KNOXVILLE — Sharon Whitlock, 58, signed for the box on Tuesday because she was the only one at the front counter of the Visit Knoxville center on Gay Street. The box was addressed to the Knox County Convention & Visitors Bureau. Inside was a glass trophy, about 18 inches tall, awarded to the Knox County bureau in Mount Vernon, Ohio, for top honors at the Ohio Conference on Travel.
Whitlock called the number on the packing slip and was told the conference office would call her back. She set the trophy on the counter by the brochure rack to wait. By Thursday, she said, people from Ohio were standing in front of it with their phones out.
“A lady asked me if Mount Vernon was our sister city,” Whitlock said. “I said no, that’s Ohio, they’ve got a Knox too. She said well, that’s nice. Then the next group did the same thing, so I went and got a sticker off the rack.”
The sticker is an orange outline of Tennessee with KNOXVILLE across it, and it covers the word Ohio on the base. The price is on a label on the corner, which Whitlock said she did not notice until a man from Kentucky put four dollars on the counter and waited for his penny.
“I said it’s not ours to sell,” she said. “He said then why’s it marked. And the rest of them ask what we won. I say it’s Ohio’s, and they say well, it says Knoxville right on it, and I say yeah, that’s the sticker, I put that on there.”
The Mount Vernon bureau has not said when it will send for the trophy. Whitlock said the sticker comes off the glass without leaving anything behind, and she knows because she tried a corner.