Signs, portents, and random oddities
by Jack Neely
Home Federal's doing some light renovations to an early 20th-century building on Market Street. Elaborate in style, the turn-of-the-century two-story double-fronted building deserves the attention.
Watching the work several days ago, some downtowners had a little surprise. As workers used water jets to blast off decades of paint, a word from the Knoxville's past appeared on the Edwardian building's north end, painted vertically on the stone facade with swipes of silver paint. The word was TELEVISION. It's about 10 feet tall, in a peculiarly bowed, oriental style.
What can it mean? This has been a bank for as long as I can remember. I looked into the city directories. In the '30s, it was a coffee-and-tea shop, then it was the Edith Kurth Gift Shoppe, then in the '40s, it was a restaurant called the White Palace.
But in 1953 and '54, not long after television's tardy arrival in Knoxville, it was McLean Television Sales & Service. The company had moved to Clinton Highway by 1955, but they left this sign behind for us to ponder. And here it is.
* Early this year I attempted to investigate an allusion in a new biography of Frederick Law Olmsted that the great landscape designer of Central Park and Biltmore did some consulting in Knoxville, circa 1890. Since our only public park was Circle Park, and it bears some hallmarks of Olmstedism, including exotic European shrubbery and exposed outcrops, I assumed it might have been his subject. However, UT student Naji Norder ran across a more extravagent possibility in an 1890 issue of the Knoxville Daily Tribune. A private company announced plans to open "the most magnificent park in America": 200 acres with "a fine commodious hotel" and "a beautiful lake at least half a mile long and supplied with water from half a dozen bold springs." The surrounding hillsides would become "the finest villa sites in America."
"No city in the United States will have anything comparable with it." That may be an understatement, considering the park was planned to be on the top of 300-foot tall Cherokee Bluff, then known as Longstreet's Bluff.
Plans were amended—maybe chilled by Olmsted himself—but not scrapped altogether. There was indeed a park up there three years later, when Knoxville's cable car, a brief international sensation, ferried passengers across the river and up the bluff, only to end with a broken cable and a dead lawyer in 1894.
* I got some response to the column about recently discovered minié balls, including one essay submitted by a Fountain City physician about precisely what constitutes a Civil War "buff." Anyway, actor Ed White, whom I credited with finding that Union minié ball in a west Fort Sanders backyard a few months ago, wanted to clarify that, although he was doing most of the digging, it was actually his friend Ange Roth who spotted the relic first. None of that explains why I get to carry it around and show it off.
* A couple of years ago I wrote a column about Jean-Paul Sartre's unlikely pilgrimage to Knoxville. The playwright-philosopher came with a delegation of French journalists in early 1945 to survey the American war effort. Knoxville, and TVA, was one of their first stops. Sartre mentioned Knoxville in a couple of essays. In one of them, he leaves an intriguing hint: he made a 78 voice recording at Fontana, detailing his impressions of TVA's operation there.
That platter, and the possibility it might still exist somewhere, intrigued me. Doing some work for TVA a few weeks ago, I emailed the National Archives, trying to track it down. They didn't have any records of the 78 on their vaults, but they indicated they had some document pertaining to Sartre's visit. It didn't sound like any big deal, but I asked them to fax it to me. The two-page typed TVA document is headed "ITINERARY FOR FRENCH JOURNALISTS." The last of the eight journalists listed is Jean-Paul Sartre.
They landed at McGhee Tyson in a U.S. B-29 on Feb. 1, 1945, a Thursday, and got out of a TVA car at the Andrew Johnson Hotel. TVA spokesman Kenneth Kennedy was in charge of arrangements.
The following morning at 8:30, TVA cars arrived at the Andrew Johnson and drove Sartre to the New Sprankle Building on Union—then TVA headquarters, it's now the upscale condominium building called the Pembroke. It was only five or six blocks; in Paris, Sartre was accustomed to walking much farther than that. In America, he later said, he was driven around so much he felt like "a parcel."
There Sartre watched a 30-minute movie called TVA, after which he met "available directors"—which ones aren't specified—along with Arthur Jandrey, TVA's assistant general manager.
Then Sartre and his amis got TVA's whirlwind three-day dam tour: Fontana, Norris, Muscle Shoals. Each night upon his return, Sartre stayed in the Andrew Johnson Hotel, which in 1945 was already notable for visitors like Amelia Earhart, who stayed there the year before she disappeared, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, who stayed there the night after the last performance of his career. It was, of course, almost eight years before Hank Williams took his final swig there.
I assume Sartre must have written those essays here in the hotel. There, or maybe over coffee and doughnuts at a sidewalk table in front of the S&W Cafeteria.
I'm careful about making grand statements, but I think it's safe to say the tall brick building on Gay Street is the only building in the world that housed Sartre, Hank Williams, Amelia, and Rachmaninoff. Not to mention Duke Ellington, Tony Perkins, and Liberace.
May 4, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 18
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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