Metro Pulse/Citybeat

Comment
on this story

Seven Days

Wednesday, May 8
Knox County Democrats' Truman Day dinner drew about 1,500 persons to hear Al Gore crack a few jokes. There must have been Republican crossovers in attendance. There aren't that many Democrats in East Tennessee.
Reports are that UT's incoming president is getting a divorce from the wife he's married to in Louisville. Uh-oh. Is anyone checking his email?

Thursday, May 9
The incoming UT president's compensation package, worth $735,000 a year, is revealed. Wow. We didn't know they expected him to coach football, too.
Regal Entertainment Group, the Knoxville-based combination of three formerly bankrupt theater chains, opened its stock sales on Wall Street several points above the offering price.... Only in the movies....

Friday, May 10
A survey conducted for the Knoxville Convention & Visitors Bureau concludes that Knoxvillians think there's nothing to do here. That's no news at Metro Pulse, where we've been trying for years to convince our reluctant neighbors that there's a lot of stuff worth experiencing here, including a lively entertainment scene just waiting to be embraced by the general population.
The News-Sentinel takes down the Scripps logo lighthouse from its perch outside the newspaper's old building and discloses that the symbol of the slogan "Give light and the people will find their own way" will be relocated inside the new building. You know, that's not a bad idea.

Sunday, May 12
UT wins the SEC men's outdoor track & field championship in Mississippi. Track? UT has a track team?

Monday, May 13
Republican Congressman Van Hilleary, who is running for governor, hosts a $500 per person visit to an enormous yacht moored in the middle of the Tennessee River at Knoxville. Fitting enough. A candidate for an office too big for his resume plays around in a boat too big to be docked.

Tuesday, May 14
A little wire story out of Louisville says the incoming UT president's wife is seeking a reconciliation. Hmm. Did she get word of his compensation package?

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Definitely not part of the Bear Foot in the City collection, this fearsome beast is one of a family of black bears fronting the pool of the Family Inn at Merchants Road (described by our winner as "the BRIGHT ORANGE '70s-looking hotel"), near the I-275 on-ramp. Karen Ann Collins, Media Relations Coordinator for the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, was first to correctly identify the image. Not wishing to anger the KACP, we accede to Ms. Collins' demand that she not receive "any old dusty book," but rather "something cool off Jesse's desk," by forwarding to her a Metro Pulse mouse pad and a Volaris Online coffee mug (we even washed it out first).

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

HISTORIC ZONING COMMISSION
Thursday May 16
8:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
City County Bldg.
Small Assembly Room
300 Main St.
Regularly scheduled meeting.

JAMES WHITE PARKWAY TASK FORCE
Thursday May 16
4 p.m.
South Knoxville Baptist Church
522 Sevier Ave.
Updates from work groups. Please enter from the side door. Contact the City Recorder's office at 215-2075 for more information.

KNOX COUNTY ELECTION COMMISSION
Thursday May 16
4:30 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Room 327 (Fourth Sessions Courtroom)
300 Main St.
Results of last week's election will be certified at this meeting.

CITY BUDGET HEARING
Tuesday May 21
Departmental presentations, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.—Public hearing 5 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
300 Main St.
Continuation of the May 9 budget hearing. The public hearing portion of the hearing will begin at 5:00 p.m.

Remembering Mr. Aubrey
The last of the old-time bosses is gone

It was 1988, and an unsuspecting young man from Greeneville had optioned a piece of property in the then-rural Ritta Community that he wanted to turn into a golf driving range. He'd been a member of the UT golf team, was clean-cut and polite, and his parents were willing to finance the venture. The Metropolitan Planning Commission had approved it, but when he and his family appeared at Knox County Commission, controversy rained down, and he lost by a vote of 18-1, mostly on the basis that his site was "too close" to Ritta Elementary School.

Never mind that the proposed golf course was more than a mile and a half from the schoolhouse door. What it was, in fact, was too close to the home of Aubrey Jenkins, boss of all bosses of the Knox County Republican Party. If the family had been schooled in the way of Knoxville politics, they would have known they were in trouble when several Commissioners left the dais to grovel before the old man with the pencil-thin, Boston Blackie mustache.

Lawyer Dennis Francis, who worked for the law firm of Jenkins and Jenkins, remembers the incident. "I was there to massage the Democrats—Chris Wade [a since-deceased member of County Commission] in particular," Francis says. "Aubrey had turned out a whole regiment of us—John Valliant, Bill Banks—and we were working the crowd."

The reason?

"Aubrey just didn't want that driving range anywhere near his property." It was probably no closer than a half-mile from his Murphy Road home. "He didn't want to be bothered," Francis says. "He said they could wait till he was gone to do it...."

Future school board member Harry Brooks took the podium and drove the last nail in the project's coffin, and when it was all over, Francis says, "Aubrey leaned over to me and in a stage whisper said, 'Who was that sonofabitch that went against us?'"

Jenkins' death May 2 went almost unnoticed by local media, beyond a standard-issue obituary in the daily paper and a big funeral attended by his many surviving relatives and friends. There wasn't much that would have clued a casual reader in to the fact that "Mr. Aubrey," as he was called, was the last of the old-time Knoxville political bosses.

Maybe that was because Jenkins, 88, had been incapacitated since 1994 by a stroke that robbed him of the ability to walk, or, even more cruelly, to speak. And maybe it was because his funeral service was on the same day as C.H. Butcher's.

He was a founding partner of the law firm Jenkins and Jenkins, along with his brother Erby and Ray H. Jenkins, "the Terror of Tellico Plains," who was unrelated to the Jenkins brothers, despite sharing a surname. His son, Joe Jenkins, served as Knox County sheriff, and his nephew, Ray Lee Jenkins is a Criminal Court judge. Here is how one prominent local political figure (a woman) remembers him: "In the late 1960s, each party appointed a 'primary board' to run county primary elections—they were not handled by the Election Commission. Aubrey Jenkins was the chair of the primary board and I was his clerk...We appointed officials at each poll, made sure they got there and conducted the election. The board then certified the results. My job was to get the paperwork in order to get them notified and then paid. Anyhow, on election night—probably 1968—the primary had ended and the GOP primary board met in a courtroom at the old Courthouse. It was me and five old guys. I was 20. We were laughing and carrying on and somehow the conversation rolled around to being a judge. I can't remember any of the words, but Jenkins walked up behind the bench and found a robe in a box. He yelled me over to put it on. This was a major joke at a time when few women were even lawyers and there had never been a woman judge around here. I put on the robe at his request and sat in the judge's chair. Jenkins had somebody take a picture.

"That night I realized that being a judge was not the most important job at the Courthouse. And that Aubrey Jenkins was a man who made judges."

—Betty Bean

Dateline UTK
UT Today puts students in the news

"5, 4, 3, 2, go." "Welcome back to UT Today. I'm Cort Sikes."

"And I'm Kendall Agee—" The young anchor bursts out laughing for the second time today. Those in the graphics room grumble in frustration. Professor Sam Swan looks a bit fed up. "Tell her to concentrate," he instructs producer Jeff McClain.

It was a momentary interruption to a mostly smooth-running afternoon of Swan's course, Broadcasting 460: Broadcast News Operations. In many ways the studio looked professional, with its banks of monitors, technicians punching buttons, and a well-coifed blond anchorwoman in a blaze-red suit. But the reporters, anchors, camera operators, producers, audio technicians and visual crew were all seniors in broadcasting at the University of Tennessee, and they're still learning how to put together good television.

The fruit of their efforts, a half-hour newsmagazine called UT Today, aired for eight Saturdays over the last two months on WBIR Channel 10. The class's 18 members came up with story ideas and worked in two-person reporter/cameraman teams to write, tape and edit the stories, or "packages." Since each show took a week to produce and some aired several weeks after completion, the students covered features of continuing interest to the university and community. Topics included UT's relationship with NASA, its ROTC program, and research on shrimp farming at the agricultural campus. Sports reporters focused on ongoing stories like intramural athletics and the Vols' National Football League draft picks. Students compared their show's format to that of Dateline NBC, another show that shies from time-sensitive stories.

Swan required his reporters to bring a UT angle to all their stories. Class members say they were free to criticize the university in their packages, and Swan agrees. "We don't consider the program a PR piece for the university," Swan says.

Members of the class say they would have loved for the show to hit harder, but factors beyond their control prevented that from happening. Many students took 15- or 16-hour course loads in addition to Broadcasting 460, and didn't have time to be persistent with reluctant sources.

Then there's the camera hurdle. Reporter, anchor and Teleprompt operator Jonathan Lloyd says many people were willing to talk to reporters, but not to appear on television. Fellow pupil Andye-Andinha Satterfield says her job as an international affairs journalist was especially difficult. Since September 11, many foreign students refused to be interviewed on camera. "They're just afraid to show their faces on film," Satterfield says. Because of that reluctance, Satterfield was forced to scrap plans for a story on the doomed Sutherland and Golf Range apartments in favor of lighter fare. "Every story that I've done has been weak, in my opinion," Satterfield says.

In contrast, McClain describes himself as a "hardcore, grind-it-to-the-bone kind of news guy," but he doesn't see digging up dirt as UT Today's chief objective. "We're here to get a job," he said, just a few weeks shy of graduation.

In that arena, Broadcast News Operations alumni have been quite successful. 2001 graduate Will Lewis landed a job as a reporter for Channel 8, where classmate Justin Croft works as a sportscaster. Local producers Rhonda Roberts and Derrall Stalvey also took Swan's course. This year's students say the class gave them experience in all areas of news production, a key asset in the working world. Each class member worked as a reporter, camera operator, and technician. Some anchored the program as well.

It's 3:15, and students are cleaning up. Today's taping took two hours, about half as long as the class's first endeavor. These future producers, reporters and sportscasters might not have gotten through without giggling, but they did manage to wrap it up almost as quickly as the professionals.

"Anyone going to OCI [Old College Inn]?" Swan asks. "We'll celebrate this one."

—Tamar Wilner