Marie’s Olde Towne Tavern, despite the gentrified spellings, is an unremarkable joint on the north edge of downtown Knoxville, with the clientele one would expect from its location only a block from the Greyhound bus station.
But Marie’s does sport one thing that no other bar in town does. On the wall there is a framed, autographed photo of former University of Tennessee football player Rod Harkleroad. And on this October Saturday Rod insisted that I experience it. “I gave them an exclusive, so it’s the only bar in town where you can see it,” he said.
The year was 2002 and ...
Today’s economic hard times have brought memories and references to the Depression of the 1930s – the Great Depression that saw almost 30 percent of America’s population without any income, that saw breadlines stretching for blocks, that saw runs on banks and the failure of financial institutions throughout the country.
A new multi-media package from Shanachie underlines the parallels. “The Panic Is On: The Great American Depression as Seen by the Common Man” contains a CD of period songs, a booklet of excerpts of letters and observations from victims, and, most telling, a DVD of newsreel and movie footage from the ...
In the early 1930s, a year or so after he dropped out of high school, Eddie Taylor caught the bus in Knoxville and headed to Morristown, about 40 miles north. He had an appointment with Herman Roddy Jr. and he had about $40 in his pocket, money he had won over several months in pool games.
“This was the Depression,” he told me years later, “and we were playing games for a dime or 15 cents.”
He was successful in Morristown, beating Roddy. “He had broke me twice before,” he said, “but this time I got him. And I knew then that ...
In my early teens, before I got my driver’s license, I looked up to the older guys at East High School who not only had cars, but had customized them. There was Tommy Mitchell, who had dropped a big V8 into his purple ’37 Chevy. And Moocher Cain, who drove what I saw as the ultimate, a ’51 Mercury, in primer gray, chopped and channeled.
Then, about the time I got my license, my classmate Jim LaMarr got a Henry J, squat, sort of toadlike in appearance, with an anemic powerplant. But the Henry J was actually LaMarr’s, not his parents, ...
As a college student in the mid-1960s, I supplemented my income, and my education, by working as a reporter for a local newspaper. The combination led to my initial first-hand encounter with abortion, then a shadowy, illegal practice. The place was the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where I lived off campus in a dilapidated two-story building popular with students.
My introduction to the area’s abortion specialist came through a neighbor, an animal-science major. Though the ridges and valleys of East Tennessee are far removed from the cattle-raising plains of the West, Roy was a true cowboy. A senior in his ...
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