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

Part Five: Exile

Pa r t F i v e Exile Pa r t F i v e Exile 146 The ups and downs of Sheriff Garner’s political fortunes made bumps in all our lives. When Garner had to give up being sheriff in the early fifties, my granddaddy Dave once more gave up being a cop. Now instead of spending weekends with him on patrol, I spent them working as an errand boy at the motel and restaurant he managed a few blocks down the Murfreesboro Road from the Colemere Club. It quickly became a hangout for cops and criminals— and the press. The first newspaperman I ever saw in the flesh was there one hot summer Saturday night. He was The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 147 stark naked except for cowboy boots and hat, a western gun belt around his waist. He had a toy pistol pointed at my granddaddy, who was about to die laughing. “Stick ’em up,” said the man cheerfully, to loud squeals of female laughter from a lump under the covers of the bed in his motel room. Even at age nine, I knew the gun was a child’s toy cap pistol and the squeal was probably the noise the people in the adjoining room had been complaining about. I had gone along lugging a jug of ice water, which my granddaddy said might be needed to “douse the ruckus.” “Looks like to me you’ve done enough stickups for one day,” said my granddaddy. “Yes sir,” said the naked cowboy. “I’m all stuck up.” The lump squirmed and let out another squeal. “Hold it down in here, Red, willya?” said my granddaddy. “Your neighbors are trying to sleep.” “Okay, Dave,” the man said. He twirled the toy pistol like a movie cowboy before replacing it in his holster so he could take the ice water. As I handed the pitcher through the door, the lump jumped again and a foot with bright red toenails peeked from beneath the covers. “Did you know that man?” I asked my granddaddy as we walked away. He didn’t answer, but when we got back to the motel office, he handed me a folded newspaper. On the front page was a picture of the man atop his daily gossip column in the Tennessean. “It’s one of old Sillyman’s boys,” my granddaddy said. “I wish it had been old bald eagle Hatcher or Sillyman himself.” James D. Squires 148 From that day on my granddaddy and Garner referred to the columnist as “Old Stick ’Em Up.” One night years later, after the writer had switched to the afternoon Banner, my granddaddy, once again back in the uniform of the county patrol, encountered him driving erratically. He tapped the siren on his patrol car and pulled him over. When the columnist rolled down his window, Dave pulled his police revolver from his holster. “Stick ’em up,” he said. Both broke into laughter and the man’s female companion, the less intoxicated of the two, was allowed to drive him home. The columnist was still on the Banner front page and a celebrity in town when I became an adult. We worked in the same building and lived only a few blocks from each other. No matter how often I saw him, he was always naked except for his cowboy accoutrements. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying “Stick ’em up.” Cootchie the Constable and Congress Mayor West was reelected in 1955 running against a political machine that once again the Tennessean had only wished out of existence. When reporter John Seigenthaler wrote of opposition to West by the Sheridan-Robinson-Garfinkle crowd, Silliman Evans stormed out of his office brandishing a clipping of one of the newspaper’s earlier proclamations that the machine had been crushed. Boss Crump had died in late 1954, two weeks after turning eighty. Jake Sheridan was in exile, and the old publisher’s philosophy was clear: Once the Tennessean ran your obituary, you were dead, period. Cootchie the Constable and Congress ...