KNOXVILLE — Ray Dockery, 62, a foreman with the Knoxville Utilities Board, has spent his last nine lunch breaks on Gay Street with a tape measure, looking for the door that goes with the awning his crew dug up there this month.
The awning was folded in a trench about four feet down, with a paper tag still wired to one corner. The tag reads “$4.50 delivered” over the name of an awning company that closed before Dockery’s father was born, and a pencilled date of 1912. Nobody at KUB asked him to return it. The utility’s position is that it will be hung again once somebody finds the door, and Dockery took that as an assignment.
The awning is seven feet four inches across the mounting edge. He has measured twenty-three doorways and says none of them are right.
“Everybody’s door is narrower than it ought to be, because somebody put glass in it in the seventies and moved the frame in,” Dockery said. “Or it’s wider and they’ve got some other door in there than the building came with. I stood in front of one place and the man inside came out and asked if I was with the church. I said KUB. He said what does KUB want with his door. I said I just want the number across. He said it’s a door. And then I’ve got half my lunch left and I haven’t eaten, and I had mustard on the tape yesterday, so it’s on there every time I pull it out.”
The awning rides on the passenger seat of his truck, and Dockery eats standing up beside it.