Belmont-Hillsboro

About this audio guide

This guide to a corner in Nashville's Belmont-Hillsboro neighborhood follows Herman Lay, a traveling potato-chip salesman who set up shop on Portland Avenue in nineteen thirty-two, and Ed and Bernice Johnson, who ran the Esso station across the street and kept fronting him gas on credit. It follows their arrangement into the nineteen forties, as Lay's small operation grew into a national snack company, and the offer he eventually made the couple who'd kept his trucks running. The corner is still marked by the same two street names today.