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
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