Join me for Thanksgiving Dinner…

It’s on me.

There’s just one catch.

What’s the catch? Well, we have to go back in time, back to 1955 to the Peggy Ann Coffee Shop at 1459 East Center.

We'll have Roast Young Native Turkey with Oyster Dressing and Whole Cranberry Sauce and of course Pumpkin Pie. 

And it's all only $1.50 - but you don't have to worry about that. I'm picking up the tab!

After dinner we’ll stroll down to Craft Motors to check out the lot.

How about a 1940 Mercury? It’s only $145.

Or maybe a '51 Chevy with radio, heater and Powerglide transmission? It’s yours for $595!

Easy terms.

And – look closely at the car lot's Thanksgiving Day ad – Craft Motors gives Green Stamps!

Buy a car and get Green Stamps!

(Click image to enlarge then click again to make it easier to read)

And have a Happy Thanksgiving!

J.C. Penney 'Turn Back the Clock Day' 1949

After my mother died in 2004, I found this photo of the employees at J.C. Penney’s all dressed up in vintage clothing.

I may have seen it as a kid but I don’t remember any family stories about the picture.

My father is on the front row, fourth from left. I can spot him even with that pasted-on droopy handlebar mustache.

After a lot of digging over the years, I finally found the story.

It was April 21, 1949, Founder’s Day at J.C. Penney, where my father worked after the war.

All the employees wore styles from the turn of the century – Penney’s had been founded in 1902. It was called Turn Back the Clock Day.

According to the newspaper story many of the employees had spent weeks working on their costumes.

There was even a contest to select “Miss Penney of 1902!”

Mrs. Grace Ketron, who worked in the Ladies Department, took top honors. She is the tall woman in the black hat, third row, third from the left. Mrs. Noble Bacon (second row, second from left, with the fan) finished second. Hannah Thompson (second row, seventh from left), who worked in Layaway, was third.

I got a few i.d.’s ten years ago from John Welch, who worked at Penney in the forties:

Front row, far left, Jack Clayman, who worked in the Shoe Department, where the photo was taken; fourth from left, Lyle Staten, who worked in the Men’s Department; fifth from left, Clarence Ford.

Second row, far left, Betty Stapleton; second from left, Hanna Thompson; fifth from left, Audrea Smith of the Boys Department.

Third row, fifth from left, Patsy Smith; sixth from left, Georgia Poe of Receiving; seventh from left, Grace Ketron, Miss Penney of 1902; eighth from left, Lena Bledsoe who worked in the office.

Back row, far left, Tilford Salyer of Men’s Shoes; second from left (partially obscured) Ross Jenkins of the Men’s Department.

 The unidentified man to my father’s left seems to have on spats. And his cigar is a nice touch.

Lots of buttons and bows in the picture! And the men in the front row seem to be holding bowler hats.

Patsy Smith was the mother of Billie Mae Smith, who in 1955 would have a date with Elvis when he played the Civic Auditorium.

Tilford Salyer went on to become a well-known gospel music promoter and producer, founding Trail Records, which recorded the McKameys, the Kingsmen, the Dumplin Valley Boys and many others. He also played Uncle Sam in Kingsport’s annual Fourth of July Parade.

Jack Clayman had been a cheerleader at D-B (class of '46).

My father left Penney’s in 1956 to open Munford Do-It-Yourself Store on Supermarket Row.

Here's the full newspaper page from 1949 - note other ads, including the one for Skateland. (As always, click to enlarge.)

More literary notes:

Kingsport native Patricia Ledford (D-B ’64) published a historical novel this year. “Strings: the Story of Hope” is set in upper east Tennessee and western North Carolina during the Revolutionary War. Reviewers on Amazon rate it a five-star “page turner.”

Pat was the first Executive Director of the Tennessee Film, Entertainment and Music Commission, recruiting 35 film projects to the state which made Tennessee’s film industry rank fourth in the nation in film production at the time.

She is also a fellow alum of Andrew Johnson Elementary School. At the time Johnson opened in 1953 it was the only school in America named for a president who had been impeached.

Poet Laureate Charles Wright’s years in Kingsport included all the familiar stops of childhood: patrol boy at Lincoln, drummer in the junior high band and city league basketball.

A dozen or so years ago one of his teammates on Harkleroad Feed in the Junior League sent me this team picture.

That’s the future Poet Laureate third from left.

After my recent post about the unmasking of wrestler Count X in Kingsport City Court in 1960, curiosity got the best of me so I did more digging on the case. Two days later the referee who had brought the assault charges, Bill Canny, decided he wanted revenge in the form of a match against the unmasked Count (real name: Jack Ross). But claiming he was out of shape, he convinced the local wrestling promoter to turn it into a six-man tag team match. (I don’t think it took much convincing.)

The Count and his team won the match. So Canny didn’t get his revenge. But the City Court judge got played by a wrestling promoter.

It wasn’t an assault after all, it was just another wrestling stunt.

Literary notes with a Kingsport connection…for those who like literary notes or Kingsport connections…

Former Poet Laureate Charles Wright, who grew up in Kingsport, just published an acclaimed new book of poetry, “Oblivion Banjo.”

One of D-B’s most accomplished grads, Mike Ainslie (’61), has written a memoir about his career in the high-flying worlds of finance and art. “A Nose for Trouble: Sotheby's, Lehman Brothers, and My Life of Redefining Adversity” arrives in January from Greenleaf.

Sally Chiles Shelburne’s (D-B ’63) daughter Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne (D-B ’97) has published a critically acclaimed first novel, “Hold On To Nothing” (Blair).

There’s a new book about the old Washington newspaper, the Evening Star, one of whose stars was editorial cartoonist and Kingsport native Gib Crockett (D-B ’30).

A little more on Wright and Crockett.

To the rest of the world he is the esteemed Poet Laureate Charles Wright.

But here in his hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee he is known as Chuck.

That’s what they called him when he was a patrol boy at Lincoln Elementary School.

That’s what they called him when he was a drummer in the Kingsport Junior High Band.

And that’s what they called him when he was a police reporter for the Kingsport Times-News.

For three months in the summer of 1953 the future Poet Laureate filed untold numbers of anonymous crime reports.

Until the night of July 8, when he was sent to cover a disturbance at the City Jail.

The result was his first bylined story:

Woman Defends

Worldly Goods

Against Police

By Chuck Wright

Wright turned a routine Public Intoxication story into a mini-drama.

The City Editor must not have thought much of it because he buried the story inside, on page 14.

And he must have had a little talk with the future Poet Laureate because for the rest of the summer all of Chuck Wright’s bylined stories were in the staid “inverted pyramid” style.

But in hindsight, we can see a glimpse of the future poet.

Here is that crime story with a few extra carriage returns inserted, in the spirit of poetic license:

It was all-very routine

To the officers making the arrest.

It was simply another case

Of a person having a few too many,

And not being able to hold them

Any too well.

If it was all routine to the officers,

It was also routine to the woman

Who was brought in on Wednesday night.

Her address was listed on the complaint sheet

As “Anywhere.”

It took three good-sized officers

To get the woman to leave

The comparative safety of the police car.

She had her worldly goods

In a paper shopping bag

And among them were four cans of beer.

She didn't seem to mind

The rest of the goods being taken,

But didn't quite appreciate

The fact that the officers

Took the beer.

And she told them

In no uncertain terms.

When Wright was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2015, the Times News front page story identified him as a “former Kingsport resident.”

That’s because much as we’d like to claim him – he’s been an acclaimed poet for forty years – we don’t know exactly how.

Is he a Kingsport native? That would be the best identifier.

But he wasn’t born in Kingsport, which is the usual qualification to be a native.

Wright was born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in the western part of the state. His dad, also Charles, was an engineer working for TVA. Wright has said in interviews that he has no memory of Pickwick Dam. He was less than a year old when his father was transferred to Corinth, Mississippi. They moved often till the war started when his dad landed at Oak Ridge working on the Manhattan Project.

Near the end of the war his father and another engineer, Tom Rentenbach, decided to open a construction company in Kingsport, where there was abundant work from Eastman. The Wright family moved but Rentenbach got a construction job from the University of Tennessee to enclose the south end zone at what was then called Shield-Watkins Field (it was renamed Neyland Stadium in 1962) and never moved to Kingsport.

Nevertheless the Kingsport company was named Rentenbach and Wright Constructors and opened an office at 217 East Sullivan.

Charles the future poet, now known as Chuck, enrolled at Lincoln School, where he was a patrol boy. He played bass drum in the Beginners’ Band at Kingsport Junior High. He was pictured in the Times News dancing with Miss Clara Hall at a Civic Auditorium party in April 1949. He played golf and basketball – making the paper once for scoring ten points as his Harkleroad Feed team topped J&M Furniture 21-20.

He went to Dobyns-Bennett for a time – he was in math teacher Dorothy King’s homeroom one year but spent his junior and senior years at Christ School, an Episcopal school just outside Asheville.

So he lacks the other Kingsport credential from that era, a D-B diploma.

Wright went to college at Davidson, where he pledged SAE, a fact duly noted in the Times News’ school notes column. After graduation he enlisted in the army and served from 1957 to 1961 in Verona, Italy. He has said in interviews that this is when he became interested in writing poetry. That led him to graduate school at the University of Iowa’s highly regarded writing program.

Even during his service years and his years in grad school he was listed in newspaper stories as a resident at his family’s home at 4575 Old Stage Road.

So Charles Wright wasn’t born in Kingsport, he didn’t graduate from high school in Kingsport. But he “grew up” here, according to numerous interviews he has given. Many of his poems mention local landmarks like Bays Mountain, Gate City and longtime WKPT announcer Martin Karant.

Kingsport can’t call him a “native.” I haven’t found any definition of native that doesn’t include “place of birth.”

But we can claim to be his “hometown.”

The Oxford Dictionary, the big boy of dictionaries, says your “hometown” is “the town where one was born or grew up.”

There you have it: he grew up in Kingsport.

Kingsport, Hometown of America’s Poet Laureate, Charles Wright.

XXX

In writing about the appointment of former Lincoln Elementary School student Charles Wright as the nation’s Poet Laureate, I may have skipped over a pertinent fact: What is the Poet Laureate?

When I was in grade school and junior high, the years when we read a lot of poetry in English class, the Poet Laureate was John Masefield, he of “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky.”

Technically he was England’s Poet Laureate but since this country didn’t yet have such a title, he was pretty much our poet laureate, too.

In England the title Poet Laureate was created in 1617 (for Ben Jonson) and is given by the queen (or king). It is largely ceremonial with the laureate expected to write the occasional verse for a special occasion. Still it is quite an honor.

John Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 till his death in 1967 so you can see why I associate his name with the title.

We didn’t have an American Poet Laureate when I was in my poetry studying years. The title was created here in 1985 supplanting the title of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which was created in 1937. Our poet laureate still has the unwieldy title Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

The pay is pretty bad – not that poets are used to making large sums of money – at a mere $35,000 a year. Duties include overseeing poetry readings and lectures and also “promoting poetry.”

A number of states have their own Poet Laureate. Tennessee is not one of them. Alabama is. Alabama?

XXX

Chuck Mather grew up on Old Stage Road in the house next to the Wright family, which included future Poet Laureate Charles Wright.

He says he didn’t really know the Wright kids, Charles, his brother Winter and his sister Hildegarde, because they were a lot older.

But he does remember that in summers the Wrights were visited by their Texas cousins. Mrs. Wright was from Beaumont.

“When I was very young, two albino boys would come visit the Wrights. I later learned that these two boys were Johnny and Edgar Winter. Charles Wright's mother's maiden name was Mary Winter, so I am guessing that Johnny and Edgar Winter are Charles Wright's cousins.”

If you are a rock and roll fan, you should recognize the names Edgar and Johnny Winter. They had a number of hits in the seventies including “Frankenstein.” (Look it up on YouTube. You will remember it then.)

Mary Winter Wright died in 1964 and her obituary in the Times News lists among her survivors her brother John D. Winter of Beaumont, Texas.

 “Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues” lists Edgar and Johnny Winter’s dad as John Dawson Winter II of Beaumont, Texas.

That means the nation’s Poet Laureate is first cousins with rock royalty. Johnny Winter is listed in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” And Edgar Winter’s group had numerous hit albums.

Gib Crockett, Cartoonist from Kingsport

The Washington Post recently printed a generous review of a book about its longtime competitor, “The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper” by Faye Haskins.

Of course the Post could afford to be generous since it won the newspaper battle with the Star. But as the review pointed out during many of the years of that competition it was the Star that came out on top.

The Star employed many newspaper stars over its 129-year history (which ended in 1981) including columnist Mary McGrory, political reporter David Broder and editorial cartoonist Gib Crockett. And there’s the Kingsport connection: Gib was from Kingsport.

In a 1953 interview with Kingsport Times News writer Bill Freehoff Gib explained that he owed his cartooning career to the guy who sat next to him in study hall at D-B. “We were waiting for assembly. I was sitting beside Charles Stone and I noticed he was copying some funny paper characters from the Kingsport Times. He turned to me and said, ‘Why don't you try it, Gib?' I did, and I've been drawing cartoons ever since!"

At the time of the interview he’d already won one National Headliner Award – for his cartoons during the 1952 Presidential campaign – and he would win another in 1957.

Not bad for a guy who never took a single art class.

In fact he almost didn’t become a cartoonist. After graduating from D-B in 1930 he worked for a time at the Kingsport Press and then Tennessee Eastman. After three years he left for Washington and soon found work on the art staff of the Star, doing lettering and background work and the occasional sports cartoon.

His work drew the attention of The Star's chief cartoonist, Clifford K. Berryman, whose cartoon featuring Teddy Roosevelt and a bear cub had inspired Brooklyn candy store owner Morris Michtom to create the Teddy Bear. Berryman took Crockett under his wing and taught him the trade.

After Berryman’s death Crockett moved up to full-time editorial cartoonist.

He explained to Freehoff how he did his job. He started at 10 a.m. reading all the local newspapers – at that time there were the Post and the Star plus the Baltimore newspapers - then followed that with a telephone conference with the Evening Star’s other editorial cartoonist James Berryman, Clifford’s son. He and James alternated days drawing cartoons. Then Crockett would rough out a few ideas and show them to B. M. McKelway, editor of the Star, who would either accept or reject them or offer some ideas of his own. Now it was back to the drawing board.

It sounded like a leisurely way to make a living but Crockett explained it didn’t always run so smoothly. “On some occasions, Crockett said, he has been called from his bed at 3 in the morning to come down and turn out a rush job.”

In addition to cartooning Crockett also drew posters for savings bond drives and for forty years, from 1944 to 1984, he drew illustrations for the Naval Academy’s football programs.

"But I never forget," he told Freehoff, "that it was 'Stopper Stone back in Kingsport, who started me off."

Crockett probably got his start redrawing either The Gumps or Etta Kett. Those were the only two comics the Kingsport Times ran in 1928.

A couple of Gib Crockett programs for Navy games: 

Column Fodder

Over the 16 years that I was a columnist for the Kingsport Times-News, I collected hundreds of old newspaper clippings that I thought might make fodder for a column.

Now I have hundreds of these clippings but no column.

So I’ll be posting some of the more interesting ones on this blog. Starting with these clips:

From the front page of the Oct. 6, 1960 Kingsport Times:

'Count X' Unmasked

A masked wrestler known as "Count X" had managed to protect his identity in the ring for about a year, but he was stripped of the mystery in City Court here this morning. "Count X" was otherwise identified as Jack Ross, 29, of Nashville, after he forfeited a $25 bond for assault and battery. Ross was arrested by City Police after he hit referee Bill Canny with a chair—near the dressing room entrance at Civic Auditorium. Ross and his partner, Hassen Bey, had just lost the main attraction decision in the ring to Tex Riley and Len Rossi. The then-masked Ross turned on Canny in the ring, and then resumed his attack as the referee started to the dressing room.

I don’t know where I thought this would go as a column but I was always fascinated by the masked wrestlers I saw on TV in the fifties and sixties, especially my favorite, The Great Bolo. There have been many masked wrestlers over the years, including Kane, currently the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee under his unmasked name Glenn Jacobs.

(I couldn't find a photo of Count X but here is his tag team partner Hassan Bey.)

Sept. 8, 1929 Kingsport Times

Model Plane In Air Over Eight Minutes, Record

Clarence “Red” Wilson Constructs Model, Flies From Aviation Field Next to A. J. School

A miniature model plane, built by Clarence “Red” Wilson, local youth, set what is thought to be a world's record when it stayed in the air for eight minutes and five seconds. The plane had rubber bounds tightly wound to turn the propeller. “Red” launched the plane on the aviation field and it spanned the distance from the field to the Andrew Jackson school building.

The boys that were with Wilson stated the plane disappeared from sight for about three minutes, but that they caught a glimpse of the plane as it came down near the school building.

This is the first time that a project of this type has been tried by local youths.

The key phrase in this brief item is “thought to be a record.”

There was no Guinness Book of World Records in 1929 (it wouldn’t come along for a quarter century). Aviation records were a big deal in the teens and twenties: speed, distance. But there was no repository of the records, just a collection of newspaper clippings.

So the Kingsport Times editor wasn’t aware that in 1924, Robert V. Jaros of the Illinois Model Aero Club flew a rubber-band powered model plane 7,920 feet that took 10 minutes and 14 seconds.

Red’s accomplishment was quite a feat. But not a record.

Today, rubber-band powered model airplanes, which compete in the  F1D class, can fly for more than 40 minutes.

Incidentally the aviation field, called Lovedale Field in other stories of the era, was the bottom below Jackson School. 

Next this city basketball league roundup from Feb. 2, 1960, published under the headline “City Cage Results.”

JUNIOR LEAGUE

Scotty Webb poured in 67 points for Moose Lodge — and still wound up as only second high scorer Monday night. Teammate Wally Bridwell scorched the nets for 70 points as the high-flying Moose ran up an almost unbelievable 170-37 score against Hamlett-Dobson. Boby Prater hit 67 points to pace Kingsport Optimist to an 89-42 win over Teen Center 2. Jack Sitgreaves had 13 for the Teens.

Teen Center I edged Indian Springs. 41-38, despite a 22-point performance by the losers' Russell Hicks. Archie Millard led the win with 12. Remnant Shop downed Church of God, 54-47, as Bob Holt hit 16. Bill Wampler of Church of God had 18. Gene Allen tallied 16 to spark Brummit Grocery past Pet Dairy, 58-49. Bill Cox added 14. Jerry Hale and Ronnie Rush had 20 and 16, respectively, for the losers.

Wallace News nipped Bennett and Edwards. 77-75, on Leon Jackson's basket in the second overtime period. John Stevens paced Wallace with 25 points. Jim Carpenter got 26 for B&E. and Bill Hutchins added 24.

MEN'S LEAGUE

Dan's Sport Shop squeezed past Lynn Garden, 49-48, behind the 14- point output of Guy Crawford. Jim Kilgore hit 12 for Lynn Garden. Willard Bowery and Jim Taylor scored 24 points apiece to spark Inter-Mountain Telephone over Blue Ridge Glass, 85-56. Bill Kirkpatrick and Ken Richardson each hit 17 for Blue Ridge. Esso tripped Garden Basket. 61- 54, as Buck Collette and Tommy Byington scored 20 points apiece. Bill Whetsel got 16 for the losers.

Lots of familiar names in those few sentences: Wally Bridwell, who was D-B’s quarterback, Boby (pronounced BO-bee) Prater, who was an outstanding punter for D-B, Jack Sitgreaves (I went to church with Jack; his brother-in-law Bill Dickson had been the catcher on D-B’s 1952 state championship baseball team).

I don’t know if the Guy Crawford playing for Dan’s Sport Shop was the D-B coach. It wasn’t his son Guy B. Jr. who would have been only eight in 1960. Bill Kirkpatrick may have been the attorney.

But what really jumps out at me is that Moose team, with Wally scoring 70 points and his teammate Scotty scoring 67.

I played City League basketball (for Palace News) two years later, when I was in ninth grade, and I can tell you that nobody came close to scoring 70 points in a game. Teams didn’t score 70 points.

We played 8-minute quarters. (And there were no three-point shots.) To score 70 points you’d have to score more than a basket every minute. And consider that you had a teammate who would also have to score a basket a minute. Hamlett-Dobson must have been a truly awful team to give up 170 points in a 32-minute game.

And finally from today’s headlines:

For Thanksgiving Pringles is introducing Turducken Flavored “Pringles”

As you probably know Turducken is a chicken cooked inside a duck which is cooked inside a turkey.

Several Thanksgivings back Bruce Haney thought he might try turducken in his turkey deep fryer.

When he asked me what I thought, I told him, “I don’t eat any dish that begins with T-U-R-D.”

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

In the spring of 1951 the Rochester Times-Union sent a reporter to Kingsport to report back about what Rochesterians considered their satellite city. What he found was not an Eastman company town but a planned city with a diversity of industries.
The Kingsport Times reprinted that story on Tuesday April 10, 1951.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

BY ANDREW WOLFE

Times-Union Staff Writer

Kingsport, Tenn, -- There's a touch of Texas in the city of Kingsport, the "city planner's dream job."

Its booming businesses, youthful unfinished look and its super-abundant energy make you think of Dallas or Houston.

But that's only part of the Kingsport story. Everywhere you feel also the far-sighted artistry of expert city planners, the influence of ultra-progressive business management, and the astonishing spirit of the pioneer people who have lived in the surrounding Appalachian Highlands since the Revolution.

Forty years ago Kingsport was hardly more than a wide place in the road in the extreme northeast section of Tennessee. Today it's a city of nearly 20,000, the center of an industrial community of 55,000. And it makes you believe that for tomorrow its horizon is limitless.

Already, in the Tennessee Eastman Company Kingsport has the largest Industrial plant in the state. But It also has the largest book manufacturing plant in the world, and the largest gunpowder factory.

In the flat lands along the south branch of the Holston River, areas set aside 34 years ago for industrial development, you see the carefully-planned complexities of the Eastman plant-more than 100 buildings covering nearly 400 acres. Nearby are other factories,shiny-fronted stores cluster on the broad streets of the business district, and businessmen will tell you enthusiastically of plans for buildings to fill the vacant lots which gape here and there. Four brick churches with| slender Georgian spires, grouped in a semi-circle, give a special character to the civic center they face.

And on the nearby hills, just as the city plan of 1917 ordained, modern homes have sprung up on large, tree-shaded lots in a carefully-designed "livings groups."

Man has done his utmost, you feel to make Kingsport a beautiful, liveable community.

And so has Nature. No matter in what direction you face, superb mountain scenery fills in a dramatic and beautiful background. To the east looms the storied barrier of the Blue Ridge, to the north the rugged Clinch Mountains, to the west the gaunt spine of the Cumberlands. And to the south and southwest the jutting, forested bulks of Bays Mountain and Chimney Top stretch of toward the Great Smokies,

Those who have seen these southern mountains in the Spring when the dogwood and rhododendron are in bloom are quite ready to say that in physical beauties, this “planned community" has few competitors in all the world. And its upland climate also is hard to beat.

Nevertheless, the most fascinating chapters of the Kingsport story deal with its people, and the way they have made the swift transition from their old highland ways to modern industrial life.

"Come go home," is one of the things an East Tennessean may say when he leaves a friend. It's his way of saying his home is always open to friends and, more, of asserting the bond of friendship

And the reply is: "You 'uns come," meaning, "no, you come to us."

To those who don't know any better, that's hill-billy talk. But to those who know the East Tennessee hill folk, the simple phrases express the highlanders' solid, four-square way of doing things, and their deep-dwelling courtesy.

Industrialism came to these people later than it did to residents of many other sections of the United States, but they've come along very last to form an Industrial society that's pretty much a class by itself. They long ago proved their ability as soldiers, and their craftsmanship and musicality are famous. But businessmen who come to Kingsport are more apt to talk about their remarkable industrial skills.

They haven't built Kingsport on their own in one generation, but they've contributed mightily and more than justified the confidence placed in them 40 years ago by the developers of modern Kingsport.

Actually Kingsport was founded in 1761, which may come as a surprise to Rochesterians accustomed to thinking of Kingsport as the city Eastman Kodak "helped to found." Daniel Boone and scores of other frontiersmen knew well the tiny settlement on the Holston. And in the Civil War, a small battle was fought near Kingsport whose anti-slavery people were largely Unionists in sentiment and remain to this day an island of Republicanism in the "solidly" Democratic South.

But the community had only a few hundred inhabitants until a New York City financier, John Dennis, created what is now the Clinchfield Railroad. Dennis saw that a successful community in the area would help his railroad prosper, and he took steps to create one.

Fortunately, Dennis was a man of high ideals - not a "gouge and run" real estate promoter. With the late J. Fred Johnson, "the father of modern Kingsport" serving as his agent, Dennis set out to build a model planned community, Johnson, a merchant who had been born in the area, was to devote most of the remainder of his life to seeing that Dennis' dream came true.

They started operations about the time of the completion of the railroad in 1909, but it wasn't until about 1917 that the project really got rolling. In that year: Dr. John Nolen of Cambridge, Mass., a noted city planner, finished a plan for the city which has been adhered to in general ever since.

Kingsport was incorporated with a non-partisan city manager form of government designed at Dennis' request by the Bureau of Municipal Research of the Rockefeller Foundation. It was the first manager government in Tennessee.

Then Johnson set out to get factories built in what was labeled "Industrial section” on Nolen's plan, but was in reality e only wide-stretching meadows beside the Holston. In World War I he succeeded in having wood alcohol and leather factories built, but they were abandoned when the conflict ended. Nothing daunted, Johnson kept working, always taking care that the companies he invited to come to Kingsport were  organizations run by men of character.

In 1920 he succeeded in selling George Eastman and the late Frank Lovejoy on the idea of using the alcohol plant as a source of wood alcohol for the kind of photographic film then in use. There is a folk story that East man approved the venture when a small hill boy told him: "Please, mister, you bring your factory here and we'll run it for you." In any case the Kodak founder chose well, and from a small factory employing a few hundred has grown the large factory of today. Perhaps 150 of as those who work at TEC are”'transplants" from the Flower city [Rochester].

But Rochesterians should not get the idea that Kingsport is a one-factory town since only about 8,000 of the city's 20,000 "gainfully employed” work at Tennessee Eastman. Many other businesses have been lured there by the city's central location, community spirit and top-notch labor market.

Into the abandoned leather factory in 1922 came the Kingsport Press, Inc. It started out to produce cheap reprints of children's classics. But under the leadership of Col. Elbridge Palmer, a short, super-energetic native of New Hampshire with blue eyes and frosty white eyebrows, the factory has grown into the largest complete book manufacturing plant in the world.

Here, hundreds of miles from the East Coast publishing centers, are the presses which print a large share of the tremendous Book-of-the-Month Club editions, encyclopedias, textbooks, Bibles, anthologies, fiction bestsellers and all other types of books at rate of a million and a half copies a month. About 1,200 people work at the Press, many of them printers of the highest craftsmanship. Another thousand men and women work at the massive rectangular brick structure of the Borden Mills, Inc. One of the largest cotton cloth factories in the South, the factory was moved here lock, stock and barrel from Fall River, Mass., starting in 1924. Other major industries include a subsidiary of the Corning Gas ne Works, a cement plant, a major foundry, a factory manufacturing power transmission equipment, a paper factory, a plant for manufacture of book bindings, a hosiery mill, a large brickworks - and last but not least the Holston Ordnance Works.

This giant plant for making RDX, the super-explosive, is a few miles northwest of Kingsport, in the flat land on a wide bend of the Holston River. Its construction in less than a year was one of the great engineering triumphs of World War II, a triumph for which major credit goes to Tennessee Eastman which designed and operated it. At peak operation more than 5,000 people were employed in making RDX, which out-TNT'S TNT, and composition B, an explosive of which RDX is a major component. On a stand-by basis since 1945, the plant is now back in production. Again RDX is being piled in concrete-and-turf igloo-like storage buildings at foot of Bays Mountain.

Commanding the works now is a former Rochesterian, Col. William E. Ryan, West Point Class of 1920 and an uncle of Jimmy Ryan, Aquinas and Yale football star.

More than 90 per cent of those who work in these factories are of the old mountain stock, mostly Scotch-Irish and some Pennsylvania Dutch who came down the Appalachians to Tennessee in the latter part of the 18^th century. Although forced by the starkness of the land to live in more or less primitive fashion, they were and are what writer Donald Culross Peattie has called "some of the most gifted and courageous and interesting people to live in this country. Given the opportunity, they quickly proved admirable workers. And they took with sureness and firmness the great step from their hill country life into modern Industrialism.”

But it's more accurate to say they combined the two, for they have retained much that is meaningful of their earlier way of life.

Take John Harr, for example. Tall, powerfully-built, but with a gentle, courteous manner, he's a foreman at "the Eastman." He lives with his wife and two children in a neat, white-painted bungalow on Old Stage Road along a ridge just outside Kingsport from which there is a magnificent view of the Holston Valley and the mountains.

Hart has worked for Eastman 17 years, and makes good wages. But it is typical of the East Tennessee hill folk that although he has bought his wife, Bonnie, every sort of kitchen appliance, he still raises most of his own vegetables and most of his own meat.

Were Kingsport’s factories to disappear tomorrow. Harr could "make out" just as his forebears "made out" for a century and a fore, that the biggest bankroll couldn't give.

And he knows that in a pinch he can depend on his family and friends to aid him, just as he would aid them if needed, since the old Scottish clan spirit is still strong.

There's still a spirit of pioneer neighborliness, too. Many of Hart's neighbors are scientists, who came from away." (In fact, Old Stage Road is now dubbed "scientists' row.") But Harr is as ready to help them as he is to aid any of his numerous cousins living up the road in what is locally known as Harrtown.

Another example of what the Kingsport people are like is Charles Bacon. He, too, works at "the Eastman," but he hasn't moved into town. Instead, he lives in a home he built with his father-in-law's help atop wooded knoll on his father-in-law's farm, His pretty wife explains the love of the land which has kept them from moving into Kingsport or to some other city:

"We've been away to places like Florida, but I always want to get home. I like the hills. They mean something to you if you were brought up in them. Families like the Harrs and the Bacons with the aid of the public-spirited industries are what have built Kingsport. The community spirit is remarkable. A Community Chest drive has never failed its goal, nor has a Red Cross drive. Hundreds of people turn out for the meetings at which the city's business is discussed, and thousands jam the municipal stadium to watch is the generally outstanding Dobyns-Bennett High School football teams in action. The modern stadium, seating 7,000 for football, is a feature of a park-like recreation area, which also includes a large swimming pool and an auditorium completed in in 1939, which seats 1,200.

Indifference is a quality of dubious value in Kingsport. You're expected to take part in civic affairs and most everybody does. As you enter the city there is a long line of signs telling the visitor when and where the various men's luncheon clubs meet. These clubs not only talk and eat, but play energetic roles in improving their city.

Kingsporters don't pretend that everything in their city is perfect yet. There are some substandard homes on Long Island in the Holston. The traffic plan, draw up before the automobile really came into its own, is being revised. There is a continuing fight to improve the 'scholastic standing of the schools, which have been housed in splendid modern structures. Businessmen say they'd like to see the hotel facilities increased. And there's room for improvement of some of the downtown buildings whose rough, unfinished look is testimony of the city's rapid growth.

But, if you stand on a corner of Broad St. Saturday morning, when the sidewalk is lined with men in blue jeans come from the hills, and swarming with women and children accomplishing Saturday shopping, you sense an energy which promises a fruitful future for the nation's "best planned city."