The gentle soul who used to get his hair cut by an Everly Father a couple of doors down – and who pumped 100 percent pure gas to keep country immortal Ernest Tubb movin’ on – has enjoyed the last four-plus decades next to what used to be called Hailey’s Shopping Center.

Ben Little’s not pining for the “good old days” before Harding Place became a blue-collar superspeedway and when Trousdale was a lonesome lane. That’s progress.

And, after all, he plans on turning this business over to his son, Andrew, much as his own father – also Ben – turned it over to him.

One of the rare 100 percent pure gas outlets in Nashville – “the rest have ethanol, and that hurts engines,” he says of the additive found in most fuel pumps – Ben Little’s Service Station and its namesake owner are not stuck in the past.

But there is a bit of the old neighborhood feel in the tidy service station where he presides six days a week – Sunday is a day of rest for this former South Harpeth Church of Christ elder – on Trousdale, just north of the strip mall that now houses a Mapco convenience store, a Cuban restaurant, a package store and more.

Change, better or worse, happens, and he’s likely one of the few who remembers when the strip was known as “Hailey’s Shopping Center” and The Everly Brothers’ father clipped hair in proud anonymity.

Ben rocks back in his chair – in between phone calls from loyal customers who come here for oil changes, new tires and 100 percent gasoline – and time-travels to 1972, when his own pop opened the this service station.

“The Everly Brothers’ father cut my hair in what was called, I think, Harding Place Barber Shop,” he says, pointing out the clipping was performed in a storefront that faced the L&N rail yard rather than Trousdale.

“You had to go down that alley to get to the shop,” he says, pointing to the narrow passageway between what’s now Mama Mia’s Italian restaurant and a Mapco store that has turned up on morning news shows as the scene of some urban thug’s late-night money grab.

“Mr. Everly did a good job, too. You know, his sons were Don and Phil,” says Ben who has spent the last 42 years fixing cars, dispensing neighborly wisdom and pumping all octanes of additive-free fuel to those in South Nashville who have come to rely on him.

“I don’t remember Mr. Everly’s first name. I just called him ‘Mr. Everly.’ He was always very nice.” He doesn’t know if the “Bye-Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie” siblings patronized their pop’s shop. “I never met them there.”

Ben conducts a mental census of the businesses, which have been his neighbors in the next-door strip mall.

“Everybody called it ‘Hailey’s Shopping Center,’ because Hailey’s Market was there. It’s kind of like what you have over there now with Mapco, but it didn’t sell gas. Just a little market.

“Doc Brooks had his drug store there, too,” he says, noting that back in that everybody-knows-your-name era, the pharmacist served almost as neighborhood doctor, diagnosing ailments and offering up over-the-counter remedies.

“There was a hardware store and a beauty salon and the liquor store (which is, like Ben Little’s Service Station, a lonesome survivor).

“Oh and there was a restaurant called Nashville Dog that had the best Chicago-Polish sausage I’ve ever had, and my brother (Chester, a former oil company engineer and now-professor at Clarksville’s Austin Peay State University) used to live in Chicago, so I had the real thing. None better than Nashville Dog, though.”

(As a side note: Ben’s other sibling, Tana Little, worked for 40 years as a medical technologist at St. Thomas Hospital.)

The small building that borders Ben’s parking lot now houses Mama Mia’s. “Used to be a watch repairman, an insurance company and something else… I can’t remember … there.”

Ben, 64, likes his current neighbors fine, but “it used to be better,” he says of the years after his dad opened the business and enticed his son to join him.

“He gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” says Ben, who degreed in psychology at Middle Tennessee State but happily decided on a grease-monkey’s life after his dad gave him 49 percent of the business. “He always reminded me that he owned the other 51 percent.”

Big Ben retired in 1988 and died of pancreatic cancer in 1991 – “it’s one of those cancers they can’t do much about, even now” – and his son became 100 percent owner and kept the business thriving. Just like Ben expects his own son Andrew, who does most of the heavy lifting nowadays, to keep the business thriving long into the future.

Ben himself is something of gas station and car repair royalty in South Nashville and Brentwood. His own father and five uncles ran Little Brothers Shell in Berry Hill from 1929 until 1971.

How loyal are the patrons of Ben Little’s Service Station on Trousdale? One longtime customer willed Little her Jeep, while countless others are willing to pay 50 cents a gallon more for his no-ethanol gas.

-- Tim Ghianni | The Ledger

“McDonald’s there now,” says the man who began his lifelong love affair with cars and gas at that shop. “They had this bucket for filling up radiators. I had to turn it over and stand on it so I could clean the windshields. I was 12.”

The brothers eventually split up, and three – Houston, Rhea and Ben – thrived with their own family gas and/or repair businesses.

Ben’s cousin Houston Jr. runs Little Brothers Shell on Franklin Road across the street from the building where Eddy Arnold ran his successful music and real estate careers. Cousin Rhea Jr. owns an auto repair shop over on Church Street, also in Brentwood.

“Dad opened his own Shell station in 1963,” he says. “It was at Edmondson Pike and Old Hickory Boulevard. I remember it was in October, about a month before President Kennedy was killed, because I was working there at night, and Dad had this little TV where we watched all that news.

“I was paid 25 cents an hour. Probably wasn’t worth that much,” he admits, with a frequent laugh.

He describes how it was a dream come true for his dad when he loaded up his grease guns and wrenches and moved to Trousdale, where “Ben Little” remains stenciled on the-plate glass storefront.

“Dad came over here and opened up because he always liked the kind of people in Crieve Hall. He’d always wanted to have a service station here.

“My wife Mary and I married a month after my dad and I moved in here,” he says, adding he and his spouse of 42 years met in “Dr. Connley’s speech class” at what is now Lipscomb University.

Mary prepared for her teaching career by finishing up at Lipscomb, while Ben left Lipscomb after two years for his psychology studies in Murfreesboro.

“My boys (Andrew, 37, and Britt, 33) are lifers at Lipscomb. Went there from kindergarten all the way through college.

“Younger one is a doctor, gastroenterologist, over in Jackson. Andrew tells people he’s a doctor, too: a doctor of cars.”

Ben, too, chose being doctor of cars over being a psychologist. No regrets.

“I always liked working on cars and engines and meeting people,” he says, with a shrug. He also likes the fact he’s among the few still peddling 100 percent gas.

“I’ve got my little niche right here,” he says of the business that began as a Pure station before pumping Union 76, Amoco, Marathon and now Pure again.

“I can’t compete with Mapco, Shell and Kroger – particularly Kroger – on price,” he says.

Earlier this week, for example, he was selling regular for $3.59 – the highest price in Davidson County, according to Nashvillegasprices.com – while the nearby Mapco was selling for $3.07.

“But there are people who want 100 percent gasoline,” he argues.

“I’ve had people who were traveling through Nashville who came here because of that. Another guy brings in his Lamborghini or Ferrari or Ford GT in here every Saturday,” he adds.

He smiles when talking about his encounters with one of Nashville’s greatest honky-tonk heroes.

“Ernest Tubb used to come here all the time,” says Ben, adding the Texas Troubadour was a loyal customer right up until he died in 1984.

The price of gas has changed as drastically as the neighborhood in the last 42 years. “Started out selling gas for a quarter a gallon, and now premium sells for $4 a gallon.

“Sold it as cheap as 19 cents back when there was a gas war. Remember those?”

He laughs and admits liking the excitement of gas wars – when service stations would try to steal each other’s customers by lowering their prices in “how-low-can-you-go?” territorial battle.

In addition to the price, another concession to time is that the pumps are all self-service.

“Back then we would wait on everybody. Dad would get mad if you were pumping gas and you didn’t ask the customer if you could check under the hood. I knew better than to make that mistake.

“There are three or four little old ladies who we still pump gas for, and there’s a gentleman who fell and broke his ankle and he comes in here, and we fill him up, too.”

Reciprocal loyalty between merchant and customer may, for the most part, be “good-old-days” recollection. It thrives here.

“Barbara Sullivan, who did a lot of horticulture at the Nashville Zoo, passed away about a year ago. She willed her Jeep to me. I was flattered.”

He nods toward the parked car that now is his main transport as he commutes from the 300-acre Williamson County farm he and Mary share with her parents, Lloyd and Frances Linton.

Ben looks out the window and ponders the future.

“I’d like to be able to quit in a couple of years. I’d like to spend a little time away. I wish I could afford to travel. But I’d like to do some volunteer work, maybe a little farming.

“We sold our cattle, but we still got a couple of donkeys out there.”

Odds are Ben won’t stray far from the service station if and when he retires.

“I enjoy the camaraderie with the customers, and I enjoy working on cars. That to me is more fun than anything.

“We serve people and we’re honest,” he says. “It’s not my good looks that bring people here.”