Chattanooga's Robert Sparks Walker by Clark Alexandra Walker;

Author:Clark, Alexandra Walker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

1927

Walker was seeking someone to lend McBroom $450 to put out an edition of his poems. McBroom had told him it was the dream of his life. Someone suggested that members of the Billy Sunday Club might lend the paper-seller money.

Walker visited the office of Provence and Hemphill, who had sold him his Ridge lot in 1919. The deed was worded so as to allow misinterpretation, allowing the abstract company to “steal” the lot through skewed description. “I have run across so many dishonest people…I wonder if there are any honest ones left at all.”

In February, the Four Seas Company sent him a contract for My Father’s Farm, his second book of poetry. He also signed a contract with Merit Newspaper Service for four-hundred-word articles and agreed to give an introduction to Royal Dixon, who was again in town for a speaking engagement.

Walker and niece Dona went to the Tivoli on his birthday to see Harold Lloyd’s Andrews’ Raid Story. Walker called it good, but “the real story of Andrews stealing the General came in for only a slight acquaintance, much disguised and hacked up.” He would keep this topic in mind.

Wendell expressed interest in going west, which Walker attributed to a recent appearance in town by “some sort of wild westerner—a Wild Bill Something—who claimed to have been raised by the Sioux. We found him on the third floor of the Yellow Cab Company building on Carter Street. He had a 700-pound lion caged in a Dodge auto, which he claimed to have captured out west, and is still looking for someone to identify it. I believe it escaped from a circus, and this man caught it, supposing he had found it in its native haunts.”

Walker was wrestling again with too little time for work. He had to refuse speaking requests to hold onto time, getting so many calls for lectures and questions that “some days my soul cries out for a minute of peace.” He wanted his nature books published to be of benefit to mankind.

In April, a kidnapping occurred in Walker’s neighborhood, but the two-year old was ransomed and returned a few days later; the culprits were caught with marked ransom money. Walker was “sickened by humanity’s silliness, reflected by the steady stream of cars and pedestrians on Greenwood,” all looking for the house where the child was abducted.

Bonnie Gilbert was helping with proofs for My Father’s Farm. She was constant as the North Star, never interfering, always ready to do a kindness, and so she would remain throughout Walker’s life—a truly good neighbor.

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