Recently I went to a local pizzeria to purchase the evening’s supper. My hair was in pretty bad need of cutting, so bad in fact that it looked slicked down because it didn’t have time to dry in the morning before I dressed for work. The young girl behind the counter said that I looked so professional except for my wild tie and slicked back hair. She asked, “Are you a car salesman?” I replied, “No, worse, I work for the school system!”

I determined to share with you, Faithful Readers (hopefully there are more than one) how I came to be dressed in a tie that would seem “wild” to a young girl working in fast food pizza. Truly, by nature I am not a person who likes to draw attention to themselves, but I’m sure if I had returned to rob the pizza store later that my description would not have been difficult to report to the police.

My first remembrance of wearing a necktie was about third grade. Perhaps this is because in my third grade school picture I wore a blue shirt that had a matching clip-on tie. I wore that same tie thirteen years later in December 1986 when I went to the Union County Board of Education Central Office to apply for my first teaching job. Of course, by then the tie would only come to the bottom of my breastbone, so I had to cover the deficiency with a sweater!

At some later point I remember my father buying me a red shirt with a red and brown striped tie, also a clip-on, from Fred Davis himself at his Maynardville store. The building still stands behind the present 33 Hardware on Maynardville Highway, next to the Union County Historical Society building. These two ties I wore to church on many different occasions.

The third tie I remember owning was a tie that Maynardville Baptist Church deacon Robert Johnson gave me. Robert Johnson and his wife, longtime Union County schoolteacher Ella Wilson Johnson, lived in a house where Wilson Park is now located. I feel confident that the Johnsons would be pleased that the site of their former home serves as a center for community recreation.

The tie that Robert Johnson gave me was the first I ever owned that had to be tied, and I kept it for years but never wore it because I didn’t know how to tie it. I have always had trouble tying things. If something needed a knot, I couldn’t seem to tie one at all. If it didn’t need tying, you could always depend on me to tie on a good one! I should perhaps be ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t learn to tie my shoes until I was in fourth grade. I have always blamed this on being left handed. Whenever someone would kneel to show me how to tie my shoes, they were backwards to me. It was my brother J. C. who knelt behind me and showed me how to tie my shoes the same way I was facing. It took him five minutes to show me what no one else had been able to do for five years.

I suppose it was about the time that Robert Johnson gave me his tie that I noticed that most important men seemed to wear ties. All the U. S. presidents had ties on in the pictures in our social studies books. All preachers wore ties. Lawyer Charles Roy Moore wore a tie. The church deacons wore ties, and practically all men who attended church when I was young wore ties. Even my father, who wore overalls practically every day of his life, bought a suit and tie to wear to church after he began attending regularly toward the end of his life. School superintendents and Mr. Edward Collette wore ties. My school principals wore ties, and the beloved late great Harrell Edmondson would not have dared darken the door of a classroom with wearing a tie. The great James G. Shumate wore ties almost every day when he was my teacher, except for chemistry or physics lab days. Even some of the other male teachers who did not normally wear ties would wear them on special occasions.

I remember wearing the tie that my dad wore when he married my mother. From this tie I learned the secret—it was already tied, for dad couldn’t tie a necktie, either. He just kept his tied, and this worked fine for him, as he hardly ever wore a tie. But this does not work if a tie is worn frequently and not tied afresh with each wearing—then the knot tightens and becomes almost impossible to untie.
My father was good friends with the Rev. Richard Nicely’s mother and father, Kate and Clyde Nicely. They lived in the first house on the left just past Pennington Chapel Baptist Church. We visited them fairly frequently when I was in elementary school, and almost every time I visited Clyde would give me a grocery bag (or poke, as it was known then) of neckties. It was really from this that I came to love ties. They came in such pretty patterns and colors. Clyde always made sure they had the knot in them so I could put them to use.

And what did I use all these ties for? I dressed up in them when I played school or church. Dad had a clip-on bow tie that I wore when I played Lincoln the Lawyer. Clyde’s tie covered decades of styles, all determined by the width of the ties. This is evident by watching classic television today. I always think of Clyde Nicely when I see Ward Cleaver’s ties from the late fifties into the early sixties—solid color and very thin. Fast forward to the decade of the seventies, when a skinny man on a situation comedy could almost literally hide behind his very wide, loudly striped or patterned necktie without showing nudity if he was wearing nothing else!

The funny thing is that with all those ties I had in my childhood, I didn’t seem to have very many ties when I needed them to do my student teaching. My college girlfriend’s father gave me some of his old ties, but they were somewhat reminiscent of the ones that Clyde Nicely gave me, several years out of style. But I made do with the best I had, and managed to get by ten weeks of student teaching with about maybe five ties.

Men who taught rarely wore ties in the late eighties and early nineties, so I didn’t worry too much about ties again until I became principal of Sharps Chapel in 1995. At this critical juncture in life, once again a good friend came to my rescue. Randy Carver, husband of the extraordinarily talented teacher Deanie Carver (with whom I was privileged to teach fifth grade at Luttrell Elementary for four years), taught me to tie a tie. Just as my brother J. C., Randy taught me standing side by side with him facing a mirror, so that what he was doing was not backward to me. To this day, I cannot tie a necktie unless I watch myself in a mirror.

In the beginning, my ties were either solid color or patterns, such as paisley, stripes, squares, etc. And then the students at Sharps Chapel Elementary began giving me Christmas ties for gifts. And it was from them that my fondness for character ties developed. My wife got in on the act, and expanded character ties to all other occasions of the year. I now have countless boxes of character ties, some for every occasion, except for Thanksgiving—I do not have a tie to represent that holiday. I have ties grouped by many categories—back to school, cartoon, holidays, patriotic, seasonal, sports, wildlife, Tobasco®, religious, miscellaneous (which contains pattern ties and character ties that don’t fall into any other category). To a gentleman who once visited our church but had not yet learned my name, I became “the guy that wears the crazy ties”.

And there was a time in life that probably would have bothered me. But the older I get, the more I can appreciate not only my own but the eccentricities of others. How wonderful it is to be unique and comfortable with it. I love eccentric people! I applaud those who have the confidence to allow themselves to stand out.

Next week I’ll share with you some of my earliest and dearest fears. Until then, take care not to get too tied up!