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Saving the most conspicuous landmark on Clinton Highway

by Jack Neely

Whenever our car wound up on a hilly four-lane highway in the countryside, I fervently hoped it was the one with the Airplane on it. I’d ask my mom or dad to drive by it, only to find we were on the wrong road, Chapman or Kingston Pike. “It’s on the other side of town,” they’d say. But when we were driving out Clinton Highway, often on our way to visit aunts in Jellico, it was a glorious thing to behold, high on its hill, looking as if it was prepared for takeoff toward the south.

The thing fascinated me as nothing else did. It looked like a real airplane, with a real propeller up front, and a rudder in the back. But cars parked under the wing to get gas.

It’s still there, saved perhaps because it exists on a tiny triangle lot on a rugged site that would be hard to develop. But it’s been vacant for years. The last tenant was the business office of a small hilltop used-car place, Airplane Auto Sales. Today, on the port window, a sign in fading colors declares We Bomb the Competitors’ High Prices.

The propeller’s gone, the tin skin looks a little beat-up, and somebody built a billboard too close to the front of it in such a way that an attempted takeoff would be an ugly thing to watch. But it’s still important to me; it’s still the main landmark on Clinton Highway, a route that has been, as much as any other, given over to giant parking lots and the signage of chain-franchises you see everywhere and willfully ignore.

If I’m meeting someone on Clinton Highway, my first question is always which side of the airplane is it on, and how far. People ask, “You know the Target?” and I say, well, no. I don’t know the Wal-Mart or the Taco Bell, either. I don’t notice them. I drive past all those things, keeping an eye out for the airplane.

Looking at it last week, it occurred to me that the plane didn’t look like it was taking off so much as if it had crashed, belly-flopped without landing gear, as if it were a nonstop Clinton-to-Knoxville flight that had not quite cleared a hilltop.

I didn’t know how many other folks cared about it until just recently. Earlier this year, a delegation led by Powell resident and UT professor Tim Ezell got the place National Register of Historic Places designation. He believes it to be the only airplane filling station still standing in the nation.

It seemed new when I was a kid, and I didn’t know until relatively recently how old it was: it was built around 1930, possibly a little earlier. I’ve heard some stories that it was meant to evoke the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927. It bears a passing resemblance.

When it was built, sometime around 1930—some authorities say 1928—the word “architecture” probably didn’t spring to mind. It didn’t look like anything like the brick-and-marble eminences being built in town in those days. Some country-club sorts surely found it tacky. It wasn’t built for them. It was built to catch the attention of tourists from the upper Midwest, driving to the brand-new beaches of Florida. A whole new school of architecture rose to meet the roadside challenge in the 1920s. The most unusual branch of this school is formally known as Fantastic: buildings designed in whimsical, sometimes bizarre forms only to catch the attention of motorists in their Model A’s.

The airplane has some national status in that regard; it appears on page 70 of an internationally published book about unusual gas stations, Pump and Circumstance, by John Margolies.

This “Aeroplane Gasoline Service Building” as it was known in its design, was financed by brothers Henry and Elmer Nickle; Wayne Smith, a Knoxville engineer, had some hand in the design. According to local legend, contractors who had something to do with building it may have included John Haggaman and A.W. Helsley. It was the only gas station in Tennessee with a 42-foot wingspan.

It’s said to be Elmer Nickle’s idea; in a circa-1930 photo, he poses in front of Knox County’s newest Texaco station with his brother wearing a flight-style jacket and jodphurs. All he’s missing is a scarf and goggles.

The original plans called for an extra rotor on top, making it a sort of gyrocopter, like the one Clark Gable flew to his wedding in It Happened One Night. If that accessory was un-Lindberghesque, it was the big new thing in the ‘30s. The gyrocopter was what we’d all be flying to work by 1950 at the latest. Though some researchers assume it was never added, a 1930s-era photograph shows it installed.

The Nickles were friends of one Harlan Sanders, who ran a little fried-chicken joint in Corbin. Because it was believed Knoxvillians might need to stop for gas on their way to try some of Sanders’ subtly spicy Kentucky fried chicken, the Nickles and Sanders sometimes advertised jointly.

Soon, you could even get a snack on the way to the Colonel’s. The Airplane was such a draw that a separate building opened nearby, known as the Airplane Tea Room. They may have served tea, but what they advertised out front was Schlitz beer—and a 60-cent chicken dinner, a 40-cent T-bone steak, and a 15-cent barbecue sandwich. That building has been gone for decades.

Over the years, the original place changed; it became a Shell station, lost the gyro rotor, expanded the office space a few square feet by building under the starboard wing, compromising the ship’s already dubious aerodynamics. Later, it was a vegetable stand and a liquor store.

The missing propeller was actually saved by the landlord. Carved of hardwood with copper tips—some aviators are convinced it’s a real prop from a Curtiss Jenny—it’s now weathered gray and cracked like some ancient Norse relic. It’s been on display recently at the Rocky Top Barber Shop on Asheville Highway.

Judging by the public meeting at Powell Presbyterian last week, a preservation effort is already happening, thanks in large part to efforts in the neighboring Powell community. Friends of the project announced their intention to raise about $150,000 to buy and restore the landmark; we can buy Save the Airplane T-shirts to support it. They’re not quite sure what to do with it; proposals include a shop of some sort, a museum of some sort, an unusual hilltop chalet, or, my favorite, a pub or cafe, the sort of place we can all take newcomers for a unique Knox County experience. The space inside is small for all of those purposes. In this case, function will have to follow form.

July 8, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 28 © 2004 Metro Pulse