A reporter learns never to doubt a rumor

by Jack Neely

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and people who pick nits should expect to have their own nits picked. Then again, everybody needs a good nitpicking now and then, especially folks like me who have kids in the Knox County school system.

* In my column, "Notes Toward a Second Edition," I argued that the new Tennessee Encyclopedia had somehow missed several influential Tennesseans, including the Everly Brothers. However, I allowed that despite their connections to Knoxville and Nashville, the Everlys were Kentucky natives. As reader Alan Wallace noted, I was only half-right. Don was indeed born in Muhlenburg County, Kentucky; Phil was born a couple of years later in Chicago, where the family had moved seeking work. The Everlys later lived in Iowa before moving to Knoxville when the boys were teenagers. In Knoxville they first performed as a duo, first experimented with rock 'n' roll, mooned over the elusive West High beauty they'd immortalize in the song "Cathy's Clown," and met Chet Atkins, who would guide their careers. However, another brand-new reference book, Oxford University Press's Encyclopedia of Country Music, alleges that the Everlys moved from the Midwest to Nashville in 1955, skipping Knoxville altogether. If there's a lesson here, it's don't trust encyclopedias. Or me.

* Reader Joe Miller of Oak Ridge noted that in that myths story I recklessly referred to "Sequoyah's famous newspaper, the Phoenix.." The great Cherokee teacher Sequoyah was an enthusiastic supporter of that pioneer Indian newspaper; he invented the whole alphabet with which the paper was written. But Sequoyah was never editor, publisher, or owner of the Phoenix, so I shouldn't suggest that it belonged to him.

* In the myths feature, I didn't mean to suggest that none of those tunnel legends are true. It's safe to say there are more tunnels under Knoxville than you or I know about. I got letters alleging there are indeed subterranean tunnels of forgotten purpose connecting several buildings downtown.

I haven't proven all the tunnels I've heard about, but I have proven one. Bob Dilworth, who lives in Fountain City, wrote that long ago—perhaps in the '40s, when he was a student at Central High—he walked through a tunnel from the old Miller's underneath Gay Street to another building on the other side. He said his wife insisted he must be remembering the tunnel underneath Henley that connected Miller's postwar Henley Street store to its parking garage. I drafted him a letter siding with his wife.

But Dilworth's memories of a sub-Gay tunnel were so vivid—he recalled arched brickwork and some kind of machinery alongside the passageway—that I thought I'd better call the one guy who would know for sure. That's Duane Grieve, the architect in charge of the Miller's renovation.

Come on over and see for yourself, he said. We put on hardhats and went down to the basement I hadn't visited since the last time I had a Coke down there around 1972. I'd spent many happy hours down there, but sure didn't remember any tunnel.

We went to the southeast corner of the basement of the oldest part of the building, the 1905 part, and there, partly obscured by a rectangle of gravel that covered what had been a downward ramp, was an arched outline around a cinderblock wall. Grieve had been curious about it himself, so, like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, he and his colleagues knocked a hole in the cinderblock wall big enough to climb in.

I was wearing my best white shirt that day, so I contented myself to poke my head in and look around with Duane's flashlight. The tunnel's floor is three or four feet deeper than the floor of the basement. Barely six feet tall and not much wider, the tunnel goes directly underneath Gay Street and ends at a walled-in arch in the basement of the building on the opposite side, underneath Arby's. Grieve says it led to what had been Miller's original loading dock, which was on the other side of the building opposite, in the alley between Gay and State.

I've heard from reputable sources that there are others. I'm learning that you'll never make a living denying the existence of subterranean passageways in Knoxville.

* In my polemic about forfeiting the unusually sensible street name "Stadium Drive," I mentioned several Knoxville street names that, unlike Stadium Drive, don't make much sense. Among them was Lake Avenue, the wooded residential street alongside Cumberland which isn't near any sort of lake. However, my old friend David Harkness recalls that when he was at UT in the '30s, some old-timers used to talk about when there was indeed a small lake near Lake, and that romantic UT students used to paddle their dates around it. Curious, I tried to confirm it. I learned the name "Lake Avenue" dates back at least to 1912, but I haven't been able to find an early map of the area which was, before it was developed, outside of the city limits. If there were a lake or big pond here, it may have been a lowland eddy of Third Creek.

By the way, concerning that proposal to rename Stadium Drive for Phil Fulmer, my friend Peter H�yng had some interesting comments. During a trip to his native Germany last month, he opened a copy of the newspaper General-Anzeiger and ran across a lengthy article about the Tennessee Vols. "Knoxville ist Football-verrückt," it says. (Peter was too polite to tell me that verrückt means "deranged.") The Germans, it seems, are amazed that we would name a street after a 22-year-old quarterback. In Germany, Peter explains, it's actually illegal to name a street for anyone until after they've been dead for at least five years. Granted, Germany has a lot of odd laws, but that no-street-names-'til-your-dead rule seems to be followed by law or custom in most of your other non-fascist states around the world. The Germans and I agree on some things.