Front of the Book: Bill Freeman, Sharon Gentry, and the Preds' Second Half

In the dead-tree edition this week, we profile another mayoral candidate, interview the school board tree, and look ahead to the second half of the Predators' exciting season:

Bootstrapper or kingmaker? Bill Freeman brings two different narratives to the mayor's race — along with a gigantic pile of money, by Steven Hale:

Presently, Freeman, 63, has just become Nashville’s latest candidate for mayor, and a serious contender in the race thanks entirely to his massive wealth and long list of political connections forged over the years. He ranks among the top Democratic Party fundraisers in the state and the country — as a campaign bundler, he reportedly raised nearly a million dollars for Barack Obama’s re-election effort in 2012. The entryway to his office is decorated with pictures of him and his family visiting with the last six U.S. presidents. Freeman's desk is on the third floor of the Freeman Webb Building in Green Hills, which houses his massive property management company. Former Vice President Al Gore's office is on the second floor.

The beginning, on the other hand, is the winter of 1951 in Donelson, where he was born and raised. After attending Peabody Demonstration School — which would later become University School of Nashville — he went off to the University of Tennessee. But he left after his father died, and never graduated.

In his mid-20s, he became the director of development at the Metro Development and Housing Agency. Several years later he met Jimmy Webb, and the two formed the Freeman Webb Company. Over 36 years, they grew it from a company with one employee and one property to a billion-dollar business with nearly 500 employees and approximately 15,000 units in the region.

School board chair Sharon Gentry lays out the process for making the city's most important hire — Metro's next director of schools, by Andrea Zelinski:

With community engagement, the search firms will be hearing from the Metro Council about what is important to them, and from the mayor's officials about what is important to them. What about the rest of the community?

There are other pockets of constituents. I look at it as, I need to do "X" number of cluster meetings, [for example, in the English language learners] community. We'll work to define that. It could be, what's our immigrant community? What are your concerns? What are your interests? What do you want to see? We're definitely looking at teachers and all those people that are stakeholders. Any other key groups that come to mind?

Parents, students, teachers, nonprofits, I think the nonprofits that have worked with us ... Metro government. Not just the mayor, not the candidates, but those other government offices. We're going to be looking to you more, which is evidenced around some of the conversation that we've had at the board, to partner with us and help us with that population of students that we know that we struggle with. I think that they're a good group to ask, "How do we make that happen?"

, by J.R. Lind:

There is a looming question mark, a big, 72-point DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN-size eroteme that hangs like the Jumbotron over the Bridgestone Arena ice: How long will Rinne be out? Hockey is 38 percent luck, the data crunchers tell us, and it was in this randomness that Rinne was hurt just before the break. A sliding Anton Volchenkov, barreling back to the net like a T-34 back to Stalingrad, caught Rinne unawares, straining the goaltender's leg. It was not, thankfully, the hip that caused Rinne to miss stretches of the past two seasons. Nonetheless, it was a devastating blow. Up to that point, Rinne was the only goaltender who had recorded a win for Nashville. In the meantime, Carter Hutton has managed to earn a win, but Hutton is a backup in every sense of the word.