Milton DeVault and Nicknames

 

Mayor Milton DeVault in 1957

 

To me he was just the mayor.

Milton DeVault is the first Kingsport mayor that I can remember. I was seven when he took office in 1955, succeeding John Wimberly.

In my memory he resembled the mayor of Mayberry, short, round, a perpetual grin on his face.

He did not look like a legendary athlete. He looked like a mayor.

So I was shocked a few years ago when I began reading about him in newspapers of the twenties. He was on the earliest Kingsport High football teams and in later years he was often called the best player ever to suit up for K.H.S. football. And he played on the same teams with Bobby Dodd!

He didn’t play one of the glamour positions: quarterback or running back or receiver. He was a center – “pivot” they called it in the twenties. I never heard about his athletic prowess growing up. That’s probably because he never played college football.

Kingsport Central High center Milton "Jargo" DeVault in 1926 yearbook

The reason that he didn’t play college football was that he was often injured. From his senior yearbook, the 1926 Kingsport Central High School annual: “Because of injuries Milt did not play in many games this year. In the Knoxville game and again against Bristol, Va., he limped on the field and so inspired his team that its line held like a stone wall.”

It was only this week, while reading through some more old newspaper clippings, that I discovered the injury. According to the stories, he had fallen arches that kept him out much of his senior year.

The other remarkable thing about Milton DeVault that I learned recently was his nickname: Jargo.

I have no idea what it meant. I haven’t been able to find any reference to what a Jargo was. But there were other “Jargo’s” in the area over the years:

J.R. “Jargo” Evans, a Kingsport auto painter, who appeared occasionally in the crime reports for possession of alcohol.

Eugene “Jargo” McConnell, a Nickelsville carpenter.

Joris “Jargo” Catron, a Pennington Gap insurance salesman.

Garland “Jargo” Sluss, a Dungannon coal miner.

It was while digging around trying to find out why Milton DeVault was nicknamed Jargo that I came across this 1942 column by Kingsport Times sports editor Irwin Cole. He had found in the Times files a 1926 Kingsport High football program. Cole reported that every one of the 36 players had a nickname.

Everybody on the team had a nickname!

Cole added, “I imagine some of the nicknames would bring a chuckle to their families today [1942] and strange as it may seem some of the nicknames have stuck these many years.”

That gave him an excuse to write about a number of those nicknames:

“They tell me that Frank Meredith is still ‘Gabby’ and Fred Clyce of bowling fame is still ‘Speedy’ to his pals.

“The team had three brothers, Richard, nicknamed ‘June,’, Guy and Crile Bevington, and the average age of the squad was 17 years, the average weight 144 pounds. ...

“Tennessee University's Bobby Dodd, now backfield coach at Georgia Tech, was nicknamed ‘Rabbit.’

“Jimmy ‘Little Jimmy’ Hamlett, the undertaker, certainly showed the bigger boys that you didn't need heft to play football and it was lots playing tougher playing the game 16 years ago. ... Jimmy weighed 86 pounds, according to the program, and stood only five feet tall....

“Malcolm Coates, brother of Guy Coates of the current team, was quite a player in his day, and his nickname was ‘Cherry Hill.’

“Robert Poston down at Eastman was listed as ‘Frog’ on the 1926 program and he's known as that to this day.

“Forrest Dorsey, the captain of the team, was known as ‘Humpy.’ ... He is now a school principal in Michigan....

“Stanley Angle, now believed in the armed forces as an officer, was known as ‘Ostrich.’

“Paul Hug, now at Memphis State, was known as ‘Cotton Top’ to his cronies.....

“Winton Compton was ‘Lefty.’...

“Ed Robinson, brother of the superintendent of schools [Ross N. Robinson] was ‘Crusie’....

“Nat Reasor was nicknamed ‘Soup Bone.’”

 

That means they had a team made up of Gabby, Speedy, June, Rabbit, Cherry Hill, Frog, Humpy, Ostrich, Cotton Top, Lefty, Crusie and Soup Bone!

 

Milton DeVault in 1943

If Jimmy Hamlett was a lightweight, Milton DeVault was the exact opposite. He was overweight.

In 1925 all 138 boys in the high school were weighed by the Physical Culture department, according to a story in the Kingsport Times.

At the first weigh-in, Milton was listed as 16 pounds overweight. (We know from a 1924 newspaper story that he weighed 151 ¾ pounds.)  

One boy, Bill Gibson, was listed as 73 pounds overweight! (He weighed 225 pounds according to the 1927 D-B yearbook). Another, Dan Coates, was 32 pounds over. Milton was third on the overweight list at 16 pounds over.

 

I dug around and found a few nicknames for other players from those early teams:

“Gentleman Bill” Pendleton

Matt “Shiek” Lunn

Tommy “Stankley” Stevenson

Emary “Jitney” Blankenbecler

Lee “St. Vitus” Meredith

Harry “Zip” Cox

 

Nicknames used to be a big part of growing up. Kids were proud of their nicknames. Enos Lord stood up in my seventh-grade art class and corrected Mr. Buchanan when he read the roll: “Enos Lord.” “Call me ‘Junebug,’” he said.

A few years back Lynn Johnson (D-B ’58) told me a few of the nicknames from his youth. “Bob Strickler was a year behind me in school and from the earliest days we called him ‘Pot.’ A lovely girl in my class, Mary Belle Cox, was known as ‘Mert.’ Dr. Bill Locke, later President of Northeast State, was known as ‘Cooter.’ Charles Sproles, an excellent football player at D-B in the early 60's, was known as ‘Poochie.’ Kenneth Cross, a dentist from my class, was known as ‘Bump.’”

Name calling was an honor not a disgrace.

 

I played high school basketball with a Snake, a Scrounge, a Bullet and a Zora Molla.

Snake wasn’t sneaky, he was six-six and lanky; Scrounge was always diving on the floor; Bullet supposedly had a bullet shaped head, and Zora Molla took his name from his favorite fighter, Zora Folley.

We cherished our nicknames.

Sometimes kids wanted a nickname so badly that they would create one. Lynn Johnson told me Melvin Joseph nicknamed himself “Jose” by writing the name on his football helmet. “Melvin was a freshman Spanish student at the time. Jose was Spanish for Joseph.”

But usually the nicknames came from someone else.

In my day one kid was responsible for most of the name-calling, Tony Drakos.

I asked Tony how he came to be the Arbiter of the Epithet. (Actually I asked him why he gave so many people their nicknames.)

“It may have been partly a reaction to my own nickname. Everybody called me ‘Greek.’”

The first nickname he bestowed on anyone was Carson Oats for Allan Rice. Tony doesn’t remember where it came from but you can see a logic: Rice, Oats. “But once I figured out I could get away with it, I just kept doing it.” He nicknamed Eddie Grills “Ratt” and Joe King “Winger.”

And when Eddie balked at being called “Ratt” Tony assured him it was okay.

Eddie says, “Tony told me it was spelled with two t’s and that if you pronounced it backwards it was Ta-Tar!”

And who wouldn’t want to be nicknamed Ta-Tar!

 

1962-63 D-B B-Team - 'Machine' aka 'Shed' is on back row, third from left

I’ve had three nicknames over the years – two at the same time - but none of them ever really stuck.

On the basketball team Ron Litton nicknamed me “Machine.” It was, of course, because I was a scoring machine.

Pause for rimshot and laughter.

It was, of course, NOT because I was a scoring machine. I was not a scoring machine. Just check the score book. It was because I had a herky-jerky style. At least that’s what Ron said, and still maintains. I have no way of knowing. There was no videotape in the early sixties.

I was also “Shed” - Dommie Jackson called me that because his dad and my dad grew up together in the Green Shed section of Fall Branch.

Later when I worked at Channel 10 News in Knoxville during my grad school years, there were four of us on the night shift and we adopted what we thought were “good old boy” nicknames for each other. We called our anchor Carl Williams “Junior” (he actually was a junior). Reporter-photographer Rusty Brashear was “Jerry” because at the time it seemed every good old boy we interviewed was named Jerry. Another reporter, Will Fitzgerald, was, naturally, Willard. And I became Bubba, for no particular reason except that every clot of good old boys seemed to have a Bubba. Those nicknames lasted about a year before Will took another job and I quit to get serious about school.

Jerry still calls me Bubba – and I still call him Jerry – but it’s more like an old, old joke than a real nickname. 

 

So what was your nickname?

 

And do you think J. Fred Johnson had a nickname? I can’t imagine what it would have been.

 

Mayor Milton DeVault of Kingsport in 1955

Mayor Floyd Pike of Mayberry - 1960

A little more about Jargo DeVault:

David Milton DeVault was born in 1906 in Fordtown, graduated from Kingsport Central High School in 1926 and died in Kingsport in 1978 at age 72. He was the Mayor of Kingsport from 1955 till 1959. He and his wife Florence Baum had two kids, David who was born in 1938, and Elizabeth “Betty,” who was born in 1941. In the fifties, when he was mayor, the family lived at 1365 Watauga Street.

His “baby brother,” as the Kingsport Times called him, was Charlton “Chauncey” DeVault who ran a sporting goods store in Bristol. He was also president of the Appalachian Baseball League for 32 years.