Happy Valentine’s week, y’all!

With tenderness, passion, and unconditional support, may we love whom we love today—and every day of the year. As John Mayer sings, “you’ve got to show, show, show” it, folks: “love is a verb.”

If you’re looking to show a little Valentine’s warmth to the Bourbon or beer drinker in your life, there is a great opportunity this week at the Frazier. Friday evening’s Master’s Series program combines two things: first, extra time to access Barrels of Heart and all of our other exhibitions on view throughout the evening; and two, an incredible tasting and storytelling experience with New Riff Distilling and Ten20 Brewery. Live a little, come have a taste!

As the official starting point of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail®, we’re proud to share some big news from the KBT® experiences this week. With 2,135,555 total visits in 2022, attendance at KBT® experiences eclipsed two million for the first time in history. There are now forty-four distilleries on the tour and attendance is up 370% in the last ten years. The industry brings a booming $9 billion to Kentucky, so it seems this Bourbon tourism thing is working for the Commonwealth.

Today’s Frazier Weekly starts out warm and fuzzy, but abruptly shifts to more sordid topics.

First, Hayley Rankin highlights a 1940s Navy sailor sweetheart pin from our collection, our museum store plugs some nifty “I heart Bourbon” socks, and Heather Gotlib teases an upcoming Free Family Day with our neighbors at KMAC. Then, changing gears, Brian West writes about the ten-year anniversary celebration of the scandal-plagued 2013—dare I say it?—national champion U of L men’s basketball team. After that, Brian and Simon Meiners each delve into the Kentucky origins (and current whereabouts) of the animal whose 1985 death inspired the new film Cocaine Bear.

Plus, Greg Schoenbaechler tells you how to vote Frazier in a Kentucky Living Best of nomination. We’ve also got the full video of our February 8 program Help Me Find My People and news about an upcoming breakfast at the museum.

I sure do hope you enjoy!

Andy Treinen
President & CEO
Frazier History Museum

This Week in the Museum

From the Collection: Navy Sailor Sweetheart Pin, 1940s

As we approach Valentine’s Day, we’re highlighting an artifact that intersects the holiday of love with Black History Month. This sweetheart pin depicts a Black sailor wearing naval dress whites and dates to the Second World War, c. 1940s.

Pins of various military emblems became especially popular during WWII as a gift from servicemen to their sweethearts as a symbol of their love throughout wartime separation. A pin depicting a Black serviceman would have been particularly rare at this time as African Americans were considered second-class citizens prior to the Civil Rights movement and thus not equally marketed. This pin is both a token of love between two people and perhaps an uncommon instance of visual representation for African Americans in service during a time of racial inequality.

Hayley Rankin
Manager of Collection Impact

Museum Store: I Love Bourbon Socks

Spend Valentine’s Day with those you love, but show off your love for America’s only native spirit with our I Love Bourbon socks! Let people know you’re full of love and want to be full of whiskey! Buy yours here. And remember: Frazier Members get ten percent off!

Frazier to Team Up with KMAC for Free Family Day!

On Saturday, March 11, come and celebrate teamwork and healthy competition with a FREE Family Day at the Frazier History Museum! Our exhibition Kentucky Rivalries captures the most iconic conflicts in the Bluegrass State—and what better time to experience it than the week leading up to March Madness?

This day is FREE thanks to the generous sponsorship of Delta Dental and the Snowy Owl Foundation. Visit the museum between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and enjoy admission at no charge—just mention that you are here for the family day!

You also get to make a day of it: we are teaming up with our friends at KMAC for a day of family fun on Main Street! Make sure to stop by both of our sites on March 11. If you complete our scavenger hunt, which encompasses both sites, you will be entered to win an exciting prize.

That’s not all that’s happening this spring at the museum! We are hosting a Pop-Up Spring Break Camp on April 3–5. The teachers are taking over the topics for this camp and talking about all of our favorite stories from history! Join us for a day, or two, or all three. It is sure to be a good time!

If you’ve browsed our website lately, you might also notice that the details for our 2023 Summer Camps are live. There’s more to come on that soon. But in the meantime, make sure you are registered, as spots are going fast! Our popular Camp Takeover, where we let the kids run the museum for a day, is halfway full already!

We hope to see your smiling faces here at the museum this spring. We’re so excited to provide so many opportunities to do so!

Heather Gotlib
Manager of Youth & Family Programs

U of L to Honor 2013 Men’s Basketball Team

Since the official press release last fall, the University of Louisville has been careful not to mention two significant words when it comes to the school’s intentions for recognizing the 2013 men’s basketball team. After the Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP) released its findings about the Adidas scandal, and questions arose about the chances for the school to “raise the banner” again, athletic director Josh Heird avoided mentioning them.

The Louisville men’s basketball Twitter account has also kept the words out of any tweets created by the handle when referring to the celebration planned for the team. “Celebrating 2013” is the only tagline for those series of tweets. Even former players have followed the party line when referring to the celebration, getting tantalizingly close to saying the words, but stopping just short of uttering them.

Fortunately for us, the Frazier is not bound directly by any NCAA guidelines. So, let’s cut to the chase. Any Louisville basketball fan who lives within an eighty-five-mile radius of the Metro is aware of what is scheduled to happen this Saturday at the KFC Yum! Center: a celebration of the 2013 National Champions.

National. Champions.

Yes, the 2013 title will remain unrecognized by the NCAA. Yes, the 123 wins tallied by U of L men’s basketball from 2012 to 2015 will remain stripped from the official record. Yes, there will still be an asterisk after “NCAA CHAMPION” on the miniature replica of the 2013 Louisville Cardinals National Championship banner hanging in the rafters of our Cool Kentucky exhibition. And, yes, the current season of Louisville men’s basketball has been historically bad.

Nevertheless, those facts will never diminish the one shining moment that the city, the school, the players, and, yes, the coaches experienced nearly ten years ago. And, despite the turmoil of the past ten years, that achievement is still worth celebrating.

Congratulations to the 2013 National Champion Louisville Cardinals.

BOOM!

Brian West
Teaching Artist

Cocaine Bear to Crash Premier of Namesake Film at Lexington Theater

This month, the Elizabeth Banks–directed film Cocaine Bear will have its wide release in movie theaters. The dark comedy—based loosely on events centered around Kentuckian Andrew Carter Thornton’s infamous, ill-fated drug run across the South—stars Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and the late Ray Liotta. However, the film’s biggest star will walk the red carpet for the premiere in just one place: Lexington, Kentucky.

On September 11, 1985, before falling to his death in Knoxville, Tennessee, Lexington native Andrew Carter Thornton II had dumped some of his smuggled cocaine out along the distribution route. By December 1985, what remained of that was discovered by local authorities at the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, just south of the Tennessee state line.

Forty empty packages of cocaine were found there. According to original reporting by the Associated Press, each of the packages was “believed to have contained one kilogram of cocaine, or about eighty-eight kilograms in all, and valued as much as $20 million.” Lying nearby was the carcass of a black bear. An autopsy verified that the animal had died from complications suffered from gorging itself to death on cocaine.

Over the years, the animal’s remains were preserved, first by the National Parks Service, and then by several other owners, including Waylon Jennings. In 2015, KY for KY purchased the remains from its penultimate owner, the widow of the proprietor of a Chinese medicine shop based in Reno, Nevada.

Since that time, the bear, nicknamed “Mr. Bear” and “Pablo Eskobear,” has been displayed at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in downtown Lexington. But, on premiere weekend for Cocaine Bear, the bear will be just up the street from the Fun Mall, at the Kentucky Theatre, on Main Street in Lexington.

The Cocaine Bear will be on display in the lobby of the theater on Friday, February 24, and Saturday, February 25. Show times at the Kentucky Theatre can be found here.

Brian West
Teaching Artist

Off the Snead Shelves: The Bluegrass Conspiracy (1990) by Sally Denton

In the Literary Kentucky section of the museum’s Cool Kentucky exhibition, there’s a selection of books by and about Kentucky figures stored on Snead Iron Works bookcases. In Frazier Weekly’s Off the Snead Shelves series, staff members spotlight different books from the collection.

“A two-hundred-pound bear discovered one of the duffel bags and died of an overdose after burying his face in the powder.”

This sentence—buried on page 434 of my copy of Sally Denton’s 1990 nonfiction book The Bluegrass Conspiracy—contains the book’s only reference to the “Cocaine Bear,” the animal whose 1985 death inspired the upcoming film.

The book’s subject isn’t the bear; it’s Drew Thornton: the pilot who’d dropped the bag from the sky.

Born in 1944, Drew grew up on a horse farm in Paris, Bourbon County, Kentucky. “The tranquil setting seemed an ironic site for the spawning of a vicious and mean-spirited boy,” Denton writes. Drew spent his summer days playing golf and tennis at Stoner Creek Country Club and polo at the Maddens’ estate. He went to Sayre School—“a country day school attended by the children of Lexington’s horsy set.”

In 1963, Drew enlisted in the Army. “From that point forward, Drew’s friends thought he was unable to distinguish between peace and war environments.” In 1965, having been shot in the arm while invading the Dominican Republic, he was awarded a Purple Heart and honorably discharged.

In 1968, he joined the Lexington Police Department. But he told his wife and others that being a cop was just a cover: the CIA had recruited him as an assassin, he said. “I did it for my country would become a catchall phrase Drew would use throughout life to explain questionable, and often illegal, actions.”

Over the next four hundred pages, Denton crafts a story teeming with scandals: including drug-fueled parties for Lexington’s elite and a Jessamine County farm called “the Trident” where foreign mercenaries, possibly Nicaraguans or Libyans, trained by rappelling cliffs along the Kentucky River.

The story climaxes in the early predawn hours of September 11, 1985.

That was when Drew Thornton—wearing combat fatigues, a bulletproof vest, infrared night-vision goggles, and Gucci loafers; strapped with a duffel bag packed with pistols, ammo, cash, dehydrated food, vitamins, a compass, an altimeter, ID papers in multiple names, and thirty-four football-sized bundles of Colombian cocaine; and eyeballing what he thought to be US Customs jets pursuing him—opened the door of his Cessna 404 above the woods outside Knoxville, Tennessee, and jumped.

Due to the weight, his main chute failed to deploy. He landed in a random Tennessee driveway, dead.

Three months later, on December 20, authorities searching the mountains of Fannin County, Georgia, for Drew’s other bags found one beside a dead black bear, who’d overdosed about four weeks prior.

Although that bear will make great fodder for the new action comedy movie, I’d recommend Frazier Weekly readers check out The Bluegrass Conspiracy first to get the real story. It shines a damning light on everything from government corruption to the machinations of the Deep State.

Source

Denton, Sally. The Bluegrass Conspiracy, pp. 38–49 and 434. 1990. 2016 ed. Print.

Simon Meiners
Communications & Research Specialist

Vote for Frazier—and Win some Cash!

It’s that time of the year: Kentucky Living magazine is holding their annual Best in Kentucky awards and the Frazier History Museum needs your vote as your favorite Kentucky museum! Last year, we got second place—but this year, we want to take the top spot.

Vote now each day until the end of February to help support the Frazier and cash in yourself. As incentive to vote in Kentucky Living, $100 cash prizes are drawn each week! The competition has thirty categories, so vote for all of the people and places in Kentucky you love, especially the Frazier.

Thanks for letting us be the place where the world meets Kentucky.

Greg Schoenbaechler
Marketing Manager

Bridging the Divide

Video: Reckoning, Historian Share Groundbreaking Research at Frazier Program

What a night of learning last Wednesday with our program, Help Me Find My People: How Archival Documents Can Connect African Americans to Enslaved Ancestors.

It was a partnership program with Dan Gediman and Reckoning, Inc., sharing a new database of information on thousands of Kentuckians who were enslaved. The data they’ve captured is vital information that may finally allow thousands of families to trace their ancestry. Searching for information that predates 1870, many families hit a brick wall, because prior to that year, formerly enslaved Black people did not appear by name in the US Census. Part of the collaboration with Reckoning, Inc., has been with Nelson County historian Charles Lemons, who for years has been scouring courthouses and archives piecing together valuable information that is now part of the database. We heard tearful messages at our program from individuals finding a connectedness to their past.

Take the time to watch the program to learn more, and visit reckoningradio.org. You can also reach Dan Gediman at dan@reckoningradio.org.

Frazier to Host Community Connection Group’s 2023 Power Diversity Breakfast

We are so pleased to host an upcoming breakfast here at the Frazier that certainly fits into our mission of “Bridging the Divide.”

The group sponsoring the breakfast, Community Connections Group, Inc., began the Power Diversity Breakfast eight years ago as a way to bridge the racial divide that exists in our city and country.

The 2023 Power Diversity Breakfast will be held here at the Frazier Monday, February 20, as part of Black History Month. The doors open at 8:45 a.m. and the program begins at 9.

The official name of the breakfast at the Frazier is Annual Community Connections Group 2023 Power Diversity Breakfast Black History Award. Founder and president James Linton says each year CCG honors a new class of individuals for outstanding community service and business achievements. Several folks will be honored this year, including Deputy Mayor David James and A.M.P.E.D. executive director Dave Christopher.

Tickets are a $50 donation to CCG—and that includes a special guided tour of the Frazier’s Commonwealth: Divided We Fall exhibition led by curator Amanda Briede. That exhibition also bridges divides by highlighting diverse voices from the Commonwealth.

We hope you can join us.

Rachel Platt
Director of Community Engagement