Knoxville History Project (2024)

Knoxville will have a hard time even thinking of itself without Bob Booker, who died last month. I can’t think of anyone of any race who has had a positive effect on my hometown for as long as he has. His name has been appearing in the local press since 1957, before I was born—when he became president of the Knoxville College chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

I grew up hearing his name, but came to know him personally a little over 30 years ago. His first big book, 200 Years of Black Culture in Knoxville, Tenn., came out just before I began writing the Secret History column in Metro Pulse, and we found ourselves at the same history-related events, panel discussions, book signings. He invited me to come over and visit Beck, and he showed me around. He had the daunting task of trying to organize thousands of items, newspapers, scrapbooks, photographs. We had long conversations on sunny mornings.

I got in the habit of calling him when I found something I didn’t know about. Over the years, he helped me on dozens of projects, often with surprising answers that made everything come into focus.

In more recent years, we were often recruited as a sort of tag team, when someone needed a broad, quick history of Knoxville. I always enjoyed it, and he claimed he did, too.

About nine years ago, I found myself in an unexpected crisis, as it became clear that the only way I could go on with my peculiar career writing about the city’s history was to create a new nonprofit to do so. As one of our first board members, Bob helped lead that effort. His presence gave the Knoxville History Project an authenticity from birth that we might have lacked otherwise.

In recent years, we’ve worked on dozens of projects together. He spoke at several of our monthly events, on Zoom and in person at Maple Hall, from a program about the centennial of the race riot of 1919 to the decidedly mixed record of Urban Renewal in Knoxville. Last summer, we were working on the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Higher Ground book, to tell the whole story of the city’s artistic heritage. Bob had a particular advantage in that regard. He kept insisting he didn’t know about art, but he knew what he liked, and he did know Ruth Cobb Brice, the schoolteacher who became one of Knoxville’s best-known African American artists, and maybe our best-known surrealist, who died back in 1971. He knew her personally, as a longtime neighbor on the fringe of the Bottom, and remembered her vividly. He also helped with our recent driving tour of Mechanicsville, answering a question about the changing course of College Street that was baffling from the written sources.

He left us quickly. He was a few weeks shy of 89, but never seemed like an old man.

***

Historians are rarely historic. People who write history generally don’t make history, but when they do, they’re pretty remarkable. Those that come quickest to mind are Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Bob Booker. Before he ever wrote a book or gave a presentation about Knoxville’s African American cultural heritage, Bob was an influential activist and civic leader. If he had left us 50 years ago, we would still be talking about Robert J. Booker’s legacy today. He was the bold young student who was willing to go to jail to defy injustice. He was later the one who led the return of Black leadership to public office after half a century when nearly all our political leadership was white.

Born during the Depression, he grew up in the Bottom, east of the Old City before it was the Old City, where people lived in the alleys between factories, within earshot of slaughter pens, but within walking distance of the Gem Theatre, the “colored” theater that featured second-run movies and occasional live music shows, and later attended all-Black Austin High. He grew up in a segregated Knoxville that was not ready to permit him to attend the University of Tennessee or even attend a movie at the Tennessee Theatre. It might have seemed a relief to join the Army in the ’50s, to serve for a few years in Europe. He learned to speak French.

Back home as an Army veteran, he attended Knoxville College, and his tall, commanding presence made him a natural for student-body president—and as the local leader of a national movement. He saw Martin Luther King make his only public address in Knoxville, on the big lawn at KC in May 1960, and knew it was a significant moment. It was just as Knoxville’s downtown sit-ins were commencing, with Bob at the lead.

His influence was real, and serious, but he enjoyed messing with the old racially fastidious system. Once, offering a tour to a cadre of internationals visitors, he passed as a North African to slip into the old all-white Pike Theatre in Bearden. When he was arrested for trying to get into the Tennessee, he complained to the paddy-wagon driver that he was being forced to share the space with white prisoners. Segregation may have been evil, but it was mainly just stupid, and he often found it laughable.

He traveled and worked in Africa. He was a public-school teacher in Chattanooga for a while, teaching French, which he had picked up in Europe. Later he was up north for a bit working in promotions, but he kept returning to his hometown.

History will remember him forever as the first Black man to represent Knoxville in the state legislature. He investigated conditions for inmates in both prisons and mental hospitals. He defended the Highlander Center from charges of Communism, and tried to pry a fair share of state money for Knox County projects. He was the first I know of to raise the alarm that Urban Renewal was going too far, and needed to stop. After a few years of witnessing what partisanship does to ideals, he tried other things.

He made some interesting connections, and was a mayoral aide during a critical era. He helped host Muhammad Ali’s visit to Knoxville, but he knew the late John Lewis much better, long before he was a legendary congressman. In his political career, Bob got to know Vernon Jordan, Julian Bond, Barbara Jordan, and others. He became a bridge between multiple factions that came to understand and respect each other better thanks to his efforts.

That was all more than half a century ago. Think of what he’s done for us since then.

His long tenure at the helm of the Beck Community Exchange Center did much to help define that unusual civic asset for many of us. And he has researched and written hundreds of newspapers articles, first for the old Journal and then for the News-Sentinel, and along the way he’s written several books that I’ll be referring to for the rest of my life. Books about long-neglected communities in Knoxville history and also about Bob’s beloved alma mater, Knoxville College.

As a historian, Bob opened a door for a whole realm of people and stories that might have been forgotten otherwise.

Memories of people, even important people, tend to evaporate as the years go on. A familiar old hymn includes a chilling couplet: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away / They fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”

You can prove the truth of those lines with a walk through any big cemetery, which might present thousands of names inscribed in stone but now unfamiliar to most visitors. Many people can’t even name their own grandparents. But thanks to Bob, and his books and articles and memorable Carousel slide presentations, Knoxville knows the names of Charles Cansler, William Hastie, Cal Johnson, Dr. Henry Morgan Green, Richard Payne. Contrary to the patterns of community forgetfulness that apply to almost everyone else, these are all people who are better known today than they were a generation or two ago. Even kids in their 20s now know who Cal Johnson was. And that’s mainly Bob’s doing.

He wrote several invaluable reference books, but the best read of all of them is his most recent, his autobiographical From the Bottom Up, playing on the nickname of his childhood neighborhood. The book encapsulates his life, but concentrates on the most dramatic scenes of his youth. As you read it, you can hear his familiar baritone voice, and occasionally his distinctive chortle.

I’m grateful for it. I’ve relied on Bob for help with a lot of questions over the years.

He wasn’t necessarily easy to get in touch with. He’s the only person I knew who published his home phone number in the newspaper. Whether he would answer was always the question. Even in his 80s, he was known to ramble far and wide. He was often out in the back yard gardening, out in the community giving a presentation, downtown in the McClung Collection’s microfilm room, singing in a bar, or out for lunch with friends at Rankin’s. Just in recent years, his phone number had something that sounded like voicemail. Did he ever check it? I’m not sure. The trick was to catch him the right time of the day, usually early in the morning or late in the afternoon, but it was kind of like bowling; you never knew whether you were going to connect. My likelihood of catching him at home rose slightly with the years. When I succeeded, I was in for a great conversation. “What you know that’s good?” he’d say, and I’d try to come up with something.

I respected the fact that he never had email, or a cell phone, or a home computer, and that he was never tempted by so-called social media. It was one thing he and I had in common: we were both, to slightly different degrees, technophobes. Once when we offered to load his old 1980s Carousel slides into a digital Power Point presentation, just for one event at Maple Hall, he politely but firmly declined.

There’s a lot to say about Bob without getting to his fascinating hobbies, like gardening and old movies and classic records. Many looked forward to his two-hour radio show spinning platters on WJBE, in which he would present both familiar and obscure pop and R&B, and say a few things about the performers as if he knew them personally, and maybe he did.

About five years ago, I was drinking beer in a crowded, smoky bar called Marie’s Olde Towne Tavern, on karaoke night. Mr. Robert J. Booker was there, singing old Ray Charles or Hank Williams standards. When he sang, everybody shut up. There were 30 or 40 people there, and I looked around at the white faces and wondered how many of them knew who this man was, that he’d led bold and successful demonstrations against segregation, that he’d been elected to important public offices, that he’d written books. Bob could have introduced himself as an author or a civil-rights legend, but he didn’t. That night, and many others, he was happy to be the best deep baritone in the room, nothing more, and that’s what he got applause for.

Now we’re waking up in a Knoxville without Bob Booker, and he’s leaving us with a void that no one person can fill. We’re thankful we still have his books, and his perspective.

But remembering Bob, we’ll all be obliged to follow his example, when we can. We’ll have to be a little wiser, a little kinder, a little bolder. And always, tell the good stories, so they won’t be forgotten.

By Jack Neely

The post Robert J Booker 1935-2024 appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

What legends did we miss just because they weren’t yet famous enough for us?

Today, we music fans may pay hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars to buy a ticket to see a major arena performer. They’re expensive even if our ticket is for the 62^nd row, at such a distance that we just have to trust that that’s really your favorite singer up there, and not just a good impersonator with some makeup and a wig.

Of course, it’s not such a dilemma here. The most expensive performers are so globally big, we assume they won’t come to Knoxville anytime soon, and probably not until they’re no longer on the magazine covers.

We can only daydream about living in a place where we could have seen these talents before they were famous.

But history suggests we pay more attention to the little performers who show up in little places.

Sometimes they get big. A lot of these mega-famous superstars are people we could have seen perform here in Knoxville, if we’d been paying close attention to the listings.

If you had nothing to do on the spring evening of Monday, Mar. 27, 1989, at 7 p.m., for example, might you have been tempted by the public listing of a songwriting class at First Lutheran School at 1207 Broadway? There that warm evening was a young recording artist from Oklahoma. And maybe because they thought a new recording artist might be tempting to outsiders, the class invited the public to attend—that is, if they had $5 to defray expenses. The guest performer, there to play a few tunes and take your questions about songwriting, was 27-year-old Garth Brooks.

Was he already wearing his big cowboy hat? Three months later, on June 30, the same Mr. Brooks performed a Friday-evening show at the old Village Barn on Asheville Highway. And apparently he hung around town for the weekend, because he performed a few days later, on Sunday, July 2, at Ella Guru’s, the basem*nt club in the Old City. The space is now the fondue restaurant The Melting Pot. Brooks later mentioned Ella Guru’s in a 1995 song about his early career called “The Old Stuff.”

***

Do you ever go to boat promotions? If you went to Aquapalooza, the boat festival at Lenoir City Park on July 22, 2006, you might have noticed a striking young blonde teenager. She was there, 18 years ago, singing and playing guitar outside, near the lake shore, for free.News-Sentinelwriter Wayne Bledsoe tried to alert us to that fact, with a big feature story based on his phone interview with the pretty young Hendersonville High student, whose name—it was already a great name for a rising pop star—was Taylor Swift.

Performing that day on the same stage were a couple of older country musicians, Danielle Peck and Dusty Drake. Aquapalooza was a boat-centric promotion by Knoxville-based pleasure-craft manufacturer Sea Ray, who kept it going for some years, though mostly in other locations, from the Carolina coast to Austin, Texas.

She was on her way up, swiftly—just a few months later, she was onThe Tonight Showfor the first time.

The following February 23, Swift was on a bill with George Strait and Ronnie Millsap at UT’s Thompson-Boling Arena (some promotions referred to it as the George Strait Concert). Bledsoe attended, along with 17,000 others, and called it: “Swift was the surprise element of the evening. While she has the enthusiasm and energy appropriate for her age, she was surprisingly professional and poised for a performer who is just 17.”

But she may have caused more excitement when she performed the afternoon before when she played to a packed house at the Farragut High Gym.

***

Reba McEntire is familiar even to those who can’t name a single one of her hit songs, and who wouldn’t like them if they could. She’s a TV star. She’s also one of the biggest country stars of the last 40 years. Before her name rang a bell with most folks, she performed in Knoxville several times beginning as early as February, 1978, when the 22-year-old from Oklahoma played with one of the big country jamboree shows that used to be regular things at the Civic Coliseum. That first time she played here, the bigger stars on the same stage with her were Ray Stevens and Mickey Gilley. She did several shows with other Nashville sorts, one at the Tennessee Theatre in early 1982 with Steve Wariner, usually for about $7.

But her first solo show in Knoxville was free, at least to anyone with a Tennessee Valley Fair pass. She performed outside at the Homer Hamilton Theatre on Sept. 14, 1983. It’s hard to tell how many of us showed up for that. By most accounts, her big breakthrough was just a few months later, with the albumMy Kind of Country, which put several songs high on the charts.

It’s easiest to find instances of famous country performers playing in Knoxville when they were so obscure they’d have a hard time cashing a check—like the whole band Alabama, a ragged quartet who about 45 years ago were playing so frequently in one bar called the Brewery that some regulars figured it was the house band. Some were refugees from Nashville, like Chris Stapleton, who was with his new band the Steeldrivers was featured on a WDVX public-radio experiment called “Tennessee Shines” in August, 2008, one of several different acts on a $10 ticket.

But there are several performers from other genres, like REM, who played a few bar shows on Cumberland Avenue in the early ’80s, before their first album. That might have been a natural move for a North Georgia band.

If you’d been at the Jacob Building at Chilhowee Park on Dec. 23, 1960, you would have seen a young rising talent billed as “America’s Top Favorite Recording Personality.” That may have been stretching it—before 1960, he had seen only two charting singles, and when he played at Chilhowee, he’d had only one #1 hit on the R&B charts, “Try Me.” But those who attended had no reason to quibble with promoters’ exhortations. The headliner at that Christmastime show was Georgia’s James Brown, who at 27 had been recently emerging as the standout star of the Famous Flames, the band that was still backing him that night. Brown had a strong following, but he was not nearly as well-known as he would be later in the ‘60s, when he was the “Godfather of Soul,” and “Mr. Dynamite,” the very founder of Funk.

At Chilhowee Park, several other R&B bands played on the same $2 bill, including the Clovers, the Spaniels, and the Five Satins. It was a show mainly for Black patrons, but in those segregated days, the ads assured that there was a “Section reserved for White spectators.”

It was one of Knoxville’s last segregated shows. A few months later, the Civic Coliseum opened, on a quietly unsegregated policy. Brown performed there at the Coliseum many times in years to come; although one performance in the early 70s led to his arrest for inciting to riot, he was one of the all-time most frequent performers at that venue. Brown eventually invested in a Knoxville radio station, which survives, through many changes, as WJBE. Of course, Brown was from Georgia, too, just like REM was, so it may be not that startling that he would have performed one state north, in East Tennessee.

***

Sometimes older eras are more surprising. Drummer Chick Webb was the consummate Harlem bandleader, the informal host of the famous Savoy Ballroom. Due to his disability he didn’t tour much, and rarely toured in the segregated South, but for reasons yet to be known, he performed in Knoxville on three separate occasions in 1937, for both white and African American audiences. The last of them was the one most open to the general public, and a very big deal: the New Year’s Eve show at Chilhowee Park, in the last hours of 1937 and the first hours of 1938. At that show, attended by both races in segregated circ*mstances, he featured his current singer, a 20-year-old who had recently lived in a New York orphanage: Ella Fitzgerald.

By then, her name was making headlines even in Knoxville. She hadn’t reached her peak, but jazz fans who were paying attention had heard of her, and perhaps attended just to hear her brilliant voice.

One perhaps more surprising example comes from the months before World War II. Every spring, University of Tennessee students organized the traditional Nahheeyayli dance. Remarkably, they often got famous big bands to perform, like those of Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, Hal Kemp, Paul Whiteman. On the first Tuesday evening in May, 1941, at Alumni Memorial, which was decorated with green and yellow balloons, you’d have seen a big star, Tommy Dorsey, and his famous band. The bespectacled trombonist was indeed very famous in 1941, one of America’s leading big-bandleaders. He was by far the most recognizable face in the room. Not yet a star was his vocalist, mentioned in an odd line in the sixth paragraph of a society-page account of the event. “Note well the mellow notes by which vocalist Frank Sinatra wins the crowd.”

At the time Sinatra was 25. He had recorded “I’ll Never Smile Again,” as part of the Dorsey band—but not yet another one of his earliest hits, “Night and Day.” He’d never been in a movie except for a brief uncredited bit in an obscure B-musical,Las Vegas Nights—which happened to open at the Riviera downtown nine days after his appearance at UT. Some students knew who he was, but he could have gotten a grilled cheese at the counter at Ellis & Ernest Drugstore without being pestered for any autographs. He’s said to have played some pick-up baseball during his brief time at UT. Of course, he was from Hoboken, said to have been the birthplace of baseball.

***

Stars aren’t all singers. Thanks to our spell as a TV-production center, we sometimes got to see lifestyle icons before the rest of the country did. If you’d gone to a United Way fundraiser telethon at the Bijou Theatre in September, 2009, for example, you could have seen host Hallerin Hilton Hill on stage, but also a 40-ish cohost named Guy Fieri. While not exactly unknown, the unorthodox chef was familiar mainly only to devotees of the Food Network, where he’d had a show for about three years.

Sports fans have had their opportunities, too. Johnny Unitas would be one of the great pro-football quarterbacks of all time, playing for the Baltimore Colts whom he led to their first Super Bowl victory in 1971. But Knoxvillians who went to see the Vols play a non-conference game on Oct. 24, 1953, against the University of Louisville, got to see the 20-year-old Pittsburgh native on Shields-Watkins Field on Oct. 24, 1953. (It wasn’t yet called Neyland Stadium, but the same gridiron, and the old masonry horseshoe that greeted the young Unitas is still the core of the stadium we know.) He was already getting some attention for his passing prowess, but the famous Vols defense was ready for him, and shut him down. Unitas scored one touchdown in Knoxville on a run, but the Vols beat the Cardinals 59-6.

Actually more impressive at the same field in 1962 was Bear Bryant’s latest find, another quick-handed Western Pennsylvania native, in fact, and one drawing comparisons to Unitas. Joe Namath was just a 19-year-old sophom*ore when he came to Neyland Stadium on Oct. 20, 1962, and led the Tide to beat the home team 27-7, in a passing game at Neyland Stadium. The day Namath played there was the day the old arena was dedicated with its new name, honoring Gen. Robert Neyland, who had died earlier that year.

There are hundreds of others, of course. The only time I know that dancer Fred Astaire ever performed in Knoxville was at Staub’s Theatre in April, 1907, when he was not quite 8 years old, as part of a large company performing a incongruously Christmas-themed play; with his older sister Adele, he was part of a duo.

A lot of our opportunities of the past may remain obscure, because often music, and the musicians who perform it, are vaporous. They often come to seem important and worth paying attention to only in retrospect.

The most perfect example is not a one-time visitor, but a local. To read Dolly Parton’s autobiography, we might gather that she performed in Knoxville several hundred times, many or most of those times with a small live radio audience made up of local folks who wandered in off Gay Street. But she hardly caused a ripple in local history. Unnoticed by newspaper columnists who, if they saw her, may have just thought of her as another cute little mountain girl, she was likewise unrecorded by radio spreadsheets. Radio found it more urgent to keep records of sponsors, often recording performers only by the word “talent.” All that fermentation, the applause that Dolly still remembers, has just vaporized, remaining only as vague and sometimes conflicting memories.

Or course, there are lots more. Several Knoxvillians of a certain age remember Jimmy Buffett performing on the Strip in the early ‘70s, long before his Margaritaville era, some even claiming he assembled his first band here. Others even have vague recollections that a seminal boy band with the odd name of NSYNC, presumably including Memphis-born lead singer Justin Timberlake, was here in the mid-’90s making a very early promotional appearance at the Western Plaza bowling alley. All are plausible, but it’s hard to find dates or verifying written evidence for these. You may know of more.

This is the lesson of music history. Performers who aren’t famous yet may deserve our attention, too. Go see an unknown this weekend. Take notes, and keep them.

By Jack Neely

The post On The Way Up appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

Has the closing of a drugstore in a suburban strip center ever been the cause of so much grief?

From the outside, it looked like nothing special. Sometime in the 1980s, the 1956 shopping center underwent a modernizing facelift, as if to convince people driving by on Kingston Pike that “there’s nothing to see here, just another strip mall, keep moving please.” But the interior didn’t change much. It was the same place created during the Eisenhower administration by Clarence Long, the beloved pharmacist who had previously worked at Ellis & Ernest, adjacent to UT campus. Mr. Long died in a car wreck on Kingston Pike in 1966, but his place kept his name and its character for decades to come, its legacy respected by management and clientele.

Maybe we should have taken it as a clue that Long’s was such a rarity, the very last of the original generation of soda-fountain drugstores, that it wouldn’t last. It’s been something to brag about, and hear visitors say, “Wow, we don’t have anything like this at home.” Obviously most corporate pharmacies gave up on that model decades ago. There’s no CVS lunch counter. Most Americans in 2024 aren’t old enough to even remember when a practical, unpretentious lunch counter was a standard amenity in any retail setting. It worked once. I’m not sure why it doesn’t still. It’s not my business.

The news stories detailing the closing of Long’s have been mainly about the impossibility of small business competing with the corporate pharmaceutical industry, and that’s hard to doubt.

Since about 1962, I’ve been to Long’s several hundred times. Perhaps it’s even in the thousands, because there was a spell in the early ‘70s, when it was on my bicycle paper route, that I went to Long’s literally every day. But in all that time, I’ve never picked up a prescription there. Most of the times I’ve ever been to Long’s were during my blissfully prescription-free youth. I do have prescriptions now, but without ever making a deliberate choice that I remember, I found myself picking them up at night at one of the big chains that were still open when I was off work.

My point is that, for most of us who have loved it, Long’s has been something much more than, or something entirely other than, a pharmacy. They acknowledged that with their longtime motto: “Meet me at Long’s.” Maybe some people do socialize while waiting for a prescription; I’ve never been able to make that work.

But Long’s contained multitudes. It was once, among other things, my favorite place to eat.

I learned early on that they could make almost anything back there on those gleaming machines behind the counter. You could challenge those ladies to make something with soda water and cherry and ice cream and cola and chocolate syrup that had never been done before. Sometime in the late ‘60s, when I got them to mix some cherry syrup into my co*ke, I was convinced that we had, together, invented Cherry co*ke. It was the perfect counterbalance to a BLT or a grilled cheese and onion rings with mustard.

I sometimes saw detectives and other cool characters on TV walk into a bar and say, “the usual.” Long’s is the only place I ever said “the usual” and made it work. My usual was a cherry co*ke and onion rings, with some mustard on the side. Sometimes I’d add a sandwich to it, but only if a larger person was handy to pay for it.

Over the years I learned much about our language and civilization at Long’s Drugstore. One of the things I learned was the meaning of the word Sundries. It was legible high on a wall, part of the old décor. For years, I thought Sun-dries were exotic colorful desserts maybe imported from tropical climes.

In fact, sundries just means “lots of random stuff.” Long’s sold toys, lotions, magazines, modest gifts, paperback novels, Kleenex, postage stamps, cigars, decorative bric-a-brac.

The whole back of the lunch-counter region was a toy emporium, an ever-changing pageant of affordable delights. Big bags of assorted plastic army men to replenish those forces chewed up by the dog, blown up with firecrackers, or lost in backyard cave-ins. Yo-yos, both Duncan and cheaper models. Baseball cards. Bicycle playing cards. Superballs, when they were amazing and new and quickly lost. Bolo paddles, Groucho glasses and other novelties. In 1964, shortly after the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, you could find authentic Beatles wigs, packaged in plastic bags like strange evidence, hanging among the toys at Long’s. Fan that I was, the wigs were a little too weird even for me. But if I’d bought one and didn’t open it, today I could sell it on ebay for a few hundred dollars.

What I bought more than anything, and I bet I bought 40 or 50 of them over the years, were balsa-wood airplanes with rubber-band propellors. Both the simple hand-thrown Skeeters but also the more-expensive—I think they were 29 cents—models that had wheels and given a concrete runway would take off by themselves, and occasionally even land safely. They thrilled me, even though I always thought I was putting them together wrong. Printed on each one was the instruction “Bend Oregon,” and I never could figure out what the oregon was. But they seemed to work fine without my bending it.

And all that right by the comic books, 20 or 30 different issues, a different array of them every week or two.

***

When I visited Paris, 40-odd years ago, one of my biggest surprises was a retail establishment right on the Champs-Elysee called Le Drugstore. They’re kind of like a drugstore on drugs. Everything you think of in an American drugstore was exaggerated there.

The people who created it were enthralled by the wonderful new American ideal of the Drugstore, a place where young people would hang out and brag and flirt and get a co*ke and some fries. It has evolved into a semi-fancy restaurant. They sell fashions, perfume, groceries, magazines, cigars.

I first saw it when I was 22, and I thought of Long’s. Le Drugstore took the idea of “sundries” to a whole different level. I haven’t been to Paris in 43 years, but I checked, and Le Drugstore is still there today, and a big deal. If it’s not tres chic, it’s tres something.

It dates back to 1960, an era when the retail lunch counter seemed modern, practical, American.

But Le Drugstore is now old, itself, almost old as Long’s, and maybe old enough to be considered historic, except that it’s in a city where several restaurants and cafes are old enough to recall the era when Zelda Fitzgerald and George Gershwin and Jean-Paul Sartre were customers. Paris has several cafes, like the Deux Magots and Le Flores, that are 200 years old.

We don’t love anything quite that much.

***

Among the many other things it was, Long’s was also, arguably, the oldest sit-down restaurant in Knoxville, a city that generally does not reward its culinary heritage with longevity. Several American cities sustain century-old restaurants. But we have only one or two that General Neyland, if revived after a 60-year nap, would recognize.

The world’s favorite cities support their old businesses, and seem to need them. But antiquity is the one thing even the most progressive mayor and city council and the most resourceful millionaires and business leaders can’t provide. So we keep letting things close, always noting something about keeping up with changing times, and the impossibility of going on with an old-fashioned business model. And we have to start all over again with what we have left.

With Long’s closed, what’s now Knoxville’s oldest same-name, same-location restaurant? Maybe the 1960 Pizza Palace, on Magnolia Avenue: even if it’s a drive-in. Most of its customers eat in their own cars—I’m often one of them—and don’t encounter anyone but the waitress. But after that, what’s next in line? When I first began writing about Knoxville, there were more than a dozen distinctive locally owned unpretentious neighborhood cafes that seemed to play a role as community gathering places. Dot’s, the Roman Room, the Amber, the Torch, the Quarterback, Wright’s, the Creamery, Ruby’s, Henderson’s, Dixson’s, Ott’s, the Court Café, the Southern Grill, Smoky Mountain Market, Glenwood Sandwich Shop; and Long’s. Those are all old-line places that have closed since the ‘90s.

Today, people do meet at one particular Waffle House or other. But almost all Knoxville restaurants that have been around for more than 50 years are national chains. What does that say about us?

***

If Long’s is the oldest restaurant in town, it may also be the least expensive. Seriously, I don’t know anywhere in Knoxville where you can enjoy a satisfying sit-down meal, with table service, for less than $5. You might expect to find the cheapest restaurant in the cheapest part of town, but I’ve sought many lunches in the cheaper parts of town, and I’m not sure anyone compares to Long’s for thrift.

Long’s is on the fringe of Sequoyah Hills and Lyons View, and many of its most regular patrons are millionaires, and the rituals and conventions of posh can get tiresome. Maybe they’re seeking refuge in a simple chicken-salad sandwich and fries.

***

Over the years Long’s has been through some unwelcome changes that may have been inevitable. One was Styrofoam. It began showing up at Long’s sometime late in the last century. I was told it was a practical necessity to get by modern health codes because they didn’t have room for a high-performance dishwasher. I hate Styrofoam, but I loved Long’s more. I learned I could avoid it by just getting a glass-bottle co*ke from the cooler.

Covid seemed to knock Long’s off balance, as it did so many good things. When I was there alone, which was often, I used to sit mainly at the counter, rubbing elbows with polite strangers. But at some point after Covid, Long’s closed their counter. They never called it permanent, but it stayed closed. As of last year the waitresses were wondering when they’d relent and reopen it.

Most catastrophic, years before all that, was the loss of the comic-book rack. That was, of course, a national grief. It’s a tragic irony worthy of Lex Luthor: it was just as we were getting $100 million blockbuster-movie adaptations of Batman, Superman, and Spiderman that the actual comic books that kids loved—they were generally a dime or a quarter—disappeared from our world. It was those slim little stapled magazines, Action and Detective Comics and Tales of Suspense, that introduced superheros to our planet and laid out the basic rules of the universes in which they operated. I first heard of Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the Thing, the Flash, the Green Lantern, and Iron Man, among many others, at the comic-book rack in that one room called Long’s.

Some comics survived as “graphic novels,” but they were sold at specialty boutiques, not from racks in drugstores. And they seemed far too dark and melodramatic and expensive ever to be nearly as much fun as the rarely published “World’s Finest” issues, packed with multiple stories new and old, so thick they had a spine. To this day, grownups pay live-concert money to see superhero movies based on cheap comic books that were aimed at elementary-school kids with a dime who devoured them at Long’s lunch counter, free from care about whether they were stained with cola and ketchup.

At the same time I was learning the fascinating rules of Bizarro World and the comparative risks of the various grades of Kryptonite, I was still reading Uncle Scrooge, Disney’s most interesting printed product. By age 10 I was not always happy for peers to catch me at Long’s counter reading about ducks, they were nonetheless irresistible, stories often more clever than Detective Comics, always entailing some sort of brightly colorful adventure to a faraway place, and more often than not with a coherent plot with sideways moral and a surprising but perfect ending, usually with Scrooge and his hyperactive nephews landing exactly as they were at the beginning of the tale.

Long’s also sold some paperbacks, detective and romance novels but not just that. The erstwhile drugstore served some of us as an introduction to Western Civilization. I was about 11 when I bought—at Long’s—a little paperback called The Wisdom and Ideas of Plato. When I saw it there, it seemed more compelling than any textbook. I was pretty sure it would make me the wisest of all sixth-graders. I did read part of it. I have every intention of finishing it, maybe this month.

Somehow, even without the comics and wisdom for sale, I kept going to Long’s. Less often in recent years. One reason I sometimes paused before a Long’s visit was that even in the 21st century, it was often very crowded. About 20 or 30 years ago, I used to take my family there on Saturdays. It was just a bit of weekly fun that a reporter could afford. But as years passed, sometimes we had to wait, standing, for half an hour before a table opened. So we just stopped going.

But in the years since, Long’s has become more a solo weekday whim. I’d pop in only when it wasn’t a conventional breakfast or lunchtime, and when I happened to be in the neighborhood on a Tuesday morning, say, or a Thursday afternoon.

A lunch at Long’s was kind of like touching home plate. Is there another place that serves that purpose now? If so, let me know about it.

By Jack Neely

The post Long Live Long’s appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

A nice bowl of goldfish, nogless eggnog, the frantic scramble, a celebrated female impersonator, a live theatrical dramatization of an aeroplane crashing through a Mexican house—and a momentous meeting at the top of the Burwell

It was Christmas season again. A lot like others, but every year brought something different. And this Christmas season would be, in a way not recognized for many years to come, momentous.

Knoxville was a city of over 80,000, sometimes even claiming it had more than 100,000, but still getting used to its recently annexed new suburbs, including a large area across the river known as South Knoxville, and the Looney’s Bend area not yet redubbed Sequoyah Hills.

Of course, those newly incorporated suburbs were almost all white. Although modern and even progressive in other ways, the new neighborhoods came with “covenants” assuring that only white people would ever live there. Such real-estate contracts were common throughout America. Some semi-rural African American communities survived, in niches between the white suburbs, but segregation, stricter than it had ever been in the previous century, concentrated people of color in the limited areas where they were allowed to live and run businesses, especially in Mechanicsville, the old Cripple Creek area becoming known as the Bottom, and East Vine Avenue. East Vine, in particular, was then developing a lively sense of its own culture, with dance halls, pool halls, barber shops, and drugstores, and street musicians like teenagers Howard Armstrong and Carl Martin. The Gem Theatre was central to everything, with both motion pictures and live jazz and blues shows. (Unfortunately, the Gem didn’t often advertise in the daily papers, so it’s hard to know what they were offering that holiday season.)

Meanwhile, across town, nationally respected Knoxville College was thriving, expanding with new athletic fields, while known off campus and even in other states for its celebrated singing quartet, which gave a holiday presentation at the YMCA.

The larger university on the Hill was growing rapidly, becoming more part of the city’s consciousness, especially through athletics. Shields-Watkins Field had no stadium but only bleachers, with a seating capacity of 3,200, more than the total number of students at the time. On rare occasions it was almost full. By December, though, the Vols had already concluded a lackluster year under Coach M.B. Banks, losing to Vanderbilt, Georgia, and Army, and tying with Maryville College. Football fans were paying more attention to the Fighting Illini, with the nation’s latest football hero, Red Grange. But there was more about the upcoming baseball season, and Fred Moffatt’s high hopes for the Knoxville Pioneers team at Caswell Park.

If Knoxville didn’t have its own football champion, it had a national legal champion. Judge E.T. Sanford, whose distinguished gray beard had been a familiar sight around UT and downtown for decades, had recently moved to Washington to be sworn into the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile another former Knoxville lawyer, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, was also in the national spotlight, announcing that Christmas that he was running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. East Tennessee remained a Republican bastion, though, and Congressman J. Will Taylor announced that month that he was backing Coolidge.

It was an exciting new era of airplanes and automobiles. By then, with three airfields, Knoxville had lots of both, but many more of the latter. More affluent Knoxvillians had a car in 1923 than ever before, an estimated 10,000 of them in the city. After 15 years, Ford’s Model T was now a familiar sight, all of them black, of course, but with little changes introduced each year. There were also Chevrolets, Hupmobiles, Maxwells, Reos, Nashes, Hudsons, Packards, and luxury Marmons. “You can’t cross the street without playing tag with two or three of the machines,” one reporter remarked.

Serious drivers joined the Knoxville Automobile Club, excited about the idea of new paved roads connecting Knoxville to the nation and even to points of interest in its own region, in ways it had never been connected before, by the new Dixie Highway and other routes. In the early 1920s, citizens were especially curious about the steep ridges to the south, sometimes visible through the coal smoke. Most Knoxvillians had never been to the Smokies, but the automobile—and, critically, paved roads—promised to make the mountains much more accessible.

Radio had arrived, perhaps not as exciting as it was last year, when it was brand new and jaw-droppingly astonishing—and not as important as it would be later in the decade, when many more people owned radios and listened to them at all times of the day. But WNAV was broadcasting a few hours, usually in the early evening. Much of its programming was live local choral music, classical, operatic, and religious, and usually just for an hour or two in the evening.

People with radios sometimes found it more fun to try to pick up bigger-city stations, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, New York’s WGY, Atlanta’s WSB, and Detroit’s WWJ, all of which could be received in Knoxville well enough that their listings appeared in local papers.

Radios, odd-looking wooden boxes with knobs, were going for $6, and advertised as Christmas gifts.

Most radios looked like homemade contraptions. Phonographs, a much nicer gift, looked like polished furniture. Sterchi’s sold three different makes of them, Victrolas, Brunswicks, and Edisons, and you could buy them on terms, with weekly payments. The Edison model alone came in seven distinctly different models, some of them resembling antique credenzas.

Invited to speak on WNAV was an interesting newcomer, the new city manager, a nationally celebrated urban planner who arrived in town just days before Christmas. The new electric medium seemed to match his new ideas. The still-new city-manager charter remained controversial, and conservative factions were already organizing to oppose it, even before they knew what this Louis Brownlow was up to. A Missouri-born relative of the old “Fighting Parson” Brownlow of the Civil War era, this modern Brownlow was keeping his cards close to his vest that December, but in years to come, his progressive ideas for the city would foment an anti-tax backlash. All he was promising in 1923 was that there would be “No politics in City Hall.” (City Hall was then still a nearly cubical building on Market Square, but soon to move, under Brownlow’s supervision, to the vacated School for the Deaf building around the corner.)

***

People were wary of Christmas, dreading the dependably maniacal shopping season, described by a local writer that month as the “same old frantic scramble, exhausted and half-crazed clerks, desperate shoppers pawing over the oft-pawed-over articles rejected by forethoughted shoppers; excited wives, irritated and overloaded husbands….”

Perhaps seeking solace, aJournal & Tribunefeature looked to the past for some perspective, asking elderly folks to share memories of an old-fashioned Knoxville Christmas, as celebrated about half a century before. Captain William Rule, a Union veteran of the Civil War, was then 84 years old, and happy to oblige for the paper of which he was still the editor. Back in the 1870s, he said, Christmas had “more of the carnival spirit than today—streets filled with shooting fireworks, blowing horns, ringing bells.”

Rule seemed a little perplexed that the public observation of Christmas in 1923 was sometimes more solemn than it used to be. “The spirit of reverence which of late years seems to have entered more into the observance of Christmas was generally lacking” in the 1800s, he said: “except in churches.” He remembered Christmas-morning hunting parties, and an occasion when a Civil War cannon planted on UT’s Hill as a relic was detonated on Christmas Day. Old women remembered when the holiday “took the form of a dance,” and “hoop skirts and tightly corseted waists seemed not to have interfered in the least with the grace of the debutante whose slippered feet kept pace with the music, oft-times till early dawn.” Some also claimed that snow was much more common at Christmastime back in the ’70s, and that horse-drawn sleighs with sleighbells, not just an ideal from festive songs and Currier and Ives prints, were once really a common part of the Knoxville Christmas.

Although bits of those old traditions remained in the Jazz Age, much of the old-timers’ memories of deafening street clamor, general irreverence, and all-night parties might have been surprising to Knoxville flappers who read that newspaper story.

“But what will be the verdict of those who in the good year 1973 inquire of the Christmas celebration of 1923?” The morning newspaper assumed Knoxvillians of the distant future would be curious to ask.

The Fred Morgan Store seemed to recall Capt. Rule’s memories when it advertised “a real Christmas with plenty fireworks”—firecrackers, skyrockets, and Roman candles. Their store was at Greenway Station, off North Broadway at Sharp’s Ridge. They could get away with it, because they were just outside of city limits, where fireworks were banned, as usual since they got out of hand back in ’93. Police Chief E.M. Haynes made that clear with a fresh directive.

But the main noise that older people might have found unsettling came from cornets. It was the jazz age, and jazz was everywhere. The big, stylish, countryside hotel at Whittle Springs advertised itself as the Playground of the South, and proved it with a seven-piece house jazz band known as Whittle’s Royal Troubadours. For several nights in the middle of December, Whittle featured Harry Yerkes’ Musical Bell Hop Orchestra, playing light jazz until midnight. The New York band, “one of the greatest dance orchestras in the country,” were among America’s early jazz recording artists, and they had several records out. (The new dance known as the Charleston had been introduced just a few weeks earlier, but Whittle assured stoic East Tennesseans, “You don’t have to dance.”)

***

Some things didn’t change much. Market Square, a rare spot where Eastern European immigrants, African Americans, and mountain people mixed every day, was still central to Christmas. TheJournal & Tribunedescribed “animated scenes on Market Square … Country people are delivering diversified lines of produce and many wagons from the mountain districts are delivering apples, walnuts, evergreens—cedar, pine, holly, spruce, mistletoe,” all for Christmas decorations. Also there was a traditional holiday-season offering not always seen other times of the year. Bear meat was apparently a Christmas tradition in some families, and was available on the square for $1 a pound, much more expensive than any other kind of meat. Local reporters called Knoxville’s Christmas market “unique” because of its mountain sources. Although the Smokies were still forbiddingly difficult to reach by conventional means, Knoxvillians met mountain people on Market Square.

In 1923, you could buy tropical fruit in Knoxville, but it was sometimes hard to find. Reich’s advertised “another carload of sweet oranges,” plus apples, coconuts, raisins, dates, figs—and, of course, that American fruit, cigarettes.

Mayo’s downtown location, near Market Square, sold mainly seeds and farming supplies, but offered a special holiday attraction, declaring that “a nice bowl of goldfish would be appreciated by anyone.”

***

It was an exciting new era of unpredictable entertainment, as movie houses like the Strand, the Queen, and the Gem specialized in movies, but offered some live entertainment on the side. On Christmas Eve, the Strand, on Gay near Market Square, featured the new film,Slave of Desire. Subtitled “The Golden Lure of Strange Quests,” it wasn’t necessarily holiday fare: a bizarre tale of forbidden love, suicide, and a fatal avalanche.

The Lyric Theatre, the 50-year-old venue that locals remembered as Staub’s Opera House, was the city’s biggest and busiest theater, despite the presence of the Bijou, just across Gay Street, and the new Riviera, a couple blocks down the sidewalk, that showed mainly movies, but still with some live music and vaudeville.

The Bijou was also hosting an impressive array of holiday shows, including several single-night touring-company versions of Broadway musical comedies and romances—The Clinging Vine, a comic satire by Zelda Sears about gender roles in business and romance, featured 48 singing and dancing performers.

However, the same holiday season brought, to the same stage, a notable boxing match. Held one week before Christmas Day, the bout was claimed to be the “biggest staged in Knoxville history.” Similar claims had been made for several fights, but that match does appear in official national online boxing records today.The contenders were Georgia teenager Young Stribling and Billy McGowan, “idol of Knoxville fight fans.” Stribling, who would turn 19 the day after Christmas, won the eight-round battle, every round, as determined by a panel of sportswriters, but local hero McGowan was “just too game to allow a knockout blow.” (Although only 166 pounds during the Knoxville fight, Stribling would be a contender for the national heavyweight championship. He later fought Italian heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and, in a bout for the top honor, barely survived a pummeling from German boxing legend Max Schmeling. Stribling was still seeking the championship in 1933 when he died in a motorcycle wreck.)

But every Sunday this same Bijou Theatre known for bloody fights and wacky musicals was reserved for the congregation of First Baptist Church. Their original high-steepled Victorian church on the 600 block of Gay Street was being demolished as they built a new church in a very different style on Main, and until it was finished, they were at the Bijou.

***

“If it’s a He-Man or a Real Boy,” went the ad, “the place to go is Athletic House,” at 522 S. Gay. There they sold guns and golfing equipment, toys and “wheel goods.” The manager of the new store was Frank Callaway, recently retired as an infielder for Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. For many Real Boys, he was, in himself, a good reason to visit the store.

Speaking of wheel goods, to amuse the shoppers, the Gay Amusem*nt Co. advertised roller skating every night on North Gay Street. And Greenlee’s Bicycles, at both locations—Asylum Avenue and North Central—were selling National and Pierce models. Woodruff’s on Gay sold velocipedes, which at the time meant large-wheel tricycles.

Charities were out in full force, with the Empty Stocking Fund, this year featuring a Dec. 23 concert by Chicago baritone Carroll Ault, at the Lyric.

Every year seemed to bring a fresh new charity, and in 1923, it was the Birthday Park fund. The idea was to establish a new city park for disadvantaged children, with funds donated to honor the birthdays of citizens, many of them children, who did some of the fundraising. By the end of 1923, it was unclear where the park would be located, with North Knoxville and Bearden suggested. As it happened, it would coalesce on a hillside beside Chilhowee Park. It would evolve, many years later, into something called the Knoxville Zoo.

***

Although local saloons had been banned 16 years earlier, Knoxville was still getting used to the fact that liquor was illegal, even during the holidays. Wags joked about “nogless eggnog,” but there was a lot of winking going on. Bootlegging was a way of life. Knoxville’s early ban had given the city’s underworld a head start. When national prohibition arrived, Knoxville already had established underground networks.

Of course, some affluent households got around the liquor ban with international travel, especially to one favorite vacation spot about 1,000 miles due south. Havana was a stylish destination for Knoxville’s wealthy; Eugenia Williams and her husband, Gordon Chandler, had been there earlier in the year, and members of the Tyson family announced they were spending Christmas in Cuba. You could buy a ticket there at the Southern Railway station—despite the fact that a critical part of the trip was not by train.

There was still some holiday trouble at home, if much less than in previous eras, when Christmas week often averaged a murder a day. The 1923 holiday season witnessed the mystery of the disappearance of Dr. J.S. Jones, a Methodist pastor from Maryville. He’d been on a hunting trip when he went missing a few miles downriver. The leading theory was that he’d been mistaken for a revenuer.

On Saturday night, Dec. 22, East Jackson Avenue restaurant proprietor Roscoe Bates had an argument with George Mackey over a bootleg whiskey deal. Mackey got aggressive. Bates was wearing his holster, and reached for his gun, but realized he’d left it at home. Mackey shot Bates four times, and the restaurateur died at Knoxville General Hospital, a few blocks away.

House Mountain saw a holiday season gun battle between county deputies and moonshiners; the latter got away, but not with their fresh batch of apple brandy.

And at 2100 McCalla, Charles Gentry had gotten up early in Christmas Eve morning, had made a fire and was reading the paper, when something whistled past his head, tore through the newspaper he was reading, ricocheted off a wall, went through the dining room, hit the breakfast-room door, and dropped at the feet of Mrs. Gentry. It was a .32 bullet, origin unknown.

Most crimes were less serious. Pickpockets were an old Christmas tradition, especially on crowded Market Square, and retailers were told to be on the lookout for a fellow with a false mustache, who was passing bad checks.

An unnamed Black man was jailed for public drunkenness. Many men of both races were; it was a holiday tradition. But as it turned out, this particular inmate at the city jail was a businessman. He had hardly arrived in the big, crowded cell before he began arranging bail for his cell mates. He “summoned officers to tell them several inmates were ready to post bond.” He was, it turned out, a “duly qualified bondsmaker,” and had gotten himself jailed deliberately to drum up business. The police were flabbergasted by the gesture, but could find no statute forbidding it.

***

Christmas Day was a little bit different from today in that it was a little more broadly sociable, with society and public events. Several churches still had Christmas-morning services, even though it landed on a Wednesday. Cherokee Country Club hosted a “matinee dance” on the 25^th, at 11 a.m., in its original semi-rural lodge, with a dinner buffet. There’d been several previous holiday dances there, including a Bal Masque—a Christmas masquerade—the week before.

All of Christmas week, the Lyric hosted Peruchi Players, a semi-local dramatic troupe, and its production ofThe Broken Wing, a love story about an American pilot crash-landing during the Mexican Revolution, losing his memory, and falling in love with his Mexican nurse. “Laughs! Thrills! Love! Sensational!” trumpeted the Lyric’s ads. “See the Aeroplane Crash through the House.”

The plot had become well-known that fall: the motion-picture version had already shown at the Strand, four blocks down the street. But the Peruchi family gave it a more-impressive live interpretation, described as “one of the most sensational and amusing climaxes ever seen on stage,” with a “realistic aero-plane effect and startling situations.”

Peruchi Players, led by Chelso Peruchi, were formed around a talented Italian family, originally spelled Pierucci, that had roots in Knoxville before the Civil War. Members of the second and third generation had been performing here since the 1890s, but Peruchi Players was a relatively recent iteration of the footloose troupe that traveled from city to city, always gravitating back toward Knoxville for long residencies.

On Christmas Day, the Lyric featured an extra matinee presentation of their unusual play.

On Christmas evening, WNAV broadcast a live vocal performance featuring students from Knoxville High School.

Also on Christmas night, perhaps encouraged by the previous week’s popular Stribling-McGowan bout, was another boxing extravaganza. The Ring Athletic Club, in cooperation with the American Legion, sponsored six prize fights, including local favorite Tiger Toro against Battling (“Bat”) Drummond. It all took place at the walk-up boxing ring on Market Street, just south of Arnstein’s department store, in a gymnasium on the third floor above David’s Women’s Ready-to-Wear.

***

Those who gave or received radios on Christmas, 1923, may have had second thoughts about whether it was a perfect gift. A few days after Christmas, William Ashton, 21-year-old primary staffer of Knoxville’s only radio station, WNAV, prompted a crisis when he announced he was leaving to take a job in Philadelphia, part of it broadcasting from ocean liners. To Ashton, who’d done a hitch in the Navy, it may have been irresistible.

So just after Christmas, WNAV, which had introduced Knoxville to radio a year before, announced that it was going off the air indefinitely. A four and a half-hour New Year’s Eve farewell program featured several classical performers, like pianist Ruth Ferrell, and the Logan Temple AME Zion church’s Usher’s Board Quartet, that last broadcast of 1923, on New Year’s Eve. The broadcasting studio in a walk-up space in the old Deaderick Building on Market Street, co-sponsored bythe Journal & Tribuneand described excitedly in that paper a few months earlier, closed.

Nine months later, Ashton surprised everyone again when he returned to Knoxville, this time to launch First Baptist Church’s new low-watt station, broadcast from its own new steeple on Main Street, WFBC. Now working a day job as a mail carrier, he became better known as an evangelist.

That same New Year’s Eve brought the new Broadway musicalWildflowerto the Bijou. The play, produced by Arthur Hammerstein, with songs written by his 28-year-old nephew, Oscar Hammerstein, was unusual in that it opened in Knoxville less than a year after it opened on Broadway—where it was officially still playing, at the grandly elaborate Casino, at 39^thStreet. A nationally popular show, its acclaim was based mainly on its songs, some of them sung by star Eva Olivotti. (She would later have a minor film career providing a singing voice for the 1929 version ofShow Boat, one of the sound era’s first musicals.) The play might have evoked special resonance with the Knoxville audience, in that its female chorus were dressed as Italian hikers. More and more women were beginning to hike in the still-wild, mostly trail-less Smoky Mountains.

And that same night, a nine-act vaudeville show at the Lyric, across the street, opened at 11 p.m., featuring a 10-piece jazz band.

But the first week of 1924 brought a bigger surprise to the Bijou. Another traveling show, the Black and White Revue of 1924, a spectacle of a “symphonic jazz orchestra” and a six-saxophone band. It’s unclear whether there were Black performers involved the extravaganza. But the star was Julian Eltinge, who’d been popular in Knoxville since his first performance at Staub’s 15 years earlier. In recent years, he had become a movie star.

A popular singer and dancer, Eltinge was perhaps America’s most respected female impersonator, though he didn’t like that term. To describe him, a Chicago critic had coined the term “ambisextrous.” They say this man who resembled a portly banker by day didn’t mimic women on stage, he became them.

The Knoxville show, at the end of the Christmas season of 1923-24, promised that Eltinge “will entertain the theater patrons with the fads and fancies of the fair sex. A complete extensive new wardrobe has been procured for this season’s tour and positively the newest creations from the ateliers of the leading modistes.” Unfortunately, the papers rarely ran reviews of one-night shows, so we don’t have descriptions detailing what he did at the Bijou.

***

With so much going on, you might be forgiven for not noticing that something momentous was afoot high in one of downtown’s skyscrapers, just before Christmas.

The law offices of Hugh B. Lindsay were on the top floor of the tall, slim, Burwell Building. Fifteen years earlier, it had been Knoxville’s tallest building, but a decade ago it yielded that superlative to another bank building diagonally across the street, the Holston. It was not yet home of the Tennessee Theatre, although a project to build a major “motion picture palace” behind the Burwell was in the works.

At 66, Judge Lindsay was considered an elder statesman among lawyers. Once a gubernatorial nominee, former U.S. district attorney, former chancellor, former attorney general, Lindsay had recently been the ablest fellow to lead the roast of Judge E.T. Sanford as he left town to join the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gathered in that top-floor room, on Friday, December 21, were other prominent men, several of whom were members of the Knoxville Automobile Club. The apparent leader of the project was Willis Davis, who had moved here from Louisville, Ky., seven years earlier. He was president of the Knoxville Iron Co. in Lonsdale, but at the time lived with his wife, Annie, in Fort Sanders Manor, the courtyard apartment building on Laurel Avenue.

The meeting had a lot to do with a bold scheme he and his wife had been talking about.

Also there was Forrest Andrews, 43, a home-schooled farm boy from the Nashville area who made it into Vanderbilt and a career as an attorney and businessman with an interest in public education.

Originally from Western Pennsylvania, businessman/realtor J. Wylie Brownlee had been a vice president of the National Conservation Exposition of 1913, during which he was also president of Knoxville’s Board of Commerce. He lived on Martin Mill Pike, but was sometimes described as a resident of Gatlinburg, and was also a member of the Appalachian Club in Elkmont.

Even though three weeks earlier he’d been seriously ill, Daniel Clary Webb, the attorney from Middle Tennessee, attended the meeting. Son of legendary boarding-school master “Sawney” Webb, D.C. Webb was a former Juvenile Court judge, and one of the first residents of the new suburb becoming known as Westmoreland; he was soon to build the waterwheel at Westland. (His four-year-old son, Robert, would found Knoxville’s Webb School.) D.C. Webb was now president of the Rotary Club, which would be a major player in the plans sketched out in that room.

Cowan Rodgers was there. The Knoxville native who had introduced the automobile to Knoxville, with a couple of noisy homemade jobs down on the Bowery in the late 1890s, was now a prominent auto dealer, specializing that year in the Hudson and Essex lines. He was now, fittingly, president of the Knoxville Automobile Club—as he was also rousing some excited speculation that he might run for governor.

Another lawyer, James Bascom Wright, was a former newspaperman who had once worked with Wilson’s Secretary of the Treasury, W. G. McAdoo; he was now attorney for the L&N Railroad. He had a home in Elkmont, but his dreams for the Smokies would differ sharply from those he met with that day.

And there, not necessarily the most prominent attendee in 1923, was David Chapman. At 47, the short, bespectacled pharmaceutical executive had trained recruits during wartime, and may have found his military habits useful for marshalling the personnel and resources for a major task proposed that evening. He had been involved in numerous humanitarian projects around town, but could not have expected to have found his name on a very large mountain.

Several of those early leaders, especially Brownlee and Chapman, had held leadership roles in the National Conservation Exposition of 1913. Held at Knoxville’s Chilhowee park over a two-month period, it was the world’s first big convention with a conservation theme, and drew one million visitors. It had closed 10 years before the meeting in the Burwell Building, but its ideals likely informed the discussion.

The small group meeting in Judge Lindsay’s office had two goals. The Knoxville Automobile Club had been hot to plan more paved roads in the region, and were especially keen on getting one through the mountains, all the way to the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina. (The new association, which included several members of the auto club, also made that a priority.) But their other, more ambitious goal, was was to create “the first national park east of the Rocky Mountains.” To be fair, by then there was one small national park up in Maine, but these men had something grander in mind, a project taking in half a million acres, straddling two states. The Smoky Mountains, visible in the distance on a clear day, but difficult to reach, privately owned and little known to most Tennesseans, should be protected forever, they said, as a public asset.

To that end, as frantic holiday shoppers swarmed the sidewalks of Gay Street down below, they founded the Smoky Mountain Conservation Association (later the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association.)

They settled on some priorities, including forming an executive committee charged with approaching the larger landholders, especially the timber industries, about acquiring some or all their Smokies properties. They also discussed collecting photographs of the Smokies to promote the idea, mentioning in particular those of the Thompson Brothers, Jim and Robin, who had already expressed some interest in the subject.

At the same time, the Knox County Federated Women’s Clubs expressed support, and promised to meet soon to discuss the prospect. A few politicians signed on. U.S. Senator John K. Shields disliked Wilson’s League of Nations, but liked the Smoky Mountains park idea.

Over the next several years, until the federal government, finally convinced it was a great idea, took it over, the association founded in Judge Lindsay’s office was the primary author and custodian of what became the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

There’s no mention of any women attending that lofty meeting in the Burwell, but it had been a woman’s idea; by early leader Willis Davis’s own account, it was all the brainchild of his younger wife, Annie, the Bryn Mawr alumna and mother of two, who had proposed a national park in the Smokies after they’d taken a trip out to see Yosemite and other great national parks in the west. Proposals to conserve parts of the Smokies as a harvestable national forest had been on several drawing boards over the years, but the Davises’ proposal was more ambitious—and closer to what actually came to be.

As it happened, her husband, who attended that meeting in the Burwell 100 years ago, wouldn’t live to see the full fruition of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but Annie would. Annie Davis, who was active in Knoxville’s League of Women Voters, was progressive in other ways, supporting the controversial city-manager form of government, and was apparently convincing in public that a few months later, her campaign to be the region’s first woman to be elected to the Tennessee state legislature was successful. In her role as legislator, she did much to further the cause of a national park in the Smokies.

But in December, 1923, the Knoxville last-minute Christmas shoppers down on the street, especially those who didn’t read the paper past the front page, didn’t yet know what those lawyers and businessmen were cooking up at the top of the Burwell, or that their region was about to change, with what would amount to an enormous holiday gift to the world.

TheJournal and Tribuneassessed the holiday:

“With humdrum cares thrown to the winds, and memories of strife relegated to the background at last, Knoxville celebrated such a happy, peaceful Christmas yesterday as was observed before the world was wrapped in conflict. Holly wreaths hung in the windows of hovel and mansion, and … human kindness shone on the faces of the hundreds who flocked the downtown business section, and the happiness of children showed that the day had lost none of its yuletide meaning….”

By Jack Neely, December, 2023.

The post STARTLING SITUATIONS: KNOXVILLE AT CHRISTMASTIME, 1923 appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

Because, for decades he always seemed to be the same age, perhaps 43, lanky, energetic, youthful Bruce Wheeler never seemed likely to leave us any time soon, but we regret that he has. He was really 84, and this past weekend, he died. And he was irreplaceable.

Originally from Tryon, N.C., he studied at Duke, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Virginia, from which he earned his Ph.D., and was already a respected (and published) scholar on American history when he arrived here back in 1970. Quickly he earned a reputation, and occasionally a major award, for his engaging teaching style. In fact, UT presented him with one such teaching award at halftime of the UT-Georgia basketball game in 1979. (Do they still celebrate academics at ball games?)

Once a specialist in the American Revolution, but by the 1970s he was studying the Tennessee Valley Authority (he wrote a book about Tellico Dam), Appalachian culture (he wrote a book about mountain handcrafts), and modern urban economic development (concerning which he wrote a book—or perhaps we should say three books—about Knoxville).

By 1973, he was getting well outside of the classroom to offer lectures around town, at historical venues and occasionally on television. He may have been the first public historian to take on Knoxville history head-on, without nostalgia or the usually obligatory respect for the powers that be—or for the premise that Knoxville was a success. That belief was once required of all after-dinner speakers; Bruce liked Knoxville, and found it interesting, but fractured the obligatory cheerleader role and made it easier on the rest of us.

He was an engaging presence: slim, long-legged, clean-cut and a sharp dresser, always in a suit and tie (relaxing on a hot day, he might disclose his colorful suspenders), he could have passed for William F. Buckley without the stammer. (Or the transparent politics. I don’t know for certain how Bruce voted.) To the dozens of organizations he spoke to, his old-school Ivy League appearance may have made his sometimes subversive ideas about Knoxville more palatable, and more effective. A deadpan humor was also part of his appeal, and I suspect a reason his classes were always full. (I took three of them.)

Though never one to laugh at his own jokes, he obviously enjoyed it when others did, and often remarked that if it hadn’t been for American history, he might have gone into standup comedy.

Even if much of the humor he deployed was in the form of quotes from Knoxville characters like George Dempster and Prof. Ruth Stephens, and others. But his humor often came punctuated with a well-timed pause, when he’d get to a serious and important point.

He befriended like-minded fellow professor Michael McDonald, and their longtime partnership concerning Knoxville’s history may have begun around 1975, when they worked together on a public cultural study of Knoxville in conjunction with planning for a prospective world’s fair.

McDonald and Wheeler’s 1983 book,Knoxville, Tenn.: Continuity and Change in an Appalachian City, examined the political and economic development of Knoxville especially in recent decades, and quickly became required reading for journalists and the smarter politicians. After McDonald’s premature death, the second edition, subtitledA Mountain City in the New South, was Wheeler’s solo 2005 effort. A third edition, updated with the help ofMetro Pulseand Compass Knox journalist Jesse Mayshark, came out in 2020.

Wheeler and his family once lived in Sequoyah Hills in their first decade or so here, but as years passed they migrated to Wears Valley in Sevier County, where he lived for most of his later life. I’m not sure even his colleagues knew about his breadth of interests: he was chairman of the Wears Valley Volunteer Fire Department, or that he sang in a choir devoted to the eccentric and tightly disciplined shape-note singing style called Old Harp.

His fascination with Knoxville and its ever-changing downtown drew him downtown, where he and his wife, Judy, lived for several years, during which time he could often surprise old students, walking his dog along Walnut Street early in the morning.

As the 2019 Knoxville History Project honoree for lifetime achievement in local history, he entertained a capacity crowd with one of his classic strolling monologues, and drew no complaints that he hardly touched on the subject of local history.

The post Bruce Wheeler (1939 – 2023) appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

THE MYSTERIES OF A KNOXVILLE THANKSGIVING

It’s supposedly a simple holiday, dating back to 1621, and the Pilgrims, who sought simplicity. But most sources claim that despite Tennessee’s plenitude of wild turkeys and pumpkins for pie, we didn’t celebrate the annual holiday here until 1855, the era of railroads and gaslights.

And its date was never securely established until after World War II. What happened here, on those first Thanksgivings, on the third Thursday or Fourth Thursday, or last Thursday of November, or the first Thursday in December, depending on the year, or in one case the last Sunday? When did we pull up a chair and join the feast?

We may never know, with certainty, but it was complicated, murky, and occasionally political. And maybe we should challenge Wikipedia’s blanket statements, because it does appear that Knoxville had something called Thanksgiving several years before 1855.

In 1819, Knoxville newspaper readers learned that Gov. DeWitt Clinton of New York recommended Dec. 22 as a “day of prayer and thanksgiving in that state.” He was governor again eight years later when he declared Dec. 12 would be Thanksgiving Day. Both times got mentions in the Knoxville press. (Clinton and his Uncle George, who was vice president, are the two prevailing theories about how Clinton, Tenn., got its name.)

In 1826, a complicated short story reprinted in theKnoxville Enquirerincluded a soldier’s plea for furlough “to keep thanksgiving and eat pumpkin pies with his friends and the pretty lasses in Connecticut.” It’s hard to understand the context, but it may be the first time pumpkin pie was mentioned here in conjunction with Thanksgiving. Were Knoxville newspaper readers familiar with that concept?

In the first half-century of the state, mentions of Thanksgiving as a holiday celebrated anywhere in Tennessee are extremely rare.

But then there’s this outlier. Apropos to nothing, in the month of June, 1833, the often-surprisingKnoxville Register, run by editor-publisher Frederick Heiskell, formerly of Hagerstown, Maryland, ran something darkly humorous and deeply cynical. It’s called “Thanksgiving Day— A Parody.” It’s the first of three poems under the heading Poetry, on the center of the front page. We’re reprinting it, without permission, with the original spellings intact:

Turkies meet their fate and die

Chickens turn to chicken pie

Geese no longer gabbling fly

Bording clouds and rain.

Don’t you hear the proclamation

Bringing barnyard desolation—

Death to half the feathered nation

On thanksgiving day?

Seize, each glutton, seize a chair

None but gluttons can be here

May heaven bless the glorious fare

Clatter knives and forks.

Wha’ for turkies roast or raw

Would not jackknife strongly draw

Glutton stand or glutton fa’

For Heav’n’s glory.

Strutting turkies, turkies meet

Pompous geese, stuffed goslins meet

Chicken-hearted boobies eat

Brother chickens now.

Eat the broken fragments up

Gormandizers—seize the cup

Here’s a health—hic-hiccup

All is over now.

It’s signed only Ut. Obs., which may be some obscure Latin abbreviation for some wag who didn’t want his name attached to that verse. It’s possible or likely it was written somewhere outside of Tennessee. But I’ve done some searches and can’t find it published elsewhere. It’s interesting if disputable evidence of two things, one that there was a clever fop in beleaguered Knoxville, hardly a generation removed from frontier days, a half-forgotten former capital town with poor river transportation, no railroad, and no clear future. It might also seem evidence that Thanksgiving dinners were familiar here, with the same association with overabundance and overeating by which it’s known today. Even if it were reprinted from some other now-obscure source, Heiskell seems to have assumed that Knoxville’s 1,500 inhabitants had enough experience with Thanksgiving Dinners to get the joke.

But it seems to describe not just familiar Thanksgiving customs, but a weariness of the whole idea of Thanksgiving, and a suggestion of its religious hypocrisy. The poem’s lack of reverence and even respect for the holiday and its celebrants may suggest that in Tennessee Thanksgiving was still a distant, Yankee think that local readers had only heard about. Newspapers always had a tenuous hold on solvency, even then, and few editors would eagerly alienate their subscribers at the top of the front page. But it’s always safe to make fun of the habits of people who are far away.

In any case, there’s not any very clear description of a Thanksgiving dinner in Knoxville in the decades before that, or for a decade after.

But in the next few years, the same paper, run by different people from farther north, would extol Thanksgiving as an ideal. As had been the case for years, references to Thanksgiving in northeastern places, especially New England and New York, made it clear that Knoxvillians had heard of Thanksgiving, even if they didn’t celebrate it.

In October, 1840, for example, theRegisterreported that the governor of New Hampshire appointed the 12^thday of November as a day of thanksgiving and prayer. But same year a reference to a “day of thanksgiving” in November could be misconstrued.

“One day of thanksgiving should be set apart throughout the whole land, for the blessing thus bestowed us by a kind and beneficent providence.” That line appeared in theNational Intelligencer, a generally conservative Whig newspaper published in Washington, D.C., to be reprinted in theKnoxville Register. Considering it appeared in Knoxville on Dec. 2, we might assume that it had to do with the holiday. But it’s a political column praising God for Harrison’s defeat of Van Buren in the recent presidential race. “The history of the last 12 years [that is, the Democratic Jackson-Van Buren era] will be read with gloom and sorrow by the future patriot of this country….”

TheKnoxville Postreferred to a Thanksgiving Ball at an “Insane Hospital” in 1841 in Augusta, Maine. The following year, theRegisterremarked 200 couples marrying on Thanksgiving Day, 1842, in Massachusetts. But sometimes years would go by with no obvious reference to the day.

In 1846, theKnoxville Registerwas located in a building on the southeast corner of Main and Gay, about where Riverview Tower is. Its editors and publishers were James and John L. Moses, both born in Exeter, New Hampshire. James had learned the publishing business while working as a printer in nearby Boston. The two had come to Knoxville at the behest of Massachusetts-raised Perez Dickinson, to run a newspaper here. They did, and at the same time co-founded Knoxville’s first Baptist church—something that, believe it or not, they found lacking in Knoxville—but at about the same time they seem to have become enthusiastic about introducing, or reviving, the New England tradition of a Thanksgiving holiday in Tennessee.

It would appear that it was something people knew about, perhaps even remembered; a holiday that George Washington had declared back in 1789—but one that wasn’t universally celebrated in Tennessee, perhaps not celebrated at all, and in any case was not a government-approved day off.

Thanks to both journalists and politicians, things were stirring in 1846. By October, it got around that Georgia and South Carolina had designated Thursday, Nov. 5, as a joint Thanksgiving Day. “Why should not the same venerable custom be adopted in Tennessee?” asked an anonymous editor for the NashvilleTennessean. “Have the people of our State have nothing to be thankful for?”

Soon the governor of Kentucky joined suit, calling Nov. 26 Kentucky Thanksgiving. Unlike its deep south relatives, Kentucky’s Thanksgiving would be not on the first Thursday, but the last one. “Will Tennessee be the last of her sister states to adopt it?” asked theTennessean.

Tennessee’s governor, Aaron Venable Brown, was a former Congressman from Giles County, at the southern edge of Middle Tennessee. Brown was a staunch supporter of the war in Mexico, and called for 30,000 volunteers from Tennessee to fight. But as the costly invasion lost support with the people, as around 14,000 Americans lost their lives. Brown lost popularity, too, and he perhaps needed a distraction. Under some pressure, he declared that Tennessee would join the Thanksgiving states.

On Nov. 24, 1846, Gov. Brown signed his name to a somewhat murky statement in Nashville: “Whereas it has been an ancient custom in most of the States of this Union to set apart, at stated periods, some day on which all the people thereof, might in common unite in prayer and supplication to the Author of all our blessings both temporal and spiritual ….

“Now, therefore, I, Aaron V. Brown … hereby designate and set apart the last Sabbath of the present year, to be observed by all the good people of this state, whose heart may incline them thereto, as a day of thanksgiving, humiliation, and prayer.”

In a short piece remarking that the governor of Missouri had just declared Thursday, Nov. 25, 1847 to be an official Thanksgiving, theKnoxville Registermade a bit of fun of Tennessee’s own governor: “Last year [1846], Gov. A.V. Brown selected one of the Sundays in November, if we remember aright, and in some manner had ‘Fast Day’ and ‘Thanksgiving’ both mixed up in his proclamation. The Governor meant right enough, and doubtless thought it was all correct; but he committed a blunder nonetheless. Sunday is the best day in the week, in its place, but it is not the best for all purposes, and is not quite as appropriate as Thursday, for feasting and rejoicing among friends, for cracking nuts and jokes—to say nothing of shooting turkeys—without which, and many other things too numerous to talk about, the occasion, to one who knows what a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving Day is, would just be just no Thanksgiving at all.”

It’s the earliest reference I’ve seen that someone in Knoxville had a personal memory of a “good old-fashioned Thanksgiving Day,” even if the Moses’ memories would have been from New England.

On Dec. 23, 1846, soon after Brown’s proclamation and just before the designated day, Dec. 27, theRegisterprinted, in a prominent column on the masthead page, just under the latest news of the war in Mexico. Headlined “Gen. Washington’s First Thanksgiving Proclamation,” it was President George Washington’s own October, 1789 proclamation, signed in New York not long after his original inauguration, that Thursday, Nov. 26, 1789, should be a formal “Day of Public Thanksgiving and Prayer … to be devoted by the people of these States, to the service of the great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, is, and shall be.”

It included some language that might cause problems for a president today: “that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions.”

Do modern presidents ever mention national transgressions? Before they’re facing indictment, I mean?

Washington didn’t mention any pilgrims, or anything about dinner, and that proclamation may have been related to an old patriotic holiday, Evacuation Day; the day before, Nov. 25, was the sixth anniversary of the departure of British soldiers from New York.

The Moses brothers may have printed Washington’s proclamation, then more than half a century old, just to remind Tennesseans who might be unfamiliar with the concept that Thanksgiving is supposed to be in November, not December, and supposed to be on a Thursday, not a Sunday. But it had also been recently printed in theNew York Journal of Commerce, with the line, “We presume few people have read his beautiful and appropriate Proclamation.”

In early 1847, theKnoxville Registerquoted a Nashville report, signed only by the initial “W,” that “Yesterday [Dec. 27, 1846] was observed by the churches as Thanksgiving day, being the first ever appointed in this State, I believe. The services at all the churches were appropriate to the occasion. By the by, I think it would be best to have some other day than Sunday for Thanksgiving. It should be on Thursday. However, for a beginning, I suppose Sunday will do.”

***

TheRegisterkept pushing for it, publishing a hopeful headline in early November, 1847: “A National Thanksgiving.”

It was not exactly national yet. So far, according to contemporary reports, only New York, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts had declared Thanksgiving to be an official state holiday.

We’re accustomed to planning our Thanksgivings in advance, but the first celebrants didn’t have that luxury. “The Governor has set apart the 25^thday of this month as a day of Thanksgiving and Prayer,” reported theKnoxvilleRegister—on the 23^rd. “Most of the States of the Union have selected the same day. We hope the Governor’s suggestions will be carried into effect.”

So, we’re going to celebrate Thanksgiving, and it’s day after tomorrow. They barely had time to thaw a turkey.

That was a different governor, by the way, in fact a different Gov. Brown: inaugurated only a month before, Neill S. Brown was a Whig, a former elector for Knoxville’s presidential candidate Hugh Lawson White and later an associate of Parson Brownlow. Also from Giles County, he was a strong opponent of the Mexican War, and popular here as a supporter for a state school for the deaf.

The next day, with a headline, “Thanksgiving Day,” theRegisterpolitely reminded us, “It will be recollected that to-morrow (Thursday) is the day set apart by the Governor, to be observed as a day of public Thanksgiving throughout the State. Appropriate religious services, we understand, will be held at several of the Churches in this place, on Thursday morning.”

It’s not obvious that it was a major success. It’s harder to find mentions of Thanksgiving in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In 1849, the Moses brothers had given up the Register to editors who seemed less enthusiastic about launching holidays in this rough-edged town still hoping for a railroad.

Another governor, William Trousdale, of Sumner County, went through the motions again, “in concurrence with several of our sister states,” with a proclamation for Nov. 29, 1849.

In 1851, Parson W.G. Brownlow’sKnoxville Whigbriefly mentioned Thanksgiving and approved of it, albeit in a paragraph buried in a political essay: “Thursday was Thanksgiving-day, appointed by the Governor of this State, [presumably new Gov. William Campbell, of Sumner County, who was, like Brownlow, a Unionist Whig] and also by the Governors of 25 [of 31] other States. All the business houses were closed, and Divine services were performed in the various churches. This all looks well, and seems appropriate, morally, socially, and politically, in a Christian people. We should acknowledge with humility our lasting obligations to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, and for food and raiment; but it did seem to me there was a little too much Liquor drank on that day. True, it rained all day, and was cold, and otherwise disagreeable, which formed a sort of excuse for drinking!”

In 1855, another governor, the 47-year-old tailor from Greeneville named Andrew Johnson, made a proclamation that Thanksgiving be observed on Dec. 6. It may have been the first official celebration of the holiday in Tennessee in a few years. In any case, perhaps partly because that governor later became president, it seems to be better remembered than the previous ones. And for perhaps the first time, it was celebrated in a concentrated public way, with a “Divine Service” held at First Presbyterian Church. It was an ecumenical service—in fact, the pastor leading it was Episcopal priest Thomas Humes, much later to be president of the University of Tennessee. It’s likely that it was held in the Presbyterian church because it was a brand new and capacious building, a neoclassical marble-faced structure at the corner of State and Church. (The current structure there replaced it in 1902 in a comparable style, and reputedly with some of the same foundation stones.)

“We presume our citizens will properly observe the day, and as is customary allow a suspension of business on the occasion,” said theRegister. The line “as is customary” seems to suggest Knoxvillians were familiar with the holiday, even if details before that era are elusive.

One thing that was not yet customary was the date. The following year, Tennessee shifted the holiday into November, but it remained a week later than the holiday as celebrated in most other states.

The year that Thanksgiving became a national, federal holiday, was probably the most famous Thanksgiving in Knoxville history. When Abraham Lincoln declared it to be a national holiday, on Nov. 26, 1863, Knoxville shared the national news, because the city was under siege by more than 17,000 Confederates, some of whom were manning the big guns on the cliffs across the river that allowed them to bombard the city’s western forts, along with the university. Much-admired young Gen. Sanders had died of a sniper wound a week before. Few Knoxvillians could have celebrated the feast, because food was in short supply. Still, Gen. Burnside complied with his commander in chief’s holiday directive, issuing General Field Order Number 32, which instructed his embattled soldiers to observe Thanksgiving. As the late historian Dr. Digby Seymour remarked, Knoxville’s defenders received “a full ration of bullets but only a half-ration of bread.”

The short but horrific Battle of Fort Sanders came three days after Thanksgiving, a Confederate bloodbath on the muddy ramparts that ended the siege.

The Civil War and its losses stunned Knoxville and made it forget most holidays for a while. But by the late 1860s, the city was growing rapidly, enjoying a cultural renaissance, culturally livelier than it had been before, afterward.

It’s typical of 19^th-century Knoxville that the first handy evidence that we were eating a big Thanksgiving Dinner, and not just praying at a religious service, on the big holiday, comes from an exotic source.

One of the first stores to advertise ingredients for Thanksgiving recipes was a unique Market Square store with an Asian persona. Advertised with an eye-catching Chinese sculpture out front, Tea Hong carried imported teas, coffee, and other goods from overseas. Despite its Eastern image, it was actually run by a colorful European immigrant named Victor Hugo Sturm. The resourceful Mr. Sturm was said to be Jewish, but he also claimed to be a godson of French novelist Victor Hugo; whether he was from Germany or Portugal, as different sources have it, is unclear.

On Nov. 14, 1869, Sturm advertised “every thing that is rare and choice for your thanksgiving dinner; such as Celery, Grapes, Mince Meat, Oysters, Sardines, New Figs, New Raisins, all kinds of Jelleys and Preserves, Almonds and other kinds of Nuts, all kinds of Cheese, all kinds of Crackers, all kinds of French Fruits, in their own juice, English Pickles and Sauces, in great variety, Cranberries, choice Butter, the finest Potatoes in the world, New Hams, New Beef, the choicest Family Hams, and all other articles that may be needed.”

It may be the earliest list of ingredients for a Knoxville Thanksgiving meal. Who needs turkey?

Several years later, in 1900, the only book ever titled theKnoxville Cookbook, recommended a “Thanksgiving Dinner Menu.”

It opens with a quote from the 17^th-century British poet Abraham Cowley: “With a few friends and a few dishes dine, And much of mirth and moderate wine.”

The quote is appropriate to this early Knoxville Thanksgiving—all, that is, but the “moderate” part.

It opens with “Oysters Served in Square Blocks of Ice,” and continues with lemon and celery. Then Puree of Asparagus with Whipped Cream.” Followed by sherry, of course. Then baked fish, cucumber salad, and another wine, Sauternes. Then some “Chicken Souffle in Cases,” followed by still another wine, Claret. Then, finally something familiar: “Roast Turkey, Stuffed with Chestnuts, Cranberry Sauce.” Followed with macaroni and corn. Then, assuming you’re still craving a drink, a course of Roman Punch—which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a pagan concoction something like a champagne mimosa, complicated with additional fruit juices, rum and brandy.

Then, assuming you didn’t get enough turkey, some roast quail and celery salad. And, of course, Champagne.

For dessert, “Individual Ices,” cake, coffee, and Crème de Menthe.

So, at the end of the century that spawned our Thanksgiving as a day of prayer in church, we were recommended to enjoy six different kinds of wine and liquor with our enormous meal.

If you have the wherewithal to try that recommendation in its entirety, please get in touch. You may need to sober up first.

Happy Thanksgiving, whatever that means to you.

Jack Neely, November 2023

The post Turkeys Meet Their Fate and Die appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

OPERA’S DEBUT IN KNOXVILLE

Both locals and newcomers tend to jump to the same conclusion: that Knoxville, whose founders were surely country-music or gospel fans if they knew anything about music at all, decided at some point—in recent years, of course—to put on airs, to imitate Atlanta perhaps, and get us up an opera company. The assumption is that opera, with its context of Nordic demigods and overdressed princes, remains foreign and contrary to our Appalachian character. Even if we’ve all known a few Falstaffs in our time.

As is often the case, reality surprises. In fact, the record would suggest that opera was here in downtown Knoxville, and a very big deal, before any other legitimate public entertainments. The sudden celebration of European opera in the years just after the Civil War was arguably the beginning of our modern habit of buying tickets to see jazz or rock shows. And there’s at least anecdotal evidence that opera played a specific role in sparking a local interest in country music.

Granted, early Knoxville is a shady character in some ways, and it’s hard to find much evidence that the struggling little town had any very coherent culture, high or low. During the city’s first several decades, before the Civil War, there were few advertised public performances of any sort, outside of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches and an occasional Whig rally.

If you skip religious or patriotic events, you could probably count the known musical performances in Knoxville before 1865 on your fingers and toes.

However: when we talk about the history of opera, it’s hard not to mention a couple of things that made Knoxville exceptional in that regard. One was an extraordinary encounter with a creative fellow of international stature, a “prince of bohemians,” who was associated with opera and spent some significant time in Knoxville during those spartan years.

Born in New York, John Howard Payne was an actor and playwright who spent most of his career on and around the London stage. He became best known for an 1822 operetta calledClari, the Maid of Milan, moreover for the show’s best-known aria, the melancholy “Home, Sweet Home.” You know it; it’s even in cartoons, with its distinctive line, “be it ever so humble.” Payne wasn’t here to perform. His fascination with the Cherokee brought him to spend some time with the original Cherokee Nation during its final years in Georgia. Arrested in Tennessee by the Georgia State Guard in 1835, Payne escaped across the mountains to Knoxville, home of the open-mindedKnoxville Register, which published his harrowing narrative of his treatment, and about the government’s abuse of the Cherokee.

The famous playwright’s ordeal, as related in theRegister, got the attention of readers across America; even John Quincy Adams in Massachusetts remarked on it. Payne was here for several days. He’s not known to have done any singing or acting in this pragmatic little town where the only stages were in a couple of churches and the courthouse.

His “Home Sweet Home” would be a favorite at multiple shows during Knoxville’s first opera era, decades later, often performed at the end of a show—perhaps a polite suggestion that the audience just go on home.

***

Rare as they are, published anecdotes about opera and opera people in London or New York appear in early local newspapers, so early Knoxvillians had at least heard of opera. It’s likely that several of Knoxville’s first citizens who had lived in Boston or Philadelphia had experienced an opera or something like it in their past. But before the arrival of railroads in the 1850s, this tiny, leftover frontier town suggested little pretention or aspiration to urban culture.

In March, 1836, just a few months after Payne’s visit, the sameRegisterran an ad for a New York music supplier called Atwill’s Music Saloon, describing “selections from Rossini’s Operas for Two Flutes.”

Although it’s just an ad for a faraway retailer, it’s the first suggestion that there might have been a passing interest in operatic music in this leftover frontier town of about 2,000 people—and the first local appearance of the name of Gioachino Rossini, a 44-year-old Italian composer who would loom large in Knoxville’s 21^st-century history as the honoree of a major festival. It’s one of the first times any opera composer’s name appeared in local papers.

The publication of several shape-note guidebooks with sheet music in the 1840s and later suggests that Knoxville had a reputation for that Sacred Harp singing—which is very different from opera, but demands vocal discipline and some understanding of how harmony works.

By June, 1848, a “Philharmonic Concert” given by a “Philharmonic Society” in Knoxville was reportedly well-attended—though a short writeup mentions nothing about the venue, the program, or the performers, offering us little clue of what it was like. But that same phrase would pop up almost 20 years later, in a much more significant context.

One of Knoxville’s first heralded concerts sounds more like a sideshow. In June, 1849, an ad goes “GEN. TOM THUMB: This celebrated English dwarf proposes to give a grand vocal concert this evening at the court-house. We hope the general will be liberally patronized, as he is himself a great curiosity, and will, no doubt, give a very entertaining concert.”

The famous Connecticut-born Tom Thumb was not English, though by then, when he was only 11, he had already toured in England and met Queen Victoria. Details are scant. But is it possible that the celebrity, who was not much more than two feet tall, performed Knoxville’s first advertised vocal concert?

The arrival of railroads supercharged the old town and its cultural aspirations. An organization called the East Tennessee Musical Association, made up of 24 men, materialized by 1855, with the stated intention of organizing public concerts. Among them were New Hampshire native George Cooke, who was then the president of the university, and Massachusetts-born Alvin Barton, who would be a key figure in opera development in years to come.

A rare “Concert” by Blakely’s Orchestral Chorus Company, described as “two ladies and three gentlemen from the Boston and New York Academies of Music,” was an apparent success at the local Odd Fellows Hall in March, 1855. The association wrote an open letter of praise: “We part with you as artists and friends, assuring that wherever you go, our best wishes are with you.” The Knoxville group’s letter was quoted to promote Blakely’s Nashville appearance.

An unsigned editorial in the Knoxville Register in early 1857 asked, “what has become of the East Tenn. Musical Association and her Concerts? Let us have something occasionally to relieve the monotony of everyday life.”

A list of its members, which included a few Swiss immigrants, but also both hardcore Unionists and Secessionists—including William G. Swan, the future Confederate Congressman–may suggest why it came apart. Cooke resigned from the university amid accusations that he was an abolitionist.

Meanwhile, a Professor J.W. Erdman, from Indiana, showed up in town, advertising himself as a teacher of piano and guitar, he taught at the East Tenn. Female Institute, a respected school for young women. He presented a series of public vocal recitals, one of them described as a “delightful and refreshing entertainment.” But the professor seems to disappear soon after that.

Something of semi-serious intent arrived at the Lamar House hotel in 1858: a quartet called the “Sight-Singing Concert Troupe,” including R.F. Beal, the “lion bass,” as well as a tenor and two sopranos. According to a rare witness, “the audience, among whom were some of our well-known amateur musicians, were delighted with the performances.” Beal was an author in the sight-singing field, and may have been here to sell some books.

***

However, it was not until about two years after the Civil War that Knoxville started singing, and singing in a trained and practiced way, and drawing audiences to hear it. This sustained interest in vocal music emerged almost suddenly, much of it prompted by the arrival of one extraordinary newcomer. As Knoxville grew rapidly with railroad-fueled industry, waves of immigration, especially from several German-speaking principalities, refugees from political chaos as a result of the Revolutions of 1848, were changing the culture of East Tennessee, sometimes radically.

Originally from Leipzig, home of Bach and Mendelssohn, Gustavus Knabe was in his 40s when he first strolled down Gay Street. He was, in fact, a former member of Mendelssohn’s orchestra, and had reportedly been friends with Robert and Clara Schumann and a passing acquaintance of the young Richard Wagner. He crossed the ocean and gravitated to Wartburg, founded as a New World refuge for German immigrants. He then roamed around the region some, living in Maryville, Athens, and Cleveland, where he enlisted in the Union Army, leading a brass band for an Ohio regiment.Knabe (his German name is pronounced with three syllables, something like “Kanobba”) played several instruments, and was related to the Knabe Piano family of Baltimore, but he was an expert on the French horn.

He landed in Knoxville around 1864, perhaps attracted by a number of other talented Germans here.

In Knoxville, in 1867, when not much seemed to be going well in the war-ravaged city except for the introduction of baseball, Knabe founded a group of musicians and singers he called the Philharmonic Society.

On a Friday evening just before Christmas, in an old bank building on Main Avenue, Knabe convened this new musical club, “invited from all the choirs in the city,” to create something remarkable.

It was barely two months before the group put on its first concert. “A large and appreciative audience assembled the old Methodist church last night, to listen to the concert of the Philharmonic Society,” reported theDaily Press & Herald. “Of the concert we can say nothing less than it was a splendid success. The managers, with rare judgment, arranged the program so that the exhibition was just long enough to gratify the lovers of good music without becoming tedious to any.” That’s the essential challenge, then as now.

Included in the show was the overture toMartha, presumably by Flotow; “Invitation a la Valse,” perhaps by Von Weber; the wrenching “Miserere,” fromTrovatore, by Verdi—it had premiered in Rome only 15 years earlier—involving an organ, piano, and Knabe’s French horn; then a “barcarolle” as a vocal duet (it could have come from any of several operas); and the famous “Fantasie,” a complex piano solo adapted from Donizetti’sDon Pasquale, an opera then 25 years old.

In 1868, Knoxville had never seen a country-music concert or a football game; it didn’t yet have a public library, public transit, or a sewer system. But it had opera—or, at least, arias from operas.

Apparently encouraged by the popular response, the following month Knabe announced the formal aspirations of the Philharmonic Society: “To encourage a taste for good music in the community—to afford opportunities for practice and an advanced school, as it were, for the musicians of Knoxville—also to afford a pleasant and profitable amusem*nt for both musicians and their friends.” They rented a room big enough to hold 100, and a piano. They would charge for concerts, but also asked for donations. It sounds as if Knabe, the conductor, was paid something for his services, making him perhaps Knoxville’s first professional musician—but the musicians were expected to do it for the love of music. They would practice weekly, and give a public concert every six to eight weeks. Knabe was a composer, himself, and most of the early programs include one or two of his own pieces, mainly instrumentals. He became most famous for a funeral march.

By April, 1868, theDaily Press and Messengerwas so impressed by this sudden surge of vocal talent that it declared, “No city of its proportions has more musical genius than Knoxville.”

A reporter made his way into the Main Avenue headquarters to listen. “We strayed into the Philharmonic Hall, on Friday night last; we found Professor Knabe standing in the center of a semicircle of fifty singers, gesticulating most vehemently, and sometimes furiously. We asked a friend what he meant. He replied, ‘he is marking time.’ We were quite delighted with the music, and became satisfied that all that was necessary to make Knoxville quite celebrated for its musical talent was a little concentration and organization of the individual genius of the different members of the society. This Professor Knabe is trying to do.”

The concert of April, 1868, included a solo and chorus from Verdi’sErnani, an 1844 opera. Giuseppi Verdi, who was 54 at the time his work was being performed in Knoxville, was still very active; some of his best-known operas, likeAida, Otello, andFalstaff, were still in the future.

That concert also included Sue Barton performing “The Fairy Queen,” likely the Henry Purcell composition from an operatic work: “Of course it was applauded,” noted thePress & Herald, “and of course it was encored, for whoever heard her birdlike voice that did not long to hear it again?”

They closed that one with a flute solo of “Home, Sweet Home,” the song written by John Howard Payne. It’s likely that no one at the show remembered the operatic songwriter had ever spent a dramatic week in Knoxville. Payne had died years before. Most of the people who lived in Knoxville were newcomers.

But the old song had enjoyed a surge of popularity during the Civil War, sung by sentimental soldiers on both sides.

The Society’s members became local celebrities. John Scherf, the German immigrant who was the “Prince of Caterers” at the Lamar House, hosted an oyster party for the Society, which by then numbered about 60. On another occasion, all the singers were invited en masse to the estate of coal tycoon E.J. Sanford for a party of ice cream and strawberries. Of the Society, several pianists and violinists were mentioned—and Mrs. Trowbridge, a Miss Craigmiles, a Miss Mabry (perhaps Isabelle, daughter of West Knox County’s George Mabry), and a Miss Cowan. But among Knoxville’s early singing stars, one towered above the rest, a woman routinely referred to as “Mrs. Barton.”

Then in her mid-20s, Sue Boyd Barton was a Knoxville native—born in Blount Mansion, in fact—who had already lived a life worthy of a Verdi plot. Daughter of a judge and Knoxville mayor, she was a cousin of Confederate spy Belle Boyd, who has sought refuge with Sue’s family after some misadventures along the Virginia front to evade imprisonment. They apparently became friends. But later the same year, Sue fell for a handsome young Union brigadier general named William Sanders, who was mortally wounded defending Knoxville from the Confederate siege. Sue later married a Unionist merchant, Massachusetts-born Alvin Barton, but for the rest of her life she treasured a keepsake Sanders had left her—perhaps as he lay dying at the Lamar House—the uniform epaulet he had worn as a colonel.

Some called her “Knoxville’s Jenny Lind.” An early 1868Knoxville Press & Messengerarticle remarkedin a concert review, “Mrs. Barton’s singing was what it has always been—thene plus ultraof vocal music; nothing can surpass it.”

The Society elected officers. The first president was Alvin Barton, the Massachusetts-born retail executive who’d been promoting cultural education since before the war. He sometimes sang, himself, and may have been obliged to, being married to Knoxville’s favorite soprano. What he thought of his wife’s preoccupation with her lost brigadier general is unrecorded.

Vice president was Dr. John Mason Boyd—the celebrated gynecological surgeon whose name would later be heralded on the porte-cochere of the courthouse.

Most of the operatic singing was by locals, and mostly performed in local churches. The German-immigrant group known as Turn Verein raised the bar, opening a public hall in what had previously been a fraternal lodge on Main Street, near Prince (today, somewhere near the main entrance to the City County Building). In those politically toxic days, the new venue had a strict no-politics rule. It was apparently not quite finished in June, 1869, when it hosted, for three nights, the Great Western Buffo Opera Troupe, apparently a traveling company promising “Operas, Burlesques, Extravaganzas, Farces, Pantomimes, and Ethiopian Minstrelsy.”

In October, 1869, a more polished Turner Hall welcomed the John Templeton Opera Troupe, who performed there over a period of several nights in May, 1869, a production ofCamilleas well as some operettas.

Named not for the famous English tenor who was still alive then but for a New York singer, the troupe starred Templeton’s wife, known as Alice Vane, but the other performers and the nature of the opera isn’t obvious in news accounts—but it’s likely that theirCamillewas a version of Verdi’sLa Traviata, based on an Alexandre Dumas novel. That opera had been making the rounds since 1853. All we know is that the hall for what may have been the first opera ever presented in Knoxville was “crowded with a fashionable audience.”

The music itself was always important, and exhilarating to some listeners. But the “fashionable audiences” sometimes impress writers more than the performances. It seemed important to them to let the world know, in those rough-edged days when all saloons had spittoons and gunfights in the street were common, that Knoxville respected opera. Part of the appeal of opera was social, and valuable in part to improve Knoxville’s image.

Turner Hall occasionally hosted Philharmonic Society concerts, as in June, 1870, when a series of selections including Meyerbeer’s operaLes Huguenotshighlighted the singing talents of Sue Boyd Barton and a few others. A Mrs. Craigmiles, from Cleveland, Tenn.—one of the few members who didn’t live within walking distance—sang the “Fantasie” from Rossini’sWilliam Tell.

Many of these singers seemed dedicated to their craft. In an era when a good marriage was regarded as elemental to happiness and success, several of Knoxville’s first generation of singers never married; of those who did, few had children. They were always available for a rehearsal.

The sudden popularity of opera drove a frenzy of theater-building. At about the same time Turner’s was hosting its first opera in late 1869, J.B. Hoxsie, a hustling New Jersey-born railroad man and oven merchant since before the war, opened his Hoxsie’s Hall, “a new temple of art,” on the second floor of a Gay Street building in November, 1869. It appears it was about where the Krutch Park extension is today. Its first event was a concert of Knabe’s Philharmonic Society. Later, Hoxsie’s reportedly hosted an obscure opera calledThe Stranger. The Templeton Opera tried Hoxsie’s Hall for a few nights in November, 1870. A high point came in February, 1871, when Hoxsie’s hosted the Adelaide Phillipps Concert Co., featuring that popular contralto from England, in February, 1871. Phillipps was probably the best-known performer of any sort in Knoxville history up to that time (unless we count Mr. Thumb, with whom Phillipps had in fact performed, herself, early in her career). In her company were composer-pianist Edward Hoffman and baritone Jules D’Hasler—who had recently escaped war-besieged Paris in a balloon.

Hoxsie’s lasted only about nine years, but its building later became the location of McArthur’s Music Hall, an elaborate piano dealership that hosted scores of musical events for many years to come.

Another building, the mundane-sounding Board of Trade Hall, sometimes hosted Philharmonic Society concerts, too, as in early 1872, when their program included sung pieces by Verdi, Rossini, and von Weber—as well as compositions by Knabe, himself. He was never shy about inserting his own work into any program.

In 1871, President Ulysses Grant appointed Knabe consul to Ghent, an unusual honor. Knabe declined the post, choosing to stay in Knoxville. Things were just getting exciting. By that time, he was teaching some at the university. In fact, one of his first homes was in the “East Building” up on College Hill. At the time, East Tennessee University, under the leadership of author and former Episcopal priest Thomas Humes, was still known for its liberal-arts emphasis, though that would soon shift, as federal funding for vocational study became available.

One of Knabe’s fellow German-refugee-immigrant peers in Knoxville was Julius Ochs, a judge, energetic merchant, and lay rabbi who cofounded Temple Beth-El, but best remembered to history as the father of Adolph Ochs, influential future publisher of theNew York Times. Ochs and his wife, Emma Levy Ochs, had lived here before the war; they returned in 1864, about the same time Knabe arrived.Knabe and the elder Ochs both served on a local German Relief committee, to help those injured or displaced by the Franco-Prussian War.

Julius Ochs was also a talented musician, and in the postwar period reportedly created an opera with an Old Testament theme. Little detail of that work remains. However, he and Knabe worked together on a pro-German musical farce calledNapoleon and William. Ochs wrote the play and performed a role as a Prussian officer; Knabe wrote and directed the music. It played to a “select and gratified audience” at Turner Hall. It was declared to be “one of the most laughable performances that has ever been placed upon a Knoxville stage.” (It wouldn’t have been popular with everybody; there were some French sympathizers in town, including one university professor, Frederic Esperandieu, who actually returned to Europe to help the French forces as a medic.)

***

All that was happening before Knoxville had anything that city folks would call a theater. German-speaking Swiss immigrant Peter Staub arrived in town not long after Knabe, nursing the humiliation of the failure of an attempt to found a Swiss community in the Cumberlands. Impressed with Knoxville’s sudden interest in the performing arts—and the inadequacy of the city’s theaters—he built Staub’s Opera House at the southeast corner of Gay and Cumberland, an elaborate European-style opera-house with multiple balconies, designed in the new Second Empire style, all the rage in Paris, a city Staub knew well. Its interior decor celebrated the “Alpine splendor” of his beloved Switzerland. His stated goal was to build a theater that would please, “especially, those who love opera and drama” in a venue so grand that it would tempt “first-rate troupes” to the city that until recently had little reputation for performing arts. With seating for over 1,000, with a dedicated section for African American patrons, it got notices across the South, reported to be “the largest and finest edifice of its kind in the state.” It was the most impressive building in town.

Perhaps in gratitude, Knoxville elected Staub mayor, twice.

As the theater was under construction, Staub became president of the Philharmonic Society. He reserved a third-floor hall for the use of Knabe and his impressive singing troupe. It was just in time, because the state Supreme Court had just taken over their old hall, on Main.

Staub’s first production wasWilliam Tell—not the Rossini opera, but the 1825 play. It was presumably non-musical, though it opened with an “Overture,” performed by the Hodgson Orchestra, led by English-born musician Herbert Hodgson, musical brother of writer Frances Hodgson Burnett; their immigrant family had moved here about the same time Knabe did. The most complicated and expensive of art forms at the time, full-fledged opera, with orchestra, chorus, conductors and stage managers, was never frequent at Staub’s. More typical were simple concerts or vocal recitals; comic operettas, which might strike us more like Broadway-style musicals; variety acts that would become known as vaudeville, just evolving at the time; and lectures, by nationally popular writers George Washington Cable, James Whitcomb Riley, and even Frederick Douglass. But for more than half a century, Staub’s would be Knoxville’s grand venue for music, especially singing, and apparently did host several full operas.

In its inaugural season, in January, 1873, Staub’s welcomed Ole Bull, the Norwegian violinist who was one of the best known instrumentalists in the world, having been associated with Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg, and Franz Liszt. In Knoxville he accompanied opera singers, including soprano Graziella Ridgway and a baritone known as Signor Ferranti. They sang, among other pieces, selections from Rossini’sThe Barber of Seville. Aware that he was performing in a recently opened theater, Bull left Staub a written commendation: “It gives me great pleasure to recommend your Opera House to any first-class Company, as in every way perfect in all its arrangements and acoustics….”

It was an enviable mark of distinction that may have helped launch Staub’s credibility to such a degree that over the next 25 years, the theater attracted some of the world’s greatest singing talent, but still celebrated the best of the local.

A few weeks later, a Philharmonic concert featured 10 singers, and again the newspapers singled out one: “Mrs. Barton, of course, electrified the audience with her magnificent voice and perfect culture,” reported theDaily Press & Heraldof her interpretation of an aria from Donizetti’sLucretia Borgia. “Her singing was exquisite.”

The word choice is worth noting. She electrified the audience many years before the theater itself, or anything else in town, was literally electrified.

TheChroniclequoted an item inThe Record, apparently a newspaper in another state:

“Good music—so earnestly desired and so seldom found—has in the city of Knoxville many warm supporters … we rejoice to state that good music is better sustained in Knoxville than in almost any city in the South. The Philharmonic Society, numbering about 60 active members, under the leadership of Professor Knabe, has well rendered to appreciative audiences some of the most difficult productions in the whole repertory of song…. Through many discouragements and years of toil he has lived to see his favorite notions of music adopted, and instead of the sentimental love ditties of modern days, there is now a demand for the grand harmonies of the old masters.”

The old masters were not all that old, by the way: Donizetti had died only 25 years earlier. Verdi was pushing 60, but still had some of his best-known work ahead of him.

Some of the Philharmonic Society’s shows raised money to help alleviate major disasters. In October, 1871, the Philharmonic brought together 40 musicians at Turner Hall to perform a Grand Concert for the “Relief of Chicago.” It was just days after the Great Chicago Fire killed 300. It was a mostly operatic concert including pieces by Rossini, Donizetti, Mozart, Weber, Hoffmann, and Meyerbeer. George Pullman, the railroad-car magnate who was heading up Chicago’s relief effort, sent a personal letter to Knoxville’s Philharmonic Society thanking them for the assist: $152, the equivalent of several thousand today. Another benefit at Hoxsie’s Hall brought in Hodgson’s Band to raise money for musician Charles Hayes, “fallen invalid to a dreadful disease.” A benefit at Staub’s in October, 1873, included several operatic arias from Donizetti and Verdi, and offered aid to the thousands of victims of yellow fever along the lower Mississippi where 2,000 had died in Memphis alone.

It would appear that Staub’s Opera House witnessed the performances of hundreds of arias before its first opera. It’s hard to nail down when that event happened, but it was no later than September, 1876, when Payson’s English Opera Troupe presented German composer Frederick von Flotow’s popular romantic-comic opera,Martha. With a piano for accompaniment rather than an orchestra, as was common for light operas,Marthareceived “unbounded applause.” In the audience was Knabe himself, who wrote a letter to theDaily Tribune. “Miss [Rachel] Samuels has a sweet yet powerful voice.Especially does she sing in the higher register with perfect ease and without any overstrained effort. Miss [Adelaide] Randall has a rich and charming contralto voice, and combines the histrionic talent with that of the tragedienne most happily.”

Randall, a Baltimore native sometimes described as a mezzosoprano, had a bit of a career singing on the New York stage, but returned to Knoxville for several more rounds of applause at Staub’s.

The same troupe returned with another performance of the same opera five months later, in February, 1877, this time with New York tenor Alonzo Hatch, who later had a national career as a popular singer.

They drew a bigger crowd on the second appearance, one that seems to have been as impressive to the reviewer as the performance itself was: “one of the most fashionable audiences that we have ever seen in the Opera-house—the very elite of Knoxville were present; and, we may add, the citizens of Knoxville could point with pride to the assembly. The ladies, dresseda la mode, presented a most fascinating appearance. A much-traveled gentleman remarked to us that one might traverse the whole territory of the United States without finding an audience of more culture and refinement. But the Paysons deserved the large house that greeted them….”

Described as “first class” but now obscure, Payson’s seems to be known to history mainly for that 1876-77 American tour.

The same company performed other musical plays on evenings thereafter, including Jacques Offenbach’s one-act comic operaVertigo(a.k.a.Pepito), which “brought down the house.”

Another traveling opera troupe put on a two-act version of Bellini’s emotional 1831 operaNormaat Staub’s in 1880. ADaily Chroniclereviewer attended the dress rehearsal and seemed flabbergasted by how great it was. “The unutterably grand masterpiece of the old Italian maestro is well rendered, and, in the acting and vocalism, well calculated to improve and delight those whose good fortune it is to be present Friday evening.”

In the 1880s, opera soared, as did Knoxville, which almost tripled in population in that decade. A separate company founded by another German-immigrant family, the Krutzsch Concert Troupe, featured, on piano, Oscar Krutzsch—brother of painter/organist Charles C. Krutch (some family members tolerated an Anglicized spelling), who had a studio in Staub’s Opera House. The troupe sometimes toured regionally with a full range of singers, including soprano Cornelia Crozier, a Philharmonic Society veteran who had reportedly “studied extensively abroad and sang with much spirit and sweetness.” She liked to sing from Verdi’sErnani, and taught music from her studio on Cumberland Avenue.

Professor E.W. Steen, a professional musician, music scholar, and music dealer from Cincinnati, began spending more and more time in this promising city to the south, bringing his musical family with him, and by 1882, they were performing in local productions. Steen sang tenor in a local production of Edmond Audran’s recent comic opera,La Mascotte, at Staub’s in April, 1882.

Knabe, still a major player, founded the Mozart Club, which produced a 15-piece orchestra, plus a “grand chorus of trained voice,” including Cornelia Crozier. Their debut at Staub’s in November, 1882, was described by theKnoxville Chronicleas “an event in Knoxville’s musical history.” It was the month after the horror of the Mabry-O’Conner gunfight, which left all three prominent combatants dead, that the Mozart Club opened another venue, Mozart Hall, just down the sidewalk from the bloody scene. A variegated second-floor space with multiple rooms, Mozart Hall sounds as if it was more for musicians than for audiences—though it did make room for at least 50 spectators—often with musicians and singers performing for each other in a multi-room complex where in December, 1882, they put on a fun pocket production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s recent hit,Pirates of Penzance.

In January, 1883, a local company put on Audran’s new comic opera,Olivette, at Staub’s. Headlined “A Grand Success,” in theKnoxville Daily Tribune, it starred Marie Lawrence in the title role—her “brilliant” performance reportedly received “storm after storm of applause”—but earning special mention was one Mae Bates. “Miss Bates is also a rising star and won a full share of hearty applause. She is very young and timid, but has a wonderfully sweet voice.” Encouraged to go on the road, the local troupe produced a big show ofOlivettein Chattanooga’s James Hall. Again, even though she was not one of the leads, Bates was singled out in theChattanooga Democrat: she “has a strikingly sympathetic voice that masters the most trying intricacies of trills, bravuras, and extravaganzas with remarkable beauty of expression.”

It’s particularly interesting to see that early notices for Bates, one of a few Knoxville singers who gained some acclaim on the international stages of London and New York—as “Villa Knox.” (The stage name paired her home county with an opera setting, even if it sounds today like a suburban condo development.)

By late 1882, Knoxville was abuzz about the debut of the Festival. Sharing the role of musical director were three of the major drivers of musical performance, including Knabe, E.W. Steen, and Ethelrod W. Crozier, a pianist who had been involved with the Philharmonic, mainly as accompanist, since its beginning.

“The May Festival” would be its simple name, and it included a grandiose ball, an art exhibition, and a nonviolent version of a jousting tournament—but it was mainly a celebration of opera. Later articulations would be called “The Music Festival.” The scope of it, and the quality of the featured performers, varied by the year, but can still astonish opera scholars.

It was a spring festival, usually lasting four days. That first year featured a production of Donizetti’sL’elisir d’amore, Planquette’sLes Cloche de Corneville, Flotow’sMartha—and, yes,Pirates of Penzance. Its star was the 17-year-old Fay Templeton, the soon to be famous actor, singer, and songwriter, early in a career that would bloom on Broadway.

Several of these operas and operettas presented at the festival were new works—in fact, opera composer Plaquette was still in his early 30s. Much of it took place at Staub’s, but with a deliberate goal to bring opera to the masses, the Festival also put on productions at the new public outdoor space later to be known as Chilhowee Park. The festival’s president was young attorney Joshua Caldwell, who was soon to found the extremely durable literary society known as the Irving Club (it still meets every Monday night). The stage manager for three of the operas was young widowed mother Lizzie Crozier French; later to be known as a suffragist, she was sister of pianist Ethelrod W. Crozier. The opera festival was not universally popular. Although two Knoxville newspapers enthusiastically supported the festival, the new, no-nonsenseKnoxville Sentineldenounced it. These visiting musicians are often arrogant and rude, the editor observed, and Knoxville needs factories, not operas.

Perhaps modeled after a similar festival in Cincinnati, Knoxville’s Music Festival drew some big stars. The 1889 festival brought Vienna soprano Emma Juch—one of the world’s great prima donnas, she was then still in her 20s—and English-born operetta composer Victor Herbert, here as both a music director and a cello player. Only recently moved to America, Herbert was only 30, and not nearly as famous as he would be 20 years later.

But here’s a cultural inversion that pulls the rug out from our perceptions of popular music. Through all these years of excitement of witnessing musical performers on stage, Knoxvillians had rarely or never purchased a ticket to see and hear a musician performing any familiar American musical genre, like old-time fiddling. That arrived as a sort of droll surprise at Staub’s Opera House, at the very end of the first big opera festival in May, 1883. A formally dressed crowd was still seated, having heard the final soprano, that Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m., when a troop of more than a dozen mostly elderly men took the stage, carrying violins. They put on a show, claiming it to be a fiddling contest, to claim a prize of $25 in gold. Remarkably, the opera crowd remained seated, just to see what would happen. They were playing old-fashioned music, from “before the war,” modest tunes no one had ever seen performed before a real audience. Most folks had heard “Arkansas Traveler” and “Grey Eagle” at barn dances and around Market Square, but never in an auditorium, never mind one called an Opera House.

It was the sort of creative surprise you might expect at an imaginative music festival. Was it the world’s first country-music concert?

TheDaily Tribuneremarked that the fiddle contest was an “innovation” in the realm of festivals in general: “but Knoxville will make new departures. She is the metropolis of East Tennessee—the capital of a capital people. They are unlike any other people in the United States. They aresui generis, and for Knoxville to have a festival like any other city would be to forget her rugged rocks and rills….”

Perhaps that one extraordinary event represented the Victorian version of “Keep Knoxville Scruffy.” Soon after opening that door, fiddling contests became a common thing on Market Square.

***

In the 1880s, as the compact city grew in population to about 23,000, Knoxville experienced a general renaissance—its first sustainable public library, a literary weekly, several cultural carnivals, three rival daily newspapers, a championship baseball team, and an opera festival. They were all elemental parts of a booming city that was proud of itself, and had plenty to offer strangers from around the western world.

And during those music-festival years, other notable singers came and went. Independent of the festival, in October, 1883, Grau’s Opera Company put onBillee Taylor, a “nautical comedy opera” by young but doomed English composer Edward Solomon, starring Alonzo Hatch, several years after his debut at Staub’s.

Better known was Emma Abbott, whose Grand Opera Company came to Staub’s to put on her operatic extravaganza, different operas on each of four nights, in 1885. The strong-willed Abbott, known as “the People’s Prima Donna,” was known to change operas to her liking, singing in English and sometimes adding familiar tunes reflecting a modern American sensibility.

The same year, a Bijou Opera Co.—no relation to the theater that was not yet built—performed a series includingThe Mikado, in the fall of 1885, another relatively recent show, and evidence that Gilbert and Sullivan’s sophisticated comedies had followers in Knoxville. Its star was Adelaide Randall, who had performed there more than once before. Also on the bill were Balfe’sThe Bohemian GirlandThe Bridal Trap, an English-language adaptation of an Audran comic opera. The troupe returned a year later with a similar lineup.

Girofle-Girofla, Lecocq’s wacky opera-bouffe, was one of the most talked-about performances of 1886, at Staub’s, another local production starring Mae Bates.

In November, 1890, the traveling Conried Opera Co. producedThe Gypsy Baron, a recent three-act operetta by the Waltz King, Johann Strauss, as well as an older and less common work, Adolph Muller’s romantic opera,The King’s Fool, on separate nights at Staub’s.

Opera society, composed mostly of affluent Knoxvillians, many of whom had lived elsewhere, was part of the scene. One of local opera’s biggest supporters was a newcomer, Scottish industrialist Alexander Arthur, and his Boston wife Nellie. He was planning a sort of industrial axis at Cumberland Gap, Middlesborough, Ky., and Harrogate, Tenn., both named for admirable industrial cities in England.

Arthur became, in 1888, co-founder and vice president of the Mozart Choral Society—apparently an organization different from Knoxville’s Mozart Club of six years earlier. The Arthurs, who walked to the opera house from their home on West Hill, were notable for their dress, he in his top hat, carrying a cane.

And to complete the picture, those dandies with top hats and canes emerged from the Opera House to an African American tamale vendor named Harry Royston. After several hours seated in a theater that probably didn’t serve popcorn, it was nice to get a bite to eat.

Meanwhile, Welsh immigrants were in town in significant numbers to work in the iron foundry, bringing with them their strong backs and their singing traditions. There are stories of Welsh singing informally in Mechanicsville, where many of them lived. By 1890, they were going public with ticketed performances of their Eisteddfod events, some of them held downtown on Gay Street at McArthur’s Music House.

The Welsh community’s star singer, Will Richards, was singing in public choral groups by the 1880s, occasionally on Staub’s programs as a featured baritone, or, as sometimes described, bass. In 1891, theAtlanta Constitutiondescribed him as “one of the finest basso singers ever heard in the South.” He seems to have preferred popular songs like “Sweet Evalina” and the “Bandalero Song” to arias, perhaps part of the cultural shift of the Gay Nineties. He became a professional singer in Chicago, but frequently returned home, and always sang somewhere when he did. By the turn of the century, he was back at home in Mechanicsville, teaching voice.

The YMCA had its own singing Glee Club, introducing organist Frank Nelson, an eccentric genius of voice who became music director at St. John’s Episcopal and, for half a century, Knoxville’s singing impresario who groomed countless young sopranos for countless recitals for more than half a century to come.

The Marble City Quartette that included bass singer Robert DeArmond was a male singing group that emerged in the mid-1880s to be “a hit with the audience”: trained voices favoring sentimental and religious English-language songs like “Lighthouse by the Sea” and “Tenting on the Old Campground.”

One of the local singing stars of the 1890s was a New York-trained soprano publicized as Mrs. John Lamar Meek, who appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, often performed at Staub’s, operatic tunes like Gounod’s “Grand Aria from the Queen of Sheba.” She was “noted for her clear soprano voice, which she used so freely for the pleasure of her friends and the general public.” Also known as Mary Fleming Meek, her name is now most recognizable for something she did decades later for her hometown’s local university: an especially popular tune that starts “On a hallowed hill in Tennessee…” It was UT’s Alma Mater. Ironically, she was not an alumna of UT, which did not admit female students when she attended Mary Washington College in Virginia.

It was an era of oddities. Forty years after his first singing appearance here, General Tom Thumb returned to Knoxville, this time with his diminutive wife, to perform at Staub’s in 1891.

Obviously expensive and nerve-wracking to produce, the big, unlikely Music Festival sputtered a bit in the 1890s, with an attempted revival in 1895, spearheaded by Peter Staub’s son, Fritz, when the Anderson Opera Company produced an “Opera Week” here. But for the last few decades of the 19th century, a week of nights on the town was likely to include something significantly operatic.

A year later, theJournal & Tribunehailed “the Greatest Musical Event in the History of Knoxville.” The November, 1896, concert was a joint concert of two Metropolitan Opera stars, Maine-born, Milan-trained soprano Lillian Nordica, the “Yankee Diva” whose greatest successes had been in Europe, and contralto Rosa Linde, both of whom would be pioneer voices as operatic recording artists. Rosa Linde, who had studied with the legendary diva Pauline Viardot in Paris, had performed here before, on the same stage with Emma Juch, back in ‘89. Advertised as the “First Dramatic Contralto of America,” she had a personal connection to Knoxville, in that it was the former home of her husband, Frank P. Wright, in the days when he worked for W.W. Woodruff’s hardware store on Gay Street. “The fact she has, by marriage, become a daughter of Tennessee,” noted theJournal & Tribune, “will add no little interest to her appearance here tonight.” She sang an aria from Verdi’s Don Carlos “Mon coeur souvre” fromSamson and Delilah—which Saint-Saens himself had dedicated to the singer’s longtime teacher, Viardot—and a bit from Rossini’sBarber of Seville. Nordica sang from the French comic opera Mignon and Wagner’sTannheuser.

The mega-show was called “Nordica-Linde”—ignoring tenor John C. Dempsey and bass William H. Rieger, who also performed that night, sometimes alongside the women. It was part of a series of shows, both vocal and instrumental, sponsored by the Gay Street music store McArthur and Sons, featuring touring members of the Metropolitan Opera. They packed the house. Many came from out of town. The only empty seats were the bad seats. “Practically every musician in the city, both amateur and professional, was in attendance,” noted theSentinel, which had apparently made peace with the popularity of opera.

“This perhaps accounted for the enthusiastic applause which greeted nearly every number on the program. As a rule, Knoxville audiences are apt to be rather undemonstrative, but this was not the case Saturday evening.”

Through the 1890s came a regular diet of famous singers. Italian bass star Giuseppe Campanari performed at Staub’s in April, 1899, with a Boston orchestra. Details are scant.

Opera survived, if not with the same degree of popular fascination, in the era of ragtime. Staub’s Opera House became, more simply, Staub’s Theatre. In early 1908, Staub’s welcomed the regional premiere of Puccini’sMadame Butterfly, put on by Henry Savage’s opera, less than two years after its American debut—but it was clear that opera would be less common in the 20^thcentury.

Tectonic plates were shifting. Culture is a moving target, and by the turn of the century, culture was proliferating, splintering, gestating. By then, Knoxville had several theaters, offering a few dozen new options, high and low: vaudeville, minstrel shows, Broadway-style musicals, magic acts, pantomimes, tableaux vivants, and popular music, as jazz was evolving—a phenomenon rapidly accelerating via phonograph records and later radio. And, of course, team sports. Baseball had arrived in Knoxville about the same time opera did, but the end of the century brought both football and basketball, the latter of which competed directly with performing arts, because it was often played in the evening.

And even as the city got bigger, it lost some of its opera stalwarts. “Mrs. Barton,” now widowed, retired from the stage. Alexander Arthur went broke with the Panic of 1893, and left his stylish wife at their home on West Hill Avenue to join the reckless Klondike gold rush. Mae Bates moved to New York to pursue her muse, returning to Knoxville only occasionally.

And a generation once enthralled with opera and the discovery of an enthusiastic Knoxville audience for it was passing away.E.W. Crozier, one of the original music-festival directors, died in 1902; his sister, once-famous singer Cornelia, blamed his sudden death at age 60 on the trauma of dealing directly with the violent murder of his brother, the eccentric aviation pioneer.

Elderly Peter Staub was mostly retired when he was killed in a horse-and-buggy accident on Clinch Avenue and Locust in 1904.

Gustavus Knabe, often called “Professor” through his association with UT, retired from the scene due to rheumatism in the mid-1890s. His death in 1906 brought accolades, obituaries noting that he was a German immigrant from Leipzig, a Union veteran, “the Father of Music” in Knoxville, and that he had composed some funeral marches, some of which were played at his own funeral. At the time, his son William Staub was leading what would become known as UT’s marching band. Not mentioned at all in his obituaries were the Philharmonic Society or any of the other opera projects of the eras of Turner Hall, Hoxsie Hall, and the Mozart Club. However, Fritz Staub, son of the late Peter Staub, was one of his pallbearers, and an honorary pallbearer was Prof. E.W. Steen, one of the recognizable local singers of the 1880s.

A few months later, Steen moved back to Ohio, where he died not long afterward. Of those who packed the houses to hear opera in the 1870s and ‘80s, only a few remained.

By the time of Knabe’s death, there was a fresh interest in classical music, but this time more of what people wanted to experience, either from the stage or from the audience, was mainly instrumental, performed by string quartets, quintets, and sextets in hotel lobbies. Leading this new movement was a conservatory-trained violinist and cellist from Cincinnati named Bertha Roth, who drew polite crowds with her quartet, and later her “Little Symphony.” Later known as Bertha Walburn Clark, she became one of the first women in American history to found and conduct a full-sized symphony orchestra.

Still, talented sopranos in affluent families worked to train their voices, and vocal music survived in recitals and church services. Lillian McMillan, of Fountain City, began singing in public places around 1896; later, sometimes by her stage name, Dorothy South, she enjoyed a minor Broadway career and toured abroad.

And high points were yet to come. Staub’s became better known as the Lyric in the 1920s, and often showed motion pictures. But in May, 1927, contralto Marian Anderson performed there in the old hall, for a mixed-race audience—12 years before she was forbidden to sing at Washington’s Constitution Hall, due to the color of her skin.

The old Opera House, getting a little shabby, had already been showing movies, but the stage where prima donnas once performed became better known for boxing and wrestling matches, as well as occasional live-radio broadcasts of country music, especially WNOX’s “Tennessee Barn Dance” in the 1940s, which featured dozens of rising stars, including Chet Atkins and the reconstituted Carter Family.

***

Knoxville’s Golden Age of opera was not completely forgotten. A graying generation remembered the excitement of that pageant of promising young singers, and occasionally persuaded a newspaper columnist to remind Knoxville of its musical past, so that the younger generations of the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s would be aware of it. A few could remember some names of standout sopranos and a few tenors, but were vague about dates and context, and back then nobody had any handy way to look them up. So those columns, often in a SundayNews-Sentinel, may have been of more interest to those who remembered than to those who didn’t. Those historical columns were often little more than listed clusters of remembered names, unfamiliar to most newspaper readers, names of singers who once, for a moment on a stage before several hundred Knoxvillians, seemed great.

Often the past seems mythological, representing eras so different they’re unreachable, but one musician of Knoxville’s first opera era survived into living memory. “Professor” Frank Nelson, began accompanying singers as a very young pianist at Staub’s during its heyday in the 1880s. He got to know Gustavus Knabe, “the Father of Music,” with whom he trained—before sojourning to Knabe’s home in Leipzig for further study. It was Nelson who performed Knabe’s most famous composition, the funeral march he’d written for President Andrew Johnson back in 1875, at Knabe’s own funeral in 1906. Knabe himself had requested it. For decades, Nelson directed choirs at both St. John’s and Temple Beth-El, while on the side grooming countless sopranos for countless recitals, most of which he organized himself. Never married, Nelson devoted his life to music, and became something of an eccentric—he was known to buy hats for people he encountered on the Gay Street sidewalk. He a familiar figure in town, frequently still performing at the organ or piano, until his death at age 89 in 1957.

Staub’s Opera House, aka the Lyric, the resonant wonder of its era, when Knoxville was just discovering the joys of musical performance, had been torn down the year before—for the construction of a department store that was never built.

They had called Knabe “The Father of Music in Knoxville,” or sometimes “The Father of Music in East Tennessee.” Today, in an era of hiphop, rock, and modern jazz, that title might seem overstating the case; there are lots of kinds of music, and Knabe was known entirely for the European classical sort. But he was the first person who inspired Knoxvillians to reach for something greater than the ordinary in the concert hall, the first to compel hundreds of strangers to buy tickets to hear any kind of music performed, and the inspiration for an era.

Knabe is buried under a flat, badly cracked slab of marble in a remote corner of Old Gray Cemetery. It’s not one of the stones you notice unless you’re looking for it.

By Jack Neely, October 2023

The post The NE Plus Ultra appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

A recent article in theNews-Sentinelabout Vol “Traditions” made me realize that my old alma mater’s traditions are constantly changing, and some are rather new. Most of those traditions listed were not things I knew about when I was at that same school, 40-odd years ago. The Vol Walk, for example. I looked it up. It seems to have been started deliberately in 1992, during Johnny Majors’ last season as coach.

I think The Rock was sanctified as such about that time. When I was at UT, it was there, but just a rock. As I understand it, that big chunk of limestone was unearthed in the mid-1960s, when they developed Fraternity Park, as part of an Urban Renewal project that had erased the middle-class neighborhood that had been there before, and landscape architects chose to keep it as a parking-lot landmark, not unlike what you see in some suburban commercial developments of that era, until someone thought of something better to do with it. When I was in school, it got tagged occasionally (did we say “tagged” then?), but never in a clever way that I recall. It was not something that we paid any attention to.

At the first few dozen football games I attended at Neyland Stadium, the only fight songs were “Down the Field” and “Fight, Vols, Fight.” As I started in college, the band occasionally played Rocky Top: kind of drolly, because the song is obviously not about people much interested in attending, or paying for, college. How did it catch on? If the lyrics do illustrate our UT ideal, we’re backsliding. We’re still having some issues with “smoggy smoke,” for example. Ain’t no telephone bills? Back then, when we sang that idyll about freedom from telephone bills, my only telephone bill was, as I recall, about $84 a year.

It’s a good deal more now, and I bet yours is, too. In the half-century since “Rocky Top” entered our consciousness, we’ve gone from daydreaming about no phones at all to a state of extreme dependency, not to say obedience, to our telephones and their associated bills.

Maybe we weren’t serious about that. But the song did indeed include the word “Tennessee,” and I think that’s mainly what we liked about it. In 1970, when it was a hit for Lynn Anderson, you rarely heard the word “Tennessee” on Top 40 radio. It got our attention.

***

But “Rocky Top” was coherent with an earlier cultural theme, surprising in some ways, and presented in several ways.

“Rocky Top” has exotic origins. The song was written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, neither of whom were originally from Tennessee. They were, in fact, both flatlanders: Boudleaux was from flat cotton country of southwestern Georgia, and as a young man performed as a violinist with the Atlanta Philharmonic, but later toured with a jazz band. Felice, who was born Mildred Genevieve Scaduto, who’s often given more credit for conceiving that song, was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Milwaukee also the home of Pee Wee King, co-author of “The Tennessee Waltz,” who performed on Knoxville’s “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round in its earliest days.) Felice and Boudleaux met at a Milwaukee hotel where they were both working, married and moved to Nashville to become songwriters, and first became famous for several hits recorded by the Everly Brothers (the Everlys wrote a few of their own songs, but “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie” were the Bryants’ creations). In the mid-1960s, the Bryants were visiting Gatlinburg, which was capitalizing on some hillbilly themes for the tourists who expected them, at a time when the nation’s most popular television comedy was “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Something in that mix of time and place seems to have inspired the Rocky Top idea. The Bryants later bought a house there.

Of course, the Rocky Top of the song is a fictional place. The real Rocky Top is a barren peak of Thunderhead Mountain, a spot probably never occupied for long by humans. But it may have suggested itself as a phrase.

By the fall of 1972, UT alum Howard Baker was employing a warm-up country band that played “Rocky Top” before his U.S. Senate campaign appearances.

The Pride of the Southland Band worked up a brassy, razzle-dazzle Broadway-style rendition of it to play at a football game, as kind of a novelty. According to UT sources, that started in 1972, but it seems not to have elicited much attention, because in the mid-‘70s, printed mentions of the song are rare. Of course, sportswriters who cover football games are rarely much interested in the band’s musical selections.

The first time I’ve found a contemporary reference to “Rocky Top” performed in direct connection with UT was in February 1973, during the old “All-Sing” competition at Alumni Memorial, when a non-fraternity group representing residential halls Reese and Humes sang it as part of a medley that also included Merle Haggard’s recent hit, “Okie from Muskogee.”

In May, 1975, Ava Barber, a young local performer and recording artist who had recently joined the Lawrence Welk show on TV, sang “Rocky Top” at one of Welk’s champagne-music concerts before a cheering crowd of more than 6,000 at Civic Coliseum.

Lamar Alexander used it in his successful gubernatorial campaign in 1978. That September, a group called the Rocky Top Cloggers performed at the Tennessee Valley Fair. Eight days later, the Bryants themselves were welcomed to a ball game at halftime in the UT-Oregon State game; by then, it had already been christened as a UT “pep song.”

In April, 1979, Hungarian-born conductor Zoltan Rozsnyai led the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra in what was almost certainly its first performance of “Rocky Top” as part of a first-ever country-pops night at the Coliseum. In March, 1980, it was played by a UT pep band as a pep song for heavyweight champ Big John Tate at a championship fight at old Stokely Athletic Center.

I don’t remember all that, don’t remember ever singing along when it was played. I don’t know when or why the additional “Woo!” was added. I’ve never actually participated, because I’m not certain what it means. But people do seem to enjoy it.

***

But that was all many years after the origin of the theme: Volunteer as Hillbilly. Before World War II, you don’t see that much at all.

Tennessee’s players had once been known as the Reds; that’s the color the early baseball teams wore in the 1870s.Orange gained dominance in the 1890s, reputedly thanks to a big summer crop of daisies on the Hill, and the team has been called the Volunteers, at first casually, since about 1902. It’s a fine name, except that it’s hard to picture. What does a Volunteer look like? It was in the late 1920s, just as Major Neyland’s football team was starting to make national waves, that the administration tried to nail it down.

In 1931, UT sponsored a nationwide contest to best exemplify the Volunteer spirit. To pick the best symbol, UT recruited a heavy hitter, Lorado Taft, the Chicago sculptor who was one of America’s most popular artists, known for his inspiring memorial statues and fountains. Taft was 70, but still taking commissions; UT probably couldn’t afford him, but brought the celebrity artist in to head a committee to choose the best depiction of a UT Volunteer for a future sculpture: that three-man committee included young Knoxville architect Charles Barber—at the top of his game, he had designed several recent buildings at UT—and local writer-artist Robert Lindsay Mason, whose recentbook The Lure of the Smokieswas regionally respected. Taft came here in person, on the Southern train.

The artist whose creation they picked was one Theodore Andre Beck, a fine-arts student at Yale. While Beck’s basic design, a man boldly stepping forward while carrying a torch and a winged-victory symbol, remained in the final product, some alumni advisors suggested changes, and for better or worse, the final product came out as a younger, more athletic-looking classical figure than in the award-winning design. It was originally intended to be a little taller, by the way, and to stand out prominently on Cumberland Avenue, but distractions and budget issues kicked the can down the road for more than 30 years. It was not actually finished and installed until 1968.

Today it’s a Greco-Roman figure, one who looks like he just stepped out of the Pantheon to see about that ruckus outside. Unless he later changed his name, Beck is fairly obscure; this appears to be his only famous work. By the time it was completed, the committee who had picked the original design—Taft, Barber, and Mason—had been dead for years, as were most of the administrators and donors who had celebrated the design with some fanfare back in 1931. My research hasn’t disclosed whether Beck lived to hear that it was finally erected.

And it went up about the same time as another, larger, bronze statue with a classical theme, within sight of it: Swedish sculptor Carl Milles’ “Europa and the Bull.” Both were 1968 installations on a rapidly changing campus.

Of course, by the time it went up, there had been other, less formal imaginings of what the Volunteer looked like. And there was a new song called “Rocky Top” just beginning to make the rounds, mainly in bluegrass circles, with no association with any university.

Those who think of Tennessee as limited and remote might find the Roman-style statue too pretentious to match their preconceptions of what passes for authentic. In fact several of UT’s traditions were even more exotic. An older tradition was the Aloha-Oe ceremony. Introduced in 1925 or 1926, it was the seniors’ formal farewell to campus, outdoors on the Hill or eventually in the stadium, with a torchlit crypto-Hawaiian theme. The fact of that Pacific-island influence on the old Hill may have seemed less bizarre in the 1920s, when during the era of the ukulele and the steel guitar, much of American culture was going Hawaiian. Togas were involved, perhaps suggesting a scarcity of authentic Hawaiian wear in Knoxville. Aloha-Oe seems to have lasted more than 40 years, fading in the late ’60s, as many traditions did, as both UT’s administration and student body preferred to jettison the Old to celebrate the Very New, though they were very different visions of what the New looked like.

But some of that ’20s spirit may have returned, with annual Torch Night. Maybe not as big a deal as Aloha Oe was, it has sputtered some over the years. When I was at UT, the only torch I ever saw was the one in the big bronze guy’s fist. Maybe I didn’t go to the right parties. I’ve heard a lot more about it in recent years.

And some UT traditions were pseudo-Native American, like the Nahheeyayli, launched in 1924, ostensibly as an homage to the Cherokee Dance of the Green Corn. The fraternity-dominated organization presented big-name bands at spring dances, and though attendees were ostensibly affluent white kids, they put on a diverse array of entertainment over the next 47 years, from Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra to Harlem bandleader Chick Webb and civil-rights diva Nina Simone. After complaints about the organization’s exclusivity, it was disbanded in 1971, to be replaced by an officially approved UT planning organization.

Otherwise, concerning traditions, UT’s Pride of the Southland Marching Band’s wardrobe may suggest a reference to the Napoleonic era, and perhaps reflecting the original Tennessee Volunteers of the War of 1812 era—but then, most college marching bands wear similar uniforms, so that may be coincidence.

Also demonstrating some exotic influence are UT’s standard fight songs, both introduced in the 1930s, during the first half of Coach Robert Neyland’s tenure, when the football Vols were rising to national prominence. Long before professional football was overwhelmingly popular, the second quarter of the 20^thcentury, 1925-1950, was probably the all-time high tide of national interest in college football.The fact that the Vols were cresting during that era may have a lot to do with why football caught on so thoroughly here, and engendered several traditions.

“Down the Field” was originally the fight song of Yale, written by an undergraduate there; Yale adopted it in 1904 and still uses it. Tennessee never plays Yale, so there’s no risk of confusion on the field.

It’s interesting that was adopted in 1931, the same year UT favored a Yale student’s depiction of UT’s “Volunteer” symbol. That connection to an Ivy League college almost 800 miles away, in Connecticut, is not utterly weird. In the 19th Century, when Knoxville’s elite regarded UT to be the local vocational school, many of the local wealthy sent their sons to Yale, probably more than to any other Ivy-League school. Yale Avenue, an old residential street near campus, left a scrap of itself on UT’s campus until it was renamed Peyton Manning Pass in 1997.

Knoxville-raised Lee “Bum” McClung (1870-1914), whose father went to UT and started a baseball team, was Yale’s football-team captain and one of that Ivy League school’s first big football stars in the 1880s, and returned to his hometown to encourage some of Knoxville’s earliest football squads in the early 1890s—just before the Vols coalesced as a competitive team. Yale’s hero—“a type Yale men idealize for emulation,” as theWashington Postcalled him, is buried at our Old Gray Cemetery, and can be considered, if not the godfather, at least a kindly uncle of UT football.

UT’s version of “Down the Field” has original words, different from Yale’s, though they’re rarely heard: “backing our football team / faltering never.” Its presumed time of adoption, 1931, seems relevant: jazz singer Rudy Vallee, at the height of his pop-idol fame, had just recorded a medley of Yale songs, prominently that one, in 1930. Yale’s lyrics, as sung by Vallee, are very specifically about beating Harvard, as if that was the only opponent that mattered; UT’s lyrics are not about Harvard at all.

There seems to be some murkiness about who wrote them. Cassandra Sproles, in the UT publicationThe Torchbearerstated in 2017 that they were written by UT engineering professor Clayton Matthews, who when he came to UT in 1907 to teach drawing and machine design was already notable in Illinois for introducing the new idea of acrobatic cheerleading. However, Betsey Creekmore, in the official UT source Volopedia, says they’re credited to Sam Gobble. He was a jazz trombonist performing around town then, formerly of Paul Whiteman’s famous orchestra, but in 1931, when he’s said to have written “Down the Field,” Gobble was associated with Maynard Baird’s Southern Serenaders, the Knoxville-based dance band. Gobble also wrote “Spirit of the Hill.”

“Fight, Vols, Fight,” the familiar staccato fight theme—again with lyrics rarely heard—also has origins far from Tennessee. It was written expressly for the Vols, but by a California songwriting trio, Milo Sweet, Gwen Sweet, and Thornton Allen, and introduced near the end of Tennessee’s impressive 1938 season.

***

But despite some evidence of local originality, before World War II, the main influences on UT’s popular identity were collegiate-generic. An Ivy-League pep song, Napoleonic band uniforms, and a classically Greco-Roman ideal of “The Volunteer.” To early UT boosters, it was much more important for UT to seem like a college than like a college in East Tennessee.

That changed, and as was the case with the Hawaiian theme of the 1920s, it may have reflected national trends. After 1940, Hillbillies were suddenly cool. Did the opening and marketing of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, ca. 1930, play a role? That’s a subject for a graduate thesis. But by 1945, two of the most popular comic strips in America were Snuffy Smith and Li’l Abner, the latter of which was celebrated in motion pictures and a Broadway musical. The Ma and Pa Kettle movies were having their day. And some of the most popular musicians in the nation belonged to the relatively new genre marketed as Hillbilly. Among them were Knoxville’s own Roy Acuff and Archie Campbell, both of whom portrayed Hillbilly characters as part of their acts, with ratty straw hats, blacked-out teeth, and a jug of moonshine. Before Acuff, son of a Knoxville attorney, began having fun on stage with his band, the Crazy Tennesseans, country music was usually solemnly presented, sentimental old-time tunes often by performers in jackets and ties. That changed utterly in the 1930s. They started calling it Hillbilly.

Hillbilly Chic was a trend more popular with youth than their elders: casual, rebellious, independent, irreverent, hilarious, unapologetically pleasure-seeking, a hillbilly was everything a college undergrad wants to be. It would appear that by 1945, as bluegrass was just becoming popular, most of America admired the hillbilly esthetic. UT may have felt that it had an inside track. In the postwar 1940s, the image of Snuffy Smith began appearing on postwar UT Vols football programs, as if he were a Vol fan, himself.

My father was an earnest, quiet, industrial engineering student at the same time that he was part of UT’s hillbilly revival, about 70 years ago. He was never sure where the Smokey the Dog idea came from, but in 1954 he was UT’s official Hillbilly, carrying a shootin’ iron and walking Smokey around the sidelines. The idea originated with students, he said, and it didn’t find many friends in UT’s administration. UT’s president was C.E. Brehm, a horticulture specialist from Pennsylvania who had taught at Purdue. They didn’t see what hillbilly ideals had to do with a university. Dad and his chums just thought it was funny. Talking to him, I got the feeling that part of what made it appealing was that their elders didn’t like it.

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call the Hillbilly a prototype of the Hippie.

Over the years, perhaps also with the aid of national popular culture, the Hillbilly, in overalls and floppy hat, seemed to evolve into the coonskin-cap pioneer. The Davy Crockett-style character, perhaps owing something to Fess Parker’s portrayal of the “King of the Wild Frontier” in globally popular Disney movies in 1954-55, became a sideline stalwart at Vols games of the post-Neyland era, a more Tennessee-specific personification of the Volunteer ideal than represented in the classical (but still-unbuilt) Volunteer statue. Crockett was a Tennessean, and he was a member of the cadre of Volunteers who fought the British in the War of 1812. He was a bit of a Hillbilly, too. Of course, he was no college man.

But it wasn’t just hom*o sapiens sorts who were representing the volunteer spirit in the 1950s. Most other SEC teams had animals mascots: Wildcats, Bulldogs, Tigers, Gators, Gameco*cks. They could be an oversized costumed character who could exhort the crowds, or a very profitable plush toy. But what quadruped is associated with a Volunteer?

During that first blush of Hillbilly Chic, there came Smokey, the Bluetick Hound. The very term seems to evoke the colorful speech of old-time mountain folks. You didn’t even have to know what a bluetick hound looked like before you imagined it sleeping under an unpainted porch up in the remote hills, where folks get their corn from a jar.

However, assumptions can be deceiving. Even Smokey has exotic origins. If Smokey was not present at the first game on Shields-Watkins Field in 1921, it may have been partly because his breed wasn’t around yet.

Chances are, your great-grandparents were not familiar with the term. It’s a 20^th-century neologism; though it may have emerged around 1915, I haven’t found the phrase “blue-tick” in reference to any sort of dog in newspapers before the mid-1930s—when the nation was electrified with radio and some movies were in technicolor, and Major Neyland’s Vols were already becoming a national phenomenon.

According to Wikipedia and its credible-looking sources, the breed actually originated in Louisiana, a new adaptation of a celebrated French breed known as the Grand Bleu de Gascogne, said to have been brought to America about 200 years ago by the Marquis de Lafayette.

The United Kennel Club didn’t recognize the bluetick refinement as a separate breed until 1946. That was not long before Smokey started showing up at the Shields-Watkins sidelines in 1953. Over the years, he has been represented by a series of actual dogs that require handlers, who are today not Hillbillies but mainly healthy-looking young people in clean tennis shoes and modern athletic togs.

After half a century, “Rocky Top’s” domination of UT culture continues to grow. TV news journalists have begun to use “Rocky Top” as shorthand for UT campus, as if the place in the song, blissfully free of telephones, is the same place where little robots skitter around campus. If the Volunteer statue had been designed today, it might wear a bronze coonskin cap, favoring a moonshine jug to Winged Victory. But before you start raising money for that installation, give it some thought. The Volunteer ideal may evolve some more.

– Jack Neely, September 2023

The post The Volunteer on Rocky Top and the Triumph of Hillbilly Chic appeared first on Knoxville History Project.

THE ROLE A COMPLEX CITY PLAYED IN A DIRECTOR’S CAREER

Knoxville’s primary contribution to the creation of Hollywood’s film industry has gotten more attention recently with the publication of a thick and well-received biography by Irish scholar Gwenda Young, calledHollywood’s Forgotten Master. Nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Director, Clarence Brown (1890-1987), created several classics, no two of them very much like each other as if he were experimenting with creating a new genre with each one, includingA Woman of Affairs, Night Flight, Anna Christie, The Human Comedy, The Yearling, National Velvet,andIntruder in the Dust,making stars of Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Elizabeth Taylor, and others, but is still not as well-known as several of his contemporaries who focused on individual genres.

Focusing much more on Clarence Brown’s Hollywood years, from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, than on his youth, Young describes a patient and technically innovative movie maker with an unusual facility for getting along with problematic personalities. His creative use of machinery and his expertise with the interplay of light and motion helped refine the art of the motion picture. And his ability to get a large film crew away from the sound stages and back lots to shoot movies on location, in small towns thousands of miles away or sometimes in problematic wilderness settings, made many of his shoots adventures, sometimes dangerous ones. Young attributes Brown’s success, along with innovations to moviemaking shared with other directors, to his education and background as a trained engineer.

Knoxville, especially the University of Tennessee, which granted him two degrees in engineering back in 1910, has been happy to call Clarence Brown its own, even though he wasn’t born here, didn’t study cinema here, and never shot a movie here. What’s Knoxville’s main claim on this significant career in the motion-picture industry?

His engineering background, which was almost entirely based at UT, may be the main answer. But by the time he enrolled in classes on the Hill, he’d also been on the fringes of show business in Knoxville, arguably one of the city’s most acclaimed junior thespians.

Brown was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, in 1890. Exactly when the Browns arrived in Knoxville is a little vague. The director’s father, Larkin Brown, became a very prominent citizen here, but drew no attention when he arrived with his wife and son. Some sources published in the director’s lifetime suggest they moved here around 1900 or 1901; it’s not clear they were here before 1902. Knoxville was then a compact and rapidly changing industrial city of about 35,000, with two daily newspapers, a teeming market square with a relatively new and capacious Market House, a large old European-style opera theater, and a growing electric streetcar network. The Southern Railway terminal on Depot Street, replacing the old Civil War-era depot, was under construction in 1902. The city was growing so fast that the day the new station opened, it was already overcrowded, deemed to be too small, calling for an unplanned addition.

Some of the first evidence of the Brown family’s arrival in Knoxville is not related to anything either parent did, but a mention of their remarkable son, Clarence, who caught the attention of Knoxville newspapers when he was only 12 years old, the short kid from Massachusetts.

But to say the Browns were from Massachusetts is oversimplifying the matter.

The head of their small household, Larkin Brown, was a second-generation cotton-mill professional. Since before the Civil War, the Browns had been in the cotton-processing business in North Georgia. Clarence’s grandparents apparently fled the Confederacy for safety; it’s remarkable how many Southern families, regardless of any war-related sympathies, opted to head north when the shooting started. Larkin Brown was born in Pennsylvania in 1866, but a few years later, the family moved back to the South, to Alabama. The elder Browns eventually moved back to Atlanta, but as an adult, Larkin went north for work in what he knew best, and found it at a cotton mill in Massachusetts. There he met Catherine Gaw, an immigrant weaver from County Down, Ireland, about three years older than Larkin.

They married, and their son, Clarence, was born in May, 1890. Clarence Brown’s earliest memories were of small-town New England.

Larkin Brown was not a college man, and was first known as a loom repairman, but his credentials were sufficiently impressive to the executives at Knoxville’s Brookside Mills. Located along Second Creek, as well as the Southern railroad line, on the northwest side of town, Brookside was an upper-tier textile mill that specialized in weaving cotton, creating complex specialty fabrics like corduroy and velvet.

Although cotton fields were scarce in East Tennessee, Knoxville’s work force and railroad connections made it appealing for cotton-related industries. Founded in 1885, Brookside became one of Knoxville’s biggest factories of any kind, with a workforce of well over 1,000, producing more than 15 million yards of cloth annually. Because women were believed to be skilled at working with fabric, textile mills employed women at much higher rates than any other factories; almost half of Brookside’s employees were women.

Most of Brooksides employees, whether those in management, or those stationed at one of the mill’s 1,318 looms all day, lived nearby, within walking distance. In 1902, only daring young sportsmen had automobiles, and horses were known mostly to farmers and the wealthy. Everybody else walked or rode the electric streetcar. So Brookside’s employees, high and low, lived around the western portion of what had been known as North Knoxville, first incorporated into the city proper in 1897, just five years before the Browns’ arrival. They first lived in a modest house at 206 East Anderson, then moved to 105 East Baxter Avenue. They were lower middle-class homes, all just a few steps away from the little milltown commercial district along North Central that was already becoming known as Happy Holler.

Just to the west were the busy Southern Railway tracks, carrying both freight and passenger cars, and not far away, that railroad’s impressively large Coster Shops, a national repair and construction facility for railroad cars and engines. Seeing the trains may have made an impression on young Clarence, a part of his neighborhood worth noting considering the creative use he made of moving trains in some of his films.

Although Larkin Brown would become a significant figure in Knoxville business circles, he was little known in his first several years here. It says something that the first few times Larkin Brown’s name appears in the paper, it was because he was the father of the remarkable young performer named Clarence. From their first year in Knoxville, Clarence Brown was something of a star in a performance genre now almost forgotten.

He first enrolled at North Knoxville Public School. Later called the Mynders School, it was two-story brick elementary school with a three-story bell tower, located at Pearl Place, off Central, and very near the Browns’ early home on Baxter Avenue. Considered “one of the most progressive schools in the city,” North Knoxville P.S. was run by much-respected “Professor” J.R. Lowry, later principal of Park City High.

In Knoxville, the first decade of the 20^thcentury was a fascinating and unpredictable period of almost constant experimentation with entertainment. It was the era of pageants, tableaux vivants, pantomimes, operettas, musical comedies, string quartets, soprano recitals, on-stage acrobatics, puppetry, dog and pony shows, spectacles of all sorts. It was also, of course, the era of blackface minstrel shows, which were popular across racial lines in that era, as they were for decades to come on Broadway and in Hollywood. If they seemed innocuous at the time, it may have been because vaudeville shows also featured troupes that specialized in ridiculing Germans, Irish, and hillbillies. But the racial stereotyping inherent in the form was sometimes meaner, and likely sharpened discrimination and segregation, which grew harsher during the blackface era.

Stages featured mostly live actors and singers, but more and more during that first decade, a bit of film on the magic lantern. A night on the town in 1902 Knoxville was almost guaranteed to surprise. Churches, schools, and charities often mimicked what was at Staub’s Theatre and the other vaudeville stages of Gay Street.

A popular entertainment of the era, the “Recitation” was a dramatic performance of a poem or story from memory. Unless you count stand-up comedy, which perhaps evolved from it, the recitation has very nearly died out in our time. But about 120 years ago, little Clarence Brown was mastering the discipline, a form of acting.

He was only 12 when his performances were already gaining the attention of the newspapers. In November, 1902, schoolteachers and students at North Knoxville schools put together an impressive project called “A Trip Around the World.” A progressive educational party at five different houses, it presented customs in fashion and food from the British Isles, France, Turkey, Japan and China, and the United States. Representing the U.S. Navy with a recitation was the new kid from Massachusetts.

“Clarence Brown recited a number of pieces, and made quite a hit,” reported theJournal & Tribune. It was, perhaps, his first review. Some actors devote their lives to drama and never get to read a line like that.

The following May, 1903, he recited at the Moses School in Mechanicsville, a ticketed fundraiser to purchase a piano. Brown, who turned 13 that month, was performing on the same stage as university musicians. Later the same month, he did another recitation at his home school, on a program shared with Cincinnati-trained violinist Bertha Roth: later to be better known as Bertha Walburn Clark. Again, the new kid was singled out for praise: Most of the young performers were not mentioned in theKnoxville Sentinelreview, but “The recitation of Clarence Brown was well received.”

An unusually eclectic August event celebrating both the culture of the Rocky Mountains and of India, held at Third Presbyterian Church, on Fifth Avenue, was another triumph. “Clarence Brown delivered an address which was received with continued applause,” reported theJournal & Tribune.He was back for another variety show at the same venue on December 28, and theSentinelnoted, “Master Clarence Brown, one of the best in the city, recited an amusing Christmas piece.”

In February, 1904, he gave a recitation at a “Valentine Social” at Second Baptist, and theSentinelreported the he “was heartily applauded. This youth has developed considerable talent in this line.”

Where he picked up that talent is interesting to speculate. There’s some evidence suggesting that Brown began the study in his early childhood. But one of the Browns’ close north-side neighbors—she lived on the same block just diagonally across the street, at 122 East Baxter—was one unusual woman with an unusual background in that performance art.

Laura Tidd Fogelsong was a dramatics teacher who offered classes in what was then known as “expression.” About 15 years older than Brown, she had Ohio roots, having performed in Cincinnati and trained with experts at the Columbus School of Oratory, as well as the Currie School of Expression in Boston. She was a 1901 graduate of the King’s School of Oratory in Pittsburgh, where she was said to have been a standout.

Wife of a bank executive, the vice president of the Knoxville Savings & Loan, she apparently arrived in Knoxville about the same time the Browns did, and was still in her 20s when she developed a reputation as a dramatics teacher in Knoxville, a specialist in “elocution, pantomime, and Delsarte”—the last being a physical expression of emotion akin to modern dance.

She quickly became well known in Knoxville society. For a time Fogelsong ran a formal studio on the 400 block of Gay Street, teaching her students and working with both theaters and churches to put on variety shows and minor spectacles involving well-known musicians. Some were conventional, featuring readings of Keats, Poe, Shakespeare, or Longfellow; some sound bizarre, like the pageant “The Microbe of Love.” She had younger children of her own, and most of her students were girls, but she developed an uncommonly close relationship with her “star pupil,” Clarence Brown.

Her name was barely known in Knoxville before his was. They became locally famous together. On occasion, they performed together, presented as “A Pair of Lunatics.”

Hence, before he even turned 14, Clarence Brown was already a local star. Under the headline “Coming Elocutionist,” in April, 1904, theSentinelran a short profile, illustrated with a portrait of a formally dressed, confident-looking young man.

“At a very early age his parents had him commence the study of elocution, which he has continued, under the best teachers in the east, up to the present time, being now under the instruction of Mrs. Fogelsong, in this city. His conception and rendition of the very difficult arena scene fromQuo Vadiswas indeed remarkable for one of his tender years, being but 13 years of age.” He had performed that one at the Asylum Avenue Methodist Church, now known as Second Methodist.

“He has a great variety of selections, being able to recite from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the pathetic to the humorous.”The unnamed reporter adds, “All who know him speak of him as a boy of remarkable intelligence, with a brilliant future before him.”

In July, 1904, he traveled to Atlanta to perform before a reported audience of 6,000 at the Grand Opera House. Sponsored by the Eagles, it was part of a lengthy and bizarre variety show that included blackface minstrelsy, wooden-shoe dancing, acrobatics, boxing, and little Clarence Brown’s piece, “How Ruby Played.” That November, Brown won a gold medal for elocution: theSentineldescribed him as “the talented young elocutionist who has creditably appeared in several entertainments.”

He graduated from the North Knoxville School in 1904, as an “honor pupil,” indicating mainly that he never missed class.

He also showed some talent as a carpenter, one of only seven boys in his school who proved he could build a “mission chair,” a stylish arts-and-crafts design, in the workshop.

As author Young points out, and as some actors like Katharine Hepburn observed—Brown and Hepburn worked together on the 1947 Schumann biopic,Song of Love—Brown was known in Hollywood for his “dual nature,” his unusual combination of enthusiasms, both artistic and mechanical. According to Hepburn, he was “by nature highly romantic, by education, an engineer.”

It started very young, as he was both what we might now call a theater nerd and a gearhead. Besides dramatics, Brown was unusually interested in all the new technology, especially the automobile and the airplane. Some acquaintances later recalled the famous director as a big fan of Tom Swift novels. It may not seem surprising at first. The Swift books were mostly about new technology—Tom Swift and his Airship, Tom Swift and His Runabout, Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat, Tom Swift and His Sky Racer. The adult Brown loved mechanical things, and fast things, drove fast cars and flew airplanes.However, the very first Tom Swift books came out in 1910, the year Brown turned 20 and graduated from college. Was he really reading boys’ books? Granted, those were especially interesting ones illustrating a rapidly changing time. Maybe he was.

Clarence Brown entered Knoxville High School, still often known as Girls High School, in 1904, as it began accepting male students and deftly changed its name to Knoxville High. Although he may not have attended for more than one year, the palatial school on Union Avenue would play a significant role in his life and his memories of Knoxville, even in the director’s chair.

He was an active kid, young for his grade and short for his age—he never got past 5’7—and forever remembered by his classmates as the last kid who wore short pants to school, in an era when they were associated with children. He apparently didn’t mind. At KHS he joined the Art Club, the Dramatic Club, the Musical Club. One image from a yearbook shows him with a triangular-bodied mandolin.

His new school was already developing a bit of a literary reputation. Among its teachers at the time the Browns arrived in town were Anne Waldron, later known as Anne Armstrong, who would enjoy a national profile as a leading business woman, sometime lecturer at Harvard, whose two novels—one of them calledThe Seas of Godwas based in a slightly fictionalized Knoxville—would gain international attention. She taught 10th grade at Girls High until 1902.

Graduating that year from the big school on Union was Ruth Hale, daughter of a controversial antisuffragist teacher, Annie Riley Hale. As a New York journalist and feminist, Ruth Hale was a core member of New York’s jazz-age legend, the Algonquin Round Table. (Hale is portrayed by Jane Adams in the 1994 film,Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.)

Ruth’s younger brother was an aspiring opera star whose severe features put him in demand as a Hollywood character actor even in his old age, in TV shows fromPerry MasontoStar Trek. Richard Hale and Clarence Brown may have overlapped as Knoxville public-school students for a brief period. Whether they knew each other here is a question worth asking, not only because the two were later familiar figures in Hollywood, but because they worked together on at least one movie. Almost half a century after they were both in Knoxville public schools, Richard Hale played the memorable role in one of Clarence Brown’s most popular movies, the original 1951 version ofAngels in the Outfield. In that movie, Hale was the sarcastic atheist. Did they swap Knoxville public-school stories?

When asked about his favorite Knoxville teacher, Clarence Brown would respond, decades later, “Molly Hayes.” Formally Mary Agnes Hayes, the Knoxville native was a Catholic-trained teacher, deeply versed in literature and history, who had been teaching in Knoxville city schools since public education started, in the early 1870s, and was devoted herself to her profession. Although only occasionally in the public eye, in 1907 she gave a lecture to the Catholic Newman Club on the subject of “Historic and Scenic Preservation.” After she died in 1913, Brown contributed to her memorial stone, at Calvary Cemetery.

Occasionally Clarence Brown performed in conjunction with members of the Nicholson Art League, the large and lively organization of artists, architects, photographers, and dilettantes promoting the visual arts in Knoxville at the time. Their most celebrated member was oil painter Catherine Wiley, who worked as a prop artist on a program by the Ladies Aid to the Order of Railway Conductors in October, 1904, in which little Clarence Brown was one of the chief draws. Knoxville’s avatar of impressionist painting, Wiley was 11 years older than Brown; they would later be at UT at the same time.

Another close brush with an endeavor even more closely related to Brown’s future career was that hardly a block from the school, just down Walnut Street, was O.C. Wiley’s optical shop. Wiley sold cameras, the latest models. And working as a clerk in his shop, when Brown was at KHS, was a young man 10 years older than Brown, Jim Thompson. Already one of Knoxville’s most prolific photographers, he would make Knoxville’s first known motion pictures, just short, creative home movies—though probably not until after Brown had left town.

A memory the director may have evoked in his 1935 comedy,Ah, Wilderness!was Knoxville High’s holiday program of 1904.

“The entertainment will be one of the best ever given at the high school,” reported theSentinel. “If they do what they say they will, there will be perhaps 300 in attendance.” The performers were reported to be “among the best of musical and literary talent in the city.” It would appear that all the performers that Friday evening, with the one exception of little Clarence Brown, were female.

Held on the school’s capacious third floor, the event closely resembles a scene in that movie, featuring previously little-known Mickey Rooney. Although the setting is a small town in New England in 1904, the interior of the building appears to closely resemble the Victorian KHS building Brown himself knew in 1904. It was a director’s addition to the Eugene O’Neill play, and several of Brown’s schoolmates in 1935 who watched the movie together at the Tennessee claimed they recognized not just the set, but the minor characters Brown had added, including imperfect recitation performers.

Brown became notable for reciting one story in particular, “How the LaRue Stakes Were Lost,” a once-familiar story about how a horse-racing jockey sacrificed a win to save a child. Brown read it at Staub’s Theatre, Knoxville’s biggest venue in 1905, when his Knoxville High School class graduated. According to the newspaper accounts, a few aldermen in the balcony, including J.P. Murphy, the colorful “Mayor of Irish Town,” broke out in guffaws at Clarence’s reading—which may have been intended to be humorous.

It was a little unusual but not freakish to graduate days after turning 15; at the time, Knoxville High School presented diplomas after 10th grade.

***

Only occasionally mentioned in the Clarence Brown story is his remarkable father.

In his first decade in Knoxville, Larkin Brown, who came to town as an unknown but by 1903 was “assistant superintendent” at Brookside Mills, gradually became an important business and community leader. He was one of a few hundred ambitious businessmen who joined the Knoxville Board of Trade in 1905. In the summer of 1906, he had a formal role in planning the big annual Brookside Picnic at Chilhowee Park. Perhaps riding on his son’s coattails, he was in charge of entertainment.

By 1909, Larkin became general manager of Brookside Mills. He was a supervisor of the factory’s construction of a 152-foot-tall smokestack, one of the tallest structures in Knoxville at the time. Clarence Brown would remember the thrill of climbing all the way up, ostensibly with his father’s permission.

Even as Larkin Brown rose in power and influence at one of Knoxville’s biggest factories, and then in various philanthropies and Knoxville-boosting organizations, the Browns were socially modest. Newspapers mentioned their trips to see Brown’s family in Atlanta, or on rare occasions when they entertained old friends from Massachusetts. They’re not often listed as participants in dances or other social affairs.

In the records, Clarence’s mother only occasionally appears. It’s not very obvious that Catherine Brown found a place for herself in Knoxville, other than within her family. But in 1908 her sewing skills earned her first prize in a downtown department store’s garment-making competition, in the “shirtwaist” category. In 1915, she was a chaperone for an outing of the Aeolian Club, which combined live classical music and camping out in a way probably unknown today.

They had been Baptists in Massachusetts, but may have tried a few other denominations in Knoxville before settling as Episcopalians at St. John’s. It was the city’s social-register church, and it’s interesting that Larkin sometimes represented the congregation as a spokesman. He knew and worked with several of the most powerful men in Knoxville, notably fellow parishioner, army officer, and textile-mill executive L.D. Tyson, with whom he sometimes traveled on business. Cherokee Country Club opened when Larkin was rising fast in management at Brookside, but there’s no evidence they ever accepted any invitations there, assuming any ever came.

***

The year Clarence Brown started at UT, it would seem that he would continue to gain plaudits for his well-practiced creative recitations. “Although quite young, he has made for himself quite a reputation as an elocutionist and impersonator,” theJournal & Tribuneremarked in 1905.

Today, planners tend not to host public events on Thanksgiving evening, but in 1905, the Railroad YMCA on Depot Street hosted a variety show including Brown performing something called “The Yankee in Love.”

Later that year, he performed on the same stage with Lillian McMillan in a “college spectacle” calledProfessor Napoleon, in a blackface role as “Mascot Sambo.” The star of the show, “Miss McMillan,” seemed to be going places, and in fact Lillian McMillan was soon to appear in several Broadway musicals, and later toured Canada and Australia as a dramatic singer, often under her stage name “Dorothy South.”

Show biz is a broad concept. Young “Brownie” often shared a stage with cornet solos and phonograph demonstrations. One outdoor event at Riverside Park featured his recitations and “a most wonderful elephant to ride.”

***

UT was an interesting old place in 1905, nothing grandiose about it, just a hilltop cluster of old brick buildings, some of them dating back to 1828, including melancholy Old College, with its bell tower, which still showed scars from Confederate shelling during the siege of 1863.

He started at UT in the fall of 1905, as an engineering student. His father, who admired engineers, and worked with them, made public assertions that businessmen and engineers should work together. He wanted his son to go to college and study something serious, though it was obvious that the kid loved show biz, and to some degree the parents had encouraged that, too. UT offered no dramatic-arts program at the time. But maybe it offered a broad perspective in a lot of things, and people, that Clarence Brown found useful.

UT’s very active Board of Trustees included several graying and balding octogenarians who remembered the Civil War, including Union veteran Captain William Rule, venerable editor, historian, and former mayor whose former apprentice, Adolph Ochs, now ran theNew York Times; author-attorney Oliver Perry Temple, another old Unionist, whose book about the war was well known and often quoted; and long-bearded Presbyterian Rev. James Park, sometimes described as “Class of ’40”—1840, that is. They were all active and involved in the university that Clarence Brown attended, none of them rare sights on the hilltop. Also on that same board were some prominent attorneys, like Joshua Caldwell, founder of the long-lived literary society called the Irving Club.

And among them was a regular lecturer at the university who spent more time on the Hill than most of the trustees. Edward Terry Sanford played a major role in establishing UT’s law school. If Clarence Brown never had a class with him, he likely saw him once or twice a week on that little campus. Sanford was a respected judge who would be tapped in 1921 to be a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Although he’s not as famous as some of his high-court peers, a recent biography by attorney Stephanie Slater makes the case that Sanford had a significant influence on federal law, especially in the realm of civil rights.)

***

Clarence Brown spent more time at UT’s Hill than most students do—five years, earning two degrees, and surely got to know all of these people, whether personally or to recognize on the sidewalk.

UT was still very small, with only a few hundred students, and the entire campus was clustered on the Hill. In charge was a relative newcomer, one with impressive credentials as a scientist. Brown Ayres, who had spent most of his career at Tulane, in New Orleans, was a genius of adapting the latest electricity-enabled technologies to practical use. He had consulted with Thomas Edison about transporting light bulbs, helped Alexander Graham Bell demonstrate the telephone, advised on the planning of New Orleans’ first electric streetcar. In the Crescent City he had a bit of a reputation as a wizard, showing to the public how X-rays worked, taking high-quality photographs of an eclipse, and demonstrating actual broadcasts of the new “wireless” radio.

Professor Ayres was in Knoxville as a distinguished Tulane scientist back in the summer of 1902, perhaps very soon after the Browns arrived from Massachusetts, when he presented Knoxville’s first demonstration of an actual wireless radio broadcast, between buildings on the Hill. It’s unknown whether newcomer Clarence was in the semi-public audience, but if he was like most 12-year-old boys at the time, was fascinated with this new technology.

Professor Ayres moved to Knoxville permanently, to accept the job of UT’s president, in 1904, just one year before Brown enrolled as a freshman. Presidents usually got to meet most undergraduate students back then, and Ayres in particular likely got to know the engineering students—but we have more specific reasons to believe that Brown and Ayres got to know each other. Brown dated Ayres’ daughter, Elizabeth, who lived with her parents in the presidential residence on the Hill. In that era, a father would certainly get to know the boys who were interested in his daughter. She was a couple of years younger than Clarence; their relationship lasted only until he graduated and left town.

Ayres was often preoccupied by administration and fundraising for much of his tenure, but he’s also sometimes listed on the engineering faculty, and it’s safe to say Clarence Brown got to hear Ayres lectures during his five years on the Hill.

It may say something about UT’s attitude toward its own heritage that only one building that Brown would have recognized remains on the modern campus: South College, on top of the Hill, is still there. It may also say something that several buildings on campus today are named for professors on the faculty during Brown’s five years there. He knew, or crossed paths with, several academics who are legendary in UT history: Ayres, Claxton, Morgan, Hoskins, Ferris, and Perkins are all the names of modern UT buildings. Most were professors that Clarence Brown knew personally.

Although engineering had been a concentration of UT ever since 1869, when the university was the first southern school to be granted federal funding via the Morrill Act, which emphasized the practical sciences, engineering did not gain “College” status until about three years after Brown’s graduation. But it was obviously headed in that direction, as is evident in the quality of the professors teaching engineering during Brown’s period.

Perkins Hall is named for one of Brown’s engineering professors, Charles Albert Perkins (1858-1945), a Massachusetts-born scholar and author of books on electrical engineering, who had known Woodrow Wilson as a fellow student at Johns Hopkins; he taught engineering at UT for half a century, and during Brown’s period, was the local expert on electrical engineering, one of the future director’s concentrations.

Ferris Hall is named for Charles Edward Ferris (1864 -1951), another of Brown’s professors. From Ohio and Michigan, he had studied at Montreal’s McGill before coming to UT, where he first combined art and technology, teaching both “freehand art” and mechanical drawing, as head of the Machine Design and Drawing School. He eventually specialized in mechanical engineering. A diminutive man with shaggy eyebrows, he became UT’s first Dean of Engineering in 1913, and, like Perkins, became a nationally respected author of books on engineering, notablyManual for Engineers,sold nationally, which reportedly went through 25 editions.

Also an athlete, Ferris had played on some of UT’s earliest football teams—back when they sometimes allowed faculty members to join—and later led the major engineering effort that became known as Shields-Watkins Field. He found Brown to be an impressive student, and later took pride in the engineering aspects of his motion pictures. In 1939, Ferris remembered Brown, from almost 30 years earlier, as “a very immature but very keen fellow.” Ferris remarked that he had the impression that Brown entered engineering mainly because of his father’s interest in it, but that Brown later told Ferris that “engineering had been a great help to him in Hollywood, where a technical knowledge of power, machinery, and lights was a great advantage to the director.”

It’s intriguing that the engineering curriculum included professors who represented “Experimental Engineering.” One of them was John Albert Switzer; in 1914, as a hydraulic engineer, he wrote a book calledThe Water Powers of Tennessee, about the potential of hydraulic power, anticipating the Tennessee Valley Authority by almost 20 years.

Taken all together, the faculty Brown knew was a small but pretty impressive cadre of wide-ranging thinkers.

Harcourt Morgan, for whom Morgan Hall is named, was a Canadian-born entomologist who had known Ayres in Louisiana, where he was credited with making a dent in plagues of mosquitos and boll weevils; an agriculture professor and administrator at UT, he later became famous during the New Deal as one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s original three directors, reporting to President Roosevelt.

Popular math professor Cooper Schmitt is memorialized inside the Austin Peay Building. His son, Bernadotte, who graduated just before Brown’s arrival as a freshman, was still a familiar figure on the campus area; a Rhodes scholar, he later won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Moses Jacob was a professor of veterinary science. Although Brown’s two best-remembered movies involve a horse and a deer, he’s not known to have studied animal sciences at UT, but would likely have recognized Prof. Jacob. He would soon be involved in the effort to launch big agricultural fairs at Chilhowee Park. Today, the park’s Jacob Building is named for him.

John R. Neal, the attorney legendary for his abilities as for his severe eccentricities, taught law on the Hill during Brown’s final years. Later fired from UT, ostensibly for his unconventional behavior, he opened his own competing law school, and in 1925 became teacher John Scopes’ primary attorney during the famous “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, working not always gracefully with celebrity attorney Clarence Darrow. (Neal also makes a cameo in Cormac McCarthy’sSuttree.)

Also on the faculty for most of Brown’s time on the Hill was “freehand drawing” instructor Catherine Wiley, who at the same time was introducing impressionist painting to Knoxville, both with shows and lectures; today, with some of her work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, she’s considered perhaps the greatest artist of her region and era. UT boasted an “Art Club” that in 1909 included Wiley; her sister, Eleanor Wiley, who was then an evangelist of the Craftsman approach to art and life; Mary Grainger, a teacher and painter who made a career in art; and Robert Lindsay Mason, who became a writer (The Lure of the Great Smokies) and, after tutelage from illustrators Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish, an influential arts teacher.

Considering that UT certainly had no film-studies program then, it may be a coincidence, but an interesting one, that the year before Brown enrolled, UT graduated a woman who would play a national role in the development of documentary film: Laura Thornburgh, Class of ’04, would become a notable expert in film, one who has been called the U.S. government’s first professional film editor. AKnoxville Sentinelreporter covering UT during Brown’s time, Thornburgh remained part of the UT family, and often on campus during Brown’s time on the Hill, especially in the coverage of performance-related events there.

***

UT’s education building is named for Philander Claxton, a flesh-and-blood professor of Clarence Brown’s era, moreover the progressive mind behind the unprecedented series of intellectual festivals known as the Summer School of the South. Aimed at an audience of professional teachers from many states—and more than 1,000 typically traveled to Knoxville to attend the on-campus event—it offered a lineup of nationally relevant speakers, including William Jennings Bryan, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Carl Sandburg, and hundreds of others, scientists, explorers, authors.

Professional teachers were the main audience. But at night, often thrown open to the public, Jefferson Hall, the makeshift “Pine Palace” built for the summer event in the quad, featured actors and musicians in performance. Among them was Charles Coburn, the Georgia native and interpreter of Shakespeare who was perhaps the most frequently seen actor during the whole Summer School era. Many years later, as a prolific character actor in Hollywood, Coburn would find important supporting roles in several of Clarence Brown’s MGM films, includingIdiot’s Delightand the 1938 classic,Of Human Hearts.

Brown’s own fellow students left their mark on UT’s campus, too.

Another building on campus today is named for one of Brown’s engineering classmates: Nathan Dougherty, a football hero during Brown’s time, would be a longtime engineering professor and dean who earned prominence in national professional organizations, in 1958 named Outstanding Engineer of the Year. They were once in the same class, though Dougherty graduated before Brown.

Jessie Harris, a Texan who graduated in Brown’s class of only 44 students, worked for some years out west before returning to UT to expand its home-economics program into a college, at the same time working in trouble spots around the world to improve safety and nutrition for populations under stress.

Also in Brown’s intimate graduating class was a local legend: Nannie Lee Hicks, uncommonly beloved as a Central High history teacher and author on local history. Brown was also at UT at the same time as W.P. “Buck” Toms, a businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist, who graduated in 1907. The region’s main Boy Scout camp is named for him.

On a small campus, these people all knew, or at least recognized, each other. It was a pretty fascinating hill, considering everyone who climbed it: a good place to do some thinking and imagine a future with few boundaries.

During Brown’s last year at UT, one of his younger classmates was John Fanz Staub, two years younger than Brown. After a heroic period as a warplane pilot in World War I and a couple of graduate degrees from MIT, Staub became a nationally notable architect, best known for his giant creatively revivalist mansions in Texas, the subject of several books. He and Brown were both enthusiastic about aviation, later serving as military pilots during World War I. How well they knew each other at UT is unclear.

And it may be stretching a point, but still hard to ignore: at the foot of the Hill lived the intellectually remarkable Krutch family. Three years younger than Brown, Joseph Wood Krutch followed the future director’s UT era closely. The future Columbia scholar and New York critic, biographer, and seminal environmentalist won the National Book Award for a work of philosophy, but was perhaps best known in New York for his 28 years as a Broadway theater critic, and author of a book on modern drama.

Like Brown, Krutch had been notable as a public speaker even at Knoxville High, winning awards for oratory; and like Brown, Krutch was once especially interested in flying, and was just 17 when he became one of the first two Knoxville passengers to go aloft in a flying machine, during an East Knoxville exhibition in 1911 that, for all we know, Brown may have witnessed, his last year in town. Did they know each other? They would have had a lot to talk about.

***

That was the setting. We know a few more specific things about Brown’s time at UT. Early in 1906, Brown was becoming known as a debater, with the Philomathesian Literary Club at UT. More than “recitations,” his performances were now sometimes called “declamations”; he was sometimes called an “elocutionist” or, officially, “Declaimer.”

At UT, he joined the Rouge and Powder Club, a previously all-female collegiate troupe that at least occasionally put on elaborate productions. Brown was one of only two men “in an intricate and perplexing situation” in a production calledThe Revenge of Shari Hot-Su: A Japanese Play in Two Acts.

In February, 1907, by request, he gave a pro-temperance recitation for a women’s group, called “Rock of Ages.” He won a statewide oratorical contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union that November—which happened to be the month that Knoxville voters chose to close their saloons.

Was the teenager opposed to liquor, or did he see it as another opportunity to practice his craft and impress a crowd? In years to come, Brown would be noted for creating colorful bar scenes in movies likeAnna ChristieandAh, Wilderness.

In the late summer of 1907, he was one of “a large and jolly party of Knoxville young people” gender-balanced with nine boys and nine girls, who rode a “gasoline launch” up the French Broad to Rock House, a natural cliff formation that offered some shelter, for a 10-day camping trip involving horseback riding and fishing. And dancing: they took with them a phonograph for dancing at night.

In his first years at UT, Brown was involved with a wide variety of extracurricular organizations, from the German Club to the Tennis Club.

He once claimed to have greased the trolley tracks of the Cumberland Avenue streetcar, a common prank in that day. He was still a teenager, after all.

***

Even while studying engineering at UT, Brown remained close to Laura Fogelsong. When she organized an event at the Cable Hall, the piano showcase and venue on Gay Street, in October, 1907, Brown joined her for another recitation. On the same bill were pianist Frank Nelson, an interesting eccentric who, never married, devoted his life to musical performance, and was perhaps the leading impresarios of his era, helping groom several professional performers—and Bertha Walburn, the talented cellist from Cincinnati who would later found the durable Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, conducting it herself, one of the first women in American history to hold a baton in front of a full orchestra. But in 1907, she was best known as a hotel-lobby performer.

In that production, Brown’s parts included some Shakespeare as well as the “Arena Scene” fromQuo Vadis, which at the time was known mainly as a Polish novel, as the bodyguard Ursus contends with the bulls. We can only guess how that was portrayed by the diminutive teenager Clarence Brown. (Brown never made a movie ofQuo Vadis, but his younger MGM colleague Mervyn LeRoy had a major popular and critical success with an elaborately produced epic version in 1951, as Brown was contemplating retirement.)

Perhaps because the classical event at Cable Hall was more serious than most of the dozens of public events that had already featured Brown as a child, theJournal and Tribuneregarded this performance, when he was 17, as a milestone. “The occasion marked the formal debut of Mr. Clarence Brown, who has already achieved quite a reputation for his ability to recite. He was the only one to respond to an encore during the evening.”

However, having hit that high note, the child prodigy began to retreat from Knoxville’s limelight. After 1907, Brown’s participation in extracurricular activities of all sorts, on campus and off, dwindles. Perhaps, being a full-time college student, he was studying engineering.

UT yearbooks suggest he was also less socially active in club activities as an upper classman than in his early years in college. He was originally a member of the Class of ’09, but didn’t graduate until ’10. Perhaps of necessity, he seems to have gotten more serious about engineering, eventually opting to get two degrees.

He did come out on stage one more time in late May, 1909, at the Pine Palace, that large auditorium built on the grassy quad atop the Hill. At the time, UT had no other big auditorium, as evidenced by the fact that Commencement was often held at Staub’s Theatre on Gay Street. Never meant to be permanent, Jefferson Hall, this large, cheap, temporary building built for the Summer School extravaganzas embarrassed some who wished for a more coherently collegiate look to the old college.

That May 21, the Pine Palace hosted a play calledA Multitude of Masks, apparently a costumed comedy of manners. Prominent in the cast of seven, Clarence Brown was John Spencer Ellington, “bearer of an unwilling dukedom.”

Brown, who played the duke who was himself playing a butler, wasn’t singled out for praise, but theJournal and Tribunenoted, “All parts were well taken, and the performance progresses smoothly from start to finish, pleasing the audience at every turn and provoking hearty applause.”

Held on a Friday, it was apparently a single-night performance, and may have been Clarence Brown’s final performance before a live audience.

It’s not clear that Brown came outside much during his senior year, as he worked on his thesis, “The Economy and Power Distribution Test of Plant No. 2, Brookside Cotton Mills.” It’s pretty dry reading, but its intent, still urgently relevant more than a century later, was to reduce air pollution. Brown concluded, “By carefully attending to the firing of the Hawley furnaces, practically smokeless combustion can be obtained.” Surely his father took an interest in his conclusions, perhaps hoping Clarence would follow him into the family business. And in fact, one initiative Larkin Brown should be remembered for is his effort, revealed the year after Clarence’s graduation, to drastically reduce the emissions from his plant’s famous smokestack.

Commencements were often held downtown, at Staub’s Theatre, but in 1910, UT chose to keep it on campus, in the Pine Palace, whose ramshackle appearance was disguised with spring floral displays. On the dais were distinguished gentlemen of another era: long-bearded Dr. James Park, of First Presbyterian, was in his late 80s. Prof. Cooper Schmitt, the beloved mathematics professor, also took part; he would die later that year at age 52, after collapsing during a lecture on the Hill.

That day Brown Ayres made the formal announcement of the funded construction of a new Carnegie Library (the steel tycoon-benefactor was still alive and very active then). The announcement was unnecessary except for reasons of formality; the building was already standing, substantially completed but not ready for occupation. It would later be substantially remodeled as the Austin Peay Building, to serve as a main administration building, and later as a psychology department headquarters. Old College, the Civil War-scarred main building, whispering distance from Jefferson Hall, was said to be completely renovated. In fact, it would be torn down a few years later for the construction of much-larger Ayres Hall.

It was said to be the biggest graduating class in UT’s history: a total of 73, though that figure apparently reflects graduate degrees, too. Clarence Brown’s graduating senior class claimed only 44.

For his profile in the 1910 yearbook, the classical quotation chosen for, or perhaps by, Brown, was from Archias, the Syrian-born Greek poet who died in 61 B.C.: “What, fly from love? Vain hope, there’s no retreat / When he has wings and I have only feet.”

Was it an allusion to his relationship with Elizabeth Ayres? Whether it was or not, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this newly minted engineer had a romantic side.

***

After graduation, Clarence Brown was listed in the 1911 City Directory one last time as a “traveling salesman,” living at his parents large home on East Scott Avenue, on the low ridge above Happy Holler. They had moved there around 1908. It may be interesting, just as an illustration of the fairly diverse city, that their next-door neighbors were Swedish immigrants; August Emil Sjoblom was an engineer for the Southern Railway. Clarence almost certainly knew them. Whether that familiarity helped him get along, in years to come, with another notable Swedish immigrant named Greta Garbo is purely speculative.

It was during Brown’s time at UT that motion-picture theaters began proliferating in downtown Knoxville, especially along Gay Street. Knoxville was by several accounts an early adapter to the new technology, and films were occasionally shown in vaudeville houses, in the larger brothels, and outdoors in parks, even before the Browns arrived in town.

By the time Brown was a senior at UT, Knoxville had at least five dedicated movie theaters, most of them on Gay Street. They showed mainly very short films: comedies, novelties, and brief spectacles. Among the one-reel silent movies that came out in 1910 were the first-ever versions ofFrankensteinandThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz, each of them less than 20 minutes long. It probably didn’t seem like much of a way to make a living. The feature film was yet to come.

The Bijou Theatre, mainly a live-entertainment theater that soon began showing movies, too, opened during Brown’s junior year. Often Gay Street stages in Brown’s youth would feature live performers who would later be cast in Hollywood films, including some by Clarence Brown—among them Lionel Barrymore and Wallace Beery.

Was he there that fall of 1910, when the old Cal Johnson racetrack on the east side of town hosted the region’s first airplane landing? It was part of the first Appalachian Exposition, which featured impressionist artists from around the country, a large pavilion devoted to African American achievement, exhibits outlining new ideas in conservation, and a visit from Teddy Roosevelt.

In 1911, Clarence Brown was listed living with his parents, but working as a “traveling salesman.” But following his engineer’s fascination with automobiles, Brown left his parents’ home on Scott and went north to Illinois to work for the Moline Automobile Co., then back to small-town Massachusetts to work for a more-famous automobile manufacturer, Stevens-Duryea. He learned enough to start his own business, and by age 23 had opened a car dealership in Birmingham. There, by his vague memories, he became more fascinated with the burgeoning motion-picture industry, and moved to Fort Lee, N.J., where several French-born filmmakers were helping invent an industry. By some murky accounts, Brown used his juvenile acting chops to get attention, but he would eventually associate himself with auteur Maurice Tourneur.

After an intermission called World War I—at which Brown predictably gravitated toward aviation, and became an Army flight instructor—he migrated with Tourneur to the new place on the West Coast called Hollywood.

***

In an unusual circ*mstance, father and son, though a quarter century apart in age, seem to have worked hard and risen rapidly in their chosen professions, blooming at about the same time.

A rank stranger when he arrived in town, Larkin Brown lived in Knoxville almost a quarter century—longer than he ever lived anywhere else—and after a quiet start was emerging as a very public figure in Knoxville about the time his son graduated from UT. The father developed a reputation as a forward-thinking industrialist and Knoxville booster, with imaginative ideas that included cooperation between businessmen, engineers, and educators.

Specifically, he promoted air-pollution controls. In 1911, the year his son left town, Larkin Brown announced the installation of “smoke preventatives” in the impressively tall smokestack of Brookside, claiming they could reduce 90 percent of the soot previously emitted. Again, it was just about a year after his son had made proposals in that regard in his UT thesis.

By 1915, sometimes helping organize big events, sometimes as an after-dinner speaker, Larkin was becoming one of Knoxville’s movers and shakers, both in his leadership of one of the city’s proudest factories, but more broadly in public life, through leadership in multiple charities and civic institutions. He was a powerful man with ideas.

Larkin Brown was a member of leadership committees and pushed for better schools in industrial areas of town. He was a featured speaker at the opening of Beaumont School—true to his holistic approach to industry, he believed that public school up on the hill would be relevant to the future of his Brookside Mill.

Larkin was inducted into the Board of Governors of the Southern Trade Association in 1917, and then led local fundraising efforts for the Red Cross during World War I. He became a stockholder in the New Imperial Hotel Co., which eventually built the Farragut Hotel. He joined the Knoxville Automobile Club, supporting better roads, and was selected to be part of the Board of Commerce Good Roads Committee. He was part of a Teddy Roosevelt Memorial Organization, after that locally popular former president’s death in 1919.

Perhaps reflecting his interests in town, and the fact that they had a car and he could drive to work—a 12-cylinder Packard, in fact—the Browns moved into a stylish home in Maplehurst, in the southwest corner of downtown, in 1919. (By 1920, he was driving a Peerless.) The budding director apparently got to know the place well; in the future, perhaps reflecting extended visits with his parents, Clarence Brown claimed to have lived in that house on West Hill.

Larkin pushed for Knoxville to build a civic auditorium, more than 40 years before it came to be. He tried to organize a much more organized electrical supply for East Tennessee, through an Electric Power Campaign, more than a decade before TVA; he and his wife joined a party reviewing Alcoa’s first hydroelectric dams.

But by then, Catherine Brown was beginning to spend more time on extended trips out to California to visit her son, sometimes for months at a time. Her son had a daughter; a grandchild is likely more interesting to any new grandmother than any of her husband’s ambitious civic ventures.

When vice-presidential nominee Calvin Coolidge came to town on the Southern train to speak at the Bijou and the Market Hall in October, 1920, Larkin Brown was on the Reception Committee to welcome the future president to Knoxville.

***

At about the same time, his son Clarence Brown was directing, originally as a substitute for the ailing Maurice Tourneur,Last of the Mohicans, one of the great feature films of the silent era.

Unlike many in industrial management at the time, Larkin Brown publicly supported the union, and tried to keep the lines open with workers and their concerns. Fortunately, Brookside was doing so well for much of his era that he enjoyed the public announcements of substantial raises. However, when an industrial downturn forced a steep wage reduction, the general manager of Brookside faced some difficulty in April, 1921, when Brookside faced its first strike. He appears to have acquitted himself well, acknowledging both sides in public discussions.

By 1924, Clarence Brown had become famous again in his hometown. Acknowledging his local origins, theJournal & Tribunehailed his 1924 silent feature,Smouldering Fires. “As director of this masterly photoplay, Mr. Brown has won unstinting praise.” For him, it was a “distinct triumph” that “thrusts him upward into the sparse ranks of the directorial geniuses.”It opened at the Strand, on Gay Street near Wall, in May, 1925. (James Agee, then a student at Knoxville High, would become a thoughtful film critic with an unusual appreciation for the artistic value of the old silents; in the 1940s, he would extolSmouldering Firesas one of Brown’s masterpieces.) The murder melodramaThe Goose Womanopened a few months later at the Queen, a larger theater, and was lauded in the local press.

The director from Knoxville enjoyed several triumphs that year, includingThe Eagle, a sometimes comical romantic adventure with Rudolph Valentino. (Hailed as signaling Valentino’s comeback, it was also one of the legendary romantic star’s last films; he died unexpectedly the following year.)

The young director—he was just 35—was doing so well for himself in Hollywood that he offered his parents a more luxurious place in Los Angeles to be closer to him. Nearing retirement age, Larkin and his wife left town in early 1926, about the timeThe Eagleopened at the Riviera, Knoxville’s biggest theater.

The Browns rarely if ever returned. Larkin Brown was forgotten in Knoxville.

When Larkin Brown died in L.A. in 1942, it’s not clear that Knoxville ever heard the news—nor when his widow, Clarence’s mother, Catherine, died about 12 years later.

***

Meanwhile, beloved teacher Laura Fogelsong’s life and career ended. She had died suddenly and prematurely, at age 52, after collapsing at graduation exercises at Knoxville High on the last day of May, 1928. Her son, Royal, had just received his diploma. It was presumed that the excitement of the occasion was enough to cause her heart attack, but she had other stresses, too; a close associate of her husband’s at the bank had recently shot himself, when it was soon to be revealed that the suicide had been embezzling funds from the Knoxville Savings and Loan. There was plenty of stress to go around.

TheNews-Sentinelmentioned that one of her students had been the Hollywood director Clarence Brown. At that time, he was working closely with Greta Garbo, with a major movie calledA Woman of Affairs. Whether he heard the news about Laura Fogelsong’s death may be hard to be sure about.

***

Knoxville is never more conspicuous in Brown’s work than in one film calledAh, Wilderness!Based on Eugene O’Neill’s play of the same name, the dour New England playwright’s only comedy, the movie touted prominently as “Clarence Brown’s Production,” was a 1935 hit, featuring Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, and a new talent named Mickey Rooney. It was shot not in a Hollywood back lot nor in O’Neill’s original small-town Connecticut setting, but at Brown’s original hometown of Clinton and especially nearby Grafton, Massachusetts. However, much of the action centers around characters of high-school age, the age Brown was when he lived in Knoxville.

Knoxville chums recognized the high-school interior, as that of the original Knoxville High School on Union Avenue, representing the third-floor assembly area. Everything was exactly as it was, they said, down to the placement of furniture, pianos, and statuary, including a model of the Venus de Milo. By the time the movie had been made, the school building had already been destroyed in a 1925 fire, to be replaced with what we now know as the Daylight Building.

Moreover, Brown added minor characters to O’Neill’s original script that his old KHS chums recognized as people they knew. And several of them are on stage, performing recitations, and comically badly. Local sources stated, as if it was a matter of fact, that the kid who recited Poe’s “The Bells” was Clarence Brown’s tribute to himself of 30 years before.

It may be his most personal film.

Four years later, Brown made the much more serious and technically unusual film, with a plague setting in India,The Rains Came, the first film to win an Oscar for Special Effects. Starring Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power, it was new, and recently declared by Knoxville attorney and politician Harley Fowler to be a greater achievement thanGone with the Wind, when Brown returned to Knoxville in October, 1939, for the first time in almost 15 years. The occasion was a gala Homecoming weekend, when UT was playing #8 Alabama. The 49-year-old Brown, who followed UT football closely in California, had publicly predicted UT would win by two touchdowns; Major Neyland’s team won by three touchdowns, later to finish the regular season without even being scored upon, the last team ever to achieve that distinction in NCAA history. A guest at the Melrose Place home of Standard Knitting Mill owner E.J. McMillan, a former UT classmate, Brown attended events at Bleak House (the Civil War relic was then the Lotspeich home, 20 years before it was associated with memorializing the Confederacy) and Cherokee Country Club, and took tours of new Norris Dam and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which was barely an idea when he last visited: “an unknown wilderness in Mr. Brown’s day here,” theNews-Sentinelremarked, the Smokies were entirely new to him.

Brown declared that the Knoxville area was the “most picturesque section in the nation,” but remarked at how much his hometown had changed, with a big new post office and multiple viaducts.

It apparently inspired Brown to reconnect with his inner Vol fan. He invited Coach Robert Neyland and his Vols to his ranch for the Rose Bowl a few months later, and again five years later. Then he settled into life in California, and the natural end of his career, making several more important films, includingIntruder in the Dust, a Faulkner treatment that impressed Faulkner himself, an extraordinary film with a civil-rights theme, with a speaking role for an important Black character. Brown was a Southerner, born in the 19^thcentury and pushing 60 in 1949, but was still pushing the boundaries.

Always a paradox, he was considered a political conservative, but was credited with a daring antiwar movie (Idiot’s Delight, 1939), andIntruder, which was too controversial for many American markets and reportedly suppressed in Hollywood, but it won the British Academy Award for Best Picture.

He made a few more movies, including the loony original version ofAngels in the Outfield, which rewarded MGM with a lawsuit for defamation of character from the manager of the beleaguered Pittsburgh Pirates, who happened to be a Knoxville public-school contemporary of Brown’s named Billy Meyer. But with more money than he could ever spend on himself, and apparently tired of the business, Brown retired at 62 to enjoy a retirement of flying airplanes and driving fast cars. Most of Knoxville forgot about him, until he turned up at a UT alumni party in Los Angeles about 15 years later, leading to the reconnection with his alma mater that resulted in Clarence Brown Theatre.

Brown would offer a major gift of unprecedented proportions to UT, even if the campus as he found it in the late 1960s bore little resemblance to the compact but philosophically diverse and high-achieving college he had known half a century earlier.

Today, the engineering department is very far away from Clarence Brown Theatre, and the well-endowed dramatic department. It would be a freakish rarity for someone to double-majors in engineering and drama. But in Clarence Brown’s unusual mind, the two were adjacent, and sometimes the same thing.

By Jack Neely, August 2023

The post Clarence Brown and Knoxville appeared first on Knoxville History Project.