These western KY Dems are ‘signing up’ to Ditch Mitch and Dump Trump

Gene Nettles, 78, and Leslie McColgin, 65, got a kick out of Burma-Shave signs when they were kids.

So the devout Democrats are reprising the old-time roadside rhyming signs in deepest western Kentucky to help retire Sen. Mitch McConnell.

“It’s time for Mitch to go! go! go! like Marvin K. Mooney in Dr. Seuss,” McColgin said.       

Nettles’ signs diss Donald Trump, too. “I fear for the future of our republic while led by Trump and McConnell,” said Nettles, a no-nonsense ex-Army paratrooper who lives in Fulton County close to the Tennessee state line. “My friends and all others who have given the last full measure for our nation are surely rolling in their graves at the path of dishonor, division, and ceding world leadership wrought by this less than dynamic duo.”

Long gone, the familiar red-and-white Burma-Shave signs were an advertising gimmick for hawking brushless shaving cream. They featured short, funny poems posted on a sequence of little wooden signs along roadways.

Nettles skipped the versifying. He didn’t mince words in his quintet of plastic signs aimed at the Republican president and Senate majority leader: “SAVE,” “NATION,” “DITCH,” “MITCH,” “DUMP TRUMP.” They’re white with black letters.

McColgin, a retired speech-language therapist who resides near Lowes in Graves County, opted for real Burma-Shave retro. Her signs are red, wooden and hand-painted with white letters like the originals.

She composed two sets of signs: “36 LONG YEARS OF VOTING FOR MITCH – KY GOT POORER WHILE HE GOT RICH. VOTE AMY McGRATH”

McGrath, a retired Marine jet pilot, is the Democrat who wants McConnell’s job.

“A little humor goes a long way in politics,” said McColgin, a co-leader of Four Rivers Indivisible, a local branch of the national Indivisible grassroots activist organization.

Her second series goes: “36 YEARS IS FAR TOO LONG – TERM LIMIT MITCH, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG. AMY McGRATH 2020”

Many, if not most, younger Kentuckians probably have never heard of Burma-Shave or the company’s storied signs.

“I remember seeing them all over the country, especially in the southeastern states,” said Nettles. The son of a soldier, Nettles spent 20 years jumping out of airplanes. He fought in Vietnam and made lieutenant colonel after serving 20 years in Army green.

McColgin and Nettles said they got the idea for Burma-Shave-style signs in weekly Zoom meetings for Jackson Purchase Democratic activists. The teleconferences are hosted by Mary Potter, a Clinton attorney and editor of the West Kentucky Journal online.

Potter plans to compose and put up her own signs closer to election day.

Nettles is shooting for mid-August. “I expect the hay to be mowed after the first of the month, and the fifteenth is my target date.”

McColgin ran the idea past her Indivisible group. “Everybody decided to kick off our ‘100 Days to the Election Unity Week’ on Monday ,” she said. “Lea Wentworth of Paducah, another group leader, has had fun painting the signs.”

“My husband, George Kennedy, has vivid memories of the real Burma Shave signs when his family would drive in upstate New York in the summer,” McColgin said.

All but one of McColgin’s signs will be on property she and her spouse own on Lowes and Shaw roads, which border their property.

The other sign is on a neighbor’s land. A retired union electrician, he eagerly agreed to have it erected and volunteered to clear some brush to make the signs more visible.

“And my husband has been motivated even in this heat to go out and clear some trees and brush along one of our fence rows on Lowes Road to improve visibility for the signs,” McColgin said.

Nettles crossed the border to Union City, Tenn., and lined up a print shop to make his signs. He stuck them along his driveway to see how they looked. But they’ll be transplanted to his hay field on Ky highway 125, which fronts Gene and Nancy Nettles’ home.

Neither he nor McColgin are daunted by the fact that in 2014, McConnell carried Fulton and Graves counties by wide margins and that Trump piled up even larger margins going on four years ago.

“I want Mitch to know that he can’t just take Western Kentucky for granted this year,” McColgin said.  “There are a lot of people that look at how long he’s been there and are fed up with someone who so obviously is more concerned with playing politics than helping people.”

McColgin said she read that McConnell “actually laughed when asked this past week if he would get a replacement passed for the special Covid-19-related unemployment benefits before the current law expires.  Sorry, but the ‘Grim Reaper’ isn’t a joke; these are real people suffering from his inaction.”

It riles Nettles to hear Trump, McConnell, and other Republicans talk as if they’ve cornered the market on patriotism. “Trump is a draft-dodger,” said Nettles who soldiered in the famed 82nd Airborne 101st Airborne (Air Assault) divisions plus the South Vietnamese Airborne Division. 

Trump avoided the draft via student deferments and a questionable medical deferment for bone spurs on his heels.

Like many young men with influence, McConnell was able to land a slot in the Army reserve in 1967, when thousands of others, many of them poor and working class whites and minorities, were being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Almost all reserve and National Guard outfits stayed stateside.

McConnell served about four months before he got a medical discharge for an eye ailment–some say dubiously–with help from his mentor Sen. John Sherman Cooper.

Nettles considers McConnell a draft dodger, too.

The Army vet remembers when “the most powerful contingent in Congress was neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties. It was veterans.

“They probably tamped down many of the warrior-wannabes from the civilian side that wanted to use force all the time. I think the veterans were a stabilizing force and said, ‘Hey guys, I’ve been shot at and I know what the hell it’s like. So we don’t need to be sending any more young people to this hell hole or that hell hole.’

“We don’t have that today. There are only a few vets, and I love every one of them, no matter what party. I don’t regard the president as being a patriot. He acts like an agent for Putin.”

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