Still Living In Andy Of Mayberry Days
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
My late wife, Lynn, sometimes told people that I didn’t like change and that I still lived in Andy Griffith of Mayberry days.
Then, one day about 15 or 20 years ago, I read in the newspaper that I had the same birthday as Don Knotts – me and Barney Fife. I laughed when I saw that and thought that maybe Lynn was right.
I have gotten my haircut since my very first one at Barnes Barber Shop in Burlington. I have been a member at Holston Hills Country Club since I was nine years old. I have been a member of Eastminster Presbyterian Church since 1959, more than 65 years.
Now, how in the world could anybody say I don’t like change? I guess I would have to admit that maybe I am a stuck-in-the-mud type.
I know that I keep clothes and cars far longer than most people. Our kids and some of their friends used to get in my closet to find clothes to wear on “Nerd Day” at school.
My wife, Vickie, has been trying to get me to give up some of my old clothes, and I have taken some to the Goodwill store. But one day she made the mistake of complimenting a blue and white seersucker shirt I was wearing.
I then got a kick out of showing her a photograph of me wearing that same shirt 25 years earlier when my son Zane, who was 13 at the time, and I were riding a ferry boat to go to and from a tour of the Alcatraz Prison.
I drove a Mercury Grand Marquis so long that I had to put a little duct tape on the front passenger seat. This car sort of embarrassed Lynn and our daughter, Whitney, so I ended up taking it with me to Washington where I didn’t need to drive as much.
Once I picked up Jimmy Haslam at the airport and was taking him to his hotel. When he got out of the car, a little bit of the tape tried to go with him. I guess he was not very impressed.
At Governor Don Sundquist’s second inauguration in January of 1999, they sent us a police car and a nice young Nashville policeman to drive us to some event.
He said the night before he had stopped a car on a license tag violation, but when he radioed in the plate number, there was an outstanding first-degree murder warrant out for the driver.
He described the murder suspect as a big guy driving a “drug dealer’s car,” a 1985 Mercury Grand Marquis. Much to the policeman’s surprise, Lynn busted out laughing, and from then on, my Mercury was referred to in the family as my drug dealer car.
My friend, Joe Bailey, the former Knoxville City Councilman, got to go on the last ride of my old Mercury. We went out to eat in a fancy restaurant in Washington, D.C., with a couple of other members of Congress. Joe and I had ridden to the dinner just a couple of miles from Capitol Hill, and the car had overheated. At the end of the meal, I asked the waiter if he could give me a cup of water for my car.
He brought out a very large glass bottle of expensive water, and when I told him I didn’t need that, he said in a very thick accent, “Nothing but the finest for your automobile.”
The car was not used to water that expensive. We made it about five miles to the Glebe Road exit off of I-395, and limped barely off of the interstate to a small African-American church.
The oldest vehicle I have now is a Chevrolet Impala I bought from Steve West in 2005. It still runs great with 173,800 miles on it – although the passenger side mirror was torn off when my granddaughter, Emma, backed up too close to a concrete pillar.
Her Dad got the mirror fixed, but the door still opens with sort of a loud creaking sound. And a small piece on the lower part of that door still sticks out, so we use duct tape on that car, too.
The oldest things I have kept are most of the files from my law practice which began in October of 1973, fifty-one years ago. In the 1970s, there were a lot fewer lawyers in Knoxville, and almost all of us had very general practices.
Most of those files have very interesting stories behind them. When I retired from Congress, I brought home almost 200 boxes of papers associated with the work I did in my 30+ years there.
I am not a hoarder, and most of these files and papers are fairly neat.
But Vickie is trying so hard to get me better organized. When she saw on the news all the boxes that Joe Biden and Donald Trump had that the FBI carried away, she jokingly told me she was going to call them to see if she could get them to carry some of my files away, too.
She was a little disappointed when I told her that none of my old files had any top secret information.
