So long, Buck
Hello, everyone. I just want to let you know that I'll probably be blogging only sporadically this week, if at all. Some of you may have read in Sunday's newspaper that my father passed away over the weekend. I know I didn't write about him on this blog, but if you've been at all informed or entertained by the entries you've read on this site, he was partly responsible for that. After all, I inherited some of his genes and following him around as a kid inspired me to go into the newspaper business.
I'm including the obituary he wrote for himself after he retired from The Tennessean in the late 1980s. It appeared on that newspaper's web site over the weekend. I'll caution you that it's quite long and parts of it are outdated (for example, he wrote at least a dozen more books after his retirement), but I couldn't possibly tell his story any better than he could.
BY CHARLES L. FONTENAY
Written by the Deceased
Charles L. Fontenay, most of whose half century-plus as a newspaperman was spent with The Tennessean, surprised himself and delighted many of his colleagues by dying yesterday. His 40-year career on The Tennessean included work as general assignment reporter, science reporter, legislative and political writer and city editor. Since 1968 his official title had been "rewrite editor," but, in fact, his work on the staff was varied, ranging from serving as city editor when needed to preparing advance obituaries on prominent people, in addition to his rewrite chores. Prior to joining The Tennessean staff in 1946 he worked as an editor for the Associated Press in Nashville, Memphis and Tullahoma, Tenn., and as reporter and editor on two other Tennessee newspapers. A thorough-going romantic who never really adapted to the routine of ordinary life and consequently was frequently at odds with impatient superiors, Fontenay achieved a solid reputation for his abilities as a newspaperman. However, "who he was" depended to a considerable degree on which of the widely differing groups of his acquaintances was talking.
To a large body of fans, authors, editor and publishers all over the country he was known principally as a science fiction author who established a minor name for himself in the field in the 1950s and was edging back into it in later years.
During that writing period, he had three published novels to his credit Twice Upon a Time, Rebels of the Red Planet and The Day the Oceans Overflowed ... as well as more than three dozen shorter works in magazines and anthologies, some translated into foreign languages.
He was the only Tennessean to be listed in the voluminous 1986 edition of Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers.
Since his retirement to St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1987 he had returned to writing science fiction and had had three novelettes published in different anthologies.
To martial arts practitioners in Nashville and to some degree in Tennessee and surrounding states, he was "Mr. Fontenay" ... these people were the only ones who ever addressed him that formally ... a third degree black belt in the Korean style, Tae Kwon Do, who had entered the art in his 50s and competed successfully against men much younger.
He received a certificate of commendation from Kuk I Won, the World Tae Kwon Do Federation, for his contributions to the art, and his instructor, former Korean lightweight champion Shin Young Kong, said he was the oldest man he knew to have won his black belt through the regular testing process instead of on an honorary basis.
In some academic circles, where he was sometimes addressed mistakenly as "Dr. Fontenay," he was known as a philosopher and biographer.
He was listed in The Index of American Philosophers for a 1969 work, Epistle to the Babylonians, published by the University of Tennessee Press and adopted as a reading text by Duquesne University's Institute of Man.
UT Press also published his biography, Estes Kefauver, in 1980, and Coombe Springs Press in England published a philosophical work, of a sort, The Keyen of Fu Tze, several years earlier.
And there was a substantial stratum of people from Florida to West Virginia and Michigan who looked on him as a spiritual guide of at least some degree of enlightenment.
A man who never adopted a formal religious faith, he dabbled in several esoteric fields, but principally "The Work" established in the early part of the century by the Russian mystic, G.I. Gurdjieff.
He was leader of the Nashville Gurdjieff Group for three years and had conducted seminars on it in Florida and Michigan, as well as visiting its American center, the Claymont Institute, in Charles Town, W. Va., on occasion.
He also was a certified clinical hypnotist in the Ericksonian method, but confined his work in this field largely to therapy for friends.
During one period he made something of a splash with his oil painting in the Nashville art world.
During his period of political writing for The Tennessean, which spanned some two decades, he covered 10 biennial sessions of the state Senate and the 1953 Constitutional Convention, the state's first since 1870.
He also covered the first U. S. Senate campaign of the late Sen. Estes Kefauver and other statewide campaigns of Kefauver, former Sen. Albert Gore Sr., former Gov. Gordon Browning and others.
He left the rewrite desk temporarily to cover the 1977 Constitutional Convention.
After the senior Gore was instrumental in establishing the national interstate highway construction program, Fontenay covered its progress in Tennessee until it was well under way, and won second place in the Ted V. Rodgers national newspaper competition for two series of articles on its progress and comparison with that in adjoining states.
One of the political stories of which he was proudest was on the Senate floor speech of Sen. Charles Stainback, a West Tennessean who sought to exempt his counties from the school integration legislation sponsored by Gov. Frank G. Clement.
Stainback failed but his speech in support of his local bills was an eloquent plea for a way of life that was passing.
Since The Tennessean supported Clement's legislation, Fontenay had some difficulty persuading the editors to use his story, but when it was used it was picked up by the Associated Press under his byline and appeared on the front page of newspapers all over the country, such as The New York Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Atlanta Constitution.
Fontenay's youthful impression of newspaper work was shaped by early movies that presented it in a superficial and melodramatic light and, consequently, it was one of the last professions he would have chosen for himself.
However, in his teens he was a Boy Scout, achieving Eagle rank with silver palm, and wrote a weekly column for his scout troop for the Union City Daily Messenger.
Having worked at several different jobs since graduation from high school ... at the age of 15 ... he was looking for another when he was offered a position as the reporter on the small town newspaper, on the basis of his work with his column.
He accepted it, somewhat reluctantly, at a salary of $5 a week, not anticipating that it would become his lifelong profession.
After he had been in it for a while he learned that it was not just a matter of chasing police cars but often presented opportunities for significant social contributions, but printer's ink never really got into his blood.
"My ambition from childhood was to be 'a writer,' but I never looked on newspaper work as 'writing'," he said.
"To me, 'writing' was fiction, and that was what I wanted to do from the time I was about 7 years old.
"So I always thought of my newspaper work as the way I made my living, so I could support myself to do what I wanted to do ... primarily writing, but some other things too."
Fontenay's family background was as colorful as some of his life activities became.
He was born on St. Patrick's Day, 1917, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, son of Charles Robert Fontenay, an Englishman who was a South American executive for Republic Steel Co., and Miriam Steel, a native of Memphis who had gone to Brazil as a Methodist missionary.
His father was descended from Karl Fortlage, a German philosopher, and the Duc de Pellissiere, marshal of France.
His maternal grandfather was Dr. S.A. Steel, a Methodist minister widely known throughout the South during his lifetime, and his maternal grandmother was descended from the Scottish poet Robert Burns, and ... reputedly ... from the English statesman William Pitt.
Fontenay's romanticism and his esoteric interest ... and perhaps his numerous relationships with different women ... were shaped for him by his mother, a beautiful young woman who brought him back to the United States as a baby and lugged him with her all over the South as she taught school at different places.
When he was five, her family persuaded her that raising a young son alone was too much of a burden and he was placed with relatives of his maternal grandfather's family on a farm near Union City, Tenn., where he was reared and educated.
A frail city boy transplanted to the country, he was largely a solitary child, and not fond of farm work.
He spent a great deal of his time reading in his grandfather's voluminous library and later writing out personal fantasies.
He was physically active, though ... since he was small and younger than his classmates in school, he learned to outrun almost anybody ... often roamed the countryside on horseback accompanied by his dog, and in high school played a great deal of sandlot football.
His teenage years with the Boy Scouts also plunged him into numerous physical activities, and he was a mainstay of his troop's track team and won his senior Red Cross lifesaving badge.
Before getting started in newspaper work, Fontenay held jobs for short periods as a government AAA surveyor and a men's clothing store clerk.
At the Daily Messenger he served as both city editor and sports editor at different times, but mostly wrote practically all of the paper's news stories.
His Union City acquaintances conferred on him the lasting nickname "Scoop" as a result of his vulnerability to a practical joke by one of his colleagues.
Fontenay had been with the newspaper for three and a half years when he had the fortune ... good or ill ... to fall passionately in love and, since he couldn't afford marriage on his salary, left to gamble on writing a major series of magazine articles on a government project, researching it by hitch-hiking across the country.
It flopped and he spent a perspiring summer working 10 to 12 hours a day, 13 days every two weeks, as a "soda jerk" in the People's Drugstores in Washington, D.C.
This was during the late years of the Depression and his $17.50 a week salary was hardly adequate for marriage either.
Before he could find a better job, the young lady changed her mind about it all and Fontenay, deeply disillusioned, spent some months living a bohemian life in the New Orleans French Quarter before joining the Associated Press in Nashville at the beginning of 1941.
Living at first with an old Union City friend as a roommate two doors from the old governor's mansion on West End Avenue, he served as an editor for AP in Nashville during the 1941 legislature, then was transferred to Memphis for most of the rest of the year before taking over as chief of the small AP bureau established at Camp Forrest, Tenn., which is now Arnold Air Force Base outside Tullahoma.
When that was closed shortly after World War II broke out in December 1941, he was returned to Nashville as an editor.
Although very shy with women as a boy and a young man, Fontenay evidently appealed to them, and he had been involved in several romantic affairs in Union City, Memphis and Nashville before one of them caught up with him.
Rooming on Villa Place and eating at a boarding house across the street, he met Glenda Lucille Miller, a young schoolteacher from Rulo, Nebr., here to visit her brother for the spring and summer.
Fontenay, wrapped up in writing a novel ... which was never finished ... about his recent disastrous love affair, hardly noticed her at first.
But she noticed him, and grabbed his hand one day as he walked out of the boarding house with the announcement, "I want to talk to you!"
That conversation led to dating.
Fontenay found himself in love again and in October, after he was inducted into the Army Air Corps, they were married.
Their romance and most of their 17-year marriage were deeply affectionate and they were looked on as an ideal couple by his colleagues on The Tennessean.
In the Air Corps Fontenay attended cryptographic school in Chanute Field, Ill., and Pawling, N. Y., then attended Officer Candidate School in base censorship at Fort Washington, Md.
He was sent to the South Pacific, where he remained for two and a half years, serving on Guadalcanal, the Russell Islands and Espiritu Santo.
He was awarded a certificate of commendation for teaching elementary Chinese to troops on Espiritu Santo and after the war was discharged as a captain.
He and his wife went to Johnson City, Tenn., where Fontenay was sports editor of the Press-Chronicle for six months before coming to Nashville to join the staff of The Tennessean as a general assignment reporter.
Because he had covered the state Capitol beat for the Associated Press during the 1941 legislature, the newspaper's editors had the mistaken impression that he was an experienced political reporter and assigned him to cover the 1947 legislature along with veteran political reporter Nat Caldwell.
From that time until he became city editor in 1964 he covered politics, working on general assignment and science stories between times.
One of his major political assignments was coverage of the 1948 Kefauver campaign, when Kefauver, running for senator, and Browning, running for governor, destroyed the entrenched statewide power of the E.H. Crump political machine.
Fontenay and his wife travelled with Kefauver and his wife and entourage during the long campaign, hitting almost every little community in Tennessee, and the two families became good friends from that time on.
Mrs. Fontenay baked excellent fruitcakes from an inherited Pennsylvania Dutch recipe and each Christmas they would send one to the Kefauvers.
Scottish-born Nancy Kefauver would always acknowledge these gifts with a nice note: "Thank you for the lovely plum pudding."
Fontenay liked and admired Kefauver personally because the senator was a political nonconformist and for his unshakeable integrity and his courage in expressing his convictions.
He edited a campaign newspaper for Kefauver’s first presidential race in 1952, and wrote a biography of the senator shortly before he made his second presidential bid in 1956.
Unable to find a publisher in a short time, he sold the manuscript to columnist Jack Anderson, who rewrote it as The Kefauver Story.
Years later, after Kefauver's death, Fontenay spent several years in further research and wrote his definitive Kefauver biography, Estes Kefauver.
He also became friends with that abrasive figure, Prentice Cooper, whom he had known when Cooper was governor in 1941-42.
After Cooper, father of U. S. Rep. Jim Cooper, returned from service as ambassador to Peru, Fontenay covered his unsuccessful campaign to unseat Sen. Albert Gore Sr., also a friend of his.
It was during the 1950s, his science fiction period, that he won several medals in competition in nationwide correspondence chess and devoted a good deal of time to oil painting.
He had taken up painting while in the Army on Guadalcanal and subsequently took the Famous Artists course.
During his painting period he won a number of ribbons, mostly at the Tennessee State Fair.
One of his most outrageous stunts in the art world occurred during this time.
Enraged because one of his paintings was "too traditional" for acceptance in a Watkins Institute art exhibit, he cleaned his palette at random onto an old canvas for a time and, when the canvas was covered, entered it in the State Fair.
He won first prize, and when the way he had painted it was disclosed in a jubilant story in The Tennessean by Wallace Westfeldt ... with color art ... the Nashville art community was thrown into an uproar.
His "ideal marriage" foundered largely on the fact that the couple remained childless.
A considerably younger married woman of his acquaintance fell in love with him and, when she became pregnant from him, he was excited enough at the prospect of fatherhood to divorce his wife in 1960 with the idea of marrying his lover.
She, however, decided to stay with the marriage she had and he, once more disillusioned, lived a bachelor life for a time.
However, while on a trip to Chattanooga in 1961 to work on a series on the interstate highway system, Fontenay met 24-year-old Martha Mae Howard, an employee of the Chattanooga Travelers Aid Society.
A courtship ensued that resulted in their marriage in 1963.
Mrs. Fontenay subsequently became executive director of the Nashville Travelers Aid Society and a member of the Metropolitan Planning Commission.
They were parents of two children, but were divorced in 1984.
Always a rebel against conformity and arbitrary authority, Fontenay got embroiled in a dispute with the editorial management of The Tennessean which culminated in his being appointed night city editor in 1964.
He ran the night desk for four years, and was remembered by the reporters who worked with him then for bellowing orders across the city room, a habit he had acquired from Jack Setters, the first city editor under whom he worked on The Tennessean.
Fontenay had not attended college in his youth, but after he became The Tennessean's city editor he was awarded a Southern Regional Education Board fellowship for a year's study at Vanderbilt University.
He promptly signed up for 27 hours, until he found out that "hours" of university study aren't exactly comparable to hours of work at a job.
Even so, he ranged in his courses from philosophy to history, German and Chinese, at all levels, and later added two years of Chinese at Vanderbilt on his own.
In 1969 his first non-fiction book was published.
This was Epistle to the Babylonians: An Essay on the Natural Inequality of Man, a philosophical work based on a decade of research into fields ranging from psychology to anthropology, ethology, history and evolutionary biology.
The book received excellent reviews, but it never made him any money.
About this time he became involved actively in Tae Kwon Do. He was highly enthusiastic about his martial art, which he entered at the age of 53, and was awarded a plaque by the heads of several karate schools of different styles in Nashville in appreciation of his contributions to the art.
Also during this period he became involved actively in the Gurdjieff Work.
He became good friends with Pierre Eliot, an Englishmen who headed the Claymont Institute and who had studied with Gurdjieff personally.
On occasion he took trips to St. Petersburg, Fla., and Pontiac, Mich., to assist proteges who ran Gurdjieff groups there.
"From the time I first came across the Gurdjieff Work in 1937, it appealed to me more than any other 'esoteric' or 'spiritual' system," he said, "because it made rational sense in scientific terms and Gurdjieff always advised his followers to believe nothing until it was proven.
"I must say that, for me, it has worked as it was supposed to work."
Fontenay disappeared largely from public view behind the rewrite desk in 1968, but re-emerged for the 1977 Constitutional Convention.
Near the end of the convention he suffered a major heart attack but, after a week in the hospital, returned to finish coverage of the convention ... and to be awarded his second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
He was very much in evidence in The Tennessean's city room, however. For quite a while his colleagues were entertained ... or irritated, in some cases ... by his breaking boards and kicking down the men's restroom door while he was at the peak of his enthusiasm about his martial art, or sitting on his desk meditating at the height of his Gurdjieff period.
Trained to accuracy during his time with the Associated Press, as an editor he was a stickler for punctuation, spelling and grammar, and as a writer he often was handed the assignment of making a dull, routine story into something readable.
He was known to both superiors and colleagues as an exceptionally fast worker in both reporting and writing, though sometimes uncomfortable to hand an assignment to, as four years in the Army had taught him the value of griping to let off nervous tension.
Fontenay had been interested in hypnosis and had practiced it informally since before his first marriage.
As a result of his friendship and sometime experimental collaboration with two Nashville hypnotists, Anderson Hewitt and Lynda Lee Roys, he spent some time in Birmingham in 1984 studying and acquiring certification as a clinical hypnotist.
Just before his retirement he spent four months in mid-1987 in Washington working for Gannett News Service.
He is survived by a daughter, Gretchen of Chattanooga; a son, Blake Fontenay, a reporter for the Jacksonville, Fla., Times-Union, and a granddaughter.
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