Editor’s Note: This news comes with no personal regrets, since I didn’t know either of the deceased. But I knew Jack Neely some when writing for Metro Pulse myself, one of the most interesting alternative weeklies in the country in print and online in the late 20th century. It’s a sad day when anyone dies, and we’ve suffered so many losses this year of the COVID. Losing independent thinkers and writers is especially hard in these times that try men’s souls.

By Jack Neely –
Knoxville History Project –

In the last few days Knoxville has lost two newspapermen who left very different marks on the city, and whose columns historians of the future will read with interest.

Frank Cagle, once managing editor of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, but better known for his newsy opinion columns, died at age 72.

Back around 2004, when the local alternative weekly Metro Pulse enlisted him as a political columnist, some readers got angry. I remember a group cornering me at Pres Pub, convinced our paper was losing its alternative soul. He had known Republican tendencies.

But Frank was alternative in his own way. He sometimes described himself as a libertarian, but by modern standards, he was a dangerous moderate. He thought for himself, a habit contrary to the modern polar dynamic; bandwagon sorts on both ends of the political continuum regarded him with some suspicion if not panic.

Some people prefer to know what you’re going to write before you write it. Frank was good at making those people uncomfortable.

He was originally from Alabama, and by the time he got to Knoxville he was a Vietnam veteran, and served for a time in administration in the Ashe mayoral administration.

When he wrote for Metro Pulse he filed his columns from home, so I knew him better in newsprint than in person. But I remember the dramatic night in January 2015, at the History Center, when we announced the formation of the Knoxville History Project and its role in starting a new newspaper, the Knoxville Mercury, Frank attended in person, and as we were about to start, asked me to find him a place among the featured speakers.

I’d always taken him as a bit of a world-weary cynic, but he gave an impassioned testimony for the urgent importance of independent local journalism that left some people wet in the eyes, including himself.

He stayed with it to the end, most recently in his column “Frank Talk” for KnoxTNToday.com. Just last month, he was still giving them perfectly logical hell.

* * *

Local Obit

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Veteran journalist Frank Cagle passed away Thursday, Feb. 25, according to his wife.

Cagle spent nearly five decades in journalism. He worked in several positions at the Knoxville News-Sentinel including managing editor. Cagle also worked at several other publications, most recently as a columnist at Knox TN Today.

Frank appeared as a political analyst for WATE, as recently as 2014.

Cagle served as deputy mayor in the Victor Ashe administration and as campaign manager for Van Hilleary in his 2002 bid for governor.

Cagle was in Vietnam with the 82nd Airborne in 1968 and 1969. He was awarded the Army Commendation Medal and the Bronze Star for meritorious service.

After his military service, Cagle graduated with honors from the University of North Alabama with a degree in English and worked for newspapers in Florence, Athens, Decatur and Huntsville, Alabama, before coming to Knoxville in 1982.

* * *
David Hunter

Similar in some ways, but very different in others, was David Hunter, who died at age 73.

He might have seemed an unlikely novelist and newspaper columnist. He’d been a Knox County sheriff’s deputy, eventually a detective specializing in controlled substances.

He used his experiences to inform a series of crime novels, including The Jigsaw Man and The Night Is Mine — and his short-story collection, Things To Do in Knoxville When You’re Dead.

As a longtime newspaper columnist, he was, like Cagle, an independent thinker, if not as political in his outlook.

He was probably the only veteran cop who ever attended author lectures and book signings or Writers Guild meetings. He was stocky and dour, and without any describable expression he would look me over as if he was sizing me up as if for weapons or controlled substances. But then he would remark about something literary, or say something so dry that I didn’t get it at first.

He lived in Powell, but got to know downtown Knoxville as a child, when it was still pretty gritty (some of his colorful memories are on p. 228 in Knoxville’s Old City: A Short History). He found Knoxville an interesting and useful setting for a noir thriller.

That’s one of the highest compliments one can pay to my hometown.

These days, independent thinkers have to brave the hazard of being labeled as the Enemy, sometimes by two or more sides of an issue.

I hope Frank and David weren’t among our last.

—
Reprinted with permission from the Knoxville History Project.