Remembering the champion of the Swiss
by Jack Neely
The last time I saw David Babelay—I think it was just last month—he didn't seem ill. He didn't even seem tired.
He never did. He was almost 60, but he had the energy of a schoolkid.
I don't think his old colleagues will mind my saying he was the most energetic librarian in the county. Many librarians prefer to remain seated as they patiently instruct you about where to find a book or a file, and that's fine. But David always wanted to bounce up and show you—and in the bargain maybe find out for himself what you were looking for.
Asked a question, he would start to say something in his quick voice, then stop, standing still and looking at the floor with his hand to his chin, then be off in some surprising direction. Sometimes, if the trail led him back to the Employees Only rooms, he'd take you back there with a grin and a glance over his shoulder.
He worked at the McClung Collection, as a volunteer or a part-timer, for more than 20 years, but he sometimes had the effect of a schoolkid who'd snuck in there to look at something the teacher didn't want him to see. He'd open file-cabinet drawers with an intense, nervous anticipation, as if he expected the history would jump out at him, as sometimes it did.
At his funeral in Fountain City last week, there was a small Swiss flag attached to the coffin. David's great-grandfather came from Switzerland in the 1800s. To David, that wasn't all that long ago. He learned French and went to Switzerland himself, several times, trying to find old cousins and new connections. One of his Swiss friends made the trip to Knoxville for his funeral.
David never started a family of his own, which may have intensified his sense of belonging in the larger French-Swiss family. They began arriving in Knoxville in the 1840s, most of them fleeing religious persecution; in Knoxville they became mayors, judges, authors, philanthropists. They kept their heritage for generations, speaking French in church, holding "love feasts" in the country and annual street fairs downtown. David could remember elderly first-generation Swiss who still spoke with an accent.
A couple of years ago, he presided over the Swiss Knoxvillians' sesquicentennial. A few years before, he had finished his massive two-volume opus, They Trusted And Were Delivered, a detailed genealogy of the French-speaking Swiss in the Knoxville area.
Many of Knoxville's Swiss have long since abandoned any sense that they're different from any Go-Vols East Tennessean. David enjoyed and preserved his inherited status as foreigner.
He favored the Swiss, but became the library's champion of all continental families, including the Austrian Knaffs. Last year, David discovered that the 1899 "Knaffl Madonna," the once-famous photo by Joseph Knaffl, was being used as a Christmas card by Hallmark, with no photo credit. David wanted people to know who made the picture, so he went to the site of the old Knaffl studio on Gay Street and taped up a Knaffl shrine on a vacant building—now, as then, one of the buildings condemned for the Justice Center project. His homage included a copy of the Knaffl Madonna itself, adorned with ribbons and captions explaining its significance, with information about the lives of the photographer and his models. It got your attention.
Within a couple of days, of course, the shrine had vanished, every trace of it fastidiously removed. Whether it was removed by an officious county employee or a random schizophrenic, it's hard to know. David responded as he did to every disappointment, with a head-shaking grin and a Gallic shrug.
To David and his research I owe several of my best stories. One of my favorites is that of Frederic Esperandieu, the errant winemaking cleric who lived in Knoxville before the Civil War. Briefly jailed by the Union army, he fled back home to Europe, unaware that the Franco-Prussian War was about to break out and he'd be enlisted to fight with Napoleon III against the Prussians. He then returned and taught French at UT.
The photographic book about Knoxville-area gravesites, The Marble City, that Aaron Jay and I did a couple of years ago, would have been a different and much duller book without David's help.
In the McClung Collection he directed me to lots of graves, always jumping up to show me a map or a listing. I'll never forget one fall Friday afternoon when he leapt up and went all the way out of the Custom House and got in his car and gave Aaron and me a four-hour tour of French-Swiss Knoxville, driving down roads in parts of the city and county I'd never seen. Taking a spontaneous sidetrip on that jaunt, he startled Aaron and me when he abruptly drove through a passage in some woods, then right across some well-mown lawns to a copse of trees, which turned out to be a little-known family cemetery. There he showed us the obscure graves of a whole family of bootleggers, most of whom died young. We didn't use the photos in the book, in part because they would have been de facto proof of trespassing.
One of the graveyards he showed us that day was the ancient Anderson-Gouffon Cemetery, off Tazewell Pike, where he was buried Monday.
The last time I remember his helping was when I was researching the 11th Street houses, when he found a file about the Pilgrim Congregationalist Church that I wouldn't have found otherwise. He never told me he was sick. He spoke of his heart attack a couple of years ago the way some folks would talk about a sneeze, as if it was just one of thost funny, embarrassing things that happens to all of us.
It'll be strange to be in the McClung Collection without David bouncing out of his chair as I walk in, whispering, Jack, I've got to show you something.
October 19, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 42
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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