Santa Sees Me

The 1954 Santa Parade and Me

It wasn’t the coldest day of 1954 but it sure seemed that way.

It was for sure the happiest.

It was the day the seven-year-old me put on my pajamas under my clothes, zipped up my car coat, wrapped yards and yards of scarf around my neck, tugged on my toboggan, slipped on my mittens and boarded the downtown bus with my mother.

We were headed for the most important event in any grade school kid’s entire life, the Santa Parade.

The Santa Parade was later then, the day after Thanksgiving, and at this time of year one week can make a difference in the weather.

My father worked at Penney’s in the early fifties so he was already downtown. And so was the family car, thus the bus trip.

The Parade was our first glimpse of Santa for the season. Sears didn’t mail its Christmas catalogs until after Thanksgiving. The Christmas season began the day after Thanksgiving then - no earlier - and was commemorated in the Times-News with a daily countdown. On Santa Parade Day in 1954 it was 24 shopping days till Christmas. Sunday didn’t count. You couldn’t shop on Sunday. No stores were open.

The parade was later in the day then, too. The afternoon Times of Friday Nov. 26, 1954 informed readers that the parade would begin at 5:30. It also reported snow flurries that morning with temperatures expected to plunge into the thirties by parade time. And thus the outfit that made me look like Randy in “A Christmas Story.”

Mother and I debarked the green and white bus at the corner of East Center and Broad and headed inside Penney’s to await the parade.

My father, who was shoe department manager then, waved to us as we threaded our way through Men’s Wear and Work Clothes. He waved because he knew we wouldn’t make it to Shoes without stopping at the Candy Counter. My mother had a notorious sweet tooth and darned if I didn’t inherit it. She went straight to orange slices, her favorite of many favorites. I circled the counter, peering at bon-bons, considering malted milk balls, feeling the warmth from the nuts, drooling over every single sugar treat, even though I knew before I left home what I wanted: chocolate-covered raisins.

I was sitting in a chair in the shoe department, watching my father measure women’s feet - he charmed every one of them, even the ones with big clunky feet - when I heard the clarion call. Two blocks away and I could hear it. It was the Dobyns-Bennett marching band heading down Broad, drum major ramrod stiff at the front, followed by the boy and girl Indian and a row of gorgeous majorettes stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk. Mother and I raced to the Center Street door. So did everyone else in the store.

The sidewalk watch began. I waved at majorettes and elves and clowns and policemen until my lips were blue and my ears were red.

And then he came into view. High atop a fire truck sat the man who looked just like his picture. “I see you,” Santa said to me and nobody else. His helpers were tossing candy by the double-handfuls into the crowd and kids were surging toward the truck, screaming and howling, trying to get Santa’s attention. But he was looking straight at me. I know it was me he was looking at. As he did, he motioned that a piece of candy was heading my way. I was stuffed full of chocolate covered raisins but I was ready to run across broken glass to get that piece of Santa candy. The butterscotch tumbled in slow motion as it headed toward me. Why didn’t I bring my ball glove? I asked myself. As I cupped my hands, a large mom and a gangly teen elbowed me backwards. They both touched the cellophaned candy at the same time, popping it upward, still in slow motion. She reached for it, then he did, it bobbled and bounced in midair, then tumbled to the sidewalk. Now they had lost interest and were jockeying for another piece of candy.

Not me, that was my candy. I went down. I wiggled through legs and boots. I could hear my mother calling. But the candy was in sight. A pair of brogans almost backed over it. Then a pair of high heels zeroed in. But I was too quick. I had it and I was back by my mother’s side before Santa could climb down and head into W.B. Greene’s Toyland, where a thousand little kids already awaited, readying their big pitches for what they wanted for Christmas.

I turned the butterscotch over and over in my hand. It was a beautiful caramel color with streaks of dark brown marbled in.

As the sun slowly set over the top of J. Fred Johnson’s, I devoured the sweetest piece of candy I have ever eaten.

“Do you want to go tell Santa what you want,” my mother asked. She knew I had been working on my soliloquy all week, why I deserved a pony. But suddenly, with my tongue still tingling from butterscotch meltdown, it didn’t seem so important.

I could write Santa a letter.

“Nah,” I told her. “I got what I wanted.” 

The Girl Wonder of the Kingsport Times News

 

CHRISTINE TUNNELL

Sports Editor of the Kingsport Times, 1943-1945

At age 16 she was writing a column for the Johnson City Press-Chronicle based on her voluminous correspondence with teenagers around the world.

At age 18 she was Secretary for the Appalachian Baseball League.

At 20 she was sports editor of the Kingsport Times, the first and only woman ever to hold that position.

And at 22 she was dead.

But before her death it seemed like the sky was the limit for Chris Tunnell.

 

Christine Tunnell was just starting her senior year at Science Hill High in 1940 when she began mining her correspondence with pen pals all over the world to bring East Tennessee readers a glimpse of wartime conditions in other countries.

From her “Heard Around the World” column of Feb. 14, 1941: “Although Coventry, Warwickshire, England, was bombed some time ago, John Weir, who lives there, continues to write interesting letters. John remarked that few people in England have holidays because they fear it will slow down production. Practically all of the population is engaged in work of national importance.

“’We give up all vacations to carry on the work that is so vitally important if we are to beat Jerry,’ John wrote. Jerry is a name applied to Germany by the English people.”

In another column she wrote, “We received a letter yesterday from Shanghai, China, from Owen Still, Jr., mentioned recently in this column. The Stills were compelled to leave Japan due to the conditions of the country and are taking a southern route home.

“A portion of this letter reads as follows: ‘We are anchored in the center of the Yangtze, and of all the filthy dumps I've ever seen, this has the prize. The color of the sea has been changing, and it seems as if we were floating in a sea of coffee. The day before, the sea was blue as far as we could see out, and there was no land on either side.’”

Later that month Christine wrote about a French pen pal: “From Micheline Bensione, now living near Paris, comes word that the once thriving city is all silence and sadness. Micheline formerly lived near the Seine where her mother operated a hat shop, but since the war they were compelled to move. She reports that food is very scarce there, especially coffee, butter, cheese, milk, and potatoes. Part of her letter reads: ‘There are not many cars here now-only the German people ride in them, and we French people have to ride bicycles all the time. Many of the bridges and trains have been torn down, and transportation from one part of town to another is seldom. We cannot listen to either English or Russian broadcasts, because they tell the news as it is, and we are not supposed to hear it that way.’”

 

Christine graduated from high school in the spring of 1941, before the war had come home and when things were still close to normal. Especially baseball.

As the Appalachian League kicked off its 1941 season, she turned her job as secretary to league president J. Ross Edgmon into the position of Secretary of the Appalachian League. It was well-deserved. She was more than just Edgmon’s stenographer. She quickly became the Voice of the League, penning a newsy column called “Around the Bases” that ran in the Kingsport Times, the Bristol Herald-Courier and the Johnson City Press-Chronicle. She was barely 18.

Just before she turned 20, in 1943, the Kingsport Times hired her to take over as sports editor from John Bloomer, who had just been drafted. (A Dec. 10, 1942 story noted he was the eighth Times staffer drafted into the service.)

Her ambitious schedule attracted the attention of the Knoxville Journal’s sports columnist Tom Anderson, who wrote in his August 26, 1943 column:

“We have a faint suspicion that one of the most versatile young women in East Tennessee is Christine Tunnell. She writes poetry, serves as secretary of the Appalachian League and its president, J. Ross Edgmon, and is sports editor of a Kingsport paper. In her spare time Christine is slapping out a book about baseball.”

Poetry? Too?

The Johnson City Press reported that Tunnell “has received notice her ‘War Wines’ poem, written under the pen name, Chris Randolph, will appear in a Writer's Shrine anthology; her poem ‘Sufficiency’ will appear in the July issue of ‘Christian Poet’ and her poem ‘Elysian Depth’ in the November-December issue; her poem ‘Aberation,’ will be published in the July ‘Wildfire Poetry Magazine.’”

Did she ever sleep?

Apparently when she did, she dreamed about baseball. She was a rabid baseball fan. In one column she tracked down the war-time activities of many of the Appalachian League’s players from the previous summer:

“Ray Vince, who will be remembered by fans as the fleet little shortstop of Kingsport, is well on his way to being a successful naval dentist at Great Lakes. He has great hopes of resuming baseball after the conflict is over, and several clubs have made offers to him.

"Joe Panaccione, Johnson City outfielder, who turned professional umpire the latter part of the season, is also at Great Lakes, as athletic director of his company Camp Green Bay. Umpire Donohoe, who was with the league in the middle part of the season has been at Camp Fort Leavenworth (suitable place for an old robber isn't it?)—but is now a corporal at Drew Field, Tampa, Fla.

“Paul Almonte, the control pitcher of the league, left Syracuse, N. Y., his home town, on December 8, for Fort Niagara to help shutout the Japs. He had planned to return to Bristol and work at a plant there, but Uncle Sam notified him that he was needed to pitch for his team and he was optioned off to the army.

“George Scherger, Kingsport s flashy second baseman, is in the army and is stationed at Fort Bragg, N. C.

“Pete Spatafore, vivacious third sacker for the (Kingsport) Dodgers, is learning how to tie knots, send messages by codes, and manipulate life boats at the Naval Training Station at Farragut, Idaho. And he, along with the other sailor-players, is learning how to do a first-class laundry job.”

 

As sports editor she didn’t ignore other sports. And despite the war there were still plenty of sporting activities in Kingsport: professional wrestling, boxing, high school football and basketball, and bowling. She was a star bowling in her own right. In 1944 she had the top average in the Girls’ City League at 167. (Second, a distant second, was Margaret Wilkerson with 143.)

She even covered local rec leagues.

On Jan. 26, 1944 she filed a game story about a controversial Industrial League basketball game between Dobyns-Taylor and Moore & Walker and in the same paper she published a column about the players’ wives in the stands during the game.

Headlined “Team Penalized For Remarks; Free Shot Wins,” her game story began, “The Dobyns-Taylor quintet, decked out in their official black and orange regalia, just barely did nose out the Moore and Walker cagers last night in what sports fans have deemed ‘the best ball game ever to be played in Kingsport.’ The score - a 28 to 27 victory for the hardware boys - was one which could have been aimed toward the M and W boys.”

She wrote that the game turned on a technical foul called on the Moore and Walker bench. “Highly excited by the closeness of the score and the fact that teammate Bill Anderson had fouled out, the Moore and Walker squad was penalized by Referee George Diehl for untimely remarks.”

Tunnell doesn’t report exactly what the insurance men said to the referee only that the technical resulted in a free throw by Ralph ‘Junky’ Williams that gave Dobyns-Taylor the victory and possession of first place in the league standings.

Then she took off her reporter’s hat and put on her columnist hat for her “Grandstand Gossip” column:

“It was the yelling-est game to be played to date. Jack Stevens, sitting on the sidelines, yelled so much for Dobyns-Taylor that he was unable to give out more than a few squeaky gruff words after the game. ... Mrs. Bill Anderson drowned out most of the competition in her section with frequent encouraging words to her hubby, with promises of an ‘extra case for each shot.’

“Right behind Mrs. Bill and going ‘full speed ahead’ were the wives of Blackie Grills and Red Blessing, Dobyns-Taylor stars. Mesdames Blackie and Red frequently got so excited that they jumped up and down and tried to keep up with the rising tempo of Mrs. Bill's voice down in front.

“Little Lorraine Williams stood beside her mother munching candy and yelling ‘Come on, Junky,’ to her dad, who was paving the way for the Dobyns-Taylor victory.”

This was a time when Industrial League games got full write-ups in the newspaper. Today results are relegated to the tiny print.

 

One of her most important assignments as sports editor of the Kingsport Times was to attend the 1943 Winter Baseball Meetings at the swanky Hotel New Yorker in New York City. It didn’t turn out as she had hoped.

From a Dec. 10, 1943 Kingsport Times story by her colleague Jerry Smith, who wrote his column by sneaking a peek into Chris’s notebook:

“The national pastime is positively a man's world according to the definite cold shoulder the news boys at the conference gave Chris.

“Oscar Fraley of the United Press came to her rescue in an atmosphere strictly man talk and tobacco smoke-tinged with a definite air of hostility. Fraley and two other United Press men were nice. He took her under his wing. Introduced her around.

“Some of the boys got friendly enough to dare her to don Mel Ott's uniform, size 44, on display at a manufacturer's exhibit at the convention. She put on the shirt, pants and cap. The shirt came to her knees. Then they dared her to go out into the lobby. But the door is as far as she got for just beyond, in the hallway, was Mel himself.”

Chris jotted down other notes that she called Echoes From The Past:

“Connie Mack is a tall, thin, most dignified man with a continual sad expression on his face.

“Babe Ruth, the King of Swat, graced the conference briefly with his presence. He batted in to say hello and then batted out to leave a wave of echoes behind him from sportsmen who knew the Big Bambino when baseball itself was an infant nursed along by the epic playing of other now hallowed names: Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb.

Jerry Smith noted in his story, “At the Press Banquet Chris, the only woman present in a gathering of 80 sports writers and an additional 40 baseball satellites, sat across the table from Shirley Povich [Shirley was the father of Maury Povich] of the Washington Post.

“’Frankly he ignored me. He spoke to everyone around us but never to me.’ Chris confided to her diary.

“In fact the preponderance of the sportswriters ignored Chris, her notes went on to say. Fraley had an explanation for it. Here was a group of men, many of them no longer young, who got to their coveted spots in the sports-light by years of hard work. They resent a mere kid - a girl at that - coming out of nowhere and coming fast. elbowing her way onto ground ‘Angels fear to tread.’

“The cold shoulder was hard and it hurt.

“But the girl who is the secretary to the Appalachian League, the girl who talks baseball, lives baseball, is baseball, must have a rubber core where her heart ought to be. She bounced back with a new, if pained smile, from the hard knock the top-notch writers gave her. When they said with their attitude, a girl doesn't belong in baseball, they said with their silence ‘Beat it, Sis, Get the Hell home.’

Smith continued, “Perhaps the trail Christine Tunnell is pioneering is a difficult one. And we're probably sticking our neck out. But give her time. Give her time to develop. She's just a kid. She is only 20. When she becomes of age and old enough to carry her liquor around in pouches under her eyes (if ever she goes for liquor or pouches) like so many well-known sportswriters are reputed to do, we predict one thing:

“Postwar sports is going to see the versatile Christine Tunnell combine the press box with a bowling alley. And then watch the big-named, cold-shouldered men go down like duckpins.”

 

It wasn’t to be.

Christine had married Sgt. Niel Davis in Pensacola, where he was stationed, on Jan. 8, 1945. Soon after she became pregnant and moved home with her parents in Johnson City.

In early 1946 she came down with eclampsia, a severe complication of pregnancy. She died Feb. 1, 1946.

She was 22.

 

Her obit misspelled her last name as Davies. It is Davis on her death certificate. 

But Christine Tunnell was not forgotten. Over the next year a number of her poems were published in national magazines. In 1947 by popular demand the Johnson City Press-Chronicle reprinted her 1940 column about Christmas customs around the world.

And in 1952 Jim Suchecki, by then pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, ran into a couple of Bristol sportswriters on a train. “I played for Kingsport in 1943 – when Beattie Feathers was manager,” he told them. He asked about Tunnell and was stunned to hear about her death. “All of us were interested in Chris Tunnell’s writing. She was the first girl sportswriter I’d ever heard of.”

 

 

 

Mary Garber, sports editor of the Winston-Salem Twin-Cities Sentinel beginning in 1944.

Was Christine Tunnell the first female Sports Editor?

The title of “first female sports editor” is generally bestowed on Mary Garber who was named Sports Editor of the Winston-Salem Twin-Cities Sentinel in 1944. (There is even the Mary Garber Pioneer Award, presented annually by the Association for Women in Sports Media. This year’s winner was Doris Burke of ESPN.)

But Christine Tunnell preceded her by almost two years.

And there was another female sports editor before Chris: Lillian D. Vickers-Smith had been named sports editor of the Leesburg (Florida) Commercial in 1937 after five years as a general assignment reporter at the weekly. (She was even featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not.)

So technically you could have three “first female sports editors.” Vickers-Smith was the first first but her newspaper was a weekly.

Christine Tunnell was the first female sports editor at a daily newspaper.

And Mary Garber was the first female sports editor at a metropolitan daily.

There were several student female sports editors before Vickers-Sanders.

The earliest that I can find is Sarah Hamner, who was named sports editor of the monthly County High News in Newport, Alabama in 1927.

 

 

Kingsport Times-News Sports Editors

There was no official sports editor in the early years of the newspaper.

Stoney Smallwood 1921-1925, covered sports off and on while attending college – never named sports editor

John Oliver 1925 – 1931, general assignment reporter who covered sports, too - never named sports editor

Frank Rule 1934-1939 – first official sports editor

John Bloomer 1939-1942

Gene Robinson, sports editor of Kingsport News, 1942-1944

Christine Tunnell, sports editor of Kingsport Times, 1943-1945

Roy Elkins 1945-1948

Ed Norton 1949

Jack Kiser 1950-1954

Phil Calhoun 1955

Bill Dale 1956

Frank Creasy 1957-1960

Henry Jenkins 1961 – 1963

Browny Stephens 1963 (Browny claimed to have worked at 48 newspapers during his career)

Bill Dale (second tenure) 1964 - 1966

Gary Gow 1967

Bill Lane 1968 – till his retirement in 2012

Tom White, executive sports editor 1973-1974

Ron Bliss executive sports editor 1975 till he left the newspaper in 2004

Pat Kenney 2005 – till his retirement in 2017

Tennessee Eastman's World War II Veterans

For Veteran's Day 

On December 20, 1942, Kingsport's Eastman Company purchased a two-page spread in the Kingsport Times to honor its employees - all 1,156 of them - who were in the Armed Services. 

Click on each page to enlarge the image to read the names. (You may need to click a second time to make the image legible.) 

Freezing in Minnesota

 

Too Cold For Me

The current cold snap reminded me that a cold snap in East Tennessee can’t compare to a Minnesota winter, which I experienced five years back while visiting kids and grandkids in Minneapolis.

I wrote a column about that experience but never got around to publishing it in the Times-News.

Here it is, finally making its public debut:

 

David Miller called at exactly the wrong time. I had just finished filling up the rental car at a Minneapolis gas station and I was frozen to the bone.

In Minnesota there is nothing to cut the wind, no mountains, no hills, not even any molehills, and the wind just whips down from Canada and goes right through you. I even had a new winter coat that I bought just for the trip and still I froze.

One problem I had at the filling station was that I didn’t know how to unlatch the gas tank lid on the rental car. So while I fumbled with latches and buttons – opening the hood three times and the trunk twice - I was freezing.

I would have paid someone to fill up the car.

So when David called, I told him my tales of woe and ice. And especially my ire at the rental car.

I was already mad at the car before the gas tank lid imbroglio. Our first morning in Minneapolis I went out and started the car to let it warm up. I came back inside and about five minutes later I braved the cold again, confident that the inside of the Chevy Cruze was toasty warm.

Here’s a tip for anyone renting a Chevy Cruze in a cold climate: if you go out to warm up the car, stay inside it. The car locks its own doors after a brief interval, apparently less than five minutes.

So we called the rental car company to get them to come out and unlock the car. Because we hadn’t purchased their $14 a day insurance, they were uninterested in coming out to unlock the car. Or even in giving us any hints on how we might unlock the car.

Tough cookies, they said, essentially.

I can’t print what I said.

Fortunately we are AAA members and the AAA guy was there in ten minutes.

I learned a couple of things from him.

I assumed he had one of those bars that you slip down the window and pull up. He didn’t. He used two small airbags and a coat hanger. A glorified coat hanger. He slipped the airbags into the door jam, inflated them, and wiggled his coat hanger through the gap and unlocked the car.

I hadn’t seen anyone unlock a car with a coat hanger since I was at D-B and Coach Brixey wandered out from the coaches’ office and wiggled a coat hanger through the window of my ’55 Chevy and pulled up the lock button. He made it look easy.

The other thing the AAA guy told me was not to use the emergency brake in Minnesota, that it would eventually rust the brake out.

Since I was already angry with the rental car company, I put on the emergency brake every time we parked.

 

 

D-B FOOTBALL ON THE RADIO

In the forties WKPT broadcast D-B’s home football games live with program director Bob Poole calling the action. Later announcer Lannie Lancaster took over broadcasting games. Eventually Martin Karant would replace Lancaster.

But there was one D-B game called by WKPT morning announcer, the late, beloved Charlie Deming, normally host of the “Gloom Chaser” show. George DeVault, long-time general manager of WKPT and a station veteran, told me, “An old story around here is that Charlie Deming, who knew very little about sports, was called upon to stand in and do play-by-play on a game when the regular play-by-play guy was sick. Supposedly he said, ‘There he goes. He’s to the 30-yard line, the 40, the 50, the 60, the 70, the 80…..’”

 

 

BIGGER AND BIGGER FOOTBALL PLAYERS

In the September 18, 1930 Kingsport Times preview of the 1930 D-B football team was this:

“The forward wall, called the best since he began coaching in Kingsport by Sprankle, has weight and speed. The eleven-line yesterday was heavy. Grabby Light, stocky end, was the lightest man on the front wall and he tips the beams at around 150. P. Bellamy, Watkins, Cifers, Dobyns, Bevins and Collins are all well on the north side of the 160 mark with the exception of Bevins, who tips the beams around 155.”

 

After I wrote about the smaller football players of the 1930s in 2006, I heard from H.W. “Huck” Haynes of Rogersville. “About your story on the 1934 football game D-B against Rogersville, I am still sore from playing in that game. I well remember the Cifers boys. They may have been small but you should have seen the size of the Rogersville Warriors in their taped-up uniforms. When we played, you were allowed to kill the punters and passer. Guess who the punter and passer was? It was me. I was a 150 pounder. They beat us 75 to 0.”

Mr. Haynes said he recently moved back to Rogersville after 65 years away. He told me he also played in the Appalachian League when it first started. “The pay was $50 per month!”

 

KINGSPORT HIGH’S FIRST OFFICIAL BASKETBALL COACH

According to Dobyns-Bennett’s official basketball records, the first coach was A.R. Miller, who coached the 1918-1919 team. That was also the first year the Kingsport High basketball team played indoors according to John. I. Cox, who was on the team and submitted a team photo to the Times News’ Out of the Attic feature in 1988. Cox supplied the team identifications including that of coach “A.P. Miller.”

I searched for years for any information about A.P. or A.R. Miller. Finally I chanced upon the answer.

The problem I had finding out about him was that his name was actually E.P. Miller, Emulus Parrott Miller, nicknamed “Boots.”

He would have been 18 when that first season started, barely older than his players.

E.P. first appeared in the Kingsport Times in 1918 when he lost his pocket book with “between $25 and $35” in it. His classified ad noted he had lost it somewhere between the Shale Plant and Kingsport Motor. He offered an unspecified reward.

When he registered for the draft that year, he listed his occupation as “mail carrier and farmer.” Nothing about basketball coach. So Kingsport High’s first official basketball coach was moonlighting from his day job carrying the mail.

He coached just that one year, his team finishing with a 5-6 record.

In the 1920 census he listed his occupation as a merchant and his residence as Indian Springs. The first newspaper mention of his merchant career was in 1924. J.W. Harrison founded Shelby Street Garage and E.P. “Boots” Miller was named assistant manager and co-owner.

In 1936 Boots, now 36, married 22-year-old Maxie Mae Cleek. Later that year the two were seriously injured when a train smashed into their car near Richmond, Virginia. They were in the hospital for months.

In 1940 Boots and his two brothers, Henry and J. Perry, acquired the DeSoto and Plymouth dealership in Kingsport.

E.P. “Boots” Miller died in 1951.

His obituary was featured on the front page of the Kingsport Times. There was no mention of his stint as a coach of Kingsport High’s basketball team.

 

KINGSPORT HIGH BASKETBALL TEAM LIES DOWN ON THE JOB…

From the Johnson City Staff, March 4, 1919:

GREENEVİLE HIGH SCHOL WINS 2 TO O

The basket ball boys of G. H. S. were very sorry to disappoint the basket ball fans of Greeneville on the 28th when Kingsport in the last minute laid down on the G. H. S. boys.

Kingsport was on the floor but because an understanding could not be reached as to the rules regarding out of bounds they decided to forfeit the game giving the victory to Greeneville 2 to 0 but the general opinion was that they had cold feet.

 

Boots Miller was the coach of this team and perhaps he was the one who instructed his team to sit down on the court.

(We don’t know if the KHS boys literally lay down on the floor. No other local newspaper wrote about the game.)

 

 

BEST UPPER EAST TENNESSEE BASKETBALL PLAYERS FROM 1947 TO 1977 ACCORDING TO ONE WHO WOULD KNOW

From the Kingsport Times-News of Feb. 27, 1977:

Carl Matherly, principal at Lynn View who was head coach of the Lynxes for 16 years, has kept his silence until now:

“I've been around here 30 years and I would have to place Lynn View’s Rodney Arnold with the likes of Holston Valley's Billy Smith, Dobyns-Bennett's Skip Brown and Charlie Leonard and Surgoinsville's Bill Kirkpatrick. Nobody else I've seen could do all the things that I've seen Rodney do.”

Arnold doesn't appear to have a chance to overtake Perry County's Mike Rhodes for the state scoring championship. The Lynn View ace has a 36-point average and trails Mr. Rhodes by about four points, which is a lot at this stage of the ballgame. Rhodes has had two 60-plus performances to pad his average. Arnold's best was 54 against Gate City.

 

BEST KINGSPORT BASKETBALL PLAYERS PRE-1940

From Kingsport Times-News of Feb. 27, 1977:

Who was the best Kingsport basketball player of the pre-1940 era? (And we have to confine it to pre-1940 because basketball is a much different game today.)

LeRoy Sprankle told this newspaper in 1938 that he couldn’t pick just one. He named his best eight:

“Guards, George Grills, Claude Wright and Robert Dodd; centers, Nat Reasor and Fred Saylor; forwards, Nat Lunn, Mansfield Jackson and Luke Bellamy.”

While he was at it Sprankle picked a second “Eight:” “Guards, William Snow, Milton DeVault and Fred Clyce; centers, Paul Hug, Usif Haney and Lee Meredith; forwards, Paul Bellamy, Ed Cifers and Paul Wilson.

Sprankle wouldn’t pick a “best” but the newspaper did. “George ‘Blackie’ Grills has been called by critics the best ‘all-time player of Dobyns-Benett.’ Grills played for five years at Dobyns-Bennett [1929-1934] and his spectacular shots and ability at handling rebounds amazed the crowds as did his magnificent guarding. Grills played last year [1937] with the Kingsport Drug Independents and is now playing on the Augusta Military Academy five.”