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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He
attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a
degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron Even those who admired him - and there were many who did - admitted that Henry G. Woolridge was a peculiar old gentleman, mighty peculiar indeed.
And those who didn't care for him at all - and there were many of those too - said it was a pure distressing shame the way he spent all that money.
Just who, they demanded with querulous hostility, did he think he was, anyway?
But Henry G. Woolridge was just the kind of peculiar old gentleman who didn't give two cents for what people thought, friend OR foe, and he never let his their trivial carping stand in the way of his plans.
It was HIS money, he said, and he made it fair and square, and he meant to spend it in any way he dadburned pleased.
And if people didn't like it - well, it might be regrettable but he couldn't see that it should cause HIM any restless nights.
So, when he died - in 1899, at the age of 77 - he left a monument to himself.
No, wait a minute; that's not right. He didn't leave ONE monument to himself - he left 18, all of them as big as life and as eerily still as death, standing out there in a little cluster in Mayfield's Maplewood Cemetery, all facing the same way in the Sunday finery as if they were going to church.
One of the statues - of Woolridge himself - is of marble and was carved by an Italian craftsman.
The others, of Indiana sandstone, were sculptured in Mayfield and Paducah - according to the most casual of instructions.
There were three women, for example, whom Woolridge wished to memorialize in his personal Hall of Fame - either three sisters or two nieces and an old flame, depending on whose word you wish to take.
Only trouble was, they were all long and dead and he didn't have a photograph of any of them.
So, being a man with his fair share of American ingenuity, he simply provided the sculptor with a picture of a distant relative and told him to use his own artistic judgement.
The result was three statues that are identical except for minor variations in dress and positions of the hands. - and none of them in the least describes the people they represent.
Another statue has Woolridge astride Fop, his favorite horse, sitting there ramrod straight with a country gentleman's hat about three sizes too small perched ridiculously on his head.
The only thing the sculptor knew about Fop, however, he was 15 hands high. The rest he improvised, a flying chip at a time.
The statue, by the way, was moved by freight train from Paducah to Mayfield - and the story is told that a drunk hitched a ride, sitting on Fop's back and holding tightly around Woolridge's waist to keep from falling off.
Also in the statuary cluster, now protected by a heavy fence because sight-seers in the past insisted chipping souvenirs - are figures of Woolridge's parents, his three brothers, a grandniece, two of his hunting dogs, a fox, a deer, and a girl who is said to be his only love.
She was killed in a riding accident and Wooldridge, so the legend has grown around him, wore their engagement ring to his grave, as a token of his love. He never married.
Am aristocratic kind of man who made a fortune in horse trading, Woolridge laid plans for his burial several years before he died - and he did it, as things turned out, in the same casual, slapdash manner in which he had commissioned his statues.
Meaning to sleep his eternal sleep amidst the graven figures of his loves ones, he ordered that a sandstone vault be built on the site, and on its lid was engraved the figure of a hunting rilfe.
Next, he bought himself am ornate walnut casket, and had it stored away.
Next, he died.
Next, it was found that the casket was seven inches too long for the vault.
Only after the vault had been enlarged could he go to his final rest - a peculiar, sometimes irascible old man who had known, nonetheless, what he wanted and set out to obtain it, despite the snickers and the criticism and the general disapproval of his buttinski neighbors.
Mark me down as one of his admirers.
May the sun always lie as gently on him as the day that I was there.
