And Then Suddenly...

Eastman Was King of Kingsport!

In 1926 Eastman had only 315 employees, making it the fourth largest employer in Kingsport.
During the next 14 years, which included The Great Depression, Eastman's business boomed. So much so that in 1942 Eastman could buy a two-page ad in the Kingsport Times saluting its 1,156 employees who were in uniform. That ad listed each employee by name.
You can look up relatives and friends easily but be aware that the alphabetization can be a little jumbled. For instance Pat Miller Jr. is not with the first seven Millers but is a dozen or so names down, below Bruce Morelock.

(As always click on the image to enlarge. Click a second time to enlarge even more)

And speaking of Eastman...

Here is a two-page ad Eastman purchased in the Kingsport Times News in the sixties to show the company's growth. 

Eastman Is King of Kingsport!

Well...Not in 1926.

On Feb. 28, 1926 the Kingsport Times listed employment figures for Kingsport's major industries and proudly proclaimed that more than one-third of the city's inhabitants were employed. "It is probable that there is no other city in the United States which has a larger percentage of workers and a smaller percentage of drones."

The biggest surprise in the list - at least to those of us who grew up in the age when Eastman was the dominant employer - is that in 1926 Eastman was only the fourth largest employer in town with 315 employees, a number dwarfed by the Kingsport Press, which employed 753 people and Borden Mills with 650 employees. Even Mead with 350 employed more than The Eastman. 

Eastman ranked fourth in town, followed closely by Kingsport Hosiery Mills with 300.

The newspaper estimated the city's population at 12,000.

(Click image to enlarge)

Arney Gospel Hour - 

From 1964!

If you watched TV in the Tri-Cities in the fifties or sixties, you remember J. Norton Arney. He was a little man with big ears and a big heart. You probably didn’t know about the big heart. More on that in a few paragraphs.

Arney was a fixture on local TV, promising “a square deal or no deal” if you would just buy a car from Arney Motors, “the used car supermarket” on North Roan in Johnson City.

He had been selling used cars in Johnson City since 1924, when he was 22. For a time he was the Oldsmobile dealer. Arney advertised his cars first on radio and then later on TV. And by “on TV” I mean all over TV. If you watched TV in Tri-Cities, you saw J. Norton.

 His passion, after selling cars, was gospel music. He promoted local gospel sings and sponsored a Sunday morning show he modestly called the “Arney Gospel Hour.”

And amazingly one of his shows from 1964 has survived.

In the sixties and seventies most local shows, if they were videotaped at all, were later recorded over. Videotape was expensive. And in the fifties they were live (!) so there were no recordings to survive. (The fifties shows you see today are usually kinescopes – films of the TV screen.)

 As a result we have no surviving examples of such early local shows as “Mountain Music Makers” with Bonnie Lou and Buster and the “Uncle Herb Show,” a kiddie program hosted by WJHL radio announcer Herb Howard (later famous as UT journalism professor Dr. Herb Howard).

But a Sunday morning episode of “Arney Gospel Hour” has survived, perhaps because a handwritten card was videotaped at the beginning of the show:

ARNEY

CHUCK WAGON

GANG

SAVE THIS TAPE

“DO NOT ERASE”

It was a special show. Arney devoted the entire hour to the legendary gospel group out of Texas, the Chuck Wagon Gang.

In May 1964 they had just published a songbook collection. They were also in the process of finishing up a new album, “That Old Time Religion,” which was released in November.

I found a review in the Oct. 31, 1964 edition of Billboard which gave the album four stars and noted it had “sufficient commercial potential … to merit being stocked by most dealers. “

Enough with the introduction…on with the show.

Here are two clips.

(Click on the picture for the first clip.)

(Click here for the second clip.)

Many thanks and a tip of the Hatlo Hat to George DeVault, Mr. WKPT, for making me a copy of the rare recording. (That’s a reference to the old comic strip “They’ll Do It Every Time” by Jimmy Hatlo, which ran in the Kingsport Times News for many years. Hatlo would acknowledge a reader contribution with “A Tip of the Hatlo Hat to….”)

As for J. Norton Arney’s “big heart.” Arney and his wife Minnie had no children so they funded an orphanage near Morristown.

Kingsport's Connection to The Steve Miller Band -

My Biology Lab Partner Johnny King

(Johnny King on album jacket for "The Steve Miller Band - King Biscuit Flower Hour)

One of the lead stories in the Arts section of Sunday’s Washington Post (click for story) is about rock and roller Steve Miller and his career long fight with the powers that be at his record companies.

Miller always had one eye on his recording contract as he wrote and recorded such hits as “The Joker” and “Take the Money and Run” during the seventies.

That business focus extended to the members of the Steve Miller Band. They were under contract to Miller.

One of his drummers was Kingsport native and D-B grad Johnny King (’65).

Johnny was a friend of mine from high school and when I moved back to Kingsport in 2002, he called me and we got together for lunch to swap tales from our careers.

Johnny told me how he was walking through the Fort Henry Mall one day when he heard a familiar sound.

It was the distinctive drum opening to “The Joker” as the song was playing over the mall’s public address system.

(You can listen to that drum opening here.)

Johnny knew the rat-a-tat-tat well. He created it.

He was the drummer for the Steve Miller Band when the group recorded the song in 1973.

John told me that when they went in the studio Steve Miller had the entire song blocked out…except the opening. Finally the producer said to Johnny, “Why don’t you kick it off?”

Johnny reached into his drummer’s bag of tricks and came up with the drum opening for one of the most recognized songs in the rock and roll canon, a song that has become such a standard that you hear it playing, well, even in the mall.

Johnny died in 2010 way too young, at age 63. But his wasn’t the usual rock and roll life: live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory. He didn’t live fast; he didn’t do drugs. All he did was die young and leave a beautiful memory.

Because he didn’t do drugs, in an era when drugs were de rigueur for every rock and roll band, and especially for the drummer, Johnny could remember everything about every concert, every recording session. And because he was a well-regarded musician in San Francisco at a time when San Francisco was one of the hubs of rock music world, he was a participant in many famous shows, concerts, recordings. He played at the Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, the Matrix, landmarks on the San Francisco music scene.

Name a big name from the seventies and Johnny probably worked with them: Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys. Want more names? Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, the Doobie Brothers, ZZ Top, Boz Scaggs, Chick Corea, Humble Pie, Peter Frampton, Jim Croce, Roxy Music, Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

(Johnny King as a sophomore at D-B - the year he was my biology lab partner)

Johnny and I were lab partners in biology our sophomore year at D-B. We were both nerds, trying to impress girls, but he was the better nerd because he was a drummer in the D-B band and even a nerd drummer is cool.

We shared a lab table with the two cutest girls in our Biology class, Laura Crawford and Cheryl Smith, and we were always trying to impress them. Which brings me to that C minus I got one six weeks. It was the six weeks of the Frog. We were dissecting frogs that term and Johnny and I were desperate to impress Laura and Cheryl. So Johnny took our frog, stuck a probe in it and twirled the instrument around. It squished up all the innards and we both thought that was cool. I don’t think Laura and Cheryl agreed.

It was cool…till the test when we had to identify all the parts of a frog’s digestive system. Neither of us could identify a single part because everything inside our frog was mush.

(The drum section of the D-B band in 1963 - Johnny King is 3rd from right)

Johnny went to college at the University of North Texas, one of the most respected music schools in the country. He moved to San Francisco to be a part of the music scene and it was there where he met Steve Miller and signed on to Miller’s band.

The key words are “signed on.”

As Johnny explained it to me, the Steve Miller Band was more like the Steve Miller Band, Inc. Johnny was paid by the concert and by the recording session. No royalties.

So if you buy a copy of “The Joker” from Apple Music not a penny will go to Johnny’s estate.

Johnny moved back to Kingsport when his children were getting ready to go to high school, to keep them away from the west coast gang culture.

I talked to Johnny back in 1993 for a story I was writing for the New York Daily News. A new Jon Cryer movie was hitting theaters, “The Pompatus of Love,” which took its title from a lyric in the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker,” the song Johnny played drums on. The lyric goes: “Some people call me the Space Cowboy, some call me the gangster of love, some people call me Maurice, ‘cause I sing of the Pompatus of Love.”

I wanted to explain to my readers what a Pompatus was.

Johnny told me it didn’t mean anything. “Steve used to make up words all the time.”

Johnny played with pretty much every big-time musician of his era except one, the one he really wanted to play with, one of his heroes, the guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix.

Not that he didn’t have the chance. Johnny was playing in a club in Texas when Jimi walked in. Jimi sat down and listened. After his set Johnny left and was getting ready to get into a car when Jimi stopped him and asked Johnny to come back inside and play a set with him.

Johnny, who was only 19 at the time, told me he was just too intimidated and turned Jimi Hendrix down. He never had another chance to play with Jimi Hendrix. Jimi died two years later, also way too young.

D-B Football Stars Endorse 7UP!

In 1946.

(Click to enlarge)

A new California law says it’s okay for college athletes to sell their autographs and their images and even endorse products.

Other states are expected to follow.

What will they think of next, letting high school athletes endorse products?

That’s already happened in Kingsport and it didn’t take an act of the state legislature to make it happen.

In 1946 the Salley twins and Buck Anderson, stars of the D-B football team appeared in an ad for 7-Up. They aren’t expressly endorsing the soft drink – there is no advertising copy in the ad - but the idea is pretty clear: after a hard practice (all three are shirtless and two are gripping footballs) nothing refreshes like a 7-Up!

73 years later we don’t know if the three received anything in compensation other than a free soft drink while they posed.

We also don’t know if Bobby Dodd received anything for endorsing Hall Mark shirts in a 1926 newspaper ad for Cut-Rate Dry Goods.

In the July 13, 1926 edition of the Kingsport Times, in bold letters across the top of an ad for Cut-Rate Dry Goods it reads “BOBBY DODD says our shirts are the best to be had.”

He is quoted in the ad: “I’ve been wearing size 15 and I can wear size 14½ in Hall Mark shirts.”

The ad continued:

“You school boys ask Bobby.

“If these shirts fade, your money back.

“Ask Bobby Dodd.”

Did Dodd, the Salleys or Anderson break TSSAA rules when they allowed their names to be used in an ad for a discount store?

The answer is simple: No.

Nowhere in the early TSSAA eligibility rules did it say an athlete was prohibited from using his or her athletic fame to endorse a product.

It probably hadn’t even occurred to anyone at TSSAA that a high school athlete might appear in a newspaper ad for discount shirts or soft drinks.

Dodd appeared in only one ad for Cut Rate Dry Goods.

The 1946 trio appeared only in the 7-Up ad, which appeared in a magazine published by D-B students called “The Cherokee.”

The new California law doesn’t address the issue of high school athletes selling autographs or endorsing soft drinks.

But that may be next. And then there’s this question: what about middle schoolers?