It’s a wonderful family business for Littles

Generations of mechanics, shop owners

Friday, January 22, 2016, Vol. 40, No. 4

If, as the classic movie line tells us: “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings,” there are plenty of soaring spirits out there today, at least judging by the George Bailey of Brentwood.

During a couple hours of conversation – I seldom do actual “interviews” for these columns – the Westminster Abbey-sound-alike chimes, signaling someone has entered Rhea Little Tire & Auto Repair, ring about 30 times.

I say “about,” because I wasn’t counting. I was enjoying the company of one of the Nashville area’s nice guys, Rhea Little, the 54-year-old who began working in family service stations when just a child.

The Littles – including cousins, uncles, great-uncles, grandfather, his father and Rhea himself – have owned about 20 service stations in the last 87 years or so.

As for the lead sentence on this column, it is sprung from the fact that during our visits Rhea repeatedly brings up the topic of George Bailey and the great Frank Capra film, “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

“That last scene always gets me,” says Rhea, referring to the scene in which, after Bedford Falls bails George out of fiscal embarrassment and ruin (thanks to that squirrel-loving oaf Uncle Billy), most townspeople who have gathered in the Baileys’ drafty, old house erupt in holiday song and a bell rings on the Christmas tree.

“Attaboy Clarence,” says George (aka Jimmy Stewart in perhaps his finest everyman role outside of “Rear Window”), as he looks to the heavens.

Clarence, the bumbling angel who saved him from suicide by showing him how his life had made so many others’ lives better, is getting his long-overdue wings for the actions that lead to the happy ending.

If you’re not an “It’s a Wonderful Life” fan, then I feel sorry for you, but you probably haven’t read this far in the column today anyway. And no, this isn’t a belated Christmas column. It’s a celebration of a life that continues to be well lived.

Rhea Little III grew up being called “Little Rhea” as his grandfather, Rhea Sr., and father Rhea Jr. and various great-uncles, uncles and cousins did their part to make the Little name synonymous with car repair and/or gasoline in Melrose, Green Hills, on Trousdale, on Thompson Lane and in Brentwood.

“At least in the southern part of the city we are,” says Rhea when I refer to the family service station dynasty.

In fact, if you go online to search out Rhea and his eight-employee staff who work in the shop on a low-slung hill overlooking a business park – “When we first came out here in 1986, we could look over there, and there was nothing but fields and woods where we could watch the foxes play. Deer. Sometimes the peregrine falcon, too” – it is listed as “Little Rhea’s.”

“Since I’m ‘the Third,’ that’s what they called me when I was growing up,” he says. “They don’t call me Little Rhea much anymore, probably because I’m getting old and I’m 60 pounds heavier.”

He is from a family that came to Williamson County with a 600-acre Revolutionary War land grant – a super-great-grandfather of some heroic sort had been a captain in the southern campaign of the War for Independence, and he was rewarded.

“He was from Carolina” and was given the land, but passed it on to younger family members as the trek through the gap and over the mountains was simply too taxing for him to take on, says Rhea.

“They were dairy farmers,” he says of the generations of offspring of Capt. Jonathan Hunt, who were planted in Williamson County in the late 1700s by his son, Gersham Hunt.

Two of Rhea’s cousins still live on the 17 acres that remain in the family from that land grant. “My wife and I live in a subdivision, not on that land. But, when I think about how close we live to that original family land, sometimes it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

The Great Depression – all too familiar to George Bailey and the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in Frank Capra’s black-and-white classic used to introduce this column – changed most of the family to city folk.

“When the Depression came, they came into town, where they sold gas, worked on cars and sold fish bait,” Rhea says. A remnant of the family urbanization is Little Fish and Oyster in Germantown, he notes.

The story of the Little gas station and car-fixing “empire” didn’t really begin until Rhea’s great uncles and grandfather returned from World War II. “Actually, my Great-Uncle Chester was one of the first submariners in World War I,” Rhea proudly adds.

But after Chester helped defeat the Kaiser and the other brothers helped dispatch Tojo and Hitler (and the considerably less significant Mussolini, who, after all, did make the trains run on time), the Littles returned to Nashville where they worked in “the family business.”

Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Well, actually just pure engine oil that they put in the vehicles they repaired and maintained, as well as the gas they pumped into customers’ cars (self-service gas pumps didn’t come into vogue until this writer became what some facetiously refer to me as “a full-grown man.”)

First there was the Melrose area where three of the boys opened gas stations. The old Esso Gas Station building at Kirkwood and Franklin Pike that still houses a Shell gas station (but no longer is owned by the family) was original to the Little empire.

The McDonald’s across the street is on the site of another gas station. And another Little had a station down near where the 440 flyway crosses Franklin Pike.

They followed it up with stations in Green Hills, including a Shell station that was on the site of what is now the Donut Den on Hillsboro Road. “When I was little, I heard all these stories of guys who said they used to fight behind this shop during Hillsboro High School’s lunch hour,” Rhea says.

“I really think they were exaggerating. I think it’s more likely they went back there to smoke, since back then everybody smoked.”

Rhea laughs when recalling his first immersion in the family business in a station that was downhill from the Esso and next to the old Green Hills Theater (that magnificent old single-screen motion picture palace that was destroyed during the city’s multi-screen progress.)

“I started work there when I was 10. Dad paid me a dime an hour and all the snacks and Cokes I wanted and he bought my lunch,” he says. “When I complained, he gave me a raise to a quarter an hour ‘but you got to buy your own food now.’

“It wasn’t long before I asked to go back to the earlier arrangement,” he says.

Eventually, the Williamson County-raised Littles began to move back into Brentwood, then a sleepy little town by Nashville’s southern edge.

Rhea’s dad and grandfather opened the Shell that was at Old Hickory and Franklin Road. There’s a newer, non-Little Shell on that corner now. A couple houses away, Rhea Jr.’s pal and customer Waylon Jennings’ “Flying W” still presides above a driveway, so many years after country’s best singer decided the outlaw bit had gotten out of hand, sold his house, moved to Arizona and died.

Actually, the Little family’s relationship with country music royalty goes back to the Melrose days, when Hank Williams (the real one, the bedeviled heartbreak kid, not the chest-thumper who fell down the mountain) used to bring his cars into town for work.

“He lived out on Franklin Road (south of Harding Place), and there wasn’t anything but country if you went south, so he came into town with his cars.”

Rheas Senior and Junior moved back out to Brentwood in 1967. Rhea III’s uncles opened Little Brothers, a service station that still exists farther into Brentwood on Franklin Pike. Someday, I’ll likely tell their story as well, since it is where I get gas for my ancient Saab.

In the early days of the Old Hickory Boulevard station, Rhea Senior opened the shop at about 5:30 to take care of books. He often was joined by one of Brentwood’s other legendary early risers, Eddy Arnold.

“Sometimes he’d come down early in the morning and have coffee with my grandfather.”

Eddy (who I am proud to remember as a gentle friend) was a huge star in the countrypolitan wave of music Chet and Owen began producing on Music Row. He also, in essence, “owned” Brentwood.

Little Rhea remembers occasions when some of Arnold’s admirers would be stunned by the sight of the crooner, sitting back in the gas station office, enjoying his early morning cuppa joe.

“They would act just as if Frank Sinatra or Elvis was in the office. I’d say ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Mr. Eddy.’”

Other times, the eldest Rhea and Eddy would cross Old Hickory Boulevard for coffee and breakfast at the still-lamented Noble’s.

Rhea Senior died in a traffic wreck on Briley Parkway in 1978. All three generations of his family were represented in the car that was hit head-on by a drunken driver. “I can remember how confused the police officer was because of the number of Rhea Littles in the accident,” says Little Rhea. Other than his grandpa, everyone else got out alive.

While on the topic of his grandfather – “he was one of my heroes” – Rhea III pauses to think about all of his relatives, the father, uncles, great-uncles who were in the service station business and the impact they all had on him and the profession he chose.

“Probably when you get right down to it, I grew up around all of these really great men who served their customers, served their employees, served their communities.

“They all were my heroes growing up. Sure, I liked ballplayers, too,” says the mechanic with a Sparky Anderson-autographed photo on his office wall. “But I never met anyone like my dad, my granddad and my uncles and great-uncles.

“It’s kind of hard to explain, but that’s who I wanted to emulate. That’s what drew me to this business.”

That love for the men who gathered for coffee every day shaped Rhea’s life after he got his business administration degree from Belmont in 1984.

He had them on his mind as he sampled corporate America and realized he didn’t belong there. He belonged at the car repair shop that his dad eventually moved out to the hill at 9042 Church Street East in 1986, leaving the filling station part of the business behind and focusing instead on making engines hum and customers smile.

“I had been in textbook sales for Random House, just to try something different. I lasted about six months in the job. I was gone about 80 percent of the time and I was getting married, (to Marie, his wife of nearly 30 years and mother of Abigail and Grace) and that probably had something to do with it.”

He also didn’t belong in a tie-wearing world where bosses could mandate what he said and did, where he went, how he lived.

Just when he thought he was getting out, the service station business pulled him back in.

“There’s a satisfaction of helping people and seeing people continually over the years, by trying to do honest work, quality work. If it’s something that we know would be necessary when fixing our own cars, that’s what we would recommend to customers.”

Those customers who have been coming to the Littles for generations “are family,” says Rhea. “I celebrate when somebody’s child gets married, because I remember them in a child seat in a car.

“I grieve when customers pass away. It’s just like they are kin. There’s a lot to be said for our sense of community. We’re always about service with integrity. It boils down to ‘do unto others as you’d have them do to you,’ ” says Rhea III, who was on the board of directors of the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce and remains a city commissioner.

By the way, he is not one to lament the growth of Brentwood (or of Nashville). It’s not just because he’s a grease-stained politician, either. “Brentwood was 3,000 or 4,000 people when we first came out here.

“There’s 40,000 people here now. There were neat things back when it was small. But there are neat things about it now. The best way I could sum it up is it was wonderful when I was a child and I lived here. It’s wonderful now.

“If it had not grown, just think of all the many fantastic people I would not have met.”

There still are two generations of Littles involved here. His mother, Judy, is his partner and does the bookkeeping and payroll. Rhea’s father retired a few years ago due to health concerns.

Until the last year or so, though, he still would come to the shop as often as possible.

“There was times he’d be out for nine months at a time, then he would come back and stay in the front office and greet customers.”

The fact he’s too ill to do that now doubtless touches the hearts of the family of customers, the folks who drew Rhea III from the corporate world and back to his roots, a mixture of heritage and dreams.

He wanted to be like the men of honor and integrity, the Little family, the service station dynasty that grew by treating customers fairly.

And that’s why “It’s a Wonderful Life” is “probably” Rhea’s favorite movie and George Bailey his favorite character.

He recognizes himself in the Stewart character, who – because of senses of community, integrity and family – gave up rambling dreams of harems and exotic locales to do his duty, to follow his own father into a solid life helping what Mr. Potter called the “garlic eaters” of Bedford Falls. (I can use the “garlic eaters” reference, by the way, as I’m Italian-American.)

“I feel like George Bailey sometimes,” Little Rhea says.

“Sometimes I think, ‘well, I’m doing the same thing I’ve done all my life. Maybe I should be doing something more important.’

“Then I realize that if you strive to do what you do well, and in a caring manner, you have positive effects on people that you never in a million years would guess. It’s kind of like I was placed here, kind of in the sense where George was going to do other things, but he was drawn back.

”Sometimes you think maybe you should have done it differently, but I look back and say ‘it really was a wonderful life.’”

And, as one would expect, the Westminster Abbey-sound-alike door chimes ring loudly.