[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 127 (Thursday, September 10, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2235-E2236]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        HONORING WALLACE BAUMANN

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 10, 2009

  Mr. DUNCAN. Madam Speaker, my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee lost a 
great citizen and community champion recently.
  Wallace Baumann was a longtime friend of mine and a tireless 
contributor to the arts in East Tennessee. His family is an institution 
in Knoxville, and the building that housed their business has been a 
fixture in downtown Knoxville since just after the Civil War, when 
Wallace's grandfather Captain W.W. Wooddruff opened the hardware and 
furniture store.
  The store remained open through most of the 20th Century, being 
passed down through the generations and standing out as a downtown 
staple even during difficult economic times. Although the business is 
now gone, the unique building which housed it remains with the family 
name still attached. I could not imagine downtown Knoxville without 
this landmark.
  Wallace never stopped serving his Country or his Community during his 
84 years. He served during World War II in the 10th Armored Division, 
surviving the Battle of the Bulge.
  He was also a member of many boards and organizations throughout 
Knoxville, most notably serving on the Knoxville Symphony Society 
Board. Wallace could often be found at the Tennessee Theatre, and he 
even personally financed the restoration of the Theatre's historic 
organ.
  Wallace's life is a living history of Knoxville, Tennessee that I 
hope will not soon be forgotten. Recently, the Knoxville Publication 
Metro Pulse wrote of this great loss to our community, recounting how 
Wallace was there to see John Barrymore and Glenn Miller perform at the 
Bijou Theatre and witness Ingrid Bergman plant a tree on Market Square.
  Madam Speaker, in closing, I would like to call to the attention of 
my colleagues and other readers of the Record the article by Jack Neely 
in Metro Pulse, which is reprinted below. I thank Wallace Baumann for 
his dedication and love of East Tennessee, and I will greatly miss my 
friend.

                 [From the Metro Pulse, Aug. 19, 2009]

  Wallace Baumann, 1925-2009--A Memory of a Surprising Philanthropist

                            (By Jack Neely)

       Wallace Baumann died last week. I'd seen him a few times 
     this summer, and he seemed more or less the same as he did 
     when I was first aware of who he was, sometime in the '60s. 
     Cheerful, well-dressed, and with a cogent remark about the 
     last issue of Metro Pulse.
       He didn't look 84, or even 74, as several people have 
     observed this week; some who hadn't known him for long had 
     assumed he was 20 or even 30 years younger. Wallace may have 
     been evidence of a paradoxical truth, that while young men 
     look older when they wear a jacket and tie, old men look 
     younger. I never in my life saw Wallace without a jacket and 
     tie, and with prominent horn-rimmed glasses, he looked like 
     an executive in one of those business-office comedies of the 
     '60s. For the last couple of years, there's been a big 
     portrait of him in the Tennessee Theatre in the landing of 
     the right

[[Page E2236]]

     stairway up to the balcony. He was in recent decades the 
     theater's biggest supporter. He directed much of the recent 
     painstaking restoration of the theater; he was three when it 
     was built, and remembered it in its earliest days. But many 
     weren't aware of the extent of his personal investment in the 
     place.
       Baumann was a merchant, by trade. He was, for some decades, 
     the president of Woodruff's Furniture, the Gay Street 
     institution his great-grandfather, William Wallace Woodruff, 
     founded at the end of the Civil War. About 20 years ago, when 
     downtown retail was widely reputed to be deceased, Woodruff's 
     was an extravagant exception, this multi-story emporium with 
     inventory that seemed fresh and up-to-date. The last time I 
     was there--it was the early '90s, we'd just had a second kid 
     and needed a kid-proof dining table--I found a plausibly 
     trendy one at Woodruff's. It was the last time I saw a 
     representative of a bygone profession in my home town: 
     Wallace may have been our last merchant to employ elevator 
     operators.
       The place is now the Downtown Grill and Brewery. The last 
     time I talked to Wallace about it, he hadn't been inside to 
     see his great-grandfather's building renovated as a popular 
     restaurant and brewpub. He seemed all right with the fact of 
     it, but didn't feel an urgency to look. The family name is 
     still on the building; Woodruff was Wallace's middle name.
       Wallace and I had some sharp disagreements about some 
     downtown issues, but stayed friendly, and he was my handiest 
     resource for certain questions about the past of our shared 
     hometown. A lifelong bachelor, he lived alone in Sequoyah 
     Hills and was usually there to answer his phone. For a guy in 
     my position, it's been handy to have the phone number of a 
     person who remembered going to see John Barrymore get off the 
     train for his show at the Bijou, 70 years ago, and who 
     recalled both of Glenn Miller's shows at the Tennessee as if 
     they were last Tuesday. (``Wallace never said, `Ah, it was a 
     long time ago, I just don't remember.' '') A few months ago, 
     when I heard an implausible story about Ingrid Bergman 
     planting a dogwood tree on Market Square 40 years ago, I was 
     pretty confident Wallace would know something about it, and 
     sure enough he was right there beside her, and had a funny 
     story about it.
       He was also an authority on architecture, though I don't 
     think he would have claimed to be perfectly objective on the 
     subject. The Baumann family, German immigrants who arrived in 
     East Tennessee in the mid-19th century, was arguably 
     Knoxville's first architectural dynasty, dominating local 
     commercial and institutional architecture in the late 19th 
     and early 20th centuries. Wallace was a Baumann who didn't 
     design buildings, but he was a champion of the Baumanns' 
     architecture. Wallace's father, who died almost half a 
     century ago, was the last of them. (Wallace once corrected 
     me, rather sternly, when in a column I referred to his father 
     as Albert B. Baumann Jr. That was his given name, maybe, but 
     Wallace told me no one ever called him anything but ``A.B.'')
       Baumann was a great supporter of several civic 
     organizations, especially the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, 
     and he could be counted on to attend each performance with a 
     lady friend. Even if you'd known him for decades, as I did, 
     you might not gather, in conversations with this elegant 
     gentleman in the lobby of the Tennessee, that he was a combat 
     veteran of World War II, a member of Combat Command B of the 
     10th Armored Division, one of the first to breach the 
     Siegfried Line. He spent much of 1944 in a foxhole near 
     Bastogne with an M1 for company. He hardly spoke of the war. 
     I never even knew he'd been in the service until he was 
     invited to write an article about his wartime memories, in an 
     especially interesting collection of memoirs of members of 
     First Presbyterian Church, called We Were There. It's 
     characteristic that in his description of the Siegfried Line, 
     he mentioned that he'd previously known it only from 
     newsreels at the Tennessee Theatre.
       (That book, by the way, is as good a collection of local 
     memories of that war as I've seen. Bill Tate, another 
     contributor to that book, a B-17 navigator who was shot down 
     over Germany, and a survivor of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, 
     also died last week.)
       Back in 2001, Baumann personally financed the complete 
     restoration of the theater's original Wurlitzer organ; they 
     sent the organ away to one of the world's top organ 
     technicians. Today it's said to be one of fewer than 20 
     concert-grade organs in America which are installed in their 
     original locations. Wallace was proud of that fact.
       The bill came to $180,000. Wallace was a private man, and 
     during his life didn't want that detail to be known. I hope 
     it's okay to mention it now.

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