As Bill Weigel navigates his Toyota Avalon down Tennessee State Highway 131 through Powell, Tenn., he points out landmarks from his boyhood. There is the house where his grandmother lived. Over there is the orchard where he went for an apple to mask the tobacco on his breath from smoking (at age 9) his homemade corncob pipe. And that’s where he boarded the bus and rode to the big city (Knoxville) all by himself before he was even 10 years old.
As he steers the car into the entrance of the Broadacres subdivision and onto the road leading to the dairy and his office, he shows a visitor the log cabin where he was born. The man’s life is wrapped up in this small town northwest of Knoxville. He is the fifth generation of Weigels in this area; an ancestor settled in Tennessee from Germany in 1847.