Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/70972
WHY DO THEY W HATE US? (Or Do They?) In search of that legendary statewide vitriol toward Louisville, the author rediscovers why she loves Kentucky. >> By Jenni Laidman Illustration by Garrett McGill Photos by Joey Harrison [66] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.12 e walk to the garage, where two pale faces, one skeletal and one round, glow from the gloom of a cave-like service bay. Te ground around us is carpeted with little toothed metal disks, bolts, nuts, doohickeys, glittering blackly. Te gaunt-faced one lifts his chin toward the man walking our way, and I am ushered inside the building with the hand-painted sign proclaiming "Bible & Tire." We were just east of Morehead, Ky., when my husband and I had spotted Bible & Tire. Bibles are a seasonal business, owner Garrett Dehart now tells me, and this isn't the season, so stock is low, although given the weather — it's a preview of hell, with temperatures pushing 100 degrees — a little wise promotion might goose a sinner or two toward scripture. Dehart says he took up his calling not long after his marriage ended. Tat was 20 years ago. "I had lost everything," he says. "I was home — you probably won't believe this . . ." He stops to look through me with Frank Sinatra-blue eyes. "I'll believe it," I promise. He continues. "One day I heard a voice on the couch: 'Come down and lease this garage.'" He says he drove right over. But the owner had not heard the same instruction, requiring the Lord to send Dehart again. Tis time, heavenly communications were clearer. Eventually Dehart bought the place. Now Bible & Tire is just what the sign says: It sells tires; it sells bibles. And Dehart oc- casionally gives bibles away. It is his mission. Yet I, too, have a mis- sion. A misbegotten mission. Maybe a stu- pid mission. But it was born of one of the first conversations I had in Louisville, with our mover. Te rest of the state, the mover said, hates Louisville. He wouldn't live any- where else — although he was born a few counties over — and people in the rest of the state wouldn't come here. Tis hardly seemed credible to me, charmed as I was by my new hometown. Ten I ran across an online discussion in which people from all over Kentucky talked trash about Louisville. "Tere is a deep-seeded (sic) dislike of Louisville in most of the rural areas of Ken- tucky," one wrote.