 Hello, and welcome to an evening with Bruce Wheeler, brought to you by the John C. Hydra Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries and the University of Tennessee Press. We are here tonight to celebrate the third edition of Knoxville, Tennessee, a mountain city in the New South, recently published by UT Press, which includes a new preface and a chapter covering the period from the death of Kaz Walker to the end of the administration of Madeline Margero, Knoxville's first female mayor. Joining Bruce in conversation tonight is Jesse Fox-Meshark. He worked as a reporter and editor for 20 years before going to work in communications for Knoxville Mayor Madeline Margero in 2011. In 2018, Jesse started the local news website Compass with former Knoxville News Sentinel editor and reporter Scott Barker. Welcome, Jesse. Thanks very much. Happy to be here. Finally, the author himself, William Bruce Wheeler, Professor Emeritus of History at UT Knoxville is also the co-author of TVA and the Teleco Dam, a bureaucratic crisis in post-industrial America, and Discovering the American Past, a look at the evidence. He is currently at work on the sixth edition of Discovering the American Past. Thank you very much. I've actually finished that. All right. So it's so great to see you both, and I thank you again for joining us in conversation this evening. I understand this isn't your first time together in an event setting, so I'll take this as my cue to let you two get to it. I'll see our audience again after our Q&A session, and remember, audience, you are welcome to ask your questions of Bruce or Jesse at any time this evening by dropping them in the comments on YouTube or Facebook. See you soon. All right. Well, Bruce, first of all, I just want to say it's great to see you. We last did this last year at Union Avenue Books, so I hope that you've been well since then. I have. Thank you very much, and interestingly enough, I happen to be in the Union Avenue Books today, and they're open all the way, so I'm very excited about being able to go in there and browse and buy. Yeah. It's great to see things starting to come back. Well, we're here to talk about the third edition of your book, and I guess I'd just like you to kind of kick us off by talking about the third edition. This is your third chance to revisit this story. Can you talk a little bit about how that narrative has changed with each succeeding edition and people who are familiar with the previous editions? I guess what can they expect to see in this one? Well, let me say this. I came to Knoxville. In fact, I happened to drive into Knoxville on the last day of the Billy Graham Crusade, so I was in something of a traffic jam as we were leaving the football stadium, but I didn't know very much about Knoxville, and I learned sort of as I went along. My co-author then, Mike McDonald, had been here longer. He knew a great deal more. We did a lot of work together, and then the more I stayed in Knoxville, the more I knew about it and wanted to change things as I went along and to add things. I think somebody said, well, has the book changed? I said, yeah, I've changed. And because of that, the book has changed somewhat. I feel a lot different about Knoxville than I did in about, I guess, I was about the year 20,000 when I came. And can you talk a little bit about that difference as a historian in writing history that you weren't present for, where obviously you're relying totally on documents and other people's recollections, and then also writing history that you've actually been here and seen firsthand. What's the difference between those two processes and perspectives? Well, that's a terrific question to be here and to watch Knoxville. And the first, my wife and I, we drove out I-40 and finally got off out. I thought it was in the middle of nowhere, but we were out somewhere there and not too far away from Concord Methodist Church. And we went there and we just didn't know where we were. We had to go and find things. We didn't know that there was such a thing as a blue law that we couldn't buy certain things on Sunday. And we did a lot of other things. But as we learned to be in Knoxville, the more we knew people here and the more we got to like the city, it got much, much different. We moved closer in to the city. And then we were actually in the Sequoia Hills area. And we loved that area. And then we decided we wanted to move out to the country. We'd both been raised in the country. And so we went to move way out in Severe County, which is where we lived. So there was that. But as I say, we learned to like the people in Knoxville and try to come to understand them. And some of their ideas, some of which I thought were quite interesting and some of them were very interesting. But me working with the fellow academicians and many of them were, I thought, were sort of sad that they were here. They wanted to move. And I thought, well, I'm actually happy to be here and I'm happy to be with these folks. Also, I had taught at several other schools before I got to the University of Tennessee. And so I came to look on the students themselves. It was quite an experience. Some of my colleagues said, oh, well, they're not very good students. Well, I found out they were OK. They moved along some of them faster than I moved. But it was that. And so as I say, I wanted to do a book. And this would be the last edition. Do a book which comes up to the present and how different the present is than the way it was when I first moved here. Yep, hit on a couple of those highlights. What are the biggest differences and some of the things that you talk about in this new edition between Knoxville as you first encountered it and Knoxville as it is now? Well, first of all, I wanted to study some of the politics in Knoxville. My wife worked at a little newspaper out in West Knoxville. And I said, well, I'll write a column for you every now and then. And I went and I would interview people like Mayor Kyle Testerman and other people. And got a different view of Knoxville from those folks. And that was, I think, different for us. The politics here were rough and tumble. I didn't know Kaz Walker, although as you can imagine, I had to interview him for the first and later second edition. And he is certainly an interesting person. Mike McDonald and I did a little bit of a paper, which was to be one of the chapters in the book. And we did that for the Historical Society downtown. And we were there. And all of a sudden at the back of the room, the doors open. And here comes Mr. Walker. And he was passing out little scissors, tie clips. I think I still have one of mine. And then he said that Mr. Wheeler must be very, very good to his mother, et cetera. But there were lots of things that he got wrong. And he talked about some of them. I didn't think later, as the book went along and as Mike and I went along, I think we were more right than wrong. More right than Kaz, maybe. More right than Mr. Walker, certainly. And what has changed in local politics or in Knoxville politics that we don't really see characters like Kaz Walker anymore? I mean, I think we're in a very different era now. For one thing, obviously, we have a lot more women involved. The majority of representatives on City Council right now are women, which certainly wasn't the case back then. Well, I think for one thing, a lot of people have moved to Knoxville. And when I came first to Knoxville and lived out in Village Green, and most of the people there were salespeople or worked, and they couldn't wait to get out of Knoxville. They wanted to get to New York, or they wanted to get to Chicago, or they wanted to get to somewhere else. And it came as I got to know some of the business people here that some of them, for a lot of reasons, liked Knoxville, and they would like to stay here. It was not as rough and tumble as a New York or a Chicago. And it was a nice place. They said they could raise their family and be with their friends and things. And so a lot of those people lived in Knoxville or in the surrounding county, and their idea of what the politics should do and could do was somewhat different than you would run into with Leonard Rogers or Carl Testament or others, good leaders in many ways. But these folks, they had certain different ideas about what should happen. They were very, very hot to go to the parents things at the schools. And I know that we went to some of the school evenings, and there were people who would stand up and say, well, where I come from, we didn't do it that way. We did it this way. And there were people who thought, well, he needs to sit down and shut up. But there were a lot of people who said, well, maybe this idea could be different. There could be the way things would be different. So that's, I think, one of the things that happened. Also, I think in the early 2000s or so, the country had a difficult situation from, say, about 2005 to 2008 and long. And people were losing houses. They were losing jobs. They were terrible things. And interesting enough, there were three, at least according to the Brookings Institute, there were three cities in the country that didn't go through that terrible situation. One of them was Dallas, one of them was Pittsburgh, and the other was Knoxville. And someone said, well, that can't be right. But why was it? One of the things was that Knoxville employers were not at risk in the recession. Covenant Health, Knox County Schools, UT Medical Center, Oak Ridge, et cetera, et cetera. These were places where the jobs were there. And new jobs exceeded and did well. Banking continued in a healthy way. So Knoxville and the people who lived here were pretty lucky about things in the years, say, from 2000 to 2012 or so. And that, I think, has helped. I've talked to a lot of people. I used to give a lot of talks to the introduction Knoxville people. These were usually new people that come to Knoxville. And almost all of them were planning to stay. And almost all of them planning to stay because of the way in which the life was for them and their families and for the economy. They thought things were different. I should warn you, Jesse, that one of those people, after I had talked to the group, said, you ought to go across the street and see if you could get a job with the comedy club. I thought, this is insane. But I actually did it. And I won the first prize in one of them. All I did was tell stories about my students and about my faculty and about the presidents of UT and the coaches and what have you. And the other comedians, they were telling other stories. But I was just telling those stories. I thought they were OK. Tales from a classroom. Class tales from a classroom. My wife said, that's the last time you do that again. And it was. Well, speaking of the classroom and the university, we have a question popped in from, I think, our friend, Ernie Freeberg. And he wants to know, in your view, was the university itself a useful force in improving Knoxville in these years or not really much of an important factor? And I guess a follow-up to that is, should we think of Knoxville as a university town? Well, Ernie Freeberg was my department head. And so I would never say anything that would suggest anything else. But I never thought of Knoxville as a college town. I don't think it ever really was. Maybe on football Saturdays, it was a Knoxville town. But I don't think that Knoxville had given much to the town. The people who taught in the education department and went out to teach and things, the agriculture people, there were some of the people that really did do some important things. But when it comes to getting the college itself to do things, when I first came here, the faculty sort of looked down their noses at Knoxville. They weren't sure that they liked it here. There was a fella here about that time. And he was on the radio. And he did things on the radio. He did all sorts of different things. And apparently, you could pay him to come up to your house at a party. And he could do some of these things, things like Kaz Walker or other things like that. And I sort of was a little embarrassed by that. I knew that, yes, there were things that needed to be corrected in things. But I wanted us to do more for the town. And in some ways, we haven't done as much as other universities have done. Some of the individuals, Bill Lyons, who had worked in the city government I don't know if he's working in the government now. He's doing a good job. He's retired from the city. He's doing a terrific piece every Sunday, I think. Yeah, he's writing for the new sentinel. He's my important boss at the city. Yeah, and there are a lot of people like him that had come out of the university, had taught at the university, and then had come and had done some really good work for the city. But no, I wouldn't call this a college town or a university town. I think we're going in a or had gone in a very, very different direction. Let's talk about downtown a little bit, because I think the rebirth of downtown Knoxville is probably one of the biggest stories of the last couple of decades here. And I know that you have had your own downtown apartment there. What's the difference living in Knoxville now with that kind of vibrant, again, urban center versus the couple of decades where there wasn't really a whole lot going on down there? Well, we lived way out in the country in Severe County. We liked it there. We liked our neighbors, and we liked what was going on. But my wife had the idea, maybe, that we could get a condo downtown, and we could go to, we love to go to the theater. We love to go to the opera. We love to do those things. And she says we could get some good restaurant food, and we could go to that. And we liked it a lot. And we met a lot of folks just in the lobby of the Tennessee Theater of people who have done that. And we just loved it. We loved going to Knoxville on Saturday and go to the farmer's market or other kinds of arts and crafts things that were going on. And people came and they liked it. There's good food and apparently a fair amount of it. We haven't been back very much because things have slowed down in downtown. But as I told you earlier, I'm very happy to see the Union Avenue bookstore open. I'm very happy to go back to get some good food on Gay Street or in the Market Square or other places. And we really enjoyed that. It was nice to see people out on the streets and doing things. I must say that the Women's March, I think, was that what it was. And I think it brought something like 14,000 people. The vast majority of them are from out of town somewhere. And they did that. And it was really, really something. I said in the book, I said that the mayor or a hero gave a speech that nobody could hear because there was so much clapping and good shouting and things. But it was good. It was a good thing to see that happening. And I liked that. I liked people downtown with their pets and doing that. And we have now learned of the people who live downtown. Well, it turned out I knew a couple of those people, but I didn't know they lived downtown. But I turned to like them and get together with them and do lots of other things with them. We haven't done as much as we wanted to do because of the problems with the pandemic. Right. We could do better, better, better now. We're also trying to add a room to our house to think that we're just as crazy as can be. But we're adding a room to our house. And this is going to be a room that's going to have all the things like the sewing and the book reading and the book writing and all of that in one room. And then try to open up the rest of the room. So the place isn't so crowded. But yeah, we like our neighbors there. And we like our neighbors here. Well, we have another question here. The question is, what time period in history, besides now, besides 2020, 2021, when would you say Knoxville was the most vibrant economically, politically, or socially in its history? I would say that probably the most vibrant and in some ways, in the same for the same reasons, was the late 1800s. We had factories. We had things. We had people to come from all over and bring with them ideas and money. And I know that the Albers Company was one of the largest drug manufacturers. But the original name of that was Sanford Chamberlain and Albers. Sanford was from Connecticut. Chamberlain was in Ohio, I think. And Albers, I'm not sure where he was, but they were all from outside. And they would come in. We were so proud of ourselves that a quarter of the downtown burned down in a fire because people were saying, it's a million-dollar fire. You can't believe that Knoxville had a million-dollar fire. And they were bragging on all of that. But those people, I think, Chamberlain, who came here, turned out to be a very important person, both in banking and in politics. And there were lots of others. Now, I think that they kept the factories going. And you could think of the people like the Albers. You could look at the Kerns Bakery. You could see that, and it's being redone. And lots of other things like that. It didn't stay long. It didn't stay long enough, in part, because the railroad was bringing in things that were made elsewhere that could compete or even do better than the things that we were making here. But if you go down to where the old railroad stations were and all there, you could sort of sense what it used to be. And it was a very important place. It was those people that, maybe a little bit later, moved out to, I guess, it was not too far from where the university grew in that area. And then it would maybe leave it further than that out into West Knoxville and into where things are now. The huge expanse of growth we've had out there, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was amazing. Now, I think the problem that there were sons and grandsons, I think, that didn't keep that going. And I'm not sure why. If I could tell you why, I could tell it and write it. But I don't quite understand why that didn't happen. But as those people died, things, it was just sort of like their sons and daughters just didn't just didn't take it up and keep it and keep it going. So I think that's probably the next most exciting period in Knoxville history. And then today, or just a little bit before today, is the early, the other thing I wanted to point out, and this is in the book, is that Knoxvillians are beginning to think about things that they can do to help the city. And I think one of my favorite former students who has a thing in the Sunday papers, and that was, now tell me what his name was. The fellow there that was there, he did something. Now, I guess they've moved the business to the Monday, but he's in that was it Don, I've forgotten his name, I have it somewhere. But he says, he said, we're having trouble with health. He said, Knoxville could do that. We can't wait for the state or the federal government to do that. We can't wait for that. David Moon, you're talking about. Yeah, right. And he said, he said that we could do that. I suggested that in a talk to the to the leadership group. And I said, we don't, we don't. David Moon said, we could do this ourselves. We have the intelligence. We have the people to do it. We have the, and the good thing about it is that as opposed to the federal and the state, our politics here are not so difficult for people to get to get things. I mean, I'm sort of sad for watching the two major parties do it and not really helping each other as much. But nobody's Knoxville's doing that, that I know of. Do you think that our nonpartisan government is part of that? What difference does that make that we have a nonpartisan city government? I think it does. I think it does. I also think the people that were chosen are people who are very, very good. If you think about the people that were chosen to lead the city. And if you talk about Ash and his four terms, but if you talk about Bill Haslam, talk about Madeleine Rojero, and nobody particularly thought of them as Republicans or Democrats, although they knew that they were. And then Rojero's person who followed her. Yes, yes. And I think Haslam and Rojero ran a really good campaign against one another, but they kept it good. And when Haslam needed somebody with Rojero's talents, he went to her to join his government, which I think is very, very interesting and very helpful, very helpful. And also, Rojero in good position to run then the next time because she had the experience there. That's true. That's true. And I think it's pretty clear that there were people who probably did not support her when Haslam first ran that probably would help her out. Because she's got the same idea about government and about the people. And I know people said, I was talking to the person today who works at the Pembroke. And he said that people stand out and watch Bill Haslam because he rides his bike all over the city, which he did when he was mayor and people was. And he would say, I can't believe it when people started waving to me and say hello mayor, which they did. And he had good ideas. I know Mike Edwards has some great stories about Haslam as mayor and bringing in people to business leaders and things to help the economy. And I think he's got an office there at Union Avenue. And I understand he's spreading along that block, which is fine. And he has a book coming out, too, this month. I heard that. Is it something about religion and politics? Yeah, I haven't read it yet. But yes, about faith in the public sphere, I think. I'll buy it. Yeah, me too. Maybe we can do another event with him. Well, I have a here's a fun question for you. What is your favorite Knoxville story to tell people who are new to the area if you want to introduce them to Knoxville? Let me see. Well, it's a story about we had just moved in to Village Green is when we first came to Knoxville. And we set up our television set. And the television set was going in. And there was an ad. And it was two men. And in between the two men, there was a pig. And and one of them said, who's that jackass that you're talking to? The other one said, that's not a jackass. That's a pig. And he said, I was talking to the pig. And my wife said, I think we need to move back to DeKalbville. But that that was I think it was it was an ad on one of the Walker, one of the Walker things. And that was because it just it just it just it just got me. It said, this is it. This is it. We're we're we're here. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina. And it was it wasn't quite quite like quite like that. But but somewhat. Yeah, that was that was, I think, a fun, fun story. The other fun story, which I did add in the book, was Paul Soper, who was who was a professor in the theater department, and he wrote a play which was sort of a play about Kaz Walker. And but he was not named that. And they said that that there were so many people that went to that that they had to open it up a couple of more nights. And he said, with all the other plays that we're doing were going on that year, that was the biggest the biggest incoming incoming. It was it was just called something about a little town. And everybody knew who they were talking about. And nobody nobody could stop stop laughing. So Soper, I understand, was just just great. He never did say anything about about that. But he was great. He was around when I first came. It was good to good to see him do that. I'd love to see the play again. Yeah, somebody should revive it. We need to find that. Well, I can be done. That ties in a little bit to another question I had, which has to do with Knoxville's kind of Appalachian culture and heritage. And it's right in the title of your book. You say a mountain city in the South. And my sense is that Knoxville has always had sort of a love hate relationship with its place in Southern Appalachia. Do you think that the city now and the city leadership now is more comfortable with kind of accepting and acknowledging that that is a big part of our identity than they used to be? I think people now are just ignoring it. But I know that when I first moved here, people told me, this is not a Southern city. This is a mountain city. And you don't think of it as a Southern city. And so there was things about its politics and other kinds of kinds of things. There were things that were not so good. I think almost every town and city in the country is having difficult, embarrassing problems with its African-American population. And Knoxville was no exception. There were problems there. And I suppose in some ways there still are, although Ash, I think, tried to stop that. And we can see. But I don't know so much whether it's even a mountain city anymore. But I think it's certainly not a Southern city. I think that's for sure, as we say. But at one time, I think, there was this thing of people moving in here. There were a lot of people that I knew when I lived in Severe County that had gone, say they had gone to the service and come out of the service and they wanted a job and they came to Knoxville. And that would be the place that they would have a job. And then as they did that, then they wanted to move back and get a job at Blalox and Company or something like that. But they came to Knoxville. And they certainly were mountain city folks and proud of it, I suppose. But I think now I'm not sure that you could say that the city is either Southern or mountain. Now, don't make me cross out the subtitle of that. Don't make me do that. It would be, if anything, it would be a new city, a new city. And maybe in a new South. And we could do that. I've got a new title. I can go back and do a fourth. Fourth edition. Well, we have another question here. Wants to know, has your perspective on the 1970s and the 1980s changed since your last edition? And specifically, does the legacy of the schemes of the Butcher-Balanton years seem different now than it did 10 or 20 years ago? Well, it certainly was something that had to be said. The Blanton business is just statewide, I think, in some ways. But the Butcher thing was, I mean, that was wrapped up very much in the fair. And there were people who thought that we didn't need the fair. We shouldn't have the fair. It should be held in far west Knoxville, where the people who would finance it would live, but not downtown. But then there were people that they thought they could, they could build a fair. And then on top of the fair, build a new city that could be there. And they could do that with the money they made out of people who came to the fair. And of course, a lot of that, unfortunately, had to do with the Butcher brothers and some of the things that were done that I suppose, in some ways, were terrible, hurtful, hurtful banks and things like that. But... Well, we're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the fair next year. How does the fair look now? Because, right, it didn't have the immediate impact on Knoxville that some people hoped it would. How does it look now, this far out? What impact did it have? Well, the acreage, not much happened to that. I think that last time I was there, they had those antique baseball guys would come out and play. And I enjoyed watching that. But we haven't been able to use the acreage as much as we thought we would. And somebody, I think, who came and talked about and studied the fair before it came, then they said that they don't put 1200 houses on that site along with stores, et cetera. They will have wasted what they have. And I don't know if you could say that actually has happened, but it certainly has not been a great enormous help, a dramatic help to the city. There have been some nice things that have happened, and we're sort of glad to... The other thing you could ask about was the Whittle. Here was a fella that built a campus, as he called it. And he was doing some really, really dramatic things, but I guess went too far and couldn't stop. I don't know what his situation is now, but I know it's not like it was back when he built, as he wanted to call it, the campus. I actually just read, there was an article about Chris Whittle in the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago. He's putting his Hampton's house on the market. I think he's in a little bit of financial difficulty again. I'm sorry to hear that. You're changed, yeah. Yeah, and I thought he set up all those scholarships. And I think Alexander, when he was president at the university, got him to set those up, and then it turned out that he couldn't finance them after a while. And I know that Joe Johnson used to have to go up to New York every year and beg money from him to get to, and there would be 20 students, and then there would be 15, and then gradually there would be none. He had some great ideas, no question about it. The man was an idea factory, and I know that there were people at the university who worked with him and thought this was going to be something. This was going to build the new city. Well, not so well. He brought a lot of talent to town. I was fortunate to work with a lot of former Whittle people when I was at Metropulse. Yeah, and there are still a lot of them around here. So I think there was some real impact there from all that. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's true. Well, we're going to be coming up on our closing here in a minute. But I wanted to ask a little bit about the relationship between the city and the county, because Knoxville has gone from being the population center of the county surrounded by mostly rural areas to now 60% of the population of Knox County lives outside city limits, and also tends to be more politically conservative than the people inside the city. What does that mean for the city to now be sort of like a minority in terms of population and also maybe politically within Knox County? Well, it's interesting to bring that up, because now, like you said, the county is dominant in that. And there have been efforts to get the city and the county to put money into projects. And that just wasn't going to happen. There were things that people wanted to change about certain of the way in which people live in the county in terms of their sewage, in terms of their sidewalks and other things. And people, they just didn't want to do that. And then, of course, so much of the money that has brought in is brought in through things that are now in the county. And I know that when he was mayor, I think Victor Ash had some ideas about that. And there were people that even wanted to combine city and county. But I just don't think it's right. I think you mentioned once that both of them might be Republicans, but they're not the same Republicans. They're different kinds of Republicans. Republicans in Knoxville, in many ways, are moderate. I think the unfortunate thing is that when things come up, before, this is sort of more like Cass Walker, before anything can get going, the county is against it. We're not going to pay for all that money. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We just can't. We can't do it. And they don't. They don't do it. Is there going to be, I know there's been talk since I moved here about the city and the county uniting together. And I know a friend of mine who taught at the university at one time. And he said, anybody who says that is going to be viewed as crazy. I don't think that's quite the way you want to put it. But certainly they didn't want to do that. If anything, it seems less likely now than 20 or 30 years ago because the city and the county kind of have these much more distinct political identities. That's true. That is true. And I was in South Knoxville. I haven't been in South Knoxville for years. And I was in South Knoxville just a week or so ago and drove down along the river in the South area. And what a wonderful place that has happened there, that has grown up with all these wonderful homes and lots of things for buying things. And there'll be more of that, I think. Yeah, it's developed a lot down there. I know that Rohero Big wanted to do a lot for South Knoxville, she thought that it was well underserved. And as I say, I just was down there and I was just absolutely in the island home area. I was just delighted with what has been done with homeowners but also with the city and with companies. So yeah, I think that'll be something. Well, and that kind of sets up what'll probably be the last question here, which is having written three editions of this book now. Are you more optimistic at the end of the third edition than you were the first edition in terms of Knoxville's future or less optimistic or just kind of the same? No, I'm a lot more optimistic than, first of all, a lot more optimistic than I was when I moved here in 1970 and grew somewhat more optimistic as went along. But now, because the way that politics have gone and the way that downtown has gone, and now I saw in the paper that there is going to be, is it so many new apartments that are being built by so much? A lot of new apartments downtown, yeah. Oh, it's going to be something. Maybe a baseball stadium again, too. That would be something, that would be something. I don't know. I always like to go out to 407 and watch baseball, but that's just me, the severe county, liking that. But yeah, I like to go to baseball down there. My mother lived in Knoxville for some time, and she was a big baseball fan. And I want to tell you the people who work there were so nice to her. She was in a wheelchair. And they made sure that everything was just right for her. And did she get a Coke? And did she get a this? And did she get a that? And they actually asked some of the people who were sitting behind her if they wouldn't move, because they were going to have trouble watching over her. And she loved baseball. And she loved to come to the games. And she loved for the people that were there. Most of them were people who work there, but not all of them. There were some that were just nice folks. Yeah, I loved the old Bill Meyer stadium myself. Well, I lived so close when I first moved in here. I lived so close that a night game was flashing in my window. Was it the Durham Bulls, was it? Was that what it was? Yeah, they would come and play. I enjoyed. I enjoyed. Well, I think that will wrap us up. Jesse, your questions have been great. Thank you very much. Great to see you again. I hope we get to see each other in person again one of these days soon. It will happen. It will happen. Yes, sir. I'm sure everyone's sad to see me, because that means our time is up. So again, I want to thank you, a UT Press author, Bruce Wheeler, and Compass co-founder, Jesse Fox-Meshark, for joining us this evening. And many thanks to our viewers.