Some of Tharpe's organizers became key staff leaders later in other OEO-funded programs like the Appalachian Volunteers, but the four county CAA in the heart of Congressman Perkins's district hardly made a peep after that.  Regionwide, OEO was underfunded, uncoordinated with other government programs like ARC, unrelated programmatically to regional economic programs, and hampered, through its own "Green Amendment" (requiring that locally elected officials serve on CAA boards), by the ingrained courthouse gang system in the region.  In other ways OEO plainly did not have Appalachia on the top of its agenda:  in 1967 there were 39,000 Job Corps applicants from six mountain states for 616 slots in the centers in West Virginia and Kentucky.  The mountaineers were sent to northern and western centers, where they achieved a dropout rate equal to that of American Indians.  Also in 1967, Kentucky manpower programs were finding jobs for fewer than one-third of those trained, while states like Ohio and Minnesota were finding jobs for two-thirds of their trainees.
     That OEO on the whole seems to have failed in Appalachia does not mean that it did not meet with success in some areas and leave some lasting monuments to its passing through the mountains.  Some examples:    (1)  In Mingo County, West Virginia, an enterprising CAA director Huey Perry, a native of the county, like Everett Tharpe, took OEO's mandate to shake up the establishment seriously.  Before the Mingo County establishment put him out, as described in Perry's delightful book, "They'll Cut Off Your Project", Mingo County citizens had exposed the graveyards that regularly voted in all elections, established a still functioning restaurant employing poor people, and organized a cooperative store that bought shares in A & P to challenge a food stamp program ruling that those poor people who cooperatively owned stores could not use food stamps there.  But, in  the end, the people, of  course, lost.
     (2)  In several counties in eastern Kentucky the Appalachian Volunteers, a group that grew from a house-painting crew at Berea College into a famous, multi-million dollar OEO program for (initially) college students--many shifting  from the civil rights movement to Appalachia in 1966--. provided lasting organized groups and programs.  While the Volunteers--headed at the beginning by a native Appalachian, Milton Ogle, and later by a Free Speech Movement leader, David Walls--did best when assisting separately organized groups like the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (the anti-strip mining group), the Volunteers did provide several Appalachian communities with surviving groups.  Most disappeared when the AVs were defunded by OEO in 1970, but among those that survived with the East Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization.
     In addition to forcing the Floyd County, Kentucky, school system to stop making poor youngsters sit on the school stage and watch more affluent students eat lunch, E.K.W.R.O. has performed a host of other community services.  From that group there is still a surviving community clinic at Mud Creek, thanks to Eula Hall, once an AV employee and long a stalwart of mountain causes.  To that group also, and to the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, an OEO-funded legal services program, credit must go for helping to make the black lung movement into an effective regional movement.
     (3)  In Letcher County, Kentucky, the East Kentucky Housing Corporation, funded originally by OEO and now by its successor, the Community Services Administration (CSA), is building homes for poor families at a cost competitive with the house trailer merchants who plague the region.  The homes were designed by Yale architects, the frames for module development were put together by Mainstream workers (OEO), and are built by the same workers for families with incomes similar to their own.  Asheville, North Carolina, and several West Virginia counties have also benefited from OEO-funded housing programs.
     (4)  In several counties of the region OEO-funded economic development programs showed signs of success until the recession and President Nixon axed most funds.  Among those that survive and provide jobs is a craft coop in in Lenoir, North Carolina, a tomato growing cooperative in southeastern Kentucky, and a furniture factory in Barbourville, Kentucky.  But the total number of persons employed is hardly significant, and the cost of creating the jobs is very high.
     (5)  Across the region OEO programs accomplished much in areas where success is difficult to measure.  Head Start, for example, whatever its merits in actually giving a head start, has saved the hearing and health of thousands of mountain youngsters plagued with childhood diseases easily cured with the most rudimentary care.  Only the next generation will fully know the impact of Head Start, and other programs like Upward Bound.
     (6)  A spin-off from OEO funding was the changing of some mountain organizations that had few ties to the mountain poor.  One was the Council of the  Southern Mountains, an old-time social service agency taken over in 1969 by OEO funded community groups and OEO salaried individuals.  The Council now, while basically broke, assists community groups in self-help programs.  A Council assists community groups in self-help programs.  A Council assisted grocery coop in Knott County, Kentucky, unlike its OEO predecessors, is flourishing.
     Despite these salutary efforts of OEO in the mountains in many instances, and the widespread "feeling" that something was happening, objective analysis fail to confirm the hope that the mountains were alive with the ferment of basic reform.
     The most extensively evaluated war on poverty programs in Appalachia have been in Eastern Kentucky.  In 1972 the General Accounting Office released the most comprehensive report done on OEO projects in the region.  The study focused on Johnson County, Kentucky, which is next door to Fletcher's Martin County, and also next door to Floyd County, Kentucky, where the AV's were the most active.  Their findings:
     (1)  By 1969 the war on poverty had spent $21.5 million in the county, $243 per resident, and made $6.7 million in loans.  Over the decade, however, the number of jobs in the county actually declines.
     (2)  The number of persons dependent upon basic welfare increased from 1965 to 1969.  The rate of poverty jumped from 57% of all families in 1965 to 65% in 1969.  (Outmigration over the period was 11%.)
     (3)  The study found that there was little or no cooperation between federal programs working in the county, even OEO programs.  Job training programs in the county, for example, trained 359 employees for jobs, and apparently few or none of them in county works programs funded by the Economic Development Administration and ARC.
     In the midst of the continued depression in Johnson County, the Paintsville Citizen's National Bank reported that deposits jumped from $7 million in 1964 to $20 million in 1969, mostly from growth in the coal industry.  Clearly for Johnson County, OEO had not designed the programs Caudill said would be needed.
     Knox County, Kentucky, was another area where OEO opinion held that things were happening.  OEO believed that so much that it hired an evaluation team to study for three years the maverick workings of the CAA, which started the furniture factory previously mentioned,  a coop craft shop and restaurant, and led a celebrated poor people's march on Kentucky's Republican Governor, Louie Nunn.  The study concluded, "The patterns of (political) alignments existing in the county when the community action programs began were not basically affected."  At most, the OEO organizing of the poor merely clarified "the leaders and narrowed the leadership base.  The real leaders....(have) consolidated their positions and (are) more firmly established than before."  CSA in the county today, as OEO's successor, is barely alive.  Most of its economic development programs totter on the brink of extinction.  For coal mining Knox County---once again--it was the Arabs, not the federal government, who put the count to work, even if it was destroyers of their own mountains with strip mining.