Pickett County, Tenn., population 4,945, is the birthplace of Alvin C. York, the World War I hero immortalized by actor Gary Cooper in the movie Sergeant York. It is also the birthplace of Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State during World War II and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for leading the creation of the United Nations. That this sparsely populated upper East Tennessee county boasts two such prominent native sons is exceptional to say the least.
York and Hull exemplify how humble beginnings can lead to global accomplishment. While larger cities have leaders who are at the heart of the state’s politics, commerce and culture, the state’s rural areas boast figures equally vital to the state, and too often overlooked when statewide kudos are delivered.
A globetrotting pedagogue who collects antiques around the world. A judicial angler whose sleight of hand has dazzled children and government officials alike. An industrial developer’s daughter working magic for the needy on the Plateau. A future state political star wrestling egos to bring water to the masses. A cattle-farming general with a flair for penning nonfiction. A Cherokee-blooded home developer who as a youth won multiple trips to Europe selling newspapers. A barrier-transcending chief of police who plays the saxophone and clarinet and designed his department’s Web site. These are stories of county power in Tennessee.
DAVE DAHL
International Man of Mystery
Dyer County
When Dave Dahl established his global student exchange company in rural Dyersburg and began receiving wired money orders from South America, Asia and elsewhere around the globe, banks in that small community 80 miles north of Memphis, wholly unaccustomed to the concept of an international business operating in their small town, soon suspected Dahl of involvement in some kind of drug cartel.
More than a decade later, Dahl’s business still somewhat mystifies locals, who are in no way directly served by the Foundation for Worldwide International Student Exchange, or WISE Foundation. The only company of its kind in Ten- nessee (but one of the biggest of about 150 operating nationwide), Dahl’s student exchange business has branch offices in suburban Atlanta, Sacramento and Chicago.
WISE recruits students in 53 countries—essentially every country that isn’t currently at war. Between 6,000 and 8,000 students are enrolled in WISE Foundation programs at any given time. In a manner of speaking, Dahl runs one of the largest educational institutions in the state. It all adds up to several million dollars in annual revenue for the 18-employee nonprofit operation. It also adds up to a lot of air miles for the globetrotting Dahl.
Though WISE offers a variety of traditional middle and high school student exchange programs, many of Dahl’s students are adult hospitality management trainees fresh out of Swiss hospitality schools. Using contracts he’s brokered with top U.S. companies such as Gaylord Entertainment, Ritz Carlton, Hyatt, Marriott and Radisson, Dahl places those international students at resorts and hotels stateside. Participants return to their home country 18 months later ready to assume good jobs in the hospitality field.
WISE Foundation also contracts with the Japanese national government to train its police recruits in English proficiency and police behavior through the University of California-Davis. Dahl is currently working to establish a similar contract with the government of South Korea.
Dahl’s rise to prominence as a global player in the student exchange industry began on an Indian reservation north of Olympia, Wash. A Skagit Valley farm boy by birth, Dahl received a teaching degree from Pacific Lutheran College and promptly landed a job teaching physical education at the Nisqualy Indian Reservation. It was the mid-1970s and tribal members were persistently being arrested for fishing off the reservation. Their leaders demanded that the U.S. government begin honoring fishing rights granted them in the 1854 Medicine Creek Treaty, which allowed the tribe to fish anywhere on traditional tribal lands. Judge George Boldt’s ruling, which granted the tribe 50% of all salmon in the water, set a precedent in Indian rights cases that is applied across America and the world. Dahl sums up his experience by saying, “I was the only white teacher, an Anglo-Saxon Protestant trying to work with a group of Indian activists. I had to prove myself, that I was there to give and not to take.”
That exercise in cultural sensitivity served Dahl well. Later, as an employee for the Amateur Athletics Union’s (AAU) wrestling division, Dahl prepared American wrestlers to be good ambassadors during overseas trips. When the call came for someone to help organize host families in America for groups of visiting Japanese wrestling teams, Dahl set to work contacting the parents of boys he’d escorted overseas in the past. A West Coast educational foundation soon contacted Dahl needing similar assistance. He went to work permanently in student exchange, bringing his first group of Japanese students to the states in 1982.
It wasn’t long before Dahl was in business for himself. Incorporated out west, WISE Foundation moved with Dahl to Dyersburg in 1991 when Dahl’s wife, Pam, a native of Weakley County, landed a job as a counselor at Dyersburg State Community College.
While Dahl may have landed in Dyersburg, he leaves it often. Last year alone he traveled 100,000 air miles. In May 2004, Dahl traveled to Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonian. Now 15 years into his globetrotting lifestyle, Dahl is as savvy a traveler as you will find on the world stage, a man equally deft talking shop with a Swiss hotel magnate as he is discussing with government emissaries the need for better pay to ensure ethical behavior among law enforcement recruits.
To this day, the Dyersburg community may remain a little uninformed about Dahl’s bustling international business. The lasting imprint he is leaving on city assets, however, is not going unnoticed.
Dahl recently purchased the building where his WISE Foundation has been located for 13 years. He restored the building, filled it with antiques (Dahl is an expert antique shopper) and now rents space to various businesses, including a travel agency that competes with the one he started years ago to supply his own needs. Dahl also recently purchased and renovated the cornerstone 1800s era property on Dyersburg’s downtown square. A long blighted space that for some time remained boarded up in the aftermath of a car wreck, Dahl has already relocated to the site a landmark Dyersburg business, the Cozy Kitchen. And although citizens of Dyersburg don’t know it yet, the continental Dahl plans soon to open a European pasty shop—staffed by a bona fide European pastry chef—in the downtown space. An educator at heart, Dahl also plans a culinary training
program on site. With Dahl around, Dyersburg can’t help but have an international flavor.
JOHN EVERETT WILLIAMS
The Final Appeal
Carroll County
John Everett Williams’ idea of a good time is braving five-degree temperatures to fish for sauger—the mysterious cousin of the walleye—that spawns when temperatures plummet. But fishing is not the only thing on Williams’ mind during his chilly excursions.
As one of 12 criminal appeals judges in Tennessee, Williams routinely finds the peace and bitter cold of sauger fishing the perfect setting to grapple with weighty issues in his purview. So rather than in the library-like setting of Williams’ Carroll County judicial office, the fates of citizens are sometimes determined in subfreezing temperatures on the shores of Kentucky Lake.
Williams grew up in a courtroom. Accompanying his father, District Attorney John L. Williams, he observed his first murder case as a five-year-old sitting in an empty jury box across from a live jury. Williams’ father once convicted a schoolteacher who had poisoned her husband and parents.
Predisposed to be a lawyer himself, Williams attended law school and set up a private practice in Huntingdon, where he spent 17 years. Cases he tried that garnered state and national press included the 1993 murder of teenager Dennis Brooks Jr., who was tortured, dismembered and murdered by his assailants, his heart literally pulled out of his chest.
During those 17 years, Williams also cast a long shadow over the Carroll County political scene. His father had served as a Republican state legislator. His family’s close friend, John T. Williams (no blood relation), is a GOP icon considered the founder of the modern Republican Party in West Tennessee.
For many years, John Everett Williams was the state GOP’s chief political operative in Carroll County. When Bill Frist the senatorial candidate needed a crowd assembled at the county courthouse, Williams got the call. Carroll County is an important county on both sides of the political aisle in Tennessee because it is the state’s bellwether when it comes to elections. Voters there have accurately predicted the last nine gubernatorial and presidential races. Like New Hampshire or Iowa on the national stage, a candidate isn’t anybody in Tennessee without going through Carroll County first. And for many years, Williams ruled that powerful roost. His appointment to the Criminal Appeals Court in 1998 neutralized that status. GOP leaders lost a great operative but gained a great judge.
Williams is the quintessential Southern man. A great orator, he has impersonated Clarence Darrow at storytelling events. A unionized magician whose favorite trick is the needle through the balloon “because when it pops, it’s real loud and in your face,” Williams has been known to perform impromptu for the appellate court. In short, he is unlike the dour, imposing figure many expect in a judge. But he is also a man obsessed with the sober pursuit of fairness and equality as it relates to an individual’s legal rights.
Tellingly, on his application to become an appellate court judge, in the space where applicants were asked to write about their most noteworthy legal cases, Williams did not specify a particular case such as the Brook’s case, where a punishment of life in prison was returned. Rather, he wrote that he considered all of his cases, no matter their size or gravity, to be noteworthy to his clients. More evidence of Williams’ balanced disposition is found in a letter of recommendation written by his former evidence professor, Charles Gamble, now retired dean of the University of Alabama School of Law. Williams would be as conversant with a justice on the Tennessee Court of Appeals, Gamble wrote, “as he would be with the judicial building janitor.”
Williams’ charm lies in his conversational ability to switch from levity to utmost gravity at any given moment. It’s a notable trait given the importance of Williams’ job. Every criminal defendant convicted in the state of Tennessee has a right to come to the appellate court to ask for relief. The court hears cases in panels of three. At the appeals level, the cases are cold. Judges see boxes full of records, not witnesses. Their job is not to render judgment but to affirm when a fair trial was given or to reverse decisions in trials that are somehow flawed. It is a largely solitary existence filled with reading, pondering and opinion writing. The stakes are high. For defendants, they often involve the ultimate price.
In cases of capital punishment, though many lawyers and laymen are not aware of the practice, a panel of the appellate court is present with the Supreme Court on site in Nashville. The courthouse is open and staffed at 1 a.m. in the morning, the time usually appointed for executions. The judges are there ready to work if necessary until the execution is carried out. By luck of the draw, Williams has been a part of every last-minute death appeal since he joined the court in 1998. He was there on the panel assigned to the Robert Glen Coe case, which on April 19, 2000, ended with Coe becoming the first prisoner executed in Tennessee in four decades. He’s been there for Philip Workman. He’s been there for Dennis Reid.
Given his qualifications and connections, it is conceivable that Williams could be a federal judge someday. The ascendance of Bill Frist to the Oval Office could make at least a nomination a reality. For now, though, the Hunting- don judge will continue discriminating between the real stories and the fish stories, while he spends time on Kentucky Lake, trying to catch a few stories of his own.
PHYLLIS BENNETT
The Human Touch
Dekalb County
One of Dekalb County native Phyllis Bennett’s earliest jobs was as a front-page editorial writer for the Smithville Review. Called “Talk of the Town,” Bennett’s column generally stuck to innocuous material such as neighborhood happenings and upcoming civic events, the type of see-your-name-in-print journalism that keeps small town newspapers profitable. But Bennett was known to wade into the political waters from time to time and once caused a stir in that small community when she published a piece on the merits of evolution.
For the past 25 years, Bennett has brandished that same intellect and chutzpah as executive director of UCHRA, the Upper Cumberland Human Resource Agency. Those who have worked on a Bennett-led project marvel at her uncanny ability to perform humanitarian feats in the office that elude others in similar positions.
UCHRA is one of nine agencies established by the General Assembly in 1973 to deliver human resources services across the state. The total population in the 14-county area UCHRA serves is approximately 300,000. Bennett’s agency serves three of five people in that region, whether by providing meals to fixed-income seniors or driver’s education to affluent, able-bodied 16-year-olds. In all, Bennett controls $30 million in programs (the highest among HRAs in the state) and has 450 year-round employees.
Bennett’s power and influence isn’t the result of lording over minions using political might or business heft. Instead, she affects individual lives on a one-by-one basis by elevating people from a dependent state to a life less dependent on social programs like welfare and TennCare. UCHRA programs run on the engine of Bennett’s vision, her ability to identify local, state and federal dollars and then to maximize those resources by leveraging one community she serves to benefit another.
In 1992, Tennessee Tech determined it could no longer maintain its 38-acre Tech Aqua campus on Center Hill Lake, a shoreline property owned and leased by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. Bennett acquired the property, seeing it as an opportunity to create a hospitality management-training course for disabled individuals on UCHRA’s rolls.
At the time Bennett acquired use of the property, the buildings were run-down. Roads were hardly adequate for walking, let alone driving. Bennett set to work collecting money from various sources to create Lakeside Resort. The state legislature supplied funds for repairs. The Department of General Services donated surplus furniture. Prison workers refurbished existing furniture. A federal grant transformed an old student cafeteria into the Villa, an upscale, state-of-the-art-dining facility. Bennett took a monetary gift from TVA, paired it with residents of an UCHRA-run home for abused boys that specialized in training trade skills, and built a residential home. Its sale doubled the value of TVA’s original gift. The new sum was then used to renovate existing dorms at Tech Aqua into efficiency apartments. A portion of the home sale, placed in escrow, funded another campus residence.
What began as a hospitality certificate program for state-dependent individuals seeking to become front desk clerks, culinary managers and sales and marketing trainees developed into a fully accredited course offered through both Pellissippi State and Motlow State community colleges. Based on Bennett’s success, the Corps of Engineers determined to contract directly with UCHRA on a 25-year, $1 lease. It also granted Bennett an additional 100 acres of Center Hill Lake property. This summer, UCHRA will open a $1.5 million lodge and conference center run by interns at Lakeside.
Back in the late 1980s, while operating a summer camp for low-income female students, Bennett discovered many of the girls didn’t want to leave because of sexual and physical abuse occurring in their homes. Realizing the Upper Cumberland region offered no safe haven for such girls, Bennett set out to establish one. Ironically, a military school for boys in Bloomington Springs, Tenn., was going on the market after student abuse charges wrecked the business’ bottom line. Bennett purchased the 15-acre Junior Military Academy property and its four buildings, renaming it Chance Residential Center. Halls were named in honor of donors who funded renovations.
Bennett never could have afforded to pay top adolescent psychiatrist John Looney, a professor at Duke University, to develop a therapeutic program at Chance Residential. Bennett was, however, aware that Looney had a farm in Crossville. She contacted his brother, Tom Looney, a Crossville attorney and cattle farmer, and the enlistment began. Soon Professor Looney was designing a program through a partnership with the Duke University Medical Center. Looney monitored the program free of charge for several years. The home is now an accredited high school. And whereas at first the local community fought the idea of placing the home in their area, residents now embrace the school, frequently hiring the girls to perform chores such as hauling hay on their farms.
The success of Chance Residential made Bennett realize abused boys needed a similar therapeutic school. When a 118-acre horse farm in Dekalb County fell into financial distress, Bennett acquired the property for a fraction of its true value. Today, Chance at Indian Mound Farm is also an accredited high school offering vocational classes in farming and building trades. Only a small number of the boys who come to the property ever return to state custody.
Based on those successes, the First United Methodist Church of Crossville granted Bennett control of a 25-acre church camp located within the city limits. The consortium of Methodist churches with ownership of the property wanted it to serve some greater humanitarian purpose, and turned to Bennett to make that happen.
Bennett promptly established a facility to train disabled persons to provide child care, smartly leveraging one group of UCHRA dependents, the disabled, with another, poor mothers in need of affordable day care. The project was an instant hit. Now, given the growing demand for childcare in the rapidly growing city of Crossville, the facility has a waiting list of over 400 parents. It is also a prime recruiting ground for other area daycare prov- iders in the area seeking new staff members.
It’s difficult to imagine an official at a state agency doing more with less.
BROCK HILL
The Plateau Rainmaker
Cumberland County
The first political rally Cumberland County mayor Brock Hill ever attended was Howard Baker’s 1964 run for Senate. A fourth grader at the time, Hill carried with him a blue denim Levi-Strauss spiral notebook on which he placed campaign stickers of both Baker and fellow senatorial candidate Dan Kuykendall. A Barry Goldwater presidential campaign button served as a finishing touch.
The son of Republican state lawmaker Les Hill, and the grandson and great grandson of delegates to both the Republican and Democratic National Conven tions, it could be said that politics runs in Brock Hill’s blood. So too does the retail business. The Hill family’s department store, a signature business on Crossville’s Main Street, dominated the Upper Cumberland shopping market for decades. Before his election in 1994, Brock Hill ran the family business as well as a subsidiary sporting goods store he opened under the Hill family banner.
Both Hill’s early proximity to the political arena and his work in the retail sector prepared him for public life. Seeing politics hashed out behind the scenes from an early age gave Hill a leg up on the art of legislative dickering. Delivering customer satisfaction in a retail setting was the perfect incubator for constituent service.
Though out of the retail business today, Hill has utilized that sales background to market and sell Cumberland County. Hill is behind the marketing push that made Cumberland County “The Golf Capitol of Tennessee,” a moniker now found in golf guides nationwide and promoted during each radio broadcast of University of Tennessee football. Upon taking office in 1994, Hill formed the task force and provided the public seed money that culminated in the county’s new branding. Since then, tourism has jumped 59%, resulting in a $71 million annual impact, the 14th highest total in Tennessee.
As a politician, though, Hill is more than just a clever marketer. By offering incentives to attract industrial businesses, reinvesting hotel-motel taxes to promote tourism and using tourism to attract additional sales tax revenues, Hill has helped fashion a more vibrant economy in Cumberland County, allowing it to drop property tax rates 20% to the lowest level in the state. Cumber-
land County’s unemployment rate has dropped from 23% above the state average to below the average. After years of neglect, the county has built $35 million in schools. It established a branch campus of Roane State Community College, donating it to the state. Hill even raised money for the purchase of 500-acre Black Mountain, the midpoint of the Cumberland Trail, which was donated to the state, as well. He managed those improvements amid some of the most rapid growth in the state. Since Hill took office, Cumberland County has grown 35% (the state overall has grown 17% during the same span), making it the sixth fastest growing county in the state and the 213th fastest of the 3,000 nationwide since 1990.
Hill has accomplished much since taking office in 1994. But the true crowning achievement of his tenure in office will be, literally, a watershed event.
Population growth is threatening the long-term water supply on the Cumberland Plateau, a region as hamstrung by environmental protections as by the inaction of decision-makers. Currently, Cumberland County residents get their water either from Crossville (which also supplies sewer service) or from one of five water utility districts operating independently in the county. Hill’s domain, Cumberland County government, isn’t even in the water business. Unlike most elected officials who would avoid wading into a political morass outside their jurisdiction, Hill has willfully thrust himself into the turf war. In fact, he has become the controversial issue’s chief lightning rod.
Hill’s initial accomplishment was impressive—getting all five water districts and Crossville to agree to work together on a solution. This feat allowed the state legislature to sign off on the creation of a joint water authority for the area that allowed the city and the districts to join as a legal entity, get state and federal grants and borrow money. Options for future water supply were soon developed. State departments hailed the planning as an example of what other regions should do. Hill’s foresight even attracted the attention of The Wall Street Journal.
But the fight isn’t over. In rural areas, utility districts typically dominate communities in the manner of fiefdoms fighting to protect their territory. Though raising the dam on the city’s primary water source, Meadow Park Lake, appears a feasible long-term solution to supplying the water needs of the area, the question of who will control that water supply remains up in the air. Crossville city officials have tinkered with a plan to acquire several of the five utilities, to whom it already sells water. The utility districts have considered a plan to unite and find a rival source of water, a move that would undercut Crossville’s budget given the enormous infrastructure and debt associated with its water delivery program. Like a recess monitor foiling plans for a playground fracas, Hill halted both incomplete solutions by hiring a Nashville attorney to lobby state lawmakers to put into writing their unwillingness to permit new water projects in the Upper Cumberland unless all parties were involved.
Hill wants to consolidate all six entities into a super utility where expenses could be shared and consumer bills reduced. Importantly, consolidation would put an end to squabbles over imaginary lines the various districts currently won’t cross to provide service. Ending such border skirmishes would extinguish what one state official describes as an embarrassing situation each time the state attempts to lure a prospective business to Cumberland County.
Hill’s quest to solve Cumberland County’s water woes was a major impetus for his recent decision to drop out of the 4th District congressional race. Though the State GOP was disappointed to see a candidate they believed could beat freshman Democrat Lincoln Davis this fall, members now agree it would have been an inopportune moment for Hill to abandon his role as referee in that watery tug-of-war. When the issue is resolved, look for Hill’s congressional ambition to reassert itself.
GENERAL CARL STINER
An Army of One
Campbell County
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld undertook the task of transforming the American military into a more agile fighting force better equipped to take on the 32 terrorist organizations operating in 60 countries throughout the world. To help achieve that objective, Rumsfeld looked to Campbell County, employing retired Army General Carl Stiner as a “senior concept developer.” It was just the latest development in the life of a man with a résumé replete with military accomplishments.
Growing up in the Powell Valley, young Carl Stiner watched as older farm boys from that patriotic community caught buses north to bordering Ken- tucky to join the war effort. Many never re- turned, buried in overseas cemeteries. Though no one in his family had ever served in the military, Stiner knew he too would someday enlist in the Army. Encouraged by his father to get an education, Stiner enrolled at Tennessee Tech, largely because it offered Army ROTC. Upon his graduation in 1958 with a degree in agriculture, Stiner was commissioned 2nd Lt. Infantry and sent to Fort Benning, Ga.
While deployed in Korea during his second year of service, the Berlin crisis broke. The unit scheduled to replace Stiner’s went to Germany instead, extending him overseas. By the time he returned stateside, Stiner was on the list for promotion to captain. Faced with the choice between staying in the Army or returning to college for tough refresher courses—he had plans to become a veterinarian—Stiner told his wife he would stick with the Army to see where it would take him.
A better question might have been where would it not take him? Stiner spent a two-year stint as chief of training for modernizing the Saudi Arabian National Guard. In that capacity, he worked for Prince Abdullah, now the acting king of that country. Years later, he would be pulled out of his post as assistant division commander for operations of the 82nd Airborne Division and taken to Beirut to advise then Ambas-sador Donald Rumsfeld, the president’s special envoy working to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In that capacity, Stiner met all the heads of state in the modern Arab countries, including Saddam Hussein’s cabinet. On more than one occasion, Stiner went toe-to-toe with Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat. Stiner later assumed the helm of all elite counter-terrorism forces and involved in the response to all terrorist incidents affecting U.S. interests during the middle 1980s, orchestrating the capture of the PLO terrorists that hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship.
Stiner would eventually hold jurisdiction over multiple brigades and divisions, including the 101st at Ft. Campbell, Ky., all of which he used to plan and execute the 1989 American invasion of Panama. In that mission, Stiner liberated the country of Panama and captured its deposed leader, Manuel Noriega.
Stiner ended his active duty career in the U.S. military as the four star general over all U.S. special operations, which he commanded during the first Iraq war. He now teaches the joint war fighting course to up-and-coming colonels and captains at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. In Norfolk, he is also a senior advisor involved in the conception and testing of all new joint war fighting experiments. As if that were not enough, Gen. Stiner is a senior mentor training and advising all the nation’s newly selected brigadier generals and rear admirals preparing to assume positions of high responsibility around the globe. In that role, he takes students all over the world to build relationships with other world leaders. Just this March, Stiner traveled with his class to Egypt, Bahrain, Quatar, Kuwait and Baghdad.
With all he has done and is doing—transforming the army, chaperoning top military brass around the globe, collaborating with acclaimed novelist Tom Clancy on a book of military history called Shadow Warriors—few would begrudge the 67-year-old Stiner were he to rest on a laurel or two. Instead, he uses those spare moments to tend to the family farm, which has 150 head of cattle and is not far from the Carl W. Stiner Highway that runs through Lafollette. After all, protecting the sanctity of such homesteads is the reason Stiner and so many other citizens enlisted in the first place.
MIKE ROSS
The Master Builder
Blount County
Everyone has a story. Real estate developer Mike Ross actually has folklore. Told and re-told in rural East Tennessee, the story of Ross’ first foray into real estate has become the Davy Crockett-themed equivalent to killin’ a bear when he was only three.
As the story goes, an ambitious twenty-something Ross read an article where a top executive of a Texas-based company stated the dream of owning an antebellum home in East Tennessee. Ross promptly put a contract on just such a home and acreage on Ft. Louden Lake in Louisville, Tenn. He then boarded a plane for Texas and sat outside corporate headquarters until he met the executive. A relationship developed that led to Ross’ sale of the property for an enormous profit. Stunned by the deal, his father promptly handed over the reigns of the family’s furniture business to his son.
Ross won’t sign off on the tale as truth, nor does he wholly deny it. With typical understatement, Ross admits that as a 22-year-old making $75 a week working for his father he did indeed buy a lake-front property from family friends. And he confirms he sold the property 29 days later for a tidy profit to a gentleman from Texas who had been interested in the site. But he’ll say nothing more on the matter besides chalking the fortuitous sale up to sheer guts and luck.
Like most folklore, regardless of the details, the tale serves a larger purpose—it tells you to expect big things from Mike Ross. Today, the 50-year-old Ross has the fulfillment of his potential well in hand.
This summer, Ross expects to sell in a single weekend his planned $160 million, 183-unit Rarity Pointe condominium lodge perched on the shores of Tellico Lake. Already with more reservations than he has units to sell, Ross is assured of relocating within a 48-hour period more than 300 people, mostly retirees, along with their bank accounts, from across America to East Tennessee. With its gardens, fountains and views to die for, the project will be completely different from anything ever built in Louden County. Surrounding it will be an overall $750 million development on 700 acres with 1,200 homes and a golf course designed to preserve natural habitats. It could be the largest project of its kind ever built in the state.
Rarity Pointe is just one of three other Rarity developments. All eschew the typical tract type developments as Ross seeks special pieces of property with special qualities, be they an idyllic mountain or lakefront view. Rarity Bay, the first project under the Rarity banner, broke ground in 1994. Like Rarity Pointe, it too is located in the Green- back community of Louden County, the same area where Ross’ grandfather earned a reputation as a horse trader in the early 1900s. Rarity Ridge, a new urbanism project of over 3,900 homes in the Oak Ridge suburbs, will eventually top out as a $1 billion investment. Rarity Meadows in Monroe County offers more moderately priced homes on larger sites in a truly rural setting. Ross plans several similar developments in other smallish locales around East Tennessee.
With his Rarity developments, Ross has almost single-handedly boosted rural East Tennessee’s prestige as a retirement hot spot. Wealthy retirees who once automatically set their sites on Florida as the place to grow old now have an alternative in the hills of Tennessee. Those already living in traffic-choked, fast paced Florida are increasingly joining the ranks of the so-called “half backs” who left the Midwest and Northeast for Florida only to come half way back to Tennessee. Still others find the four-season climate of East Tennessee the ideal spot for a second retirement home. No matter their reasons, the overall migration amounts to a major industry for the state.
Ross’ direct investment in these rural area is enormous. The indirect investment that trails him is equally percussive. Rarity residents put their money in local banks. They build new homes and pay substantial property taxes. They buy boats and cars, eat out in restaurants and shop in local establishments. As predominantly empty nesters, they don’t burden school systems.
There is also a conspicuous cultural impact. Typical Rarity buyers are affluent individuals who want to have a positive impact on the places they live. They host events to raise money for local schools. They volunteer at hospitals. In short, a Rarity Community is a great industry for the county in which it locates. By and large, local governments love to see Mike Ross coming.
Last year alone, Ross did $100 million in sales. Supplying the needs of the retiring baby boomer community, Ross has reason to be confident he can maintain that level of sales for the foreseeable future. It’s a savvy business operation executed by a savvy businessman.
That’s not to say Ross’ career in real estate development has been all sweetness and light, particularly with regard to his lodge at Rarity Pointe. Ross ran aground of a significant controversy when he acquired from the Tennessee Valley Authority 110 acres to expand that development. Decades earlier, TVA had condemned the land, sinking family farms into the waters of Tellico Lake in order to create public recreation and green space. Many in Louden County viewed the sale as a betrayal of the common man to benefit a millionaire luxury home developer. Hard feelings still exist despite Ross’ donation of more than double the acreage across the lake.
But ultimately, TVA’s original plans for industrial and recreational growth in the area just didn’t pan out. Twenty-five years later, the city of Vonore remains a scarcely populated town without much economic activity. By granting Ross control of the Lake Tellico property, TVA has at last brought industry to the area. No one can deny that Rarity Ridge has significantly broadened Louden County’s tax base, stimulated economic growth in the area and created hundreds of both temporary and permanent jobs. And who knows? With the passing of a few more years, there might be a few more tales added to the folklore of Mike Ross.
JOHN THOMAS REYNOLDS
The Quiet Man
Giles County
When Giles County native and 25-year Pulaski cop John T. Reynolds was appointed that city’s new police chief last October, some viewed the choice of an African American for the job as a sea change in the cultural landscape of the small manufacturing community near the Alabama border. In truth, it was just a competent man getting a job he deserved. To Giles County residents, there wasn’t anything racially significant about it at all.
Why all the hubbub? Though residents of Pulaski have worked strenuously to stomp out the identity, their town remains world-renowned as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s also the site of that infamous group’s annual parade. The hiring of an African American as police chief in what has essentially been for decades the crucible of the white supremacist movement was perceived as a dramatic development, to say the least.
Within Giles County, however, a place of arguably greater racial harmony than, say, Nashville or Memphis (Giles was the first Tennessee county to voluntarily integrate its school system), the news did not spark much comment. Giles County has a long history of outstanding black leaders in politics, education and business. (Consider that while Nashville is still applauding itself for electing a black vice mayor in 2002, Pulaski had one 20 years ago.) Most Pulaski residents already knew Reynolds, or knew of him, given that for many years Reynolds was the only black cop on the 40-man force. Revered for his fairness, his good works and his color-blindness on the beat, Reynolds in recent years also ran all citizen training and community programs and served
as the media’s lead liaison. He’d even served as interim chief. To townspeople and to Reynolds himself, the significance of his new appointment wasn’t the color of his skin but the fact he had become the first city cop in modern history to rise from the bottom ranks of the Pulaski Police department to occupy the top spot.
Nevertheless, it is understandable why outside media would capitalize on Reynolds’ appointment—an easily defined story tailor-made for the 30-second news bite. Throughout the 1980s, the spectacle of the Klan’s annual march in Giles County garnered international coverage from news organizations including Newsweek magazine and The New York Times. Nowadays, participation in the march is minimal given the KKK’s steady decline over the past two decades.
The KKK was founded in Pulaski on Christmas Eve 1865 by a small set of wealthy professional Confederates. Disgruntled with Union occupation, with having their voting privileges stripped (11,000 recently freed Giles County slaves meanwhile had gained the right to vote) and concerned about the protection of wives and children of Confederate dead, the social circle or “kuklos” was born. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest disbanded the group four years later. While the organization has reorganized several times in its 130-year history, it has never re-grouped in Giles County. There probably aren’t enough Klan supporters in Pulaski today to organize a weenie roast, much less a cross burning. So it is with good reason that Pulaskians resent being perpetually saddled with the KKK connection.
The image sticks, however, due to the Klan’s annual “homecoming” in their town. (The first occurred in 1976.)
As a 24-year veteran on a small force, Reynolds has worked during those KKK marches. A uniformed line officer throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Reynolds took up his badge and served those marchers each January in the name of protecting their constitutional right to free speech. “He did his job,” says one Pulaski supporter. “He’s the consummate professional. He’s an exceptional man. He never makes race an issue. So we don’t make it an issue either.”
Reynolds’ temperament and demeanor no doubt serve to quell racial ferment in the Pulaski community. Perhaps his greatest influence has been his ability to shape attitudes to minimize racial churn in a charged community. But the fact remains that the Pulaski community is steeped in racial history. The Reynolds name itself evokes the memory of the vast Reynolds family plantations of pre-Civil War Giles County that were run by one of the largest slave holders and cotton producers in Middle Tennessee. Likewise, a recently passed city proclamation recognized April as Confederate History Month in both Pulaski and Giles County. Given Pulaski’s Confederate roots, it’s an innocuous enough resolution, unless you happen to be black.
One native of the area describes the appointment of Reynolds as an important step in overcoming the city’s troubled history, whether city residents want to acknowledge it or not. “Sometimes we don’t confront the past, and we should,” the longtime resident remarks. “Here’s an example of a situation where we did. John Reynolds did it. And it happened sooner than most in that community expected.”
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