VENDOR SPOTLIGHT
JACKIE GOT TO RETURN TO HIS FAVORITE JOB BY HANNAH HERNER From the ages of 9 to 12, Jackie L. would book it downtown after school. He went from East Nashville and zipped across the Jefferson Street Bridge, sometimes hitching a ride with a friend who had an electric scooter. He’d pick up 10 copies of the Nashville Banner sports extra edition and hustle up and down Church Street, in the bars and movie theaters that thrived there in the late ’50s. Then he’d return three cents per paper and keep two cents to himself, plus tips. “Going into beer joints, people feel sorry for you and sometimes give you a dime or a quarter instead of a nickel for the paper. I enjoyed it, I loved it,” he says. “I’d make a quarter or 30 cents a day. Man, that was big time money for me. I was like a king then.” His next stop would be the chili shop, where he spent the 20 cents on a bowl of chili and a fried wiener sandwich. The rest would go to candy. Then he walked across the newly constructed Victory Memorial Bridge to his family’s home on Howerton Street. “It was boring, and it gave me something to do, and I just learned to love it. After I done it for two or three years, I just loved selling the paper,” he says.
A profession that used to cure his boredom became a lifeline later in life. When he and his son lost their apartment in a house fire in Dickson, they found themselves living on the streets. “We run into some bad luck. We were living in Dickson. Our apartment caught on fire and we lost everything. We come to Nashville, piddle around for two years sleeping in old buildings, abandoned cars and everything. Finally I had some luck, got on my feet and started selling The Contributor,” Jackie says. The Contributor office is just blocks away from where he would get papers back when he was a kid. And using money he makes from selling The Contributor, he’s able to pay for the apartment he secured through a Section 8 voucher in Bellevue. He’s been selling at his spot at Annex Road and Charlotte Pike for seven years now. Jackie grew up in a Nashville that’s far gone, and stories about the old days spill out easily in his Southern drawl. He’s one of seven siblings, and his father worked at a coal yard for 25 years. The family lived on company property. “It was a good life. We had it hard, you know. Back then when I was a kid,
times were hard. My father worked at that old coal yard. He probably didn’t make more than 25 or 30 dollars a week. But back then things were ten times cheaper,” he says. “He’d take that ol’ coal truck up to H.G. Hill grocery store and for what he made he’d fill the back of that coal truck up with bags of groceries.” When he was 15, his father went in front of a juvenile judge and got permission from the juvenile judge to take Jackie out of school so he could go work in the coal yard, too. Because of this, Jackie never finished high school. His coal boss took him over to get his driver’s license and Jackie went right to work hauling coal in a five ton truck, taking over his father’s old route. “Back then, just about everybody in Nashville bought coal,” he says. “They had what was called a country run and I drove five ton dump trucks delivering it out to country folks. They had a coal shed out behind the house and they burnt for a heater.” After the coal company shut down, Jackie did construction work. He had to retire in 1996 when he got in a severe car accident. The accident messed up his neck, and he’s had three surgeries on it, leaving behind metal plates and screws.
A view (looking west) along Church Street at Fourth Avenue N in downtown Nashville. Besides an affection for the job, Jackie is driven to get out and sell papers each day to stay healthy. Having had blood clots and stents put in, his heart doctor said the best thing is exercise. He’s grateful for those who roll down their window to chat at a red light, pull over to a nearby parking lot and come over on foot for more time to fellowship, plus those who give a meal, a ride home, some groceries. “They’re just the nicest people in the world,” he says. Jackie says that if he hadn’t started
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working at the coal company at such a young age, he’d be working behind a desk making lots of money today. There’s always been something he likes about the job of selling newspapers, though. “I love selling The Contributor. I enjoy it,” he says. “Of course, I’ve never in my life been the type of person who can sit in the house. I gotta get out. I’ve been an outdoor man all my life. I’m going to sell papers until I play plumb out and have to give it up, hang it up. I hope that’s quite a while longer.”
