The Secrets of the Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City's Coming of Age

The Last Hurrah

The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 261 Hooker’s political career nor the Minnie Pearl Chicken business would ever recover. Instead they became just more carnage strewn on the battlefield of the Banner-Tennessean wars.The political dead left by the wayside in Nashville during the glorious days of Camelot ran the gamut from little evil to big, from guilty to innocent.The victims included corrupt sheriffs and ignorant ward heelers; labor racketeers and their foolhardy lawyers; senatorial statesmen, brave city saviors, and idealistic pioneers of the New Frontier; and, of course, what was left of the old Garner Robinson political machine. The Last Hurrah Garner ran for public office one last time in 1975, the year Dave retired from the police department.The campaign gave them both something to do besides hanging around the funeral home. Garner was sixty-nine and Dave seventy-one. Together with Dick Jones, who was seventy-three and had been part of Garner’s shadow as long as Dave, they resembled some kind of frosty-haired over-thehill gang out to rob one more train. The race was for a district seat in the forty-member Metro council. The district encompassed Old Hickory, which meant Garner had at least a chance of winning. But Mayor Briley was also retiring after thirteen years in office, and his handpicked successor, Representative Richard Fulton, who had been in office since the 1962 vote fraud scandal, was anxious to keep control of the council. Garner’s history showed that there was no chance of controlling him. The opposing candidate was a union man named Cotton Turner, a man half Garner’s age who had learned his politics in labor-management wars where tire slitting and sugaring gas tanks were considered fair and manly tactics. The Last Hurrah James D. Squires 262 One of the twins, Maude, ran her father’s campaign out of the Robinson store which had moved and modernized. She plastered the town with campaign signs and stickers, just like in the old days. But now the placards were torn down and destroyed as quickly as they were posted. The family was shocked. Things like that didn’t happen, not in Robinson country. Maude complained to the police, but nothing was done. Her cousin Jimmy Roberson, then a state senator, came in to help. Maude launched such a fierce counterattack against Turner that he publicly called her “a rattlesnake.” His supporters responded by shooting out the lights in the Robinson store. In the face of it all, Garner was nonchalant. He and his old pals went through all the usual motions, but times had changed. The Robinsons didn’t own the Old Hickory voters anymore. Garner knew it, but by now he had figured out that while winning was better than losing, winning wasn’t all it was cracked up to be either. The real fun was in the running, the camaraderie with his old cronies, the scare he could still put into the political establishment that he had once personified. For the old war horse, the tone of this campaign had been set the day he told Dave he was running. Dave came to the farm more frequently then, because it was one of the few places he had to go. It was closer to his home than the funeral home and he could be more certain of finding his way back. His memory had begun to slip.The old boys still met outside—always, no matter the weather. The privacy of Garner’s driveway had replaced the courthouse hallway as the protector of their secrets. Garner casually mentioned that he was thinking about going for the council seat, which Dave just as casually ignored. Maybe his mind was slipping faster than Garner had thought. “What’s that dog’s name?” asked Dave, nodding toward an old speckled bird dog lying in the yard. Dave loved bird dogs and had never seen that one around Garner’s. “Oh hell, I don’t know. He came here. I just call him Dog.” “I’ll be goddamned,” said Dave, shaking his head. “I’m gonna The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 263 take him home with me. Ain’t nobody in Old Hickory gonna vote for a sonofabitch too sorry to name his dog.” “Well, by God, we’ll just see,” Garner replied. “’Cause I’m running anyway.” “All right, I’ll help you. But...