An anesthesiologist in the family

by Jack Neely

At 76, Dr. Oliver King Agee has been a family physician and anesthesiologist in the Maryville area for over 40 years. He says he's semi-retired, which surprises his colleagues. He's director of Wellington House, a new assisted-living center.

He's been working today, dealing with an especially difficult Alzheimer's patient, but he shows up right on time for the weekly Alcoa Rotary Club meeting at the Methodist Church. He's wearing a handsome dark-blue pinstripe suit, a conservative striped tie, and a pair of loud multicolored Nike running shoes. He's carrying a green-and-purple nylon gym bag, which he stashes away for after the meeting.

He was an army doctor stationed in Korea and Japan during and after the Korean War, but has lived in Maryville since then. His mother's family goes way back hereabouts. His great-great-great grandfather was Dr. Isaac Wright, the doctor who wrote a popular medical guidebook in 1833 and also operated a ferry across the river. His grandfather, for whom he's named, was Oliver King, the sand-and-gravel magnate who also owned a fleet of riverboats at the end of the steam era. Dr. Agee remembers him as a harness-racing enthusiast, and a generous man who bought all his grandchildren ponies; they'd enter horse shows as a family, each member on his and her own horse.

And Dr. Agee's own mother was the one and only Annabell King; the steamboat named for her sank after a collision in 1911, a symbolic end to an era. Once on the bottom upstream from Looney Island, the Annabell King is still listed in some national shipwreck directories, but Dr. Agee can't be sure there's anything left of her. Dr. Agee is too young to remember the steamboat era and the Annabell King, but his mother recalled her own personal sternwheeler fondly, especially the on-board graduation party her father threw for her.

Dr. Agee does remember riding on another ship in Oliver King's fleet, one his grandfather named for Anabell's husband. It was a gas-powered tugboat called the John H. Agee. The King side of Dr. Agee's family is as rich and colorful as anyone's, and touches every era of Knoxville history. But strangers may be more likely to ask about Dr. Agee's last name.

At the Rotary luncheon Dr. Agee says several hellos. He's one of the most loyal and generous members of the benevolent club, which opens its meeting with the Pledge and a rousing a cappella chorus of "When the Saints Go Marching In" and a speech praising the club's global charities. The club does serious work, but is afflicted with wisecrackers. Dr. Agee laughs at the better jokes, with a voice high and uninhibited, one that, if he weren't such a venerable and well-esteemed doctor, you might call a giggle.

After the meeting, in the adjacent library, he hoists his gym bag to the table and opens it. Inside are several books and photographs. He draws them out and peers at them with clear blue eyes. Most are black-and-white prints of women and children, some with old houses in Fort Sanders in the background. Some of the pictures are of Dr. Agee as a child, but one is a photograph of a boy of about six. He was Dr. Agee's first cousin.

That boy grew up to be James Agee; Dr. Agee is the author's closest surviving local relative. They both grew up on Highland Avenue, both attended the old Van Gilder Elementary School there at the corner of 13th, both went to old Knoxville High, both visited their common grandmother who lived in LaFollette. Dr. Agee picks up a photo of himself with his grandmother, Moss Lamar Agee, on her front lawn in LaFollette sometime in the 1920s. Three decades later, she would become a character in A Death in the Family.

But James Agee was almost 13 years older than Oliver. The last time James lived in town, Oliver was only four. Dr. Agee did not really know the author, and can only assume he was one of those big people who were around when he was a kid.

Their fathers were brothers. Oliver Agee remembers his father John speaking fondly of his older brother who was killed in that car wreck in 1916. "They were very close," Dr. Agee says, holding an oval portrait of the three Agee brothers, posing abreast very early in the century: Frank and John flanking James, the oldest. John Agee was a young civil engineer working in Idaho at the time his brother died; he couldn't make it home for the funeral.

It was that man in the portrait, not his famous son, that the family called James Agee; it's the name inscribed on the tombstone in Greenwood Cemetery. The son they called Rufus was the one who grew up to be a writer.

"Most fiction is based on fact," he adds. "A Death in the Family is very close to being factual." The boy's name is Rufus even in the book.

Dr. Agee recalls one family story about young Rufus. "He used to go to my mother's parents' house—Mrs. Oliver King, who also lived on Highland. He'd go over and ask for cookies. But his mother said, 'Rufus, you must remember your manners; you must wait for Mrs. King to ask.' So he went back and said, 'Mrs. King, would you like to ask me if I would like any cookies?'"

As a teenager, soon after he left Knoxville, the boy came to favor the name James. "I think he liked to be identified with his father," Dr. Agee says.

Dr. Agee says the family didn't make a big deal of James Agee's success in magazines—he doesn't recall whether they even subscribed to Time or Fortune—though they were aware he'd written the screenplay for The African Queen. (The two books by which Agee is best known today, A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, were not well known until after his death.)

A family resemblance between Dr. Oliver Agee and James Agee is plausible but not obvious. That Agee's first cousin might be any sort of doctor might surprise anyone familiar with his story. James Agee was known to avoid doctors when he could, and ignore their advice at all costs. Had he paid closer attention to their advice, James Agee might have turned 89 this coming Friday—but he died, of course, at age 45. "He smoked heavily, drank heavily." Dr. Agee laughs. "Loved heavily."

Dr. Agee helped author Laurence Bergreen with his lauded 1984 biography of James Agee, loaning him some of these pictures. "He did an excellent job, I think," Dr. Agee says.

Unlike James Rufus, who was moved around frequently after his father's death, Oliver Agee lingered in Fort Sanders. "I was born at 1710 Highland Avenue in 1922," he says. "It's still standing, in good condition, and is still lived in," he says. "Stand and face it, and the first room behind the living room was the room where I was born." He would live there for 20 years, graduating from old Knoxville High in 1940, eventually walking to class in UT's two-year pre-med program.

Some Fort Sanders residents are in shock about how much the neighborhood has changed. Dr. Agee seems surprised at how much has remained the same. "There was a grocery on 18th between Highland and Laurel that is still there, and still functioning as a grocery!" Dr. Agee says. "It was there when I was a youngster, the old Roberts Grocery Store." He remembers playing hockey on rollerskates on the flat part of 18th. Dr. Agee says he hasn't heard much about development plans in Fort Sanders, and looks as though he'd just as soon not hear the details.

He recalls the "Old #7," the streetcar that ran down Highland. "I can still feel that streetcar sway as I ride it," Dr. Agee says, swaying in his seat. "I'm sure that's the one he wrote about in the book."

Dr. Agee has read a lot of his cousin's work, but for him his favorite piece is still the one with the description of the trolley in it: "Knoxville: Summer 1915." He knows a scrap of it well: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child..." he recites musically, almost as if he's recalling his own childhood. "I can't get over that," he says.