Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Issue 33, Volume 125
UT employee killed in parking garage accident Victim served as supervisor in College of Law since 1979 the corner of 16th Street and White Avenue on her way to work early Monday McCord Pagan morning. Copy Editor According to a Knoxville Police Department report, A University of Tennessee Phyllis Carter, 60, parked employee was killed in the her Toyota Prius in the parking garage located on garage but accidentally
Troy Provost-Heron Sports Editor
Phyllis “Sally” Carter
left it in neutral, and the car began to roll down an incline inside the garage. Carter chased after it in an attempt to stop it but was crushed between a wall and the car. After her fellow employees realized that Carter, who went by Sally, had failed to show up for work, they started calling around, according to KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk.
The employees contacted her husband and when he couldn’t reach her via cell phone, he began to search for her with another UT employee. Authorities determined that the victim “had not been there long ” before her body was found. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Carter was a supervisor in the UT College of Law
Stephan Hatfield• The Daily Beacon
SEE
INSIDE
Angel Olsen’s new folk effort taps into the existential soulseeker in all of us
ARTS & CULTURE >>pg. 5
Martin not concerned with chatter surrounding job security Steven Cook Copy Editor
Sex Week officials are now legally labeled as ‘condemned’ after House resolution passes, 69-17 NEWS >>pg. 2
Library and has worked at the university since 1979. “Sally was a treasured and valuable member of the law school community who contributed so much to make the College of Law a better place,” said Doug Blaze, dean of the College of Law, in a statement. “She will be sorely missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with her entire family.”
ing. “The adrenaline you get from a sparring match is just so fun,” Adkins said. “It really is. It’s just ecstatic.” In January, Adkins began a low-carb diet to drop 21 pounds, permitting him to box as a Junior Welterweight. Adkins recommends “cutting.” Otherwise, he believes, boxers face serious disadvantages. “I would have to go up and fight people who probably cut and made the weight,” Adkins said. “So they would be bigger, taller with longer reach and more power.”
The elephant in the room has hardly been brought up all season long. On Monday, it could no longer be ignored. Coming off another bad loss to Texas A&M and sitting at 16-11 in what many pegged as a makeor-break season for Tennessee basketball, the embattled face of the program was prodded by question after question from reporters over his job security. And Cuonzo Martin, like practically everything else the third-year coach has faced since arriving in Knoxville on March 2011, handled it with a business-like, no-nonsense approach. “Don’t waste time and energy on it,” Martin said of how he deals with outside criticism and pressure. “The next game presents itself and you move forward.” Pressure is nothing new to Martin, who played four years at Purdue, two years in the NBA and had two years of head coaching experience at Missouri State before arriving on Rocky Top. But with the tough spell UT has fallen upon as a program in this past half-decade, pressure and negativity has reached another level as of late on Rocky Top. That has only intensified with each loss this year.
See BOXING on Page 3
See LUNCHEON on Page 6
After weigh-ins on Sunday, Golden Gloves Gym management hold a mandatory meeting for boxers participating in the upcoming Ace Miller Memorial Boxing Tournament. The majority of the boxers in the photo raised their hands to signify they have no prior experience in the ring.
Boxers ready to trade blows After months of preparation, annual Boxing Weekend nears closer Hanna Lustig News Editor Standing in line on Sunday, Elliot Watson knows he has made his weight class. He’s already been to the sauna and he’s been training for two and half, maybe three months. Watson, senior in Supply Chain Management, is a two-time veteran and champion of the Ace Miller Memorial Boxing Tournament. A ravenous one, at that. “I can’t wait to eat,” said Watson, a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. “... I’m really more excited about drinking
a lot of water. I can’t wait to down a good Gatorade because I’m a little dehydrated.” The feeling, among boxers waiting for their final weighins, is mutual. Before a swarm of eager spectators fill the Jacobs Center or a single jab is thrown on Thursday night, the Ace Miller Memorial Boxing Tournament has already begun. It started weeks, even months ago. It started beneath the lights of the Golden Gloves Gym with sweaty T-shirts and sparring. It started with forgoing Cookout burgers and whiskey to stay trim for weigh-ins.
Every match fought on Boxing Weekend is prefaced by tireless, bloody practice. Every match is won long before the boxers step inside the ring. “I’m at Golden Gloves a lot when they’re training,” said Holt Edwards, senior in political science and tournament executive director. “They’re not joking around. They take it very seriously.” Taylor Adkins, sophomore business analytics and member of Sigma Chi, is another of these serious boxers. For him, that training period stretches back to May, with conditioning and mastering technique. This year’s tournament will mark his first year participat-
‘Vagabondia Castle’ a haven for artistic roots
Tennessee forward’s increased “selfishness” Overlooked Knoxville fortress housed children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1800s could be the difference write beloved children’s classics herself that she had,” Jones said. has long since splintered away exception. Liv McConnell “I’d been here quite a while including “The Secret Garden” “You can tell this by the name she and with it most of its modern in late season NCAA run Copy Editor The year is 1865, only two years after the bloodshed of the Campaign, and the city >>pg. 6 Knoxville is struggling to resurrect itself. Rising from crumbled foundations and carnage is a new breed of Knoxvillian – freed blacks and immigrants flood the city in expectation of opportunity. An imaginative 16-year-old girl, INSIDE THE DAILY BEACON packed onto a ship from England following her father’s untimely In Short Page 2 death, is one such lowly dreamer. News Page 3 Made to marry a man she didn’t love and forced to move from Opinions Page 4 shack to shack, she reinvented Arts & Culture Page 5 her humble prospects and drew Knoxville’s budding artistic circle Sports Page 6 to her riverside refuge, known to all as “Vagabondia Castle.” Scribbling stories in ledger books since girlhood, she would go on to
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and “A Little Princess.” Her name – one that has since become as shrouded and obscure as her literary garden – was Frances Hodgson Burnett. “Burnett is a well-hidden secret in Knoxville,” Whitney Jones, lecturer in children’s literature, said. “Very few people know about her presence here, which is unusual because I think we know a lot about the other authors who’ve had histories here. Maybe it’s because she left here and never came back.” As a girl from impoverished origins with a heart fixated upon far more worldly prospects, Burnett felt “almost imprisoned” by the poverty of her Knoxville life. “Having to live in dirt-floor shacks, it just wasn’t the image of
gives to the shack on the river, Vagabondia Castle. She had these illusions of grandeur and decided to make this shack into some kind of artistic refuge for the highthinkers of Knoxville.” Jones describes “a pretty large community” of artists inhabiting mid-19th century Knoxville, a city rife with historic transience due to its river location and recent installation of a major railway line. Burnett hosted musicians, bartenders, philosophers and artists of all stripes in her ramshackle home. “It was very poor, very dilapidated,” Jones said, “and she sort of recolored it through her imagination into this artist’s refuge, this salon for philosophical and artistic thinkers, and held court there.” Today, the rickety shanty
remembrance. An unobtrusive rock, its gray slate inscribed with a commemorative paragraph about the author, serves as sole sentinel to Burnett’s memory. Swallowed by the shadow of Calhoun’s On the River, the location historians believe to have once been the site of Vagabondia Castle, Calhoun’s manager Steve Fletcher has walked past the stone tribute countless times without paying mind to it. “I’ve worked at Calhoun’s since ‘98 and walk by (the rock) twice nearly every day on my way in and out of work,” Fletcher said. “It’s right next to the dumpsters.” Fletcher, who has never heard anyone at the restaurant mention the land’s literary significance, read the rock’s engraving out of idle curiosity but believes he is an
before stopping to read it and learning of Burnett’s presence,” he said. “It’s a strange thing, realizing such an interesting and valuable bit of local history could go so ignored. “The rock is hardly visible and doesn’t do her story or memory justice.” “She often said she started really writing, or getting the ideas for, ‘The Secret Garden’ here in Knoxville because of the outdoor, wilderness feel,” Jones said. “In her memoir, she talks about this little bird leading her off into the fields and woods of Knoxville, and that’s when she has these hugely transcendent moments where she realizes how connected she is to nature.”
See BURNETT on Page 5