The Last Wataugan

Ken Roberts passes

I first met Ken Roberts in the late summer of 1986, and for most of the three dozen years since then I have been in awe of him. He was a large man, sure enough, and he was usually better dressed than me. But he was also a guy who exuded more self-confidence than anyone I had known before. These were parts of his practical power that impressed me the most.

The obituaries this week that have reported Ken’s death of Friday morning have been proper and informative, as Ken would have wanted it, but to my eye none has been complete. How do we take the full measure of this man? That he had influence and authority? That he possessed wisdom and skills and capital and contacts to make important things happen? All true.

Ken Roberts seemed to own whatever room he was in. We also tend to think of him in connection with a checklist of institutions that today define the modern Nashville. Here are some institutions and civic furniture that today have Ken’s fingerprints all over them:

• The Frist Art Museum

• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

• Center for Nonprofit Management

• Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce

• Leadership Nashville

• Nashville’s Agenda

• Schermerhorn Symphony Center

• United Way of Middle Tennessee

And many more, as well. There are, in fact, several thousand not-for-profit agencies across Middle Tennessee that could salute Ken and The Frist Foundation. His active career, stretching back to the 1950s, came to delineate not only a rising city but also the story of a man in full.

Ken was born in rural southwest Virginia and grew up in the Tri-Cities area of upper East Tennessee. He was a graduate of Dobyns Bennett High School in Kingsport, then he came to Vanderbilt for college. After his military service, Ken entered the VU law school and finished with honors. He joined a Nashville law firm after that, and in 1966 he ran for the United States Senate - but drew Howard Baker as a Republican primary opponent that year. It would be Ken’s last political campaign as a candidate.

Nonetheless, in time he became a preeminent player in the public affairs of the city. Over the years, he was a lawyer, then a banker, at the old Commerce Union - back in the day when the three or four principal banks were locally based in Nashville. Ken relocated for a time to Richmond, Virginia, to run a prominent bank there. From 1976 until 1990, back in Nashville Ken was President of First American National Bank in Nashville. He soon was chairman and CEO of First American Corp., the largest bank holding company in Tennessee at the time.

When Ken left First American, in 1990, he was invited by his long-time friend Tommy Frist Jr., to run The HCA Foundation, later renamed The Frist Foundation.

Ken Roberts (center) arranged for a tour of the Nashville Arena (now called Bridgestone Arena) when it was still under construction. From left are Dr. Thomas Frist Sr., Tommy Frist Jr., Roberts, and Mayor Phil Bredesen who guided the visit. (Photo by Keel Hunt)

Ken’s tour as executive officer of the Frist Foundation opened a productive new period of noteworthy leadership, and our region today is broadly richer for it. I certainly remember the afternoon when Ken came to my office and our conversation stretched into an idea for a city-wide visioning project for Nashville. (In Chattanooga, civic leaders had done this a decade earlier, with broad participation, and that city accomplished much in their process.) Ken embraced my idea, and in short order The Frist Foundation became a major funder of Nashville’s Agenda.

As a member of the project’s Steering Committee, Ken also threw himself into its detailed planning. The Agenda project unfolded through the summer and fall of 1993, with more than 2,000 Nashvillians participating in a structured series of 29 wide-open public meetings across Davidson County. Out of this emerged a set of “21 Goals for the 21st Century” along with several hundreds of “ideas for action” - from better schools to affordable housing to improved race relations to the arts, among others.

After the holidays, the goal-setting project quickly shifted into an implementation mode, in March 1994, and a new action-focused Steering Committee was convened. Ken organized and chaired a 22-member “Action Team on the Arts” that would lead to the birth of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (it opened in April 2001 and is now called the Frist Art Museum). Other progressive steps for the broader project included creation of the Nashville Housing Fund and re-establishment of a race relations initiative called The Davidson Group.

There were many champions of all this progress, and there were valuable antecedents. Nashvillians of a certain age may remember a quiet leadership group who called themselves Wautauga, though never publicly. The group consisted of the chairmen and CEOs of major employers in the city. Little was written about it in its day. One of the iron-clad ground rules was that it would live strictly in the background, and members were asked to check any personal ego or business agenda at the door. Ken was in this group.

In 2002 my friend Bruce Dobie, then editor of the Nashville Scene, wrote the most thorough piece of journalism I had seen about Watauga and how it worked. You can read it here. By that time, Watauga was gone. It did not last beyond the middle 1980s, though of course its members lived on.

On one of my last visits with Ken in his Green Hills home, he spoke with me broadly about Watauga, its purposes and procedures. He acknowledged that Watauga would not meet our present-day tests of transparency and diversity. It was all male and all white, but in Ken’s memory Watauga was a selfless, noble effort among certain senior leaders of the town, positive in their civic motives and commendable in their results even now. True, Watauga had operated in secrecy, but considering their accomplishments it must be acknowledged now that at least they had meritorious secrets worth keeping - and which did not stay secret for long.

On our final visit, Ken also told me he had realized he was now “probably the last living member of Watauga.’ This was true. On last Friday morning, when Ken died at age 89, that particular era came fully to a close.

Today, we say Watauga’s way is not how Nashville anymore works - not how important things get decided in our much more diverse, inclusive city. Ken’s death last week thus marked the passing not only of a formidable man - and a valuable friend of mine - but also the closing of another era that was useful in his day.

Today, some say we again need more candid visioning of the city’s best future, and it ought to involve lots of selfless souls, who commit themselves to candid discussions in a structured process, everyone checking personal agendas and egos at the door, with the high aim of making Nashville the best it can be.

And I agree.

© 2022 Keel Hunt