Metro Pulse/Ear to the Ground

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Rock and a Hard Place

County Commissioner John Schmid's angry denunciation of City Council member Jack Sharp after Sharp turned down Melissa Mayfield's request to serve out her late husband Danny Mayfield's unexpired City Council term caused a buzz in certain business circles, in part because Schmid's employer, Holrob, has a contentious rezoning that is due to come before City Council this year. The Holrob rezoning would put a super-sized Target store on the west side of Washington Pike near residential Valley View Drive on property currently zoned for office use. The property owner has tried for commercial zoning, and failed, about a half dozen times over the last decade. Schmid's Commission colleague and co-Holrob guy John Griess is running the point for the project.

So will Schmid's telling Sharp that what he did was "despicable" and other things affect the rezoning? Most sources think it doesn't have a snowball's chance anyway, but some point out that the disputed parcel is in Carlene Malone's district, and that Malone—whom Sharp openly dislikes—has long championed the neighborhood.

Said one wag: "Jack'll have to decide who he hates most, John Schmid or Carlene Malone."

Turn Off, Tune Out, Fart Around

UT's performance last week by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author and sage of humanism, attracted a more-than-capacity crowd of 650-plus into and around the UC Auditorium. Vonnegut, nearing 80 and struggling for breath, hinted it might be his last such speaking engagement in spite of the enthusiastic reception to his philosophical humor ("We're on this Earth to fart around, and don't you let anyone tell you different."). He told the students and others attending that he wanted to leave them with one thing to remember. "Call your TV a 'tantrum,'" he said. "And turn off the tantrum and talk to each other." The one thing he wanted remembered was left out of the News-Sentinel's front-page coverage of Vonnegut's address. That's probably only coincidental to the paper's Scripps corporate kinship to HGTV. Wonder if anyone told him that 150 or so of the overflow were watching him across the hall on television?

Is That Magnate or Magnet?

Short-line railroad entrepreneur Pete Claussen introduced a couple hundred giddy Knoxvillians to his newly refurbished steam engine, the "Lindy," as she chugged and whistled and pulled his Three Rivers Rambler excursion train along Knoxville's riverfront last week. In the course of the excursion, Claussen admitted he doesn't know what to do with his newest private car. (He now owns four, counting the office car "Resplendent," which is part of the Rambler string.) Parked on a siding at Stadium Drive across from Thompson Boling Arena, along with his own private car, the "Tennessee," and his wife Linda's car, the "French Broad River," is the "Curlyhut," a 1930 special that was Woolworth heiress and international playgirl Betty Hutton's toy in the pre-World War II years. Named for an uncle, "Curly" Hutton, the car is presently a hideous purple and yellow, with a "Chessie" cat logo from its later years as a Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad show car. Claussen bought it at auction in West Virginia from the C&O's successor, CSX, a few weeks ago and says it was "cheap. A motor home costs more." Maybe so, but speculation is rife that the Gulf & Ohio rail magnate now has more private cars than Cornelius Vanderbilt ever owned.

Every Dogwood Has His Day

Our Metro Pulse next-door neighbor, the Dogwood Arts Festival, seemed altogether less annoying than ever. The crafts, exhibited at the old Watson's Building, have been of a much higher quality than in years past, featuring some interesting Chinese antiques, highly imaginative art from local school students, live demonstrations of furniture making, and a curious absence of glue-art and spray-painted pine cones. The live music out on the Square has only occasionally descended to the genre of karaoke evangelism that used to reverberate through our offices every April. And while it's still puzzling that the "festival" keeps bankers' hours, shutting down just before thousands of downtowners get off work, closing down the food vendors just before suppertime, we've heard only one complaint: a Market Square landowner was told she could not dine on the public part of the Square, as is her custom on a spring evening. For these two weeks, police have enforced a strict no-loitering policy.