THE HAPPY DAYS- CHAPTER 5

  One of the things that I looked forward to every Friday night in the late 1950's and early 1960's was roller skating at the old Hippodrome every Friday night. The Hippodrome has since been razed but it was near Vanderbilt University and across the street from Centennial Park. This is where I learned to roller skate. It was a huge building used for a variety of uses. It had a 40,000 square foot roller rink. An organ sat up in a balcony on the east end and a lady played music while everyone skated. There were skating parties and baseball was played on skates. During the Depression there were walking marathons where boy and girl couples would walk until one or the other collapsed. The stronger of the two would hold the other up and the couple that finished on their feet would win a cash prize. There were also Big Band performers like Benny Goodman and many others that performed there. From 1937 until 1941 Vanderbilt's basketball team played at the Hippodrome. In the early days of streetcars you could skate all night for a quarter. During the 1950's and 60's there was professional wrestling promoted by Nick Gulas. Wrestler's such as Tex Riley was one of the good guys. Tojo Yamamoto and the Fargo Brothers were the bad guys. Like most everything else it was segregated and there were the white and colored restrooms. Everyone my age should have fond memories of the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome was torn down in 1968.

 Growing up in 1950's and 1960's Nashville provided many memories for me and an important part of my life was going to the movies. Movie theaters were palaces compared to today. They only showed one movie at a time. Many times we would arrive late but you could always hang around and catch the part of the movie at the next showing that you missed. There were a few suburban theaters like the Melrose or the Belle Meade theater where my sister Donna took me to see my first indoor movie called Bombers B-52. Belle Meade was built in 1940 had a wall of fame where just about every Hollywood movie star had signed their autograph at one time or another. Along with their photographs taken at the theater. It had a saturday matinee for years and tragically a number of kids were killed and injured one Saturday when an elderly person became confused and accidentally stepped on the accelerator of the car thinking it was the brake and ran through a line of children waiting to get in the theater.

 In the summertime we usually went to the drive-in's like Warner Park, Bel-Aire, the Skyway, Colonial, Crescent or Montague. You haven't really lived until you have had the experience of a drive-in theater. I loved Warner Park and Skyway because they had playgrounds. The theaters downtown had atmosphere. The Paramount opened on November 14, 1930. During World War ll it had an organ and a organist. If you began walking east down Church Street starting at 8th Avenue and staying on the right side of the street the 1st theater that you would come to would have been the Paramount. I saw many movies there along with the Longest Day. It was released for the 20th anniversary of D-Day and a special section down front was roped off for D-Day veterans. The next theater and the fanciest was an opera house originally. It was called the Loews Vendome theater and it opened on October 3, 1887. It had 2 balconies and 16 boxes. Loew's took over the theater in the mid-1920's. There were Vaudeville acts along with movies. When I was a kid all of the Walt Disney movies were shown there. The last movie shown there was the Dirty Dozen. The theater caught fire and was heavily damaged in 1967. The lobby was used as retail space until 1986. 

 In front of the Loews if you looked straight up Capital Boulevard you would see the Knickerbocker theater. This is where I spent many of my Saturday's watching such B rated classic horror movies such as the H-Man and Frankenstein's daughter. The Knickerbocker opened on March 22, 1916. It had two entrances one at 210 Capital Blvd. and one at 205 6th Avenue North. Originally it was painted ivory green and gold and described as " altogether one of the handsomest establishments in the country". It closed on on February 4, 1962. Continuing east down Church you would come to the Tennessee theater. It was the most spacious and modern theater. The address was at 533 Church near Harvey's and Cain-Sloan. It opened in 1952 and was demolished in the 1980's. Last but not least there was the old Princess theater. It was later changed to the Crescent theater. I saw many epic movies there like How The West Was Won and John Wayne's the Alamo. This was where my brother Mark acted like he was looking for something on the floor. This was because he didn't want me to know he cried when Davy Crockett died. Black's had their own theaters but they were allowed to sit in the balconies of the White theaters. Modern day theaters are capable of showing many more movies but when I was a kid going to the movie was an experience.

  

 For me Christmastime was a magical time as a child growing up in Nashville. There were no malls and the vast majority of Christmas shopping was done downtown. Nashville was a madhouse with thousands of shoppers walking the streets and through the stores combined with the sights smells and sounds of Christmas. Church Street was the epicenter of activity as well as 4th and 5th Avenue. There were stores like Castner-Knott, Harvey's, W.T. Grant's, Cain-Sloan, Woolworth's, Kress 5&10. I loved the Christmas lights and everything was lit up. The movie "A Christmas Story" reminds me of what Christmas was like in Nashville. As in the movie the Christmas parade was held at night. The route was from west to east down Church Street. My father's drugstore was at 17th and Charlotte and mother and daddy took us to watch the parade in front of what was then the Taystee Bread Co. at 17th and Church. 

 My favorite memory was shopping with my mother at Harvey's. We looked forward to eating in the Monkey Bar Diner upstairs at lunch time. They had live monkeys in a cage and a carousel. This was maintained and operated by a Mr. Max Lowenstein who was a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp. They even had a monorail that ran around the top floor of Harvey's. Daddy would give us five dollars each to buy Christmas presents and I could go to Woolworth's and buy everyone in the family a gift. Uncle Bud would always get a pair of socks and granddaddy would get Half & Half pipe tobacco. We would get our picture taken with the Harvey's Santa. For several years I was scared to death of him. One year I refused to have my picture taken with Santa after throwing a tantrum. 

 Crime was a problem then as now. I will never forget the day that my mother had been shopping all day and her bags were loaded with gifts. She set them down for just a second turning her back. When she turned around the bags were gone. She found a pay phone and cried the whole time she was on the phone with daddy. I really felt bad for her. Fred Harvey sponsored a beautiful nativity scene on the south side of the Parthenon. Most people in Nashville took a yearly pilgrimage to see it. We would stand in a long line as we slowly filed past as Christmas music was playing from loudspeakers and the scenes changed color on a regular basis. Change is inevitable. In the late sixties and into the seventies and eighties mall's were built in the suburbs. One Hundred Oaks, Rivergate, Harding Mall, Green Hills, Hickory Hollow, and Cool Springs. This was to accommodate the thousands of people moving into the suburbs expanding development and building of new homes in the greater Nashville area. The wonder of Christmas died in downtown Nashville. I am glad that I was able to experience it while it lasted. 

 In the days and weeks leading up to Christmas I loved all the activity associated with this time of year. Daddy loved to decorate, especially after we had our own house. There is nothing that smells better than a live Christmas tree. One thing I particularly liked was the cardboard Santa behind our tree. The ones of Santa holding a bottle of coke. Daddy would get them from the Coca-Cola deliveryman every year and we would put them behind our tree. I wish we had saved them because they would be a collectors item today. On Christmas morning we would wake up early and run into the living room. Everything was bright and shiny. Mother would never wrapped our presents that came from Santa. The only gifts that were wrapped belonged to family or friends. Debbie's mother wrapped her gifts from Santa and Debbie has always maintained that tradition in our family. Personally I liked how my mother did it better because it is much simpler. I have seen Debbie stay up into the wee hours of the morning wrapping gifts along with everything else she has to do. The older I get Christmas is not what it used to be to me. I still like certain aspects of it but I have become somewhat of a Scrooge. My favorite thing about Christmas is Christmas Eve and when it is over. It is the most tiring season of the year for me.

 After we had a chance to play with our toys a little while we would get dressed and pack up the car. We packed it with food, presents and whatever toys we wanted to show off. Then we would head over to our grandparents house. Until I was about five they lived at 827 North Fifth Street near Cleveland St. I can barely remember that house but we have quite a few pictures from there. My grandparents bought it in 1940. The house no longer exists because it was torn down when Cleveland Street was widened. This area is predominately black today and one of the most crime ridden inner city areas in Nashville. My grandparents moved to 1300 Mckennie Avenue off Gallatin Road in East Nashville about 1955. This house was built in 1930 and it had 12 foot ceilings. My mothers parents, who I called granddaddy and mama lived there along with my Aunt Didi, my cousins Roy and Alton, and my Aunt Arda who was granddaddy's sister. She was an invalid with rheumatoid arthritis. Didi was a single mother and had been divorced since about 1954. With the 12 foot ceilings they always had a huge cedar tree that reached to the ceiling and I loved Christmas at my grandparents. There was a large dining room table where all of the adults ate dinner and the kids ate at the kitchen table. As I got older I resented it when my cousin Roy who was only two years older than me got to sit with the adults and I didn't.

 In addition to our family there was my Aunt Tincy who I never really liked because I thought she was crazy. She always reminded me of Joan Crawford for some reason. Then there was her husband Jim Hall. He had a glass eye because his brother accidentally poked him in the eye with a butcher knife while cutting a watermelon when they were children. Uncle Jim was a studio musician and back-up singer for a lot of famous country music singers during what I call the golden age of country in the 1950's and 60's. He would earn a gold record for arranging the music on Roy Orbison's big hit "Crying" and a platinum record for Sue Thompson's hit "Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry". Then there was my Uncle Alton "Bud" Brown who would always come in for Christmas. Frrom wherever he happened to be preaching out of state. He was a United Methodist preacher that preached at various places in Kentucky and Louisiana over the years that I knew him. He was also a part-time mortician. Uncle Bud would come home a few days before Christmas and we would excitedly wait by the front door for him to show up. Sometimes off and on for hours. It was like we were waiting for Santa himself. When he did finally show up we would hang on every word. He would talk about life among the mountain people of Kentucky and his experiences as a mortician. Uncle Bud would tell us all the gory details of the embalming process. Although I was terrified I listened with morbid fascination.

 I have mostly good memories of our Christmas dinners at my grandparents but I remember one particular year that my Aunt Tincy and daddy were drunk. There was a big fight because Tincy slapped my dad for something he said or did. Aunt Tincy and Jim were both alcoholics and I can remember many nights when mother, Didi, and my grandmother would pack us into the back seat late at night and we would all drive out to their house in Donelson. The adults would leave us in the car while they went inside to pull them apart so they couldn't kill each other in their drunken stupor. Once everything had settled down we left. Regardless of this one bad memory my memories of Christmas would not be complete without those happy times I spent at my grandparents house at Christmastime.