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Another periodic deck-clearing column

by Jack Neely

“Pencilettes” was the title of a column of random observations, short news items, and promotional blurbs in some local newspapers of the Victorian era. This wrapup column isn’t exactly like that, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call it.

• First, a correction. Lawson McGhee, for whom her generous father named the main library, was not the first cousin of Capt. McGhee Tyson, the World War I pilot killed in a 1918 crash for whom his generous mother named the airport. McGhee Tyson’s mother, Betty, was Lawson McGhee’s sister. Therefore, Lawson McGhee was McGhee Tyson’s aunt—though the two never knew each other. McGhee Tyson was born after his aunt Lawson died.

• Just got a copy of a handsome new paperback. Published by Arcadia, it’s printed in Great Britain, but it’s all about its title, Fountain City.

Knoxville’s northernmost neighborhood was established in the 19th century as a healthy, temperate refuge from urban evils. People came here from all around to stay in the grand old hotel, relax in the park, even attend college. As it loses one historic building after another and succumbs to chain stores and strip malls and asphalt, Fountain City is a less obviously distinctive place than it was just a few years ago; approaching it via Broadway, you might mistake it for Anysuburb, U.S.A. (Simmer down, touchy developers; I can’t interfere with your God-given right to make once-idyllic North Broadway look just like Kingston Pike or Clinton Highway or thousands of identical carelessly developed strips in hundreds of other cities. You’re succeeding well at that.)

But I’m glad some of the distinctiveness of Fountain City is still there if you look for it. And I’m glad my friend Dr. Jim Tumblin and postcard collector C. Milton Hinshilwood put together this well-produced book to help us remember Fountain City icons like the McClungs’ Belcaro Estate, which vanished without warning not too long ago; the grand Fountain Head Hotel, for which the heart-shaped duck pond was built, but which no one alive is old enough to remember; the enormous, long-gone Whittle Springs resort; the old Palace Theater; the old Dummy Line, the unusual steam train that spent its days running up and down Broadway from downtown Knoxville, and the Fountain Head Station. Also represented are several of the rare personalities this rare place bred, especially conservationists Harvey Broome and Carlos Campbell, fiesty columnist Lucy Templeton, and Roy Acuff—who rates six photographs, four of which show him wearing football, basketball, and baseball uniforms for Central High teams. The book will mean more to long-time Fountain Citians than to the rest of us, but everybody will find something to gawk at.

• I mourned to hear of the death of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the famous French photographer, not because I’ll miss him personally, or because his death was untimely—at 96, he lived longer than most of us will—but because, unless he left extensive memoirs, we’ll never know the circumstances of one of his well-known photographs, “Knoxville, Tennessee, 1946.” It depicts a beautiful woman in a stylish coif, wearing lipstick and a fur coat and an eyepatch and sitting in the cab of a beat up pickup truck with the rear-view mirror broken off, on Market Square. How a newcomer happened onto the perfect metaphor for Knoxville, I don’t know. I attempted to get in touch with M. Cartier-Bresson a few years ago, but learned he was an elusive sort.

• Remember Professor Ebenezer Alexander in your toasts this week: an enthusiastic supporter of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the Knoxville-born classics-professor-turned-diplomat played what may have been a critical role. Alexander is unmentioned in most histories of the Olympic Games I’ve seen, but we do know he was U.S. ambassador to Greece at the time, and contemporary press reports hold that he was the first monetary contributor to the famously underfunded effort.

Stories that came down through his family hold that he did much more; that he greased the diplomatic wheels to make it a truly international effort; that he played a role in recruiting the original U.S. Olympic team, a bunch of Ivy-league men Alexander helped identify through his academic contacts; that Alexander, an evangelist of all things Greek, gave the first American Olympians a persuasive primer on the ancient games. My favorite story, as yet unproveable, is the American athletes were so impressed with Alexander’s descriptions of the ancient Greeks’ competing naked that when they arrived at the field, they took their clothes off, alarming the Greek authorities.

After a buggy ride around town in 1911, Alexander suffered a fatal heart attack at the Pryor Brown livery stable on Church Street. The business is now better known as Pryor Brown Garage. He’s buried at Old Gray.

• The September 11 exhibit at the new wing of the Museum of East Tennessee, which closed a couple of months ago, was phenomenally popular, bringing tens of thousands of people to the new building on Gay Street to see it.

It’s too bad the museum couldn’t put that momentum to good use. The museum has been closed ever since, as staffers put together its permanent exhibit hall—which will span the new old old parts of the building (the new part’s more or less done, with the archives and McClung Collection open for business), but the old Custom House, still being remodeled, won’t be ready for a few more months. The expanded and reorganized museum, with its new signature exhibit “Voices of the Land,” won’t open for more than a year, slated for fall, 2005. It will include a refurbished, early 20th-century Knoxville streetcar.

Staffers say they don’t want to open until the whole thing’s finished. A modest version of the museum’s gift shop is nominally open during regular business hours, but it’s not unusual, on a Sunday afternoon, to find a couple or a family wandering into the lonesome lobby, looking for the history museum. I tell them, since they’re downtown anyway with time to kill, to go upstairs to McClung, where they can at least look at Davy Crockett’s rifle and Catherine Wiley’s impressionist paintings.

• For many years—more than half a century, by some accounts—the southwest corner of Market Street and Union has entertained mid-day street preachers. The corner, occupied by the Arnstein Building, has, in fact, been known as “Preacher’s Corner.” The preacher appears on that corner in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Suttree. There’s a longstanding rumor, unfounded as far as I know, that it’s a corner officially designated by the city for their strenuous exhortations.

The street preachers are still here at the intersection most mornings around 11:30, but now they’re on the other side of Market Street, on the Krutch Park corner. They may have felt a little crowded by MacLeod’s sidewalk patio, where beer is served. It seems to me they’re also not quite as persistent as they were a year or two ago. Many days they’re not even there at all. I’m a little worried about them. Maybe, in giving up on Preacher’s Corner, they’ve given up on us, too.

August 19, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 34 © 2004 Metro Pulse