The 53rd Annual O’Tucks Banquet
Nov. 1
Receptions, 5975 Boymel Dr., Fairfield
Happy Hour, 5 p.m.
Dinner, 6 p.m.
Entertainment by Nightflyer (www.nightflyerband.com)
$25 per person
For reservations, call (513) 737-3107 or (513) 829-6975
Committed to community coverage
The Hamilton JournalNews is committed to coverage of the local community — from schools and our local history to business and news. Each Sunday, reporter Richard Jones tells the story of the people, history, places and events that make Hamilton unique. Have an idea for Richard? Email him at Richard.Jones@coxinc.com.
It’s often been said that if in 1894 Peter Thomson had opened Champion Papers in Manchester, Ky., Hamilton might not have happened.
An exaggeration, to be sure, but it illustrates the historical impact of the migration of people from Kentucky into the city.
“From its earliest years, Champion welcomed transplanted Appalachians, especially Kentuckian,” said local historian Jim Blount. “Thomson hired people from the hills and hollows because they tended to be loyal, adaptable, hard working and ingenious at fixing machinery problems.”
Blount said no one can pinpoint when people started calling the city “Hamiltucky,” but it was a term that was widely used by the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Although it was used derisively, there was one man in town who embraced it and sought to organize transplanted Kentuckians in order to take some of the sting out of the stigma: Stanley Dezarn.
“There was an Italian-American Society and a German Society, so Stanley set out to create a group where people with a Kentucky heritage could get together,” said Don Carpenter, a member of the O’Tucks, a contraction of “Ohioans from Kentucky”, the group that Dezarn started in 1959.
“He wanted people to know that there was nothing wrong with being barefoot and not having much money,” Blount said. “When he started the O’Tucks, there were a lot of people who did not talk about their Kentucky past. He set out to reverse this.”
In a 1975 op-ed column in the Hamilton JournalNews, Dezarn said that the O’Tucks’ main objective was to create “an enrichment of the cultural base.”
“The first task was to look at ourselves from the viewpoint of past experiences, traditions, customs, folklore and music,” he wrote. “We decided just because we are from a little spot somewhere in big Appalachia… that we did not wish to be branded. We wanted to develop our culture in a new setting.”
Those who knew Dezarn describe him as an energetic, enthusiastic person who didn’t know a stranger.
“If you met Stanley, you knew within a minute that he was born in a log cabin on Crane Creek in Clay County,” Blount said.
After he served in the military, Dezarn taught eight grades in a one-room school in Clay County, and in 1955 came to Hamilton because he would make better money there because the schools were desperate for teachers, largely as a result of the influx of Kentuckians, Blount said. He taught at Fairfield North Elementary School, and eventually became the principal there for many years.
Dezarn was a crusader for all things Kentucky, Blount said, including music. During the early years, the O’Tucks organized a day-long music festival at the Butler County Fairgrounds that would draw as many as 10,000 people, according to newspaper reports at the time.
“A lot of times, he would book the musicians before he had the money to pay them,” Blount said, “but he would usually raise the money by the time they got here, and if he didn’t he’d take the money out of his own pocket.”
Later on, when Blount and Dezarn organized an “O’Tucks Night” as part of the Fort Hamilton Days festival, they would pass a hat to pay for the bands.
“It would be packed with 6,000 or 8,000 people,” Blount said. “One night, we came up with $10,000.”
The O’Tucks also held annual banquets featuring Bluegrass music, bringing in some legendary performers like Stringbean of “Hee Haw” fame, members of the Carter Family and Merle Travis, the writer of “Nine Pound Hammer” and other bluegrass classics.
The banquets usually took place just prior to the fall elections, and Dezarn was so well-connected with Kentucky politicians that he would bring in gubernatorial candidates because they knew that some members still voted in Kentucky.
Dezarn had an especially close friendship with former Kentucky Governor and Major League Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler, and would not only have him come to Hamilton for the banquets, but would frequently take people to Kentucky to meet him.
“I’ll never forget the time he arranged for a group of Hamiltonians, including my father and me, to have a private meeting in Lexington with Happy Chandler and his grandson, the future Congressman Ben Chandler,”
“I’ve still got Happy Chandler’s autograph framed and hanging in my office… thanks to Stanley Dezarn,” said Hamilton attorney John Holcomb, son of the former Butler County Prosecutor, who was a Democrat. “I’m fairly certain that Stanley was a Republican, but he sure knew how to play to both sides of the aisle.”
A big part of Dezarn’s crusade was to take busloads of people from Hamilton, including many politicians and dignitaries, on his “Bluegrass Tours,” where they would visit coal mines and other sites of cultural interest to help people bridge the gap between Kentucky and Hamilton.
“He was a lot of fun to be with,” said Ercel Eaton, former JournalNews columnist who went on several of Dezarn’s tours. “One time we were deep in the mountains on a Sunday morning and there was a pull-off to the side of the road just big enough for the bus, and Stan had the driver pull over.
“We all got off the bus and had a prayer,” she said. “It was so beautiful and the mountains were so big.
“He had a lot of soul about him, and he was totally devoted to the young’uns in his school,” Eaton said.
Although Dezarn died in 2004, the O’Tucks continue his efforts with the annual banquet, set this year for Nov. 1, and a scholarship program that has given away $46,700 since 2000, according to scholarship program chairwoman Joyce Thall. The scholarships are awarded through Miami University Hamilton and are given according to need with an emphasis, but not a requirement, that recipients have some Kentucky heritage.
Indeed, O’Tucks Scholarship recipient Christina Harrison’s grandmother and all 15 of her brothers and sisters were born in Clay County.
“My great-grandfather, Gilbert Allen, was a teacher in a one-room school house in the 1920s,” she said. “Four of his children became educators,” and Harrison is majoring in middle childhood education.
“This scholarship means a lot to me because what the O’Tucks stand for really fits into my own heritage,” she said.
Although “Hamiltucky” still carries emotional weight, good and bad, in the 21st century, most O’Tucks would agree that Dezarn’s tireless crusade helped many in Hamilton embrace their Kentucky heritage.
“I turned myself inside out to do that and so did he,” said Eaton, a Kentucky native whose “Appalachian Yesteryears” columns were a popular feature in the JournalNews for decades. “He did a lot to remove that stigma, but it’s still here.”
Blount, a former editor of the JournalNews and first-generation Hamiltonian from a Kentucky family, recalled a story he did about Gaston Herd, the head administrator of Fort Hamilton Hospital, in the 1970s.
“In the article, he started talking about being born in Kentucky, and after the story ran, no one remembered anything else because no one knew that he was from Kentucky,” he said. “Stanley made it possible for Kentuckians to come out of the closet and speak openly about it.”
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