LYNCHBURG

 

The Caboose Restaurant

Saturday, I ate in a restaurant for the first time in a year. Barbecue seemed to be the ideal meal for a person who lives in Tennessee six months of each year and who has been isolated for a long spell (cautious about Covid). Although I had to hobble through a small town due to a torn meniscus in my right knee, I masked and found my place in a famous tourist haunt called “The Caboose Restaurant” in Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of Jack Daniels whiskey. 

I’d been through the Jack Daniels factory on a previous jaunt and again felt the irony of the famous whisky manufacturer being located in a dry county. Still, I’m not a whiskey sipper and haven’t investigated the reason for banning bourbon. I assume it’s a religious ban. I remembered that the distillery had been listed as the oldest registered distillery in the U.S. The tour guide at Jack Daniels also touted the bourbon as being made with iron-free cave water.

During the 19th century, 15 distilleries operated in Lynchburg, but Jack Daniels emerged as the second most productive manufacturer and eventually gained fame worldwide as a quality bourbon. Nowadays, tourists are offered samples, but when we toured the facility a few years ago, we weren’t offered a taste of this famous whiskey.

Lynchburg is one of those Tennessee “burgs,” and the winding scenic route from Sewanee to its city limits is worth a Saturday drive. I saw numerous farms with healthy-looking cattle grazing and homes in several prosperous-looking neighborhoods that I surmised had been built by livestock profits (horses and cattle).

I could hear an auctioneer bellowing as soon as we approached this small town of about 5700 residents and was shocked at the large crowd gathered in the square, many of whom were bikers showing off their body tattoos.

Lynchburg boasts of one traffic light, and amazingly, we found a parking space near the chosen restaurant. The Caboose’s hostess had once visited Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and when we paid for the hefty barbecue plate, she asked me to write out “let the good times roll” in my limited French. As we exited the restaurant, she continued to repeat the phrase to herself to impress the customers who followed us, many of whom were Texans.

The numerous shops surrounding the square reminded me of Bell Buckle, another historic Tennessee town that could be called a “burg.” That town, one in hilly horse country, was made famous by Webb School, a small institution my godfather attended as a boy and that produced numerous Rhodes Scholars. (Godfather became head of the English/Foreign Language Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.) 

I wondered about the derivation of the name “Lynchburg.” The town’s name seems to be related only to a Judge Lynch who headed up a vigilante committee that met after the War of 1812 (according to an article published in the spring 1972 article of the Tennessee Quarterly). 

Lynchburg may be a burg, but it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I don’t know if the designation is attributable to the Jack Daniels factory, but many of the wood buildings on the town square appear to be several centuries old. And, of course, the town historians honor Little Richard, an American rock and roll musician who once resided in this “burg.”

Following a doctor’s counsel, I bought a cane to navigate the small town of Lynchburg. It now stands in the corner of my living room, but the next opportunity that arises, I’m back on the road again, even if the town turns out to be a Tennessee “burg.”

Photography by Victoria I. Sullivan

 

 

 

RETURN OF THE KAJUN KWEEN??

While packing up papers in anticipation of returning to Tennessee for a short visit to my home on The Mountain, I came across an old book entitled Of Other Worlds by C.S. Lewis. It includes an essay concerning his speculations about the famous Narnia stories for children, as well as those about his science fiction trilogy. The short essay that interested me, “It All Began With A Picture,” focused on how Lewis came to write The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which he explains that all of his seven Narnia books and three science fiction books began with seeing pictures in his head; e.g., the Lion began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.

I experienced a sudden “aha” in my own head when I read this line, remembering how Kajun Kween, a young adult book I wrote several years ago, originated with a picture in my head of a six-foot, two-inches tall, 13-year old girl with feet that required size 12 shoes. The entire story, in comic book form, unfolded in my head. It featured this giraffe-like girl who interviewed for an actual comic strip publisher and beat out more ordinary jolie catins in a contest for a character who would become the heroine of this comic strip. Her job was to provide true adventures about her native Cajun French Louisiana; e.g., an encounter with a mama ‘gator protecting her egg nest; a stand-off with a giant snapping turtle; and an experience with a loup-garou late at night in a cypress swamp. The pictures in my head were described for and beautiful executed by Paul Schexnayder, New Iberia artist, for Kajun Kween.

Sketch by Paul
Schexnayder for Kajun
Kween

The picture that came into my mind as I planned the trip back to Tennessee was one of Petite Marie Melancon fulfilling the last line of Kajun Kween – she would be exploring new kingdoms. Thus, she might consider The Mountain at Sewanee in Tennessee. Pictures of adventures flashed in my head: ghosts appearing to Petite at Rugby, Tennessee where a Brit once tried to establish a Utopian colony; Petite attempting to hike to Fiery Gizzard;  a “See Rock City” trip to Chattanooga where she plunges off a cliff; an experience in which she becomes Queen of the Moon Pie Festival at Bell Buckle, Tennessee…

Since I’ve just completed a book of poetry, Street Sketches, which should appear in a few weeks, the pictures that appeared in my head about Petite Marie seem like they want to tell a story in 2016. Like Lewis, “I don’t know where the pictures came from, and I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he/she makes thing up. Making up is a mysterious thing…” All I know is that the pictures will persist until the story is told. In Petite Marie’s case, four or five years passed before she was birthed. We’ll see how she responds when I return to the winter cold on The Mountain next week; that is, before we move on to Florida for a few days. Pictures of her exploring Florida may become cut lines for a comic strip based there -- elusive crocodiles in the Everglades, Disney World experiences, glass-bottomed boat rides, explorations of coral reefs… Petite has begun to travel a lot.

As Lewis notes, “the right sort [of stories] work from the common, universally human ground the stories share with the children, and indeed with countless adults.” Meanwhile, I’ll just enjoy the pictures forming in my head.

MUCH ABOUT MOON PIES

Yum! Yum!

Last month I spent several days in Chattanooga, Tennessee and accompanied my daughter and her husband on a shopping spree. Mostly, I watched them shop, but when we went into a bookstore, my shopping spirit suddenly came alive. I picked up a copy of David Magee’s MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack and began reading about one of the snacks that has been consumed by millions of southerners since a recipe was created for the pies in 1929 at the Chattanooga Bakery.

My experience with MoonPies dates back to fishing trips in the late 1950’s, which I'll mention in a subsequent blog. MoonPies were an indispensable part of lunch when we floated the Bogue Chitto River fly fishing near Franklinton, Louisiana. We didn’t take along RC Cola, but I’m told that this drink was a popular and inexpensive complement to the pie. During the 50’s the song “Gimmee an RC Cola and a MoonPie” became popular and celebrated the success of this inexpensive workman’s lunch.

The MoonPie is a dessert sandwich that consists of two moon-shaped graham cracker cookies, filled with marshmallow and coated in chocolate, banana, or coconut. It isn’t a high fat concoction but the sugar in it is deliciously high. It was first concocted by a chef at Chattanooga Bakery in Chattanooga, Tennessee following the instruction of Earl Mitchell, a salesman for the bakery, who had learned from miners in Kentucky that they wanted a filling snack shaped like the moon for their lunch pails. Mitchell returned to the Chattanooga Bakery with the idea to stack one round graham cookie on top of another, sandwiching marshmallow in between and covering the snack with a layer of chocolate. The concoction sold for a nickel and was a big seller in the coal fields, later becoming popular throughout the South, from the Carolinas to Georgia and Tennessee.

David Magee reports that the Chattanooga Bakery doesn’t expend large quantities of its time and resources telling customers how great their product is – the little round dessert pie, about four inches in diameter, sells itself. Of course, there’s the famous MoonPie festival in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, approximately an hour’s drive from Sewanee, attended by more than 20,000 festival goers. It features a run, a parade, and the crowning of a MoonPie king and queen. I’ve always been a week late for the Bell Buckle celebration, but when I want to ship this dessert to my daughters, I shop in Bell Buckle for the snack. I don’t know whether New Orleanians throw the pies from their parade floats, but Mardi Gras krewes in Mobile, Alabama have been known to throw MoonPies, in addition to the traditional beads, to clamoring crowds.

According to David Magee, 100 million MoonPies are produced annually, and the Chattanooga Bakery is believed to be one of the largest producers of marshmallow in the world. The MoonPie has a phenomenal shelf life of four months.

In the introduction to MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack, David Magee quotes from one MoonPie consumer in Clayton, North Carolina who claims that the first breakfast she ever fixed for her husband was a MoonPie and an RC Cola, and his book is filled with similar anecdotes extolling the flavor of this snack.

When Magee questioned Sam Campbell IV, third generation leader of the MoonPie company, concerning the number of MoonPies that have been produced in its history of over eighty years, he estimated that three to four billion of the flavorful snack have been produced since the first pie was baked!

Author David Magee is a newspaper columnist and non-fiction author who lives on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. He has also authored The John Deere Way and Turnaround: How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan.