Muldraugh
and the coffeehouse
by John Filiatreau and Guy Mendes
Carey Cosgrove, a 26-year old divorcee with two children,  lives with her mother at 287 Main Street in Muldraugh. Ky. ; it's where she grew up. For the longest time, the ugly awkward-looking white frame building directly across the street was a kindly meat-market.
Now it's an anti-war coffee house, and it's brought the turmoil of dissent (previously confined to the Outside world) to this backbone-of America town on the fringe of Ft. Knox.
It's all been quite exciting; according to Mrs.  Cosgrove, "The biggest thing to happen before this was when we got water and sewers back about '55 or '56. "   But it's not that the local folks are liking it--on the contrary. 'I don't want my kids growing up in a town with that type of place in it, " said Mrs. Cosgrove.   "We object to the people that run it mostly, they're not the kind of citizens we want here. . . I wish it would burn to the ground. "
Many other people in Muldraugh (pronounced Mul-dro) feel the same way.   Including someone who threw two firebombs into the coffeehouse at three a. m. on October 9.   It didn't burn to the ground though. The bombs were poorly made and only did a bit of damage to the floor and a couch. Spec 4 Tom Jackson, his wife Kathy and their 16-month -old child who were upstairs at the time weren't even singed.
The MPD (Muldraugh Police Department) has vowed that it will investigate the attempted bombing, but at the same time was suggesting that the coffeehouse people did the bombing themselves.
Mrs. Cosgrove:
an unfulfilled wish
So it's doubtful whether the culprit(s) will ever be found.
The attempted pyrotecnics was just an example of the consumate wrath brought down on the coffeehouse and it's sponsors by the U.S. Army, the Meade County courts and the citizens of Muldraugh, a town of 3, 000.
All because the coffeehouse was set up to be a place where soldiers could
gather to talk'about things like the war, and how they hate it.   (One Muldraugh-ian madame put it simply, "We're Army, we're not anti-Army. ") The coffeehouse conversation rarely includes much favorable comment about the Army or its "lifers"--the career men.
The coffeehouse offers reading material unavailable at Knox. Underground newspapers and magazines mainly, like the FTA, an anti Army sheet which tells GIs they're being treated like dogs--something Knox "lifers'" don't like the draftees to think about.   The coffeehouse also has a stereo, and a collection of anti-war records.   "Lifers" stay away.
An Army private,  stopping in at Perry's Grocery (on Main, down the road some from the coffeehouse), says that's not all that goes on at the coffeehouse.    "I hear they're trying to to get men to go AWOL by promising that they'll give them refuge, a girl and food."
Mrs. Cosgrove isn't fooled either. "I asked one of the girls over there where she got her money from and she said she sold her body.
The coffeehouse people say both charges are ludicrous.
"Yoti know, " continued Mrs. Cosgrove, "I don't know of anyone who is FOR the war, but we're in it and that's it, there's nothing we can do about it. I know the Army has some things wrong with it, but it has plenty of things right with it too.   If it can take a sni- ¢ veiling little baby and turn him into a man. . . "
She then introduced one of the "men" Sgt. Tom Lockwood, a rotund, 22 1/2 year "lifer' who has served in Vietnam and now lives a grenade's throw away
10
blue-tail fly