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A few ribald epilogues

by Jack Neely

This is, maybe, my last column about the long-gone Union Avenue burlesque house known as the Roxy. In the month since my last update, I've heard from several surprising witnesses. One, Harry Smith, recalled something that none of our Roxy memoirists admitted to remembering: the content of one of house clown Webfoot Watts' circa-1945 jokes.

Guy walks into the Roxy, looking for a local hostelry called the Old Log Inn. Mr. Watts is, at the moment, cavorting on stage with one of the dancing girls, whom he's entertaining behind a stage prop.

"How far is the Old Log Inn?" the man asks.

"None of your business!" Mr. Watts replies.

I repeat that one for the historical record only.

John Moss is too young to have ever visited the Roxy's live shows, but in the early 1970s, while working as a carnival barker for the James Strates Carnival, the traveling show that survives as the last railroad carnival in America, he got to know one of the carnival's showmen, an aging clown he knew as Art Watts. The fact that Moss and Watts were both former Knoxvillians was coincidence; the carnival never came here, in Moss's experience, though it did come as close as Nashville, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh in a liberal tour up and down the east coast.

He says Watts was rarely known as "Webfoot" in those days, but it sounds as if he hadn't changed his act. "He was very jovial, onstage and off," Moss recalls. "He was your typical burlesque comic: loud, brash, wildly dressed, used a lot of double-entendre jokes." He says Watts wasn't very tall, maybe five-seven, and was often smoking a cigar. He lived in Mountain Home, Ark., with his wife, dancer Norma Jean Watts, and tended cattle when he wasn't on the road.

He says Watts performed at a theater in Memphis some, too, and was planning a triumphal one-time return to Knoxville at the Bijou Theatre around '71, but got sick and missed the gig. He says Watts has since died. His widow was still living in Mountain Home as recently as the late '90s, but Moss has recently tried, and failed, to reach her.

Moss sounds erudite for a retired carnival barker. "I'm fascinated by popular culture," he says. "That led me into it." He also got interested in crowd psychology, and the delicate art of getting customers to "make the turn" into a carnival tent. "There's a lot more to that than people think," he says. Moss retired from show biz when he began suffering from emphysema; however, he will be delivering a lecture on Wednesday Sept. 18 at the East Tennessee Historical Society on the Chatauqua movement in this region.

And I heard from the legendary Eddie Harvey of Eddie's Auto Parts. He remembers the Roxy well; his first job, after graduating from Halls High in 1940, was as a messenger boy for Western Union, which was located near the Roxy. When he had a free spell, he'd duck in there to see a movie or two. Later on, he lived in the Roxy; there were some simple apartments upstairs.

But that wasn't the main thing he called about. He called to tell me that the Roxy is still standing. When the Roxy was demolished in 1959, Harvey bought the rubble, or at least those parts of it that were still useful: some of the bricks, the metal stairway, and the steel frame (presumably excluding the one I-beam that Moose Schwarzenberg claims is holding his West Knoxville house up). He regrets he got there too late to get the marquee. Anyway, Harvey re-erected the place on Walker Boulevard in North Knoxville, just off Broadway. "We just put it all back up," he says.

The old Roxy served as the second location of Eddie's Auto Parts for almost 20 years—that is, until he bought an old Fountain City White Store, and moved it to sit nearby the Roxy. Then he embellished the old grocery with the facade of the 1982 World's Fair's Italian pavilion, which still forms part of the front of his store. That's his current store. He's big on moving buildings around, and he says he has saved hundreds of thousands that way.

The Roxy is now home of All-Med of East Tennessee, a wheelchair and adaptive-equipment store. Its front now wears a modern disguise of wood shingles over its second story. Only on the north side, where the metal staircase runs up to the second floor, does it look much like the building in the pictures.

Harvey, of course, is proud of his own show-biz career as the Whup-Ass Man in John Bean's "Leroy Mercer" prank tapes. Harvey, who starred in an episode of the TV show Jackass, says he's especially looking forward to next month's East Towne premiere of the movie Jackass, in which his friend Johnny Knoxville promises to wear an Eddie's Auto Parts T-shirt.

Along the same lines, my column about the mysterious buxom nude who appeared unexpectedly on a roll of microfilm in the monasterial McClung Collection prompted one astonishing response. Appearing on this roll of microfilmed deeds from Smith County in the 1830s, you'll recall, was a photograph of an extremely buxom brunette. My column about it earned unexpected citations in two professional archivists' journals. But the most surprising response I got was from Nashville archaeologist Sam Smith, who works for the state Department of Environment and Conservation. He claims to have been present when this softly pornographic prank was perpetrated. It happened, he says, at the state library in downtown Nashville—in 1962. He does not remember the names of the miscreants, but says they were employees of the library.

"The first thing I learned in my training was that the microfilm staff liked to lighten their routine and rather repetitive filming tasks with a measure of humor," he says.

He understates their workplace levity. Smith says there was one particular employee running the microfilm-shooting machine who was one of those who tends to bear the brunt of every joke. His fellow staffers came up with a plot more elaborate than I'd imagined. They cut a photo of a nude woman from a current gentleman's magazine, treated it with chemicals to make it look like an ancient daguerreotype, and attached to it the note signed by one "Nancy Lou," who's threatening to run off with Davy Crockett. When it was perfect, they slipped it into a Crockett-era Smith County documents book.

When the poor guy got to it, he was apparently so astonished that he held down the pedal and made multiple exposures of Nancy Lou into the microfilm.

After they'd had their fun with the poor rube, the earnest archivists carefully edited out the evidence of their prank. All the exposures they made, that is, except one, which they left in the microfilm as testament to their comic genius: "as a tribute," archaeologist Smith says, "to what they felt had been a fine joke." It's the one the lady found at the McClung Collection this summer.

Either no one had seen it in the 40 years since then, or those who did were content to have a look, rewind it, and put it back into its little cardboard box to be refiled in the flat metal drawers at McClung. That's what I've always done, anyway.

A reader wrote a letter to the editor questioning whether I could possibly have true memories of the Strohaus during the 1982 World's Fair, because my Strohaus memories, recounted in my column about that place, were of middle-aged Midwesterners doing the Bunny Hop—and because I didn't mention another dance named for the other cute animal most often abused at Easter: the Chicken Dance, which several folks seem to remember as the required house dance.

Many readers who saw that letter have the impression that this lady caught me in a lie. However, I insist I was indeed a regular at the Strohaus. The fact that I probably did spend more time drinking quarts of Fosters with the dinkum Aussies at the Downunder shouldn't undermine my case. Maybe I have a selective, Stroh's-addled memory, but to this day I honestly don't know what the Chicken Dance is and wouldn't recognize it if I saw it. If it bore any relation to the Funky Chicken of the early '70s, of course, I would have discreetly averted my eyes.