VOL. 54 NO. 30
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Eating Pizza Papa John’s Pizza in Halls is raising funds for The Butterfly Fund of the East Tennessee Foundation in memory of Kylie Grace Overton who died last August from cancer. Through Sunday, Aug. 2, when customers order two large one-topping pizzas for $20, Halls Papa John’s will donate $5 for each order placed, said Misty Barger of the Butterfly Fund. “Please note that this is the only offer in which the contribution applies,” she said. Additional items may be ordered such as Pepsi Products, wings, sides, other toppings and specialty pizzas, but the two large, one-topping pizzas must be included in the purchase. The coupon/promo code for call in orders is “4KYLIE.” You must mention the promo code when you order to be sure we get credit, she said. Multiple orders of the two large, onetopping pizzas can be ordered as well.
Watching birds About three weeks ago, a birding friend and I spent a remarkably good birding morning at our newest state park, the Seven Islands State Birding Park, out past Strawberry Plains along the French Broad River. It has a beautiful bunch of habitats – hilly woods, riversides and big fields planted with an abundance of birdfood vegetation. The birds thought that it was still spring.
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Read Bob Collier on page A-12
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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By Sandra Clark
Fountain City residents in the Martha Berry-Ridgecrest area are organizing to oppose a 150-foot cell tower proposed for construction, calling it a “Godzilla invasion.” The tower is on the agenda of the Metropolitan Planning Commission in August. Residents had a meeting set with attorney Mary Miller, who represents Branch Tower/T-Mobile, on July 27. The MPC has an information meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 30, in the small assembly room of the City County Building. MPC’s cell tower consultant, Larry Perry, will give information on carrier siting requirements, FCC requirements and the role of local government in tower regulation. Tom Brechko is coordinating this meeting. Info: 865-215-2500 or tom.brechko@knoxmpc.org Suzanne Matheny lives on Ridgecrest Drive, as do her sister and brother-in-law, who designed and built their home 39 years ago. “Think of that tower as a Godzilla
By Shannon Carey New Halls Middle School principal Jessica Smith wants to make sure students leaving HMS are “ready to launch into high school.” “Everything is pushing down in education right now,” she said. “You have students leaving high school with almost an associate’s degree. We want to continue to advance the students academically to produce the best middle school experience they can have.” By “we,” Smith means the HMS leadership team, including assistant principal Jay Wormsley and new assistant principal Joy Sherrod. Wormsley has worked with Smith before as part of the Tennessee Association of Middle Schools. “I am very excited to be working with these ladies,” said Wormsley. “I think we’ll make a great team.” Smith hails from Roane County. She attended Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City and taught English at Carter Middle
Read the interns’ stories on A-8
7049 Maynardville Pike 37918 (865) 922-4136 NEWS news@ShopperNewsNow.com Sandra Clark | Ruth White ADVERTISING SALES ads@ShopperNewsNow.com Patty Fecco | Tony Cranmore Alice Devall | Beverly Holland
Halls Middle School will host a “Meet the Principals” 4-7 p.m. Thursday, July 30. Students, parents and community members are invited to attend.
Halls Middle School assistant principal Jay Wormsley with new principal Jessica Smith and new assistant principal Joy Sherrod. Photo by S. Carey School. She spent 11 years at Carter, becoming a master teacher and assistant principal. Smith spent one year as interim principal at Carter Elementary before being appointed principal at HMS. Sherrod spent seven years
teaching at Bearden Middle School, followed by 10 years at Carter Middle, then two years at Vine Middle, where she was a TAP mentor and master teacher. Smith has been full time at HMS since July 1, and she’s met
one-on-one with 65 of the school’s teachers so far. She likes the strong community ties at Halls, with many of the current HMS teachers having attended the school as youngsters. It’s also a strong school academically, she said. Smith said she has an open door policy for the whole community, and she hopes everyone will take time to get to know her and the assistant principals. She invited students, parents and others to attend a “Meet the Principals” night 4-7 p.m. Thursday, July 30, at the school. “We look forward to continuing to strengthen our school,” she said.
Mass shootings are not unique
Digging dirt
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wide paved road would be built to access the tower, a plan neighbors really dislike. Matheny writes: “My neighbors and I are very much opposed to this in our or any neighborhood for numerous reasons.” Objections specific to the Ridgecrest site include: ■ Devaluation of homes by as much as 20 percent; ■ Disturbance of a “sensitive, avoidance area” which does not preclude a tower but does insist on a search for alternate sites; and ■ Land use, environmental, potential hazard and aesthetic objections. Matheny said Branch Tower misrepresented the view of the This photo shows a cell tower superimposed over a balloon floated by resitower after conducting a balloon dents with their string length adjusted to replicate the altitude of the protest at a 70-feet lower elevation. posed cell tower on Ridgecrest Drive. Photo by Bob Hillhouse She and neighbor Bob Hillhouse replicated that test. Additionally, invasion, and you get a decent from the June MPC meeting, they have created a website at sense of our feelings,” she wrote. Branch Towers promises to build topoftheridge.info. “I hope we’re not on a verge of an an 8-foot security fence on the alAnd, while Branch says there is epidemic of cell towers in neigh- most 6-acre site and says the tower a lack of coverage in the area, the borhoods.” would initially have four telecom- T-Mobile online map shows full In its proposal, postponed munication antennas. A 16-foot 4G coverage, Matheny wrote.
Getting HMS ‘ready to launch’
Read Betsy Pickle on page A-9
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.
July 29, 2015
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Proposed tower is ‘Godzilla invasion’
Kids
It’s back-to-school for Knox County youngsters, and we’ve got tips galore inside “My Kids.”
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www.ShopperNewsNow.com |
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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