Get to know reporter Karla Ward: Telling stories about and for my Kentucky neighbors

My first 18 years were spent on a small farm in Logan County where my dad raised pigs, tobacco, corn, soybeans and wheat.

He knew how to grow his own food, fix his own vehicles and construct his own buildings, and he included me in most of what he did, from working in the tobacco fields to digging night crawlers to sell to a roadside bait shop for extra cash.

He literally dug his living out of the dirt.

One of the greatest sadnesses of my life is that, with this richness of heritage, I have grown up to be a Starbucks-drinking, handyman-hiring, gardenless city girl.

Not long ago, I was listening to WEKU radio in the car when I heard a recording of Gurney Norman reading his poem “Allegiance.”

“I pledge allegiance to Rockhouse Creek in Letcher County, however far I roam. I pledge to always visit my family’s graves, brother, mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins scattered in the hills.

“I will always drive the old roads I traveled in my youth and still travel every chance I get, especially Route 7 from Jeff to Sandy Hook, through old coal camps and towns like Wayland where our football team in 1952 played a pretty good game even though we lost.”

It stopped me cold.

Sitting in the parking lot outside the Hallmark store in Lansdowne Shoppes, I found myself unexpectedly crying the kind of crying that created so much snot and eye redness I knew I wouldn’t be able to go in and buy that birthday card for another 20 minutes for fear that someone would wonder what had happened to me.

Because I pledge allegiance too.

I pledge allegiance to the ponds in the hog lot and in the back field on that farm near the Bucksville crossroads.

I pledge to visit my family’s graves in Berea Cemetery – the one on the way to Adairville, not the one in Madison County – where Dad, Aunt Till and Uncle Tuck, Granny, Pawpaw, Ruthie, Mawmaw, Aunt Imogene, Aunt Shirley and so many others lie.

I will drive past Granny and Pawpaw’s house on Plainview Church Road, even though the dinner bell has long been removed and the gray barn finally got torn down, and I will take the long way through Chandlers Chapel to see where the old school once stood.

It was like Norman’s poem was a Mad Lib for how I feel about my home and my people.

Some of my earliest and best memories are of community and close ties to the neighbors who surrounded our family.

I remember riding in a seat attached to the back of my dad’s old bicycle to visit Mr. Everett and his wife Bea, who lived across the road from us.

I remember getting in trouble with my mom for going next door to ask our neighbor, Mama Mae, if I could pick some of her cherry tomatoes. Of course she was thrilled to share her tomatoes, and the trouble at home was worth it, because they were so good.

I remember the sound of my dad and his buddies gathered in a circle to play Bluegrass music together in the evenings.

And the swell of a cappella singing when the pews were packed at the Auburn Church of Christ, where my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles all attended.

I grew up surrounded by neighbors who knew me, because they knew who I came from.

‘No two days are ever the same’

I remember sitting in the cafeteria at Logan County High School and being handed my results from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the ASVAB test.

It’s that test they give military recruits to figure out what job they ought to be assigned to, and every student in my school had to take it, whether they were joining up or not.

I certainly had no intentions of heading off to boot camp.

The ASVAB asked academic questions, most of which seemed pretty easy to me until they started asking about auto parts. The language and reading sections were a breeze.

But the assessment also asked about what I enjoyed doing. Would I like adjusting bicycle gears? How about taking an art class? Helping students with homework, yea or nay?

I might be the only kid who ever took that test and then voluntarily, with no drill sergeant involved, built a decades-long career doing exactly what it told me to do.

The results said I might like being a newspaper journalist.

For once, the government got something right.

When I enrolled at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 1995, I declared journalism as my major.

My college years were going to be somewhat atypical, though.

I was a freshman living in a dorm on a full academic scholarship, but I was also an expectant mother.

When I temporarily moved back home to give birth to my son in 1996, I needed a job, and I landed at the local newspaper, the News-Democrat & Leader.

It was a chance to learn the craft of journalism in the best and maybe the only real way: by just doing it.

I was surrounded by colleagues who became like family in the county where I grew up, and they let me do it all. I took photos and wrote stories about everything from city council and fiscal court meetings to the local family adopting a baby. I helped lay out pages the old-fashioned way: by cutting with scissors and pasting stories up onto broadsheet grids with wax.

I spent two summers working at the newspaper, the same one Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer Al Smith once owned, and I was hooked for good.

I liked that I got paid to meet people and learn what was important to them. I liked shining a light on problems facing our community. And I loved telling a story readers hadn’t heard before.

I still do.

Whether I’m staying up late making sure people know about a deadly tornado outbreak, giving someone a proper sendoff with a news obituary, writing about the viewpoints expressed at a community forum or just highlighting something unusual that happened at the Kentucky Derby, no two days are ever the same.

I’ve been a reporter for the Herald-Leader for more than 23 years now. In that time, I’ve covered health care, aging, retail and restaurants on the Business desk, done a stint as a religion writer, helped out on the copy desk and, for the past 15 years or so, worked evenings and weekends covering public safety and breaking news.

I’m a part-timer these days, which allows me to focus on my family. That newborn I was trying to support as a college student is now an adult with two kids of his own. My husband and I have two more boys as well, one in middle school and the other a high school sophomore. My days off are busy with school drop offs and pickups, babysitting grandkids and handling the housework, errands and multitudes of other stuff that keeps our household running.

Though Lexington is a little bigger than the farming neighborhood I grew up in, I’ve found community here. I know the neighbors on my street. Some of the people I go to church with are folks I’ve known since I moved here almost 30 years ago.

And on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, you’ll find me at work telling the stories of Kentuckians, for Kentuckians. My people.

And I pledge allegiance to you.