Neil Furr/CITIZE>
Well-known Mooresville artist Cotton Ketchie relaxes a momen
at his Landmark Galleries in Mooresville. Ketchie is author o
Memories of a Country Boy for sale at the gallery.
Cotton Ketchie as an infant “country boy” with his brother Roger
sister Laura and mother Helen.
Ketchie’s painting of old Blackwelder’s Store in the Amity Hill area,
a source of many fond country boy memories.
Down Home with uotton
The Ketchie clan at home. The
Ketchie kids, from left, are
Laura, Roger and Cotton, with
daddy, Millard Vincent Ketchie;
and mom, Helen Ketchie.
Neil Furr
IREDELL CITIZEN
“You can take the boy out of the
country but you can’t take the
t
F Well, you know how that old
platitude goes.
Cotton Ketchie, well-known
Mooresville artist and gallery
owner, is proof the country really
“can” come out of the boy. Lots
of mornings at 4:30 a.m., deep
in the recesses of his downtown
Mooresville art gallery,, he keeps
pulling more and more country boy
memories out by the roots ... using
a keyboard. His foraging through
his past has resulted in a 263-page
book, Memories of a Country Boy,
published in 2006.
Even as Ketchie was pulling out
those memories, others filled in and
he found 263 pages was not nearly
enough.
Ketchie’s scratching around
through his memory banks started
innocently enough. Just over a year
ago, he typed out a little story about
old Christmas Days back home.
Thinking gallery .patrons might
enjoy picking up the story and
reading it over a cup of brew nearby
at Pat’s Coffee Shop, he put a few
copies out by the register.
He was startled by the response.
Some readers found the piece
evocative and said, “Write a book,
why don’t’cha?”
So he began writing about growing
up so far in the country “you had to
go towards town to hunt.”
He discovered one memory hooked
into another and that every time he
pulled one out, it dredged up dozens
more. He also began going through
old pictures he hadn’t seen in years
- like Grandma Ketchie’s frame
house he loved so much and old
Bill the Mule he loved a bit less.
In one photo, he found himself
as a one-year-old holding tight
to his Daddy, Millard Ketchie,
who looked jaunty in his US
Army uniform. In another Kodak
moment, he was back home in
old bibbed overalls. In another,
he took his little three-wheeler
for a ride down a dirt path. Other
memory snippets took him back to
Blackwelder’s Store on old Amity
Continued on next page
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