Funeral services to be held for Gish

Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. Monday, November 24, for Thomas E. Gish, the longtime editor of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg.

Tom and Pat Gish bought The Mountain Eagle in 1956, and took control of the paper in January 1957. Over the years, they endured harassment, boycotts and a fire bombing after taking on corrupt county and city governments, and mining interests.

Tom Gish died Friday after a long illness. He suffered heart failure on Tuesday, and had been in a coma ever since. Visitation will be at the Letcher Funeral Home in Whitesburg beginning at 5 p.m. Sunday. Funeral will be the following day at Graham Memorial Presbyterian Church in Whitesburg.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Ben Gish of Whitesburg and Ray Gish of Brooklyn, N.Y.; three daughters: Ann Gish of Virginia, Sarah Oakes of Thornton, and Dr. Katherine Gish of Bottom Fork; four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

A Spectator Crime

Sometimes a community buries a murder so deep that the people who live there forget what really happened, or even that anything happened at all.

Like Leonard Wood’s mutilated body, the facts surrounding his murder are buried so deeply that few people in Letcher County, Kentucky, know the atrocity took place. Even his name is not sure, with some reports calling him Leonard Wood and some calling him Leonard Woods. But Wood’s murder was so outrageous and his subsequent mutilation so horrendous that it made national news in a time when there was no television and precious little radio.

To find out more about Leonard Wood's murder, read my post on today's In Cold Blog.