I’ve started reading Robert A. Heinlein books again and I’ve noticed that, in at least two of them now, the city “Paducah” is mentioned in an off-hand way. I noticed this is Stranger in a Strange Land, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and I feel that there was one other which I’ve forgotten.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Paducah is mentioned as the place the carnival is traveling on to, without Mike.
In The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, on page 110 in my copy, during the escape from Golden Rule, one of the characters wishes he was in Paducah.
Why Paducah? It’s just a large town (locals call it a city) in Western Kentucky. Was it just a convenient place-name or did it hold significance to Heinlein?
I suspect it’s just a dated way of saying “boondocks”. There’s a show business saying, presumably from vaudeville: “But how will it play in Peoria?” . Nothing against that town but just a way of saying generic middle america. Maybe “P” names are funny.
Another thought: In RAH’s era people traveled by train, and the list of destinations are announced. Maybe that’s how Paducah got stuck in folks brains as a funny name.
Maybe because it’s a stop along the river?
I’ve noticed that Louisville gets mentioned the same way in various books because it was once considered the Ohio river gateway to the rest of the country.
Well, there’s the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which made enriched Uranium for nukes. The Feds are spending $90 million this year to clean it up, and were recently the defendants in a suit alleging that they knowingly exposed workers to dealy levels of radiation without telling them.
As someone who lives about 25-30 miles south of the CITY of Paducah, KY, I would bet that the references are because to Vice President Alben W. Barkley. Although he was actually from the tiny (now defunct) community of Wheel, his birthplace is usually given as Paducah. (One of the dams in the Lakes area is named Barkley Dam- he was instrumental in the construction of the dams to keep flooding down and produce electricity for the TVA.) Heinlein probably heard or read that Paducah was Barkley’s hometown, and decided to use it.
Of course, it could also be river-related, or train-related, or he could have meant Paducah, Texas. I’m not real sure.
(Just for future reference- Paducah, KY was named for Chief Paduke, who was the leader of the Indian tribe that inhabited the area when settlers arrived. There’s a chainsaw sculpture of him in Noble Park.)
Actually, the Gaseous Diffusion Plant might be closer to the mark as to why Heinlein mentions Paducah. Heinlein was very much a hawk and did work for the US military during WW II that was classified and Heinlein refused to tell what it was. It might be that it involved something to do with that plant. Or, Heinlein’s second wife Ginny might have been born there. So far as I’ve seen there’s been very little written about her, other than her physical characteristics and her political leanings.
> Heinlein was very much a hawk and did work for the US military during WW II that was classified and Heinlein refused to tell what it was.
Um, you are aware, aren’t you, that Heinlein (along with Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp) worked for the Navy doing engineering research in Philadelphia during the war. This fact appears in writings by all three of them, so in no sense was the place he worked ever a secret.
Irvin S. Cobb, the great humorist and raconteur, is another native of Paducah, and referenced it extensively in his short stories and comic pieces. His first job was as a reporter for the Paducah Daily News, after which he moved on to the Saturday Evening Post and other slick magazines.
Cobb (1876-1944) was once extremely famous, the Georgie Jessel of his day (What? Oh, okay, the David Letterman of his day), so folks in the teens-thirties heard a LOT of Paducah jokes.