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