduation from Morehead State University, until a paralegal opening came up in nearby Paintsville, Natalie Caudill worked as a secretary to one of the bank’s executives. “I wanted to get a job in my field,” Caudill said. “He let me stay until I could.”

It is understood that Duncan himself is Exhibit A, although he doesn’t say so explicitly. “He’s living proof,” said Melinda Stepp, a Morehead State student who has already spent two summers as an intern. “Look at all he’s done.”

The interns walk to their meetings along a hallway where framed photos show Duncan with retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, comedian Bob Hope and Pope John Paul II.

The young people all know that Duncan is a member of the Republican National Committee. They’ve seen his White House cuff links and his scrapbook from the party’s August convention in San Diego.

Duncan’s story, they realize, could be their own.

He is the son of a general store owner who lives near the Tennessee line. As a child, he loved to watch candidates come through for “speakings,” delivering stump speeches to country folk who came from miles around.

Duncan was an intern himself, in the Kentucky General Assembly, and chauffeured Richard Nixon when the president visited Kentucky during the 1972 campaign. He worked alongside young talents like the late Lee Atwater and Roger Stone, who went on to carve national swaths as political consultants.

“I had some of the same job offers they did,” Duncan said. He admits to an occasional twinge of envy. “I’d see them on TV and wonder, ‘Why didn’t I do that?’ ”

His path led instead to Inez, population 600, on the forks of Rockcastle Creek.

He met Joanne Kirk at the University of Kentucky’s Law School. They honeymooned in the Bahamas and at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami.

They were still students, married two years, when Joanne came down with hepatitis. She wanted to recover at home, where her father ran Inez Deposit Bank.

At the time, oil was short, coal booming. His father-in-law needed help. Inevitably, Duncan reprised Jimmy Stewart’s role in “It’s a Wonderful Life”: He agreed to work at the bank for a year, then two. . . .

Now 45, Duncan chairs the Community Holding Co., which controls both Inez Deposit and the First National Bank in Louisa, the Lawrence County seat.

But he and his wife promised each other that they could devote one day a week to something besides banking.

It was to Inez that President Lyndon B. Johnson helicoptered in 1964 to declare his “War on Poverty,” a web of government programs to protect the poorest of the poor. But even in good times, Duncan noticed, the brightest students wanted something more than they could get at home. And by the mid-1980s, the coal companies were laying off workers.

His father-in-law had always hired local kids for part-time jobs--blessing enough in an area that offered few such opportunities. Duncan resolved to court the best students and influence them, not only to further their education but to use it here.

He began hosting an annual luncheon at each bank for the top scholars from each county’s high school. At these affairs, he touted his program and urged his guests to apply.

He interviewed each aspirant, plumbing them for their plans. His hires got minimum-wage teller jobs during summer breaks, winter vacations, after school or on weekends, for as long as necessary. Some interns stayed one year, others as long as seven.

He taught community service by requiring it; he paid interns to run a camp for gifted elementary pupils. He paid them to attend public meetings on roads and prisons, so they could understand that they might help bring change.

He claims that he’s never totaled up the program’s cost. It is as intangible as the program’s benefits for his business; if he helps the town, it certainly can’t hurt the bank.

Duncan also invited each intern for private chats. The youngsters were floored that the most suave guy in town paid them such attention.

In 1993, Duncan took a year for a White House program for mid-career business executives. He returned with yet more ideas.

He instituted a summer seminar series, paying an intern, of course, to organize the lectures. Then-Lt. Gov. Paul E. Patton (he’s now the governor) spoke to the kids. So did college deans and presidents, a federal judge, a local publisher.

This past summer, the theme was Appalachian culture. The interns met dulcimer legend Jean Ritchie, heard about the role of religion in the hills, listened to tales of the Hatfields and McCoys.

They also were required to research their own family trees--at a Mormon genealogy center more than an hour’s drive away and in musty courthouse files.

Red-haired Melinda Stepp fleshed out the legend of Moses Stepp, a flame-haired woodsman who managed to escape from a band of Cherokees who had nailed his ears to a tree. Jennifer Begley traced her ancestry to Pocahontas. Natalie Pope wrote of her grandfather, a sheriff who raided moonshine stills.

They learned heritage and pride.

But Jimmy Don Kerr was missing from the group. An irrepressible prankster, betrayed by his tendency to blush, he’d decided to spend the summer in Lexington, working as a carpet cleaner for higher pay than he could get at home.

During the school year, he had stayed at Eastern Kentucky University, seldom bothering to visit home. His friends on campus teased him about his twangy accent. The other students from Inez talked of going far away.

Then this autumn, Kerr returned to sit among the sycamores and oaks, in wait for a deer to wander into shooting range. He mulled Duncan’s creed. “I’ll just move back home,” he thought.

Duncan promptly offered him a job as a management trainee. Kerr changed his major from pharmacy to accounting.

Kerr’s mother, the county librarian, is overjoyed. His father, a coal miner who has worried each day for 10 years that his job might disappear the next, is warier.

But Kerr is a 20-year-old with a made-up mind. “Give me a big ol’ hill and a chair, and I’m happy.”