When TAMIS donor Joe Longmire brought in a collection of home movies recently, there was a surprise at the bottom of his bag full of films: reel-to-reel tapes containing the audio of a 1964 episode of WATE’s TV Classroom Quiz. Longmire was a contestant on the program, which pitted Gibbs against Powell in the Scholars’ Bowl-like contest, and his parents recorded the audio from their television. No film or video survives, and a few photographs from the set are the only other evidence of the show’s existence.

In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for stations to record over taped programs to save money, and to send film to the landfill to save space. Most station managers didn’t think what they were doing would ever be of historical import. It’s only because of people like Longmire’s parents and forward-thinking producers, hosts, engineers, camera operators, and others working in television that much pre-1970s material has been saved and found its way to archives like TAMIS.

One person who saved a good deal of interesting programming was the host of Classroom Quiz, Jack Wiedemann. A few days before Christmas, we took Wiedemann a CD of the Quiz audio and interviewed him about his life and work in broadcasting, particularly his time in Knoxville. I don’t have the space to go into all of Wiedemann’s accomplishments as a local television pioneer, but Jack Neely wrote an excellent biographical piece on Wiedemann in the Oct. 24, 2013 issue of Metro Pulse that I wish I could direct you to online. (Since I can’t, I’ll put in a plug for Neely’s subject files at the McClung Collection, where you can find most of his articles going back to 2002.) I’ll focus mostly on the contents of Wiedemann’s archives.

Wiedemann was born in New Orleans to a performing family that included the Wiedemann Bros. circus troupe. He started his broadcasting career on radio in Harrisburg, Ill., and then worked at several television networks in the South, introducing viewers to such talents as James Brown, Brenda Lee, and Jim Nabors. He moved to Knoxville in the late 1950s, working at WATE studios on North Broadway, where Petree’s Flowers shop is today. Before it was a television studio it was a mayonnaise factory, and Wiedemann says it reeked of rotten mayonnaise. Later, Wiedemann, who has a degree in architecture from Columbia University, would convince the station to move into the more refined setting of the Greystone building. He says he even helped design the studios there. He produced and hosted a variety of shows for WATE, from which most of his collection at TAMIS is sourced. When asked why he kept all of the audio and video all these years, why he took them home in the first place, he says simply, “I was proud of them.”

Some of the more interesting items from his collection include audio from Cas Walker’s evening show on WATE, which Wiedemann produced. Other than a short commercial, no film is known to survive from Walker’s WATE show, and these recordings from 1959 and 1961 are the only known audio recordings. The sound quality, sourced from open reel-to-reel tapes, is excellent. You can hear Willie G. Brewster’s quartet performing a lovely gospel performance of “Reunion in Heaven”; Red Rector and Fred Smith tell jokes and run through a flawless version of “Gathering Flowers From the Hillside”; tap-dancing youngsters Curly Dan Bailey and Glory Belle, who were going to do “Today I Burned Your Love Letters” but realized they didn’t know the words so settled for the reconciliatory “Let’s Be Sweethearts Again.”

A big part of the recordings, naturally, consist of Walker hawking wares at his supermarkets and reeling off his hard-to-beat prices. If you’ve seen clips from his shows floating around online, you know even these seemingly mundane activities can be fairly entertaining. Walker is “as unhappy as he can be” that his Midtown supermarket ran out of meat over the weekend, taking the time to list  all of the missing meats. It was uncalled for, he says, sounding genuinely pained, before threatening the butcher on air. He’s perturbed there was no one at the snack bar that day, either.

Perhaps inevitably, Wiedemann says he and Walker had a disagreement when Walker wanted to use his show to promote his political ambitions. The producer reminded the host of the equal-time rule, and cut the show off the air, surely the only person who ever dared such a thing. Walker threatened to have his job, and Wiedemann reminded him he was doing his job. He says Walker respected him even more after that.

Through a Walker-sponsored contest, he also helped his old friend Jim Nabors cut his first record, in New York City. It was an ill-fated attempt at rockabilly, which you can hear online via the TAMIS Facebook page.

Wiedemann was also a staunch supporter of Al Carpenter, best known as Captain Al on the local installment of The Popeye Club. Carpenter had a good singing voice that lent itself well to the folk boom of the 1960s. Wiedemann recorded a two-song demo he tried to shop around and produced The Al Carpenter Variety Show. Carpenter does pop-folk takes on songs like “Take This Hammer,” “Cotton Fields,” and “Oh Shenandoah, I Long to See You,” with ace Knoxville wrecking-crew players Chubby Beeler, Ray Rose, and Stoney Stonecipher backing him.

Another curio in the Wiedemann collection is an audio recording of two live 1962 Stepin Fetchit performances at Whittle Springs Hotel, from which WNOX was broadcasting at the time. Much of the routine is old vaudeville style—wife and mother-in-law jokes and bad puns—but there is a fair amount of racially based material. It’s an excruciating listen, especially during the laughter of the well-heeled, all-white audience. Knoxville would desegregate the following year, and the recordings are an interesting cultural document that displays the sort of ingrained mindset civil-rights activists were up against.

After leaving Knoxville in the early 1970s, Wiedemann opened a pair of nightclubs in Virginia called the Roaring Twenties, where a young Pat Benatar got her start as a flapper-styled waitress and singer. There are lots of stories about the Roaring Twenties, but we’ll leave those for another time.

Wiedemann continued to work in television in Richmond and even invited Al Carpenter up to host another variety show. He would go on to work in film, on projects such as Gator, Smokey and the Bandit, and The River. He still keeps his hand in motion pictures today, operating out of a West Knoxville home that resembles a ’70s bachelor pad trapped in amber, where an illuminated sign above the driveway lets visitors know they are entering “Shangri-La.”

Eric Dawson

Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.