Main Street from the Public Square to Five Points was only two blocks long, but the 80/20 rule was in operation way back then. I don’t care what you wanted or what you needed, you could get it there or someone there could get it for you, and usually it was of good quality and at a reasonable price.
This applied to everything. If you wore it, ate it, drank it, planted it, harvested it, listened to it, talked through it, painted with it, built with it, heated with it, cooled with it, sold it, bought it, borrowed from it, saved in it, married in it, divorced in it, read it, read by it, looked at it, looked in it, washed with it, dried with it, learned in it, learned from it, lay by it, swam in it, drove it, rode in it, repaired it, washed it, dried it, painted it, cleaned it, bought it, sold it, buried by it, or buried in it. From inception to resurrection, everything you could ever need was right there in the beehive called Main Street, Franklin.
Now, there just might have been one exception to this:
From 1941 to 1946, because of WW11, there were no new automobiles for sale on Main Street in Franklin where the car dealerships were located. The dealers had done a bang up job trying to keep everybody’s jalopy running, but it was hard to get gas because of the rationing, however, I heard about some people using a six foot length of rubber hose to siphon gas out of the county trucks.
I remember when Miss Agness Bennett drove her big old car into Harpeth Motor Company for repairs, and with the accelerator pushed to the floorboard; she accidentally shoved the gear leaver into reverse and when she took her foot off of the clutch, the car shot backwards out of the dealership, across the side walk, across the street and across the other sidewalk and through the showroom window of the John M. Green Insurance Agency, and stopped inside the office and Mr. Green got up slowly from his desk and walked over and opened the car door and turned the ignition key off and casually said, “get out Miss Agnes and visit with us for awhile.”
This happened a bout a week after “Dago” Lillie drove his motorcycle through the front window of Pillow Williams Dodge and Plymouth Agency while he was attempting to jump over the two cannons on the Square. When WW11 was almost over, everyone that wanted to buy a new car would have to sign up at Walker Chevrolet, Harpeth Ford, or Pillow Williams Dodge and Plymouth in order to get one when the factories started manufacturing again, and supposedly, when the new cars were delivered they would sell them in the order as they had them on the sign up lists. You talking about a fiasco, this was it. People who had been dead twenty years were on the list, as well as people who didn’t even live in Franklin. This caused such a ruckus that they started a new list and you had to make a small down payment and show your drivers license and were limited to one car per family. That list was more abused than the first list. People screamed and hollered that service men and women who hadn’t been discharged couldn’t get on the list. They added more rules and everybody in Franklin was fighting mad, and the Review Appeal Newspaper wrote a new editorial every week. Brother Jackson, The preacher at the Fourth Avenue Christ delivered a sermon entitled, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first”.
Then when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got worse. Lard Thompson, a used car dealer handed out a bunch of circulars around town saying that he would buy any new car from the owner for $200 more than he paid for it. He bought a bunch of them and then took them to Tyler, Texas and sold them for $800 more than he paid for them. Then they got mad at Lard and also the dealer as well as the person that bought the car from the dealer.
It seems to me that every thing should be better. The war was over and we had won. Service men and women could go to college for four years under the GI bill of rights. People that just wanted to set back and rest up could sign up and Uncle Sam would pay them $52.50 per month for one year for doing nothing and they had the audacity to call that 52.50 or work. If you wanted to work, you could sign up and Uncle Sam would pay your employer about half of your salary for a year. If you didn’t want to do any of those things you could hang out at the VFW and tell war stories.
However, I think the biggest thing in Franklin was that you could now get a date easier than you could get a gas stamp, and you had enough money to go to Nashville to the Hippodrome Skating Rink, and the Willow Plunge Swimming Pool in Franklin was still open. I can also remember how great their chess pies tasted.
Yeah, the war was over and Franklin with all its faults was still the best place on earth to live…but I missed my friends like Scoby Burchett, Snake Akin, David Gentry, Billy Lynch, Mack Terry and others who were killed in action and had the blue star in their parents window changed to a gold star.
