Chapyer 4 - THE TRANSITION

 In the spring or Summer of 1965 I was downtown standing on the corner of 6th and Charlotte preparing to cross the street. Just then I heard pop, pop, pop which sounded like firecrackers. I noticed a crowd beginning to gather on the next block at 5th and Charlotte. They were standing around a man in a brown suit and he was lying prone on the sidewalk. Almost immediately the wail of police sirens could be heard coming from every direction. I crossed the street and walked to a hotel near James Robertson Parkway. I had no clue what was going on but I learned later that a Nashville detective had been shot and wounded while chasing a bank robber in a foot pursuit. The robber ambushed him as he ran around the corner of a building. I walked into the lobby of the hotel in order to use a pay phone but while I was on the phone I heard a commotion out front. After hanging up I walked outside and police had the building I was in surrounded. Many of them were carrying rifles and shotguns and looking up at the roof. Just then several police officers escorted the bloodied bank robber out the front door and into a waiting police car. Fortunately the wounded police officer survived.

During these years I spent a lot of time in downtown Nashville and I would either take the bus or ride my bike. I saw a lot of movies at the Paramount, Tennessee, Loews and Crescent theaters on Church Street. Epic movies like the Longest Day, the Alamo, How The West Was Won, and so many others. My cousin Roy worked as an usher at the Paramount theater. One day he told me that if I could get a few friends together, and pass out flyers advertising a Sinbad movie, we could go to the movie for free. I called three or four friends and we rode our bikes downtown. For several hours we walked up and down the street passing out flyers. After a quick glance people would throw them down and soon Church street was trashed. These flyers were blowing all over the street and an irate police officer walked up to me and started chewing me out. I tried to explain to him what we were doing but he kept asking if I knew how much it would cost the city to clean up this mess.

Another thing that I loved about going downtown was visiting the Tennessee State Museum which occupied the basement of the War Memorial building. I virtually lived there and I especially loved the military exhibits. A friend gave me a WW1 German gas mask that he had bought at an estate sale. The mask belonged to a veteran of the war and I took it to school. A friend wore it around all day at Bailey and the mask and filter was old. By the end of the day he was sick as a dog. I took the mask to the museum and asked the curator what kind of gas mask it was. He was a WW1 veteran and he identified it as a German gas mask and asked if I wanted to donate it. For years I would look for my gas mask when I visited the museum. It had a piece of paper in front of it that identified it as a donation by Greg Segroves. The museum had a mummy, a model of the battleship U.S.S. Tennessee, a scale model of a WW1 battlefield and trench system built by a war veteran. They also had a shoe that Sam Davis used to hide his dispatches and a piano that was used as an operating table in the Civil War. A bench built by David Crockett and a ten foot stuffed Polar bear. The museum was crammed packed with interesting things and my time was well spent there peaking my interest in history even more.

In May of 1965 I went fishing with my best friend Gus Fowler and his dad up at Camp Boxwell which is a Boy Scout reservation near Lebanon Tennessee. There was a lake on the property and all I had to fish with was a cane pole and night crawlers. We were fishing from the bank when something big grabbed my hook. It was so heavy that I thought my fishing pole was going to snap in half as I fought to bring the fish to the surface. Just then I caught sight of a huge and silver on my line as it reached the surface of the water. It was getting dark and I couldn't see that well. The fish turned out to be a 5 pound large mouth bass but I almost lost it. It was out of the water and hanging over the edge of the bank when the fish fell off of my hook. Flopping around on the ground it managed to drop back into the water. Gus's dad jumped into the water desperately trying to catch him before he got away. Cupping his hands together and after several tries he was able to trap the fish and throw it far enough up on to the bank that it was not able to get away again. Without a doubt that was the biggest fish that I ever caught. In retrospect I wish that I had had it mounted but we had him for dinner instead.

The 1965 - 66 school year was historic in Nashville. Because I entered the tenth grade at East Nashville High School and for the first time in my life attended school with Black kids. Altogether there were about ten Black kids at East that first year that we desegregated. The fact that I was going to school with Black children never bothered me for a minute because I had been around blacks all my life working in my fathers store. The number of black students increased over the next two years. There was some friction that developed between some of the students that seemed to increase as the numbers increased.. A White working class neighborhood was in front of East and a Black neighborhood was behind it. East had a distinguished history going back to 1932 and many of it's students have gone on to successful careers. The school produced military heroes and officers like General Hugh Mott who won the Distinguished Service Cross for his action as a combat engineer capturing the Ludendorf Bridge over the Rhine River in WW2.

Eighteen hundred men served from East in WW2 and 59 died. The clock over the front entrance is 59 inches wide as a memorial to those men. Two prominent local politicians attended East, Richard Fulton and Bill Boner. Both were mayors of Nashville and Congressmen. East alumni included many in the entertainment world. Among East High graduates were Frank Sutton, who played Sgt Carter on Gomer Pyle USMC. Ralph Emery and Oprah Winfrey, who graduated in 1971, three years after we graduated. Pat Boone didn't go to East but I have been told that his career was launched after he won a talent contest there. The only other school in the Nashville area that comes close as far as I know is Hume Fogg. Dinah Shore and Bettie Page graduated from there. East was built during the height of the depression and it was damaged by the East Nashville tornado of 1933 that nearly destroyed Bailey. The trophy case in the front lobby was filled with trophies, game balls, pictures, and other memorabilia that represented the long sports history of the school.

I enjoyed my years at East and had a lot of good friends there. My friends began calling me Brother Greg and the nickname caught on. I wasn't a Christian yet but I had good values and because I didn't smoke, drink or cuss I was some kind of saint or something. This didn't stop me from hanging out with them in our designated smoking area near the annex. Another nickname that I acquired was Gunther Toody. Why my friends started calling me that I don't know. There was a comedy show on television called Car 54 Where Are You in the 1950's. It starred Fred Gwynne of Herman Munster fame and he played a cop whose partner was Gunther Toody. I didn't take offense at the nickname because it done in good fun and at my twentieth high school reunion they were still calling me that, although it has been shortened to Gunther over the years.

One morning I was getting ready for school and needed my shorts for gym class. Didi told me that they were in a pile of clothes on top of the dryer and I quickly stuffed them into my gym bag. Later that day I was dressing out for gym and after taking my clothes off I was about to put on my shorts when I noticed something white sticking out of the waistband. Curious, I began pulling it out and to my horror it was a pair of Didi's panties. Because of static they had clung to the inside of my shorts and I quickly crammed them back into my gym bag while at the same time looking all around to make sure that I had not been spotted. My predicament was never discovered and I can only imagine what my nickname would have been if I someone had seen her panties in my bag.

The Tennessee State Fair usually began in the third week of September. In September of 1965 I went to the fair with my cousins Jenny and Judy. Jenny and I were close in age but she was a few months older than I was and she was always trying to get me to dance with her but I was shy. Jenny was an attractive girl then and I had a crush on her. She was the type of girl that was always wanting to grow up too fast but at the time I was not aware that we were not biological cousins. She and her sister Judy were both adopted so I guess I am not really a redneck after all for having a crush on my cousin. We were at the fair for several hours and later that night Uncle Doug and Aunt Catherine picked us up. At that time I-65 north ended at Trinity Lane. As we approached the Trinity Lane exit the announcer broke in on the radio and said that a fire had broken out at the Fair. Instinctively we turned our heads to look out of the rear window and saw flames leaping hundreds of feet into the air. The entire sky seemed to be on fire. It reminded me of the scene from Gone With The Wind of the burning of Atlanta. I knew immediately that it had to be the Woman's building on fire. The Woman's building had been a prominent feature of the fair for as long as I could remember. It was a gigantic old wooden structure that looked like a spooky castle to me. There was a complex of wooden buildings around the Woman's building along with the wooden grandstands next to the race track. The Woman's building held fair exhibits and was normally packed with people.

I felt kind of sick at the thought that people were probably trapped in the fire and we had just left there. Miraculously there were no fatalities and there were only minor injuries. At one point during the night every fire company in Nashville was at the fairgrounds. When I went to pick up my newspapers early the next morning at Company 18 the firemen were still at the fairgrounds fighting the fire. Just before I left out on my paper route the Company 18 fire truck returned and slowly backed into the fire hall. The faces of the firemen were blackened with soot and they looked utterly exhausted. The 2nd largest fire I ever saw was the night that the old Maxwell House Hotel burned down on Christmas night 1961. We were coming back from my grandparents house in East Nashville and could see the fire for miles. The Maxwell House sat right across Church street from the L&C Tower, the tallest building in Nashville at the time. As we crossed the Victory Memorial Bridge we could see firemen shooting water straight down into the fire from the ledges of the L&C Tower. The light from the fire made the area look bright as day. One of the male guests at the Maxwell House died in the fire.