NVCR 2
Interviewee: Jack Kershaw
Interviewer: Ben Houston
Date: June 30, 2003


H: It is June 30, 2003, and I am in the house of Mr. Jack Kershaw. Sir, thank you for
 meeting with me, I appreciate your time. Can we start off with asking when and
 where you were born please?

K: I was born [on] October 12, 1913, in Carthage, Missouri.

H: How did you end up coming to Nashville, then?

K: Well, my family was in Missouri only temporarily. [It is] a Tennessee family.

H: Could you describe for me the Nashville of the 1950s, given that I'm an outsider
 both to Nashville and the 1950s?

K: Nashville in the 1950s was in the process really of becoming a city after having
 been a wartime town. In the 1950s, this was about a five hundred acre farm
 where we sit, and as you can see when you drove up, it's solidly filled with
 buildings and little houses and things. That's progress, they tell me; I'm not too
 sure about that. There was, I think, a beginning flow toward the attitude of the
 1960s, but it'd been in the South and in the American culture since the 1920s.
 You remember the Roaring 1920s, and the 1920s rolled right on into the 1930s,
 except there wasn't much money to spend in the 1930s. But people still went to
 restaurants with coats and ties, even up until the 1950s. Now you go into a
 restaurant and it looks like a collection of ragamuffins. Air travel, at the time,
 speaking of dress, it was quite expected that you wore a coat and tie to travel on
 an airplane, but now blue jeans alone is quite sufficient. It's also sort of a cultural
 attitude that went along with dress-style changes. Everything became more
 discussible. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, you just didn't hardly mention rape
 in polite company. But there was oncoming influence, of course, of science. You
 see, science brought in so much like Freud and absolutely unmentionable
 activities between people of the same sex and all that. The scientific discussions
 of such was, of course, carried on by educated people who were perhaps
 familiar with Freud, or probably perhaps not, but they were familiar with second-
 tier writing of Freud.

H: In terms of Nashville, did you see evidence of this progress occurring in the city,
 or did it still retain a more rural feel, considering that it was such an outpost for
 migration from the surrounding counties?

K: I think that the presence of the university here was a part of the scene, and it
 certainly encouraged people to read the latest discoveries and discuss them all