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Probably not the last column about Thunder Road

by Jack Neely

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about the 50th anniversary of “the first of April, 1954,” the date mentioned in Robert Mitchum’s only radio pop song, “The Ballad of Thunder Road.” In that story I suggested that the date Mitchum gave the incident—April Fools’ Day—might be a tipoff that the particulars of the bootlegger’s crackup “out on Kingston Pike” might be fictional.

In the years since 1958, when the movie and song were released, the Thunder Road story has become one of Knoxville’s defining legends. The tale of the talented bootlegger who didn’t quite make it through Bearden serves the same purpose as the story of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland or Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone. Reports of the fate of the real Luke Doolin have been coming in from all over the metro area.

First, a couple of corrections. I mentioned that people might have heard the 1958 song, “Thunder Road,” on WNOX, WBIR, or WIVK. One reader thought it much more likely that Knoxvillians would have heard the song on WKGN. That was the cool rock ‘n’ roll station when I was a radio-listening kid in the late ‘60s, but I didn’t know it was cool that long ago.

Also, the movie on which Robert Mitchum and former Knoxvillian James Agee worked in 1954 was The Night Of the Hunter. The, not A. I knew that.

Now for the Luke Doolin sightings. Some readers speculate that Doolin was kin to the former Dulin Gallery of Art, which was also on Kingston Pike. Luke might have driven right past it on his stressful final ride.

I’ll leave that one alone. But one man said he remembers vividly hearing about the original wreck from his 6th-grade teacher in Fountain City in 1953. “I believe I can assure you that it was real,” he said on the message. He supposes the year was changed to 1954 to suit the song’s rhyme scheme. I tried to call him back at the number he left, but wasn’t able to reach him.

One of the most vivid memories comes from Buddy Wagner, who runs a British car-parts establishment in the sometimes surprising area underneath the interstate between downtown and Mechanicsville, the forgotten industrial neighborhood known to hipsters as the Spaghetti Bowl. Wagner says the Thunder Road wreck happened in 1952: April, he thinks.

Wagner was then a Fulton High student of 17, the day he and a friend were coming out of the old Pike Theater, which was at the site now occupied by Bennett Galleries. “We were going to get us some ice cream at the Zesto,” he says. A Moon wrecker went by, driven by a Bearden man everybody called “Blue.”

“We hollered at him,” Wagner recalls. “He said, ‘There’s a bad wreck.’” Wagner followed Blue’s truck over Bearden Hill, about a 20-minute walk through Bearden. By the time he got there, Blue already had the car on its way out. Wagner says that between the stone building recently occupied by WIVK and Papermill Road was an electric substation, and that somebody had driven a car right into it. Wagner, who already worked part-time for a body shop, knew his cars; he says it was a new ‘52 Ford.

“We saw Blue pulling the car out,” he says. “It was pretty well torn up.” The driver, he heard, was killed. But he heard he was a bootlegger, and also heard that he’d wrecked after hitting spikes in the road that had been strewn to slow him down. He can’t swear to any of that, though. “You know how the talk goes,” he says. He doesn’t know when the actual wreck occurred, and admits that it might have been the night before.

Being in the body-shop business and also living near some bootlegging headquarters near Division Street, with an uncle who was a cop, Wagner knew quite a few bootleggers. He can tick off a list of them for you and tell you some pretty good stories: about the gypsy bootleggers who stored whisky bottles in septic-tank trucks, and the black bootleggers who did their business riding Cushman motorscooters around town. Wagner knew a lot of bootleggers, but he didn’t know this fellow who cracked up on Bearden Hill. “I think he was from another town or something,” he says. As, of course, Luke Doolin was.

Wagner says the Moon towing equipment was advertised for at least 15 years thereafter as “the one that picked ‘Thunder Road’ up.”

There are other stories like that, and they may all be true. But the most surprising story doesn’t involve a crash at all.

“There was never a crash,” says Don Palmer, with some confidence. He says the story of Luke Doolin is based on his father Dan Palmer, who entertained friends with his stories of bootlegging in the area. One of his most attentive listeners on a particular fishing trip, according to Don, was Robert Mitchum.

The elder Palmer was reportedly adept as a bootlegger, running bonded liquor, not moonshine, to Alcoa, Knoxville and other places where it was strictly controlled. Dan Palmer, who lived on West Broadway in Maryville, was a fishing buddy of Rube Huddleston, proprietor of the Traveler’s Restaurant, and one of those guys who knows everybody. One good friend of Rube’s was actor Kirby Grant, better known to a generation of kids, including this member, as “Sky King, America’s Favorite Flying Cowboy.”

Huddleston, Grant, and Palmer used to take fishing trips together. One time, around 1952 or ‘53, they were joined by another sometime cowboy actor, Bob Mitchum. The better-known actor, already a movie star with a rap sheet, was fascinated with these Tennesseans’ tales of bootlegging, and was inspired to make a movie.

Anyway, the younger Palmer says that Thunder Road flattered his father, but annoyed Huddleston. “Rube was pissed,” he says. “Mitchum had violated the Good Ole Boys’ Code of Honor. And he didn’t call anybody and offer them any money.”

Now, I haven’t been able to confirm much of this through biographical sources. Even movie stars don’t leave a record of every fishing trip. If that is true, it’s a major development, as far as I’m concerned. Previous researchers have assumed that Mitchum, who did a good deal of the research for the movie in Asheville and eventually shot the movie there, never even visited the Knoxville area, but got the details through other sources.

If it was in 1952 that Mitchum visited the greater Knoxville area for that fishing trip, he could even have added a contemporary news item, the incident that Wagner remembers. Maybe Mitchum just patched it into the more personal stories he’d gotten from Palmer. Heck, maybe Mitchum and Palmer and Sky King came back from Fontana Lake one night in time to drive down to Bearden for a dip cone at Zesto’s. And maybe they turned just in time to see a ‘52 Ford fly by, heading west.

April 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 17 © 2004 Metro Pulse