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Knoxville's 10 most embarrassing moments

by Jack Neely

As we near the end of this century, we thought it might be worth looking back at Knoxville's 20th century to uncover some of its most ignominious moments in the spotlight. These are some of our biggest blunders and bad choices—things that, when we recall them, still have the power to make us cringe. Is there wisdom to be learned from these episodes that might insure that we'll have a less embarrassing new millennium?

Escape of Kid Curry, 1903.

He was our most famous prisoner, ever, and damned if we didn't let him get away. Perhaps the deadliest member of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, Harvey Logan, a.k.a. Kid Curry was arrested after shooting two policemen in a Central Avenue saloon in late 1901. We held him in the Knox County Jail for 18 months, while judges deliberated about how to punish him, and for what. During that time Logan was also our biggest celebrity, visited by scores of young women who found the serial killer attractive. Then, through a series of blunders, he choked a guard, slipped out of jail, and rode across the Gay Street Bridge on a stolen horse. Though credible reports have him committing suicide in a gunfight out West the following year, murkier stories have him living comfortably in South America for years after that.

Logan was never positively identified anywhere, dead or alive, after we watched him gallop across the bridge into the wilds of South Knoxville.

Lynch Mob Riot, 1919.

For half a century, Knoxville had felt conde-

scending toward the rest of the benighted South. Lynchings were rare here, and the black community included a prosperous middle class. We understood civil rights here, we said, and civil rights was good for business. Knoxville industrialists served as missionaries to cities in Alabama, bearing a message of cooperation.

Then, in that suspicious year when the doughboys returned from Europe, a murder on a Labor Day weekend provoked a dangerous lynch mob which turned into what was arguably the weirdest "race riot" in American history. Whites, not blacks, did the greatest part of the damage, and most of it to white-owned buildings and businesses. A frustrated lynch mob dynamited the jail, looted the confiscated moonshine and weapons, broke into dozens of downtown businesses, and enjoyed several hours of pure anarchy. However, when the Guard arrived, soldiers aimed their machine guns at the black part of town; the precise death toll remains unknown, and the subsequent martial law was much harder on the black population than the whites. To this day, blacks and whites in Knoxville have not enjoyed the mutual trust the races are said to have had before 1919.

UT, Joseph Wood Krutch and coverage of Scopes trial, 1925.

When the monkey trial happened in Dayton, 60 miles away, many Knoxvillians pointed and snickered as you only can at something that happened somewhere else. However, one essayist in the national press believed that Knoxville, not Dayton, deserved the lion's share of ridicule. Knoxville-born, UT-educated Joe Krutch was the young drama and book critic for the national liberal weekly, The Nation. He usually didn't cover judicial subjects, but perhaps because he was from East Tennessee, his editors sent him to cover the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Krutch actually defended Tennessee, sort of: "There is no state in the Union, no country in the world, that does not have communities as simple-minded" as Dayton, he wrote. Knoxville, he implied, had less of an excuse. He excoriated our professors and politicians, with special wrath toward UT's administration. "If Tennessee has become the laughing-stock of the world, it is not because she has her villages which are a half-century behind the centers of world thought, but rather because among her sons who know better there is scarcely one who has the courage to stand up for what he thinks and knows."

Back in New York, his editor headlined the widely read essay, "Tennessee: Where Cowards Rule."

Louis Brownlow's resignation as city manager, 1926.

He was a well-traveled Missourian nationally known for his ability to tackle difficult urban problems through progressive legislation. While here, he proposed several progressive plans, including riverfront parks and a justice center. But he couldn't deal with certain Knoxville politicians who would not countenance any new taxes, even for needed improvements. Brownlow reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown before he resigned and eventually moved to Chicago, where he became a prominent and effective urban administrator.

Publication of John Gunther's Inside U.S.A., 1947.

John Gunther, bestselling author of travelogues seen as a hero for his expose of prewar Nazi Germany, visited Knoxville during a strangely cold week in May, 1945, made some notes, and later announced in a book called Inside U.S.A. that Knoxville was "the ugliest city I have ever seen in America." Many howled in protest, calling attention to a few inaccuracies in Gunther's description; but a few brave souls agreed. On the brink of electing an uneducated grocer to be mayor of the city, Knoxville was busy and crowded but physically neglected, covered in soot from chimneys and factories; vigorous attempts at urban planning had failed in City Council; creeks were used as dumps; historic buildings were falling apart; and Knoxville may have been the only city of its size in America without a single urban park.

Knoxville actually got lots and lots of bad press, especially between 1925 and 1980, but nothing on this scale. Inside U.S.A. became an international bestseller and even the basis for a Broadway play.

Cas Walker's well-publicized fistfight in City Council, 1956.

We can't remember what it was about, we've seen the Journal's famous picture of it, Councilman Cas with his fist drawn back, about to hit Councilman Jim Cooper as other councilmen ducked. It wasn't the only fistfight in City Hall history, but the photograph of it has circulated far beyond the city limits; it even appears in a history of 20th-century Knoxville.

Football Riot, 1957.

After an unexpected victory over the mighty Vols, an enthusiastic University of Chattanooga crowd was ready to party. But several observers said overzealous enforcement by Knoxville police in and around Neyland Stadium magnified the party into a riot with multiple injuries.

World's Fair Housing Fiascos, 1982.

We threw a fair,and the world came, sure enough. The World liked the Fair okay, but had some complaints about its accommodations. By the time the Fair opened, the reservation system was already a giant rat's nest of mixed-up orders and lost deposits. We're not sure whether the mess was ever straightened out, but the bad press it caused gave the occasion such a negative cast that it repeatedly gives outsiders—and many Knoxvillians, as well—the misperception that the Fair itself was an unpopular failure.

Collapse of the Butcher empire, 1983.

The most prominent private supporter of the 1982 World's Fair seemed, to some, like the Prince of Knoxville in 1982. The UAB/Plaza Tower, the tallest building in East Tennessee, was his royal tower; the Sunsphere was his scepter. The World's Fair had been over for all of three months when federal agents stormed the tower and discovered the prince's books weren't in perfect order. It would be one of the largest-scale bank failures in American history. The prince did time, though maybe not hard time, and vanished from view into a new career as a car salesman.

Collapse of Whittle Communications, 1992-94.

Whittle Communications, the media company formerly known as 13-30, grew by astonishing proportions every year for two decades. The company published scores of advice-laden magazines and was experimenting with new kinds of television programming, with a total staff of about 1,000. Knoxville didn't take Whittle Communications terribly seriously until the late '80s, when Whittle planned a grandiose two-block headquarters building in a three-century-old Georgian style we hadn't seen since—well, we hadn't seen anything of this scale and prominence, ever. We gave Whittle tax breaks and a leadership position in downtown redevelopment.

The building opened in 1991; the interior of one wing wasn't complete, but don't worry, said the smiling man in the bow tie. They'd soon be building TV studios in there. Within a year or two, he said, he'd need more space than the building provided. We gasped. In the iron gates was a big iron W, in the style of Charles Foster Kane's gates at Xanadu.

Hardly six months after that, the company announced its first layoffs in its history. By 1993, Whittle Communications was clearly in a free fall. The last Whittle employees left about three years after the palace was completed.

Runner-up: Cas Walker's bizarre 11 months as mayor of Knoxville, before he was recalled by a remorseful public, 1946.

We considered including it in Knoxville's 11 Most Embarrassing Moments, but thought it might be cruel to include Cas twice.