The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 123

TT 7T0 LWDM SECTION the Atlanta constitution SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, 1989 '7 PERFECT I i. -if I- dff. JJL Porfc Production a Scientific Endeavor at Kentucky Site 1 -w At top, Sammy Stinson moves nursery pigs along a corridor connecting houses on the en-closed farm. Above, Pig Improvement Co. manager Jeff Menke holds 2V week-old piglets, IIY Line on the left and Line 26 on the right, both breeds developed by PIC.

At right, 2-week-oid pigs in the farrowing house. By Rebecca McCarthy SttflWriter FRANKLIN, Ky. For a while, some of the people around town were convinced that the new company building offices close to Interstate 65 was a front for some kind of secret intelligence agency. Many of the employees had British accents. They spoke of foreign-sounding concepts, such as "disease exclusion" and they mentioned "Camborough" surely a quaint village in Great Britain.

The locals employed by the new company didn't talk much about what was happening in the offices or over at a large complex of buildings on Dogwood Ridge, way back in the woods off the main road. newcomers, people eventually learned, were not with the CIA but with PIC, the Pig Improvement and Camborough was a hybrid breed of pig, not a British town. Owned by the London-based Dalgety Group, PIC has offices and operations scattered from Chile to France, from the United Kingdom to Australia including a second i U.S. installation in Spring Green, Wis. and is the largest pig-breeding company in the' world.

Worldwide, PIC sold more than 400,000 parent females pigs that breed other pigs in 1988. "About 100 years ago, you saw an increase in the lard on pigs," says Andrew Coates, technical manager of PIC's Kentucky operation. He keeps talking as he slides behind the wheel of his Honda. "Pig farmers in the Midwest were called 'lard he says. "Through World War II, lard was needed for cooking and even making soap." A fat pig, it seemed, was a good pig.

But Americans began discarding fat-laden food during the 1960s and "70s, as concern about cholesterol levels, additives and heart disease rose. Consumers spurned pork chops for chick- PIGS Continued on 6L Staff photographs by JOEY IVANSCO A Death Diminishes Thoughts of Sweet Times Celestine Sibley Mountain Woman Is a Living Legend To Younger Climbers By Maureen Downey SUff Writer CLINTON, Tenn. Other people have statues erected In their honor or buildings named after them. Grace McNicol has a rock It's not just any rock. "Grade's Pulpit" is an outcropping of Mount LeConte, the mountain that has been Miss McNicol's obsession and passion for more than 30 years.

Grade, as she is known on the mountain, was 62 when she first made the seven-mile trek up LeConte, which is part of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park In 1983, at age 92, she made her 244th and final trek by horseback She holds the record for overnight stays (more than 200) at the rustic lodge atop Mount LeConte. Today, Gracie is 97. Doctors in the nursing home where she has lived for the past year have put an end' to her climbing. But they could never put an end to her romance with the mountain. "You couldn't keep me off the mountain," she said.

"I wanted to ride up this year, but I called my nephew, Robert, and he called the doctor. Between the two of them, they said I couldn't go." During the summer, Gracie was so homesick to see Mount LeConte that she took a bus to the base. "I sat there and heard the birds sing, but I wasn't able to hike," she said, sitting up ballerina-straight on her narrow bed at the Anderson County Health Care Center. On her first trip to LeConte 10 yean ago, Knoxville dental technician Barbara Woodard en- GRACIE Continued on 3L '1 The old John Donne line "Any man's death' diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind" is often quoted, but it does not always seem as true to me as it did last week when 1 went to the funeral of an old country neighbor, "Miss Artie" Cox. The whole time I was sitting in the Al-pharetta chapel listening to the songs and the funeral sermon about Miss Artie, I kept thinking how her going diminished, if not actually destroyed, the part of Sweet Apple settlement of happy recollection when it was still a country place, with farmer neighbors who had mules and kept cows and invited us to hog-killings.

Miss Artie had been so much a part of that time when I was new at Sweet Apple. Everybody else wiihin hollering distance was an old settler, many of whom lived very much the way their pap ents and grandparents had lived when they came over the mountains in mule wagons. I looked around the chapel and found I was in company with a few survivors of that time Miss Artie's relatives, some old neighbors and many gray-haired, slow-moving old friends whose ages approach her own 88 years. SIBLEY Continued on 4L.