This is the first in a series of articles dedicated to the stories and recollections of local octogenarians about growing up and living their entire lives in our hometown.
By Robert Pryor, Sr. |Photograph By Nathan Sparks
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 41, Issue 6 (Nov/Dec 2025)
W
hen I decided to collect memories of growing up and living in Knoxville from people who have lived and worked here their entire lives, I knew I wanted to include the experiences of my 87-year-old friend, Glenn Allen. I called Glenn and told him that I wanted to interview him so that I could write about his experiences living in Knoxville for so long, and he said, “I’d be happy to do it, but you better hurry – I ain’t been feeling too good lately.”
I always refer to Glenn as the First Man of Fountain City because his wife, Jane, has been honored so many times for her civic work in the Fountain City community. She has been named Woman of the Year twice and has received other honors surely making her the First Lady of Fountain City, which, I assume, would make Glenn the First Man.
Glenn was the fourth of six children born and raised in East Knoxville by Troy and Audrey Allen. Troy was a highly religious machinist who worked building coal digging equipment for Dempster Brothers at their manufacturing facility on Springdale Avenue off North Central. George Dempster (who invented the coal digger, which included his design that allowed the digger to mechanically empty its load, and who, of course, invented and began manufacturing the famous Dempster-Dumpster waste container in 1935) was also a politician and served as Knoxville’s city manager and mayor off and on from 1929 to 1946. Audrey had her hands full with six kids and a thin budget to feed and clothe the active clan. Glenn and his four brothers and one sister all worked to support the family.
Glenn Allen—at 87, still starting each day in search of a new adventure.
Glenn and his older brother, J. B., were fond of horses and got jobs in 1948 to work after school at Chilhowee Park where there was a horse boarding and training center. Glenn shoveled manure and groomed and fed the horses while paying close attention to the on-staff farrier. He began to pick up on how to custom make horseshoes and shoe all types of horses. Glenn and J. B. heard about an old horse for sale and paid $10 for a brown horse named “Pat” and took him home when the family lived on McCalla Avenue next to the current Austin-East High School. The house had a garage in back, but the family had no car, and Pat had a cozy home in the garage. When feed and supplies were needed, Glenn would hook up a Radio Flyer wagon to Pat using strips of material cut from a blanket to serve as the harness, and he and J. B. went off to the Henderlight Feed Store in Burlington. They rode in the wagon going to the store and walked back with Pat pulling a load of corn and oats the boys had saved up to buy. J. B. practiced on Pat and started looking for work shoeing horses for a living.
Pat was a good old horse, but they traded him for a black horse at the stockyards on Willow Street where the new Knoxville Smokies Covenant Health Park is located. They gave Pat and $15 for the black horse and hooked him up to the wagon.
J. B. got a regular gig shoeing the horses of Kay’s Ice Cream for a dollar per shoe. The horses were kept in a barn behind the Kay’s Ice Cream plant at the corner of Cherry Street and Magnolia Avenue and were used to pull ice cream carts all over Knoxville beginning in the 1940’s and all through the 1950’s. Kids all over town ran into the house for change when they heard the clomp of the horses and the ringing of the ice cream bell. One early morning, Glenn answered the phone, and it was the superintendent of Kay’s asking for J. B. to come and shoe several horses. J. B. was out of town, and he asked if Glenn knew how to do it. Glenn, only 12 at the time, jumped at the opportunity, and the superintendent, so desperate for help, sent a Kay’s Ice Cream truck to the house to pick up Glenn to take him to shoe the horses. That day Glenn put on 16 shoes and gave the superintendent a ticket for the work at $1 per shoe. The superintendent looked at the ticket and told Glenn, “Son, you’ve made $16 in an hour and a half before going to school, and that’s more than I’ll make all day and I run this place.” Thereafter, Glen had the Kay’s account and a new occupation.
The Allens did their grocery shopping across the street from their house on McCalla Avenue at H&W Market. In those days each neighborhood had a small grocery store as there were few large chain stores. Audrey Allen would send one of the boys to the store and she would cook up pinto beans, fried potatoes, and maybe country steak in gravy for supper. The Allens raised chickens in their back yard and ate a lot of chicken and had plenty of eggs. Glenn remembers cutting off chicken heads with an axe and watching them run around the yard before they collapsed in surrender.
In 1952, Glenn’s older brother, Bob, graduated from college but died of injuries suffered in a crash when he was returning from school in a borrowed car. The death was devastating to the Allen family, and hard emotional and financial times followed. Glenn’s father had a nervous breakdown over his son’s death and was unable to work for months, but the children helped, and by pulling together they were able to save the house and keep the lights on. While off from work, Troy Allen drew only $26 a week in disability, but every Sunday he would tithe $2.60 to First Wesleyan Methodist Church on Woodbine Avenue located behind Swan’s Bakery.
First Wesleyan was the family church throughout Glenn’s childhood, and he loved to go to Sunday morning service because the church had an old International bus that went around East Knoxville to pick up worshipers. Glenn loved to ride in the front of the bus with the driver, Bob Sexton, and was allowed to move the lever to open and shut the bus door. Glenn watched Sexton drive and memorized the procedures, including how to start the old keyless bus with a penny stuck in the ignition. Having three older brothers has its benefits, and Glenn had been taught how to drive by the time he was 9 years old. During the service, the bus was parked next to the church and Glenn, then 10 years old, invited his sister, Charlotte (8), and his youngest brother, Jerry (7), for a ride. The three slipped unnoticed off the back row and away they went for a 20-minute ride around Park City in the church bus. Glenn chauffeured his younger brother and sister the first time, and it was so much fun they did it every Sunday, religiously.
In about 1950 when Glenn was 12 and Jerry was 10, they and two more boys were “running the alleys,” which ran behind most houses in East Knoxville. Glenn explains that sometimes “good stuff” is thrown away in alleys behind the houses and businesses. One day, in the alley off Harrison Street, they came upon a 1947 green Crosley station wagon that looked good but had four flat tires and an accumulation of dirt. Crosley was probably the smallest automobile ever manufactured in the United States. The boys walked around the car and questioned whether or not it had been abandoned in the alley. They got in, one at a time, and sat behind the wheel and pretended to drive. A man in the apartment house where the car was parked hollered out the window, “Hey, you boys, you want that car – you can have it, just get it out of here.” Excited, Glenn ran home and got an air pump, and they inflated the tires only to discover the car had no engine.
Undeterred, the boys pushed the Crosley station wagon six blocks to Glenn’s house where they washed it and made it shine. For the next several days the boys pushed the Crosley all over the McCalla/Milligan Street neighborhood. They would push it on level streets, and all would run and jump in for a ride. They pushed it up Elmwood Hill behind what is now the Austin-East football field to a location Glenn knew as the place to buy Ruby’s Hot Tamales where he had often bought a dozen for his mother for sixty cents. From the top of Elmwood Hill, the boys would take turns driving back down the 300-yard downgrade only to push it back up the hill so the next boy could drive. So few people owned cars at that time, traffic was not a problem.
One day during the great Crosley escapade, the boys were exhausted from pushing the car and were sitting on the curb beside the impotent Crosley on East Linden Avenue behind the Tic-Tok barbecue restaurant when a U-Li-Ka Cleaners delivery truck stopped and the driver asked of they needed a push. The boys looked at Glenn and they all smiled, and Glenn said, “Yes sir, get in, guys – let’s go.” The delivery truck lined up against the Crosley’s rear bumper and away they went west toward downtown Knoxville. The Crosley had never gone so fast, and the boys had never had so much fun. Finally, after eight long blocks and near Park City Lowry School, the U-Li-Ka driver backed off and they coasted to a stop. The delivery driver parked and walked to the Crosley and said, “Boys, I think you must be out of gas because it never started up.” “No,” said Glenn leaning out the driver’s window, “this car ain’t got no engine.” The delivery driver stomped off mad and got in his truck and left but was seen once more by Glenn in the Medical Arts Building café on Main Street 10 years later and after Glenn was discharged from the Navy. Glenn recognized the U-Li-Ka driver and asked him if he remembered pushing the Crosley. They both had a good laugh remembering the station wagon without an engine.
Glenn Allen grew up in a mixed race neighborhood but never attended school with a black student; he rode a bicycle delivering telegraphs downtown for Western Union; he delivered morning newspapers for the Knoxville Journal; rode on a streetcar (trolley) to the doctor’s office; and worked as a “hog pusher” at East Tennessee Packing Company. He started U. T. thinking he would become a veterinarian but quit when he learned that he would be required to go to Auburn. He worked 31 years at the Post Office in Knoxville, became a real estate broker and an auctioneer, shoed horses and cut hair as a barber off and on over many years, worked construction, and played golf for 52 years primarily at Whittle Springs public course. He has lived in Knoxville his entire life and has lots of great memories to share. Today, Glenn is up early every morning looking for a new adventure.
By the way, the owner of the Crosley came and retrieved it when he heard the boys were “driving” it all over town.
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