A few late-year rants and raves
by Jack Neely
In the column about Admiral Husband Kimmel's postwar sojourn in Knoxville, I reported that the erstwhile admiral lived in the Andrew Johnson Hotel; he's listed as a resident of the tall Gay Street hostelry in 1947. But there's at least one other place in town that claims him. According to retired merchant Wallace Baumann, Kimmel lived, for about six months, in the Franz home on Melrose Avenue. The English-style home was long ago torn down, and Baumann thinks it's a UT parking lot.
Baumann lived nearby. "We all thought it was fascinating that the infamous Admiral Kimmel of the Pearl Harbor disaster was living right on Melrose," Baumann says. "I would sometimes go by the house hoping to see the admiral, but I never did. I don't know of anybody who ever saw him."
 A new book is out just in time to challenge the Wright Brothers' centennial hubbub. Its subject is Edward Huffaker (1856-1937), born in the Seven Islands area of East Knox County, an early aviation theorist whose mostly accurate essays about practical flight were being published when the younger Wright Brothers were still fixing bikes in Ohio. Huffaker joined the Wrights for a tense spell at Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1901, hence the title. The Wrights had read Huffaker's work, but didn't want him crashing their party.
Sometimes called the first aerodynamicist, Huffaker deserves more than his customary footnote in aviation history. The Unwelcome Assistant: Edward C. Huffaker and the Birth of Aviation, written by Greene County aviation enthusiasts Steven and Julia Hensley and published by Overmountain Press in Johnson City may be the only book ever written about Huffaker.
The book's kind of an odd one, I have to say. The frou-frou typesetting of the entire text, which reminds you of a wedding invitation, and the broad error in the book's cover copy (the late 19th century appears as "the late 18th century") don't do much to invite you to take the book seriously. In organization, the book's idiosyncratic, perhaps befitting its eccentric subject. Except for a great deal of detail about Huffaker's second wife, from the letters, book doesn't give us a lot of personal color or context. The narrative is, in fact, only 90 pages long; Huffaker's entire East Tennessee youth is dispatched in a single paragraph.
But read further: the book's clearly written and full of information not readily available elsewhere, much of it from a cache of personal letters that happened to be in the possession of Steven Hensley who is, serendipitously, a pilot, and one of the few who would have understood their import. The Hensleys do a good job of explaining Huffaker's groundbreaking application of Bernoulli's Principle to flight.
For pilots and those whose bookshelves are groaning with Wright Brothers hagiographies, it's an important alternate gospel. Future historians of aviation will ignore —at their hazard.
It was cold and windy with a threat of snow when I went to the Santa Claus Parade on Friday night. There I cheered the floats and bands and, once again, wondered about the earnestness of certain downtown merchants.
I'm not sure I believe the official police estimate of 15,000, but no question there were lots of folks on Gay Street in spite of the weather. The parade was set to start at 7, but they'd begun arriving by 5, when people were already jockeying for prime sidewalk real estate.
Gay Street's a great place for parades. And you'd think a parade would be very good for downtown. But there's a catch: for a downtown business to profit from big crowds, that business has to be open.
Parade time was also, for most of us, suppertime. If someone were selling chili dogs or burritos for five bucks, I'd have been an easy mark. But I ate at home that night.
My daughter and I were standing near a couple of businesses I patronize in the daytime. One was a fast-food sandwich place, the other a convenience store that traffics in sandwiches and snacks. Both were resolutely closed.
These businesses close at 5 or 6 on weekdays, and perceived no reason to stay open just because there'd soon be thousands of hungry people swarming outside their doors. I figure they didn't want to hurt their regular 9-to-5 patrons' feelings by two-timing them.
I feared that, thanks to the chaos of construction, 2003 would turn out to be the first whole year since 1853 when no produce was sold on Market Square. I still haven't seen any of my potatoes or collard greens down there. But lately there's been a guy there selling Christmas wreaths. He may know he's carrying on an ancient tradition, with roots deep into the 19th century, when every December mountain folks would come down to sell cedar and holly and mistletoe to the city folk on Market Square.
Wreaths may not be what you'd call produce, but maybe it's just enough to prime the pump. I hope to see some real produce out there in 2004. That was the square's original purpose; it's still one of the criteria by which a public square should be judged.
December 11, 2003 Vol. 13, No. 50
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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