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Seven Days

Wednesday, March 31
• A state Senate committee that considered a bill to make “aggressive driving” a traffic offense in Tennessee has turned back the bill, the News Sentinel reports. The legislators voted down the measure on the same day a Tazewell man was acquitted of homicide charges brought when he shot an Alabama truck driver dead after the trucker ran him off the road. Coincidence? We don’t think so. Tennesseans are pretty sure they know how to handle aggressive drivers.

Thursday, April 1
• The Associated Press reports that the manager of a fast food restaurant in Newport was arrested for selling cocaine to customers. Poor guy misunderstood. It’s “speed” that fast-food restaurants are supposed to be selling.

Friday, April 2
• In a move to demonstrate the need for freedom from discrimination, four same-sex couples apply for marriage licenses from the Knox County Clerk, who turns them down on the flimsy excuses that “arranged marriages” went out with feudalism.

Saturday, April 3
• The Associated Press reports that a city alderman in Whitesville has resigned after being accused of stealing city water by bypassing a meter at a trailer park he owns. If you check the price of bottled water at the store, you’ll realize that could be a Class A felony. Knocking over a Brinks truck could bring you less.

Sunday, April 4
• The Lady Vols win their third straight national basketball tournament game by a whisker in the final seconds. They’re getting so good at it, they look cool and unruffled as they do it. Fans aren’t so blasé about it, but, whatever it takes.

Monday, April 5
• The Legislature passes and sends to the governor a bill legalizing raffles once a year for authorized charities. Gov. Bredesen is expected to sign it into law, even though an administration amendment to allow him to raffle off the annual state budget process did not meet with legislative approval.
• Connecticut wins another national basketball title. No, not that UConn. This is just the boys.

Tuesday, April 6
• Connecticut wins another nat... Whoops.

Knoxville Found

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:
Our little April Fools’ Day joke didn’t seem to fool anyone. The National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum is located in Knoxville, but not Tennessee. We’ve got women’s basketball, and Knoxville, Iowa, “promotes the future by preserving the past” with its sprint car museum. To each his own. Congrats to Mike Yen who identified the not-so-local oddity, and went on to say, “If only we’d thought of this attraction first, we’d have no trouble with visitors flocking here to use our empty Convention Center.” We’re proud to present you with a treat-filled Chinese food take-out box in honor of the giant convention center. Unlike it, your box is full.

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

KNOXVILLE DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING
Thursday, April 8 • 1 p.m. • City County Building, Room 584
Briefing on traffic calming devices.

KNOXVILLE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Monday, April 12 • 12 p.m. • wesTrent Courtyard • 18 Market Square
Discussion of the book Rise of the Creative Class. Reservations and information available at 215-2120.

Jettisoning Heritage

TVA cuts slice library, threaten historic collection

It’s an uncomfortable month to be a TVA employee, as some employees are applying for voluntary layoff packages, others are told they’re too indispensable to volunteer, and still others are wondering whether they’ll get involuntary layoff notices after April 23.

An estimated 600-to-800 employees might be affected in the reduction, across the entire multi-state system. (About 1,140 TVA employees work in Knoxville; that’s less than 10 percent of the agency’s total workforce.) TVA spokesman Gil Francis says they’re not yet ready to make announcements about the reductions because some of the agency’s individual departments have not completed their programs reviews. “Under TVA’s Strategic Plan,” he said in a statement, “all organizations are conducting program reviews to determine whether programs should be continued, reduced in scope, eliminated or outsourced, and where surplus staffing exists.”

This time, TVA cutbacks will be evident in symbolic ways the public may notice. The federal agency was once eager to communicate its unusual history, but sources say TVA is closing its burgeoning historical collection, and cutting way back on its library and exhibit services.

For the last several years, TVA’s corporate library has been on the plaza level of the East Tower. It’s the best place in the world to study the 71-year history of the far-flung agency that once promised to improve a whole region. Until recently, the library also had a wealth of other sorts of information about demographics, sociology, botany and geology. Education was once one of TVA’s emphases, and in the ’30s the agency was nationally famous for its innovations in library science.

But now, much of the once-jammed 7,000-square-foot space is empty, as librarians have relieved themselves of about 60 percent of their collection: mostly periodicals and books that are available elsewhere. TVA once made about 200 journals available to the public and its employees, but by this summer, they won’t be subscribing to any more magazines except online. The reason for the physical reductions has more to do with making the library a small enough package to consolidate into the West Tower when other uses are found for the one emptying out on the east. But at the same time, the library’s hours are being cut back to two days a week.

To those who study TVA and its history, longtime librarian Edwin J. Best, Jr. is one of the agency’s most familiar faces. His father was once the agency’s spokesman. “Since 1936 there’s only one six-month gap with no Edwin J. Best at TVA,” he says. Best started as a reference librarian at TVA in 1975 at the Chattanooga office, soon after his father’s retirement. When he started at the Knoxville library in 1982, it had a staff of 20. Now it has only two, Best and fellow librarian Nancy Proctor. This summer it will be cut by 50 percent. Beginning this summer, Proctor will be the only TVA librarian in Knoxville, and she’ll just be part-time, two days a week.

“So much has happened so precipitously, so suddenly,” the 57-year-old librarian says; the recent developments alarmed him. Best seems resigned to the inevitable. He says the watchword at TVA these days is DCOP, “Delivered Cost of Power,” and he now respects TVA’s “bottom-line approach.” His voluntary retirement was approved last week.

Best estimates the library answers 75 to 150 queries a month, most of them by telephone and e-mail. Most of the librarians’ work is for TVA projects, and some of it’s practical and even critical, like recent requests for 1940s studies of the geology of the Chickamauga Dam area, which would be expensive to recreate. But the librarians get a significant amount of interest from the curious public, much of it genealogical, people trying to track down a grandfather who worked on a dam in the ’30s, for instance. This reporter has used TVA’s library for research more than once.

Some of the changes have come as a result of technical innovation, and the fact that journals and statistics are now available on the Internet. There’s no longer as much demand for a paper-and-ink corporate library. “We’re more and more of a desktop library,” admits the former print specialist. Drop-ins have dropped off since security made it harder to make a casual visit, anyway; the headquarters buildings are now accessed mainly by employee “prox cards.” Still, the shriveling of the library seems the end of an era.

TVA still has three libraries: on in Muscle Shoals, one in Chattanooga, and one here. Knoxville’s library reflects the whole of TVA’s history, even the agency’s utopian days, from its experiments with urban planning and disease control and literacy and industrial development, the idealistic projects, some almost forgotten, that brought TVA worldwide attention in the agency’s New Deal years. Today, TVA’s almost entirely about power and flood control.

Chattanooga’s library was once smaller than Knoxville’s, but its specific focus on TVA’s power programs may have exalted it; unlike Knoxville’s, it’s going to remain staffed throughout the work week.

Best remains proud of the Knoxville collection, which contains items that don’t exist anywhere else, like what he calls the 999 collection, which includes photographs taken of riverfront populations before they were displaced by reservoirs. It also contains engineering reports, economic analyses of individual counties in the Valley, and the comprehensive clipping files that kept that staff of 20 busy for years.

Apparently faring even less well than the library is TVA’s unusual historical collection. In 1987, the Board of Directors deemed it fitting to establish a museum-quality historical collection; TVA was then more than half a century old, but it had little tangible to show to school kids and retirees’ groups to demonstrate the ambitious, expansive and sometimes exotic history of the agency.

TVA hired historian Mike Dobrogosz in 1991 to be curator of an ambitious project to collect artifacts having to do with everything from electrical innovations to soil experimentation to the porcelain-industry experiment in Norris. With help from donors across the valley, Dobrogosz assembled a frankly impressive collection of some 30,000 artifacts related to power, housed in three locations, including Norris and Hartsville, but the more manageably remarkable objects were assembled for viewing in a large area at the bottom of the West Tower. Sometimes called “TVA’s Attic,” despite its subterranean location, the museum is a well-ordered array of interesting devices and curios, from a 1930s chain saw used by TVA damworkers to an Edison dynamo and the enormous Westinghouse spark-gap voltmeter, as well as a collection of film and photographs dating back to the days of George Norris, Arthur Morgan, and David Lilienthal. Most of it dated from TVA’s own years, but a few electrical objects from earlier times provided historical perspective. It looks something like Nikola Tesla’s secret laboratory. Like an engineer’s version of a carnival showman, Dobrogosz would sometimes take his favorite gadgets on the road to represent TVA at schools and carnivals.

At its peak, the collection was valued at over $10 million. A couple of years ago, there had been hopes that Dobrogosz’s collection, with TVA’s support, could form the core of a downtown children’s museum of the Discovery Center variety.

But not in these times. The collection meant to confirm and celebrate TVA’s rich and varied past may be coming to an abrupt end. Though TVA is allowing only that it is “now conducting an analysis concerning the historic collection,” some sources expect Dobrogosz to leave TVA and the museum to be wholly dismantled and divided, donated, sold off, or otherwise disposed of. Dobrogosz and others decline comment on the likely fate of the collection, saying there may be an announcement about it soon.

Librarian Ed Best says he hasn’t decided how to spend his unexpected retirement, beyond tending to his other job, as organist for Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Alcoa. “TVA still has a job to do, still has mountains to conquer,” he says. “It’s just going to be without me.”