The day Papa came to town and sent a telegram
and probably ate some lunch
by Jack Neely
He came into this town from the west, driving his Ford Roadster along Kingston
Pike by himself. He was a strong young man with a broad face and a black
mustache, and his black hair was receding from his forehead. He did not mind
his hairline receding because he had many guns and he was the most famous
writer in the world. His fine book about bullfighting was called Death
in the Afternoon and it was new in the bookstores. The writer was not
happy because some of the reviews were very bad.
He came to this town in the valley where the peasants drink the white lightning
under the bridges and the leaders make no plans but eat lunches at Regas
and he went to the Western Union office. Here he sent a telegram to his editor
who was called Maxwell Perkins and he signed it ERNEST. The telegram
that he sent his agent from Knoxville is the only way that we know he was
here 65 years ago this week, and we know it only because the great UT professor
Allison Ensor found it in a footnote and told us about it.
The writer was here because he had spent Christmas in Arkansas at the home
of the parents of his second wife and had spent the holiday firing 2,300
shotgun shells at many ducks in the sky. His son was ill and thought he would
die because the boy had spent his life in France and he did not understand
Fahrenheit thermometers, and the wife of the boy's father took the boy home
to Key West. His father could not go home with them because he had business
in New York and he drove there without women and on the way he came to Knoxville
and he stopped his car.
We do not know what he thought about Knoxville. The big two-hearted Tennessee
River flowed through the town without dams and at the street called Henley
there was a fine new bridge across the river and into the trees of South
Knoxville. There was not the thing called TVA anywhere.
Downtown on Central Avenue that winter there was still a sad billboard that
said SHAMROCK SALOON - JUNG'S BEER, but it had been there for three
decades and no one had drunk Jung's Beer inside the Shamrock Saloon in many
years because the Shamrock Saloon was not there anymore. There were no saloons
in Knoxville at all and no bars where the writer could drink unless he knew
someone and he probably did not know anyone well.
We do not know whether the writer met the young man called Cas who sold the
pork sausage at 25 cents a pound and the JFG coffee for 29 cents a pound
at his eight cash stores and we do not know whether the writer met the fine
young fiddler named Roy Acuff or George Dempster, the man who invented the
great Dempster Dumpster. If he did meet them all four of them would have
fought each other because they were strong men and all four of them liked
to fight very much and they all four hit very hard with their fists. That
is one thing the writer would have liked about Knoxville in 1933, that even
the successful men who wore the ties were strong men who fought very hard
and broke bones when they could.
We do not know whether he met other people who were in the town called Knoxville
that day. We do not know whether he met Major Neyland, the leader of the
great Vols or who would have won if they fought. We do not know if he met
the young Presbyterian from Monteagle called Myles Horton who was in town
saying capitalism would fall or if he hit him. We do not know if Papa and
Myles and Cas and Roy and George and Major Neyland had baloney sandwiches
at the Gold Sun Cafe and drank bootleg grappa and fought and talked about
fine big trout and argued about the generalissimo. They probably did
not.
All we know is that the writer sent a telegram from one of the five Western
Union offices that were downtown near where all the cafes and poolrooms and
theaters were.
At the Tennessee Theater the movie called A Farewell to Arms had just
closed. It had Helen Hayes and the new actor Gary Cooper. Earlier that week
a woman from Fountain City whose eyes were clouded with tears from watching
the movie stood up and missed a step and fell and hurt her spine and she
could no longer walk.
The writer did not like the movie at all because he wrote the book the movie
was based on and the movie had a happy ending which was not in his book and
he did not like happy endings because they were not honest and true. If that
movie had been showing when he was here he would have punched the usher and
the girl in the ticket booth and the man who showed the movies with the projector
and he would have told them never to show the movie again.
If the writer stayed in Knoxville the evening he sent the telegram he might
have gone to the fine new Alumni Gym, where the great UT Vols basketball
team were playing an exhibition game with the great Celtics. It was a very
exciting game and the Celtics beat the Vols by only two points. We do not
know if Papa saw the game or if from the balcony he shouted Ole!
Soon after he left he published a sad story about a kind-hearted waiter without
hope called "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." It was set in Spain and was probably
not about the place called Knoxville.
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