Someone asked me the other day, “Keel, are you from Nashville?”
“No,” I answered, “I’m from East Nashville.”
You may know what I mean, unless you’re from somewhere else. Most anybody who grew up on the east side of the Cumberland, as I did, probably has a similar set of memories: school days, great teachers, fine neighbors, odd jobs, lots of sandlot baseball in the afternoons, and a general happiness if not much in the way of material abundance.
My own family - Dad, Mom, younger brothers Shawn and Kris - mostly lived in the Rosebank School zone, but I also had a couple of other, very early childhood homes that I remember most of all - the places where my grandparents lived…
On my mother’s side, the Hoopers lived on North Sixth Street in the inner-city section between Cleveland Street and Highland Heights. The earliest residence I can remember with my Mom and Dad was a small garage apartment behind my grandparent’s house.
My Dad’s folks lived ten blocks further east, at the intersection of 16th and Holly Streets. From this spot my father as a teen had walked to East High School - where he played football, marched in the band, and acted in the Drama Club - and then walked back home after practice in the late afternoons. Only a little while after that, he departed from this corner house for his service in World War II.
The house on this corner still stands, though today it’s a grand single-family residence, much renovated from the triplex rental of my grandmother’s day . Yet even now I remember how it seemed so spacious to a child’s eye. It brimmed with our family’s life and resonated with our family’s history. We heard many stories of the War Years.
It was from this same spot, in the early 1940s (well before I arrived) that my father’s father commuted weekly to his mysterious wartime work over in Oak Ridge, when it was still a classified top-secret city. Later on, my grandmother recalled how he would never talk about his work there at home - not until much later - and by then everyone knew how the work in Oak Ridge and at Los Alamos had helped the USA put an end to the War in the Pacific. (I still have a commemorative certificate naming citing my grandfather signed by the US Secretary of War, and dated the day the Bomb was dropped.)
My Dad, meanwhile, was away in uniform across the Atlantic, in the war across Europe. He was a gunner on the fabled B-24 “Liberator” bombers and saw many dangerous missions over Italy, another dark domain of the Axis.
My grandmother was part of the war effort, too, as were all the families of America’s service men and women in that time.
Across the street from the old front stoop, the venerable Holly Street Firehall still stands. Diagonally across the intersection was the old Lockeland Baptist Church, our family’s church, though the robust congregation I remember is long gone.
I also remember walking with my grandmother down the street to the tiny market on the next corner south, at Fatherland. On Saturdays, I rode with her on the city bus downtown. All told, my grandmother lived at this same east-side corner for 41 years. I was a young man when I helped her move out and away from it.
One of my favorite photos from the old days (taken well before I was born) is this vintage black-and-white newsphoto below, with my father sitting with his Dad and Mom. (This must’ve been 1944 when my Dad returned from overseas, and probably on a weekend when my grandfather was back home from Oak Ridge.) They are listening intently, grateful for his survival and his health, as he points on the globe where his service took him overseas. Like thousands of young American men of his day, my Dad helped to liberate Europe and to save the world from fascism. They were all so young and brave.
My middle brother Shawn has been one of our family historians, together with our brother Kris. We are grateful Shawn has collected these and many other photos and Hunt family artifacts. Here’s another, my Dad and his three sons, sitting on the stoop together on a Sunday.
After the war, back in Nashville, Dad attended college on the GI Bill and later studied law at the YMCA Night Law School (now called the Nashville School of Law). Much later on after my brothers and I arrived, I remember sitting together in my Dad’s childhood home, in the warmth of my grandmother’s kitchen over countless Sunday dinners after church. (The menu varied little: Fried chicken on the table, usually, and her chocolate-meringue pie for dessert). Outside the kitchen window, we knew endless summer days of high adventure and much fun with the neighborhood children.
This, after all, was the house where our Dad was formed and made ready for his life in the wider world.
And so were we all.
Keel: This article is one of your best. It is very personal, very informative and contains historical references that all can relate too.
Beautifully written, Keel. I have pleasant memories of visiting with both of your grandmothers at your wedding reception before slipping over to the piano to play The Tennessee Waltz while the bride danced with Lamar.