It was spring when Alan and I paid a visit to the 100 block office of Knoxville History Project (KHP), the nonprofit devoted to researching, preserving and promoting Knoxville’s history. We wanted to share our big news in person: Alan was retiring, and I’d be taking over Inside of Knoxville.
It was important to me that Jack Neely, KHP’s executive director, be among the first to know. He’s been a mentor and touchstone for me over the years since we worked together at Metro Pulse in the mid-2000s (oh, and also our wedding officiant). The evergreen joke is that I was Jack’s twentysomething “boss,” and I guess technically I was. But for the record, I never touched a word of his stories, which frequently sprawled into many thousands of words. My assignment, as I understood it well, was simply to petition the publisher for more pages.
Paul James, KHP director of publishing and development, is a prolific writer/historian in his own right and a monthly contributor to Inside of Knoxville. His “Ghost Walking” series takes readers on strolls through Knoxville’s forgotten histories, where old stories still echo underfoot.
Alan had to peel off for another meeting—he’d already had the grand tour of “Underground Knoxville,” the section of the 100 block entombed when Gay Street was raised in 1919 to accommodate a viaduct over the railroad tracks. (Not to be confused with the ‘90s-era nightclub The Underground a block away. RIP.) But Jack was eager to show me around.
Just steps from KHP’s office, we slipped behind a door that’s meant to remain closed. Sunlight filtered through glass sidewalk blocks above as I disappeared into a vintage patina of Gay Street 100+ years ago. Antique streetcars and sepia storefronts, with ghostly figures floating through.
“Good place to murder someone,” I muttered, squinting into the darkness of a long subterranean tunnel. Jack lifted one eyebrow, barely, in that way he does.
Hundreds of footsteps pass overhead every day, never suspecting what’s beneath their feet.
History is one of the few natural resources that isn’t finite. There’s an abundance of it—an infinity, really. And yet so much of it slips, and continues to slip, through our hands. There’s no way to document everything. But historians like Jack and Paul have devoted their careers to pressing into public record everything of value that they can.
The History Project’s advocacy has many arms: books, articles, archives, educational talks and tours, consulting. Last Sunday, the organization hosted an “Open House in Underground Knoxville” in their space. I don’t think we were really supposed to go in the tunnel part — the office itself is quite underground enough — but our 6-year-old, Thomas, showed up in his Minecraft tee shirt and a headlamp, and how can you say no to that.
“At least he didn’t bring a pickaxe,” I told Paul.
They more or less looked the other way while we went in for some gawking and an impromptu shadow puppet show.
Jack was occupied by a line of people waiting to talk to him. We shared a passing hello, and intrepid reporter that he raised me to be, I took the opportunity to snoop around his desk.
“Wow,” I said to Nicole Stahl, KHP administrative coordinator. “Jack’s desk is pretty … wild.”
“Yeah,” she said, with a raised eyebrow of her own. “That’s one part of the office that we are not allowed to touch.”
I had some follow-up questions, to say the least. So I called Jack. In 20+ years I’ve never had the nerve to edit him, and I’m sure not gonna start today. So here’s the transcript of our conversation, pretty much in full, with just my own yip-yap trimmed for length:
LB: Hey Jack, how’s it going?
JN: Good, yeah, sorry I didn’t get a chance to chat with you more on Sunday. It was kind of a madhouse down here.
LB: I picked up on that and didn’t want to interrupt. But I’m working on a story about the History Project and weaving together a few things, and I just wanted to pick your brain a little bit.
JN: Which project?
LB: The History Project.
JN: Oh, our project. The project in general. I forget we have a project.
LB: For starters, Jack, I want to talk to you about your desk. A lot going on there.
JN: I’ll say.
LB: I think that when I visited before, I must have just walked right past it, but on Sunday I really took a moment with it.
JN: We don’t usually invite curious people, but, um …
LB: I’m concerned, Jack. The bookshelf looks like it’s about to tump over sideways.
JN: Yeah, our floor isn’t quite level, and that’s the whole issue with that.
LB: So you think it’s the floor’s fault, not the bookshelf.
JN: Definitely. With all the books … I guess there could be a better built bookshelf that would take into account the deficiencies of the floor, but yeah, and sometimes it falls over and I just deal with it.
LB: Interesting.
LB: My dad had a sign on his desk that said, “A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind.” I’m just curious about, like, when you’re sitting at your desk, do you know where everything is?
JN: Not exactly. But I can usually find it within two minutes or so. I have one side that tends to be more “in” and one side that tends to be “out,” to be filed. We have so many projects and we have them all at the same time. I do try to use files sometimes, but then a phone call comes in or an email and things get out of hand. I do try to clean it up every month or two.
LB: I’m trying to remember your office at Metro Pulse. Do you feel like it is messier now? Over the past decades, how would you say the state of your desk has evolved?
JN: I guess it’s how you define “mess,” I guess.
LB: Sorry, that was a judgmental word choice.
JN: I think I had more drawers at Metro Pulse, and that’s part of the issue.
LB: [Thought I keep to myself: OK, so we’re shifting blame from floor back to office furniture, noted.]
JN: We’ve just got these kind of cheap desks here, and we don’t have as many drawers that were useful to put things in. Also I think that at Metro Pulse I was usually working on maybe three or four stories at time, and now we have short-term projects and long-term projects, and some of them are book projects and some of them are just quick blog projects, and they all have notes connected to them. And I also take lots of notes on paper and keep all those notes and have different pages for different projects and things. So it probably is messier, now that you mention it.
JN: I still have my old Whittle Rolodex, which most of the people in it are dead now. But it’s still sometimes useful.
LB: I noticed that. And also, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I remember that book from your Metro Pulse office.
JN: There are some books I tend to refer to a lot more. And I guess those are the books that I have close by, but I walk across the way and go to the big bookshelves frequently too.
LB: A long time ago, you shared something with me about your brain. You were talking about how you see dates and years in, like, I believe it was different shades of gray.
JN: Yeah, that’s true. Very dark and light, too.
LB: Synesthesia. The same way that some great pianists sit down and they see notes in different colors, clear as day. Like, you can’t tell them that B-flat isn’t indigo blue, or whatever. That’s how their brain catalogues things.
JN: I don’t know how unusual it is, but it’s been that way since I was a kid. You know, the ‘60s are bright and the ‘50s are dark. Not in a sinister way; they’re just different, variegated shades of color or texture or whatever. I guess it might help me. Dates just seem like personalities to me, and it’s hard to imagine mixing up one with another, unless it’s a long time ago or something like that.
LB: I mean, it’s not normal but it’s real. I have something similar. I’ve spent a lot of time working in the UK and I see accents in angles. Like I can tell an Irish from a Scottish from a British accent, and different provincial British accents within British accents, because they present in different angles that are more acute or more obtuse. It’s very specific. I can’t explain it.
LB: Anyway, I’m still just thinking about your desk, and it seems like you can hold some space for chaos and you can sit with that, with so much going on all at once. But you also have a system of organization that you’ve established. I wonder how that mirrors or doesn’t mirror what goes on inside your own head.
JN: Well, it kind of informs what goes on to some degree. The “in” stack on my left side reminds me of “There’s that thing I need to work on” because it’s too easy to forget all the things you have agreed to do this month. We do the newsletter every two weeks, and an operations report every month for the board, and those aren’t even things that are part of our programs. But I’m making notes for the next talk I’m giving, and then we do a blog every month for Visit Knoxville.
And then we have what we call the donor column, which is something we send out to donors every month. That’s a different thing, and often it gets much bigger than I expect it to. Lately, they’ve been feature length, like the Scopes Trials piece; I meant to write a 800-1,000 word column and it is over 12,000 words. We’re not even getting paid for that, and it took a lot of research.
I often don’t bury stuff in files until it’s completed. So it’s lots and lots of notes. They’re not hard to tell apart, because you can look at the top of them and see what’s what they are. I’ve also got crossword puzzles and things like that, and books.
LB: When the Metro Pulse archives vanished overnight, I assumed that you had everything that you’d ever written backed up somehow. I recently learned that you didn’t, at least not all of it. And you were locked out of your email, which must have been pretty devastating too because you have always been very generous in your correspondences. I don’t mean to psychoanalyze you, but I wonder if that has colored the way you … [pause to rack brain for synonym for “hoard”] … keep records.
JN: Years ago, I used to keep everything I had written in files. I stopped doing that when it was going online and it seemed like it was permanent and easy to find, as it was 20 years ago, when the stuff we were doing for Metro Pulse was out there and the public could see it and we could see it. So I stopped saving all these yellowing scraps of articles back then, and I haven’t gotten back into the habit of saving paper as I used to. In fact, a lot of our stuff now is never on paper. But it has influenced us.
Our board made a choice to take custody of [successor to Metro Pulse] The Knoxville Mercury, so one of our many responsibilities as a nonprofit is to maintain the two-and-a-half years of the Mercury for public consumption. And as you know, we have tried to obtain Metro Pulse in the same way. And as you know, it hasn’t proven to be easy, or something we can justify the time for. Yet I hope to do that still sometime.
But what I save is mainly just my notes that I’m still working with. I sometimes weed them out a little bit, but I usually save most of my notes. And I’ve got a whole two drawers of filing cabinets of subject files, things that might be useful in the future for one thing or another, and then other old story files and notes on them in boxes.
I probably don’t really need to keep all that, but it’s hard to throw away anything, really. That cringing feeling of looking for something, ‘Gosh, could I have thrown that away?’ I would prefer to have the extra bulk than have that anxiety of having discarded something important.
LB: Right. But it must feel good to have autonomy over your organization now. You know, my Metro Pulse writing is gone, too. But it’s like, “OK, I’m the publisher of Inside of Knoxville now, and it would have to be over my cold, dead body that this website’s archives ever go away from the internet.’ We have that power now too, where we didn’t before.
JN: But it’s more responsibility in a way, too. I actually didn’t even know it was possible to do what the News Sentinel [owned by Scripps, which was bought by Gannett] did to Metro Pulse back in 2015. They shut us down in terms of email and all that right away, and I didn’t even have access to my computer anymore. Metro Pulse was still online for several months after it shut down, and then it was gone. And Joe Sullivan actually offered to pay them a significant amount of money to buy it back, and did not get a response from corporate or the board.
LB: It’s taken so much time and effort at this point to just figure out who owns it now. I mean, I’m sure there’s limited awareness at Gannett that they even own this and that it’s something of value to people, because it’s not really a monetizable thing.
JN: It says something about the way corporations work. Then again, it wasn’t even the corporation we were dealing with. One corporation was in the process of being sold to another, and the only people who cared about us were the people who were looking at the profits.
That’s the reason I don’t own stocks. The idea of people caring about something only because it’s making money is the problem. It’s not that they’re greedy people. The people they’re trying to please are people trying to save money for their kids’ education, or for their retirement, and they’re just saying, ‘Gosh, this stock’s going great, I’ll buy some of that.’ It’s not an evil thing. It’s just, corporations are like weird viruses that only have one purpose, and that’s to maximize profits.
And anybody who thinks that has something to do with improving a product just needs to look at the journalism experience with it, because often the great magazines, the great papers, are the ones that didn’t make much of a profit if at all.
LB: It speaks to the value of the work the History Project is doing now, and really anybody who is working in the history field. Like, somebody’s got to preserve all this in some permanent way, because it’s so vulnerable. The risk is so great that it just vanishes.
JN: Especially now, I think our generation is more vaporous than previous generations because the newspapers aren’t covering as much about us as they used to. In some recent work I ran across a couple of well-known people who, when they died at age 97 or something like that, the paper basically had a little family obituary but didn’t talk about all the things they accomplished in their lives. They’re people who would have been a front-page story if they had died at age 60, but they lived a long time, and the current young newspaper writers just didn’t recognize their name when they died.
LB: Everything is so piecemeal. We’re documenting our lives in these little snippets of social media and it’s increasingly rare to stitch all of those pieces together into a narrative. Like, pulling all of these little threads and weaving them so you can see the bigger story.
JN: I was working on a Bijou project recently and I didn’t realize it until about five years ago that I had memories of going to the Bijou Theatre before it was a porn movie theater. I think the first movie I ever saw in a theater was at the Bijou; I had to look this up to prove it, because I had a vague memory of it being in this dark, old building. But at age five, I saw the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone. My grandmother took me to see it, and sure enough, it was at the Bijou in 1963.
LB: No way!
JN: And I have a vivid memory of seeing this movie. And what I remember most was, they had this young kid that plays the future King Arthur, but they also have Merlin, the magician. And Merlin was, to me, the most interesting character in the movie. And he lived in a tower and had an office there, and his office was just piled and piled with books and papers. And they were all kind of leaning one way or another. And I remember he had candles on them.
He was always purely occupied with the subject he was working on. To me, at age five, that just seemed like an ideal way to live, for thoughts and collected wisdom and to have all this stuff at your fingertips. Maybe that’s a connection to the way I keep my desk now. That picture of Merlin and his tower was just more inspiring to me than the story of the kid pulling this sword out of the stone.
We chat for a few minutes longer, catching up on life stuff. I tell him Thomas is about to start first grade—six years old already. I picture Thomas in his headlamp, exploring the underbelly of the 100 block, and Jack at that same age, watching The Sword in the Stone at the Bijou, unknowingly tucking away the images that would shape him. You never know what will stick, what will influence the way a person sees the world.
Jack would never center himself in that story—he’s happiest as the narrator. But his story is Knoxville’s story, too.
Learn more about Knoxville History Project at the website here.