By Tom Wood Diana Collins has a lot on the ball these days. The longtime Nashville resident is a regular league bowler at Donelson Plaza Strike & Spare and other lanes around Music City and serves as president of the Music City Senate of The National Bowling Association. Oh, and she’s the mother of baseball superstar Mookie Betts of the World Series champion Boston Red Continue reading →

By Tom Wood What’s old is soon to be new again. The year was 1958, and construction of Donelson Plaza was underway, a transformational project that would reshape a rural community less than 10 miles east of downtown Nashville. The Plaza opened its doors in 1961, ushering in an unprecedented wave of growth and boom times that made Donelson a thriving neighborhood destination. Thirty-something years Continue reading →

By Tom Wood Forget politics, religion, sports or movies. If you want to start an argument in Nashville these days, bring up “shared urban mobility devices” – aka scooters. Everyone has an opinion on their future in Music City and their role in Nashville’s burgeoning transportation problems. Fans love riding scooters, and foes hate dodging them, but we’re all dealing with them. The dockless, electric Continue reading →

By Tom Wood Charity Morgan has a lot on her plate. She is currently focused on feeding the huge appetite of very large men. But for 2019 and beyond, she is preparing a feast of dreams. A vegan, plant-based chef with a culinary arts degree, Charity cooks for her husband – Tennessee Titans outside linebacker Derrick Morgan – and more than a dozen of his Continue reading →

Sports Illustrated series on McNair murder gives air to charge that Metro botched the investigation It had all the elements of a Hollywood script or a best-selling whodunit, but the shocking 2009 Fourth of July murder of legendary Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair was – horribly – all too real. The Nashville police department took just four days to close the case. At a July Continue reading →

Of Bookworms and Bibliophiles  This weekend marks the 30th annual celebration — the Diamond Anniversary — of the written word in downtown Nashville. The Southern Festival of Books is one of the South’s premier events for book-lovers, but this is a special one. The fun begins Friday morning at War Memorial Plaza and the downtown main branch of Nashville Public Library and concludes late Sunday afternoon. Continue reading →

Fall is Here … But It Sure Didn’t Feel Like It! How hot is it? It’s so hot that … That was a regular bit on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, and I still remember many of the zingers and one-liners. But what we experienced this past weekend at Fall Fest at the Hermitage was no laughing matter. I spent the weekend outside on the Continue reading →

‘You can feel it in the air around here’ By TOM WOOD Donelson has always had its share of friendly neighborhood restaurants that served up good food and conversation. But if you wanted to go someplace hip, hot or happening, that meant driving across town to one of Nashville’s trendier areas like East Nashville, Germantown, The Gulch, 12South or The Nations. That’s no longer the Continue reading →

Visiting the Ghosts of Dutchman’s Curve The Nashvile Ledger, a weekly newspaper here in Music City, recently asked me to write a piece on the 100th anniversary of the deadliest train crash in U.S. history, which occurred on the morning of July 9, 1918 when two steam locomotives met head-on and derailed in a cornfield near Richland Creek Greenway at White Bridge Road. You can read Continue reading →

Here’s my complete June 29, 2018 article in the Nashville Ledger. Thanks for reading! —————— By Tom Wood  Standing out here in the freshly-mown grasses of Richland Park Greenway, several yards from the Dutchman’s Curve Train Wreck historical marker placed alongside White Bridge Road, I listen for ethereal echoes of the past. This is as much a ghost story as it is a history lesson. Continue reading →