UT's Homecoming Hero 30 Years Later
by Jack Neely
When you've got a group of middle-aged UT grads drinking beer at a favorite cafe, somewhere around the fourth or fifth round you're going to hear the name Vince Staten, and everybody's going to react some way. To a generation he was a legend, along the lines of Tom Dooley or Guy Fawlkes.
Vince Staten was many other things, but we remember him today because he was the first and only man elected UT Homecoming Queen. This season marks the 30th anniversary of his triumph.
Today, the very same Vince Staten runs a barbecue joint in Prospect, Kentucky. He's also a popular author who has written several books on travel, cuisine, and small-town life that have garnered for him national acclaim, including a 1990 appearance on the David Letterman show. We called him at his home near Louisville, and let him tell his often tragic story.
"I don't have a career now," he says regretfully. "I'm a freelance writer." His non-career is booming. In addition to his regular column in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Staten regularly writes for several national magazines, and has eight books under his belt.
Originally from Kingsport, Staten first attended Duke University, where in 1969 he earned a degree in psychology. "Duke was an excellent academic school," he recalls, "but not a lot of fun." For contrast, he came to grad school at UT.
His was one of the first graduate classes in communications; because the college didn't offer quite enough for a full graduate course, he was told to pick a minor. "I chose educational psychology. I didn't know what that was. I still don't know what that is."
He got a job moonlighting as a late-shift TV producer at WBIR. He got that job on purpose, to pay his way through school. But he got the job that would make him a legend, as a Daily Beacon columnist, purely by accident, and it's a mighty sad story. "I had a typical experience with a girl—for me, that is." An attractive hometown girl had called Staten to tell him to meet her in Kingsport one weekend. He went home and called her house to hear her mother inform him that she was in Nashville. To cut his losses, Staten wrote a short story about the trip. Dan Pomeroy, the cartoonist at the UT Daily Beacon,was a friend; at his Fort Sanders apartment, Pomeroy and his girlfriend talked Staten into showing the story to the Beacon's editor.
"Can this guy do this every week?" asked the editor, Ben Taylor (who would later write for the New York Times). It turned out that Staten indeed could, and did. In the academic year of 1969-70, the most turbulent year of the 20th century at UT, Staten's humor column became one of the Beacon's most popular features. The name his editor picked, "Staten's Static," annoyed Staten a little, because it seemed to confirm the most common mispronunciation of his last name. He pronounces it with a long A. "The people who own the Island are wrong," he alleges.
But columnists are paid to be annoyed. Staten's perspective was all-purpose antiauthoritarian—President Nixon was a favorite target, and in Staten's column, UT President Ed Boling was Mr. Ed.—but he also made fun of the often humor-deficient counterculture. Student activist Peter Kami became, in Staten's column, Peter Commie. Staten recalls, "I wanted to write a book at the time and call it, Oh My God, the Revolution Is Starting, And I've Nothing To Wear."
One of Staten's proudest contributions was when UT's chancellor, Charlie Weaver, was found to be applying for a job at Georgia Tech. Staten printed a form recommendation, urging readers to fill it out and send it to Tech.
Staten parried with both sides until Valentine's Day, 1970, when he received his own draft notice. The Beacon published it. After four months of mourning the end of his academic career, Staten reported for his army physical and was rejected, due to a hernia he didn't know about. For Staten, it was a gracious indignity. Somehow he never got around to getting his hernia fixed until after the Paris Peace Talks.
In months to come, disappointed Homecoming Queen contenstants would charge that Staten posed for photos with a paper bag over his head because he was ugly. "It wasn't that," he protests. "I was a handsome devil. Still am."
He explains his famous bag-headed look. Returning that fall of 1970, the still-herniated columnist was a little perplexed that Frank Gibson, the new editor, insisted that all the columnists have "sigs"—small photos, accompanying their columns. Staten bristled. "People already have in their head what they think I look like, anyway," he pleaded, "so let's not ruin it for them." They reached a compromise. Staten posed for the shot with a paper bag over his head.
"I was in the Beacon every day," he says. Deep in the windowless bowels of the Communications Building, he says the newsroom was "like a playpen." One day a press release came through announcing Homecoming. The theme that year—Staten swears he remembers it right—was, "Homecoming: Rejected, But Still Valid."
Staten and editor David Williams thought that was plenty funny, and began goofing with the concept. Staten declared to his colleagues, "Rumors that I'm running for Homecoming Queen are not true."
Staten was surprised the next day when he found an item on the front page, under the heading, Rumor. "Daily Beacon columnist Vince Staten denied yesterday that he is running for Homecoming Queen."
The idea took on a life of its own. "I can't deny that I helped carry the ball," Staten says. "I think I wrote two columns on it." Beacon reporters determined that there was no rule specifically excluding men from the contest, and extracted a pledge that if Staten won, he would indeed be Homecoming Queen.
Though he hardly campaigned for the title, Staten says, "It really did get out of control. People started putting up signs." Someone unfurled a huge sheet from lofty Carrick Hall, with a drawing of Staten's trademark paper bag, and the words THE UNCANDIDATE. Staten's official campaign slogan was, "I Have Something None Of the Other Candidates Have."
When election day came, Staten garnered 2,512 votes, all of them write-ins. That was 60 percent of the total. His nearest rival, an actual female whose name was on the ballot, got only 300. It was a landslide without precedent.
However, the Homecoming board announced they weren't going to announce Staten's victory. Their first excuse was that they couldn't count write-in votes. Staten and former Student Government President Jimmie Baxter both sued in the student tribunal. It was finally determined that Staten was ineligible for the crown because he was a grad student. The tribunal eventually overturned the entire election, and announced there wouldn't be time to hold another race. For the first year in decades, they'd just make do without a Homecoming Queen in 1970.
"Suddenly I became a pariah among some groups," says Staten, who was living in an apartment on Moody Avenue at the time. One night, he was visiting a friend in Fort Sanders when his roommate called from South Knoxville. "Don't come home," his roommate said. "There's a group of football players here who would like to 'talk to' you." Staten spent the weekend on the lam.
Among the mob was at least one disappointed Homecoming Queen candidate. Bitterly she told Staten's roommate, "I'd worked my whole career at UT for this." Staten argued that his gesture was a gallant one: He had given each of 10 beautiful women the right to claim that she would have won the crown.
The deposed Homecoming Queen spent much of that football season a fugitive, perhaps something like Marie Antoinette during the Terror. Though he'd been a football fan, Staten took a trip to the mountains on Homecoming weekend, when UT faced Kentucky. "I have a warm spot in my heart for UK," he says. "UT was playing UK for homecoming, and UK lost, 49-0. I'm certain that if the Vols had been beaten, I would have been blamed for it."
Homecoming officials skipped the crowning ceremony. The wealthy UT benefactor who was intended to do the crowning just walked out onto the field to a round of applause. Chancellor Weaver took Staten's election as a sign: "I think the students are trying to tell us something," Weaver said. "We're spending a lot of money on something they don't really care about." There were no more homecoming queens for a dozen years after that.
Staten seems to have recovered from his bitterness about not actually receiving his rightful crown, but over long-distance phone, he still sounds wistful. "My idea was that if they had crowned me, everyone who had voted for me would have joined me out on the field, all with paper bags over their heads."
Staten found the will to go on, finally earning his masters in communications. He stayed in Knoxville until 1974, attempting to launch a local periodical called Knoxville Magazine, which lasted only a few issues. Broke, he joined a political campaign to boost Tom Wiseman's candidacy for governor. Wiseman came in third behind the winner, Ray Blanton, and the challenger, Jake Butcher. Considering that the two front-runners both did jail time, Staten's now relieved that his guy didn't do better.
Broker still, Staten, at 28, went home to live with his parents in Kingsport. He got a job with the Kingsport paper, then moved to Dayton, Ohio, where he reviewed movies and music.
Then he got a job as TV critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal, a job that worked well until a consolidation forced him out. In New York working on an interview feature about David Letterman in 1986, he met with an editor at Harper & Row and pitched a few book ideas.
One of them was a tour of America's barbecue joints. Staten had grown up taking short trips to the legendary Ridgewood, in Bluff City.
Staten's years in Knoxville deepened his fascination with barbecue through late-night trips to Brother Jack's on University Avenue. In 1978, he went on a road trip for the Courier-Journal to Memphis, where he joined his old friend, Knoxville journalist (and sometime Metro Pulse contributor) Chris Wohlwend on a quest for "cosmic barbecue."
As fate would have it, that Harper & Row editor's boss had commented "I'm sick of all these gourmet cookbooks"—he wanted something different. He bit, and the publisher signed Staten to a contract.
"It was my greatest scam," Staten says. "To get Harper & Row to pay me to eat barbecue for a year, all over the country."
Staten's first book, Real Barbecue, came out in 1987 and became a cult classic. A Washington Post critic wrote that it was the first food book he'd ever been able to read cover-to-cover. Though it's now out of print, copies are still sought. Some have sold on the internet for upwards of $100 apiece.
For a follow-up, the suddenly nationwide Staten followed with a travel book, Unauthorized America: A Travel Guide To the Places the Chamber of Commerce Won't Tell You About, got him on the David Letterman Show. "It was quite a trip," he says. "They treat you like a rock star."
After that, Jack Daniels invited Staten to write a barbecue book. His sudden status as a barbecue wizard flabbergasted him. "I'm the world's worst cook," he says. He'd even been a failure at backyard grilling until a friend showed him the technique of indirect heating—piling the coals in one spot, putting the meat on the other side, then opening the vent on that side.
At a backyard barbecue in the summer of '92, Staten and friend David Jenkins began speculating about what America needed most. Staten decided it was a "McDonald's of Barbecue—not bland food, but a barbecue place that would be clean, and you'd know that the food would be good and consistent."
Jenkins took the idea more seriously than Staten expected him to. "By the end of the month, I was signing a lease." By November, Vince Staten, former Homecoming Queen and TV critic, was a restaurateur. "The first restaurant I worked in, I owned," he says. "Dave knew the restaurant business. I knew barbecue from the customer's side."
He serves pork shoulder, pulled and chopped, in the North Carolina style, but offers several sauces that allow customers to pick their favorite region: North Carolina, Memphis, Texas. "Because I've eaten so many different styles, I decided I didn't want to tell people what kind of barbecue they had to eat." He's doing something right. Vince Staten's Old Time Barbecue in Prospect, Kentucky (just outside of Louisville), a 10-seater in 1992, now seats 50. It has been recommended by national authorities, such as Jane and Michael Stern's Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A. and, just this year, the culinary magazine Bon Appetit.
Meanwhile, Staten was still writing. There followed an inquisitive book series that began with Can You Trust a Tomato In January? about supermarkets, in which Staten asks, "Who invented jello—and how did they get the first people to eat clear food that wiggles?" In 1994, it got him on NBC's Dateline, for which the network sent three camera crews to accompany Staten on a shopping trip. Impressed with the expense of the short segment, he says, "I don't know how they make a living."
The followup was, Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench?, a Simon and Schuster bestseller about hardware stores, and Do Pharmacists Sell Farms? about drugstores. It's being released in paperback this fall by his original title, Do Trojans Use Trojans?
He's finishing a similar book about barber shops, which he calls "one of the last bastions of community, where you can find out everything that's happening in the neighborhood without even asking." While researching it, he recently visited Barnes Bros. Barber Shop on MLK. He calls this book the fourth in a trilogy. "I always wanted to write a Small-Town Trilogy. At least I did until I wrote the fourth one. I've never heard of a quadrilogy, so I'm just going to call it the fourth in the trilogy." His book about barbershops is due out in early 2001.
For years, he says, he kept season tickets to see the Vols play. Though he doesn't anymore, he comes to town at least once a year, as any gracious old Homecoming Queen would, partly to point at his old friends and ask, "How did we get so damned fat?"
September 21, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 38
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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