A labor of love

Local Smokey perseveres as a family business despite patriarch’s passing

It looks the same, this little bar on the edges of downtown Knoxville’s slow creep north, as it did when Mike Ledbetter was last there, three weeks before colon cancer would claim his life.

That day – and even the ones that followed as he gave his body over to full-time medical care and then, in the last days, hospice – he did what he’d always done, going back to his four-decade career as a manager of Walgreens that earned him national accolades for his hard work and dedication: He took care of business.

Always taking care of business, his daughter, Ashley Diggs, remembers.

“Even when he was in the hospital, he kept saying things like, ‘I need to look at our sales! I need to call and get beer ordered! I need to order the liquor and the food!’” she says, sitting at one of the tables in the spacious interior of Local Smokey, located at 404 Williams St. catty-corner to the Mill & Mine and in the shadow of Regas Square. “He still cared. This was his dream, and he loved this place. He spent so much time and effort and energy and money just building this place, and when we finally opened, he loved watching people have fun, and he loved talking to customers.”

The late Mike Ledbetter, who died roughly three weeks after 2024 dawned, loved a lot of things. University of Tennessee football, for starters, one of the catalysts for wanting to create a place where like-minded fans could cheer on the Orange and White. He loved his family – his three children and his wife, Nancy, and his five grandchildren – fiercely, and he loved the Lord, always looking out for those divine nudges that inevitably pointed him in the right direction, even when others doubted.

And though he got to enjoy the fruits of his final labors for only a little more than six months, he loved Local Smokey as ferociously as Sam Malone ever did Cheers, and that dedication is evident today in everything that survives him.

“We still get customers in who don’t know, and they’ll ask, ‘Where’s your dad? We loved talking to him!’” Ashley says, smiling at the same memories that bring her to tears. “He was the face of Local Smokey. Even our musicians who got to talk to him like to remember how he would come up and dance in front of the stage while they were playing.

“He spent so much time here. He was here 15 hours a day a lot of days, leaving here at 10 p.m. and coming back up here at 7 a.m., just to make sure everything was done. He did all the ordering, all the deliveries, the bookkeeping, paid all the bills. This was his dream. His baby.”

A life on the grind

This is the kind of guy Mike Ledbetter was: His widow recalls stopping in the Walgreens in Alcoa, where he served as the manager for the bulk of his 40-year career, sometime before he retired from the company in 2017. He’d recently returned from the retail pharmaceutical chain’s annual conference in Las Vegas and was back on the clock. Nancy had Michael Ledbetter, Ashley’s brother, with her as she ran errands and decided to stop by the store to see her husband.

“Michael had to go to the bathroom, and I noticed all these balloons on the way through the breakroom. I thought, it must be someone’s birthday,” she recalls. “On our way out, I asked the girl at the register, ‘Whose birthday is it? I saw all the balloons!’ She just kind of looked at me and said, ‘They’re for Mr. Ledbetter! He was named Manager of the Year out of all the stores in the company!’

“He’d been recognized as the manager of the top-earning store in the country, and he never said a word. That’s just the kind of guy he was.”

Mike Ledbetter, the family recalls, believed in hard work. His Walgreens journey started when he was 15 years old and rode a motorcycle to West Town and asked for a job at the mall store. They weren’t hiring, he was told, but as he climbed back on his bike, the manager followed him out. There was an attached café at the time, and they needed a busboy. When could he start?

“He just said, ‘Right now, but can I bring my helmet in with me?’” Nancy says.

For the next 40 years, Mike worked his way up, reaching manager status at 22 and earning a reputation over time as the guy who could work magic. For years, he steered the Lovell Road store before transferring to the Alcoa location, and his ability to turn floundering franchises around earned him the nickname “Mr. Profit.”

“He worked so hard for our family. My mom was a stay-at-home mom with three kids [Ashley and Michael have an older sister], and he worked so hard to provide for us,” she says.

In 2017, he retired, but it didn’t take long before he went back to work – this time at Home Depot in Lenoir City, where the elder Ledbetters had bought land and built a house.

“He was bored!” Ashley says with a laugh. “He stayed home for a few months, but then he told my mom, ‘I’ve gotta go do something!’ And while he was working at Home Depot, he started thinking: ‘I want to do something more. I want to build a place and a community of people who want to get together and have fun.’”

He mentioned the idea to the wife and kids, who encouraged him to do what would make him happy. They never expected where his daydreaming might lead.

“He wanted someplace where people could watch UT games and play pool and have fun, and he came home one day and said he wanted to open a sports bar,” Ashley says. “We were surprised, to say the least! We told him, ‘Wow, dad! This is different for you! Are you sure about this after being at Walgreens for 40 years?’ And he just said, ‘I want to make a place where people can have fun.’

“I think the rest of us were probably thinking, ‘This is not going to happen. We’re just a family of four people!’ But he kept saying, ‘No, this is my dream. This is what I want to build for you and Michael.’”

The search for a downtown home

It’s hard not to draw parallels between Mike and Moses, the Biblical figure who led his people to the Promised Land through a long journey of doubt and turmoil. Nancy and the kids had their doubts along the way, but the guy who talked his way into a job at 15 and never made a peep when he won national recognition always helped them see the bigger picture.

“My dad, my brother and myself thought of this concept,” Ashley says. “We wanted TVs, but we also wanted beer and liquor and a kitchen and a pool table and live music, all put into one. We wanted something that would just be fun, all in one building together.”

It was a slow process that took a couple of years of planning, and even then, finding the right location was vexing. Michael urged his dad to look to West Knoxville, but the elder Ledbetter wanted to stake out a spot near the city center.

“Dad was like, ‘No, let’s do downtown. Downtown is growing, and people are remodeling a lot of these old buildings and making it a family-friendly place to go,’” Ashley says. “He was on the MLS [Multiple Listing Service] and making calls every single day, but most of the properties that would work were very outrageous. We were afraid we weren’t going to be able to find a spot we could afford, and then have the money to put into it and keep it afloat.”

And then Mike found the building on Williams Street. According to a 2017 article in Knox Focus, the building was originally a three-room school, later remodeled to include a second story, named for James Addison Rayl, one of the early proponents of public education. The school named in his honor opened in 1897 as an “opportunity school for underprivileged children,” writes Mike Steely, before it was converted to a “regular high school for mechanically minded boys” with the addition of an 80-by-90 shop, which would later become the home of a Free Service Tire shop.

The exposed brick on the interior of Local Smokey offers hints of that history, but when Mike took his family to look at the property, there was little else in the way of charm.

“The floor had all these holes in it, and even though dad walked in and was like, ‘This is it,’ my mom and I were like, ‘Dad, are you sure? It’s gross in here! What are you talking about?’” Ashley recalls. “But he looked at this big, open space, and he saw everything he wanted to do. He saw the room for a 360-degree bar and a lot of open tables and dancing. He told us, ‘This is the place. God is telling me this is the place.’”

It helps that the Smokies stadium project is underway less than a half-mile away, on the other side of the towering Hall of Fame Drive and James White Parkway overpasses. Getting a lease for the property, however, was a year-long process that wasn’t guaranteed: The owners accepted bids, and prospective occupants had to submit business plans and pro forma financial statements, all formidable stuff for a family of four whose experience amounted to backgrounds in education (Ashley), nursing (Nancy) and golf (Michael, who works as a golf pro at Tanasi Golf Course in Tellico Village). But the retired pharmacy manager was nothing if not industrious, and together he herded the family through the process until one day, months later, they got the call.

Triumph and tragedy

Happy tears dried up fast in the shadow of the hard work that needed to be done, however. Almost immediately, the Ledbetters began a complete overhaul of the property, but the costs meant a radical decision.

“My dad was like, ‘We could take out a loan, but then we would have another expense to pay back … or I could take my retirement from Walgreens and try to make something more of it,’” Ashley says. “We had a lot of conversations about it, and he prayed about it, and he felt like this is what God was wanting us to do, to take it and build it into something my dad wanted.”

Mike transferred $1 million into a ROBS 401(k), a Rollovers as Business Startups arrangement specifically designed for business owners who finance their start-up costs through retirement funds. That money provided for a brand-new HVAC system, new windows, a kitchen install, coolers … everything, save for the support posts throughout the floor and the old Free Service tire rack that hangs over the main bar, which now serves as the perfect place to hang rows of big-screen TVs. As they closed in on the finish line, Michael stepped in to plan the venue’s entertainment-related events, Ashley helped with logistics and the entire family marveled at what Mike’s dedication had produced.

“It’s amazing to see what the building was – and what it is now,” Ashley says. “When they started putting in the plumbing and the walls and everything was coming together, we all said, ‘Dad, you were so right! This is super cool! Your vision is really coming to life!’ He was so excited, and we were so proud of him.”

Then, in February 2023, Mike was diagnosed with colon cancer. The Ledbetters stood at a crossroads, but their patriarch was determined to push on.

“We told him, ‘Are you sure this is what you want to do? We can stop. We can build it out and sell it. What do you want?’ And he said, ‘No, this is what we’re doing,’” Ashley said. “He put everything back into the business, and he never got paid one dime. To this day, we’ve never paid ourselves, and now this is such a legacy. Not only did he fund everything, he worked 40 tireless years for that money. He always worked so hard for everything he had, and it’s amazing to see.”

Even while battling cancer, Mike continued to put in long hours, determined to get Local Smokey ready. And in June 2023, it was his wife and children who nudged him across the finish line.

“Dad was like, ‘We’re not ready! We can’t do this!’ But we all told him, ‘Dad, we’re taking the leap, and we’re doing it,’” Ashley says.

In June 2023, Local Smokey opened for business, and it became a place where the owner was always on hand to carry in boxes of liquor, jump on the grill or just play the consummate party host to locals and visitors, college students and old-timers, Vol fans and supporters of other teams who found neutral ground in a place where smiles and camaraderie transcended partisanship.

His cancer, however, was brutally aggressive, and shortly after the new year, Mike left Local Smokey for the last time.

‘Keep it going’

There are days, like the recent rainy and overcast first day of March, when the neon flourishes and flickering televisions above the Local Smokey bar fail to disperse the pall left behind after Mike died on a Wednesday in January.

Ashley feels it keenly. Her brother, Michael, and her mother, Nancy, feel it too, and some nights, when the traffic hums along the nearby Interstate 40 overpass and a University of Tennessee basketball game is on and the pool balls clack in the background and a singer-songwriter tunes up for an evening show, it’s surreal. The world goes on in spite of their broken hearts, but by the same token, they’re struck by both pride and gratitude to look out at the weekend crowds and see everything that Mike built. At all that he accomplished, and all they’ve done to heed his final words.

“When he was dying in the hospital, he told us: ‘I love you so much, but keep the business going. Keep it running, for you and Michael, because I did this for you,’” Ashley says through the tears that are a frequent companion some days. “Those were his last words to me before he passed away, and I told him, ‘OK, we will, but you have to help us!’”

There are mornings, she says, when she has to steel herself before she unlocks the door. Because when the old building is quiet and the shadows shift in the early light, Mike’s absence is almost more palpable than his presence ever was. It’s hard, so hard, to see what became of Mike Ledbetter’s Promised Land and realize he didn’t get to experience it for very long.

“I just wish I could still call him and tell him we had a good sales day, that we made X amount of dollars. If I didn’t know how to do something, I would call him, because it felt like he knew everything, and now I just can’t,” she says. “Mostly, I just want to tell him, ‘Dad, you did good. You built a good thing, and I’m proud of you.’”

But then, from somewhere on the other side, Mike sends a sign. She believes that with all her heart, and the rest of the family feels it, too. Business was never luxuriantly prosperous, but in the weekends since Mike’s death, the bar has experienced its best sales weekends to date, giving the family a little more faith that they can sustain what he built.

And then there are those inexplicable moments, like the one just two days after he died, Ashley adds.

“Dad was silly, and he loved making people laugh,” she says. “He passed away on a Wednesday, and every Friday, we have karaoke. That Friday night, this guy gets onstage, and the song he sang was ‘Margaritaville.’ Now, that was my dad’s favorite song, and it made me smile, but then when he finished, the DJ said, ‘Everybody give it up for Big Mike!’

“The guy’s name was Mike, and he sang my dad’s favorite song. Little things like that have happened, and that makes me realize he’s still here. I feel him here. I know he’s here. And most of the time, I’m happy to be here because I feel my dad. We want to keep it going in his honor. It’s been a really fun adventure, but it’s not stopping because of his last words.

“I told him he had to help me, and he is. We love to be here, and we’re here for my dad, but also because we love it here, and we love what he built: a family-friendly place where people can have fun and come together just like he wanted.”

Channel Pressure will be taking place at Local Smokey on Sunday, March 24th. The lineup has been curated by New Romantics’ Brandon Biondo and is completely free to the public. Find out more about the event here.

wildsmith@blanknews.com