Category: Knoxville

LENOIR CITY — Earl Pettus, 68, walks down to the dock every Sunday and looks at Fort Loudoun Lake before he writes “Water: present” in the sailing club’s log, as someone has done since 1958. He would like it noted that he is not avoiding the chairs.

KARNS — Wendell Hatmaker, 78, shoots the northeast corner post of his fence every April and finds it three-eighths of an inch east of where it was the year before. He has been moving his chair to match.

A six-hour standoff outside a right-wing forum in the Old City ended at kickoff, when both sides agreed the Tennessee game should be on.

KNOXVILLE — Carol Pruett, 63, has kept the Madagascar flat-tailed tortoises at Zoo Knoxville since 2002, and this fall she started training the person who will take over from the person who will take over from her.

A Visit Knoxville clerk signed for a top-honors trophy meant for the Knox County in Ohio and covered the word Ohio with a $3.99 souvenir sticker. Visitors have since tried to buy it.

KNOXVILLE — Rhonda Teasley would like whoever measured the back door at 9630 Kingston Pike to come back and measure it again with the door open. She has worked the Nov. 1 changeover there for three different chains, and the six-foot animatronic has outlasted all of them.

HALLS — A Halls man hired sheep to clear the poison ivy off his back slope so he could stay inside, and has spent every weekend since setting out folding chairs for the neighbors who come to look at them.

KNOXVILLE — Walt Dossett, 69, finished a library book in April 2019 and has been trying to return it ever since. Each time, the desk hands it back with a new due date and a bookmark.

KNOXVILLE — Dennis Talley keeps $4.12 in a sandwich bag in his truck’s console so he can get it under a loose paver on Gay Street before work. A paving crew found the 1911 ledger that says he owes it, and nobody at any of four banks can say to whom.

KNOXVILLE — Hollis Loy, 77, retired from Neyland Stadium in 2011 and still visits the lost-and-found shelf, which holds 31 left shoes from 40 years of home games and no right ones.

ANDERSON COUNTY — Wanda Pruitt Sizemore keeps two TVA mileage forms in a bread bag under her oven. Her grandparents moved their house up a ridge in 1935 and back down in 1936, and both trips were paid.

KNOXVILLE — A TDOT sign-shop worker lettered CLOSED PERMANENTLY for the Cusick Road ramp, then received a second sign reading THROUGH FALL 2027, and would like to get back to his speed limit sign.

KNOXVILLE — Earl Lawson, 79, has paid the fare on his old KAT route every Tuesday since 1996, and keeps a pencil notebook of the stops he has been told were “temporarily” moved.

A misfiled box of Bureau of Prohibition reports describes the same warm still, the same dent and the same cup on the same stump across ten years of visits to Walter Blevins’s hollow.

The city’s 1937 ledger lists exactly 4,312 WPA blocks on Kingston Pike. A curb crew has now found a 4,313th, and it is an inch taller than the rest.