 in Middletown, Ohio, an industrial city 30 miles north of Cincinnati, 20 miles south of Dayton. His maternal grandparents, Jim and Bonnie Vance, known as Papa and Mama, moved to Middletown in the late 1940s from Jackson, Kentucky, a town in the heart of southeastern Kentucky's coal region. Jim was 16, Bonnie was 13, and pregnant with Jim's child. They were unmarried at the time.