Sundquist Flower Fund

Gov. Don Sundquist hooked up by telephone with Hallerin Hill Election Day morning to make one more push for your vote and to answer a few softball questions. One of them dealt with the massive campaign war chest (up to $6 million) he squeezed from the party faithful to do battle with his highly marginal Democratic opponent, John J. Hooker.

Privately, some GOP candidates who had been dunned by Sundquist for mandatory contributions while attempting to raise money for their own causes have complained bitterly about the strongarm tactics out of Nashville this season.

They will be pleased to know that it's all for a good cause.

Guv Don explained that because he will be legally prohibited from fund raising in the future—this will be his last term—he must squirrel away a pile of dough now for future contingencies: Christmas cards, donations to causes, and flowers.

Murder! Drugs! Nice Scenery!

All this and more can be witnessed on City Confidential, the latest nationally broadcast cable show produced by Knoxville's own Jupiter Entertainment, set to debut on the A&E channel this Saturday at 6 p.m. Much to the horror of tourist bureaus across the country, each episode explores the character of an American city through "the telling of a notorious crime that occurred there." (Hmmm—what would the Zoo Man case say about Knoxville? Oh dear...) The first episode—entitled "Deadly Odds In Biloxi"—details the 1987 contract killings of a prominent Biloxi judge and his wife. The twist is that the crime was masterminded by a future mayor of the Mississippi city. As supervising producer Geoff Proud notes in a recent New York Times story on the 12-part series, this "tells us something more about a city than you normally get from a travelogue or a Chamber of Commerce brochure." Indeed. Next up in the company's ongoing assault on societal mores is the revival of nothing less than roller derby with the formation of the World Skating League, to be aired on the soon-to-come TNN show Roller Jam. As the Hollywood Reporter declared last month, it's "a piece of Americana restored."

Trail Mix

The city deserves some credit for finishing a job long left unfinished. When the first leg of the Third Creek Bike Trail was installed in the early 1970s, it never went quite all the way to Tyson Park, but emptied onto Painter Road, a dead-end residential road not quite half a mile long—then left bicyclists to deal with about 100 feet of busy Concord Road traffic before making it to the entrance of Tyson. The new link, made possible in part by a land grant from Multi-Media Corp., is a handsome addition to the trail which takes us north of Third Creek and which includes a zigzaggy swamp-style wooden bridge over a wet-weather marsh. Another leg leads to a parking area and soccer field accessible from Sutherland. It still entails crossing Concord Road without a light, but it's altogether an improvement. With only three fairly easy road crossings, you can now bike, jog, or walk all the way from the eastern end of Volunteer Landing over six miles through the center of town to the Golf Range Apartments at Sutherland and Hollywood, just behind Western Plaza.

Unfortunately, the improvements came with a casualty. The old mill house along the original trail was one of those colorful props that Disney World might have constructed there to make a creekside trail more quaint-looking, but this one was real. (Though parts of it had been rebuilt, we've heard it was a turn-of-the-century electricity generator for one of the big houses on Kingston Pike before this area was annexed into the city's utility grid.) Anyway, the city tore it down last month, ostensibly because it was a potential hiding place and a security risk. At least they left its ruins, including the broken old milldam.