VOL. 9 NO. 30
My
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Kids
An Indo-Brazilian Zebu and a Watusi with a nine-foot horn span are two of several exotic cattle breeds at Citico Wildlife Wilderness. Photos by Wendy Smith
It’s back-to-school for Knox County youngsters, and we’ve got tips galore inside “My Kids.”
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See the special section inside
Digging dirt
By Wendy Smith Smi mith th h
The Knoxville Botanical Garden and Arboretum, which was once Howell Nurseries, is the oldest continually running business in Tennessee and is now working to preserve the region’s plant life. “In your lifetime, there will be wars fought about food and water,” Robert Hodge, the director of the Center for Urban Agriculture told Shopper News interns
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Read the interns’ stories on A-12
A woman boss Dawn Michelle Foster, who will soon step into Knoxville Redevelopment Director Bob Whetsel’s shoes, doesn’t mind being a woman in an industry typically dominated by men. She spent 22 years as a senior transportation planner and construction project manager for Wilbur Smith Associates (now CDM Smith) before her career with the city. “This will be the first time I’ve ever had a woman boss,” she says, referring to Mayor Madeline Rogero.
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Read Wendy Smith’s profile on A-5
July 29, 2015
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Paul Cleveland “Cleve” Tedford has lived a wild life − and he wants to share it with as many other wildlife lovers as possible. He’s the ow ner/op er ator of Citico Wildlife Wilderness, locatCleve Tedford ed in the Cherokee National Forest. His West Knoxville roots date back to just after the Revolutionary War. His brother, John, still lives on the original family farm off Keller Bend Road. The cornfields were covered with water when Bluegrass Lake, just south of the intersection of Ebenezer Road and Northshore Drive, was formed. Like his father, Oscar Howard Tedford Jr., Cleve and his three siblings attended Blue Grass Elementary School. Cleve was active in 4-H Club, and showed cows with his friend Frank S. Niceley. Oscar Howard started a business selling food and feed ingredients, and Cleve followed his advice by studying food science at the University of Georgia. Upon graduation, he took a job with a meat brokerage in Atlanta. But part of his heart was still in East Tennessee. Even though he
could barely afford it, he bought a 65-acre farm in Monroe County near Tellico Plains. He fell in love with the area while hunting there as a teenager. Even after moving to New York City to work in the Park Avenue office of an international distributor of milk products, Cleve made frequent trips to the farm and built a log cabin there. It was his exit plan, he says. He moved to the farm in 1981 after seven years in New York and started a dried dairy product distribution business called Tedford/
Tellico. After selling the business, he bought a nearby horse farm and began raising nonnative deer. One of the skills he gained while caring for 1,000 deer was fence-building, and he eventually began travelling around the country installing fences for university farms, animal parks and zoos. Soon after Cleve bought the horse farm, he purchased a nearby 100-acre tract surrounded by Cherokee National Forest. He mostly left the property idle, except for surveying it by foot. It had magnificent mountain views and
lush vegetation, and he imagined it might someday become a farm, with horses and cattle grazing in grass fields. As he visited parks and zoos and learned more about animals, his vision changed. In 2005, he got the idea of starting an animal park on the mountain farm. He invested the next few years in improving the property and acquiring animals, and in August 2013, began offering tours. Citico Wildlife Wilderness has a broad range of non-carnivorous animals, like capybara, antelope, bison, wildebeest, yaks, emus and Patagonian cavies, which look shockingly like a cross between a rabbit and a kangaroo. There are several varieties of goats, nonnative deer, and a pair of enormous porcupines, which are less than happy when Cleve wakens them from their nocturnal sleep pattern. He finds the animals through a broad network of animal park owners and other friends. “It’s not hard to find the animals. It’s just hard to come up with the money,” he says. He selects animals that thrive in the environment, and carefully chooses species, and gender, to achieve maximum harmony. Visitors tour the park on a sometimes hair-raising ride in Cleve’s converted pickup, which is outfitted with covered bench seats. He’s generous with his time and his To page A-3
Touching STEM Attention, all young brainiacs and your families! Now’s your chance to explore STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) in a fun, lively environment made just for you! This weekend, The Muse Knoxville presents “Robotics Revolution” at Chilhowee Park.
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Read Carol Shane on page A-9
Tripping along Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reprise their iconic roles as Clark and Ellen Griswold, as son Rusty, now grown, takes his family on (you know it) “Vacation.” Rusty plans to recreate the magic of his childhood with an epic road trip in a rental car with a mind of its own.
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Read Betsy Pickle on page A-9
Lonsdale parade The annual Lonsdale Homecoming Parade will step off at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, at 2700 Texas Ave. Mayor Madeline Rogero is grand marshal.
10512 Lexington Dr., Ste. 500 37932 (865) 218-WEST (9378) NEWS news@ShopperNewsNow.com Sherri Gardner Howell Wendy Smith | Anne Hart ADVERTISING SALES ads@ShopperNewsNow.com Patty Fecco | Tony Cranmore Alice Devall | Beverly Holland
It’s a park; let’s party Bearden Council members (front) Mary Elizabeth Yates, John Yates, Chris Griffin, Terry Faulkner; (back) Jim Bletner, Ed Nickelson, Sandy Gillespie, Marlene Taylor, Scott Bishop, Duane Grieve, Amy Midis, Tom Midyett and Finbarr Saunders gather around a sign marking the location of the future Everly Brothers Park. The park, located on Kingston Pike
in front of Earth Fare, will be dedicated at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 7. The council invites all Bearden business owners, community members and Everly Brothers fans to attend. Photo by Wendy Smith
Mass shootings are not unique By Bill Dockery Monday marked the seventh anniversary of the shootings at my church, Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist on Kingston Pike. Two persons were killed and seven more wounded at a Sunday morning children’s service. An Army veteran and longtime East Tennessean is now serving life without parole for those deaths, which he confessed were generated by his hatred of liberals and gays. Tragedies like the one at my church have become commonplace, most recently in a Charleston church, a Chattanooga strip mall and a Louisiana theater. Each community that is hit experiences the event as a one-off tragedy – the deaths of innocent individuals, the acts of personal heroism, the gore, the physical and emotional suffer-
ing, the perpetrator driven by derangement or ideology or whatever, the public acts of mourning and above all the horror that it could happen “here” (and not somewhere else in the bigger America that – we assume – is more violent than our own peaceable community). I was intimately involved with the response and recovery at TVUUC, handling media relations locally and nationally for the first hours, then days, then weeks, then months following our tragedy. Five years after the fact I was still taking media calls about similar events. And as the list of tragedies has lengthened on a weekly and daily basis, I’ve noticed something. There is nothing one-off about these occurrences. The individual stitches may vary a bit, but they fit into an overall tap-
estry of violence and terror and heroism that furnishes the background before which all Americans go about our daily lives. We’re learning how to read the mass-murder narrative, and we even relish to an extent the details – the extravagant violence, the acts of unanticipated courage, even the arguments about the roots of these kinds of events. These shootings have become a true reality show, unscripted, with real blood and real hurt and poignantly real death. One other thing I’ve learned: After responding professionally to our tragedy and the one that followed that and the next (et cetera to the nth power), I’m beginning to experience a slo-mo case of PTSD, not from exposure to violence in my church (as a police photographer I’d seen plenty of that) but
from the way we bend our words of sorrow and anger and condolence and gratitude around violent events that are truly “needless” and “senseless.” Again and again we try to give redemptive meaning to that abyss so that we won’t be sucked into it, but when you’ve heard it so many times, the explanations begin to lose their meaning. Yet the events keep coming because we do not have the political will to rein in the gun industry, or help the people with mentalhealth needs or those whose poverty of spirit and engagement leaves them with nothing to value in their lives except pain and grudges and anger they don’t know how to cope with. I am no longer shocked or sad or angry – I’m bone weary. But I don’t see an end to it.
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