Gavin Radcliffe
Customers of Raddy’s Liquor Center on North Broadway were dismayed Oct. 19 to find the shop closed and a notice on the door explaining that all the employees were attending Raddy’s funeral.
“I didn’t even know Raddy was a real person,” one regular customer remarked.
He was indeed real. Granvil William “Raddy” Radcliffe, II, founding owner of Raddy’s Liquor, died of cancer on Oct. 15 at age 80. Earlier this year, Raddy signed the business over to his youngest son, Gavin Radcliffe, who plans to continue Raddy’s unchanged; same name, same location.
Raddy started Raddy’s Liquor in 1967 in the Andrew Johnson building on Gay Street. In 1970, he moved to the Broadway Shopping Center, where the liquor store was wedged in beside a barber shop and a small Kroger grocery store. When Kroger expanded in 1984, he moved his business just across the street to the yellow brick and cinder-block building where it’s been ever since.
Gavin started working in his dad’s liquor store in 1995 when he was 18 years old, and worked every Friday and Saturday throughout his college years at UT. Gavin’s two older brothers, Granvil (named after his father) and Gary, worked in the liquor store too, but moved on to other careers. Gavin stayed, and last Friday evening found him working later than usual, attaching price stickers to bottles of wine. The sun was just setting in the sky, and business was picking up.
Gavin is “very aware” that he works on a block affectionately branded the “Fellini District” by local quipsters extrapolating from the Broadway “Fellini” Kroger. For several decades the grocery store has been notorious as the place to witness eccentric characters and poignantly absurd vignettes, like those found in the films of Federico Fellini. The name “Fellini Kroger” is perpetuated by occasional articles like this one, and at least two Facebook groups dedicated to “our beloved freak show of a grocery store.”
“In this location you get people who don’t come in fully dressed, at times, no shoes. We can [also] have a lawyer, a student, a professor, a nurse, all in here at the same time in this area,” Gavin says.
Broadway Towers, Section 8 housing for low-income and elderly people, sits just up the hill from Raddy’s, no doubt partly responsible for the high concentration of poverty and dementia in the area. Also nearby are law offices and the gentrified historic Fourth and Gill neighborhood, so Raddy’s sees quite a mix.
Recently, alert customers spotted a bottle of Boone’s Farm malt liquor standing in for Chianti in a Fellini Kroger-style-fancy Taste of Italy display. With the recent passage of the wine in grocery stores bill, Kroger may soon stock the real thing.
Gavin says he does not not feel unduly threatened by the new competition. Raddy’s store sales break down to about 75 percent liquor and 25 percent wine. Gavin has a $200 bottle of cognac for sale, but says his bestseller is cheap vodka, especially the $2 half-pint, with the cheapest mini bottles at 75 cents each. He says an average sale is $11. Under recent laws, he can now sell beer and mixers, too.
Shopkeeping runs in the Radcliffe family. Raddy was born in Copperhill, Tenn. His father, Granvil William Radcliffe the First, had a small grocery store in Copperhill, where Raddy picked up his first shopkeeping experience. He joined the Navy and was stationed in Hawaii where he ran a convenience store. After the Navy, he returned to Tennessee, graduated from UT, and started a family. He spent most of his life in Knoxville. Raddy was married to Nina Radcliffe for 47 years, and outlived her by only 11 months. She passed away last Thanksgiving.
Raddy was well-known as a salty character with a naughty sense of humor, an avid gambler and card player who spent a lot of time in Las Vegas in the 1960s and ’70s. Later, he liked to play golf at Fox Den Country Club in Farragut. Once, as family legend goes, he golfed with George Lindsey, famous for portraying Goober Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show.
“He was hilarious. My brother Gary always said he was a mixture of Jackie Gleason, Rodney Dangerfield, and Archie Bunker… extremely dry humor,” says Gavin.
Can he repeat any of Raddy’s jokes? No, it seems Raddy’s humor was too salty for a PG-13 newspaper, and anyway, Gavin’s loss is as-yet fresh for jokes.
Did everyone call him Raddy?
“No,” Gavin says, “I called him Dad.”
Eleanor Scott's Possum City explores our urban forests, gardens, and wild places, celebrating the small lives thriving there. A freelance writer and columnist, she also maintains the Parkridge Butterfly Meadow in East Knoxville.
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