Norma showed up at my grandparents’ house sometime in the late 1940s. In her teens, she had left her home in rural southwestern Virginia the day before, catching the bus …

The top executive, sole employee, and chief window washer of the Kalijah Window Cleaning Service was a small-statured, big-voiced character who was known around town as Squeegee. His unofficial headquarters …

In the mid-1960s, I was neighbors with a University of Tennessee animal-science senior in a two-story building that had been built as a motel. It was on Laurel Avenue a …

I was introduced to Clarence Bunch shortly after I became an employee of the Knoxville Journal in 1965. The Journal had its own clippings library, files of newspaper stories from the …

Two of my uncles, with assistance from a couple of baby alligators, founded Knoxville’s zoo. At least, that’s the story my mother told me. But I don’t want to mislead—the …