Bill Landry
photo by John Shearer
Bill Landry
photo by John Shearer
Bill Landry among Chattanoogans is remembered as the Notre Dame High graduate who played football for a period at UTC and later became interested in acting.
He went on to become a very familiar name and face in Knoxville, where he narrated and helped produce a popular TV segment called “The Heartland Series,” which aired on the newscasts of WBIR Channel 10 there.
Now living in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area, he recently returned to Chattanooga for his Notre Dame class’ 50-year reunion.
He called the gathering a meaningful and very emotional affair, in part due to the fact that they learned classmate Skip Brannen had been ill before his subsequent death.
Besides reminiscing about the old days of high school, he has also been looking at the past in another way through a book he recently wrote focusing on the early days of Tennessee. Titled “When the West Was Tennessee,” the book is a collection of historical and unusual stories about the pioneering days of the state gathered through both research and his years of doing “The Heartland Series.”
Actually, he had been doing the research almost unintentionally by observation all his life. He said that started during his childhood and continued on through his days as a teacher and coach in East Tennessee after college, as well as when he become an actor portraying a Tennessee River boat captain for TVA in the early 1980s.
As a result, he was already quite knowledgeable about the region’s heritage when he began serving as host, narrator and co-producer of “The Heartland Series” for 25 years fulltime beginning in 1984. And that work increased his knowledge even more, he added.
“But more than the geographic education from the state I received by living and working in it, I also grew to understand our stories, legends, myths, folklore and 'behind the scenes' tales,” he said in explaining how the book came about. “What it took to settle this land, how come it came to be the way it is.”
Whether through the TV segments or as a writer, Mr. Landry has at heart also been a storyteller, and he tries to bring this out in the various stories in the book.
Topics covered include what was faced by early travelers in the region, the memoirs of 18th century visitor Lt. Henry Timberlake of England, the Indians in the area, and stories on Cades Cove and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
He also focuses on a planned duel between early Tennesseans Andrew Jackson and John Sevier, and an unusual explorer in the area named William Bartram, who introduced the world to the Great Smoky Mountains.
“These are the things, the subjects and the places that interest me the most, and they always have,” he said. “Pretty much that’s why I wrote the book.”
And fans of “The Heartland Series” will be pleased to know that Mr. Landry has written five stories on topics that were either planned or he had hoped to do TV segments on, but they never made it past the partial production phase.
These include “The Last Will and Testament of Homer Obelweiss,” “Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier,” and one intriguingly called “The Witch’s Curse.” Landry said the latter is about a woman named Dit Rose, who wanted to be a full witch.
Mr. Landry thinks such stories help people understand better what made Tennessee the state it is now.
“These are need-to-know stories of what it took by these uncommon people to settle this land,” he said, adding that the mountains isolated people on the frontier of the 18th century and forced them to learn to make do.
“These are the stories of uncommon people, what they faced, and how they faced it.”
The Periploi Press book is scheduled to come out in October, and Mr. Landry is making several appearances in East Tennessee to promote the book and discuss his work and Appalachian life.
Dates include: on Sept. 8 and 9 at the grand opening of the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore; on Oct. 27 and 28 at the Mountain Makings Festival in Morristown; from Nov. 16-18 at the Foothills Craft Guild at the Jacob Building at Chilhowee Park in Knoxville; and next Feb. 16 at the Rose Glen Literary Festival in Sevierville.
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Mr. Landry welcomes opportunities to make additional appearances closer to Chattanooga regarding his new book. He can be reached at blandry50@hotmail.com.
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Jcshearer2@comcast.net