Readers send the durndest things

by Jack Neely

The best thing about this job is the mail. For more than a decade as a reporter, I tried to get mail, and failed. For six years at Whittle, our marketing experts kept telling us our magazines were reaching 20 million people across the nation, but we almost never got mail from them. I began to suspect that each of those 20 million readers was intensely shy, out of stationery, or entirely fictional.

When we did begin to get mail, it was mostly from psychopaths and—not to imply they have anything to do with each other—professional writers. Writers wrote to us because they'd caught wind of our dollar-a-word rates. I was just an assistant editor there, which means I went to a lot of meetings and filled out forms. The few times I actually wrote something there, Whittle paid me, roughly, a cup of coffee per word. Some swanky cafes sell coffee for a dollar a cup, so I figured I got what I was worth.

Anyway, mail from readers—as opposed to mail from hungry writers—is important to reporters. Even when it's not polite, a letter is irrefutable evidence that there are actual readers out there—moreover, readers who care enough about what we're writing to invest a 32-cent stamp toward improving it.

I started writing regularly for Metro Pulse five years ago. All of a sudden I was getting lots of mail. Metro Pulse's circulation is about 2% of the advertised circulation of the last magazine I worked for at Whittle—but somehow I get more mail for this one column than I used to get at the whole magazine I used to edit. I'm not sure what the deal is.

The only problem with getting lots of mail is when you feel obliged to answer it. I'm behind on my correspondence. I apologize to everybody who hasn't heard back from me since Memorial Day. In the meantime, I'll try to take care of some business here.

Writing a few months ago about a new CD of early country music, I described the long-gone St. James Hotel on Wall Avenue, where some of the cuts on this album were recorded in 1930, in sessions described in the CD's liner notes. In country-music histories (and even one jazz documentary), I've run across so many references to the hotel's brief career as a radio and recording studio in the late '20s and early '30s that the St. James came to seem as profound, as mysterious, as mythical as any medieval shrine. There were promotional sketches of the St. James in city directories of the '30s, but I'd never seen a good photograph of it.

A week or two after the column appeared, I took the mail out of my mailbox and took an involuntary step backwards. There, in my hand, was a "Hotel St. James" promotional postcard, addressed to me—with a color photo of this sunny six-story building in the early '60s, a few years before it was torn down. "Located near Knoxville's famous Mall," it says. "Fire Proof—150 Air Conditioned Rooms—Free Overnight Parking." On the back was a message from a reader whose father ran the place in its later years. The writer mentioned that in his childhood, the hotel had a coffee shop and even a "fantastic skating rink" he and his brother enjoyed. The writer didn't include a return address, but I'd like to thank him. Even though it makes the St. James seem a little less mysterious and legendary than it did in those descriptions from the '30s, I have the postcard framed in my dining room.

After my story about utopian visions in Knoxville's past came out, a Northwest Knoxville reader sent me a set of schematic drawings detailing an ambitious proposal of almost Gettelfingerian proportions: a plan to redevelop the World's Fair site and most of North and Northwest Knoxville as a bold new Lake Knox—with the motto, "A little of the ocean in Tennessee." On the newly created lakefront, the utopian proposes, would be the revolutionary "9-hole Indoor Golf Course & Bar."

I got several responses to my October column about a visiting English physician tracing his Knoxville ancestors, wherein I reopened an old can of literary worms by reconsidering the 75-year-old rumor that Emily Dickinson visited her Dickinson cousins in Knoxville. All scholars who've weighed in on the subject are dubious, to say the least. I understand that some national Dickinson scholars have caught wind of the column and are still dubious. It's true there's no hint of such a trip in any of her surviving papers. It's true that the poet was a rather extreme case of a homebody, spending most of her life literally inside the same house in Amherst, Massachusetts.

But we don't, and never will, know some details of her personal life. Many of her personal papers were destroyed by her sister after her death. There's a new school of psychology that finally acknowledges the fact that human beings aren't consistent. Sometimes they get a wild hair and do something utterly out of character. Like get on the train to Knoxville.

I didn't say Emily Dickinson was here. I didn't say she probably was here. I merely suggested that the age of the 75-year-old rumor, which predates Dickinson's modern high-school-textbook, household-name popularity, makes the question less than absurd.

I'm a skeptic by nature. If the party line were that Emily was definitely here, I'd argue. But when people say something in the past was "impossible," I'm skeptical about the impossibility. If someone says, Emily Dickinson probably didn't visit Knoxville, I'll agree. But if you say, That's preposterous, I know for certain that Emily Dickinson didn't visit Knoxville, well, you may get an argument from me.

After my column about the block of Gay Street apparently doomed by the Justice Center project, I got lots of mail, some of it from out of state. And, a couple days after that column came out, an editorial appeared in our daily newspaper of record dismissing any notion of preserving the place, holding that the S&W's "not historic." I'm not sure what sort of research gave the editor the confidence to make such a bold statement, but I suspect it only reflects the common prejudice that to be "historic," a building has to be an 18th-century tavern put together with wooden pegs, or the birthplace of a state, or the cradle of one of America's first state universities, or a fort that repelled a massive Confederate onslaught, or the childhood home of a famous author (but only if it's also the setting of his Pulitzer-winning novel).

We've had all those historic structures in Knoxville, and we've torn them all down. Now we have to settle for our second-string historic buildings. The S&W easily makes that team. As a gathering place for thousands of Knoxvillians of the Depression, of the World War II era, the S&W consoled us through some of the bleakest moments of the century, and still hosts many of our fondest memories of crowded lunches and nights on the town.

I'm pretty sure Emily Dickinson was never there, but for nearly half a century, Knoxville's own best and brightest—country musicians and nuclear engineers, industrial inventors and socialist utopians, dambuilders and major novelists—shoved their way through its revolving doors. They've closed deals, whispered about that top-secret project over in Oak Ridge, debated the civil-rights marchers on the sidewalk outside, described new ideas in hydraulic locks or guitar licks.

The S&W is historic, as all historic things are, for who's been there and what's happened there, some of which we know about, much of which we won't know about until historians dig though letters and memoirs in years to come. But people in the preservation business also measure history by the rarity of a building's architectural style. In style, the S&W is one of Knoxville's very rarest, our last surviving remnant of a lively architectural style, art nouveau/deco. It's historic. Whether we can afford to save it or not, I'll leave up to County Commission and the people who elect them.

Back to the subject of mail: a few weeks ago I wrote about all the mail we still get here in the Arnstein almost daily for people who used to work for Whittle, some of whom left town more than a decade ago. In the column I mentioned getting some mail addressed to Bill Beuttler, an old friend from Chicago and alumnus of Downbeat magazine, who left Knoxville in 1988. I hadn't talked to him in several years, and had no clue about what part of the country he was living in—but occasionally I spot his byline in the New York Times or Sports Illustrated. Maybe three weeks after that column appeared, I get a call at work. "Hey, Jack," this guy said, in an accent I already recognized, distinctly Chicagoan but smooth and nonchalant, like a disk jockey for a Windy City NPR jazz station. "Bill Beuttler," he said, unnecessarily. It turns out he's working as a writer in New York, still freelance, still following the jazz greats, still thinking about writing a book. A Metro Pulse subscriber in Los Angeles (Howdy, Jim!) had sent him a copy of the column.

Start writing a column, you never know who you're going to hear from. I need to start being careful about what I say.