Metro Pulse/Secret History/August

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A few random late-summer observations

by Jack Neely

Every time the hydraulic shovel bit into Market Square or Market Street or Union or Clinch Avenues this summer, it brought up a load of interesting dirt. Most of it looks like plain Tennessee red clay, but there are discolored striations here and there. Considering that this neighborhood constituted the busiest couple of blocks in East Tennessee for more than a century, I'm sure there's more there than mere dirt of the sort I find in my backyard.

Nobody has time for it, but I'd be willing to bet that if you sifted through all that dirt, we'd find recognizable, interesting things, detritus of an industrial town becoming a city: a rusted horseshoe, a busted sour-mash bottle, a fragment of a cannonball, a lost Indian penny. Back when people made excavations in the Market Square area by hand, they'd sometimes find human skeletons. It happened more than once in the late 1800s. I don't know where they came from, but I don't have any reason to believe the Victorians found all of them.

In any case, they're now one with the clay; maybe one of those gray streaks is an antebellum murder victim. But some larger, more stubborn skeletons are still identifiable along Union and Clinch Avenues. They're streetcar tracks. They and the stout wooden crossties that supported them for untold decades are mostly still there beneath the pavement. Even though I've seen yards of them yanked up in my lifetime, there are still miles of them left, as if they're still being installed by industrious mole men. Though none of them have been used since 1947, they're still straight and shiny and well-supported, as if they're still ready to bear the load of a streetcar full of shoppers and commuters and pubescent boys on their way to a burlesque show at the Roxy.

We cut out the ones that are in the way, and cover the rest up again. I don't doubt that excavators will continue to encounter these obstacles centuries in the future. They'll require more explanation for each generation that finds them.

* On the subject of downtown transportation, the city's gesture of offering all-day free parking downtown for three months has made for an interesting experiment. The Civic Coliseum parking garage, an attended lot with free trolley transportation to the business district—for those who aren't up to the four-minute walk to Gay Street—would seem to have been a godsend for those who have insisted that downtown's main problem was no free parking.

How's it working? After six weeks of publicity on TV, in the daily, and on the flashing Coliseum marquee, the free-parking garage is barely half-full most weekdays. Many do take advantage of it, but every day hundreds of free spaces go begging. The second level is never full, and the third and fourth decks of free parking are lonely places.

I can't tell whether it's helping downtown much. Maybe it would help the free parking if they were to put in some businesses nearby. Businesses can make free parking more popular.

* Two years ago in this space, when the Board of Trustees was facing an embarrassing absence of a president, I noted that, for the last century, the average age of a UT president at inauguration was 55 years. I suggested that the board of trustees break a longstanding habit, and try something other than hiring another white man in late middle age. A young man, maybe, or a woman.

The UT Board of Trustees never listens to me much. They hired another over-55 white guy, and they'll do it again. Maybe, among the secret qualifications we hear rumors about, AARP eligibility is every bit as important to the trustees as a Y chromosome.

UT has never had a female captain, but some of the university's most dynamic leaders, during even dicier periods in the 19th century, were young men. The man who probably had the most positive influence on the university was one Charles Dabney. A dedicated educator with a lot of fresh ideas, Dabney challenged UT to become one of the nation's more progressive universities. In 1887, when the board of trustees picked Dabney, the UNC chemistry professor and scientist was 32.

Of course, there's a hazard there, and a paradox; it's said that younger men are more likely to succumb to affairs of the heart. By the time a man is over 55, or so trustees probably presume, even if he's not brimming with energy and ideas, well, at least he's not likely to throw over his career, and UT's reputation, for a woman. Somehow, though, that impulse was the downfall of both of UT's last two chronologically venerable presidents. With mild-mannered, grandfatherly Wade Gilley, the allegation was a straightforward affair with an underling. Dr. Shumaker's webs began to unravel when folks noticed that the recently divorced academic had been taking a comely academic in Alabama on expensive dates. The relationship came to light soon after he started at UT.

The position is unquestionably a great way to get dames. There must be something about the position of the presidency of the University of Tennessee that touches the heart of late-life academic, and makes it shout, Hubba, Hubba!