Les Jones

East Tennessee > Lileks Does Tennessee Hotel Postcards

For months now blogger and pop culture rag and bone man James Lileks has been scanning and annotating hotel postcards from the 50 states in alphabetical order. He finally made it to Tennessee. Here's a postcard sent from the Admiral Benbow Inn that used to be in Knoxville.

If you like this sort of thing, you should definitely visit Swank Pad's Knoxville Then and Now, Vanishing 1950s America, and Highway 11.

P.S. - Did you know there was a Corvair van?

Bonus! Swanky writes: "AH, you missed the Admiral Benbow: http://forum.hukilau.org/viewtopic.php?t=201. It's in the holding bin on the forums and I have not offiically added it to the site." And one of his commentors on that thread adds this bit of local color:

Brothers and sisters when the old WETE radio station (later WRZJ) was located across from Catholic High, this was the closest watering hole! Heck Margie used to come down after she did the weather at 6, have a few adult beverages and sing with the house band until time to go back to do the 11. Woman could flat sing!

The bar was downstairs and it opened at 9 in the morning, most of our sales staff from WETE were in there at 9:30 dropping a few and telling lies about who they were going to sell later that day.