With the residential real estate market in its current state of disarray and prices rising in every segment of the Greater Nashville area, there are pockets that still provide affordable opportunities, with Goodlettsville leading the way.

The house at 3347 Freeman Hollow Road recently sold for $655,000, and the property includes 5.1 acres along with a five-bedroom, three-full-bath house. Listing agent Cayla Cook invited buyers to “Bring your horses, goats, and chickens to the home that was renovated less than a year ago.”

She also noted that hiking trials had been established on the property.

Cook is with Parks, where she has been for four years and heads her eponymous team that is perennially ranked as one of the best in the area. Malcom Landenberger of eXp Realty delivered the buyer.

With 12 letters in his name, he is no match for former Columbia native and Battle Ground Academy baseball star William Van Landingham. With his 20 letters his name, Van Landingham held the record for the longest name in Major League Baseball when he played for the San Francisco Giants for four years beginning in 1994 and winning 27 games as a starting pitcher.

When the players went on strike in 1994, Van Landingham worked in Sam Hills in Columbia. The establishment was owned by Van Landingham’s uncle, the late Peter Hudson. Working as a bartender during his rookie season, which had begun with eight wins, he was approached by a sports writer inquiring how he had learned the skills of bartending in such a short time.

He responded it was not that difficult as most of the clientele drank Wild Turkey and Coke.

Back to Cook, who mentioned the house has an open floor plan, high ceilings and a full walkout basement. At $267 per square foot, values like these are difficult to discover, yet appear periodically in Goodlettsville.

For those unfamiliar with the hamlet, Kathy Key, who serves as corporate manager for Zeitlin Sotheby’s International Realty, has a solution as to how to remember the name:

G double-O D

LE double T

SVI double-L E

Kathy Taylor, as she was once known, captained the women’s – then known as the girls – basketball team. Not to date Ms. Key, but in those days, a common literary ploy used to differentiate the boys teams from the girls teams was to add the suffix “ette” to the end of the mascot for the boys teams. For example, in her case, the team she captained was known as the Trojanettes. The boys team was called the Trojans.

Even the Belmont women’s team was known as the Rebelettes, which was trouble on two fronts.

This practice might have originated when the term “suffragette” was coined in 1906 by Charles Hand, a reporter writing for the London Daily Mail who penned a piece on the British Women’s Social and Political Union, a group of women who were fighting for the right to vote.

The term suffragist is defined as the Oxford Languages as “a person advocating the right to vote to be extended to more people.” Based on information posted in Wikipedia, Hand created the term to belittle the group fighting for suffrage. Instead, the WSPU adopted the term as the name of its movement.

Many teams used this practice even and the “ette” worked its way into mascots and cheerleaders, and the Nashville Sounds had their Soundettes during their first few seasons. Many successful women were Soundettes, including Dianne Payne, the past president of the Tennessee Mortgage Bankers Association and now an area sales leader in the mortgage division of Synovous. Shelley Mangrum was crowned Miss Tennessee shortly after leaving the Sounds and was a Top 10 finisher for Miss America.

Many who viewed the pageant that year felt Mangrum was the best among the 10 finalists. She later hosted “Club Dance” for The Nashville Network that ran for 1,850 episodes.

Shawn Williams, who also graduated from the ranks of the Soundettes, is the director of strategic marketing and publicity at SESAC, that position following a stint in leadership at Sony Music Entertainment.

Williams mentioned that Lorianne Crook worked alongside the talented women as she starred on the Nashville Network for years as and reached mega stardom with Crook and Chase, her show with Charlie Chase. Lorianne is homegrown, as are the others, as she attended McGavock before graduating from Vanderbilt with a degree in Chinese and Russian languages.

Richard Courtney is a licensed real estate broker with Fridrich and Clark Realty and can be reached at [email protected].