The day UT frat boys struck out Frank Sinatra

by Jack Neely

One of the problems with history is that the old stuff rots first; you look in the file and read the stuff that hasn't rotted yet, and even though there's some brownish powder in the bottom, you figure what you can still read is all there is to the story, and that the older stuff never existed to begin with. I'm beginning to suspect that due to some atmospheric phenomena, the older stuff rots faster in TV studio files.

Last week, one TV news station anchorperson commented that the current baseball impasse may threaten "85 years of baseball in Knoxville." Better-preserved accounts prove that Knoxville has had pro baseball for well over a century.

Anyway, a few days earlier, bless her heart, the same TV reporter who carved decades off Knoxville's baseball history claimed that the late Sinatra had never performed in Knoxville. You ought to know by now that you should never suggest that anything never happened in Knoxville.

Sinatra always said his favorite color was orange—the "happiest" color, he said. He liked to wear orange, surrounded himself with orange bric-a-brac. And his devotion to Jack Daniels was legendary; he drank a bottle of Tennessee Sour Mash a day, stored 10 cases of it in his plane, walked out of bars that didn't stock it. A friend once said, "If you don't like Jack Daniels, he looks at you like you were queer or something."

Add his irregular English, his love of cigarettes, and his habit of busting a few heads now and then, and it's clear that Frank was, basically, an East Tennessean. He just dressed better.

Where and when Frank Sinatra got his eye for orange and his taste for liquor, I don't know—but I'm betting it was in the spring of 1940. I've heard several second-hand stories about Frank's weekend at UT. My old friend, Knoxville boulevardier-historian David Harkness, who was then the 27-year-old principal of Jellico High, actually saw the show. He says he's certain it was at a series of Nahheeyayli dances in the first few days of June 1940. (Nahheeyayli, allegedly Cherokee for "Dance of the Spring Corn," was a longtime UT tradition, a social group that sponsored two all-campus dances a year.)

At 24, Sinatra was Tommy Dorsey's latest hire, only then becoming famous, for his sentimental 78 "I'll Be Seeing You." You'd think Dorsey and Sinatra would be a front-page story, but their show seems not to have been mentioned in either paper, either to announce it or review it. UT dances usually spun on their own axes; they didn't need publicity to ensure a good turnout.

Dorsey was more famous than Sinatra in 1940 but not quite as big a deal as two other headliners who happened to be in Knoxville that same week. If that date is correct, Dorsey and Sinatra had plenty of competition for UT students' ticket money. On June 6, 1940, both Glenn Miller and his orchestra and Cab Calloway were in Knoxville, playing independently organized simultaneous shows at different venues.

Harkness recalls the Glenn Miller show, but the Dorsey/Sinatra shows at Alumni Gym are what he remembers best. He says Dorsey's band played two nights, plus an afternoon tea dance, each one with Sinatra, as well as back-up singers the Pied Pipers, including the great Jo Stafford.

Harkness was there on a double date with another couple and a UT junior named Janet Martin. Dorsey opened with Frank's new rendition of "I'll Never Smile Again." Harkness recalls it acutely:

"There was this emaciated, hungry-looking young man," he recalls, "and my date practically swooned." He and the other guys couldn't understand the attraction.

Joe Brownlee was there, too; a freshman at UT, Brownlee was a trombonist himself and an avid follower of swing. "Frank Sinatra was a big joke in those days," he recalls. "The teenage girls loved him, but the guys made fun of him. We didn't believe he weighed 100 pounds. We said, if he didn't have that microphone to hang onto, he couldn't stand up by himself," he says.

"Now, he was a good singer," Brownlee allows—but recalls he and his friends preferred Dorsey's other vocalist, Bob Eberly. Still, he recalls that when Sinatra sang, everyone crowded around the podium; Brownlee got in a shoving contest with another guy that nearly turned into a fist fight.

Other stories have Frank making guest appearances at familiar places all over campus that weekend. One, perhaps apocryphal, has Frank getting drunk at the Kappa Sig house, then on what's now the southeast corner of Volunteer Boulevard and Andy Holt—but Brownlee says that was drummer Buddy Rich. (Only beer was legal in Knoxville in 1940, but most fraternity houses were also speakeasies.)

In the book Hello, Everybody, I'm Lindsey Nelson, the autobiography of the late CBS sportscaster, Nelson includes a Frank sports story. In the early '40s, Nelson was working part-time for the News-Sentinel and part-time as a softball umpire. "One of the bands that came to the University of Tennessee was that of Tommy Dorsey," he recalled. "One afternoon a softball game was arranged between members of the band and a group of UT fraternity boys, mostly SAE's. They played on what was then a vacant lot next to the northeast end of the stadium. My friend Frank Thomas pitched for the frat boys, and at one crucial point in the contest, he struck out a skinny vocalist with a lot of hair named Frank Sinatra."

Of course, it could have been another vocalist whose hair was named Frank Sinatra, but I'm willing to bet it's the same guy.

To bring it all back around, Nelson's memoir of his far-flung life ends with a sentimental return to old Bill Meyer Stadium, which Sinatra probably never visited. But be careful about making a claim like that on camera.