Twilight in Hazard by Alan Maimon

Author:Alan Maimon [Maimon, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2021-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

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Even in its darkest hours, Harlan County has always felt more penetrable. The people there might not always want to talk to a journalist, but at least they’ll tell you in a raised voice where they’re coming from. The current Harlan County judge/executive and I go way back. I first met Dan Mosley when he was an eighteen-year-old community college student. Back then, when he wasn’t in school or working at a local tobacco store, he spent his time at government meetings and community events, keeping tabs on everything of significance that was happening in the county. Mosley liked to wear suits and hold court over a few beers with reporters from the local paper, the Harlan Daily Enterprise. I attended some of these off-the-record sessions and came away impressed with Mosley’s firm handshake and understanding of public policy.

As a politician-in-training but not yet an elected office holder, he didn’t have to worry about a provocative quote ending up in the newspaper. I could tell the kid had a promising political future, so it came as little surprise to learn that in 2014, the thirty-two-year-old Mosley won Harlan County’s top elected position, becoming the youngest serving judge/executive in all of Kentucky. By comparison, Senator Mitch McConnell was thirty-five when he launched his political career by winning election to the judge/executive post in Louisville in 1977. Mosley’s immediate predecessor, Joe Grieshop, had clashed for years with the county sheriff, who wound up arresting him for the unauthorized use of a public building. “Politics is one thing, theft is another,” the sheriff said at the time. “I don’t play favorites and I don’t go out of my way to pick on people. Ain’t nobody above the law.”34 The case against Grieshop didn’t go any further, but the sheriff ended up getting convicted on felony theft charges.

Mosley has arguably one of the most challenging jobs in the state. Harlan County’s population, which peaked at 75,000 during coal’s boom years, has been dropping ever since. He has seen the exodus from Harlan up close. “People get laid off and just take off and leave their houses behind,” he told me. “They’ll come in and give me the keys and tell me to show the house to anyone who’s interested.”35 Mosley says the opioid epidemic compounded the area’s problems, creating unsafe communities and a “lost generation”36 of people who got hooked on the drugs.

Mosley is a believer in the idea that Eastern Kentucky can benefit economically from more transparency and fewer little kingdoms. He doesn’t run from Harlan’s feisty reputation and counts himself among the biggest fans of the critically acclaimed television drama Justified, which was set and partially filmed in Harlan. In Justified, a stetson-wearing deputy US Marshal named Raylan Givens navigates the seedy underbelly of rural crime and justice. Mosley says the show got the spirit and roughness of his home county just right. Justified featured a version of the oft-covered song “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” an atmospheric gem

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