Geography, at my command then was a vaguery learned from the seat of a bike rigged to carry the news to a one hundred customer paper route running the length of Lake Avenue where I lived, but for some strange reason there was no lake, that I knew of, in the vicinity. Life along Lake Avenue, the way I remember it, was as an arbor of trees running the whole way from Melrose Avenue to the railroad tracks, thinning only to accommodate Mountcastle Park and thinning again at the end of Lake and 23rd Street (Volunteer Boulevard) for another park, less kept up, located just behind Ms. Elgin’s School. Fort Sanders at that time was a neighborhood of schools, private and public, and my street had two of them within earshot of my parent’s driveway. The air was always full of the machinations of very young children at play in one or the other schoolyard. It all was sweet-smelling in the spring and shady and verdant in summer. Fall was a wonderland of colored leaves from the Oak, Poplar, Hackberry, Maple, and Ginko as well as the occasional scaly barked Sycamore, all collaborating to form a canopy, under-arched by Dogwood, Redbud and Crepe Mertle. Hedges of Boxwood or Privet defined the yards here and there with notes of Azalea and Rose of Sharon. Some of the hedges were invaded by Honeysuckle, or English Ivy and the ivy bordered the foundations of the houses peeking out behind the Iris beds and Rose bushes with at least three kinds of Holly, red with berries on toward the Holiday season. There were lots of kids my age and slightly older that lived on both sides all the way up the street and on Terrace Ave. up the ridge to the south. It is a street that really does live up to its name. The shorter numbered streets crossing the avenues kept our little grid connected to the much larger Fort Sanders neighborhood. Half way down Lake Ave., opposite Mountcastle Park, were two of the absolute biggest trees around, one an Oak and the other a Poplar that stood tandem as if holding up the heavens right there in front of a row of duplexes. The sidewalk between them was always full of young girls playing hop-scotch in the dappled sunlight with their laughing voices fluttering in the wind. Directly across from them in the new mown grass of the park proper was where the boys gathered to play the sport of the season. Theirs was a more guttural sounding interaction as were the taunts shouted to one another or even their teasing directed towards the girls across the street. There was, I knew too, a jungle of sorts about two blocks away that was called the Kudzu, where some of the boys had hide-outs and where they played war. When I heard, later on, that Kudzu was a vine and not a place, I was crestfallen. I was still quite taken with that place even without its enigmatic name, however, drawn as I was to the unknown and what was always just out of reach, but that is another story.
When it rained really hard the water ran down Lake Ave. like a swollen stream, and at the end down by the railroad tracks it did back up into what could be called a pond or lake if you had a vivid imagination, which of course I did in my limited sort of way. If I had been alive before the railroad came, I would have known that Lake Avenue is part of the Third Creek watershed before that twenty foot high berm was built to accommodate the rail road tracks that run over the trestle at Cumberland Avenue on the eastern side of Third Creek. Now, it takes some time for the run-off to get drained through a sewer system and then to flow into Third Creek. Just about opposite the outflow drain pipe, on the western side of the creek. Here is the location of Fulton Bottoms. The name given to that piece of land because it was adjacent to, and probably owned by the Robertshaw-Fulton factory. Weston Fulton was the inventor of the sylphon or bellows, used in just about all machines containing thermostats, or detonators regulated by pressure such as depth-charges, used as well in rocketry, automobiles, and much more. He was called by some, “Edison of the South”. Like Edison, held a large number of patents and he also became a multi-millionaire. For the years around 1920 the factory was Knoxville’s largest employer. Throughout my youth I walked or rode past the factory a multitude of times and used to go there to the entrance, when the shifts would change, to try to sell raffle tickets for school events or candy for scouts. Once, someone gave me a puppy there. When she grew up a little, she could run around the top of the brick wall in the back yard at full speed and catch birds in flight. I was sure that dog thought she was a cat. I was forever unable to fulfill the quotas of those projects for raising money at school, always content, as I was, with just watching people interact with one another.
I suppose technically, as Cumberland Avenue becomes Kingston Pike, where the road crosses over the bottoms there at Third Creek, that should be the place where the name-change takes place. The bottoms, on the other hand, continue under the bridge at Cumberland Ave. and include the creek-side land that is designated as Tyson Park. The low bottom land switches sides a couple of times the farther you go up the creek for the length of the park toward the north-west until the creek disappears into the thicket beyond there in a faint scent of coffee. On the cliff above Third Creek was Tyson Jr. High School, my alma mater. Back then there were no middle schools. Some elementary schools took students through the sixth grade and such was the case with me at Fort Sanders Elementary. Students were then sent to junior high for the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, then they went on to high school. It was at the beginning of the eighth grade that I came out for football at Tyson Jr. I was as ready as I could be to become one of the “Generals”, as we were called. I suppose the name referenced General William Sanders and General James Longstreet of Civil War fame since there was a battle nearby where the blood of eight hundred dead and many more wounded soldiers drained back down the hill into Third Creek, almost exactly one century before this story began. It makes me wonder that if the South had won the Battle of Fort Sanders, would it have forever been called the Battle of Third Creek? To the victor go the spoils. Anyway, the Generals had a new head coach, a can-do sort of guy and a young man, too. He had a problem, though, no place to practice this group of wild-haired gangly and unkempt teenagers who looked like anything but a football team. After a cursory reconnaissance of the area around the school, he focused on Fulton Bottoms, for the lack of a better place. Sure, it was a muddy bottom and subject to flooding and all, but it was flat and plenty big enough. We all were marched down there and unceremoniously put to work clearing all the old logs washed up onto the land above the creek bed and then to picking up all the driftwood and flotsam that collect in places like that over the years. We teens grumbled and gnashed our teeth over the fact that we had never bargained for this. Of course the mosquitoes and the August heat were no help to us either. All we wanted was to start playing football. A week or so later we did start to divide up into squads for drills and later still, we all were proud of our new practice field that had been reclaimed from the wilderness.
Just before the end of the season, the rains of November began, and with them as if on cue, came change on a grand scale. When in English
class I heard word come over the recently installed public address system, fulfilling its appointed purpose by announcing to the horrified class, that the president of the United States had just been assassinated in Texas. No, this was not some kind of weird fire drill, this was reality. Somehow, reality was suddenly a changeling, some of our innocence had been washed away. The whole consciousness of the country was united in shock and sadness of a sort unlike any I had ever experienced. The pall of dark feeling lasted for months. Nothing else was talked about, written about in the Newspapers, or seen on TV it seemed. All three channels were consumed with the story. We never really found out what actually happened, but we were young and resilient. We were the “Baby-Boom” generation. We thought we could change the world. It was a world then that was, as were the times, in need of a changing.
Early in the following spring that catharsis brought on a rebirth of the spirit. It was a remarkable recovery. It came in the shape of the new music coming out of Briton picked-up on by the youth of this country. Through old timey Country, Blues and folk music rooted in union organizing, civil rights and women’s liberation movements happening in our own country at the same time, the excitement that was in the air was palpable and it definitely struck a chord worldwide and here too, because East Tennessee has always been one of the major wellsprings in the world of music. The music moved the culture itself from a feel-good, sing-song ditty oriented stasis up to another level marked by a more serious and searching, yet more self-assured celebration of a whole generation. I even got a spark of the need to play music too at that time when we used to play-like we were a band while listening to 45 rpm records in the basements of my friends’ houses. We would pick up brooms or tennis racquets to act out the songs and maybe use a flashlight to simulate a microphone. Sometimes we would try to sing with the records and sometimes we would pantomime. We had a great time doing all that, but, eventually there were some basements where guys that actually played the music were learning the songs we heard on the radio. About that time we thought it was great fun that it was actually our own Tennessee History teacher that was nick-named Bird Dog in a song that was, not so long before, a hit on the radio. The new sound coming across the ocean was not that different from the sound coming from our own city and was being appreciated all over the free world.
May Day was a holiday celebrating new beginnings we used to observe when I was a kid, anymore though, we no longer treat it with much fan-fair. One of the last that I do remember was there on the banks of Third Creek that May after Kennedy’s death. Until then, there were still field events such as broad jumping, High-jump, and dashes for the boys and the girls for trophies. There was as a grand finale, the dance of the May-pole, with all the colorful streamers woven and unwoven by the girls dancing one direction and the boys in the other. Music was played on loud-speakers put out the windows of the gymnasium way up at the school, making the music sound strange and otherworldly, mysteriously wafting through the valley bellow. We drank Cool-Aid and ate sugar cookies and even played ‘Red Rover, Red Rover, Won’t You Come Over?’. Later, there was a concerted effort to propagandize the Russian threat by eliminating the celebrations and concentrating on the menace of missiles on parade in Red Square. After that I always thought the Ruskies may be mean, but at least they knew how to have fun.
As the next year came around we moved our ball practices up the creek so as to be ever closer to the school. We set up camp right across the creek where it hugged the cliff below Tyson with it’s form looming and hulking like an art-deco version of a medieval castle high above. One afternoon, while we were running a scrimmage, one of our team-mates broke a bone in his arm. Someone who had a car took him to the hospital and we went back to our football practice and all were thus engrossed, when all of a sudden, we heard a yell that turned into a scream and then a thud with the sound of the ripping of fabric, the breaking of branches and finally after a pause, a big splash. That’s when I looked to see Mr. Riddle slowly rise up out of the creek like a freshwater Poseidon and climb up the bank toward us. He was shouting, “Where’s my boy, my son is hurt, where is he!” We were sorry but had to tell him his son was taken to the hospital a half hour before. It’s a miracle he didn’t kill himself falling off that cliff. We couldn’t help it if we all rolled on the ground with laughter after he left with his torn clothes hanging off of him and dripping wet to find his son at Fort Sanders Presbyterian.
Then there was the time our coach got into an argument with some guys we nick-named the “hoods”. They were guys that were not into playing football. They had said to him in Phys. Ed. class that they could beat our football team without any practice or coaching. Coach took their challenge and he told them to show up down to the practice field after school one day. There we were as usual in our full gear, helmets, pads, and cleats, and these guys showed up wearing pegged jeans and tee shirts with cigarettes rolled in their sleeves and loafers and their hair slicked back in ducktails. We kicked off to them and after that play they took off their loafers. They couldn’t do much for a series of downs and had to kick back to us. They told us we had to take off our helmets, so we did and they punted. We had our series of downs and scored a touchdown. That was all they could take, walked off complaining how
it was so unfair, but we shouted back that it was they that had challenged us. We never heard anymore from the “hoods”, after that day.
I did eventually start singing and playing harp (harmonica) for a real band at that time. We practiced in a garage behind a house on Clinch Avenue, down on the lower end near the railroad tracks but up across Cumberland Avenue by a couple of blocks from my family home and close to the Fort Sanders School we had all had attended a couple of years earlier. Things started in earnest when we got a drummer. His family was quite well off and so that’s when our group moved to a practice space that was nicer than the houses where some of us grew up. We called our band Saint John and the Juveniles. Some other guys, our contemporaries from across town, a rich boy band became our nemesis. Our drummer, Saint John and Sir Alex, the drummer of Sir Alex and the Absolutes, had known each other from before and when each got a band of his own, the rivalry was on. They played more soul and American beach music while we were playing more rhythm and blues, English invasion and old time rock and roll. Those were indeed heady times and we had more fun than ever, stylin’ and profil’in’.
Music of a much different quality came to the Third Creek valley when, in the early seventies, the powers that be at the university banned the free concerts that began at Circle Park on campus when they took a more radical turn. The youth of Knoxville would not be denied their reason for being, much less their collective voice of the times. Some musicians went to Canada and left the madness behind, but some new ones came and things were changing fast. That’s when the valley resounded with wailing guitar music and the songs of the local music scene, bringing more people to my old stomping grounds in Tyson Park than ever before. It was all free and it rocked. People spread out quilts onto the ground to picnic. Love and Frisbees flew all around.
Jumping ahead again, in Fulton Bottoms, someone by then had built a back-stop down there for the playing of baseball or softball. The field had fallen into disrepair once more and was in need of another facelift. Some of us that hung out and worked around the Cumberland Ave. Strip, just up the way, started a mixed sex softball team, The Odyssey, a head shop and leather working establishment sponsored us and gave us all team jerseys. Due to our unconventional make-up, we called ourselves The Odyssey Chubbyknuckles. There were men’s leagues and there were women’s leagues, but none of those leagues would suffer us to be included on their rosters for the season. We could not be denied our season in the sun, so, we claimed Fulton Bottoms as our home field. We mowed the field, lined the foul lines and batter’s boxes just right and as a finishing touch, I mowed a huge “C” into the tall grass on the hillside beyond and overlooking what would be centerfield. Sundays was a day when all the city league teams looked for a practice field, so word got around. On fourteen consecutive Sundays our team took on all comers and as unbelievable as it sounds, we won all those games but one. Chalk one up for the unconventionally challenged of the world.
The University of Tennessee’s Rugby team has been for a time the custodian of Fulton Bottoms, as long as most people can remember, that is, except for a few of us still able to tell of the times back before it
Got filled in and graded and sown and manicured into the great looking pitch it is today. Then, this last year they tore down the old factory complex, just a little downstream from the bottoms, completely. Thinking back on these stories, it all makes me wonder what the future holds in store for the places that still live so vividly in memory. What has happened in a given place or time, is really all we have to go by in looking for a reflection that resembles that from whence we came and the people we once were. Otherwise we are at the end of our ability to consider meaning within the human experience itself.
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