Colonel David Carpenter Chapman rallied both public opinion and financial support crucial to the park’s establishment in 1934. The native Knoxvillian and former UT football player attended the university from 1895 to 1897 but didn’t graduate.

Chapman was the first commissioner of the Tennessee Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission, which was charged with acquiring lands to create the park. Because most of the property was privately owned, the task proved difficult, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: “Boosters not only faced a daunting task in raising the estimated ten million dollars needed to buy the necessary land, but six thousand landowners, especially the large timber companies that owned most of the land, resisted acquisition.”

Chapman negotiated hundreds of land purchases, even as he raised money to buy more parcels of the scenic terrain. Fundraising to purchase land for the park began in 1925. The legislatures of North Carolina and Tennessee appropriated $2 million each in 1927, and other donations came from individuals, groups, and schoolchildren who gave their pennies.

But that wasn’t enough, and Arno Cammerer of the National Park Service and Chapman were credited with persuading John D. Rockefeller Jr. to give $5 million to guarantee the project’s success.

In the October 1934 issue of Tennessee Alumnus, UT professor and park historian Carlos Campbell saluted Chapman and other alumni who spearheaded the effort. “University of Tennessee alumni furnished the leadership, and most of the work, for one of the greatest movements ever undertaken in—and for—the state of Tennessee,” Campbell said.

Other UT alumni deemed instrumental in the park’s founding were General Frank Maloney, class of 1898; Cowan Rodgers, 1899; General Cary F. Spence, 1886; and General J. W. Cooper, 1899.

But it was Chapman who made it happen, Campbell says: “It was the scrappy colonel who refused to give up the fight when, at so many different times, it seemed hopeless.”

Chapman was rewarded with the naming of Mount Chapman, a 6,340-foot peak near the Tennessee–North Carolina border, in his honor. U.S. Highway 441 in Knoxville—Chapman Highway—bears his name, as well.

Corey and Millicent Bell have only six children at home. Yes, only. Because, you see, they used to have eight. The Bells, both UT Knoxville MBA grads, are in their mid-thirties and live in Round Rock, Texas, where Corey Bell has a successful business. Certainly they have a bright future ahead of them.

But it’s unlikely anything the Bells will ever do, no matter how spectacular, will overshadow the big-hearted gamble they took in 2001, when they became legal guardians for eight of Corey Bell’s younger brothers and sisters.

You may recall their story from Tennessee Alumnus. Corey Bell is the eldest of 13 children. When their mother died, the eight children who still lived at home in South Carolina were left alone. Corey and Millicent, married just 3½ years, took the youngsters in. The young marrieds, both with good jobs at Dell Computer in Austin, became instant, if inexperienced, parents. They bought a big house, new and shiny, to accommodate the influx. Beyond that, they weren’t sure what to do.

“We learned lots of lessons,” says Corey. Now just three of Corey’s siblings remain at home (ages 15, 17, and 18), and the Bells have three children of their own, a 3-year-old and 10-month-old twins. The siblings who’ve left the nest have all gone to college, except one who’s in the Air Force.

Just how did the family manage? “By the grace of God,” says Corey. That’s no throwaway line; he means it.

Disciplining the children was tough. Corey is, after all, the kids’ brother, not their dad.

“Whereas I can discipline one of my own children, and forty-five minutes later everything’s OK, with my siblings, they’d be mad for a day and a half,” Corey says. “I wanted to be the good-time brother. I wasn’t prepared for not being liked.”

And Millicent recalls the challenge of making the kids feel secure and loved. “We had no experience as parents. Corey’s mom had done such a remarkable job of making each child feel like the only one. It was difficult for me to establish those relationships.”

Corey recalls his siblings’ emotional tumult when they came to live in Texas. “Everyone was still grieving [their mother], and then we brought them to a place they’d never seen before. They had to wonder if we really planned to keep them, or if we would pass them off to someone else.”

There were financial challenges as well.

“We simply had to look at the hierarchy of needs—food, clothing, shelter,” Corey says. “Our focus hasn’t been on wealth accumulation or vacations. Our house is screaming for maintenance and paint.”

The family cars suffered too. “We had three or four wrecked cars,” Corey recalls. “We instituted a plan that if any of the kids were going to drive, they had to pay for their own insurance, and if they wanted a car, they had to pay half.”

Millicent, who continued to work at Dell until last fall, has “retired” for a bit. She remembers how job-focused she was fresh out of UT. “I had a specific timeline for my career,” she laughs. “That went out the window.”

But the good times outweighed the bad. The Bell family has enjoyed sports, school plays, fashion shows, homecomings, boyfriends, girlfriends, and “fun at every stage,” Corey says.

In 2003 Corey cofounded TriFusion, an information-technology service provider, in Round Rock. As of 2007, the company had about 150 employees and revenue of $7.5 million. He’s won awards for his success and entrepreneurship, and he has ideas for several other companies and for international expansion. Millicent, though, is his rock. “If there’s one fundamental effect I can point to from all this,” he says, “it’s that I love my wife even more.”

It was 1958. Having spent the ­summer of 1956 working in Alaska’s mining and fishing industries, I wanted to return to that vast and beautiful land. I stuck my thumb out in Boston. Ten days and 5,000 miles of hitchhiking later, I found my weary self in Fairbanks, unloading hundred-pound bags of sugar from boxcars.

Soon I hitchhiked to Anchorage to look for better work and found it with a fish processor on the Kenai River. At the end of the salmon run, I was hired as inspector for construction of the Denali Park road, which required living in a tent and working 70-hour weeks—all for less than $100 a week. But maybe I should have paid my employer for the opportunity to live in that beautiful wilderness and chase silver fox down the road while driving to work in the morning.

Later I tested successfully for a position with the Territorial Land Office in Anchorage. My job involved depositing lease money from the oil companies every day. I came to understand why people embezzle. There I was, earning less than $100 a week while carrying $75,000 to the bank at the end of the day. My free hours were spent in contradictory activities—singing for a church and playing piano at the Cheechako Tavern, which advertised the warmest beer and the worst music in town.

It wasn’t long before Alaska received increasing attention from folks down south. Most of it was the result of a Life magazine series about the Michigan ’59ers, a group who left the depressed economy of their state to homestead in Alaska. When they arrived at the land office, I showed them maps of parcels open to homesteading. A photographer walked in and snapped our picture, and that photograph appeared the next day on the front page of the statehood edition of the Anchorage Daily Times.

President Eisenhower signed the statehood declaration in January 1959, and the party began. In Anchorage wood was piled high for a bonfire on a vacant lot—49 tons of it, we were told. Under cover of darkness, which is considerable at that time of year, a prankster planted a Texas flag atop the woodpile. Texas became the butt of many jokes in Alaska. The fact that Alaska is two-and-a-half times the size of Texas inspired my favorite, in which the Alaskan says, “If you Texans don’t quit complaining about being the second-largest state in the Union, we’ll split in half and make you third-largest.”

The statehood celebration spilled over into the “Fur Rendezvous,” a major event in Anchorage that includes a dog-sled race and a huge fur auction. My principal interest, though, was in the “Fur Face” competition. Of the several categories, one called “Red Fox,” was exclusively for those with red beards. Since I hadn’t seen a red beard to compare with the length, thickness, and bright redness of mine that winter, I was somewhat confident I would win. However, a local hairdresser, in celebration of statehood, had grown just enough of a beard, probably a quarter-inch at the most, to allow him to cut a star design on his chin and to shape his left and right sideburns into a 4 and a 9, respectively, to represent the 49th state. He won. Today my dense red beard, which once inspired a friend to call me “Big Red,” has lost its hue to the point at which that same friend now calls me “Great White.”

Half a century later, Alaska remains foreign to many down south. Events here must be extremely dramatic to make the news down there, and national weather reports rarely mention our state. Many mail-order companies impose large surcharges on even small packages. Most offers made to residents of the continental U.S. exclude Alaskans, although we reside in a continental (if not contiguous) state. A reporter who had taken a quick tour of the popular sites up here returned home to write of his adventure. “We didn’t go far enough north to see polar bears or penguins.” To see the latter, he would have had to turn around and travel to the other end of the planet.

Just as some people think Tennesseans go barefoot and live in shacks, some believe Alaskans live in igloos. We smile at the misconceptions and treasure our remoteness. It’s a great land. Come see for yourself! You won’t even need a passport.

U.S. Army Lt. Jeremiah Manning has a perfectly good excuse to put off finishing his master’s degree in civil engineering. He is stationed at Joint Base Balad in Iraq and won’t be coming home until February.

But in a world of telecommuting, videoconferencing, and “webinars,” being nearly halfway round the world is no obstacle. Manning found a way to not only continue working on his degree but complete it by taking a course offered through the Department of Distance Education and Independent Study (DEIS) at UT Knoxville.

This summer Manning took “Urban Systems: Engineering and Management,” which was taught online by adjunct professor Sam Parnell. There were some students who actually sat in the classroom in Knoxville while others joined the class through webconferencing. For Manning, it meant staying up well past bedtime and even falling asleep in his office. He logged in when he could every Tuesday and Thursday evening. In Knoxville, it was 4:45 p.m. In Iraq, it was 11:45 p.m. The class usually lasted 2 hours.

“Taking classes while I’m here is a huge burden,” Manning wrote in an e-mail from Iraq. “I typically work on the assignments and view the courses when everyone else has completed their 14- to 18-hour day. I have slept in my office a few nights.”

All of his work for the master’s degree has been through distance education–first at the University of Florida (of which, Manning writes, “I didn’t really want to be a Gator”) and then UT. He was mobilized while taking another course during the spring semester.

“It will have taken me close to three school years to complete this degree part-time long distance, and that is long enough,” he wrote. “It feels good to know that I will have been able to do this one thing for myself this year here in Iraq.”

Parnell heard about Manning and knew this was the last course he needed. Parnell was willing to work with Manning no matter what it took, but it turns out that he did not need to make many special accommodations.

“Jeremiah had a microphone like everyone else, and it sounds the same from Iraq as it does in Knoxville,” Parnell said.

Manning’s brigade oversees all the engineering work for the Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq.

“This is cool because working at this level, I get to see everything that is going on in Iraq, from all of our construction operations to the counter-IED work being done, and I get to travel throughout the country to develop projects and programs,” Manning wrote.

“And by the way, everywhere you go and whatever you are doing, you have to be mindful of some type of attack coming when you’re not looking.”

Following his current duties in Iraq, Manning expects to return to the U.S. in February 2009 and work with the Army Corps of Engineers in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

“The work [in Iraq] is fun and interesting, but the sacrifice is great,” Manning wrote. “I look forward to being back in Tennessee.”

UT salutes Manning’s above-and-beyond efforts to complete his degree while serving his country.

“Jeremiah is an excellent example of a motivated individual who has utilized available resources to reach his goal,” said Caroline Bowers, assistant director of DEIS. “He is serving his country in Iraq while completing his graduate program–no small accomplishment!”

My bleary eyes gazed through a plate-glass mirage as the runway of Las Vegas’s airport drew a literal line in the sand. Sometimes the line between life-changing dreams and nightmares runs thin as the queen of hearts.

I pushed all my cow chips to the middle of the table. In poker parlance, I’m all in.

I’m 31, but this trip began when I counted birthday candles on one hand, a boy without cable television riding high with the Westerns on rainy Sunday afternoons.

From my layover in Las Vegas, my plane whisked me across the Pacific to the Big Island of Hawaii. The ranch country of Waimea shatters all preconceptions about the Aloha State as cowboys ride horses through the McDonald’s drive-through. There were cowboys here 40 years before the icons entered the American consciousness.

Dahana Ranch graces the green foothills of Mauna Kea, the tallest volcano on the island chain. Harry Nakoa, the Hawaiian Horse Whisperer, owns the beef and cattle ranch. I mainly worked ranch-hand jobs—feeding, shoveling manure, catching horses, grooming, saddling, and unsaddling—during a 3-month winter contract, though I did get to add bovine undertaker to my resume.

I took out a few rides as tourists came from the beach resorts to ride our fine quarter horses. I led my second ride ever for Japanese honeymooners who had never ridden horses and spoke no English. I had visions of a Japanese obituary, but all turned out fine.

We moved cattle on horseback, still superior to any other method of moving beef (except by fork). The branding we held at Dahana seared my memory as the most adrenaline-soaked activity of my life. In only my second week, my task was to pin down the calves while they received ear tags and were branded. Those calves were plenty stronger than I and didn’t much enjoy the process. I slept well that night.

During the 2007 May-through-September guest season, I wrangled for Cherokee Park Ranch in Livermore, Colorado. Owners Dickey and Christine Prince, formerly of Knoxville, run an amazing outfit, and I will be surprised if a day passes as long as I live that I don’t miss it. Laughter, Chris LeDoux, and the thunderous thud of hooves provided my summer symphony.

In a daily sunrise stampede, we ran our 125 horses through the ranch to the corral as the guests stood outside their cabins, the sheer spectacle shaking the sleep from their eyes.

Early in the season, the wranglers rode behind the herd on top of Goat Mountain and pushed the horses down the perilous descent, across the Cache la Poudre River and into the corral for breakfast. Atheists were an endangered species on Goat Mountain.

Words prove inadequate to describe the feeling of riding a fast horse through a meadow with the Rocky Mountains on both sides, always one bad step away from death but never so alive. A delightful 82-year-old woman with a natural list to the left, an issue when traversing the Rockies, likely took the last ride of her life with me. Bringing her safely home brought me pure satisfaction.

I never had to ration satisfaction at Cherokee Park. On our off day, the wranglers decided to ride together one last time as the season waned. We knew we would never have a chance to ride together again. As we ran through two late-summer hailstorms, the icy pellets lodged in Cocoa’s black mane even though we took shelter under a ponderosa pine. We ate soggy sandwiches for lunch and headed home laughing, smiling, and soaked, singing “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Amen and happy trails.

Nathan Kirkham (Knoxville ’99, ’05) worked 12 years in the UT men’s sports information office, serving three NCAA championship squads—football 1998, outdoor track and field 2001, and indoor track and field 2002.

From my 24th-floor office in northeast Beijing, each day I survey the startling expansion and transformation of the city. Every morning brings either a new high-rise or a vacant lot where an old high-rise once stood, a situation accelerated by the $40 billion Beijing is spending in preparation for the upcoming Olympics. But the changes China is experiencing are far more profound than a few new skyscrapers, and the consequences of those changes reach around the globe.

As an editor for China Security, an English-­language policy journal based in Beijing, I am in a unique position to observe this transitional time for China and the effect it has on the rest of the world. The mission of our journal is to foster a dialogue between Chinese and Western scholars on security issues that range from traditional military defense to energy and environment. In the course of bringing our articles to print, it is my job to help research, critique, and tailor each piece to provide our readers with diverse and informed viewpoints on modern China. It is both a demanding and a fulfilling job.

How I began a career in China defies straightforward explanation. At the University of Tennessee, I studied geography and political science, learned Spanish and Russian, studied abroad in Europe, and conducted my thesis research in the Balkans. This may seem a circuitous route to Beijing, but the breadth of experience I gained in that path is useful in a country so inextricably linked to the rest of the planet. After all, in China, the big picture is the only picture. Now the world’s fourth-largest economy, China’s exports are worth more than $1 trillion and fill stores and markets around the globe–this from a country that was struggling to feed itself only decades ago.

However, China’s reversal of fortune has come at a tremendous cost. The most obvious consequences of its unchecked growth are environmental. According to the World Bank, China is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. Moreover, it gets 80 percent of its electricity from coal, which has resulted in the trebling of carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 and a 25 percent increase in global mercury pollution. China’s growing thirst for energy also calls into question the sustainability of peace. Once a self-sufficient petroleum-producing country, China is now expected to import 70 percent of its oil from the Middle East by 2015, potentially putting it on a strategic collision course with U.S. interests. Meanwhile, all of these problems are compounded by lagging political reform, which has failed to progress in step with economic growth.

While many are tempted to label China as the epicenter of the world’s troubles, we must acknowledge that the expectations for China’s conduct are much higher than they were during the development phase of Western countries. Furthermore, because it faces so many challenges, China has the potential to become a leader in addressing global problems. There are many indications it is rising to meet that challenge, particularly in areas of environmental and energy innovation. Whether China succeeds or fails in this endeavor is perhaps the most important question of our generation and will impact every person on the planet. In the coming decades, policymakers and researchers will be divided into two groups: those who understand China and those who do not. Whether we like it or not, China will play a pivotal role in the coming century, and I am here in the hope that I can play a constructive role in that future.

“Can we put our name in Chinese on the homework?” asks one student. (Hopkins deftly declined the request.) It’s not that these students already know it all, it’s just that they all seem entirely comfortable with giving it a try.

That environment–where students’ enthusiasm to learn is matched only by their teachers’ desire to challenge them to learn even more–is at the core of Governor Phil Bredesen’s vision for a residential school that the University of Tennessee brought into being in just a few short months.

“It was just last January that we announced the school,” Bredesen said when he visited last August to dedicate the school. “To be here today and meet the students reminds me of the amazing things we can accomplish when we put our minds to it.”

Bredesen’s visit to TGA reflected his personal passion for giving talented high-schoolers the opportunity to pursue a tuition-free 2-year advanced course of study, as well as the chance to conduct hands-on research alongside top scientists. He pointed to his own experience in a summer scientific academy during his high-school years that eventually led him to pursue and earn a degree in physics from Harvard University.

It is that desire to live “the scientific life,” as TGA’s executive director Dr. Vena Long often calls it, that drives the work of the academy’s staff.

“As we thought about how to build this academy from the ground up, we knew that we wanted to create an experience that would really give students a taste of what life is like for researchers,” said Long, who is also the associate dean for research in UT Knoxville’s College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. “This has to be a singular opportunity.”

The inaugural class of students was selected from a pool of 174 applicants from across the state, and they represent the breadth of the state both geographically and culturally. In spite of their diverse backgrounds, however, the students share a common bond in their love for science.

That’s evident in talking to the president and vice-president of the TGA student body–Su Ji Jeong from Martin and Ben Owens from Germantown. Jeong envisions a career as a biomedical engineer, and Owens says that while he’s always wanted to be a surgeon, his choice of what kind of surgeon to be “kind of changes every week.” (This week’s choice is neurosurgery.)

Both students pointed to the opportunities they and their classmates had after a few short weeks at TGA to be involved with real-world research as a major change from their home high schools.

Each Wednesday TGA students travel to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the key partners in the academy’s development. While at the lab, they spend time working one-on-one with a researcher on a real scientific issue. Students also have taken field trips to the Great Smoky Mountains to study salamanders and examine how physics affects water flow, as well as to the ancient fossil site in Gray, Tennessee, to help in the archaeological dig taking place there.

“To be able to do all that,” said Owens, “is something no one could ever bring to a normal school.”

“This forms the basis of the research we’ll do in the future,” Jeong added.

Indeed, the proximity to researchers at UT Knoxville and ORNL is what led to the school’s being located in Knoxville. Students live and learn in two cottages on the campus of the Tennessee School for the Deaf on the banks of the Tennessee River in South Knoxville, an experience that has paid dividends through interactions with TSD’s students. TGA students are helping tutor TSD students in science and math, while TSD students are helping TGA students learn American Sign Language.

In developing the academy’s curriculum, the TGA faculty sought out opportunities to make students’ learning experience seamless, with each class and each subject a natural extension of the previous one. They split the academic year into multiweek modules.

Each module is built around a fundamental question, for example, What can you learn from a bone? Over the course of the module, each class will examine the question from a different perspective. In a physics class, students might address how an understanding of physics aids forensic science, while in calculus class they would look at applying math to the data collected from bones. At the same time, their humanities class might spend time looking at the role of archaeology in U.S. history and literature.

“We want students to immerse themselves in these questions, in class, on field trips, and in their work with researchers,” said Long. “As they do, they’ll acquire the fundamental knowledge in a way that will be more meaningful and, we hope, more useful to them.”

For students used to ranking at the top of their class, the adjustment to being surrounded by others who are just as intelligent has been both a joy and a challenge. The support of the faculty has been crucial, according to Jeong.

“Inside the classes, they are our teachers, but outside class they are like moms and dads. They want us to succeed,” she said.

Each member of the teaching staff holds an advanced degree, and all have experience teaching high-school students. Even members of the academy’s residence hall staff, who live in the cottages with the students to provide programming and support after hours when the faculty isn’t on campus, hold degrees in science.

There’s also a sense of camaraderie among the students that reflects their often-quirky natures. They’ve united behind pi, the “magical number” of mathematics, to the point that for Bredesen’s visit they specially arranged the tables into the shape of the Greek letter Ï€ (pi). They’ve also adopted nicknames for one another that can seem a little unusual–just ask Andrea “George” Castillo, a student from the West Tennessee town of Savannah. The camaraderie pays off, though, as students frequently tackle group projects that demand teamwork and collaboration.

Students and staff alike recognize that they are in the midst of an experiment that can affect the future of education in Tennessee. Each summer, the academy will offer teachers from around the state an opportunity to visit and learn about new approaches to science and math instruction based on TGA’s successes.

“Ideally, we want TGA to be a laboratory to improve science and math education in Tennessee,” said Long. “It’s about these exceptional students, but there are larger implications, as well.”

Implications Bredesen made clear during his visit to the academy: “Science and technology are key to a huge part of the economy. I’d like to make Tennessee a leader in these fields, and I hope that this school will make that happen. You’re doing something different. You’re a part of history, and I hope you will look back on this with pride.”

Alumni Staff the Academy

UT’s stamp on the Tennessee Governor’s Academy is evident in the educational background of its staff. A majority of TGA staff members–administrators, teachers, and residence life staff–are UT Knoxville alumni. Several are also pursuing additional degrees:

Bennett Adkinson, instructor of physics, B.S. ‘04 in College Scholars and M.S. ‘05 in science education

Jon Bethard, residence hall director, B.A. ‘02, M.A. ‘05, and Ph.D. in anthropology expected ‘08

Denise Harvey, program administrator, M.S.S.W. ‘89 and Ph.D. ‘99 in education

Thomas Hodges, instructor of mathematics, M.S. ‘05 in teacher education and Ph.D. in education expected ‘08

Terri Hopkins, lead teacher, B.S. ‘87, M.S. ‘01, and Ph.D. ‘04 in education

Kristi Nelms, director of residence life, M.S. ‘94 in college student personnel and Ed.D. ‘05 in educational administration and policy studies

Erika Soderstrom, assistant hall director, B.A. ‘07 and M.A. in computer science expected ‘09

Yan Wang, instructor of mathematics and Mandarin, M.S. ‘06 in math education

Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by big, sprawling families. When I began dating my husband, Kiffen Lunsford, doing plays together at the lab theater as UT Knoxville students, he told me he grew up one of 13 children. I thought to myself, “If I marry this man I will never run out of stories.” We were married at the Knoxville Courthouse in 1986, and the International Department at UT Knoxville found us teaching jobs in China to begin our married life together. We now have three children aged 18, 16, and 8, and we bring them back to Tennessee every year from our home in California.

After Gentle’s Holler, my publisher asked me to write two more Smoky Mountain novels for children. A professor at Western North Carolina advised me that to really see the way mountain folk live, I needed to visit Dot Connor’s mother, Mary Jane Queen. So on my next trip, Kiffen came with me, and Dot took us to Caney Fork to meet Mary Jane, aged 91. The cabin Mary Jane lived in was more than 100 years old. Before she married, her name was Mary Jane Prince, and she said to us, “I was a Prince who married a Queen.” And she laughed. Mary Jane had a wonderful laugh that rang out in the air. She pointed out the woodstove, the water from the spring that ran right into her kitchen sink. Dot described her favorite chore as a girl, which was reading books by the woodstove and making sure the cornbread didn’t burn.

The following summer, I took our youngest child, Norah, to meet Mary Jane. We spent the day talking and listening to her stories. She took Norah by the hand and showed her all the flowers in the garden and taught her about “pretty-by-nights” and “touch-me-nots.” She sang songs, including, “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again” and “Billy Boy.” We talked about the film Songcatcher and how she was the inspiration for the mountain woman, Viney Butler. Norah tended to a butterfly with a broken wing that clung to her ear for an hour or so and sought Mary Jane’s advice about every 5 minutes on the fate of the butterfly. Mary Jane laughed and said, “Just let it alone. It’ll be fine.”

This past spring, Dot called to say Mary Jane was dying. She had recently celebrated her 93rd birthday, finished her memoir, released another CD of mountain music with her family, and even lived to see a PBS documentary called The Queen Family.

A month after Mary Jane’s death, I went to North Carolina to do a reading of my second novel, the setting now so much inspired by my visits to Mary Jane’s home. Dot handed me a tiny bag of black seeds. She said, “These are from Mother’s garden, and I wanted Norah to have them.” I looked at the writing and it said pretty-by-nights.

I don’t believe I’ve ever met a happier woman than Mary Jane Queen, whose laughter welcomed everybody into her world. I will always love her for teaching my daughter about Smoky Mountain flowers. We’ll have to decide where to plant the pretty-by-nights in our garden, and when we do I’ll play the Queen Family CD to hear Mary Jane’s voice serenading us with stories, songs, and love.

Two years ago, in August 2005, Moore was starting her sophomore year at the University of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina aimed for the Gulf Coast. The university shut down, and Moore fled the Crescent City with a backpack containing two bottles of water, some saltine crackers, and two changes of clothing.

“Hurricane Katrina hit a week after my mother dropped me off at UNO,” says Moore, who’s from Cookeville, Tennessee. “I was among about forty stranded students who boarded two buses that made a grueling twelve-hour journey to Baton Rouge, where I slept on the floor of a church shelter with many other students for three days. On the evening of my fourth day, my aunt drove from Dallas to pick me up, and I flew from Texas back to Tennessee.

“I didn’t want to lose momentum in my studies,” Moore says. So the next day, she and her mom drove to Knoxville because they heard UT was accepting displaced students. (In all, 85 undergraduates, 14 graduate students, and 14 law students would transfer to UT’s Knoxville campus for the fall 2005 semester. Of those, 20 undergrads, five graduate students, and two law students would remain for at least another spring semester.)

About 3 months after the storm, Moore’s mother went to New Orleans to see what–if anything–she could salvage from her daughter’s apartment. To her surprise, almost everything had survived. “My mom packed her car full of my clothing, books, kitchen stuff, and a few other possessions,” Moore says. “Although my life had been severely disrupted, all of my personal belongings were fine–I had not lost the material remnants of my past.”

For a while, Moore wasn’t sure whether she’d return to New Orleans or stay at UT. She had received a full scholarship to UNO. Furthermore, she says, “the campus was small and attractive, and I had been fascinated by the city of New Orleans since I read Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour.” But Moore quickly made good friends at UT and found she was excelling in her classes. “Since I was already halfway done with school, I decided to finish up at UT,” she says. University officials helped her work out the details.

“I had made plans my second semester at UNO to graduate in three years and had my whole college schedule planned out. When I transferred to UT, I worried that my plans would be upset, but almost all of my UNO credit hours transferred.”

Despite the turmoil caused by the storm, Moore stayed on track to graduate in 3 years. “I always took nineteen or twenty-one hours a semester. It was stressful but very much worth it to be finished. All it took was motivation and determination, which are two characteristics I have plenty of.” Moore graduated with a degree in psychology and top honors from the College of Arts and Sciences.

As for her career plans, Moore is looking at healthcare–but she’s keeping her options open. “My father, Terry Moore, owns a psychiatry practice in Cookeville, and my mother, Janet Moore, has a doctorate in clinical psychology and runs the office. I have worked part time in their office since I was in high school,” she says. “I love both research and clinical work, but I am putting graduate school on hold for right now to explore my career options.”

She’s looking for a job as a youth counselor.

I fully expected to see this newspaper headline. Most of the things I worked on made national news. But maybe not this time.

Momma’d had a heart attack, and I’d come home from Washington to fill in for her “for a couple of days.” She was the receptionist in my father’s rural family medical practice east of Knoxville.

With my arrival, the tiny office was bursting with degrees from UT: two in pharmacy (B.S. and Pharm.D.), one in medicine, one in engineering, and one in law. Daddy’s office was probably unique in that “doctors” also manned the reception desk.

Unfortunately most of my previous work experience was being a spoiled, haughty, aggressive, overdressed U.S. Senate committee counsel (specialty: nuclear environmental law)–not a kindly swabber-upper of body fluids nor a stoic fixer-upper of maulings and manglings.

It’s hard to decide what was most shocking about my suddenly, drastically changed circumstances, but probably it was learning that Medicare would reimburse claims caused by “legal execution, beheading, decapitation (by guillotine).” I was looking for the code for “sore throat” and saw it. What sort of care could a senior citizen possibly need after having her head chopped off?

I know this sounds cranky. And I’m willing to admit I wasn’t making the most graceful of transitions to the profession of receptionist. (Yes, it proved a lot harder to get out of Strawberry Plains and back to my glitzy life than I’d expected.) But the most painful aspect wasn’t trading Neiman Marcus for Wal-Mart.

It was realizing that although I could draft nuclear legislation, I was utterly buffaloed by filling out a Medicare form for a patient with a stomachache. What I’d done easily as a 15-year-old was impossible after 40 because, in the interim, the government had “streamlined” the system.

Would you have guessed there’s a Medicare code for “accident involving spacecraft, includes launching pad accident, excludes effects of weightlessness in spacecraft”? There is.

Although a former boss, the brave and beloved astronaut and senator John Glenn, went into space at age 77, I’ll bet such an event is only slightly more common than filing for Medicare benefits following your execution by guillotine. So why did we have a specific code for these things? And why, if we’re trying to keep healthcare costs down, do we provide Medicare reimbursement for “problem, spoiled child” and “quarrelsomeness”? I was forced to wonder about my own presumed competence as a writer of laws and regulations.

For 40 years my parents quietly treated about a third of Daddy’s patients for free–the working poor, the mentally challenged. Together, they worked 24/7 for decades, often awakened by patients at least once during the night. With Momma unable to work, I was the only person they could “afford” as a replacement: I could live in the basement and work for food.

What I saw at ground zero of public service as opposed to what I saw from the secretary of the navy’s Lear jet forced me to ask some hard questions.

Are we serious about addressing healthcare?

Apparently not.

Under the newfangled drug program are prescription drug benefits available for seniors who have been guillotined?

Probably so.

Is swabbing up barf more meaningful than writing speeches for prime-time news?

Absolutely.

Heart in the Right Place, published for Father’s Day, displays my spectacular ineptitude alongside the escapades of Daddy’s rather eccentric patients. It’s guaranteed to make you laugh. Fannie Flagg and Dolly Parton loved it. Alums may go to www.CarolynJourdan.com and get a specially inscribed copy.

Jourdan (Knoxville ‘76, ‘81) is a writer for Great Smoky Mountains Association. Her father, Paul, and mother, Elise, earned UT pharmacy degrees in 1954, and Paul also holds an M.D. (’59). Heart in the Right Place was selected by three leading book clubs–Literary Guild, Doubleday, and American Compass.