A forgotten idol from a downtown cinder pit
by Jack Neely
An old lawyer friend of mine stopped me in the street a few weeks ago to tell me that Harold Duckett had found something very peculiar in his basement on Jackson Avenue. I didn't know Harold well, but knew that he was an architect who worked in the building now known as the Jackson Ateliers, where the Cup-a-Joe cafe is. I had to go have a look.
I walked over there one morning last month, and arrived at his third-floor office before Harold did. The lights were out in his office, which was lit only by the big windows overlooking Jackson. I peered in the glass door and saw two men sitting at a table, perfectly still, staring at me. Neither returned my wave or made any motion suggesting I should come in. Neither seemed concerned that this stranger was peering into their office.
In pince-nez spectacles and elaborate attire, the shorter one looked a great deal like Franz Peter Schubert. I figured I could deal with him. The other was an older, taller, balding man with a stern look I wasn't sure about. I offered the rude men an uncertain wave and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.
I returned to find that Harold had arrived, and was just unlocking his door. I opened my mouth to warn him about the two men I'd seen in his darkened office but he was already inside. The men were still there, but neither of them moved. Only when Duckett flipped on the lights did I ascertain that the two men weren't alive.
They weren't dead either, not exactly. They were both made of wax, startlingly realistic even with the lights on, especially by Gatlinburg standards. One was indeed Herr Schubert, Harold explained—I'd learned something from all those piano lessons after all—and the stern-looking one I didn't recognize was seminal American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Duckett says they date from about 1930, and were overstocks in a Florida museum whose curators decided they had a superfluity of 19th-century artistic figures, and Harold picked them up at a sale. Today, they watch as Duckett goes about his business.
What Harold had found in his basement made the wax dummies seem like ordinary office furniture. "We were digging through the cinder pits in the basement, it must have been about five years ago," he said. "Most of it was coal dust, shoveling out in wheelbarrows. Then little pieces started showing up. They were all black, and we had to sort them out from the coal." They didn't know what they'd found until later, when they washed them off.
He set it on a table. A small clay figure, six or seven inches in length, with the body of an ungraceful four-legged animal, a pig, maybe—but a pig with the scowling head of a bald man. The head has strangely large, Vulcan-like ears, and the deep eye sockets are slightly asymmetrical, one lower than the other. His left hind leg is missing.
Duckett, who used to work in ceramics, recognized the chalky figure as unglazed porcelain. But the subject of the sculpture is a mystery to him.
Duckett sees a smirk in the bald man's face. To me it looks like a pure scowl. The man with the pig body looks sad and more than a little bitter, perhaps about his awkward situation.
Duckett and his colleagues found some other things down there, too, and he props the largest one up on the table. It's not a sculpture, but a negative image, a mold for a statue of a German Shepherd standing nobly on a rock outcrop—the sort of thing you would have seen used as a bookend for a Zane Grey collection in a rumpus room in 1948. He also found a number of arms and legs of kewpie dolls. But nothing else like that sphinx.
There's no way to know for sure how old the thing is; this building was here by 1887, but was a shoe warehouse for the largest chunk of its history. The old spiral tin product chutes are preserved, still spiraling through Duckett's office. The Haynes-Henson Shoe Co. went out of business during the Depression, but its old painted signs, some of them recently restored, are still visible on the old brick outside.
In the late '30s, the building became Whitie's Novelty House, which manufactured and sold bric-a-brac. It was named for Milton "Whitie" Thompson, who was from out west—Anaconda, Montana—and moved here sometime after serving in World War I. He ran his factory in this building from 1939 until his death in 1954. The novelty house limped along under the same name after his death, but closed around 1959.
The sphinx likely came from Whitie's days, but another business, the Knoxville Statuary Company—Thomas Ward, proprietor—opened in the same building just before Whitie's did. and apparently coexisted with it for the next two decades, maybe sharing the basement kiln.
Duckett heard from a former Whitie's employee that the factory produced small statues for sale in fall festivals and carnivals, like the Tennessee Valley Fair, which was in full swing at Chilhowee Park every fall during the Whitie's era.
The question remains of who the guy is. "It's clearly a personality," Duckett says. "Its features are too interesting to be just a human head."
Just who this model in porcine porcelain might be is another problem. Even if you narrow it down to bald, local political figures who might have been controversial enough to inspire statuary caricatures, well, you've got a few choices. Cas Walker is one; the grocery magnate's 11 tempestuous months as Knoxville mayor, which ended with his recall, was right in the middle of the heyday of Whitie's Novelty House. Another was George Dempster (1887-1964), inventor of the eponymous Dumpster, who was city manager, city councilman, and finally mayor during the Whitie's period.
Dempster and Walker were probably the most conspicuous and often controversial figures of the Whitie's era, and they were both bald men that some might have found it amusing to make fun of. The figure looks slightly more like Dempster than Walker, but it may easily be someone else altogether.
It may not even be a pig. Its dimensions are piggish, but its thick legs seem more elephantine than porcine. Could this be the GOP elephant, in a horrible mutant form? And are the long, pointy ears meant to suggest elephant-sized flaps? For the record, George Dempster was a Democrat.
For now, the Sphinx of Jackson Avenue is keeping his secret. Messrs. Schubert and Cooper seem puzzled about it, too. But we're publishing his portrait here in hopes of establishing his true identity.
November 2, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 44
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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