Tennessee Titans

Someone forwarded this link to me with the question, "Does this make you then son of a titan?"  This is The Nashville Scene's 2011 In Memoriam spread of the influential and notable people who will be missed ("Titans" is the word they used.).  My father, John Hardcaslte, tops the list under Business.  Betty Brown, all around awesome person and mother to my good friends Susannah, Nina and Eliza (and Martin 3), tops the list under Connectors.  Both passed this year, and both from the same kind of Parkinson's.  We've been through a lot and loss together.  And Nashville is the less for their moving on.

Business

JOHN HARDCASTLE
1936-2011
Real estate titan, H.G. Hill Co.

By Bruce Dobie

John Hardcastle combined a banker's manners with a historian's intellect, and that mix produced one hell of a delightful and agreeable man. With his wife, Fran, he was firmly planted in Aulde Nashville social circles, but displayed a driven intellectual curiosity and often thumbed his nose at convention — such as his participation, in 1976, in a re-enactment of the storied 1779 flatboat trip from Kingsport to Nashville that historians consider the founding of the city. Similarly, the first time I ever heard Hardcastle deliver a lecture, on Nashville history, he was dressed in a coonskin cap and other 18th century attire. If memory serves me correctly, he was channeling James Robertson. Perhaps "performance historian" would be an apt description of his metier.

Besides his passion for Tennessee history, Hardcastle was an ardent environmentalist, active in the early efforts to save Radnor Lake from development. He was also active in the Nature Conservancy. (At his funeral, a son offered the remark that while his father loved nothing more than sleeping outside in a tent, the only tent his mother ever really loved was the one enveloping the Cheekwood grounds once a year.) Professionally, Hardcastle started out as a banker but later was named president of the H.G. Hill Realty Co. Under his watch, the company developed the upscale project Hill Place on Post Road.

Hardcastle was an extraordinarily sociable man and had a fabulous laugh. In fact, just about everything he said seemed to start out seriously but then detour down a trail of good humor. At one point in his long slide into so-so health, I ran into him at the Whitland Avenue Fourth of July picnic, which he loved. He was dressed in a natty red-white-and-blue. "Age is getting to me," he said, taking a seat on a nearby bench. I then repeated to him what John Jay Hooker had told me, when he had turned 70. "When I woke up this morning," Hooker said, "I grabbed my penis and told it, 'Penis, if you were alive today, you would be 70.' "

John Hardcastle laughed so hard I thought I was going to have to call a doctor. At his funeral, a Dixieland jazz band played classics, and smiles broke out everywhere.

Connectors

BETTY BROWN
1939-2011
Environmentalist, philanthropist, progressive, single degree of separation

By Bruce Dobie

Betty Brown tended to a broad array of interests from her (and her husband Martin's) almost feudal spread out Hillsboro Road. Her agenda seemed to flow rather organically, although an official obituary would point to the fact that she was the founder and guiding light behind the Nashville Tree Foundation, which has planted thousands of trees here. There were other board memberships certainly, but most of her official commitments stemmed from a love of the outdoors. Friends often found themselves traipsing after her to inspect one or another wildflower on the family's property. Her environmentalism was, in many ways, her religion.

Because of her husband's family ownership of Jack Daniel's, Betty had standing the moment she moved to town. But from then on, it was her ballgame. Smart, progressive, unabashedly happy and willing to do whatever she wanted, she was a force. Betty didn't spend her time grooming future Swan Ball chairwomen. But the social arts were, in fact, her forte. Betty was a consummate and inveterate connector of people, always at the center of something. A visitor to her and Martin's house might find seated around the table a talking medley that included a congressman, an Episcopalian bishop visiting from California, and an environmental activist just in from the woods. Her summer trips to the family compound in the Canadian wilderness, attended over the years by dozens of thankful guests, were studies in how to make the difficult look easy. Betty's running buddies were a who's-who of literate, well-heeled Democrats, and at the Brown home they were often refreshed.

One time around Betty's table, someone mentioned a nasty divorce whose details were rocking the city. "Yes, they're negotiating here," she said nonchalantly. Activity often found Betty. She was comfortable in the fray. She loved spotting talent, putting people together, mixing it up. Her native Louisville pulled hard, but Nashville was where she invested her time and energies. An epic struggle with Parkinson's claimed her far too early. What we all would have given to see a vibrant Betty, 25 years hence, still presiding, the city's grande dame. She was buried in a wooden casket made from a tree felled on the family property. The gal had style.