Ellen Cheever Rockwood's 1915 letter about her niece Betty meeting a man on a cruise

Transcribed below is Ellen Cheever Rockwood’s letter to her sister Charlotte “Lottie” Cheever Tucker from York Harbor, Maine, dated September 17, 1915.

This was written soon after the news that Lottie’s daughter, Elizabeth Washburn Tucker (Betty to her family; Backie to her grandchildren), had met, by “chance acquaintance on an ocean voyage,” Frank William Cushwa, an English professor at Phillips Exeter Academy.  The voyage was the second passenger ship through the Panama Canal and ended up at the Pacific-Panama International Exposition in San Francisco, whence Betty had sent an enthusiastic letter home on August 25, 1915.

Will and Lottie Tucker eventually announced the engagement of Betty and Frank in December 1915.

What is interesting in the realm of family lore is that Ellen does not seem to have known that the chance meeting on the cruise had actually been orchestrated by her youngest sister, Louisa Cheever, an English professor at Smith, and Miss Helen Pittman, a friend of the Cheever sisters at Choate School who knew Cushwa from his time on the faculty there. (Note Ellen's reference to Pittman's “recommendations.”) Betty’s Aunt Louisa had accompanied her on the cruise and “procured” the introduction.  

Chance meeting indeed. 

York Harbor, Maine

Sept. 17, 1915

My dear Charlotte:

     This is a very exciting corollary to the Panama trip! I hardly know what to think or say.  I have never seen the person to whom I could think with equanimity of entrusting Betty’s happiness and it is a bit difficult to get adjusted to having her carried off by a chance acquaintance on an ocean voyage “all of a sudden”!  But his recommendations from Helen [Pittman] seem to be high, and from what you say I should judge that Betty is not likely to find it so difficult to know her own mind as sometimes happens.  The visit from him at home will be sure to clarify things for her, and he can trust to her good sense and his comments to choose wisely.

     I agree with you that she would not be so likely to find city life so congenial.  And Exeter would not be very far away.  I can’t bear to think of how you will miss her when the time comes, or how we shall fare to have someone else taking her off to New York on little trips.  But much is the way of the world.

     We wanted awfully to lift the slight veil of mystery that seemed to surround Betty when she was with us, but we had to content ourselves to wait—

     When the time comes for us to give our blessing our hearts will go with—it, for Betty is very dear and precious to us both—and we have taken great comfort in her all these years.

     I hope her father is bearing the extra excitement and heat combined without too much fatigue. It has been very oppressive even here, but tonight a slight shower has cooled things.  We have decided not to leave early in the week, though Lizzie [Cheever Wheeler] goes to Long Island early tomorrow morning, and I have sent for Sarah to get our breakfast and tea and keep the house in order as long as we care to stay.  There is a chance that Lizzie may decide to return after her two weeks with her friends are up.  She is really a very excellent cook.

    Tell Betty she is not the only cause of punctures. Nat [Wheeler] came to tea Monday night and on the way up the hill said, “Doddie [George Rockwood], s’pose you should have a puncture here, could you get up to the house before you slipped.”  Returning after tea, lo! an ominous sound as he went up from the hedges.  So Nat and I walked home as George had to go back to the house to change his only white trousers before tackling it. Wednesday we had a fine trip to Exeter and back with Bancroft [Wheeler], but just as he passed the Breckenridge’s, the same rear tire that he had put on the night before had to come off he all the heat of noon hour on the highway!  Was it not curious three punctures within four days, after going 2,800 miles in three months without one!

   I am off to bed now as we rise early to see Lizzie off on the 7 o’clock train.

   My especially dear love to you all

Ellen

Jack Neely's Tribute to Bill Rukeyser

 Bill Rukeyser, 1939-2022

Of all maverick publisher Chris Whittle’s celebrity hires in the late 1980s, he may have been the most surprising, not that Whittle would have offered Bill Rukeyser a job here, but that the powerful editor would have taken it, moving from a high-profile career in business and financial journalism in New York to take a job with a famously unpredictable company down in Knoxville. The tall Princeton alumnus with a deep voice and formal bearing was a Wall Street Journal reporter before he found a place at Time, Inc., as managing editor of Fortune magazine, and later as founding editor of Money magazine. He arrived at Whittle in 1988, just as the company was planning its palatial downtown headquarters. First working on the top floor of the Andrew Johnson Building, Rukeyser was best known here for helming Whittle’s prestige project, Whittle Books, a series of short but substantial works by major thinkers of the day, including George Plimpton, Gary Wills, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The company crashed by degrees in the mid-1990s, “overextended,” as many assessed it, at a time when the company was venturing into unconventional television projects and a quixotic plan to overhaul America’s public school system by challenging it with a private model called Edison Schools.
 
Even more surprising than this publishing titan’s arrival was the fact that Rukeyser, unlike most of the other honchos including Whittle himself, stayed in Knoxville. While here, Bill Rukeyser created a glossy niche publication, Corporate Board Member magazine, which he created and edited from his office high in Plaza Tower. It had an exclusive audience of 60,000 subscribers, all board members of public corporations (“60,000 very interesting people,” he remarked). His Knoxville-based Bill Rukeyser, Inc., was also involved in other forward-thinking projects, like online auctions.
 
But after landing here, he and his English-born wife Elisabeth looked around with an open mind and got involved in a broad spectrum of worthwhile community efforts, including UT Medical Center, of which Rukeyser was chairman of the board; Knoxville Museum of Art, of which he also served as a director; and the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, of which he was a major benefactor, and one of its most regular attendees. Despite his button-down demeanor, he loved jazz, and was impressed with what Knoxville had to offer, especially through UT’s jazz program.
 
His preference for Knoxville first puzzled his colleagues in New York, but he explained it by citing its beauty—from his high office he could see “the mist rising off the river and the mountains in the distance”—and the city’s unusual openness to newcomers and new ideas. He and Elisabeth lived in Rocky Hill and convinced his old urban neighbors that life in Knoxville was “an acceptable eccentricity.”
 
He was a regular reader of Metro Pulse, and when it was terminated, he joined the cadre of people who attempted to revive its spirit via the Knoxville History Project. He was one of our first supporters, and served on our original board of directors. Thanks to his corporate-board member experience, he was the primary author of our original nonprofit bylaws (and patiently explained to me why we couldn’t just skip that part), and an important advisor on the complicated financial aspects of founding a nonprofit.

Although his chief interest in KHP was its support for our major journalism venture, the award-winning but short-lived Knoxville Mercury, he has remained a valued advisor in the five years since it closed. In early July, he helped us more accurately remember some details concerning the Whittle paragraphs in our new “Walking Literary Guide.”
 
In Knoxville he remained a formal New Yorker of another era, always in a dark suit, always with a bon mot worthy of Thurber. He loved humor, and always seemed to be restraining a pun, but somehow, I believe, got Knoxville to take itself more seriously as a worthwhile project.
 
Following his own wishes, no funeral is planned, and there’s been little public notice of his passing in the media—as of this writing, Wikipedia still refers to him in the present tense—but we can’t help remembering him, and finding inspiration in his example. 

~ Jack Neely

Great Grandmother Lottie Cheever's 1901 Letter about Yale's 200th Anniversary Celebrations

Below is my transcription of a letter dated Oct. 25, 1901, from Hanover, New Hampshire.  

I found it in one of the many boxes of letters to and from my great grandmother Charlotte “Lottie” Cheever Tucker (1887-1944) that I have in my basement.

The letter describes the elaborate celebrations surrounding the 200^th anniversary of the founding of Yale University, which took place 0ct. 20–23, 1901.  Lottie's account includes her husband, Dartmouth President William Jewett Tucker, meeting the new president, Theodore Roosevelt.  Interestingly, among many other notables, Booker T. Washington took part in the celebrations.

Probably Great Grandma Lottie was writing to her “Round Robin” of sisters and friends, who would circulate by mail a binder with the latest updates from each one of them, replacing their last letter with their new one and dropping the binder in the mail to the next recipient.

Lottie’s younger sisters were Ellen Cheever Rockwood (seated at right), Elizabeth Cheever Wheeler (standing), and Louisa Cheever (seated at left), who in 1900 had begun her long career teaching English professor at Smith College.  They are pictured below with their Auntie Elizabeth Cheever Washburn in 1886.

Here is my transcription (with some words I can’t make out):

My dear girls,

      Safely returned from out outing that was really most enjoyable though very fatiguing. It gave me an additional pang to find that Betty [Elizabeth Cheever Washburn Tucker, my grandmother, would have been 12] had had a crying spell of homesickness for her Mamma, but otherwise things seem to have gone on well without me.  Margaret McHugh’s trunk has come and she seems to be settling into her work pretty well.  I do not like her as well Mary, and she is not as neat: but I believe she will prove a better cook. I trust that Elizabeth [Cheever Wheeler] is well supplied by this time. It seems to me that I am very fortunate to have the change made with so little trouble or delay.

    The “Yale luck”, as the Harvard men would say, followed them as to ______ {Wrarten?]. Nothing could have been more propitious. Shortly after our arrival Monday night we were taken by the Mungers to a house on Hillhouse Ave. Which proved to be that of the sisters of Dr. Terry Englewood, who with his wife and daughters was our host for the celebration.  They both wished to be particularly remembered to Ellen and spoke warmly of her and Auntie [Elizabeth Cheever Washburn, widow of Worcester industrialist/philanthropist Ichabod Washburn (1798-1868)].  It was my pleasure to meet them.  There was quite a company of friends and neighbors to view the Torchlight parade, and M afterwards were served with bouillon & rolls, and ice cream + cake. The parade was a monstrous affair and very picturesque. All over the Univ. buildings, on the campus, and whenever it was wished to show allegiance to Yale, then more lines of Chinese lanterns, imported for the first time into this country from Paris. They were pumpkin-shaped and pumpkin-colored and were very effective. The whole town was as light as day and a blaze of color and sound. Beginning with the Harrises + Corps (?) whom we met on the street that night, we saw almost everybody we knew and met many others.  The English guests = the Messia (?) of Mansfield College, Oxford, were interesting, companionable people and I never tired of hearing her bold inflections and queerly-managed mouthings of familiar words.  Dr. White, the Ambassador, was my left-hand neighbor at table (I sat on Dr. Munger’s left) and he is a very charming man.  Mr. Hitchcock + Chandler, the two brothers-in-law of Mrs. Munger came and went at different meals, and the two children - Miss Rose – the invalid and Thornton, a Freshman – made the company at table- and it was exceedingly pleasant.  Tuesday A.M. we had good seats in the gallery of Battell Chapel, and saw the long procession of delegates and notables come in with all their “millinery” on.  It was a great show.  But the speaking did not come up to it, and the exercises were so long that in came one before the end.  I heard Parker’s “Hora Novissima” well-rendered, with a true (?) quartets of soloists, in the afternoon, and in the evening braved the tremendous crowd and more seats in the universe amphitheatre on the campus.  I never saw so many people together, but that was all I could see; For the women,—who had been admitted only on sufferance, at the last moment—stood up on the benches and in the aisles so that a good quarter of the alumni & guests could neither get their seats, nor having gotten them, see the stage. And this in spite of the maddening shouts of the young alumni, “down in front,” “ladies, please sit down” “ladies under 40, please sir down, all others rise.”  I blushed for my sex.  The singing of College songs, led by the band and a chorus, and taken up by all the 6000 or 7000 alumni was memorable, and the glimpses we had of the talk____ were enough to show how well-conceived and well-carried out they were.  The next morning, the Presidents’ arrival brought together a crowd of people that was absolutely terrifying. We made three attempts to get into the theatre when the degrees were conferred, but by the time we had reached the entrance the seats had been taken up, and along with hundreds of the alumni, entitled to fit in by virtue of their badges, we had to wait nearly an hour in order to get home again, without even a glimpse of the discussion.  It was very disappointing, and all the more so when the men came home and told us of the enthusiasm at fining (?) the defrus (?).  But President Roosevelt was entertained at a house only a few doors above the Mungers and we saw him driving by two or three times, and again at the reception in the new dining hall -- Prof. Ladd, next door, entertained Ed Marquis Ito (?) and we saw him several times also.  The President is not as good looking as his picture and William, who was invited to meet him at Mr. Farnum’s in the morning, says he talks too much and is undignified.  I watched the receiving party at the afternoon reception and was glad that they did not shake hands.  The crowd was so great there also that we did not attempt to get in line and greet the two presidents, but stayed on the outskirts, meeting various people and watching the interesting crowd- Pres. Seelye, ex-Pres. Carter, Pres. Buckham, Eliot, Murkland, Booker Washington, the Chief Justice, Philip Moen, Edward Everett Hale are some of those I met.  Sec. Hay, Dekess (?), Choate sat behind us on the Campers, and one could not stir (?) miture (?) encountering some distinguished person.  Mr. Frisail’s (?) degree was received with much applause and he was greatly pleased.  He called Wednesday evening while we were sitting on the piazza, watching the select coming and going from the Farnums’.  At 5 that afternoon the thermometer was 74˚! And the next day, on our return to Hanover there was sun (?).  We called on the Dwights Thursday A.M. and there met the Steadmans- not very distinguished in appearance or conversation.  And in spite of the _asturiss (?) of the whole celebration and the crowds of dignitaries which it brought together, I think the general impression was not of such distinction as ours.  The speaking here was of a much higher order, and some of the Yale men of this faculty thought the conferring of degrees were much more impressive.  We got ahead of Yale in honoring Sec. Hay and our Ruisman – shall be amused to see how Collin gets out of his sweeping statement on the pulpit.  He thought we were doing it on too great a scale and that it distracted from the dignity of the degree to give it to more than 3 or 4 men – “Yale + Harvard never do.”  And here there were 50 or more who were so honored at his own alma mater.

     Helen Pitman [who eventually arranged a meeting on a cruise between my grandmother and Frank Cushwa, who was then teaching at Choate] and the Choate School boys sent an urgent request to stop there, and I planned to take lunch with her on Tues.  Will could not leave, and when I got to New H. I found it would not do to try to get away.  I wish I might stop there and at Worcester on my return.  But at this distance it seems unwise.  Maggie is staying here 5 nights and begins work with us Monday.  My present plan is to join Will [Lottie’s husband, Dartmouth President William Jewett Tucker], at Hartford the evening of the 8^th.  Perhaps you might send this to Louisa [Cheever, teaching English at Smith]?  I rather hope she will spend the 3^rd with us, when Lyman Abbott [theologian, Congregational minister, pictured below] is to be here.  Mrs. Dr. Smith went to her H. w. the Dr. and had one of her ill times.  She asked for Ellen [Cheever Rockwood] w. interest.  With all dear love to you all, Charlotte  

 

The Great Hoskins Art Heist

By Brooks Clark

In the darkest hours of a sticky night in August 1973, no one on White Avenue noticed a stealthy figure crawling through a basement window of Hoskins Library. Inside, the intruder pried the lock off the door to the circulation department and went directly to two boxes, where they found a total of $102 and the master keys to the building. The burglar and accomplices then made their way to the top floor of the tower, which had been built in 1932 to house the collection of oriental and Turkish rugs, jewelry, sculptures, paintings, and Renaissance furniture—some 400 pieces in all—and several thousand volumes of art and travel literature that Louis and Eleanor Audigier had accumulated during 20 years living in Rome and donated to UT.

Louis Bailely Audigier had been born in 1858 in Switzerland and emigrated to Searcy, Arkansas, where he became a newspaper editor and publisher. In 1887, he married Eleanor Deane Swan of Knoxville. They first lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Audigier wrote for the Arkansas Gazette, then moved to Knoxville, where Audigier was a book printer and worked in various capacities on a monthly, The Industrious Hen, serving the poultry industry. 

Eleanor was an artist, active in the Ossoli Circle, who helped organize the Knoxville Art League. The Audigiers lived in an elegant house called Crescent Bluff at 3100 Kingston Pike. In 1911, they traveled for two years in Greece, Egypt, and Palestine, then settled in Rome, where Louis took photos for the New York Times, including portraits of Mussolini and a Pope Pius XI, published several books of his pictures of Rome, traveled and lectured. Eleanor, meanwhile, collected all manners of art, originals and copies, old and new. She died in 1931, and was buried in Knoxville. After Louis remarried in 1933, he gave Eleanor’s art collection to UT in her memory. In 1936, Louis and his new bride returned to Knoxville and settled into a large Victorian home on East Magnolia Avenue. He died in 1943 and was buried in Little Rock.   

In the relatively innocent era of 1973, there were no guards on duty or electronic surveillance cameras to watch over the Eleanor Deane Audigier Art Collection. The intruders came prepared: they had brought packing crates and straw packing material. They packed up some 80 objects on exhibit throughout the gallery and slipped them out the basement window. The list of the stolen goods ranged from five antique rugs and 23 sculptures to a mahogany model of a Venetian sedan chair, a brass French coffee pot from 1809, a 19th century nutmeg grater, and an Arabian dagger and scabbard. 

Since the thieves knew exactly where to find the master keys, the police assumed it was an inside job, although lie-detector tests on 50 employees revealed nothing. The larcenists may not have been art experts: they took neither the five Raphael paintings nor some of the other most valuable artwork. Nor may they have planned what to do with the goods once they had them. The pieces have never shown up in local pawn shops or on the international markets. The Knoxville Police never found any clues to lead them to the identities of the thieves. 

In 1978, the entire collection was moved to the McClung Museum, where it resides today in vault and storage rooms secured by several systems of locks, video surveillance cameras, and motion detectors. 

To this day, the Hoskins Heist remains the largest theft of art in Knoxville history and UT’s most perplexing unsolved mystery. If your great uncle has ever wondered about a remote barn or warehouse full of packing boxes, please call me at 865-310-1277.

 

The Scandalous Miss Evelyn Hazen

By Brooks Clark

Over the years, UT has been home to any number of “characters.” Not many of them, however, have been featured in the pages of Life magazine.

In 1914, green-eyed, raven-haired fourteen-year-old Evelyn Hazen graduated from her private girls’ school and enrolled in the University of Tennessee. The last of Alice Evelyn Mabry Hazen and Rush Strong Hazen’s three daughters, she grew up in the antebellum Victorian home at 1711 Dandridge Avenue, at the crest of Mabry’s Hill in Knoxville, with a majestic view of downtown to the west and the Tennessee River to the south. 

As a UT student, Hazen took the stage in Staub’s Theatre alongside a smooth-talking fraternity boy named Ralph Sharringhaus, the only son of a prosperous Knoxville businessman. They were engaged in 1917, but when the United States joined the war in Europe, Sharringhaus signed up for the Army and began basic training. On one of his weekend visits, Hazen fell for an old line—basically, “What does being married in the eyes of God matter when we love each other so much?” She regretted going to bed with Sharringhaus, she later claimed, finding the experience unpleasant. It also seemed to cool his ardor to marry her.

      

Hazen graduated in 1918 and took a job as a teacher in the Knoxville school system, eventually landing at Knoxville High School. For the next fifteen years Hazen tried to maneuver Sharringhaus to the altar. She joined him for weekends and vacations in places like New York and Asheville, alternately fending off his advances and acceding. Finally, in 1932, Sharringhaus dumped her. “There is no solution but to stop,” he wrote to her. 

     

After briefly contemplating killing him, Hazen decided to sue him for breach of promise. The trial, in Covington, Kentucky, made national news, especially as she testified about her humiliation as a woman betrayed and what she called Sharringhaus’s “perverted and lascivious” demands, as recounted by Jane Van Ryan in the book The Seduction of Evelyn Hazen.  

Hazen won the case, and the jury awarded her $80,000. Life magazine ran her picture and called Sharringhaus “an ardent wooer but a laggard groom.” Even though an appeals court upheld the verdict in 1937, she never received the money, lost her job as a teacher, and never recovered her ruined reputation.

      

Hazen lived out her life in the house on Mabry’s Hill. In 1951, John C. Hodges, the straitlaced head of the UT English department, hired her as his administrative assistant. Wagging tongues imagined some dalliance between the tweedy Hodges and Hazen; in fact, there was never a hint of hanky-panky, and the gossip is more telling about attitudes about female sexuality at the time. After Hodges died in 1967, Hazen continued to work in the English Department, patrolling the corridors like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play, carrying a loaded pistol on campus, and doling out office supplies like Scrooge, at least according to some. She died in 1987 at eighty-eight years old after falling in her home and suffering a stroke. Her will stipulated that her home be preserved and operated as a museum, which it is today under the direction of the Hazen Museum Foundation.

Source: The Seduction of Evelyn Hazen, available from UT Press, tiny.utk.edu/hazen 

Ken Medaris (1950-2020): An Improbable Life that Linked Weightlifting, Pro Wrestling, and "The Barn Dance" cable show

Back before spandexed multitudes swarmed tony places like Court South, Curves, and the Rush, before “personal training” was a profession, when the Downtown YMCA’s cinderblock basement weight room was known as “The Dungeon”—a few of Knoxville’s well-heeled doctors and businessmen discovered they could improve their strength and bodies by training under a former Sheriff’s department supervisor and pro wrestler named Ken Medaris. 

 

Ken Medaris (right) with pro wrestler Barry Windham    

   “Some people fish. Some people collect stamps. I love weightlifting,” said Medaris, a former 135-pound weakling who liked to say that he learned his bodybuilding techniques from a succession of experts who fortune placed in his path, each of whom had studied under one of the biggest names in the field. Under examination, this turned out to be true. 

     “He was not a bullshitter,” says Mark Hill, a local headhunter who trained with Medaris for several years. “He was such a colorful character and an interesting man.” From connections made training—mostly in the Dungeon—Medaris spent five years on the pro wrestling circuit body-slamming colleagues like the Mongolian Stomper, Klondike Bill, Professor Malenko, the Suicide Blond, and the Iron Sheik. “The best time of my life,” said Medaris. “We were stars. When we went through the Atlanta airport, we’d have to stop and give autographs.” Later, Medaris danced for five years on the Bagwell Communications cable show The Barn Dance. In real life, he worked for 16 years as a Knox County Sheriff’s Department officer and supervisor. 

     “He came from that old-school era of training,” says Clayton Bryant, former owner of Total Fitness, where Medaris trained clients starting in the mid-90s. “Back then weightlifting was a little more of a cult thing. It wasn’t as popular or widespread as it is now. It was a lot of bodybuilders, basic weightlifters, and wrestlers. For so long, athletes in other sports thought weights would take away flexibility or quickness. Now all athletes do it. Heck, even swimmers do it.” “He was Old School, but he was good old school,” says Hill. “He was smart about training. He knew. He didn’t let you hurt yourself and he was conscientious about form. Many people may not realize that he was a sensitive and deeply caring man.” 

Tiny Long Makes a Difference

In the summer of 1960, Ken Medaris was 10 and painfully shy. He was especially embarrassed that his legs looked like pencils. “I was always athletic,” said Medaris, “but I was always small. I was so skinny that it really had an effect on me psychologically. I wouldn’t go to McDonald’s to get a hamburger.” At a Saturday morning class at the Downtown Y, a 21-year-old counselor named David “Tiny” Long gave young Ken some tips. 

    “He took the time to teach me how to improve,” said Medaris. “He showed me how to sprint and told me to pick a mark on my street and run to it, then go a little further every day. He showed me how to do a lay-up and shoot a basketball, make a softball throw, do a broad jump. He told me to build a pull-up bar and do as many pull-ups as I could twice a day.” 

     At the end-of-summer decathlon, skinny Ken won top honors for Knoxville. “This is the possession I’m proudest of in the world,” he said, showing off a tiny gold award on a gold chain reading YMCA Athletic Achievement. “It was presented by John Duncan, the mayor. Jimmy Duncan was in my class, even though he was three years older.” “Tiny kindled my interest to build my body,” said Medaris. “He sent me on the road and had more influence than anything in my life.” 

     Medaris was born on December 30, 1950, in Knoxville, and lived for many years in the house he grew up in, on Lamour Ave., just off Hollywood Rd., near Pond Gap Elementary. His father, Paul, was a KUB lineman for 34 years. His mother, Hazel, worked in the cosmetics department at Miller’s Department Store. Ken moved back in to the family house take care of his dad in the 90s. “I played Midget football,” said Medaris, “but I was a tackling dummy.” His athletic career ended when he took a paper route at 13—but he did wrestle. Mr. Bowman of the Bowman Hat Company would stage impromptu wrestling matches among the kids and give a dime to the winner. “You can say that I did wrestle for a dime!” said Medaris. 

An Entrée to the Secrets of Pumping Iron

     After graduating from West High School in 1969, Medaris started at Hiwassee College. On Jan. 3, 1970, he walked into the weight room. The barbells were pipes with cans filled with cement at either end. The pulldowns were made of pulley and ropes from the hardware store. There, by what he calls a stroke of luck, the 6’1”, 135-pound string bean met a Brazilian named Evandro Camera who had apparently been carved from marble by Michelangelo. “He was five-eight and 220 pounds of solid muscle,” said Medaris. “I consider this the day I started.” 

     Back in Recife, Brazil, Camera had read all the magazines and learned about the top names in bodybuilding—especially the great Bill Pearl. Camera had embarked on a pilgrimage to Muscle Beach—Venice Beach, California—and asked, “Where is the home of Bill Pearl?” He moved into Pearl’s basement and learned the secrets of pumping iron, then earned a scholarship to Hiwassee. “We buddied up and he set out to train me and teach me what he knew,” said Medaris. “It started, as it still does, with the six sets of basic exercises: the bench press, squat, bent-over row, lat pulldowns, press behind the neck, biceps curls. I looked at all the magazines. They were baloney, other than Iron Man.” 

     Medaris trained for a year and a half with Evandro, then moved back to Knoxville and UT for one quarter in 1972. “I took a course in nutrition at UT at the Home Ec school. It was 70 women and me. Before there were protein shakes, there was Carnation Instant Breakfast. Starting then, I ate, slept, drank weightlifting. I became obsessed with only putting things in my body that would make my muscles grow.” 

      In the Dungeon, Medaris had the good fortune to get to know Bob Simpson, a commercial artist “built like a refrigerator” with a 55-inch chest who was Knoxville’s most famous weightlifter and even wrote for Iron Man. Simpson had trained under Paul Anderson, who once appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson billed as the undisputed strongest man in the world.. In 1974, “Simpson was one of the first men in America to overhead press 500 pounds,” said Medaris. Simpson did it in the YMCA. A lifter named Ken Patera did it in competition, stealing Simpson’s glory, but Medaris saw Simpson do it. He also saw Simpson partially press 820 pounds, bending a York Olympic bar double in the process. “That bent bar stayed in the Y for 20 years as a tribute.” 

Medaris watches the Stomper lift.  

Sheriff's Deputy and Pro Wrestler

      In 1974, Medaris was working part-time in a health food store when a U.S. Marshall came in—and started Medaris thinking about law enforcement. He took the test for the County Sheriff’s office and started out “at the bottom of the pole” as a process server. In a 16-year career, he worked his way up to officer and eventually supervisor. In the later 1970s, Medaris watched Southeast Champion and Smoky Mountain Wrestling legend Archie Gouldie, the Mongolian Stomper, who lived in Maynardville and East Knoxville. “He was the Stomper,” said Medaris. “It was so intimidating. For six months I was afraid to talk to him. One day I asked, ‘Could you tell me how to build my chest?’ I ended up training with him for over a year.”

The Stomper was Medaris’s entrée into professional wrestling, where Medaris was known as an “excellent worker”—meaning that he made the seasoned hands look good—and a “good hand,” meaning that he could handle the basic moves that audiences liked. “On the wrestling tour,” said Medaris, “you gotta be able to get along with people.”

    In 1981 Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had won Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe bodybuilding titles and been featured in the documentary Pumping Iron, came to Knoxville to do a promotion for Larry Jackson’s weightlifting equipment. 

     Medaris sat next to him at dinner at Jackson’s house. “We were the same height, 6’ 1”, and weighed exactly the same, 215. But my arms looked like spaghetti noodles next to his. I thought, how is that possible? He told me, ‘It’s 50 percent what you do in the gym and 50 percent what you put in your mouth.’ He told everybody he was on his way to Hollywood to make movies. Everybody said, ‘You’re on your way to the poorhouse—that’s where old weightlifters go.’”                     

      Medaris wrestled for five years and was always paid in cash. In 1983, he suffered a serious back injury, rupturing a couple of discs and ending his ring career. “It put me out of business.” Then came The Barn Dance at Bagwell Communications, which was then pioneering the production of shows to fill the vast expanses of cable TV. Medaris danced on 800 shows with Amanda Maples, now marketing director of the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce. Medaris met and befriended the original three Dixie Chicks (below), especially Laura Lynch, who was eventually Pete Bested in favor of Natalie Maines. 

The Accidental Personal Trainer 

      One day, in 1982, at the Knoxville downtown Y, Dr. Ray Depue said to Medaris, “I’ve been watching you, and you seem to know what you’re doing. I’ll be glad to pay you, but could you teach me how to lift weights?” “There was no such thing as a personal trainer in those days,” says Medaris. He trained Depue, which led to another client and another. He charged them $10 a session. When Depew built the Sports Farm, Medaris started training there. 

       When I-40/75 ran over the Sports Farm, Medaris moved his operations to other gyms. Around 2006, Mark Hill walked into The Gym, then owned by a former male model named David White, and asked for a trainer. “He looked me and saw that I was old and skinny,” says Hill, “and he shuffled me over to Ken. He sent the dregs to Ken.” Hill turned out to be a dedicated student who quickly doubled his strength. When The Gym ran into money problems, Hill helped Medaris set up shop at the Knoxville Racquet Club, where he trained clients for five years before his declining health led to his retirement. 

      Medaris died of various complications of heart failure on Thursday, December 3, 2020, a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday. I was lucky enough to win five training sessions with Ken Medaris at an Opera Ball auction. After those five visits to the Racquet Club, I signed up for many more and learned a regimen for the weight room that brings benefits to the present day. 

       I like to remember Ken quoting the bodybuilder John C. Grimek, known as “The Monarch of Muscledom,” who often said, “What a shame it is for a person to go through his life and not know the joy of a well-developed body.”

FRANK CUSHWA: A LEGACY OF PASSIONATE TEACHING AT 100

By Brooks Clark
From the Exeter Bulletin, Summer 2007

Beloved by his colleagues and students (including writers like James Agee, Robert Benchley and Robert Nathan), Frank Cushwa was “a skillful and sympathetic teacher who made a difficult subject living and thrilling.” He was also a puzzle.

One hundred years ago, Frank William Cushwa joined the Exeter faculty as an instructor in the
English department.
   At such a milestone, it’s fitting to assess Cushwa’s influence on the Academy over his 32-year
tenure. “From the moment he joined the faculty,” wrote Myron R.Williams in The Story of Phillips
Exeter, “he began arousing interests that had grown sluggish and set in motion new ones. Under
him the English Department truly came of age, and he gave new life to the Bulletin, which he

edited until 1933. The Davis Library, the Monthly, Academy lectures, funds for lectures and prizes, the Lantern Club, the Southern Club, the Musical Clubs, winter sports, new dormitories, the Art Department, the Dramatic Association, Phillips Church, the Problem Committee, the Harkness
Plan—these and other things received from him either the initial impulse or much of the momentum to make them go.”
  At the same time, the centennial of Frank Cushwa’s arrival at Exeter presents a puzzle. It’s not a puzzle we can solve, as much as we might like to, but it can perhaps draw us closer to a legacy
of innovative teaching.
  Cushwa grew up in Martinsburg, WV. He graduated from West Virginia University in 1902, got one master’s degree at WVU in 1903 and another at Harvard in 1904, then taught at Choate for
several years.
    In his first year at Exeter, Cushwa, then 26, assigned his class to write an essay on a practical subject. One student, the future humorist Robert Benchley ’08, sought out the local undertaker, who eagerly taught Benchley every gruesome detail of preparing a body for burial. Benchley’s essay nonplussed his teacher with its stomach-turning itemization of corpse-care. “Mr. Cushwa, who was young and rather shy, had a little trouble getting through it,” wrote Nathaniel Benchley ’34 in Benchley, a biography of his father.“He could not deny, however, that it was practical. He cleared his throat, wiped his glasses, and gave it an A.”
    Benchley carried his interest in embalming into his years as an Algonquin Round Table wit. He subscribed to undertakers’ trade magazines, and when he and Dorothy Parker shared an office at Vanity Fair, they decorated their walls with cadaver illustrations, which they found hilarious. When their editor told Benchley and Parker to take the pictures down, it fueled the world-
class humorists all the more.
    Benchley and Parker befriended Donald Ogden Stewart ’12, then an editor at Life. (Stewart later wrote humorous books and crafted many screenplays, including The Philadelphia Story, for which he won an Academy Award.) “One of the things which brought Robert Benchley ’08 and me together at
our first meeting 10 years later was our mutual affection for Cush,” wrote Stewart in Exeter
Remembered,a collection of essays.“A more imaginative nickname [than Cush] would have been
‘Dr. Johnson.’ He was perfect for the part. His fat body moved awkwardly; his one good eye glared
from his blotched face as he grunted out his angry judgments.We loved him. His Shakespeare
classes were the most popular in the curriculum. His student imitators (and they were legion)
could always get a laugh, but it was a sympathetic laugh.”
    Cushwa taught, inspired and instilled a love of literature and writing. “In the 1920s,” wrote
Charles Edward Wyzanski Jr. ’23 (a judge with the U.S. District Court of Boston) in Exeter
Remembered, “the Phillips Exeter Academy was the most incandescent place for a boy who was
ready for the world’s most stimulating teaching—the kind of fire that burned from Frank Cush-
wa with lightning force lit the wicks of a thousand waxen lads.”
     Cushwa was a member of the committee that created the Harkness Plan. In 1933, he published his
Introduction to Conrad,which used autobiographical passages from Conrad’s works to paint a picture of Joseph Conrad as a person and a literary craftsman. In 1936, Cushwa co-wrote, with Exeter colleague Robert N. Cunningham, Ways of Thinking and Writing, a textbook
of advanced composition that provides a window onto the passion for ideas and creative thought that made the Exeter experience unique. (Used copies of this textbook are still available through Amazon.com.)
     “Undoubtedly,” wrote Williams in The Story of Phillips Exeter, “Mr. Cushwa’s great gift was that of vitality.   He loved life himself and loved to see things live. His passion for shrubs and flowers was one example. With this love, however, went a lively sense of justice and a quick concern for the weak or the distressed. Almost best of all was his rich sense of humor, and his friends can still hear the hearty laugh that trumpeted the good joke.”
      Williams quotes a student who described Cushwa as “a skillful and sympathetic teacher who made a difficult subject living and thrilling, and an adviser of never failing wisdom and experience, a father and a companion. Patience and a sense of humor prevented him from ever
treating anyone harshly.”
    Then there is the puzzle. In the late 1930s Cushwa apparently fell into a depression—though no one in those days knew to call it that. On April 30, 1939, at age 57, Cushwa took his own life at the home of relatives in Worcester, Mass. As is often the case, no one ever really knew why, if there
was a why, or if there ever is a why. We certainly can’t escape the irony of a person who so loved life ending his own.
    While noting this mark of 100 years—and how distant it makes that era sound—we can at the same time remind ourselves that in fact it was just a generation or two ago. Frank Cushwa was my
grandfather. His son,William T. Cushwa ’36, 89, is my uncle Bill. His daughter, Charlotte Cushwa
Clark, is my mother. Now 90, Mom remembers James Agee ’28 walking through their garden behind Gilman House. “He was a very odd walker,” she says.“I didn’t know his name at the time, but I saw
pictures later and knew it was him.” Cushwa wrote in a recommendation letter for Agee, "He was meant for Harvard and Harvard for him." At one time my grandmother, Elizabeth Cushwa, had in her bookshelves a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that Agee had inscribed, “To Mr. Cushwa, who taught me everything I know.” It is somehow appropriate to Agee’s legendary status that
the book was lost after my grandmother’s death.
    None of Frank Cushwa’s 11 grandchildren—my five cousins, my five siblings and I—
were born during his lifetime. So, strictly speaking, none of us knew him. But we know his
hearty laugh. It was passed on and can be heard at any family gathering. Many other clear and discernible traits were passed on—among them love of learning, words and talking, a joy in aiding the development of young people, and, for some of us, alas, a tendency to girth. We can look around and realize that Cushwa’s passion for teaching still lives and breathes at Exeter—and some of us can realize that it lives and breathes in us.

The youngest brother of W. Tucker Clark ’63, Brooks Clark (St. Albans ’74, Dartmouth ’78) lives in
Knoxville, Tenn.