♪♪
- [Walt] In this episode, we'll visit some strange
and unique places in Mississippi.
We feature an airplane recovery yard
in the Delta of all places.
We'll take a look inside the International Museum
of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, and we'll go climb a tree
at artist Johnny Knight's Treehouse in Mendenhall.
♪ Down Mississippi Roads
♪ Mississippi Roads
Hi, welcome back to Mississippi Roads.
I'm your host, Walt Grayson.
This week, we're gonna be taking you to some unusual places
in Mississippi, and we're starting here.
This is Johnny Knight's Treehouse.
It's near Mendenhall, Mississippi.
Johnny Knight was, I guess for his occupation,
you could say he was the local handyman.
If you needed something fixed, he could fix it.
If you needed something built, he could build it,
but he was also very creative.
He was a painter and a sculptor.
Among other things, Johnny made the totem pole
that's in front of the Mendenhall Library.
A little girl asked Johnny what's a totem pole.
Instead of telling her, he just made one.
That's the kind of guy he was.
Very quiet, but also very creative, obviously.
We're gonna talk more about the treehouse later,
but we said we're going to unusual places,
so let's start at the Delta up the cotton fields.
In the springtime, you've got the foliage growing out there.
In the summertime, there's the cotton blossoms,
and in the fall, there you have the cotton bolls.
Way over on the other side of the cotton field,
there's the Boeing 747, and here's what it's doing there.
[insects chirping]
- Airplanes are like any other object
that moves around with lots of moving parts.
Eventually, some of those parts need
to be repaired, replaced, or whatever,
and one of the best sources of parts that are usable
off the airliner fleet that's currently in the air
are from airplanes that are coming out of service.
General Electric owns a lot of the world's airliners,
and so when airplanes come off lease
or are about to come off lease,
some evaluation of that airframe I think is done
by the owner to determine whether it's worth more in parts
or whether it's worth more as a serviceable flying airplane,
and once those airframes are deemed
to be worth more as parts, generally speaking,
they head to a place like Greenwood
and to the GECAS operation here where they are disassembled.
(mid-tempo music)
- Right now, we have planes out there that have come
from China, from Brazil, from places in America,
and pretty much all over the world.
These are not worn out planes, they're not broken planes.
Nothing's wrong with these planes.
GECAS actually stands for GE Capital Aviation Services
and our division is the AMS division,
which is the asset management services division.
GECAS actually owns, they're one of the largest owner
of aircraft in the world, so they buy the planes
and they lease them out to the airlines in the industry.
After a certain time, they get,
depending on the number of hours, how long they've flown,
who's the current requirements of the market,
at some point GECAS will make the decision
to do what we call a roll off,
and when they roll them off, they take 'em off the books.
A lot of the time they'll come.
They fly them here to Greenwood,
and then we dismantle them and we resell the parts.
- When you look at aircraft such as the Triple 7 behind me,
the average person sees an airplane.
Someone in the dismantling business sees
a lot of other things, such as the landing gear,
the engines, the avionics out of the cockpit,
the flight control services,
all have in some cases an immediate potential
for reuse on a flying airplane.
They keep the rest of the fleet in the air,
so these companies like GECAS provide
a very valuable service to the international
and domestic airline industry.
(mid-tempo music)
- It's a very regulated industry.
It's very controlled.
It's an opportunity for us to take these parts
and give them a second life.
These are very good parts.
They're very needy parts.
They're parts that go on a lot of aircraft types.
A lot of planes need these parts,
and so what we do is we help them have surplus
so that you're not stuck on the ground waiting
because something malfunctions at the airport.
We offer a good solution to people
so that we can all continue to fly and fly safely.
- [Allan] And so the parts and pieces
are interchangeable by design,
and a used part that's been properly inspected
by a certified FAA approved inspector
is just as good as a new part.
- And so it's a cost savings not just to the airline,
but contributes down to the people like us who fly,
so it's what helps keep flying affordable to the industry.
(mid-tempo music)
- Well, it's been referred to as the airline graveyard
of the south, and it had that unique position for many years
of being the only place in the south to a large degree
where airliners are being disassembled.
When they first set up shop here,
people just weren't accustomed to seeing
large airplanes coming and going from this airport.
- We've done a really good job
in the last four or five years especially
of really being visible in the community,
because we did get that once or twice a month,
somebody would stop and say,
"I don't know what y'all do here.
We didn't know you did all this stuff here."
So we've had several events.
We most recently in the last three years,
we're very active with an air show.
It's called Greenwood Air Show.
That's one of the opportunities that we've had
that we let the public come down, look at the planes,
you know, we'll walk around with them,
'cause really people don't understand.
You know, we've got kids that come out
that have never been on an airplane,
so we like the opportunity to explain it to them
and what we do and say, you know,
the world's a big place, and so they come here
and they see a little bit of the world
that they might not see somewhere else.
We're certainly not a junkyard.
We've heard that before.
It's not a place where airplanes come to die.
To me, it's a place where they come
to have a little bit of a second life.
You know, they have some repurpose.
So, if I was an airplane, I'd want to be repurposed.
- We're talking about unique places
in Mississippi this week.
Got another one for you here.
In Jackson, Mississippi, there's a museum
dedicated to showcasing Muslim culture,
and it's the first such museum in North America,
which obviously would make that kind of unique
to Mississippi as well as the nation.
It was the dream of a couple people back in 2001
that it'd be a good idea maybe to let the world know
the contributions that Muslims have made.
How that museum wound up in Jackson, Mississippi
is what we're about to find out.
(mid-tempo music)
- We have a museum in the city of Jackson, Mississippi
which has a two-fold purpose, both to educate about Islam,
but also to educate about all religious traditions.
There's no just one form of Islam,
just like there's no one form of Christianity.
- I talked with folks at the museum and was pretty impressed
by the good work that they were doing.
They're really committed to making
a difference in this community.
The unfortunate thing, though, is I think
that things like ISIS end up getting more attention
than some of the work that we see being done by people
like the International Museum for Muslim Cultures.
- It was never our vision that this would be
turned into a full-time museum.
Back in 2000, the city of Jackson hosted international
exhibitions that used to come to Jackson every two years.
At that time, there was an exhibit
called The Majesty of Spain,
featuring primarily Spanish art.
- This exhibition was a major international exhibition
promoted to be probably the number one
must-see exhibition across the country.
We just thought that, "Okay, they're gonna be doing
something on the Islamic contributions of Spain,"
but as it got closer, we learned that of course,
they weren't gonna be doing anything.
- So the Muslim community in Jackson,
which is relatively small actually,
decided to get a group together
and begin to plan a companion exhibit
called Islamic Moorish Spain,
Its Legacy to Europe and the West.
So we started the planning in late 2000,
and actually we were open to the public
concurrent with The Majesty of Spain in April of 2001.
- We got a good number, about 25,000,
of their visitors came to our exhibition,
and they said to us, "What you have
is more substantive than what they have there,"
and we got a lot of encouragement.
We were just gonna do an exhibition.
We weren't gonna do a museum.
We were just gonna do the exhibition,
close the exhibition, and be through with it,
but of course September the 11th happened.
- The Muslim community in the United States
is relatively small.
We are a minority group,
probably around two to three percent.
The population of the Muslims in America
have ranged from seven to ten million people.
So a lot of our neighbors and friends and colleagues
don't know many Muslim Americans, and so a lot of times
when people don't know each other, this creates anxiety,
and particularly after the events of September 11th.
- When September 11th happened, we just expected
that we were gonna have to close the doors then.
We came to the museum the next day.
We had, a brick had been thrown in our glass window,
so we just, you know, were really, really concerned
about that, but what happened was that we got support
from the Interfaith Community.
We got educators that brought their students to the museum.
We actually had a group that organized a press conference,
you know, telling people in Mississippi in the Jackson area
that they stood with the Muslims,
that they really didn't want any harm to come to the Muslims
so really that gave us a thrust to go on and stay.
- We discovered as part of this process
that there is not a single institution in the country
that focuses on Islamic history and culture,
and so a lot of our supporters encouraged us basically
to turn this exhibit into a full-time museum.
So as a result of this, the International Museum
of Muslim Cultures was born as the first
Islamic history and culture museum in the country,
focusing primarily on educating the American public
about Islamic history and culture.
Since then, until now, with a lot of the issues
of terrorism, violence, extremism,
you know, there's a lot of tension
between Muslim Americans and the larger community,
and every time in our opinion what bridges the gap
with misunderstanding is the issue of education.
- I definitely believe that the museum helps
to counteract some of the Islamophobia that we see
around here and throughout the country,
and throughout much of the world to be honest.
I was reading a story recently
that showed that a greater percentage of Americans
have a negative opinion of Islam than there are
a percentage of Americans who have ever met a Muslim,
so what that means is a lot of people have a negative view
of Islam and a negative view of Muslims
who have not ever actually met a Muslim,
and so one of the things that the museum is doing
is helping to counteract some of these negative stereotypes
by showing that Islam means different things
to different people, just like any religion does.
To be a Christian doesn't mean the same thing for one person
as it does to another necessarily.
Similarly with Islam, it doesn't have to represent
the negative values that are often reflected on TV
in some of the worst news stories that we see.
- We provided a place for educators, for students,
for just the general public to come
and learn more about the Muslim culture
as opposed to depending on what they read about in the news.
So, you can actually come here and take your time
educating yourself on Islamic culture,
what it is and what it isn't.
You can get more accurate information.
You get a chance to talk to Muslims directly
and ask any question you like, and we'll be happy to,
if we can't answer the question,
you can always use our library
or we can get that information for you
and assist you in any way we can.
- We have a particular verse in the Quran
that states, "There is no compulsion in religion,"
that we don't force anyone to become Muslim.
We don't subject them to our religion.
We simply just educate if asked.
- Some people think that the museum
has some sort of Islamic agenda.
Really what it's trying to do is to enlighten people
about the history of Africa,
the history of Mississippi, the history of Islam,
and to show how all of those are connected,
because not a lot of folks in the United States know
that Islam is part of America's history.
Muslims were, you know, in the US
long before we even had a constitution.
Because so many of the Africans who were enslaved
came from predominantly Muslim parts of Africa,
it was these enslaved Africans
who actually built the southern colonies.
- Historians say that two-thirds of the enslaved Africans
that were brought to the Americas were Muslim,
so part of the social fabric of America is to understand
that Muslims are a part of what actually created America.
- The impact of those enslaved Muslims,
the contributions that they brought here,
like music for example, America's original music, you know.
The blues sound actually was brought over
not only by Africans, you know.
That's kind of been, that's been known for a while,
but there's a recent study that now has established
that that original blues sound
actually came from the Muslim Call to Prayer.
- We wouldn't have the blues
without the Muslim Call to Prayer, right,
so that whole music style comes out of Islam.
We have many, many different cultural connections
and actually at one point, there were probably as many
Muslims living in Mississippi as there were Christians,
because if you count all of the enslaved Africans
who were Muslim but not allowed to practice their faith,
they probably equaled many of what we would consider
practicing Christians at that time.
So, this idea that religious diversity
is a new thing to the United States' history
and to America is simply, factually wrong,
and part of the work of the museum
is to dig back several centuries and show
that we've been a pluralistic country ethnically,
religiously, culturally right from the very, very beginning,
and to say that Muslims don't belong in the United States
is basically to ignore the history of the south
and the history of Mississippi itself,
which is a living witness to how long
Islam has been part of the United States.
(mid-tempo music)
- As this is kind of a fun episode of Mississippi Roads,
we're taking you to unique and unusual places in Mississippi
and this is one of my favorites:
Johnny Knight's Treehouse near Mendenhall.
I've loved this place since the first time I saw it,
and thankfully, now it's open to the public.
You can come down and rent it for the weekend if you'd like,
or even have a wedding out back.
At the beginning of the show,
we said we'd show you more about it.
Here it is.
(mid-tempo music)
- A world-renowned treehouse man
saw this place not as it is today,
but like Johnny originally built it,
and he declared that this treehouse
that Johnny Knight built was an engineering marvel.
He just said it was one of a kind in the world.
- He could not believe that a man built this place
by, really, blueprints he drew on a paper napkin.
He was really blown away by Johnny's genius,
and he wished that he could have met him.
- Johnny was my uncle.
He began the treehouse with the stumps,
and the stumps came from Broadhead Lumber Company,
and I think that they had received those stumps
and couldn't run them through the mill.
- So Johnny saw the stumps.
I'm gonna call them stumps,
and he wanted to use that as a foundation,
so we took forklifts, load 'em up on our truck,
take 'em out there, and then we just watched
the treehouse as it was being built.
- My daddy, Cletus Knight, was Johnny's older brother,
and they were very close.
They were like two years apart,
and my daddy came down here every weekend
to help him work on it.
- He started building on the house
in maybe the mid sixties, late sixties, early seventies,
and he was always workin' on it.
He seemed to never finish.
- I remember times when he would call on us to help him.
We came down, and of course my brother Bobby,
he was a really, really strong guy.
He played football, worked out with weights,
so we put him on the heavy end of the stick.
- I had to pull all the beams up for the roof, so,
that was, I'm not trying to brag or nothing,
but I was pretty strong back in them days.
The thing about Johnny, though,
you know, if you do something for him,
he's gonna turn around.
You're not gonna get away with him
not doing something for you in return.
- He would just do things and give it to people.
He did so much community service
and so many things for people in Mendenhall,
and never wanted to leave Mendenhall.
He loved people in Mendenhall and he loved the family.
- He did a lot of stuff with my dad.
You know, they were very close.
They stayed that way the whole time,
and when my dad passed away, it was like a void.
- When we would drive back to Pensacola from Jackson,
we'd always try to stop and see Johnny,
and I knew he was alive and you know,
that would help fill that void
that I had since my dad had gone,
and then when I would come and visit Johnny,
I noticed the roof was needing shingles
and the shingles on this was needing redone,
and it was kind of, you know,
beginning to need a lot of attention to it,
and I know Johnny wasn't able to do it himself.
Since my dad passed before him,
it was like I had a big hole in my heart,
and I was looking for Johnny to fill that hole,
but it didn't happen 'cause of Johnny's passing
probably a year after my dad passed.
- It was devastating to me
and everybody in town that knew Johnny.
Now, I think what you see here,
what's left of what he started
is probably the best indication
of the artistic aspect of his life, you know,
and the people in Mendenhall just knew him.
You know, they accepted Johnny for what he was,
and didn't try to make anything else different out of him
because they wouldn't have succeeded if they had tried.
He was just Johnny.
Wonderful man. I miss him.
- After his death, my mother and her family
sold the place to Gail Hederman.
- I bought that treehouse in 2004
and we embarked on a project to stabilize it and restore it,
which was just, I cannot tell you.
It was the most wonderful thing I've ever been a part of,
and I told my husband, "I feel completely compelled
to try to save this place."
I said, "I don't know what it is,
but I just feel like I need to do this."
So, we did.
- What she did to this place just revitalized it
and turned it into a magical place.
It was very, very special to us because Gail
continued to let us feel a part of the house.
For example, every single thing she did,
she would call and she would say,
"What do you think Johnny would think about this?"
- I'm sure he wouldn't like everything I did,
but I think he would like the fact
that I saved it and kept it going.
- I'm so thankful that someone did buy it and remodeled it,
and real thankful that it's being preserved,
because just looking at the place does bring back memories
of times that we spent with Johnny,
and the way in which he loved my dad and my dad loved him.
- People have said, you know,
how much they enjoy coming out here to Johnny's house
and visit and be with Johnny.
It's just almost like having a relationship
with Johnny here on this place.
- From the beginning,
I never felt like I owned the treehouse.
I just felt that I was a caretaker of the treehouse.
I think Johnny Knight will always own the treehouse.
- And that's all the time we have for this week.
If you'd like information about anything you've seen
on the show, remember, you can contact us
at mpbonline.org/mississippiroads.
Make sure you like our Mississippi Public Broadcasting
Facebook page.
Until next time, I'm Walt Grayson.
I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads.
♪ Down Mississippi Roads
♪ Mississippi Roads
- [Announcer] Mississippi Roads is made possible in part by
the generous support of viewers like you.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)
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