The secrets of the Hopewell box

When Boss Crump's boys didn't show up on time with the last unreported ballot box in the sheriff's election in the fall of 1945, the courthouse crowd suspected something was going on. And when the box finally arrived, stuffed with more votes than the community had citizens, most everyone in Nashville knew for certain that somebody had done something secret. But the "Old Hickory gang" got away with it then and in every other election for the next seventeen years. And their secrets were kept - until now.

Jim Squires was only two years old in 1945, but he knows what happened because it was his own pistol-toting, gold-toothed granddaddy Dave White, an enforcer in "Crump's gestapo," who stole that election - and a lot more.

And in this rich, astute memoir, the former political reporter and editor of the Chicago Tribune presents a rollicking, personal portrait of his hometown of Nashville that documents the rise and fall of a political powerhouse like no other, rooted in the undertaking of business and branching all the way to Washington and the United States Supreme Court.