A few more epilogues and errata, for the record

by Jack Neely

Last week, with the help of readers' responses, I tried to fill in some gaps in recent stories. Maybe someday I'll rely on reader mail to fill this space every week. I'm not anywhere near there yet, but my Oddities & Amplifications file is still pretty thick. I can get back to fresh work when I get these off my chest.

A researcher at UT called asking if I knew anything about a huge establishment, circa 1888-1892, called the Knoxville Hotel. A scholar at the University of Chicago is studying the life of architect Henry Ives Cobb and found a reference that Cobb had come to Tennesee and designed "the largest building in the state"—and that it was called the "Knoxville Hotel." I was clueless, speculating that might have been the original name for one of the grand Victorian resorts just outside of town, Whittle Springs or the Fountainhead.

However, that week I happened to be researching the Flat Creek train wreck, which involved Scottish-born financier Alexander Arthur. In addition to Arthur's famous Four Seasons debacle in Middlesboro, I learned he'd also planned a huge hotel, originally meant to consume most of the block bounded by Gay, Main, Cumberland, and Market, where the new federal courthouse is today. Arthur's hotel was to cost $2 million in 1889 dollars; Arthur was signing up investors at the time of the wreck, but maybe not enough of them—I doubt it was ever started. If you know anything about the unfated Knoxville Hotel, give me a call and I'll pass it on.

* You might have heard that Merrill Proudfoot, the Presbyterian minister and scholar, died over the summer at age 74. He wrote a book called Diary of a Sit-In, a moving account of civil rights demonstrations in Knoxville in 1960, which includes some dramatic scenes at the Walgreens lunch counter in the Gay Street building we now call Gus's. Proudfoot lived here for several years in the late '50s and early '60s when he worked as a professor at Knoxville College. His service in Kansas City, Mo., sounds more impressive than any funeral I've ever attended, including a hymn written by Dr. Proudfoot and a solo, "Mi chiamano Mimi," from Puccini's La Boheme.

I did not know Dr. Proudfoot, but should have. After referring to his book in a column a few months ago, I got a letter from a friend of his in Missouri, with information about how to contact the author. I never did, but it's still in my source file.

Several Knoxvillians remember Ernest Dickerman, the nationally influential conservationist who died in Virginia this summer at age 87. The independent-minded Dickerman lived in Knoxville for over 30 years—most of it, apparently, as a resident of the downtown YMCA—but spent his spare time cross-country hiking in the Smokies, which he believed were already overdeveloped in the '60s. Dickerman was active in the Wilderness Society in the '30s and helped get the Wilderness Act passed in Congress in '64. The UT Library wants it to be known they're trying to collect any papers connected to Dickerman and his prodigious work for conservation issues.

Blame me, not Dr. Digby Seymour, if you knew that Bob (or was it Ray?) Eberle didn't sing with Tommy Dorsey's big band. He apparently did sing with Tommy Dorsey's brother Jimmy Dorsey's band, but his brother Ray Eberle didn't. In last week's column, I corrected an earlier column about Frank Sinatra's 1940 visit with Tommy Dorsey's band, but had misread Dr. Seymour's correction of another witness's recollection that Tommy Dorsey's second singer was either Bob or Ray Eberle (not to be confused with the comedy team Bob and Ray, nor with the Everly Brothers). Bob, Dr. Seymour says, sang with Jimmy Dorsey's band. Ray Eberle was with the band of Glenn Miller, who, of course, was not a Dorsey Brother at all. Got it?

After quoting part of the story "Knoxton High" by the adolescent Jim Agee, ca. 1926, I got a call from one 1920s-era alumnus of Knoxville High who took exception to the description. He'd never heard of his possible former classmate James Agee, but he was incensed that anyone would make fun of Knoxville High, and especially that anyone would laugh at that doughboy statue, even a teenager in the '20s. (Agee held that it had been mass-produced by the "Doughboy Statue Mfg. Co.")

Agee may have been merely stating fact. Reader Steve Allen sent me a copy of a recent issue of the Indianapolis Star which happened to publish a photograph of a very similar doughboy statue in Hartford City, Indiana. It's one of at least ten in Indiana, based on an original 1920 sculpture by E.M. Viquesney of Spencer, Ind. The article says 138 life-sized copies were shipped to locations in 35 states. And speaking of Agee:

You probably know that Whittaker Chambers, the portly fellow who, having failed to find fame as a Communist, found fame by ratting on former Communists, had few friends on either side of the iron curtain. But one was his open-minded colleague at Time, our own James Agee. The new biography Whittaker Chambers, by Sam Tanehaus, has gotten a lot of attention in the book reviews, and appears to be a generally well-research-ed, well-written book. But it makes one error I'm getting really, really tired of seeing.

"The most gifted writer in Time's history," Tanehaus calls Agee—a bold but supportable claim. However, the author goes on to say Agee "had come to the magazine from Nash-ville by way of Harvard...." Agee, of course, spent most of his pre-Harvard youth in Knox-ville (not counting about five years up in the Cumberlands), and never lived in Nashville.

If you're talented and famous, get used to it: you'll eventually end up Nashvillian, like most of Knoxville's proudest sons and daughters.