CHESTNUT MEMORIES ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Chestnut Memories Oral History Transcript Bethany BAXTER Interviewer: Bethany Baxter Interviewee: Wallace Coffey Interview Location: Bristol, Tennessee Interview Date: June 1 st , 2008 Transcriber: Bethany Baxter Audio File: WallaceCoffey,5.1.08.WAV BB: So I have to explain to you what’s happening, ok so, the key objective of this interview is to serve as a research tool to document memories of the American chestnut in the southern Appalachian region. Information attained in these interviews will be retained and made available for future use in efforts to promote a better understanding of the role of American chestnut in Appalachian culture. Have you signed the participant identification and release agreements? WC: yes I sure did. BB: ok great. So you want to start out, tell me your name, when you were born, where you grew up, background information, where you went to school, what you did WC: Well this is June the first, 2008, it’s about 5:22 pm, and I’m sitting in the comfortable confines of one of my most favorite restaurants the Mad Greek in Bristol, Tennessee, which is my home town where I’ve been all my life, I never ever went away to the military. Sitting here with me is my wife is here with me, Carolyn, we’ve been married about 45 years, 46. How long is it? CC: 42 years WC: 42, see too long. So she’s here with Bethany and myself. I’m a native here, I’ve had a natural history interest ever since I was a child. I’ve always loved the outdoors. I grew up with a father who was quite an outdoors person, he always did a lot of fishing and things like that, and I had to be one of the children that went along on that sort of thing. He always had a great deal of respect for the changing of our landscape with the coming of the Tennessee Valley Authority and construction of TVA lakes. We would go out when I was a child and watch them build the dams here, the big lakes, he was always interpreting that to us. So in my family there is a sense of appreciating those thing, but also I have an older brother who’s a triple professor at John Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore Maryland, and he is past president of the American Cancer Research Association, he’s on the Whitehouse Committee for Cancer Research appointed by Bush to a 6 year term. He’s 8 years older than I am, so I grew up with a brother who’s very technically minded. All of us, he’s a biologist, he’s a cancer researcher, so we all have a technical look at everything we do. I’m a real people person, that’s a term Ken Dubke in Chattanooga, Tennessee gave me, talking about himself, he was with the National Park Service, he said we are people persons, that’s something I’ve always valued. I’m a lifetime mentor of young people and I probably have 4 if not 5 young people who I met in the early 20s or teenagers who have their PhDs, and I still have one on the way. A young person at Austin P State University who got an undergraduate assistantship even when he was in high school, he got an undergraduate assistantship with them He got funded by East Tennessee State University for biological research, the biology department chose him, so you can imagine what kind of people I’m dealing with. Anyhow, I spent a lot of time communicating with people on the faculty around. I’ve studied plants, I’ve collected ferns, studied ferns, I have in the university herbariums around, I’ve done work with the North Carolina, with the New York Botanical gardens, I’ve taught field trips and summer classes at Roan Mountain for the University of North Carolina. So, I have a broad interest that’s a little bit closer to academia because of that background. My father died when I was a senior in high school so I had to set out for an education on my own. So I worked and went to school and I started in television in 1960s, worked 10 years with an NBC affiliate and worked 31 years with the Bristol Harold Currier, which is now a media general newspaper, so I worked with that newspaper, did everything, I wrote, very much an environmental writer in 1970s. Traveled everywhere in doing that, I had many friends who wrote significant things, authors. Marsh Brooks, who wrote the Appalachians, from the school of forestry fishery and wildlife at West Virginia, was a very dear close friend of mine, I spent a lot of time with him. And so I have an extensive library of natural history nuts and I have always collected the best materials and stayed in touch with the general developments of forestry and that sort of thing, I have a number of friends in government jobs, some younger and some older. In 1964 I was offered the opportunity to be the first ever naturalist on Cherokee National Forest, so I worked in the north zone of the Cherokee, worked out of Elizabethton on what was known as the Watauga Ranger District, and that was the counties of Carter, Sullivan, and Johnson. I’ve had a life long interest in birds since I was a teenager, at about 21 years of age I became a bander with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Did that for 44 years and was editor of the Tennessee Journal of Ornithology, and was on and off that editorial staff for almost 40 years. So I’ve worked a lot in my field of research with birds with the United States National Museum, served on advisory committees, school forestry, Fish and Wildlife at Virginia Tech, so that’s sort of my background. BB: that’s great. Do you have any firsts hand memories of seeing a chestnut or anything that you experienced yourself? WC: my most memorable involvement with the chestnut was after it was long gone. That was in the spring or summer of 1970 and I’ve studied reptiles and amphibians along the way, salamanders were an area of great interest to me. I became interested in salamanders with Dr. Jerry Nagel who was on the faculty at East Tennessee State, and just going out on field trips. One of the species that we were greatly interested in was a species called Yonahlossee Salamander, Plethadon Yonahlossee, and it was found at the base of Grandfather Mountain, I guess back in the 20s or 30s, and he named it for the road they found it on called the Yonahlossee road. So we were looking for that salamander in this area and it was pretty scarce and there was not much known about it. As a matter of fact Dr. Tom Laughlin at East Tennessee State University now has a grant to research that species, and I’m helping him get together information about historic sites in western Carolina for the Carolina Museum of Natural History in Raleigh and things like that. So anyway, looking for the Yonahlossee, there were no known records of it Sullivan County, there may not have been any in Johnson County. There were a lot of people looking for that salamander, I found them on Holston Mountain in Sullivan County, and I remembered that Tennessee Tech, one of their faculty members Dr. Ray Jordan, he came up very quickly and we went up collected there and a guy from the faculty at the University of Missouri came up and we collected more. Went out and we were hiking just north of McQueen’s Knob near the Maple Spur fire trail, Appalachian Trail lean to is there, where you can camp out. We were going up there, 2 way radio, young guy named Tim Hawk was with me, Tim called me on the radio, he said Wallace, he was a high school student, he said I swear to got I just saw a Yonahlossee salamander and I said ‘oh really, did you catch it’, and he said ‘no it got away from me, it got away down a hole’ and I said ‘you’re kidding me’, and he said ‘no, it got away from me but I swear to god, take my word’. I said ok, keep looking. A few minutes later I turned over a log on the other side of the trail and there was a Yonahlossee salamander and I grabbed it real quick with my hand, I looked at that and I was so shocked, and I called him on the radio and I said Tim, I just found one, and he said did you see it? And I said I caught it with my hand. So the next few days a young fellow who was an undergraduate student at East Tennessee State came up and his name was Charlie Smith. Charlie Smith was one of the kids I mentored, since he was a teenager, about 13, and he was about a Senior at East Tennessee State. He is now on the faculty of the school of natural resources at Cornell University, about ready to retire. But he came up and a couple other students, and he did an undergraduate science study of the distribution of Yonahlossee salamander in Northeast Tennessee over about a 3 or 4 county area, and described rather well that habitat up there. And what we found was the top of that ridge there was covered with logs of decaying chestnut.