Marvin Bartlett has been a journalist for more than 40 years, recently completing a 32-year career as an anchor and managing editor for FOX 56 News in Lexington. During his tenure, he received 19 regional Emmy Award nominations for writing and reporting, winning five. He also received more than a dozen awards from the Associated Press and the Kentucky Broadcasters Association.
This fall, Bartlett is working for KET, where he will host several episodes of Kentucky Edition and moderate panels on the long-running public affairs program Kentucky Tonight.
On January 2, 1995, Bartlett became co-anchor of WDKY-TV’s FOX 56 Ten O’clock News, helping launch the newscast he would anchor for more than 31 years. His remarkable tenure cemented his place as one of the longest-serving and most recognizable news anchors in Lexington television history.
Before joining FOX 56 News, Bartlett worked for seven years as a reporter and anchor for WLEX-TV in Lexington. Prior to coming to the Bluegrass, he spent two years as the Eastern Kentucky bureau chief for WCHS-TV in Charleston, West Virginia, working from an office in Paintsville.
For the past 13 years, he has served as the reporter, writer, videographer, and editor of a weekly segment called Spirit of the Bluegrass—a true one-man band. He continues to share stories about interesting people and places in Kentucky on his Spirit of the Bluegrass Facebook page.
Bartlett has written three books, including The Joy Cart and The Boy Who Delivered Joy, which tell the inspiring story of Jarrett Mynear, a Central Kentucky boy who gained national recognition for collecting toys for patients in children’s hospitals while battling a rare form of bone cancer himself.
His third book, Spirit of the Bluegrass, was released in 2025 and features more than 80 of his favorite stories from the television series.
Bartlett has taught journalism classes at the University of Kentucky and Florida A&M University.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from Marshall University and a master’s degree from Ohio University, where he also produced a nightly student-run newscast for WOUB-TV. While at Ohio University, Bartlett produced a one-hour documentary about the effects of longwall coal mining in southern Ohio as his thesis project.
He discovered his love of journalism in his hometown of Grafton, West Virginia, where he became editor of his high school newspaper and co-editor of the yearbook. Bartlett also worked part-time for a local radio station and interned at his hometown newspaper, The Mountain Statesman, each summer throughout college.
He has moderated debates, hosted telethons, and written columns for various publications, including Lexington Family Magazine. Throughout his career, Bartlett has also emceed numerous events, including the Miss Kentucky pageant and the Dream Factory gala. He remains active as a speaker and leader of storytelling workshops.
He and his wife, Elizabeth, have two children and live in Jessamine County.
Rotary in Review
Marvin Bartlett Celebrates Spirit of the Bluegrass
For more than 40 years, Marvin Bartlett has made a career of telling other people’s stories. Last week, members of the Rotary Club of Lexington heard a few favorites and discovered why the longtime Lexington journalist remains every bit as fascinated by the people and places of Kentucky as when he first picked up a reporter’s notebook.
Bartlett recently completed a 32-year career at FOX 56 News, including more than three decades anchoring the station’s 10 p.m. newscast. But his Rotary presentation focused on another part of his legacy: Spirit of the Bluegrass, the award-winning feature series he created approximately 13 years ago.
After years covering political campaigns, disasters, crime, and breaking news, Bartlett said he found himself drawn to feature stories about interesting people and communities. The inspiration stretched back to his childhood in West Virginia, when he watched Charles Kuralt’s legendary “On the Road” reports and imagined how much fun it would be to travel, meet fascinating people, and tell their stories.
When FOX 56 later offered Bartlett the opportunity to create a weekly franchise of his own, he knew exactly what he wanted to do—with one condition: He wanted to do it his way.
“I would like to do that kind of thing around Kentucky,” Bartlett recalled telling station management.
Bartlett became a true one-man newsroom for Spirit of the Bluegrass, shooting, writing, reporting, and editing each story himself. That freedom allowed him to return to locations when needed, work on weekends or holidays, and spend the time to uncover the story behind the story.
Nearly 300 stories later, Bartlett has collected quite a few. Rotarians heard about the Apple Valley Hillbilly Garden in Western Kentucky, where discarded toilets, shoes, appliances, and assorted junk have been transformed into folk art, including a row of commodes appropriately dubbed “Thronehenge.” There was Hazard’s famous Mother Goose House; Punkyville, one man’s homemade western town; Pineville’s legendary Chained Rock; and even Northern Kentucky gas stations with “disco bathrooms,” where pressing a button causes the lights to dim, music to play, and a disco ball to spin.
As Bartlett put it, there’s suddenly a “party in the potty.” Behind the humor, however, is something deeper.
Bartlett said Spirit of the Bluegrass became a way to preserve stories that might otherwise disappear. Because television reports can be fleeting, he eventually collected more than 80 favorites in his 2025 book, Spirit of the Bluegrass, choosing stories he hoped even lifelong Kentuckians might not know or might have forgotten.
And he isn’t finished. “I hope you appreciate the Spirit of the Bluegrass as much as I do,” Bartlett told Rotarians. “We’ll keep sharing those stories.”
After more than four decades in journalism, perhaps that is Marvin Bartlett’s greatest gift: reminding us that extraordinary stories don’t always belong to extraordinary people.
Sometimes, they’re waiting down a Kentucky back road, and all it takes is someone curious enough to stop.
— Dan Koett