by Ray Hill | Apr 18, 2021 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Few readers likely recall how very close the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon truly was. Kennedy won by a margin of 0.17 percent of the vote, some 112,827 votes. As Kennedy prepared to take over from President...
by Ray Hill | Apr 11, 2021 | Columnist, Hill, Ray Hill's Archives, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Lyndon Johnson once called Estes Kefauver, “The greatest campaigner of them all.” Kefauver was no silver-tongued orator; in fact, he was oftentimes tongue-tied and frequently mangled names and phrases. Yet Estes Kefauver likely had no peer as a...
by Ray Hill | Apr 4, 2021 | Columnist, Hill, Ray Hill's Archives, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Carroll Reece had first been elected to Congress to represent Tennessee’s First District in 1920 when he had defeated incumbent congressman Sam R. Sells in the Republican primary. 1920 had been a banner year for Republicans in Tennessee with the GOP...
by Ray Hill | Mar 28, 2021 | Columnist, Hill, Ray Hill's Archives, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill To get to Congress, Carroll Reece had to defeat an entrenched incumbent, who had served for a decade. After taking the oath of office on March 4, 1921, Carroll Reece became one of the most enduring political figures in Tennessee’s political history. ...
by Ray Hill | Mar 21, 2021 | Columnist, Hill, Ray Hill's Archives, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Carroll Reece, thirty years old and a veteran of the First World War, had defeated Congressman Sam R. Sells for the right to carry the Republican Party banner in the general election of 1920. Sells had not taken his defeat lightly and had tried to...
by Ray Hill | Mar 14, 2021 | Columnist, Hill, Ray Hill's Archives, Stories In This Week's Focus:
“Live so that when you die, even the undertaker will be sorry.” Sign that hung in the business office of Jim Cummings. By Ray Hill James H. Cummings is likely a name unfamiliar to most readers, but during his time he was a power and a man to be reckoned with. When he...