"Where is it that everyone dies or gets married?"
 "Pleasant Shade, Tenn.!"
 The answer comes with a roar from 70,000 and more Banner readers.
 For years that name has been appearing several times in almost every issue of the Banner. People write in and ask about it. It appears so much that other towns of the state become irritated. Maybe a half dozen times in one paper there it well be, "Pleasant Shade, Tenn.--"
 This little town of 120 people, 60 miles north of Nashville and 10 miles north of Carthage, has become one of the state's best-known towns. It boasts, besides its churches, just a few homes, a store or two and a filling station or two. It is a beautiful little town of substantial, good people.
 It has become the best known community in Tennessee, at least its name has, because of the work of Calvin Gregory, preacher, teacher, newspaper correspondent extraordinary--the town's one-man Chamber of Commerce.
 Wives of traveling salesmen, "drummers" they call them in Pleasant
Shade, tell their husbands, "Now don't stop long in Pleasant Shade. I don't want you to die or marry someone else."
 Much of Calvin Gregory's news has to do with marriages and death. The telephone operators in Pleasant Shade and in the various towns for miles around in all directions, know Calvin Gregory and like him. When anyone dies or marries, when a home burns or an accident occurs, Calvin Gregory hears of it. In the news comes to the Banner.
 The date line is Pleasant Shade, Tenn. That is why all over the state they ask, "Where is it everyone dies or gets married?"
 And the answer is "Pleasant Shade."
 Calvin Gregory, frank of face, steel blue of eye and with light, brown hair, looks the whole world in the face and loves it. He is to Pleasant Shade, Tenn. what the late Dick Wick Hall was to Salome (where she danced) Arizona.
 He preaches in four churches, Baptist ones, does Calvin Gregory. He teaches school. He serves the Banner and his county paper, the Carthage Courier. A valued man to that weekly truly is the preacher-newspaper correspondent of Pleasant Shade.
 At one time he had eight churches and satisfied the congregations of them all. He averages one funeral a week, as he is called to all sections of his and other counties. He marries them and he says the last words over them. Those he doesn't marry or bury he hears about and sends in news of them.
 So well has he done his work that Pleasant Shade gets two or three letters a week asking about the opening for undertakers.
 Pleasant Shade, a healthy community, where few die, chuckles and goes on about its business.
 Letters come in to the Banner, to the Query Box and to the editor: "Where is Pleasant Shade?"
 Calvin Gregory knows his town and people. He serves them. He teaches at Kittrell's schoolhouse, one mile north of Pleasant Shade.
 He supplies his county paper with almost half its news. They have no contract. Now and then they send him a bonus.
 His revival season opens in July and continues until November. He holds from ten to fourteen meetings a year, of a week or more duration.
 He preaches about 300 sermons each year.
 Even the Banner workers, reporters and editors were curious about Pleasant
Shade. They chuckle because one man could dig up more news from a town of about 100 people than come out of, say, Columbia or Murfreesboro.
 Calvin Gregory came to visit the Banner last week. The Banner editorial staff liked him. Calvin Gregory didn't know it, but as he sat pecking out a story in the Banner office the force was passing the word around, "the chap who gets all that news out of Pleasant Shade." Reporters who have a hard time digging up news in Nashville looked at him with open-eyed admiration.
 He's a dynamo--probably 300 sermons in four churches, 52 funeral, 30 marriages, 3,000 news items, 150 days in the class room--all by one man at Pleasant Shade, Tenn. A busy life, truly, and one richly worth while.
 So we took his picture (against his will) and wrote this that the Banner readers might meet the man who put Pleasant Shade on the map.
 "Where is it everybody dies or marries?"
 Pleasant Shade!
 

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