“There’s no one like Wallace”

You hear the same things over and over about Wallace Baumann. He was a fascinating conversationalist and a meticulous dresser. He knew everything about Knoxville’s history. He loved music and movies. He was a great friend. And he liked his bacon crisp.

The Coffee Club sans Wallace Baumann

Wallace Baumann died this month at the age of 84 following a very serious lung operation. He left behind legions of grieving associates in Knoxville’s music, preservation, and historical communities. They packed his memorial service at downtown’s First Presbyterian Church, an institution to which he was extremely devoted. Baumann, a lover of tradition, had specifically requested that the readings at his service come from the King James version of the Bible.

He would have loved it that Maestro Lucas Richman and eight members of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra played at his memorial. His friend Bill Sndyer, the official organist of Baumann’s beloved Tennessee Theatre was the guest organist for the service. And it concluded with his favorite hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

“Wallace had a very good sense of place,” recalled Betsey Creekmore, a close friend of his who often accompanied him to the symphony and other social outings. “He knew his place and he wanted to make his place better for everyone.”

Baumann's portrait at Tennessee Theatre

“There’s no one like Wallace,” she said. “He joked about having the first nickel he ever earned. But look at what all he supported with his money and time and energy. There is an enormous number of things in Knoxville that owe Wallace a huge debt.”

One is the Knoxville Symphony, which benefited from Baumann’s financial generosity for many years.  And the Tennessee Theatre, of course.

“Wallace had a lifelong love for the Tennessee Theatre,” Creekmore said. “He was the only historian the Tennessee Theatre will ever have.”

“He watched every brush stroke when they were re-doing the Tennessee Theatre,” his friend Dick Koella agreed.

In addition to personally paying to have the theater’s signature “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ restored, Baumann is widely known as the “anonymous” $1 million donor who kick-started the theater’s $25 million restoration campaign. “The restoration of the Tennessee Theatre would not have been possible without Wallace,” said George Ed Wilson, who knew Baumann as a friend of his mother since Wilson’s childhood. “We bought our first TV set from Wallace in 1954. It was as big as a house.”

Baumann was the retired president of Woodruff’s department store on Gay Street, which was founded by his great-grandfather. His family is what is known as “old Knoxville.” It incuded many well-known architects.  Perhaps that explains Baumann’s  attention to details, especially when it came to the Tennessee Theatre.

Says Creekmore: “Wallace had an eye for little things: ‘The ceiling is not right. That panel is not right.'” His portrait, which he didn’t care for, hangs in the Theatre today.

Baumann was simply a joy to be with. He liked Alan and me and sometimes asked to be seated with us at symphony dinners and events. We heard that from the symphony staff and we were hugely complimented by it. “You all are fun,” Wallace said once.

Even though he was a bachelor and lived alone, Baumann liked to go, go, go. “We went a lot of places and did a lot of crazy things. We saw a lot of bad movies!” Creekmore said.

“There will be a big hole without Wallace,” Creekmore noted. “He was a wonderful community resource. He had strong values. You had to admire the values he stood for.”

He fought in World War II at the Battle of the Bulge and was said to have spent some time in a fox hole with some dead Germans. He didn’t talk about it much. He was the national president of his fraternity, Kappa Sigma. He was devoted to the library and what the library meant, Creekmore said. “He said it was the compilation of generations of knowledge,” she said. He was a member of the “old” library board.

He was in the club that created the famous “card tricks” at Neyland Stadium in the old days. Creekmore says they were very complicated routines whereby fans in the stadium would pick up cards that were affixed under their seats and follow directions on how to hold them to create elaborate images. “Some routines would require six or seven turns of the cards,” she said. “One produced the image of Ayres Hall, for instance. That was the best one.”

Baumann also was a dedicated member of the Coffee Club, the long-standing gathering of gentlemen that meets for lunch at Club LeConte on Tuesdays and Fridays. “He was the most knowledgeable guy in the Coffee Club,” says fellow member Jim Talley. “When he sat down, he always had something intelligent to say. I don’t think I’ve had a better friend than Wallace Baumann. We went to kindergarten together. He appreciated me inviting him to join the Coffee Club. He called me before every meeting to see if I was coming. He was a very devoted member.”

All the members said the meetings will be different without Baumann. “We’re not going to talk about organs or pre-World War II movies or theatre palaces nearly as much,” noted club member Sam Fowler.

Added Koella, “I’ll miss his facts. He was so factual about everything. A genuine detail person.”

Wilson agreed. “He had an encyclopedic knowledge of entertainment and the history of Knoxville.”

“You could walk up and down Gay Street and he would recount for you the history of every building,” Fowler said, adding that Baumann “always gave me a hard time when I slipped out at intermission” on symphony nights.

Many Coffee Club members chuckled when asked what they would remember about Baumann’s membership. They all said that often he ordered breakfast food, even though the meeting was at lunch time. He always told the server, “Make sure the bacon is crisp!”

Creekmore said that whenever she and Baumann attended an event at the Tennessee Theatre, they would park in the nearby State Street Garage. “When we’d leave the garage, we’d always circle back and go back down Gay Street to see the Tennessee Theatre’s flashing blade sign light up the night,” she said. “For as long as I live, I’ll never be able to not do that when I leave that garage.”

Jack Neely wrote a wonderful story about Baumann for Metro Pulse. Here is a link: http://www.metropulse.com/news/2009/aug/19/wallace-baumann-1925-2009/