KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- 'What If You Gave A World's Fair And Nobody Came?' the Wall Street Journal asked archly in a front-page headline which enraged this host city for The 1982 World's Fair.
The Journal, adding insult to ridicule, described Knoxville as 'a scruffy little city of 180,000 on the Tennessee River.'
And there was the Reader's Digest article entitled 'The Shocking Saga of Expo '82,' which charged the fair was 'born of sordid politics' and is a 'gross example' of pork-barrel spending.
Undaunted by attacks ranging from the merely snide to the vituperative, the fair's organizers are hard at work on the exposition they insist will have a $400 million impact on Tennessee's third largest city, create 37,000 jobs and reclaim 70 blighted acres in the downtown section.
God willing and if the creek don't rise, as mountain people in these parts have been known to say, my hometown on next May 1 will join London, Paris and the other great cities which have hosted official international expositions.
That is heady stuff for a town that heretofore has hosted only fairs of the type where blue ribbons are won by hogs.
By the time the fair ends after 184 days on Oct. 31, 1982, according to local movers amd shakers, 11 million people will have attended what will forever after be known as -- for better or worse -- the Knoxville World's Fair.
Paris and Knoxville were once mentioned in tandem by travel writer John Gunther, who described the former as the world's most beautiful city and my hometown as the ugliest.
Philip Hamburger, writing two decades ago in The New Yorker, put it this way: 'There is very little to be said for downtown Knoxville. Even third-generation and fourth-generation Knoxvillians, a prideful people, tend to shudder when walking through downtown.'
At the time Hamburger wrote those mischievious words, the city was tearing down the old red-brick Market House and erecting in its place a new shopping mall.
Some of us would have preferred to keep the Market House, which may have been ugly but displayed beautifully cured hams and sausages and fresh produce.
Knoxville now has lots of new buildings but some people still see it as ugly.
The city never seemed ugly to me. I loved growing up and working in Knoxville. As a kid, I delivered the Knoxville News-Sentinel and deposited my earnings at a bank in the Flat Iron Building, which as you may suppose is shaped like a flat iron.
Some people say the Flat Iron Building -- which admittedly is not a thing of beauty and a joy forever -- is typical of old Knoxville architecture.
Knoxville's landscape today is dominated by a glittering 27-story office building which is the headquarters of a banking empire put together by Jake Butcher, whose support of the fair may have cost him the governorship last year.
It was Butcher, a Democrat who helped elect Jimmy Carter to the presidency, who persuaded Carter to approve federal seed money for the fair.
A 1979 poll indicated a majority of Knoxvillians opposed the fair but public opinion now has swung in favor of it.
Support for the fair is bi-partisan, with Sen. Howard Baker, the majority leader in the Senate, leading the Republican boosters.
In an interview in his skyscraper office, Butcher attacked his critics.
'They called the fair the Jimmy Carter-Jake Butcher pork barrel but they never revealed that Howard Baker also supports it,' said Butcher, 44, a former Marine from nearby Maynardville, hometown of country music star Roy Acuff.
'I don't expect to get anything personally out of the World's Fair,' said Butcher, a friendly man with steel gray hair.
'The World's Fair is more important than my being governor,' said Butcher, who added that if his losing race against Republican Gov. Lamar Alexander -- also a fair supporter -- were held again in 1982 'I would get a lot more votes than I got.'
Dr. Joe Dodd, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee, is the most outspoken opponent of the fair.
'You cannot justify using federal funds for this fair as a pump-priming device because Knoxville already was an economically booming area,' Dodd said in an interview in his office in a campus tower which the professor noted was made of yellow brick rather than ivory.
'This is a scheme that concentrates public funds in the hands of a few for their own betterment,' said Dodd, a lanky Virginian who describes himself as a Democrat.
Dodd also grumbled about the 'social costs' of the fair, which he said would include air pollution and an increase in crime, not to mention inflation.
Other critics of the fair worry about the hordes of people they believe will swarm into town. Proponents of the fair argue that the city easily handles football crowds of more than 90,000 that jam Neyland Stadium, home of the Tennessee Volunteers.
S.H. 'Bo' Roberts, president of the fair whose theme is 'Energy Turns the World,' still is hopeful the Soviet Union and China will participate.
But with less than a year before opening day, international participants include only Australia, West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the 10-nation European Economic Community.
The fair claims a dozen 'corporate participants,' including the Church of Christ, but the big energy-related firms such as Exxon have not signed on.
Roberts, a former journalist, said the fair will focus attention on energy advances at the University of Tennessee -- where he was a vice president -- and also at the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the world's largest utility complexes.
The fair has had difficulty signing corporate participants because of direct competition from a permanent scientific exhibition which is to open next fall at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.
Mayor Randy Tyree, a native Middle Tennessean and Democrat serving his second term in staunchly Republican East Tennessee's largest city, acknowledged politics 'played and important role' in efforts to organize the fair.
Tyree, who some say will run for governor in 1984, said Butcher was able to interest Carter in the fair but the mayor added Republican support also will be vital to the ultimate success of the fair.
The fair evidently enjoys the quiet support of the Reagan administration and some observers consider it a good bet that the President will attend.
Tyree rejects charges the fair is financially unsound, contending the revenues it will generate will provide a net profit for the federal, state and local government investments.
The fair's biggest backer is the federal government, which so far has put up more than $44 million dollars. The city approved an $11.6 million bond issue and the state chipped in $3 million. Butcher put together another $25 million in a financing deal involving lending agencies throughout the world.
Federal and state funds totaling $224 million are being used to improve Knoxville's interstate system -- which includes a bottleneck local wags call 'Malfunction Junction' -- before the fair opens.
The fair site is a valley between downtown and the University and will be dominated by a 226-foot 'Sunsphere,' which will resemble a golf ball on a tee and will house a revolving restaurant.
Charles D. Smith, fair vice president for site development, works in an office in an old warehouse topped with a sign that reads '1982 World's Fair Operations Center.'
Smith, an architect, explained what he had in mind for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Depot, where my father worked in an upstairs office as a train dispatcher before retiring at the age of 75.
As a youngster, I liked to go there and watch Dad, who wore a green eyeshade, use a telegraphic sounder to send messages in Morse Code down the line to places like Etowah and Copper Hill.
My Dad is bemused by plans to turn his old work place into a posh restaurant.
'This has been a great construction year for us,' said Smith. 'We're actually ahead of schedule. The weather has been fantastic. We have a no-strike to thegreath tt onesons. of the past. . fBefore leaving Knoxville I got a $7 haircut from a pretty young woman named Marty Colicketilins in a place called The Lion's Den on Gay St., which is the city's main drag and is not at all gay, in either sense of the word.
'The World's Fair will be great for Knoxville,' said Mrs. Collins, deftly snipping my thinning mane with scissors.
When I was a kid growing up in Knoxville, my haircuts cost 35 cents and were administered with electric clippers noisy and powerful enough to mow a lawn.
I had a fertile imagination in those days but I certainly never dreamed Knoxville could one day be the site of a world's fair.
It is true that Two Ton Tony Galento once fought an exhibition at Knoxville's old Lyric Theater, which is gone now. Anot for thurs may 4
he time my Dad took me to a railrock.
adv here a dead whale -- which gave off an odor indicating it had not lived for some time -- had been hauled into town on a flat car. idetrald's fair with the theme 'Energy Turns on a srld' has got to be more 'educational,'
