Two epilogues and a shipwreck

by Jack Neely

This column is dedicated to the proposition that history is a living thing that breathes and grows and, every now and then, burps. Stare at history long enough—even history that's more than half a century old—and you start to notice it's still moving. It can give you a chill.

In June, for example, I wrote about Frank Sinatra's 1940 appearances with Tommy Dorsey's band at UT's springtime Naheeyayli dances, never guessing how many Metro Pulse readers remember that weekend well, though some disagree about the details. I still haven't firmed up the precise weekend Sinatra spent here—performing at least three times over a two-day period—but a couple of witnesses are convinced it was in May, 1940, not early June, as I'd reported. Dr. Digby Seymour, who's better known for his impressive Civil War scholarship, turns out to be a big-band scholar, too. He was there and says Dorsey's second male vocalist was Bob Eberle, not his brother Ray.

So far, written sources on that spring weekend before the war are elusive.

I mentioned stories that Dorsey's drummer, Buddy Rich, who rarely got along with Sinatra, got drunk at the Kappa Sig house and had to be prepped for the show at Alumni Gym with a cold shower. However, retired UT Professor Gideon Tanner saw Frank himself at another frat party at the Pike House on the corner of Clinch Avenue and 13th, one of several off-campus speakeasies. A big handsome brick house, it's still there. For those who can't make it to Hoboken on Frank's birthday, I'm coming up with a sacred tour of the UT area, the Fourteen Stations of the Cufflink.

And Bob Webb, founder of Webb School but then a junior at UT majoring in mathematics, saw Sinatra at the long-gone SAE house, which was on a long-gone hill on long-gone Cornell Street, a part of town UT has erased beyond all recognition; for the purposes of pilgrimages, it was maybe 200 yards west of Circle Park. Webb was especially looking forward to seeing Dorsey's newest star, the young singer from New Jersey. Webb says the SAEs threw an intermission party for the whole band. As Webb recalls that night, "Frank Sinatra threw open the front door, stepped into the room, and shouted, 'Where's the Scotch?'"

At 24, Frank apparently hadn't yet developed his famous alliance with Jack Daniels.

In the story about Knoxville architecture, I reported that Barber & McMurry designed the Gothic-inspired Church Street Methodist Church (at Henley and Main, if you can't guess from its name), often described as one of the most beautiful churches in the region. Even Franklin Roosevelt is reported to have remarked, as he rode past during one of his visits, "That is the most beautiful church I have ever seen." Obviously, it's a real trophy for the architect who designed it. However, there's some dispute over who that was.

Several sources, including the impressive new Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture describe it only as a "Barber & McMurry" project. And at the time of its completion, a 1931 News-Sentinel interview quoted Charles Barber himself taking credit for the design, especially its most distinctive feature, the asymmetrical spire. ("Perhaps the chief thing that led me to put it there was for balance...." said Barber.)

However, a reader pointed out that Barber & McMurry wasn't the only firm involved in the design. William Ross Mc-Nabb's informative 1974 essay, "Architecture in Knoxville, Tennessee" describes the church design as a collaborative effort between Barber & McMurry and nationally prominent architect John Russell Pope, who in 1915 had designed the Dulin house on Kingston Pike. In McNabb's caption for a photograph, in fact, Pope gets top billing.

Barber did acknowledge that the older Pope was a "consultant" on the project. That's also how the church's own history has it: Barber & McMurry as architects, Pope as a consultant. (Barber was, by the way, a parishioner of Church Street Methodist.)

However, the reader who called in to dispute the Barber & McMurry claim tells us he has strong reason to believe that the Methodist church was primarily the work of Pope's firm—in particular a lesser-known Pope associate named Otto Eggers. He says Barber & McMurry mainly functioned as Pope's local interpreters and facilitators.

Our caller quoted the late Malcolm Rice, an architect who had worked for Pope's firm at the time of the design and later for Barber & McMurry, as giving primary credit for Church Street Methodist to Eggers. This reader says he's been troubled for years by what he believes to be a chronic misattribution.

I don't have the heft to weigh in on this one. A scholar at the University of Maryland tells me the church is listed among Pope's commissions in 1930, but says that doesn't necessarily mean he was the chief architect. I did learn that Pope and Eggers later worked together on other projects that would be even more conspicuous than Church Street Methodist: the National Gallery of Art and the Jefferson Memorial, both in Washington. (Incidentally, they chose to use Knoxville marble for the floor of the Jefferson Memorial.) Pope died in 1937 and didn't live to see either completed.

We probably haven't heard the last of that one.

Finally, I got an interesting postcard from John Hall, who works in the archaeology department at UT. Labeled "Derelict Ships," it's a scene of an Outer Banks backwater in Wanchese, N.C. There are several ships in the photograph, a burned-out tugboat listing hard to starboard in the foreground, several other industrial-looking hulks tilting at unseaworthy angles in the background, but only one name you can make out, on what appears to be a big gray rusty dredger with a useless crane on deck. Though most of the first letter is corroded away, you can read that the vessel was once known as the Knoxville.