MetroPulse Stories: Features

Knoxville's Boat People

neely@metropulse.com (Jack Neely) — Wed, 23 May 2012 18:56:00 -0000

Surely one of the biggest surprises of first encountering Knoxville is that this peculiar place, 400 miles from the nearest seashore, and 1,600 miles upstream from any briny water, offers an abundance of marinas. Within an hour’s drive of Knoxville are about 20 of them. The smaller marinas offer around 100 boat slips, the largest more than 400, not counting dry storage. Most marinas seem to have people living at them, for practical purposes, whether openly or not.

Local Bassmaster Elite Competitors Go All Out to Win

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:34:00 -0000

Welcome to Day 2 of the Bassmaster Elite Series Douglas Lake Challenge. For the uninitiated, competitive bass-fishing is a real sport, and a hugely popular one—see that ESPN2 truck over there? See those fantasy fishing stats? At that booth you can win an autographed Kevin VanDam jersey; at this one you can take home your own Bass Pro Shop coozie.

Margaret Lazarus Dean and Christopher Hebert: The Hot Literary Couple Next Door

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:11:00 -0000

Young, talented, and attractive, Margaret Lazarus Dean and Christopher Hebert just might be the next hot literary couple. The married authors have both published their first novels to wide acclaim and are working on their follow-ups. Cari Wade Gervins takes a look at this literary household, and how the couple manages a family life while pursuing the world’s most solitary job.

Local Color: South Knoxville's Vestal Neighborhood

neely@metropulse.com (Jack Neely) — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:48:00 -0000

In the second installment of our series on Knoxville neighborhoods, photographer Shawn Poynter walks the streets of Vestal to create a wide-ranging portrait of this unique community.

Rossini Street Fair Takes on International Flavor

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:20:00 -0000

Festivalgoers at the 11th annual Knoxville Opera Rossini Festival will find familiar sights, sounds, and tastes—along with an exciting new experience and even a new name: The Knoxville Opera Rossini Festival International Street Fair.

The Battle Over the Birthplace of Adm. David Glasgow Farragut

neely@metropulse.com (Jack Neely) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:58:00 -0000

This Saturday morning, the Tennessee Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission will unveil a Civil War Trail Marker at Admiral Farragut Park on Northshore Drive. It will honor the renowned historical figure Adm. David Farragut of “Damn the torpedoes!” fame—a figure who’s also become a modern-day Hispanic American hero. But all the new attention is coming just as his presumed childhood home is being developed as an exclusive residential community. Last summer, the big, stone Farragut birthplace monument at Stoney Point vanished. All of which is pitting preservationists vs. a recalcitrant property owner. Jack Neely reports from the front lines.

Activist Larry Silverstein's Battle With TVA's Tree-Cutting

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:10:00 -0000

TVA is in the process of cutting down hundreds of thousands of trees across seven states, any tree TVA deems unsuitable that happens to grow on a TVA transmission line easement. Easement brush clearing is nothing new, but for the first time ever, TVA is clearing the full width of the easements of any vegetation that is over 15 feet tall. TVA says the change in policy will make everyone safer, but an unlikely coalition of environmentalists and property rights activists have joined forces to stop it. This group’s leader? Larry Silverstein. Cari Wade Gervin profiles Knoxville’s own Lorax.

Is There Any Hope for Beating Knoxville’s Notorious Pollen Problem?

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:30:00 -0000

You will probably sneeze before you finish reading this blurb. That’s because Knoxville is the reputed worst city in the U.S. for spring allergies. So what can you do about it? Cari Wade Gervin tries out several different treatments to let you know.

Going Gluten-Free

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:24:00 -0000

If you haven’t noticed, wheat allergies are hot—and eating gluten-free is the new restricted diet of choice. Hillari Dowdle (note: she’s the EDITOR’S WIFE!) explains the phenomenon and explores the local gluten-free scene.

Dogwood Arts Festival Revival

kennedyr@metropulse.com (Rose Kennedy) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:01:00 -0000

The fortunes of the Dogwood Arts Festival, launched in 1961, have fluctuated wildly over the years. By the late ’90s it had settled into an easily parodied collection of crochet Kleenex holders, hot-glue T-shirts, and church-bus excursionists for the most part. In 2008, not only was the festival short a director, it was fighting years, even decades, of identity crisis. That’s when Lisa Duncan took it over, and by all reports has succeeded in making it truly festive once again. Rose Kennedy stops to smell the dogwoods.

Bazillion Blooms or Bust: Repopulating Knoxville's Dogwoods

kennedyr@metropulse.com (Rose Kennedy) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:56:00 -0000

Jim Cortese says he didn’t care about getting credit for his idea. As a certified master arborist and passionate tree preservationist, he was just worried that the dogwood, namesake of the festival, high point of 60-plus miles of trails, had been “assaulted pretty intensely” in the past few years—nationally and locally.

Knoxville’s Ever-Changing Public Image

neely@metropulse.com (Jack Neely) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:37:00 -0000

John Gunther’s remark in his 1947 best-seller alleging that Knoxville was the ugliest city in America prompted a whole new Dogwood Arts Festival—and a civic insecurity complex. But Knoxville has enjoyed, or endured, several distinct spells of good and bad press. Though each review reflects a visitor’s limited view of the place, some consistent patterns suggest travelers’ impressions may reflect Knoxville’s real peaks and valleys over the years. Jack Neely shares our public image over the centuries.

Local Non-Profit Feral Felines of East Tennessee Helps Curb Cat Euthanasias

kennedyr@metropulse.com (Rose Kennedy) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:42:00 -0000

Feral Felines of East Tennessee has at least 4,000 "TNR"s (trapped, neutered, and then released wild cats) to its credit, many performed with the help of the University of Tennessee Vet School’s quarterly “feral fixin’” events, and has grown to 50 or more volunteers. Rose Kennedy hits the cat-herding trail.

Young and Sick: Fighting Kidney Cancer

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:11:00 -0000

According to the most recent statistics from the state, approximately 75 people in Knox County get kidney cancer every year. That’s the third-highest number in Tennessee, behind the more populous Shelby and Davidson counties. In 2010, 20 people died from cancer of the kidney or renal pelvis in Knox County, 7 percent of the state’s total deaths from those cancers. And that’s exactly the sort of cancer that writer Cari Wade Gervin was diagnosed with last fall. Here’s her account of dealing with the dreaded disease, from beginning to end.

Hodges Turns 120

brooks78@aol.com (Brooks Clark) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:24:00 -0000

This Ides of March brings a special anniversary to the University of Tennessee: the 120th birthday of Dr. John C. Hodges, longtime head of the English department, who would be counted among the most influential scholars in UT’s history even if he hadn’t written the Harbrace Handbook of English back in 1941 and used the royalties to build the library and endow a fund for the English department.

Julia Tucker's Life of Activism

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:58:00 -0000

Over three decades, Julia Tucker has contributed and raised countless dollars for charity, served on scores of boards, and became the city’s most influential AIDS advocate. She is a historic preservationist and a political activist who has never been far from the crossroads—if not the crosshairs—of Knoxville history. Betty Bean recounts her colorful life and her most earnest efforts.

Julia Tucker vs. Cas Walker

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:45:00 -0000

On November 30, 1979, millionaire grocer (that’s what reporters always called him) Cas Walker was stewing over the recent city elections. He was mad at Julia Tucker for refusing to support his candidate for City Council, so he dictated a three-page letter telling her off.

The Boxers: In the Ring at Knoxville's Ace Miller Golden Gloves Sports Arena

mconnergibson@gmail.com (Mike Gibson) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:00:00 -0000

If MMA has overtaken boxing as America’s favorite combat sport, you wouldn’t know from visiting Ace Miller Golden Gloves Sports Arena on a Tuesday night. More than 50 sweat-soaked young fighters, on some evenings, make the spacious gym seem almost cramped as they pound heavy bags, shadow-box, and spar with each other in two centrally located regulation-sized rings. Who are these people? Photographer David Luttrell and reporter Mike Gibson find out.

Photographer iO Tillett Wright Intends to Capture the Humanity of the LGBT Community in Self-Evident Truth Project

kennedyr@metropulse.com (Rose Kennedy) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:57:00 -0000

Widely known photographer, blogger, and LGBTQ activist iO Tillett Wright is coming to Knoxville as part of a the Self-Evident Truths photo project, a collection of thousands of unposed portraits intended to discourage anti-LGBT discrimination with simple images of real faces.

Tennessee's Red-State Blues

neely@metropulse.com (Jack Neely) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:24:00 -0000

While we weren’t looking, Tennessee does seem to have become dyed in the wool as a “red state,” a state that votes Republican in presidential races every four years. For most of its history, Tennessee was never subjected to the finality of a political label. By the recent criteria defining a state’s color, Tennessee was often a “blue state” as recently as 1996. So what happened? And what does it mean for us? Jack Neely ponders our redness.