When Nashville was Camelot

It was a sunny, magnificent day as President John F. Kennedy smiled and waved to the crowds along the sidewalk. Riding in a convertible, the young president’s coppery hair shimmered in the sun as the final leg of the motorcade made its way down West End Avenue. People hung from office windows and waved as he passed.

Forty years ago—on Saturday, May 18, 1963—Nashville was a frenzy of activity because, for the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, a sitting president was honoring the city with a visit. On that busy morning, Kennedy rode from the airport in a motorcade viewed by 150,000 people, spoke to a crowd of 33,000 at Vanderbilt Stadium and attended a lunch at the governor’s mansion.

The Banner, the conservative afternoon newspaper, wasn’t inclined to exaggerate on Kennedy’s behalf, so when it published an estimate of 150,000 spectators along the streets, plus the 5,000 or so at the airport and 33,000 in Vanderbilt Stadium, the staggering numbers were all that more believable. Nashville’s population in 1963 was 400,000, meaning that almost half of the city got a glimpse of the president that day.

JFK was in Nashville to observe the 90th anniversary of Vanderbilt University and the 30th anniversary of Tennessee Valley Authority’s founding. He also set off a dynamite charge by remote control that began construction of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Cordell Hull Dam.

But the young president did more than that. He offered a glimpse of the future that might have been, a hint of what his 1964 campaign and potential second term would have looked like.

“By 1963, Tennesseans, like the rest of the country, had gotten the message that his spirit was something special—that he had charisma, intelligence and vision,” says John Jay Hooker, a friend of JFK’s who was on the platform for his speech that day. “By then, he and Jackie were the biggest celebrities in America.”

That day, Kennedy stood in a Southern city that was fighting to shed Jim Crow and nailed his banner to the progress of civil rights, urging all people of good will to march under that banner with him. When it was over, the words he spoke here topped front pages across the country.

For that one springtime Saturday, Nashville was the center of Camelot.

A banner headline in Saturday morning’s Nashville Tennessean blared, “Throngs to Cheer Kennedy,” and it was accompanied by a two-column head shot of Kennedy, labeled “Our Guest.” Inside were two more pages of coverage, along with an editorial welcoming the President to town. The previous evening’s Nashville Banner had also welcomed JFK—although in a decidedly less boosterish way, in keeping with the rabidly anti-Kennedy stance of the paper.

Students at Saint Bernard’s Academy reported to their parents that the nuns were virtually giddy about the president coming to town, and were making plans to line the street near the school to wave as the first Catholic president in American history passed.

Families from all over Nashville turned out early to get a good seat at the stadium or a spot along the motorcade route. Those coming from counties to the west could drive in on Interstate 40, whose first leg, Memphis to Nashville, was completed just a few months earlier. It was much better than old Highway 70, though the entrance and exit ramps took some getting used to.

For the lady who wanted to look dashing for the president, Castner-Knott was advertising “A colorful basic dress, becoming to all, perfect for vacation, office, club or church” for $10.98. Men were content to sport white short-sleeve dress shirts, on sale at Harvey’s for $1.66. The skinny dark ties that were a men’s fashion staple were $2.50.

In the days before suburban malls, most of the serious shopping in Middle Tennessee happened in the two-block corridor of Church Street that housed Caster-Knott, Cain-Sloan and Harvey’s. At the time, nobody was much worried that developers in some parts of the country were singing the praises of a new type of shopping center, something called a “mall.”

In preparation for the presidential visit, parents saw to it that their children, who had been forced to go to bed early Friday night and miss the end of The Twilight Zone, were scrubbed, dressed and made presentable. Everybody piled into their Chevy Bel Airs, Ford Fairlanes or Plymouth Fury wagons with the kids in back. An oddball professor or two might have driven something obscure like a Volvo or Volkswagen, but it would be years before anybody in Nashville would hear of such a thing as a Toyota or Nissan.

To contemplate the distance between 1963 and today, consider this: The reason the crowds knew where to stand to see the president’s motorcade was that the route and his full itinerary had been printed in the newspapers. There was no doubt about what they would see; an article had assured them that “Kennedy will stand in an open convertible, his private limousine flown here for the occasion.”