Split Rail Winter 1974: Earl Almost Quit
The fifth issue of Split Rail opens with something we haven't seen from Earl Tackett before: doubt. The coal market collapsed in October 1973, and three of his advertisers pulled out in the same week. Earl sat at his desk in the print shop, looked at the bills, and thought about quitting. For about ten minutes. Then he poured a Wild Turkey and got back to work.
Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1974) is now online, and it might be the best issue in the archive. There's something about a man fighting to keep his magazine alive that makes every page feel earned.
The Girls
Jolene Adkins from Durbin gets the cover and a six-page spread shot at Cranberry Creek in Pocahontas County. Earl found her sitting on a rock reading Flannery O'Connor with her feet in the water. She's a waitress at the Mountain View Diner, she doesn't own a car, and she agreed to be photographed on one condition: "Don't try to make me look like a city girl." Earl didn't. The creek and the mountains did the rest.
Tammy Blankenship works as a secretary at the coal company and types invoices for men who can't spell. She was shot on a cabin porch on Paint Creek and she looks like she was born there. Donna Maynard runs her daddy's feed store in Rainelle and could outwork half the men reading the magazine. She's twenty-one and making her own decisions about what to do with her photograph.
The Writing
Earl's publisher letter is the longest and most personal we've seen. He talks about nearly folding, about the coal layoffs, about driving up to Pocahontas County to find Jolene because the mountains don't quit on you even when the economy does. It's the kind of writing that belongs in a better publication, and Earl would hate me for saying that.
The letters page has a soldier at Fort Benning who passes the magazine around the barracks, an offended grandmother from Welch, and a man named Dale Riffe who's been ordering coffee he doesn't drink at a truck stop for six weeks trying to get noticed by a girl from the last issue. Earl's responses are deadpan perfection.
The Articles
Hank Jarrell's wood heat guide is genuinely useful—the kind of article that could save someone's life in a mountain cabin with no furnace. The part about chimney fires isn't theoretical; Earl lost a cousin to one. Bobby Lester's Power Wagon road test involves a goat, a creek crossing, and a truck the color of an angry school bus. Rating: four out of five pickaxes.
Condition
This copy shows significant age. The cover has handling wear, the interior pages are yellowed, and there's foxing near the spine from fifty years in a shed in Raleigh County. The B&W interiors have the grainy, high-contrast look of a print shop that was doing its best with limited equipment. It's authentic in a way that the glossier magazines in the archive aren't.
— Glenn