Trying to keep up with an Edwardian Christmas
by Jack Neely
This Christmas, shake your holiday up a little by inviting a stranger to your table. Somebody from outside your regular circle. Say, somebody from 1902.
He might well be amazed and bewildered by our DVDs and CD-ROMs. But try to be gracious; he probably won't admit it, but by the time dinner's over, he'll be a little bored. The modern Christmas is missing a lot of what it had a century ago: mainly things that involve actually leaving the house.
Our 21st-century streets begin to grow eerily quiet in the mid-afternoon of Dec. 24; the pall doesn't begin to lift until the 26th. You figure most Knoxvillians endure the holiday inside, unwrapping presents or eating or dozing or watching TV.
They had some of that homey stuff in 1902—the dinner and unwrapping presents, anyway—but it was just the beginning. For thousands of Knoxvillians in 1902, Christmas Day was a festival of fireworks, dances, church services, vaudeville shows, a bowling tournament or two—and, perhaps most important of all, the now-elusive state of communal jollity.
Not that it was all good. Then, as now, the season has a way of bringing out life's pathos. A week before Christmas, police arrested newcomer Irene Bledsoe and her companion, somebody else's husband, on charges of lewdness. Irene's 12-year-old daughter was so upset by her mother's arrest that she insisted on accompanying her into jail.
The same morning, dairyman Andrew Stott happened to drive his wagon on Tazewell Pike across the tracks of the "dummy line," the steam-driven trolley to Fountain City, at exactly the wrong time. The engine demolished the wagon. "The unfortunate man's body was horribly mutilated. His head was severed from his body and both arms were torn off." His watch was found stopped at 6:30 a.m.
Constable Thomas Dewine and bartender W.S. Woods shot each other at a Depot Street saloon. Both were wounded, but "Neither of the men harbored any ill feeling against the other, and they simply decided it would be better for both of them if the matter was not carried into the courts."
Knoxville was, for the moment, still holding on to Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan, the Wild West outlaw, who had just celebrated his first anniversary in the Knoxville jail, but was showing signs of discontent. Legal proceedings regarding his complicated series of charges, held at the Custom House, sometimes provoked angry outbursts from the former train robber and serial killer.
That year, Christmas smelled of holly, cedar, and smoke. Early on the morning of the 22nd, another fire broke out in the second floor of the Knoxville Pants Co. on Commerce Street. It was the "fire-ridden precinct": the White Mule block bounded by Gay, State, Union, and Commerce. No one died, but half a million dollars in losses to more than a dozen businesses, made it one of the costliest fires in memory, second only to the fire that destroyed the same block five years earlier. Ailing Fire Chief Sam Boyd, who lived in a room at the Palace Hotel across the street on State, was awakened by the noise and heat of the fire but was too ill to direct the firefighting effort.
B.H. Sprankle's, which was on an undamaged part of Gay Street, made the best of the situation. The next day they ran an ad headlined "The Great Fire..." then continued, in smaller print, "will not interest you half as much as the low prices we are making on suits, overcoats, shoes, hats...."
Shoplifting was a lesser problem. In 1902, some Gay Street shops tried an innovative solution for the holidays: female undercover agents. When the spy caught one, she just told him to scram; prosecution of shoplifters was rare.
The fun was out on the streets, where unpredictable "street fakirs" ruled, selling "all the latest novelties: climbing toads on strings, automobiles [that] run around in a circle, mechanical mockingbirds, rubber pigs that squeal...."
On Christmas Eve, a newspaperman walking down Gay Street was approached by an old man with matted hair and wobbly legs. "Say, pardner," he said, "ain't yer got so much as a dime about yer?"
"What's the matter with you?" replied the skeptical journalist.
"Matter enough," the man replied. "Friend, I jest lack one dram er bein plum drunk, and I ain't got er nickel left. What sort er Christmas'll this be less I git more money?"
On the evening of the 24th, UT hosted a Christmas Eve Ball attended by 50-odd students and their dates. The same night, Miss Bonnair Price, the celebrated actress, opened a week of shows at Staub's Theatre. She played the dual roles of country maiden and French adventuress in A Woman's Power. Accompanying her were the comedy team of Kieffer and Diamond, "high-class society sketch artists," and the Wells Brothers, musical comedians. On Christmas Eve, Mlle. Price performed a four-act dramatization of Whittier's poem, "Maud Muller." Miss Price's shows boasted "special scenic and electrical effects."
Electricity was the wonder, and the terror, of the day. That night, a power line sagged over a Gay Street sidewalk. Daniel Cafe was walking alone down the sidewalk at about 8:30 that evening. The railroad worker, described as "a giant of a fellow," saw the wire and, for whatever reason, touched it. The 6,000-volt shock knocked him into the street, fracturing his skull. He was taken to Knoxville General to die.
But he didn't cooperate. The next day, Christmas Day, Cafe was up and walking around. They let him go.
He might have been anxious to get to Chilhowee Park on Christmas Day, because, as usual, it was the Knoxville Bowling Club's annual tournament. Contestants came to bowl for prizes, including a bottle of pickles, a French doll, a scarf pin, and bottles of liquor and wine. Manager Frank Bundschu was in charge of the "perpetual lunch." That and a coyly described "something on the side...kept the balls, both kinds, rolling until late...."
It wasn't even the only Christmas Day bowling tournament; there was another in the basement lanes of the Imperial Hotel on Gay Street.
The police had promised to crack down on fireworks, but some inevitably were smuggled in from lawless South Knoxville. One Al G. Paine was injured "exploding some sort of new-fangled thing which he purchased from the south of the river stores, where firecrackers and torpedoes were sold almost by the wagonload" on the 24th and 25th. A 12-year-old boy on the south side was injured when a firecracker blew up in his face.
Uptown, Christmas started early. For Christmas Day services, nobody could top the pre-dawn Mass at Immaculate Conception. The Farmer's Mass in B Flat must have sounded like a military parade, with trombones and cornets; the intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavaleria Rusticana was sung by young Bertha Roth, future founder of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
Staub's Theatre offered a Christmas-afternoon matinee, "No'th Ca'lina Folks"; that evening was the "sensational play" Life In New York.
The crowds of people passing to and from the vaudeville shows and church services and bowling tournaments were orderly. A reporter remarked, with some astonishment, that "there was practically no drunkenness except on the Bowery."
Down there, of course, was plently of drunkenness. A crap game near Finley's Bar on Central ended badly when one stranger "tried to sever [Ed] Stewart's head from his body," slicing him from ear to ear. In another joint, one man tried to kill another with a knife, "literally cut his clothing off him" as the naked man fired three pistol shots, each one missing. Both were arrested and "lodged in the boose." A guy named Louis Lancaster walked into a Bowery saloon and "took a notion to kill everyone in the place. He emptied his pistol, charitably missing everybody, and was disarmed before he escaped. Overall, there were only 12 arrests, making for an unusually quiet Christmas.
"Up-town, many of the saloons were actually closed after [noon] dinner, an innovation for many of them to be sure." (In those days, "up-town" meant middle-class Gay Street as opposed to working-class Central.) "Some of the saloons closed before noon, not because the patronage was not good, but for the reason that the proprietors and employees wished to take the day for themselves."
Even with no open saloons there, Knoxvillians thronged Gay Street on Christmas afternoon. Some were "those who came out to see and be seen." It was "a good-natured, jolly crowd of men and women and children with happiness beaming from their faces and good cheer and good wishes in their voices and never ceasing to talk."
December 12, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 50
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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