A few amplifications on recent columns
by Jack Neely
 Concerning my story about finding the origins of the term "Cedar Bluff" in one extinct marble quarry, one reader noted that the stone for which Knoxville was once famous is not marble, but high-grade limestone. I first heard that point about a year ago, and maybe there's something to it. But the term "marble" has been applied to the products of Knoxville's quarries for 130 years, not only by local promoters but by the national press. The word marble was the heart of one of Knoxville's most marketable nicknames, "The Marble City." To my knowledge, "Knoxville marble" was never called "limestone" by anybody during the industry's heyday.
I'm no geologist, but I understand the prevailing definition of "marble" insists on some degree of metamorphic crystallization. Knoxville marble is harder than most limestone, and it does have the streaked, marbly look of marble. Is it doomed to remain mere limestone by the prejudice of crystallization?
I wonder if Knoxville's marble industry predates the geological distinction, anyway. I think it should be grandfathered in.
My column about the mysterious house at "918" Speedway Circle—the old Joe Knaffl house that was apparently moved there from Gay Street in the 1920s—drew a surprising array of responses, from people who remembered the house in several eras. Everyone remembers the house's elaborate interior woodwork. One remembered falling in love with a girl on that porch to the backdrop of the John Kennedy assassination; another claims to have been the only straight man in attendance when the place was a wild gay party palace during the disco era. The place has at least one novel in it, I'm convinced.
I also heard from a couple of folks remarking on the Knaffl legacy, which, by modern standards, is a mixed one. Some claim Knoxville's most celebrated photographer brought photography to new heights in the 1890s, elevating it to the status of "art," and maybe he did. Others remember that Knaffl made a lot of hay from his reputation for making photos of black people posed in comical attitudes: "coon pictures," as they were called, were the still equivalent of minstrel shows, and almost as popular. Knaffl's race pictures are still traded on the internet. An Oak Ridge reader noted that Black Byrd, a 1973 album by the great jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd, is illustrated with an ironic 1897 Knaffl photo of black musicians.
Speaking of folks with mixed reputations, it turns out that the Sage of Monticello might not have been quite as appalled at last week's lottery vote as I'd assumed. I'd taken his snippy response to a Tennessee-lottery-for-higher-education proposal in 1810 as a moral rejection of lotteries as a way to raise public money. "Having myself made it a rule never to engage in a lottery or any other adventure of mere chance," Jefferson wrote Knoxville's Hugh Lawson White, "I can with the less candor or effect urge it on others."
A couple of readers note that at other times in Jefferson's career, he did promote lotteries. Nick Chase, a wonderful source of arcana, observes that President Jefferson funded the construction of Constitution Avenue in Washington with a lottery.
Reader Jim Grossen remarks that in 1826, Jefferson wrote an essay called "Thoughts On Lotteries," which calls lotteries a revenue source "wherein the tax is laid on the willing only."
I looked up Jefferson's original essay. It's so pro-lottery it could have been quoted on bumper stickers this year.
"If we consider games of chance immoral," he writes, "then every pursuit of human industry is immoral..." He goes on to equate shipping, commerce, land ownership, and hunting with gambling. "But the greatest of all gamblers is the farmer," he concludes. "These, then, are games of chance. Yet so far from being immoral, they are indispensable to the existence of man." It's one of Jefferson's last writings.
He had an ulterior motive. Like Tennessee, he was broke. At 83, he was making a desperate plea to the Virginia legislature to allow him to sell his own land by lottery. In 1810 he told us he couldn't possibly promote a lottery, but that's what he was doing 16 years later, during the last months of his life.
Finally, I couldn't help but notice that the 20th anniversary of the end of the World's Fair came and went with little note. Many thought the Fair might mark a revolutionary attitude toward energy in America. The millions who attended might easily have believed, as the song said, history is being made in Tennessee. But I'm beginning to suspect the legacy of the World's Fair ended about 20 years ago, too.
The Simpsons notwithstanding, references to the fair in books, magazines, and documentaries are scarce. It's hardly even a footnote. UT professors tell me their freshmen don't know that there was ever a big fair here.
Now we seem to be on the way to erasing the last evidence that it ever happened. The U.S. Pavilion and the IMAX theater, announced as permanent, weren't. The Tennessee Amphitheatre was supposed to be permanent, too. The Sunsphere remains. A couple of years ago, Leopold Adler, the Savannah preservationist pioneer and urban planner, strongly advised a roomful of city officials to demolish it. Knoxville can never have an attractive downtown with that thing standing there, he said.
But I'm afraid we'll have to keep it. It may soon be our only proof that we ever hosted a World's Fair.
November 14, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 46
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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