Knoxville journalism icons Sam Venable and Charlie Daniel share years of humor (and hate mail)

Columnist Sam Venable and cartoonist Charlie Daniel have fond memories of sharing their hate mail during their years together in Knoxville's newspaper scene.

Daniel - not to be confused with Charlie Daniels, of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" fame - and Venable learned how to make the best of it. "One of the fun things to do together was exchange hate mail. We had mutual haters," Venable said.

Venable described one particularly heinous letter Daniel shared with him. It went on and on, Venable said, railing against Daniel's cartoons. The conclusion? "P.S. I hate your music, too."

Although their approaches differ, Venable and Daniel possess a shared knack for storytelling, one that's highlighted in their new book, "Naked Dining Is Not on My Menu and Other Whimsy," written by Venable and illustrated by Daniel. It's full of wit and humor, traits that are inextricable from any conversation with the two. Knox News takes a look at some of Venable and Daniel's best - and funniest - stories from five decades in Knoxville journalism.

Laughing together from the beginning

Before he came to Knoxville, Daniel was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying political science and drawing for the student paper, The Daily Tar Heel. Toward the end of his studies, Daniel began sending out inquiries to newspapers around the south in the hopes of becoming a full-time editorial cartoonist.

He received 48 rejections - his mother kept all of them, Daniel said - and one "maybe," from Guy Lincoln Smith Jr. at The Knoxville Journal. Daniel needed to figure out how to convince Smith to hire him, and he'd surmised by looking at old copies of the Journal that Smith was a Republican, a bit of an anomaly in a era when much of the South was still dominated by Democrats.

"I had a classmate from Western North Carolina who said he was a Republican," Daniel said during his and Venable's May 8 talk on their new book. "So I talked him into driving me up for my interview." His strategy worked. Daniel was hired at the Knoxville Journal. "I convinced Guy Smith that I was a Republican," he laughed. "You gotta do what you gotta do."

Technically, Daniel was hired to be a cartoonist three days a week and a reporter the other four, an arrangement that lasted up until the end of the fourth day, he said.

When Venable began his journalism career at the Knoxville Journal as a copy boy, Daniel was already excelling as its cartoonist. Their friendship didn't take long to form. "The only available desk was about here to that window to Charlie’s office, so he and I were just bantering around from day one," Venable said.

Venable soon departed for the Chattanooga Free Press, and later, the Knoxville News Sentinel. When the Knoxville Journal closed in 1992, Daniel joined Venable at the News Sentinel. Venable remembered greeting Daniel his first day. "I said, 'Chaz, we’re back together again.'"

Both worked at the News Sentinel until they retired, Venable in 2014 and Daniel in 2019.

A legacy in Knoxville journalism

If you ask Venable, his time at the News Sentinel hardly qualifies as work. "I never had a real job," he said. "I was hired as the outdoors editor and I spent 15 years doing that; it’s basically a license to hunt and fish and write about it."

Even as he joked, it was clear Venable's gratitude is immense. "I could not ask for better editors than Jack (McElroy) and Harry (Moskos) and people like that that just let me do what I wanted to do - for better or for worse. That kind of opportunity doesn’t come along very often," he said.

Venable had been at the News Sentinel for a year or two before he began writing humor, too. More than 50 years later, Venable still writes a humor column for Knox News. "How can you not laugh at the world so many times?" he said.

Daniel's comics became a regular feature of Knoxville journalism too. Rosy's Diner, a semi-recurring setting in Daniel's cartoons, became a weekly strip in 2007, and Rosy's red hair and iconic "No Hat No Service" rule could be found in every Sunday paper.

Daniel and Venable witnessed a major shift during their years in the industry. Newsroom culture was changing. "Old-time newspapers, old-time newsrooms, they were not for the faint of heart. They were really too rowdy," Venable said.

Venable recalled one particularly chaotic incident that took place prior to his arrival at the Knoxville Journal but was legend by the time he arrived. It began when one employee finally cleaned his notoriously dirty desk. All was well until he returned to the office to find someone had purposely dirtied it again, and a fight broke out between him and the suspected prankster. The conflict reached its height when the copy desk went up in flames, the result of gobs of rubber cement and a match.

Things are much calmer in the newsroom these days, which Venable can confirm from his regular visits. "It's a different era in so many respects," he said. "But everything changes."

Read more in their latest collaboration and others

While they've participated in their fair share of mutual teasing over the years, Venable and Daniel speak of each other with a tremendous amount of respect, and their work together on "Naked Dining Is Not on My Menu and Other Whimsy" is no exception.

One of the first points Venable made about the book - even before the talk - regarded Daniel's artistic brilliance. "Charlie is the most incredible talent I’ve ever worked with," Venable said. He's fast, too. "I sent him that email on, let’s just say a Monday, gave him a brief outline, we had lunch later that week and he already had the front cover done."

From Daniel's perspective, it was just instinct. "Sam asked me to do the cover for the book, and he told me the title. It drew itself, you know."

"Naked Dining Is Not on My Menu and Other Whimsy" is available at for purchase at Union Avenue Books and the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville and the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, as well as on Amazon. It can also be purchased directly by contacting Venable at [email protected].

Daniel's new book, featuring cartoons new and old, as well as light verse, "Eat Your Greens," is scheduled for release in June and will be available on Amazon.

Hayden Dunbar is the storyteller reporter. Email [email protected].

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Charlie Daniel and Sam Venable share funny tales of journalism careers