BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

There were carrots in the flower arrangements. 

“Do you know who did the flower arrangements?” a woman asked across the table. She waited for a reply. But the ladies on the other side couldn’t hear her among the chatter. A white-haired woman in the middle mediated, “they don’t know,” she said. 

“I’ve never seen anything like it. With carrots in the bottom! You could just eat ‘em,” replied woman who had posed the question. The table laughed together, and the noise mixed with the noise of the crowds from the other two tables. There were three tables—white cloths with carrot centerpieces laid out like the flop at a card table. 

It was a Tuesday morning before the humidity came, gray and sooty, and the golf green at Lakewood Country Club was empty. The club was undergoing renovations, and a member of Tullahoma’s Literacy Council stood by the entrance, alongside a barricade of wooden Easter displays, ushering people toward the meeting room. 

Inside the meeting room there was a long catering table full of breakfast food. Tiny muffins and barrels of eggs. Members greeted members. Members greeted volunteers. Literacy Council figurehead Dot Watson welcomed everyone coming through the door, a bright blue suit and the diplomacy of Jacqueline Kennedy. Literacy Council Chairman Len Houser stood next to Dot, shaking hands in a front-door parade.

The Literacy Council is a group in Coffee County that helps adults get basic education and earn their high school equivalency diploma through the HiSET test. They run a used bookstore in Tullahoma called The Book Shelf. It’s a way to raise money to cover testing fees and buy supplies to support education centers. They also help people in jail and recovery programs across the county, offering reading material, computers, and learning tools, and they rely on volunteers and donations to do it. It was the council’s annual get-together. 

The event was more like a birthday party than a board meeting. There were no items on the agenda to discuss. There was no agenda. No politicking. More like a group of friends who arrive at the party once a year to say, “my god, how are you still ticking!” Pats on the back and hugs, and a reminder that you’re expected to keep living so they can do it all again next year. All the markers of a birthday party but a beer tower and a Mexican restaurant sombrero.  

Mayor Lynn Sebourn and former Mayor Lane Curlee wafted through the room, two feet above the 5’4” crowd. The breeze settled them on opposite sides of the center table. Curlee reached across the table, “hello, mayor.” Sebourn shook his hand, “hello, mayor.” And they sat down together. 

Forty minutes in, Dot announced the guest speaker: Roland Segroves—former Literacy Council Chairman, Rotary Club friend, and “the man who sang Old Gray Mare at my birthday. I want to find some old goat cheese to give him one of these days,” Dot said. “We’ve had a good relationship and worked well together. We’ve asked him to speak. I don’t know what he’ll say.”

Roland stood up. He said he was a member of the Literacy Council. A former chairman—that he believed in what he did. And that he wouldn’t bore us anymore. “I’m preaching to the choir. Ya’ll know the importance of literacy,” he said.

Instead of a speech, he decided to tell stories of old Tullahoma the way a wedding uncle might once the kids had been put to bed.

Fred Grider, namesake of Grider Stadium, and Shorty Stevens, a beefy Tullahoma welder with broad shoulders and a roatan cigar, had a stump to move one afternoon and a half-stick of dynamite. “Shorty, he was a bunch of man,” Roland said. A half-stick wasn’t enough for Shorty. It wouldn’t work, he said. So Shorty sat on the stump to make his point. And when the dynamite exploded it launched him into the trees and killed a man passing by on horseback. 

Roland’s house used to be owned by the Prescotts. The Prescotts had a pond out back, lined with goldfish. The Prescotts’ neighbors owned a white lap dog, and the dog took interest in the goldfish—bobbing in the water and eating them like kids bobbing for apples at the carnival. The mother, Mary, complained to the neighbors, “oh, no, he wouldn’t do that, they’d say. So Mary being Mary, she went down there on the third day of July, fished all her goldfish out in a bucket, and put Rit’s blue dye in there.” The dog shuffled home through July, swampy and blue to the neck. 

Roland told stories of ball lightning and bar bets at London’s. The time he thought he was hit by a mongoose. When Roland sat down, Mayor Sebourn stood with a proclamation in his hand—April 22, dedicated to the Literacy Council. Chairman Houser held the proclamation and gathered the members and volunteers for a picture. The photo was taken. The proclamation folded. Women gathered their bags and talked about the weather. Outside, the sun was just starting to bust through the clouds.