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A memory of a local scholar, boulevardier, and heroic pedestrian

by Jack Neely

Through the 1980s and ’90s, when I was walking around downtown, especially down Church Avenue, I would often hear the clip-clip-clip of someone gaining on me. After a while, I was no longer surprised that it was always a tall, thin, distinguished-looking old man, always in a suit and tie.

David J. Harkness was, for many years, the fastest pedestrian in downtown Knoxville. I’m fairly quick, myself, mainly of necessity, because I’m usually late. But Mr. Harkness was faster.

When I turned around, he was always smiling, and wanting to talk about something. He talked intensively and never for long. After a brief exchange he’d sing, “Bye!” and be off down the sidewalk ahead of me to some unmentioned destination. The day he turned 85, he told me that fact quickly, that it was his 85th birthday, and then he vanished around a corner.

He died this past weekend. Mr. Harkness was an old family friend, from Jellico, my mom’s family’s home. He’d been principal at Jellico High, back in the ‘30s. He knew small towns, but he also knew big cities; he’d lived in San Francisco and New York, studied at Cal-Berkeley and Columbia. But unlike most small-town kids who get a taste of the big city, he maintained a lively interest in his hometown. When he mentioned Fifth Avenue, I didn’t always know right away whether he was thinking of the one in Manhattan or the one in Jellico. To him, they were both fascinating.

I always called him Mr. Harkness, as you tend to address people you knew as a kid, although he preferred to be called Dave. He was often the only one at a family birthday dinner table to whom I wasn’t blood kin. When he visited, he was pretty much the life of that party.

When I was 11, Mr. Harkness gave me a copy of The Golden Book of the Civil War. He inscribed it to me, which made me feel, for a week or two, like a grownup. It had lots of photographs and color bird’s-eye map-sketches of Antietam and Gettysburg that seemed designed for arraying your own blue and gray plastic soldiers at home. It’s a kids’ book, and maybe I shouldn’t admit this—The Golden Book wouldn’t shine too well in any bibliography—but it’s still the quickest way to remind myself of the basic landscape of a battle.

Phlegmatic Knoxville men often didn’t know quite what to make of David J. Harkness. But their women loved him, sometimes in the idolatrous way that they loved Maurice Chevalier or Liberace. He could compliment a new dress or hairstyle in ways unknown to most husbands.

My sister and I used to speculate that he was dating our grandmother. When Grandmother heard that rumor, she would laugh happily, and shake her head. He dated other widows, too, but for most of his life he lived alone, in one of the old apartment buildings in Sequoyah Hills.

Mr. Harkness was a great maker of lists; he loved puns, ironies, and coincidences, especially those that had to do with literature. He filled booklets with them: 55 of them, I’ve heard. He was proud of Tennessee to a degree I only rarely find reason to be. But he was conciliatory toward other states. Some of the booklets he gave away demonstrated the surprising similarities between states. Some of them read like diplomatic greetings between warring nations. I had a collection of them, as a kid, and pored over them.

His writing was something like his talking; it came in short bursts, with frequent changes of subject. To Mr. Harkness, life was too short to dwell on one thing for too long. We sometimes had longer talks on the phone, and he was a great help in putting together several stories.

He was, as near as I could tell, a polymath, but he did have some particular interests. One was the life and career of Abraham Lincoln. He taught at Lincoln Memorial University for a time, and his best-known book was a co-edited volume, Lincoln’s Favorite Poets. He was proud that Lincoln had ancestral connections to East Tennessee, and could describe them, going back to Mordecai Lincoln of Greene County.

If there was anyone in his firmament to compare with Lincoln, it was soprano Grace Moore. Mr. Harkness grew up in a time when the blonde singer and actress was Jellico’s greatest claim to fame. She was a nightclub singer turned opera star turned Hollywood icon, and was ultimately nominated for an Oscar for starring in her own life story, One Night of Love. She died in a plane crash in Europe in 1947. Mr. Harkness never knew her in Jellico, but met her backstage after a show in New York in the ‘30s.

He was an advocate of local history and a great supporter of the East Tennessee Historical Society. He was especially an authority on the performing arts. He’d seen a lot of plays here, over a period of several decades, and he’d met a lot of stars, representing Knoxville as a one-man welcoming committee.

He was also for many years the continuing-education librarian at UT, with an office in the Communications Building. It hardly seemed to contain him. I was working for UT’s mail service for a summer in 1977, and I brought the mail to his office every day for three months and never once saw him sitting at his desk. He was on his feet, talking to the secretary, or on his way in or out. Except at those holiday dinners, I hardly ever saw him sitting down. For a scholar, he didn’t like sitting very much at all.

Every time I saw him in the street in his 70s and 80s, he was in a headlong hurry. Chances are he was on his way to talk to a luncheon group; he loved standing in front of people and entertaining them with humor and trivia for half an hour. There are a couple hundred luncheon groups in this town, and I’ll bet Mr. Harkness had spoken to most of them.

Alzheimer’s disease descended on him, and he spent his last couple of years unable to walk much or remember well. But I’ll always recall him as he was for over 85 years, as a great walker and a great rememberer. Knoxville will miss his conversation, his encouragement, and his pace.

October 14, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 42 © 2004 Metro Pulse