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Seven Days

Wednesday, September 10
Early voting in the Knoxville mayoral and Council elections gets underway. That's Knoxville, folks. That's us! Hell-o.

Thursday, September 11
The Associated Press reveals that former UT President John Shumaker, who resigned in disgrace last month, had bought $40,000 worth of red carpet to replace the orange carpet in the UT executive offices. Talk about a disgrace! No wonder they ran him off.

Friday, September 12
Johnny Cash dies. Whoa. Talk about a BIG River flowing to a halt.

Saturday, September 13
The UT football team does not play and moves up a spot to 12th in the national rankings. Does this mean if they didn't play the rest of the season they'd end up in the top five?

Sunday, September 14
Former Vol Jamal Lewis breaks the all-time single-game NFL rushing record with a 295-yard performance. This is the guy UT won the national championship without. He missed the last seven games of that season with a bum knee.

Monday, September 15
The FBI puts out an APB on a suspect in a Vonore bank robbery. He's about 6', 180-plus, wearing a ball cap and shoulder-length hair in a pony tail, jeans, and tennis shoes and was seen driving an old-model Chrysler. Well, they know he ain't a Vonore native. Too tall.
News Sentinel headline: "Metro government could be on the horizon." Yeah, dream on.

Tuesday, September 16
The AP reports that there's a 'gator hunt underway this week in Georgia. Shoot. Wrong state.

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Judging by the number of responses this week, a lot of folks must be spending time on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Cumberland Avenue staring at the cartoon characters painted on the wall in front of Smoothie King.
Several folks correctly named the location of the dancing/fighting fruit but only one reader, 7-year-old Sam Parker from Knoxville, identified them by name as Chocolata and Berry. We don't know if he's correct or not about those names but he gets an "A" for effort. Sam also wins free smoothies for his entire family, compliments of Smoothie King. Congratulations, Sam!

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

Baker Center Goes Public
UT gets it off the ground

A new source of enrichment to the University of Tennessee's offerings will begin making its presence felt next week. The Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy is holding a daylong conference Sept. 23 examining the role of journalists who were embedded with combat units during the Iraqi war.

Speakers and panelists drawn from the military, journalists who covered the war and media analysts will address such questions as: How and why the concept of embedding journalists came about; how it worked; what the experience was like for journalists involved; and how it affected media coverage of the war.

The conference represents the Baker Center's first step into the public arena—but only the first of many. Two more conferences in the planning stages for next year—one on Watergate, the other on clean air. And the center's executive director, Alan Lowe, envisions at least three annually in the years that follow. There will also be an annual Howard Baker lecture which is due to be inaugurated this fall with a speaker yet to be selected.

"Our mission is to examine means of public governance and to emphasize the importance of public service, and within that we're also supposed to have a special emphasis on the role of the media," says Lowe. As with Watergate, other conferences can be expected that focus on issues central to Baker's years in the U.S. Senate (1967-85) and then as White House chief of staff (1987-88) under President Ronald Reagan.

Lowe brings strong credentials for tapping into the Reagan years. Prior to taking the helm of the Baker Center at the beginning of this year, he had worked for 13 years at the Reagan library and then as director of operations at the Washington-based Office of Presidential Libraries that oversees all of them.

Public programs are just one facet of the work of the Baker Center, which was formed in 2001 with a $6 million endowment appropriated by Congress. Supporting research that makes use of some 600,000 pages of Baker papers is another. And the center also has an educational role, aimed at least as much at high school teachers and their students as at UT students.

"Baker's papers are fascinating, and we want students at all levels to come in and use them to gain an understanding of how to do primary research," says the center's assistant director, Nissa Dahlin-Brown. Beyond that, she envisions a program patterned after a White House decisions center at the Truman Library where students assume the roles of Truman administration officials and make decisions based on documents they've been furnished.

"By next summer we expect to have a program based on role-playing scenarios where kids will take roles in Watergate issues," says Dahlin-Brown. "We'll be working with teachers and furnishing them materials so that when their students come in they will have studied the person whose role they are taking and be prepared to look at the ethics, look at the law and make decisions."

The Baker Center's offices are temporarily tucked away in hoary Hoskins Library. But an $11 million fund raising campaign is underway to build a permanent home for the center at the corner of Melrose Place and Cumberland Avenue. Once the new building affords the space, Lowe envisions augmenting the center's archives with the papers of other public figures, both Tennesseans and Baker contemporaries from around the country.

"We want to be a magnet for bringing in more archives, and we want to partner with presidential libraries because they have so many great resources there," he says. In addition to the Reagan library, Lowe suggests that the Gerald Ford library could be a source of materials for a presidential decision exercise addressing whether Ford should have pardoned Richard Nixon.

While the Baker Center is a free-standing unit of the university, Lowe is also collaborating with several other UT units, including the College of Communications, the history and political science departments, and the library. Journalism professor Ed Caudill played a leading role in shaping the program for next week's Iraqi war conference and will moderate a panel discussion on the impact of embedding.

Featured speakers at the conference include Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense, and Rick Leventhal, a reporter for the Fox News Channel who was embedded in Iraq with a Marine Corp reconnaissance battalion.

The conference, which is open to the public, runs from 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Sept. 23 at the University Center Auditorium.

—Joe Sullivan

The Trade Show Trade
Expo Center is a going concern

At first glance, there would seem to be no comparison between the Knoxville Convention Center and the Knoxville Expo Center.

The former is city-owned, publicly-financed, brand new and chock-full of high-end amenities like a water wall and an abundance of fine art. It boasts 119,922 square feet of exhibition space, sits on the west side of downtown, cost $160 million and was sold to the public as the engine that would drive the city's economy.

The privately-owned Knoxville Expo Center sits drab as a post-midnight Cinderella some five miles northwest of town on Clinton Highway. It is long and low and has concrete floors and industrial lighting. It is functional, tidy and well-maintained, but it looks exactly like what it is: a converted '70s-era big box retail store (most recently a Lowe's) squatting in the middle of a vast asphalt prairie. Although it has about the same amount of exhibition space (120,000 square feet) as the convention center downtown, compared to the glittering edifice on Henley Street, well, there's no comparison, even at second glance.

But pretty is as pretty does, say some former clients of the Knoxville Convention Center and its sister facility, the next-door Exhibition Center adjacent to the Holiday Inn Select Hotel. The crucial contrast boils down to this: the Knoxville Expo Center is busy and the Knoxville Convention Center and Exhibition Center are not. The Expo Center operators work at building goodwill by offering the cavernous facility for non-moneymaking civic events like early-voting and prayer breakfasts. The Convention Center generates stories about food nazis hawking $20-a-dozen Krispy Kremes, forbidding a city official to take home a piece of chocolate cake left over after a luncheon, and forcing volunteers for charity benefits to pour out cups of coffee and bottled water at the front door.

Therefore, few local observers are surprised that the Expo Center is thriving while the Knoxville Convention Center, which awaits bookings for the big events for which it was designed, is losing some of the smaller, regional trade shows and exhibitions that could take up some of the revenue slack until the big-bucks conventions—booked years in advance—come through.

"The guys at the Expo Center have eaten this town alive," says one local civic leader who wishes to remain anonymous. "They are serious pros."

The operators of Auction Game Sales would second that emotion. When AGS brings its popular weekend event to Knoxville again, the Shelbyville-based company will head out Clinton Highway to the Knoxville Expo Center. AGS, which used to hold its shows in the Knoxville Exhibition Center, won't be setting up its eye-catching array of video games, juke boxes and pinball machines downtown anymore.

"We come in, set up on Friday, and have our auction on Saturday. We're very happy at the Expo Center. There are several reasons we swapped, the cost being number one. Since SMG (the Philadelphia-based firm that manages both the Knoxville Convention Center and the Exhibition Center) took over those two facilities, that space became very expensive, and we were just over there in the old hall—I can't imagine what their prices are in the new convention center. Also, they aren't easy to deal with. Frankly, they're kind of rude, and when they (SMG) took over, the place started going down hill. It was like they didn't really want our business.

"Finally, somebody suggested we go out and look at the Knoxville Expo Center, so we went out, met Dave (David Skinner, KEC executive director), came to agreement on price—have loved it ever since. The people there are friendly, they take care of you—you just didn't get that feeling with SMG."

Jerry Luneke, the Second Harvest promotions manager, is more restrained about why his organization, which is a food bank, has chosen to hold its annual "Without Reservations," a sit-down fund raiser/dinner for 750, at the Expo Center instead of downtown at one of the SMG-run facilities:

"Initially, it was because of availability. The convention center was taken up with the American Bowling Congress. But once we got out there to the Expo Center, we found out that prices are better, it's an easier location with more space for vendors, and there's adequate parking."

Next month, the Junior League will hold its second annual Tinsel and Treasure sale. The first one was at the Knoxville Convention Center. Anne Schechter, who is coordinating the event, is reluctant to get into the details of why the Junior Leaguers aren't going back downtown this year.

"It's so beautiful," she says. "But we had a few issues with the vendors, and customer parking was difficult. We had some other interesting issues, but I'm not going to tell tales out of school. We're happy to be going to the Expo Center."

David Skinner, the affable, fast-talking, silvery-haired boss of the Knoxville Expo Center since 2001, says that it has never been his intention to take business "away from downtown," and he bristles at any suggestion that KEC has "ripped" anything away from the city-owned venues.

"We've had 153 event days—that's new events—that never were in this city before, and we didn't take those away from downtown. We created them. No one can ever say I've gone after one piece of business from downtown. If any other facility had the team that we have here, were as creative as we have been here, they wouldn't have too many open dates downtown, just like I don't."

Skinner, who lived in Atlanta and was a consultant prior to coming to work for KEC, has a long resume in the exposition and convention center industry. He managed the Commonwealth Convention Center in Louisville, Ky., and was later a partner in the Facilities Management Group (FMG), where he served as manager of operations. While with FMG, he also managed the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. Skinner says he was squeezed out of FMG, which eventually had contracts to manage major facilities in San Francisco, Hong Kong and London, when it was taken over by SMG.

If Skinner is the one who has taken the Expo Center to the proverbial "next level," it was his boss, Tim Graham, who laid the foundation. Graham, a longtime area shopping center developer who started out working for Doug Horne, is president of the Graham Corp. and calls himself "just an old redneck from Carter." Skinner and Graham have worked to help found the Hospitality Network of North Knoxville, an amalgam of neighboring hotels, restaurants and businesses that work together to promote their common economic interests.

Graham is just as quick as Skinner to disavow any intention of taking business away from the convention center. "I went to the American Cancer Society Orange Affair there. What a beautiful facility! There will be some overlap, but I think it will be a small percentage. We are specializing in trade shows—regional events that draw in people who are interested in a particular industry."

He ticks off KEC's advantages—access, parking, visibility and location.

"We are pro-Knoxville. I've been selling Knoxville for a long time, and what we've done here is apply very straightforward—but simple—business principles, and we caught the consumer show industry at the right time."

But talk to Skinner and Graham for awhile, and it becomes clear that while they say they don't want to take business away from the Knoxville Convention Center, they wouldn't mind taking it away from SMG. Skinner has lots of ideas for promoting the convention center, and he doesn't buy most of the usual excuses, particularly the much-lamented lack of a low-fare air carrier.

"A reduced-fare airline could be a plus, but is it a deal-breaker? No. There are 120 million people within a day's drive. We've created 153 days of events that never happened before this place opened. UT football brings in approximately 600,000 people per year. Well, we bring in 610,000 people through the doors of this building this year. We've taken a wooden box, and we've filled it full. Just think what we could do with a velvet bag."

Graham approaches the matter bluntly: "We've created jobs, generated a lot of tax money and economic benefits for our community. We live here. This is our town, and we are highly invested. We've shown that we know how to do it. We're Knoxville. We're not Atlanta or Charlotte, and I have been personally marketing Knoxville for 20 years. Maybe it's time the city puts the management of the convention center out to bid. And if they do, I would submit that here is a guy (gesturing toward Skinner) who knows the business inside and out and could step into managing all the public space in Knoxville. And I'm not saying anything bad about SMG."

Bill Overfelt, director of SMG's Knoxville operations, did not return a phone call in connection with this story.

—Betty Bean