Cheer to the Sufferers

Another Knoxville Christmas, one century ago

It’s Christmas, 1924.

If you’re an aficionado of cynical poetry, you may know that’s the title of a very short poem by British novelist Thomas Hardy, who, in his mid-80s, was worried about the future of his species.

“Peace upon earth” was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it;
After 2,000 years of Mass
We’ve got as far as poison gas.

Of course, that item remains a concern a century later.

There were Knoxvillians suffering gas wounds from the wounds of the last war, but in public at least they seemed able to overlook the hypocrisies of the holiday. Downtown was still the shopping center for a region, and Christmas was all about the big stores, Miller’s Arnstein’s, George’s, Newcomer’s, Sterchi’s. Several of them had live Santa Clauses who had some claim to authenticity.

Knoxville was excited about the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park project first formally proposed just about a year ago. A few days before the holiday, the ambitious Smoky Mountain Conservation Association met with big shots in business and politics at City National Bank on Gay Street. The National Parks Association’s Christmas-Day bulletin offered an unqualified endorsement of the Smokies proposal over a competing one in Virginia’s Shenandoah’s. “Its peaks are higher, its valleys deeper, its groupings of summits vastly more tumbled and more magnificent,” the influential journal opined, while adding that Mount Le Conte was more impressive than North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell, even if not quite as tall. It was good news in Knoxville. There was even a proposal to rename the city’s baseball team, previously the Pioneers, the Knoxville Smokies.

Everything was shifting. In the 1920s, every year was different from the one before. Technology was changing life as we knew it, arguably faster and more dramatically than would be the case a century later. More and more young men were learning to fly airplanes, tooling around town in them almost as casually as on motorcycles. Several different airfields in suburban areas all around town were vying to be the inevitable Knoxville Airport, though “Aviation Field,” out on Sutherland, supported by an organization called Knox Aero Corp., seemed to have the inside track.

Meanwhile, on the ground, more people than ever were driving automobiles, so much so that they were coming to seem a greater hazard than horses had ever been; in 1924 alone, over 30 people had died in automobile accidents, and dozens of others maimed.

Phonographs, now affordable but not yet in every home, were a popular Christmas gift. There was suddenly much more music to play on your phonographs than ever before. Sterchi’s was beginning to sell records for working people, some of it recorded in New York by Knoxville street musicians. They weren’t yet labeling it as “country music.”

Some technologies arrived before they were quite ready. Two years earlier, Knoxville had hailed its first radio station with a live Christmas broadcast. But WNAV lasted only a few months, until the guy who knew how to run it left town. Lots of people were buying radios, because you could tune in signals from other cities, but in 1924, Knoxville’s only station was WFBC—for First Baptist Church. It was a local low-watt religious station rigged up by a UT engineering student, using the church’s new Main Street steeple as its antenna tower. WFBC was on the air mainly for announced events, but did offer a Christmas Eve show, broadcasting live a 9:00 p.m. service of Christmas carols at the church.

Meanwhile, a more commercially minded young man named Stuart Adcock was working deals to build a much more substantial station. But in 1924, nobody had ever heard of WNOX.

Of course, there were other media. In fact, in 1924, Knoxville was a three-newspaper city. There was the evening Sentinel, of course; the relatively new and progressive Scripps-Howard paper, the Knoxville News; and the oldest of them all, the Republican Knoxville Journal. All three had offices on Gay Street, competing with each other, each with its own point of view.

 

 

The brand-new Journal Arcade—the marble-front newspaper office that was also a sort of gracefully stylish little shopping mall and sometime art gallery—was an interesting study in contrasts, a modern building whose most notable occupant was a fellow who liked to think of himself as modern, even at age 85. In his natty white van dyke, Captain William Rule, Union veteran of the Civil War, was still editor of the Journal, the morning paper.

The holidays were never famous for good weather, but Christmas Eve was awful. A cold rain fell on the ice that accumulated on the viaducts. It was hard to drive a Model T in this weather, hard to drive a streetcar, too. The “blinding, drizzling rain” was blamed for five serious injuries in accidents, including one case in which the Broadway streetcar demolished a Ford, sending its driver through his windshield. He landed on the pavement, but survived in better shape than his car.

The holidays were dangerous for other reasons. It raised the demand for alcoholic beverages, which were of course illegal during national Prohibition. So all the suppliers were technically criminals, and as they fled the police, they battled with each other. As it got dark on Christmas Eve, Bruce Dyer, a married construction worker of 32 who’d been shot at a bootlegging joint on the east side of downtown, died at Knoxville General.

About two hours later, the police got another call that someone had fired five shots into the front window of a house on Swepson Street, in a long-gone neighborhood near the mouth of First Creek. When they arrived, no one was home, but a pot of beans was burning on the stove. Spots of blood crossed the kitchen floor and appeared to go out the back door. Officers Adcock and Hall were puzzling over the mystery when a man suddenly showed up with a shotgun, claiming he had just emerged from a ”fainting spell.” No problem here, he said. The five shots, he thought, were an accident, purely celebratory in nature. When it happened, he ran outside and fired his shotgun, too, for the hell of it, then went to a neighbor’s house, leaving his beans to burn, until he saw the cops. The blood on the kitchen floor was from two chickens he had slaughtered there. It was a weird story, but police were often too busy to pry.

The rain kept falling on old Knoxville, forming ice in the trees. Some trees fell, taking out the electrical lines in Lincoln Park and Fountain City, where thousands of homes went dark for the night.

Downtown distracted the chilly, wet shopping crowds with several movie houses. The Queen and the Strand, both on Gay Street, were built to show Hollywood movies—they were both showing silent Westerns that week—but older places, like enormous Staub’s Opera House, reborn in the ‘20s as the more euphonious-sounding Lyric, was showing movies occasionally, too, as was the Bijou. The Lyric and the Bijou both had a tradition of finding seats for people of all races, in a segregated setting that sometimes shifted in anticipation of demand. Most new theaters were entirely for white people, with few exceptions. The Gem, on Vine Street, was for Black people.

 

 

A grand new downtown theater was in the early conception stage, not yet named the Tennessee. But the four-year-old Riviera seemed grand enough for most folks: the classically designed theater seated 1,000, showing new movies but also live shows.

The big attraction Christmas week was Argentine Love, with Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez. (Also known as Jacob Krantz, Cortez was a Jewish actor from New York, but Hollywood, where anything can happen, reinvented him as a Latin lover.)

By Christmas Day, the feature had shifted to a Western: North of 36, hailed as “The Trail of Thrills,” with dashing Western star Jack Holt and folksy Noah Beery.

Just after Christmas came the movie many were waiting for: the first feature film to be based on the 20-year-old fantasy play, Peter Pan. Portraying the boy who never grew up was lithe Hollywood beauty Betty Bronson. (The tradition of a graceful young woman portraying Peter had begun with the first stage show in London in 1904, and seems to have caused no consternation.)

Of those holiday films that excited audiences at East Tennessee’s biggest theater, one can no longer be seen. Argentine Love, ran its course, made a profit, and by 1926 was forgotten; like many movies of the silent era, it’s now considered lost. Peter Pan was believed lost for some years, but known parts were stitched together to cobble together an accurate version of the film in the 1990s.

Live shows still drew the biggest crowds. “Ziegfeld’s Sally” landed at the Lyric on Christmas Day. Showman Florenz Ziegfeld had launched the Broadway hit from four years earlier. The traveling version that arrived in Knoxville in the train featured a cast of 75. That big New York troupe took up the whole of the fourth floor of the Farragut Hotel, where on Christmas Eve, they had a big holiday party, with their own electrically lit Christmas tree.

We don’t know the whole cast, but it did not include the original Sally, Marilyn Miller, who’d left the production earlier that year after clashing with Mr. Ziegfeld. The leads in the Knoxville performances, Lou Powers and Vera Myers, are minor figures in Broadway history.

The music was by Jerome Kern, at age 40 one of America’s most-successful songwriters. Its most famous tune was “Look for the Silver Lining,” which Knoxvillians were likely humming on the sidewalks that Christmas. The Lyric offered two showings on Christmas Day, matinee and evening.

A lot of things have changed in 100 years, but one surprising fact is that our grandparents and great-grandparents had a chance to see more performers on stage on Christmas Day than we ever do.

The city obviously didn’t have much regard for its citizens’ ability to entertain themselves on Christmas Day. There was a big dance, Christmas night, at “Whittle’s”—the stylish Whittle Springs resort hotel north of town. The same night was a semi-public party with 50 tables hosted by two bachelors at Cherokee Country Club.

You couldn’t get away from live performers on Christmas Day if you tried. Even if you were a patient at Knoxville General Hospital on Dameron Avenue. Knoxville’s biggest hospital always did big business on Christmas, dealing with the holiday wounded, like the two girls hit by a drunk driver on Central. Or Charles Jones, a 22-year-old who scuffled at a train station in Winchester with an unnamed man who claimed to be a federal prohibition officer, but wouldn’t show his identification. His family transported him to Knoxville, where doctors found the bullet lodged in his spine. His condition was listed as critical; he died on New Year’s Eve.

 

 

And there was Mabel, the 18-year-old bride shot at her father’s house in Jacksboro, when a holiday visitor’s loaded pistol fell from his overcoat. The bullet pierced her stomach and intestines. She was not expected to survive. But after an operation and a month in the hospital, somehow she did.

The hospital corridors featured a prominent “overpass” that could accommodate a variety of festivities. On Christmas Eve, an array of phonographs—an item not yet in every home—were wound up to play Christmas music on that overpass. Then on the morning of the 25th, promptly at 6 a.m., some 50 nursing students strolled through the wards singing familiar Christmas carols, “bringing cheer to the sufferers and [offering] the first hint that someone wishes the lonely a ‘Merry Christmas.’”

The editor of the News, Ed Meeman, remarked that if a Martian were to land on Earth during Christmas, 1924, he would conclude that Earth people are kind and generous and, generally, happy, on only one day a year.

From its modest headquarters in the old Commerce Building on the 100 block of Gay, his paper was responsible for one of the holiday initiatives that made the holiday different. “General Knox” was a new column to address questions and complaints about the city. Every December, the General Knox Santa Claus Club invited families to donate old toys to a program run by firemen, who would fix the toys, repaint them, and make them look new, to give to families who couldn’t afford them. The tradition would last for several decades.

At Eastern State Hospital for the Insane, better known as the Lyons View Asylum, someone counted 997 patients who made their way to the hospital auditorium for a special Christmas Eve celebration. Wilhoit’s Orchestra played familiar carols, a couple of patients sang, as staffers distributed gifts paid for by the state.

“It was an orderly crowd,” reported the News, “as orderly as the congregation of a church on a Sunday morning. It was largely a happy crowd. Most of the patients were smiling. Some kept time with the music with hands or feet. But here and there was a sad face—the face, no doubt, of some patient who couldn’t enjoy the holiday festivities for thinking of other Christmas Eves when he or she was at home with loved ones, or thought of their own vacant chair at some fireside that night. A middle-aged woman on the front row turned her head, covered her eyes with her handkerchief, and sobbed.”

I don’t know the name of the reporter who described that scene, but it’s hard to read it today.

By Jack Neely