The mystery of downtown's row-boat guy is solved—and a festival is born

by Chris Wohlwend

When I returned to Knoxville to live in 1995 after a 23-year absence, the most striking change I noticed was the different downtown landscape.

The people were fewer in number and they were concentrated closer to the river, around the intersection of Main and Gay where only the old courthouse and the Andrew Johnson Hotel remained from my day.

The Butcher brothers had erected ostentatious phallic towers, their mirrored-glass walls gleaming like pinkie diamonds. In the process they had taken out a parking lot and the Gateway Book Store.

The northwest corner was dominated by the more refined "campus" constructed by Knoxville's other smooth-talker of national renown, Chris Whittle, which in its stated homage to the architecture of Thomas Jefferson, is even more pretentious than the Butcher baubles. He had taken the Trailways Bus Station and, thanks to city generosity, a block of Market Street.

A block north at Church and Gay was another new office building, called, in developer dialect, Two Centre Square. Anchored by SunTrust bank, it had replaced an open-all-night Krystal and two perfectly good upstairs pool halls, one doubling as a bookie joint. Across the street had been Blaufeld's, where Henry Nichols once served up the city's best chili dog and Kenneth Shelton served up a particularly skewed viewpoint of the local scene. Blaufeld's had been swallowed by KUB.

The Two Centre Square builders, using red brick, did manage to create an edifice more graceful than the Butchers' monuments. And, in setting their building back from the corner, they had left room for the sculpture of a rower in his boat. Of all the changes, I found this statue the most puzzling.

Is this waterless river rat sinking or rising from the brick? And who does he represent?

He's relatively modern, as his raiment includes a baseball cap, so he's not supposed to be Admiral David Farragut, Knox County native and Civil War naval hero.

I asked cohorts from my earlier time here, knowledgeable Knoxvillians who hadn't strayed as I had.

Jim Dykes, fisherman and retired author of a newspaper column called "Without a Paddle," suggested it was a stylized likeness of himself.

But, I pointed out, instead of being without a paddle, the boat's occupant is equipped with two oars. And you never wear a baseball cap.

"Artistic license," Dykes answered, unconvincingly.

Someone else—it may have been adman/producer Tom Jester—thought it a composite of Knoxville's more famous hustlers, struggling to keep their schemes afloat: William Blount, Jake and C.H. Butcher, Chris Whittle.

But again, the rower's clothing suggests otherwise. He's not in 18th century garb, or a banker's suit, or a cape.

Another suggested the late Knoxville Journal's long-time sports columnist, the also late Tom Anderson, who frequently wrote about his johnboat, the Dodd Dam.

But Anderson, despised by the city's establishment as he was, isn't a likely candidate for such honor. Anderson, in fact, holds the distinction of being the only Knoxville sportswriter to be permanently banned from University of Tennessee facilities. Couldn't be him.

I looked at other non-historic possibilities. Not business—Knoxville's never had a fishing industry. Not sports—he doesn't look like Bob Suffridge or Big John Tate or Peyton Manning. Literary? George Washington Harris' Sut Lovingood? Possible, though there's that baseball hat.

But Sut Lovingood leads to another fictitious Sut, a more modern one. Cormac McCarthy's Suttree was set in the 1950s. And one of that novel's most memorable characters, Gene Harrogate, certainly deserves to be bronzed.

Harrogate is the hustling "country mouse" to Suttree's "city mouse." When he isn't residing at the Workhouse, Harrogate lives on the Tennessee River or under the bridge across First Creek. Though it's true that he uses the hood of a car as his boat and he catches bats instead of fish, during one period of the novel he does try to make his living from the river. And a later scheme involves tunneling underground to reach the city's bank vaults. He could be attempting to row out of the bank basement.

The likeness has to be of Gene Harrogate.

And that conclusion lends itself to a proposal for the city fathers, a way we can not only honor one of Knoxville's most talented writers and his innovative creation, but also put some life into downtown in the summer.

The Annual Gene Harrogate Watermelon Festival could take place in the dead days between the end of the Dogwood Arts Festival and the start of UT football season.

Harrogate's love of watermelons is indelibly documented by McCarthy, and the boat sculpture is naturally shaped for filling with ice and watermelons.

The festivities could start with an actual rowboat race on the river. Prizes could be awarded to the person bringing in the most bats and to the person concocting the most outlandish money-making scheme (Blounts, Butchers, and Whittles not eligible). The mayor could read aloud Harrogate's introduction in Suttree.

And then everyone could gather around for a luscious piece of watermelon.

We highly recommend you read Suttree to attain this column's full comic effect. And if you want to write one yourself, send it to:

YIKES!
c/o Metro Pulse
505 Market St., Suite 300
Knoxville, TN 37902

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