Critics had their way with Knoxville, 1982
by Jack Neely
About 20 years ago, hundreds of reporters from newspapers across the country and the world descended on Knoxville. Each of them described the city, and the Fair, in his or her own way. However, for sheer fame, one description eclipsed all others; it came from a front-page story by Susan Harrigan in the Wall Street Journal over a year before the Fair opened. It was called "What If You Gave a World's Fair And Nobody Came?"
The line everybody remembered went like this: "Nevertheless, with visions of international exotica dancing in their heads, leaders of this scruffy little city of 180,000 on the Tennessee River are churning out breathless press releases comparing Knoxville to such proven world's fair hosts as Paris and New York."
Never have three throwaway words been so widely quoted, on T-shirts, on posters, in the name of a small publishing company. Ms. Harrigan, who now writes business stories for New York Newsday, didn't return our e-mail queries.
Of course, we expected our fellow Southerners in the regional press to be much more polite than that Journal Yankee. Carol Clurman, at the Nashville Tennessean, described Knoxville as "an unknown, uncelebrated town of 184,000 that few outside Tennessee knew existed before 'The Today Show' went there."
Jim Dumbell, of the Charlotte Observer, mentioned "untouristy Knoxville, a not particularly distinguished Southern city...."
Our I-75 neighbors to the north at the Lexington Herald-Leader called us "Little old Knoxville, that sleepy slowdown spot on the way from Kentucky to points south...."
"Guess who's having a World's Fair?" queried Larry Bonko in the Roanoke Times. "Sleepy ol' Knoxville, Tenn. That's who."
Travel writer William Schemmel in Atlanta magazine said, "The city crouches like a Venus flytrap at the confluence of three interstate highways, ready to snare thousands of Florida-bound tourists." He went on to add how the city's better restaurants were unaccountably concentrated on "garish" Kingston Pike.
Compared to our neighbors' jabs, the patronizing tone of well-known 66-year-old New Yorker writer E.J. Kahn, Jr., was easier to take: "Knoxville, a riverside metropolis of about a hundred and eighty thousand, is the 75th most populous city in the United States, the 17th most populous city in the Southeast and, behind Memphis and Nashville, the third most populous city in the not very cluttered state of Tennessee...."
Host a World's Fair, we found out, and you pretty much declare open season on your city. It can be rather startling to see what some folks were saying about Knoxville 20 years ago; it almost makes you believe in the idea of progress.
Writing for Forbes, energy-policy expert Carol E. Curtis wrote her own assessment of the scruffy little city: "Though it is 30 miles from the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, little of the natural beauty has rubbed off," she sniffed in an article entitled "Meet Me Where?": "Knoxville looks like what it is, an undistinguished industrial town in the heart of Tennessee coal country."
Kurt Andersen, later founding editor of the parody magazine Spy, and still later of Salon.com, was working for usually polite Time back then. In an article unusually snide for Time, titled "Barn Burner in a Backwater," the 27-year-old wrote, "Knoxville is not the prettiest or most intriguing city in the world, or the United States, or the Southeast, for that matter." (He didn't forget us; Andersen portrayed Knoxvillians as rubes in his 1999 novel, Turn of the Century.)
Newsweek gave up on adjectives altogether, referring to "nondescript Knoxville."
About six years before his editor-brother Bill would move here permanently, an astonished Louis Rukeyser reported in a newspaper column that the World's Fair would be held in "the East Tennessee city of Knoxville, of all the improbable places..."
And Ivor Davis, at The Times of London, couldn't resist joining the stateside fun: "Here they know more about the kind of energy you get from swigging moonshine made to age-old recipes up in the Tennessee hills. But Knoxville is the home of the Tennessee Valley Authority Power Co., hence the Fair's theme," admitted Davis. "One thing is certain. Knoxville, which one visitor described as 'not so much sleepy as comatose,' will never be the same again. It is getting accustomed to Japanese businessmen in dark suits and berobed sheiks running all over town."
Sticking out from all these slams was Metropolitan Home, which also covered the Fair. "Knoxville has borne up rather heroically," wrote Michael Walker. "The city itself is pleasantly sprawling, peopled—at least near the downtown fair site—with friendly, helpful folks wielding fetching drawls and almost disarming Southern hospitality."
Writing for GQ, celebrity film critic Rex Reed was alone among the national-press-corps scribblers in that, heedless of his reputation, he confessed to having been here before:
"Knoxville...used to be a quiet, lazy sort of place with winding dogwood trails, impervious Victorian buildings, and dreamy-eyed kids strolling hand in hand along the University of Tennessee's campus that slopes toward the Tennessee River's banks...." He may have been familiar with the city thanks to the reputation of another famous film critic. But he said Knoxville had changed. "Don't go there expecting to find the town James Agee wrote about in his Pulitzer-Prize A Death In the Family. And don't look for the railroad tracks behind the house where they filmed All the Way Home, the film version of the book. Today, if they tried to shoot that movie in Knoxville, all you'd see in the background would be a 74-foot energy-efficient glass globe inlaid with 24-carat gold dust called the Sunsphere, sitting atop a 192-foot tower of steel. At ground level, it's surrounded by 72 acres of Ferris wheels, popcorn stands and international pavilions that look like utility companies from outer space...."
UnFairest Cuts
The Fair itself didn't fare much better in print than its maligned host city. The Wall Street Journal's assessments are usually obvious in the headlines: "Knoxville's Fair: Sophisticated It Isn't." In the article, written by well-known New York Times food critic Raymond Sokolov a year and a half after his colleague Harrigan's prior dismissal of Knoxville and the project, he described the "large, centrally located, high-tech, glass-walled U.S. Pavilion... the effect was that of a central atrium in a Hyatt Regency Hotel cluttered with antique pumps and other Smithsonian-style relics...."
Predictably, The New Yorker described the Fair in greater detail than anybody else did: "At Knoxville," wrote Kahn, "the foreign pavilions consist of squat steel boxes; the imaginative architecture that one looks forward to at world's fairs is sadly lacking. Two of the more beguiling structures on the grounds, as it happens, are Victorian-style ones that were built in the lower Second Creek Valley around the turn of the century and have been refurbished—a onetime L&N railroad station and a onetime candy factory. The new, $12.4 million United States Pavilion, a slope-side six-story pile whose main distinction is that it is in part solar-heated and solar-cooled, looks like a factory that was designed by the factory owner's son-in-law. The theme building of the Fair, a 266-foot tower called the Sunsphere, has been accurately likened by a number of critics to a giant golf ball on a tee."
In headlines, frustrated editors across the country spent much of that summer lashing the word Fair into all manner of tortured puns: "Knoxville: Less than Fair" (Science 82); "All's Fare at the '82 World's Fair" (Houston Chronicle). And, worst of all, "An Energy Fair Fares Without Energy." That one was Mr. Reed's story for GQ.
He wrote, "It's a modest event by comparison [to the 1964 World's Fair], showing a world in which the promises of science and technology have already arrived...."
He admitted Knoxville's was only the second world's fair he'd ever attended. But he thought it should have been more entertaining.
"There are two things wrong with the energy theme," he wrote. "First, the gas crunch is over.... Second, it's boring...." He seems to have gotten his biggest on-site thrills by taking shots at the architecture.
"Nowhere is the computer craze more obvious than in the U.S. Pavilion, a six-level horror of glass and steel that looks like a giant gasworks gone berserk. At a time when the federal government hasn't got a penny to aid the arts, it's positively revolting to discover that the U.S. Department of Commerce has spent $21 million on this pointless Tinker Toy...
"One interesting sidelight was a wall of TV monitors where the panel of experts speaking on several energy-related topics could be changed just by touching your hand to the screen, but when I asked for a demonstration nobody was around who knew how the damned thing worked."
Metropolitan Home's mostly positive assessmentheld that the Fair "possesses a bizarre charm equal parts Iowa State Fair and General Dynamics Corp. new-products convention." The writer later describes the "pleasing, vaguely seductive change of face" that came over the fair at night before its 10 o'clock closing. "Gone is the moms-dads-children-of-all-ages ambiance that bears down during the day like the hot Tennessee sun. In its place is something a bit mysterious, even bashfully romantic."
Reed and others found the Fair a little too scientific to be fun. But one of the most scathing reviews came from an article by John Tierney in the journal, Science 82:"There are a few mildly entertaining exhibits, but anyone contemplating a long trek to Knoxville should give serious consideration to the Fair's many exhortations to conserve energy. This exposition is modest both in size and spirit.... It raises the question, Why bother with world's fairs anymore?"
Tierney, who later became famous as the iconoclastic New York Times' anti-recycling columnist, went on: "There are two good movies at the American and Japanese pavilions and a few scattered inventions that are interesting...pasteurized milk that doesn't require refrigeration, a photo lab that processes visitors' film within 60 minutes...a Japanese robot that paints.... Beyond that, the Fair isn't much more than a trade show.... The vision offered at Knoxville won't do. If this is the world of tomorrow, we're in for dull days."
Judging by national press attention, the 1982 World's Fair was almost completely forgotten after it closed on Halloween night. The only book about the Fair published in the last 20 years was written by a guy who never visited it, UT professor and outspoken Fair critic Joe Dodd. Without apology, a 1998 book World's Fairs recounts fairs from 1851 to 2000 and concentrates mainly on the un-themed "universal" expositions; the word Knoxville does not appear in the book. (For that matter, neither does Spokane or New Orleans.)
One exception appeared from an unlikely source, several weeks after the Fair closed, in the L.A. Times: Referring to "Knoxville, the much-lampooned dreamer of Appalachia...." it went on to say that "This spunky city's world's fair came off like some classic American success story, an underdog palooka punching his way to the title, or a bumpkin that got the pretty girl...."
May 9, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 19
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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Taking On a World's Fair