Donna Reagan's Page

I was working for Newsline, a now defunct weekly newspaper in Giles county, when a number of Klan and associated Neo Nazi groups and others decended upon Pulaski to protest MLK day in January of 1989. I hadn't been working form long and so I decided to cover it from beginning to end, starting with some sincere young men who met at the wrong place and the wrong time. We talked, I took notes. They were concerned that they get fair and impartial coverage. I was there to give fair and impartial cove… Continue

After my six month's stint as a volunteer at Beauty for Ashes, I stayed with a woman and her daughter out in a rural area. She didn't have running water and the bathroom was about 30 feet out back, next to the woods. Each Saturday we walked down the road, wagon and plastic milk containers in tow, to her mother's cabin where we got water at the kitchen sink. I was astonished to see that in spite of the fact that her mother had a sink with running water, she always kept water in an old wooden buck… Continue

Tech I was hell, but I got through it. Part of Tech I (a.k.a. the class from hell) was having to do TennShare Learn and Discover. I felt it was so much extra work that didn't mean a whole lot but when you do everything you're supposed to do and you don't get penalized for a less than stellar feeling about the experience, then you get an "A" on that particular assignment. It all counts and so I'm glad for that. What I learned about myself in Tech I is that my knowledge of the net is Swiss cheese.… Continue

There is a little community out from Pall Mall called "Rottensfork." There wasn't much there in the 70s--just a little church and a few houses. There is a creek that runs behind the church a ways and it was pretty bad. My then fiance' and I cleaned up about 50 feet of it one day and then we laid in some large rocks to make a swift running channel so that the creek could keep itself cleaned out. It was a lot of work but when we went back years later that stretch of creek looked very clean and ver… Continue

The blog feature being here, I've been using it to blog reflections of people and places I've known. It's the Tennessee History and photo features from our week on TNShare--brings back people and places from long ago. Down from the mountain, towards Pall Mall, there is a place in the Wolf River that you can wade through hip deep water; on the other side is a tunnel. That tunnel goes through a hill and comes out at a remote place beside a gentle stream. At least, it was remote back in the seventi… Continue