>> for more information visit the authors web site, willswift.com. next on book tv recent trip to tennessee, bill talks about a few of the famous people from chattanooga. ♪ there are a lot coming into town and folks were gaining interesting history by connecting the names around town to their story and who they were rather than kind of the list of today's. it was a new approach that gave the story of who they were. it's a very interesting story, and in 1898, he enlisted and went to cuba in the spanish-american war, and while he was there he encountered a bottled drink, and i think the name of that was -- it was a

pineapple drink. he was impressed with that and so when he came back he talked to friends about this and at this time, coca-cola was kind of on the ascendancy in atlanta. it was invented by john who was a doctor in 1986. he patented it and then it was bought and it was started to grow year by year and a land of bye fountain drinks because there was a popular place for a lot of people especially young folks. thomas and a friend of his started thinking they might go to atlanta to see if they could meet mr. kandler. according to some of the things i read it seems like they went a

couple of times. and the idea to him is we would like to bottle your drink and get it sold around the country. he was a tough nut to crack and he was skeptical about the possibility of the reality for two reasons, he was worried about the quality of the product and there were still problems with bottling and keeping things fresh in bottles. of course this was a carbonated drink and she was also worried about these two men. i believe he was in his thirties. he wasn't totally convinced that they had the ability and he didn't want a failure on the part of his company. he gave thomas exclusive rights to bottle and sell coca-cola in

the u.s.. actually there was a couple of states that basically they got the entire united states had to do it. they signed a contract allegedly for a dollar, supposedly he never collected. that's the legend. and evidently they were so broke they had to borrow money just to get the train back the last time. so this was july. they had to enlist someone to get more money so they could buy the equipment, tables, the years and all that sort of stuff so in three months they had set up a facility and started bottling and distributing at and within a year they were just cooking. they determined between themselves with the dew has become apparent bottlers and they would divide the united states into territories. so this would be a franchise

system. so as a parent bottler he bud selig franchise to somebody in ohio, wherever. people were knocking at his door to get this and then he would get some profits from those operations, but the killer was he and the ever to have exclusive rights to get the syrup from atlanta. so they got this draft and then they sold it to the bottlers. so that was pretty much his story and its a golden story of american entrepreneurship. he was the son and was working when he was 11 for a newspaper. he continued off and on working as long as he was going to school. he worked at the drugstore, the

grocery store and left the ring back to the newspapers. he cleaned up around the shop and the dirty work often as a kid. but one person described him as a human interrogation point. that is he asked questions all the time. he loved to learn how to do things. there was a chance to buy the chattanooga times, it was also a struggling newspaper with all kinds of debt and in 1878i think it was july of 1878, he bought that paper, and i believe the paper cost was $800. $1,500 in debt. he had two or 3% capital. he had just a little bit of money, and the story goes according to his granddaughter, he went to the bank to ask for a loan for $300 to secure his interest in the paper, the

chattanooga times, and the banker said who have you got to cosign for it? you are a minor. he looked at the banker and he said me and the banker evidently went along with it and signed it. his dad came down from knoxville to help him sign the final paper 71878, he took it over but he was very social. he loved people, he was very energetic and obviously really focused. so he took the paper over in 1878, and within two years, he had gotten a subscription up, the debt was way down. he was able to pay it off by the 80's and own it. he already had most of the interest but he made a huge success. in the late nineties, he got word from a friend in new york who said "the new york times"

was a newspaper having major financial difficulty and this might be an opportunity for him to jump into new york and have control or interest in a major daily. so he went to new york and met with a group of people that were trying to buy the newspaper that evidently was printing 19, 20,000 copies a day and only selling eight or 9,000. if they were running against a lot of the old journalism newspapers would sell for a penny or two or they had to sell their server three. was a losing cause. from what i read, it was really uncertain whether he was the man. i think he felt like he was a small town fellow and he met

with some of the principles that were interested in him but he had very little money and essentials and he called on his contacts, it's not what you know but it's who you know, including the president grover cleveland to sign letters of recommendation or backing to see if he could borrow enough money to purchase an interest in the paper, a controlling interest. that's what he wanted, ownership and control and he did it and it was trust in a few years he upped the circulation and began to bring down the debt and show the organizational superiority. was obviously something he was very gifted with. it didn't take many years for him to turn "the new york times" are around and make it a very respected newspaper and very

profitable. he did things like on the 61st day he started a pension fund for his employees. he was geared towards his and when he is doing well and the paper and trying to do good. it sounds silly today that he evidently elevated the quality of the riding and was being presented to the public. he had a public vision. ♪ ♪ her older brother had joined the show. he took her with him or she

volunteered to try out for the show and was accepted as a dancer, not as a singer and began traveling with the show. a blues singer who kind of precedes her as a woman singer of the blues was on the show and she gradually became well known. betsy eventually supersede and her in terms of popularity, but she traveled with the show and she did a lot of shows in atlanta and the theater. there was there early version of the circuit so she played in a lot of what they called courthouses and this was kind of before the era of the race records and garnered a great following. she had a big felice and she's got that kind of bigger kind of style of singing as a was

typical in the teens and twenties. she never got the record until she was 30-years-old. so in a way her valise was never captured on the record. nevertheless as soon as she released her first records they were wildly popular selling in the tens of thousands and some over 100,000. and she became very wealthy. and by this time she moved from a land that philadelphia. she died on a road trip when she was in mississippi. janis joplin was one of the people that made her story famous and the didy essentially because she couldn't get medical help. her funeral was held in philadelphia and was attended by estimates of ten to 20,000 people. i mean that's how widely popular and how she connected with people and that indicates her great popularity. one thing about bessie smith in chattanooga that interests me is

everybody knows the name betsy smith. i would venture that may be 95% of the people in chattanooga probably couldn't name more than one or two of her songs. i don't think many people have probably never really heard it. so that is an interesting legacy. ♪ ♪ >> i would like people to be able to look at the book and find interesting stories and inspiration from the people that live here that have worked hard and done well and have given back to folks and i think it's enriched the community a lot and

brought a good feeling to all. >> from book tv trip to chattanooga tennessee we bring an interview with john wheeler come author of "the chronicles of cadilac dave: true confessions of a drug kingpin". >> i wrote "the chronicles of cadilac dave" that is a series. i use the name jackson alias and frankly it is my story and i am happy to take responsibility for it. i put that subtitle true confessions of the drug kingpin as a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing because the dea and the fbi and all of these enforcement agencies and every local agency wanted to portray me as a big king of him character.

and when i look at myself in the context of all the people i knew and what i really knew was going on, i was pretty small but it was more tongue in cheek to say can attend. although i'm sure there are probably still people but argue that that's what i was. it was an interesting thing. in high school and never even smoke cigarette or drink a beer until i graduated from high school. that summer i started drinking with some friends of mine and actually at that time, sniffing glue was a big thing and that's kind of what we were doing. we work mixing mixed drinks in a blender and sniffing glue and that was before marijuana came along. this was the late 60's and in chattanooga at least nobody knew what marijuana was. a was a couple years later when i was in chicago before i got

introduced. i was with the heppe folk singer group and, you know, it was kind of cool we would go to the coffee houses and set out in the parking lot and smoke a joint and was this just greatest thing in the world and that was how it started. somebody said the key to success is to do what you love to do. so in the beginning, that was marijuana and that was kind of -- it was kind of in my mind at least and the people around me it was a righteous adventure. everybody wanted it and was the fuel of the counterculture and when i discovered how i could go and get it and bring it back i was like the hero.

i always resented that stereotype of current drug dealer over in the shadows sneaking things to kids coming out of school. it wasn't like that at all. it was people my age or older than me who wanted marijuana and was being suppressed and nobody could get that and i brought that. later on after i discovered cocaine, i really got into that. i was actually sentenced to a term three times and the first time was not related to drugs and had to do with burglary, where i was running with these older guys and we were breaking in places and they were saying you have more than jesse james. you go in here and i will be the one that gets caught. but anyway, i was in the work house when i was 18. the first time i got out and i was 19. the next time it was drugs where

i served marijuana to the first undercover agent in chattanooga and it was a contract met kind of deal but they got me and i was out there and i'd been there about three months. it wasn't any jailbreak. i had a trusting job at the hog lot and found out that there were some things happening that were pretty upsetting. my partner had stolen my money, my old lady was running off with somebody and i just got mad and one day i left and a skate for three years and that's when a lot of these adventures happened while i was and he escaped fugitive kind of flying under their radar. i went straight to tucson where i started buying things taking a back to ruslan tuck. i found some connections in

mexico and started smuggling and it was very different back then. mexico is the same in some ways, but it's much more violent and murderous now than it was then. back then i would walk across the bridge from arizona and carrying a cracker box full of money just going across the british and then i would go down a hall of the co - way and there's carlos. he had his wife and kids and it was just a destitute place and i felt great because you can see how much good it was doing them to be able to sell to me and back home everybody loved it and so that's how i was. personally in terms of smuggling only about a thousand pounds.

it was an amateur hour thing. an old beat-up pickup truck and a bunch of mexican teenagers with a duffel bags and each one had 80 pounds of pot in bricks and on the mexican side they would go through and pay off all of the farmers and federalese to open up the fences and let them through down to the border and then they would all jumped out and carry the bags through the desert across over to the arizona side. and when was gone we would swoop down and the truck and pick it up behind the market right on the main highway. we had a little radio shack walkie talkie that we would communicate with and this was our smuggling deal. so, you know, 500, 600, a thousand pounds. that's what we did. i was arrested at the executive

park hotel on january 31st of 75. it was almost three years to the day from the time that i escapes from silver dale. they were promising me 30 years. the dea people came coming u.s. marshals, they took all my jewelry and said you won't be needing this. but i had some really good lawyers and as it turned out, through a variety of brilliant legal maneuvers which i will detail in the book, i did go to prison in south georgia but only for a brief time. and it was about 22 and a half months later that i was out again and that was the last time that i was in prison. i can't detail everything that happened during those years.

but suffice it to say, there was a voodoo connection to cocaine smuggling that i never knew about but i described in the book. the plane couldn't come. they didn't give it clearance and i thought you got to be kidding me. i don't believe any of that stuff that was going on all around me. and eventually it had an effect and i had some pretty sore real experiences which i really can't detail for you on the camera. it was hard enough to write it in the book. i ended up in a mental hospital for about six weeks and they wanted me to stay longer but i didn't. and all that led to the process of searching what happened, what happened to snap my mind? and but let me again to begin to

search for god, and that led to a dramatic conversion experience in miami in march of '81. that's totally transformed my life. and from that point on, there were no more drugs, there was no more anything. to me everything about the drug dealing and smuggling, the parties in atlanta, the rock bands, it's interesting and enticing and a lot of people want to read it because of that and that's fine but it's the back story. it's what brought this particular individual to this point in time where i had this satanic supranatural encounter that almost destroyed me, which i had rejected to that point in

time. and how had my life changed after that? >> author deborah levine gives an introduction to southern culture. she joined us on our recent trip to chattanooga, tennessee. >> part a history of my own journey coming here to the south but also for others who are making the same journey whether it is international were elsewhere in the united states. it has a particular culture and it's not always easy to navigate. in the first chapter why take this journey booming southern, i talk about why i made the journey. i felt that it would be a way that was comfortable for me to come to the south after having lived in a combination of british colonial islands and on the south and moscow i felt that the south was coming into its

own. there were lots of international companies and defenders and businesses that started up in the self at a rapid pace and i wanted to be part of that so i tell people this is a good reason for them also to come to fossella and experience a rather unique piece of american culture in the making. one of the things we see some times of the internationals to come in who are used to traveling and different cultures and they end up perhaps here for a few years. could you also please train the americans coming into this house because i think they have expectations that of what they are going to see and experience that are unrealistic. some of them are based on the fact that everybody is very friendly and smiles and greets you.

very happy to see you and let's get together. you must come over to the house sunday. people don't understand that in the south that's part of saying hello but that doesn't mean they actually want you to come to their house or they are going to stand delete to extend the invitation. that takes a little more doing so it's a little confusing for people who first arrived. who are the real seveners? when i ask this question and give presentations and say how many generations have to be here to be considered a real southerner, true southerner? it's a minimum of three more likely for and occasionally five and i have had a few people who've said it needs to be ten. but you can see that in the last of we've had a situation where young girl generations haven't chosen to move away and have stayed and have been part of a culture for a very long time

coming and that means that there is a sense of real seveners and it's unlike anything i've seen in the rest of the country. this list is a strategy for finding some hour well-known southern talent. and i put this in the book because in many ways, these people are some of the best and well known southerners worldwide. so, for example i asked people to pick a southern musician to follow. personalities are key conversation pieces in the south and a good tool for making friends. so if you find that you really, really love the music of the band leonard scanner -- lynard

skynard will find a company in that fan base for sure. so there was a genre to follow and get familiar with the musicians in that genre so there's so many. there's a gospel, there's rock, there's the riffing blues and country. there's something for everybody and there's plenty of performances and festivals. etkin day festival where it is featured and festivals and concerts can be found in most locations in this house, particularly in the warm weather any day of the week. this one. if you play an instrument, learn some southern sound. the experience will give you a feel for southern culture and give you something to share with others. so can i tell you a story about

this? a few weeks ago, i was in alabama at the university there and asked to do a workshop for a group of fulbright scholars. because i had such an investment in the arts as a way to get used to culture, i brought along with me some videos to show so i showed a video of lynard skynard performing sweet home alabama. now they are both fulbright scholars and professors and local leaders working with them and you could tell who was who. scholars thought that's interesting, and the locals were singing along. then to show the flip side of that, i showed of video have

sweet home alabama being sung [inaudible] in uniform as the backup singers ♪ ♪ ♪ sweet home alabama ♪ >> that was stunning to everybody in the room that sweet home alabama would be summoned to a russian audience, the russian version of pond rock i can only describe them as that. to understand the power of the

southern music as an export coming and it was great fun but it was also a teaching moment so you could see what is happening to southern culture. in this house, words have a life of their own and they are colorful. they are abundant and they can be exaggerations and metaphors. it is a wonderful experience it also means that there are a lot that are very particular to the south and cannot transfer well if you are not from that round here. [inaudible] >> nobody needs to know and if you really want to ask that question coming you might get the old southern response of yonder.

[laughter] or they could give you directions. some people say if you need to elections it's probably best not to ask a southerner because you will get something it seems to be more colorful. you go down three blocks past the light and then turned where that old house is where the shutters used to be and then you go past the building you know where that is before it burned down and then you are going to go down a couple of miles. there are two kinds of picture people coming into the south. one interestingly enough, southerners who had worked studied or returned to their

home town families to find it is considerably different and they could have changed and they are doing something with a special perspective on both sides and they are great bridges between the old and the new. the new admissions including myself we have come from the states and many from overseas and usually for our jobs with a different set of skills and if people look at the south and urge that historically after,

there was a lack of investment in the south and a removal of the sources as opposed to investments so they didn't have major corporations. that is what many people are bringing and they're doing an amazing job. it's like taking an isolated culture and introducing it to the changes virtually overnight. it's creative and innovative and it is an experience that i wouldn't miss for the world. >> sensationalism, murder,

mayhem, scandals and disasters in the 19th century reporting. >> what is the sensationalism and scandals and disasters and actually i edited it together with david b. ruler and the abu dhabi, the sensationalism is interesting because it excess on those papers and has all different kinds of funds but goes only to a certain limit because it is as much entertainment as it is shock. but the interesting thing is it starts with a chapter about joe campbell that was written about the journalism of the late 19th

century, the 1890's in new york and he finds a lot positive about it and wants us to take another look at the yellow journalism as a positive in the muckraking aspects and telling the truth about what's going on and we do have to remember that and the other thing we have to remember is what he said in the 1830's on the mission from the french government with a very good look at america at that time what he said was the scandal of the press is an essential to american democracy so he said it's a very good thing also, so the very interesting thing in the book

isn't a judgment about the sensationalism, it is fundamental and it is worth every story in the most famous picture that never appeared in the newspaper was skipping centuries to 1927 which was a picture of somebody in the electric chamber that appeared on the front page of the daily news with a camera on his ankle to this has been going on a long time and it is essential especially in political terms to our democracy. >> do you feel it has changed from the 19th century to the 20th century? >> sensationalism has been around for a long time. we start in the book and the beginning in the american press had to do with politics and the

mud slinging scandals of the late 1700's and early 1800's with jefferson being accused it turns out correctly of sleeping with his sleeve -- slave. and that this the same at this moment but this is going through different periods of time where for example when i first got into this business in the 60's and 70's my professor of stanford used to talk about kennedy when he was a reporter and during the kennedy era, everybody knew and everybody kept it private last of who they thought he was sleeping with but nobody ran the story, so

different situations either as a culture we run the story and run with the story as i think we would today, but i'm not sure, or we wouldn't. and no one ran with the eisenhower questions and no one ran with kennedy. as a matter of fact the story didn't come out until the 70's when it was revealed that one was also so when that broke away when there were lots of stories. just from the 60's to the 76 changed, and this change of plea to the 19th century as well. again, the 19th century press where it started was lots and lots of little political newspapers and every town, but

with the coming of the steam engine it's possible to have big circulation newspapers in the cities and so from being a political press we went to being a press from everybody and as a press for everybody, crime stories came on and became the big thing. newspapers actually ran phony stories on purpose just for the entertainment value and the fan conflict in newspapers would say that is a hoax and the first one would say no with isn't. and this would run throughout the 19th century. very much the entertainment function as well as disasters then and now, a ship sinking or falling down was the front page news of the circulation newspapers. now, the newspaper business

became more and more mass circulation so it went from 30,000 it's beginning to the circulation of hundreds of thousands at the end of the century. sensationalism teaks new forms. either the topic is sensational or an explosion or that treatment is sensational or the degree of the treatment is sensational. so you can't have a war or portable tone or you could do that 50 times. that is what we are in today. tartabull adjectives 50 times. what they say about president obama on running news shows.

if it were about a private citizen it would be wrong with every possible negative thing that can be said and done a list imaginable language. we don't throw out any punches today. ..