Like the baseball player elected to the Hall of Fame after his retirement, Betty Kearns of Ashland has received her most prestigious career award four years after she retired from the Ashland office of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even more impressive, Kearns, 72, is the first “worker bee” (her term) to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFT. She retired as an investigative analyst for the AFT at the end of 2005.
Kearns began her career with the AFT as a secretary, but over the years she acquired the skills to be much more. “I’m just a high school graduate, but I got a college education with AFT,” she said of her 30-year career with the federal agency.
As the sole secretary for the Ashland, Lexington, London, Pikeville, Pineville and Somerset field offices, Kearns worked with many young agents who later became group supervisors, division chiefs and assistant directors and who credited her with furthering their careers, saying they were “trained by the best.”
“It was the best job in the world and I worked with the best people in the world. I worked all over the United States with ATF and many agents — they all know Betty,” she said, later adding, “I did everything but carry a gun.”
In her role as an investigative assistant and later an investigative analyst, Kearns worked on some of the bureau’s most important and high-profile cases, including the Olympic Games in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, a church fire investigation in Knoxville and a major arson investigation in Indianapolis. She handled all of the evidence and testified in a 55-defendant explosives investigation and actively worked to keep the Ashland field office open. She also worked with informants, handled public concerns, kept track of cash used for undercover buys, maintained vehicles and acted in any way possible to support the agents assigned to her offices.
So how important was she to the agency? Well, Todd Willard, special agent for the Ashland ATF Field Office, said four years after her retirement, Kearns still is “terribly, terribly missed by everyone here.” He added that Kearns being the first woman to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award “speaks volumes about her value to this agency.”
He’s right. We congratulate her on the honor that, from our perspective, is the equivalent to being elected to the hall of fame, if the ATF had one.
Editorials
Lifetime award — 10/05/09
Local ATF retiree honored
- Editorials
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Charles Chattin
Before it merged with Ashland Community College to form Ashland Community and Technical College as a result of the 1997 Higher Education Reform Act, the Ashland Area Vocational-Technical School compiled an impressive record for teaching job skills to young adults and placing more than 85 percent in jobs for which they were trained.
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Try again
It is time for Kentucky Speaker of the House Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, and Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, to cease playing political games and redraw district lines that are compact and are based far more on population changes during the first decade of this century than on partisan politics.
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'Asset poor'
More than one in four Kentucky households are “asset poor,” meaning that they are living from paycheck to paycheck with little or no financial cushion to fall back on should they suddenly lose their jobs or have another emergency resulting in a temporary loss of or delcine in income.
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Safer mines
The head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) says coal operators throughout the country are improving their operations and, as a result, mines are becoming safer. However, MSHA chief Joe Main said too many coal operators still “don’t get it” and are continuing to cut costs by ignoring safety. That’s why MSHA plans to continue targeting mines with a history of repeated violations for additional inspections.
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Not far enough
For the past three sessions of the Kentucky General Assembly, bills that would raise the minimum dropout age from 16 to 18 have been approved by the Kentucky House of Representatives by wide bipartisan margins only to die in the Senate without even a vote.
Now the Senate Education Committee has unanimously approved a dropout bill hailed as an alternative to the House bill, but it does not go nearly far enough. It is a halfway measure that would have only a limited effect on preventing teenagers from quitting high school before graduation and virtually assuring themselves of lives on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
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Not their job
The local government committee of the Kentucky House of Representatives has wisely killed a bill — dubbed “Cooper’s Law” — that would have allowed the family of the Lexington toddler with cerebral palsy to have a playhouse on their property despite a deed restriction that apparently prohibits such structures.
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Keeping FADE
Despite an increase in cost to the department, Carter County Sheriff Casey Brammell told the Carter County Fiscal Court that his department will continue to be active in the FIVCO Area Development Drug Enforcement (FADE) Task Force — at least for now.
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Needed changes
The soaring enrollment that Kentucky’s community and technical colleges have experienced in recent years could come to a sudden end — or at least be slowed — as about 5,500 students in the statewide system that includes Ashalnd Community and Technical College are expected to lose their financial aid under new rules being implemented by the federal government.
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Released early
While it is disappointing that 75 of the 952 prisoners granted early release in January have violated the terms of their releases, the good news is that none of the former inmates have been charged with new felonies. That’s an early, but positive, indication that the nonviolent felons released before their sentences were up have been carefully selected and are among those least likely to return to a life of crime.
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Obese children
Almost a decade after former Gov. Ernie Fletcher called childhood obesity an “epidemic” in Kentucky, a majority of Kentucky adults still think that there are too many overweight children in the state and they place the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of their parents.
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Charles Chattin
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