Poor ol' Kaw-Liga

In 1954, our milk cow died.

So we took our first -- and last -- family vacation, a three-week trip in our 1953 Chevrolet sedan that meandered through umpteen Eastern and Midwestern states as well as a piece of Canada.

Electricity had just arrived at our Killough Valley farmhouse in the Ozarks over yonder, but we were still using the old battery-powered radio, which picked up one station, in Poplar Bluff. We did not get a new radio to plug into one of the wall sockets. The old radio still worked just fine. Why would we want to spend money on something that wasn't broke?

We must have listened to country music on the radio. How else would we have known about the Grand Ole Opry?

I don't remember many of the songs we heard on the radio, except "Kaw-Liga." Anyone who remembers that song can probably sing parts of it. It's not easy to forget.

So the first stop on our one and only family vacation was Nashville, where we were in the audience of the Grand Ole Opry in the Ryman Auditorium.

I don't remember much about the performance, except for the peanut shells thrown on the floor, which horrified my mother. I also remember the "Applause" sign on the stage, and the the applause prompter, a man who waved his arms wildly when the audience was expected to clap and cheer. Telling people when to clap seemed then -- and still does -- like the strangest thing in the world. Either you like a song or you don't.

I had not been back to Nashville until 1995 or so when we drove, on Christmas Eve, from Cape Girardeau to Florida in just over 11 hours. On this trip, there was no stop in Nashville for country music. My wife and I passed through Nashville several more times on our way elsewhere, mainly Asheville, N.C., and the Great Smoky Mountains.

Each time we drove through Nashville, we would see signs for the Hermitage, the home of President Andrew Jackson. "We need to come back to see that," we said. But we didn't -- until last weekend. We followed a line of storms to Tennessee with plans to visit not only our seventh president's gracious home and farm, but also something else we had read about: a full-scale copy of the Parthenon, the one on the Acropolis in Greece, which we had visited a few years ago.

We did not go to Nashville for country music, but it's hard to escape. Last Saturday Nashville was host to a Music City marathon and half-marathon. Nearly every hotel room in town was booked by 32,000 runners along with the usual conventioneers and fellow sightseers.

Our hotel was next to Opryland, the amazing complex of hotel, shopping center and present-day home of the Grand Ole Opry. We decided to take a look at the hotel. We were, as most visitors are, bowled over. We've traveled all over the world to see things we've read about all our lives. I honestly don't remembered being so awed as we were at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which is a make-believe world of jungles, waterfalls, rivers, fountains, islands and lagoons.

The Hermitage and the Parthenon in Centennial Park are well worth the trip, if you haven't been there already.

If you go, try to pick a time when tornadoes aren't bearing down on Tennessee's capital.

jsullivan@semissourian.com<I>