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How a dead man's car launched a career

by Jack Neely

Most comments from readers are interesting footnotes. A call I got a couple of weeks ago was a little more than that.

There's a good deal of local lore about the car wreck which killed James Agee's father in May, 1916. You get the impression that even if Agee hadn't written a novel about his father's death, that rare car accident near Bell's Bridge on old Clinton Pike would have been something people would have remembered. The wreck separated a father from his son, leaving a wound that never healed. But Agee's wreck also commenced a vigorous career for another father and his own son. It's a story I'd never heard before until a reader called and told me.

Born in Copenhagen, Nicolai Knoph came to America in 1904. He first worked in a Virginia lumber mill, but was drawn to stories he'd heard about the booming Smoky Mountain timber business in East Tennessee. He worked for the Little River Lumber Co., as a trainmaster, in charge of the trains on the Little River Railroad, which hauled timber and sometimes passengers.

On the job, he met a young lady named Neta Reagan, who lived in Powell. The 29-year-old Dane began visiting Neta and her parents, in Powell, by train. He was there one day in May 1916, when he had a macabre task.

When Jay Agee's car flipped over, of course, it killed him. But the Ford Model T itself was still driveable. It was owned by the Ty-Sa-Man Machine Company, for which Jay Agee worked; the Knoxville factory specialized in building heavy marble and granite-cutting machinery. One of the co-owners of the company, the Ty of Ty-Sa-Man, was Joel Tyler, who was Jay Agee's father-in-law.

Anyway, someone with Ty-Sa-Man asked if Nicolai Knoph knew how to drive a car, and if he could drive the car to Ty-Sa-Man's office, which was near old 10th Street (then known as 3rd St.), on the downtown side of the Fort Sanders neighborhood.

Knoph agreed. Accompanied by his girlfriend, Neta, he drove back to the dead man's former place of business, and—a perfectly sensible question, in retrospect—asked if he could have the dead man's job. He didn't realize that the man he asked was the dead man's father-in-law.

Knoph's brief conversation with Joel Tyler is preserved by the family.

"Young man, do you curse?" Tyler asked.

"Mr. Tyler," Knoph replied, "I log with oxen." Something about that straightforward response impressed Tyler, who hired Knoph on the spot. The young lumberman got a room at the YMCA and went to work for Ty-Sa-Man as a bookkeeper, even though he had no experience, and learned to type on an old "blind" typewriter, one with no letters on the keys. He apparently did well enough, because he stayed there for over 30 years.

Just before he was drafted to fight in World War I, he married his sweetheart. After his return from Europe, they had a son.

Nic Knoph, Jr., is our source for most of this story. He lives in Knoxville again, after years in Florida. He confirms the story as I'd heard it, but adds he thinks it was his mother, Neta, who asked about the job. "She was much more aggressive," he says.

After serving in World War II, Nic Knoph joined his dad's company, and in 1950, the two of them bought it. Ty-Sa-Man was a suddenly booming business, a national player in the marble and granite-cutting industry. When Nicolai Sr. died in 1952—never knowing the wrecked Ford he drove back would ever have any national literary significance—young Nic took over. He ran Ty-Sa-Man until the mid-'60s, when he sold it to Carborundum. The site of it was leveled for the 1982 World's Fair, and is now part of what's known as the South Lawn.

Anyway, for several years, Knoph says, "I ended up a business partner with James Agee." Then much better known as a reporter, critic, and sometime screenwriter than as a novelist, Agee was a shareholder in Ty-Sa-Man, and apparently expressed some interest in the growing company his grandfather had co-founded. When Knoph was in New York on business, sometime in the early 1950s, he arranged to meet with Agee at the old Pennsylvania Hotel.

"I walked in in my best suit, scared to death," Knoph recalls of meeting the famous Time essayist, 11 years Knoph's elder, who was then doing a good deal of work in Hollywood.

"And there he was in an open-collar wool shirt, corduroy pants, and real rough shoes." Knoph says it was mainly a social meeting, over a couple of drinks. Agee wore a coat and tie when he had to, but was famous among his friends for wearing work clothes in urban situations. Knoph doesn't remember much of their conversation, except that he gave Agee a report on the company, which was doing very well at the time. He doesn't mention whether they discussed the Model T.

Agee died in 1955, not long after their meeting, and before anybody had heard of his great novel, A Death In the Family.

This weekend, the Knoxville Museum of Art will be showing a fascinating film, Ross Spears' documentary, Agee. The film's at 2 o'clock, on Saturday and Sunday, but after the Saturday showing of the film, at 4, we'll be meeting in the vicinity of the old Porch adjacent to the 11th Street Victorian houses, for the first of what we hope will be an annual event. The Agee Amble will be a four-hour hike, reading, and pub crawl, with some real actors reading long portions of A Death In the Family in or near the spots described, as well as other excerpts from Agee's prose, poetry, screenplays, and journalism, with some surprises along the way. Bring your rough shoes and corduroys, because it's not a literary tea; it's a circuit around perhaps 50 city blocks, but we'll be taking frequent breaks for refreshments, as we suspect Agee would have.