What does that mean, anyway?
by Jack Neely
Well, they got me. It was a Friday afternoon, and I had a column to write, fast.
I've gotten used to this drill: something comes up, and what began as a Secret History column gets promoted into a feature. It's usually no problem. This time it was the great American Bowling Congress convention and tournament of 1970. My take on it was originally going to appear in this space.
Of course, the shift left me the question of what to do about this half of page six. All I had to do was write a thousand words about something else.
Ideas are easy. I have three overstuffed file folders of them. A couple of them seemed promising, and I had a few hours to check them out before the library closed. I enjoyed a leisurely bowl of mushroom soup at Brazo, then ambled over to the library in no hurry.
When I arrived at Lawson McGhee just before 3:30, I could tell something was horribly wrong. The lights were off; the interior was strangely lifeless. The sign on the front door said the system had closed at 3 "due to inclement weather conditions." I looked around for them. It was a sunny, cloudless day. The AmSouth Bank clock told me it was 34 degrees. I was wearing a sweater, no jacket.
I did spot a patch of melting snow, and it reminded me of a fascinating documentary I'd seen the night before about Reykjavik, Iceland, on public television. Maybe you saw it, too. It had to do with the uncommon degree of musical creativity in that city. Like a lot of things, it got me thinking about my hometown.
There's one phrase you hear a whole lot here, the preface to a thousand statements about Knoxville. It's often meant well, and probably doesn't do much harm, but it's based on a false premise, and I'm not sure the truism that follows it is necessarily true. For a city its size, Knoxville...
You can fill in nearly anything you want to here. Has a lot of restaurants. Has a lot of talented musicians. Has a lot of crack houses. Has a lot of weekly papers. Has a lot of asphalt.
At 174,000, Knoxville is no Tokyo. Some call it a "small city," though 174,000 makes it way too big to be classified as an official "Small City" in Rand-McNally's national surveys that regularly say nice things about Maryville or Johnson City.
And city limits are lines that are easy to cross without a passport. A good many people who actually live in Knox County say they live in Knoxville. I've even met people who live in the county who think they live in the city and are disappointed to learn otherwise when they try to vote for mayor. By the 2000 census, Knox County was home to more than a third of a million people. It may be around 400,000 by now.
You can do a whole lot with that many people, if you do it right. As I mentioned, I was watching that show about Reykjavik, and the lively avant-garde musical culture there. The singer Bjork is just the tip of their iceberg; there are dozens of musicians in Iceland who have earned international acclaim for innovation, and they all seem to draw crowds of interested local folks. The documentary cameras roamed around the city, which seemed to have an impressive urban nightlife: as, of course, they'd better. This time of year, they have a lot of night to fill up.
I've never been to Reykjavik, but I looked it up in the Lonely Planet guide. It's famous for its lively pubs, a variety of restaurants, including an all-vegetarian one. It supports an opera, a symphony, a dance company, the National Gallery of Art, a Hard Rock Cafe, several discos, and a wild-sounding winter festival of songs, spirits, and native food, called Thorrablot.
I also looked up the population. About 112,000 people live in Reykjavik. It's barely two-thirds the size of Knoxville. That is, it's smaller than Knoxville proper, not counting most of the -ington subdivisions of West Knox. There are, in fact, more people living in Knox County than there are in the entire nation of Iceland.
But cross our county lines and you won't find yourself swimming in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Unlike Iceland, we have a metro area. Close to a million people live within a half-hour drive of Knoxville, and a good many folks in Maryville, Oak Ridge, and even Morristown take advantage of that fact and support Knoxville's stores, shows, and restaurants.
And if you judge Knoxville-area residents by the fact that they're overwhelmingly employed, with a high rate of home-ownership, we may be better off than some metro populations. Furthermore, within that population is also the biggest university in the state of Tennessee (you could throw in Kentucky and a few more Southern states and make a region of it). It seems to me that this particular population should be able to support nearly anything without surprising anybody. To my mind, it would be weird if this many people didn't support a symphony orchestra or a brewpub or a kosher deli or at least one weekly newspaper. Knoxville could probably support a North Korea booster club or a Florida Gators pep rally if word got around. It stands to reason that Knoxville can support all it does, from a Robert Burns Society to a belly dancing alliance. And that maybe it should support a lot more.
So I stood outside a closed library on a sunny Friday afternoon thinking maybe Knoxville's not so amazing "for a city its size." Maybe, in fact, we have some growing to do before we fill these shoes.
January 23, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 4
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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