Friday, May 15, 2009
Fun and Games Memory Lane: Does Anyone Else Have a Jones for Fido?
Posted by Carrington Fox on Fri, May 15, 2009 at 6:37 AM
This week's dining review is one part homage to Fido--the beloved coffee shop in Hillsboro Village, which has evolved into an unexpectedly sophisticated yet unpretentious restaurant--and one part ode to the bygone Jones Pet Shop, where I bought my first guinea pig and was actually bitten by a monkey.
I'm not surprised to hear people agree that Fido is a hidden gem of a restaurant, as suitable for dinner as it is for breakfast. But I am surprised by the number of people who have shared with me this week their own nostalgia for Jones Pet Shop.
No pet super store will ever compare to the cozy charm of that tight room, where the myna bird squawked in the back and puppies gamboled by the front windows. When I was 7, I launched a gerbil-breeding program and sold my litters back to the store for a buck a baby. For all I know, my parents gave the store the dollars to pay me, just to encourage entrepreneurship--and to get the excess gerbils out of the house. (Who's going to buy my kids' surplus rodents?)
Does anyone have any other memories of Jones they want to share?
Comments (9)
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If I sit quietly in a dark, quiet room, I can probably conjure that myna bird's name. We used to beg our parents to take us to see that bird.
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Oh yes, many memories. I use to walk through Hillsboro Village everyday on my way to Eakin Elementary in the late 60's. Interesting time, for sure. Jones was one of my favorite stops, along with Cotten Music, Daniel Hoppie Drugs (where I got my first bike stolen), all the assorted record stores (aka head shops) like Sgt. Peppers and the House of Bamboo with it's cool black light room in back. Jones always had great dogs, fish and yes, I remember the myna bird. Very cool place!
Speaking of how times have changed, does anyone remember when Pancake Pantry wouldn't allow anyone in with "long hair"?
i think fido is extremely underappreciated for its food. i go at least once a week and order from the specials menu and have hardly ever been disappointed.
Just last Saturday, when my bros and I took the Paterfamilias there for birthday brunch, talk turned to the myna bird. I was the only one who recalled it being able to squawk "Son of a BITCH!" But I remember it fairly vividly. It's possible we had gone in there with some miscreant kid like our neighbor Joe (who eventually died in prison) and he had coached the bird.
There's a nice 1960s streetscape of the village showing the facade of the shop as part of a new exhibit at the Metro Archives in Green Hills. The archivists unearthed a trove of slides taken by MDHA and its predecessor agencies that accidentally documented Nashville's street life of the 1950s-60s.
If that bird ever actually squawked "Son of a bitch," I'm sure he was talking to that bastard monkey.
Not to get all maudlin, but this post is giving me a sensory overload memory of the smell of grape incense from Sgt. Pepper and cedar shavings and puppy breath from Jones. And I can hear the tinkle of the beaded curtains hanging every 10 feet in the House of Bamboo.
Maybe it's because this week I finally moved out of the neighborhood (temporarily) for the first time in twenty years.
That's not a tear in my eye. It's allergies, dammit!
My family lived in a house on 21st for the first six years of my life, behind the front office of my father who was a doctor. Visits to the pet shop were frequent. I have a large B&W photo of me, age three, being interviewed by Joe Calloway. The year was 1953. He was the announcer for a weekly radio show called Let's Talk Pets-aired every Saturday at 5:45PM. The photo was actually used as an advertisment for the WSIX show. When Fido first opened, I took a framed copy of the photo/ad to the shop in the hopes they might display a bit of the shop's history. In my subsequent visits to Fido, I have never seen the photo displayed. It does hang in my home and creates a lot of conversation about the pet shop.
Anyone remember the name of the gourmet grocery that was on one of the Village's corners? This was late 80's/early 90's, I believe.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane! I don't remember the monkey, but that bird was a headliner in several of my childhood nightmares.
