I like to walk around the town just before dawn. Sometimes you get interesting pix.
Stu Can’t Spell
Not only can Stu not spell, he has a misunderstanding of how the old Kingsport telephone numbers worked. (When I visited Kingsport as a child in 1956, I was amazed at the dial telephones. We still had the operator system in Morristown. I was such a rube.)
Kayo #1
This was the Kayo Number 1 gas station on the corner of Industry Drive and Netherland Inn Road. It sat beside the Ward Feed facility (you can see the silos behind the station building) fronting on Netherland Inn Road. Both these buildings are long gone now, razed when the City put in the traffic circle. Surprisingly, the old Chuck’s Drive In building is still there, as part of a used car lot. Back in the ’60s, Chuck’s had the best burgers around.
Treasure
This is behind the former (long time ago) Intermountain Telephone Company (often referred to as the “Intermittent Telephone Company”) building in Kingsport. The arrow points to a basement entrance.
Not what you think…
At first glance, it looks like it’s a person crouched over something. It looked that way to me when I happened on it and took the picture. But it’s not. It’s just a coat over a bag of trash, with just a little bit of a shoe in the background. Whew.
A frog
This is a frog. It’s part of a switch in Kingsport yard. It’s called a frog, I’m informed, because of its resemblance to a part of a horse’s hoof. Since I don’t know anything at all about horses, very little about frogs, and only a smattering about railroad technology, I’ll take their word for it.
The Devil’s Inn
This is on the highway between Elizabethton and Hampton TN. Just sitting there, glittering in the morning sun.
Point Counterpoint
This is the only piece of work I ever signed “Bula”. It was the name of a business I had at the time with Tom Buchanan. Boo-Lah. Oh, well.
Girl with tail
This lady was an attendee at a Halloween party we had back in the 80s.
Owl Sits in for the King
This was done back when I was playing chess a little and finding out again and again how little I could play chess. It was also a part of my interest in perspective and a certain fondness I had for putting the owl in unusual circumstances.
Summer: Morning Shift
I was out walking on a pleasant summer morning, just after dawn, when I saw this. The windows are steamed up from the early morning prep. I angled around until the sign hid the sun itself and let the light show through the windows. I had a paper route in downtown Kingsport not too long after this Pal’s was built in the late 50s. I delivered the Kingsport Times (the afternoon paper…the News was the morning edition) right after school, before supper. Several of my deliveries were on Shelby Street. The smell of the hamburgers (still the same today) would remind me how long it had been since I’d eaten.
Eureka Roller Mills
This was in Telford. I took the reference picture sometime in the late 70s. The original drawing is much larger (it had a left vanishing point approximately 9′ from the drawing itself). I sold it a decade or so ago. Later, in 2004, I decided to do another take on it.
Old Virgnia-Carolina Railroad trestle
You’ll see pictures of this stately old trestle all over the web, but here’s the story. It’s part of the Creeper Trail now and spans the confluence of the Middle Fork and the South Forks of the Holston River (a guy named Holstein was the first non-Native American to come paddling down this watery avenue…probably a million Native Americans paddled down it before he got here, so where are their names? And who now knows those names?). Anyway, the Creeper Railroad was built by the Virginia-Carolina Railroad, reaching Damascus from Abingdon (after a long, tortuous time a-building) in 1900. Many a train thundered over this trestle, until the line fell into disrepair and was abandoned. Some people with amazing vision created the Creeper Trail, an outstanding stretch of rails-to-trails. It’s more fun than that hellish (for me) 12-mile Guest River Gorge trail on the railbed of the former Interstate Railroad (someone once asked me if I were a railfan, or “foamer” as they’re sometimes known, and I said, “No, I’m into trackage.” ), but just as scenic. This trestle is so pleasant on a warm summer day.
Nobody comes here anymore
This is in east Jenkins KY. We got a number of pix in a brief stop here.
Greenhouse, Christmas
This Backer’s Florists, which used to be located at the corner of Watauga and Charlemont Streets. The location is a parking lot for a funeral home now. It had snowed that night and I was out walking in it, with my camera, and I saw this view. It’s been worked on a fair bit, since the original was an analog image.
Uncle Bob's Pix 