(upbeat jazz music) - This time on "Retro Tennessee Crossroads" Joe Elmore takes us to a big party and you'll never guess who it's for.

Jana Stanfield visits a funky store in Joelton.

Jerry Thompson scares some goats.

And Al Voecks introduces us to a couple of artists who specialize in stained glass.

Absolutely beautiful work.

Hey everybody, I'm Miranda Cohen.

Thanks for joining us.

- I'm Laura Faber.

Welcome to "Retro Tennessee Crossroads".

We're so glad you're here.

(gentle music) (high-pitched tone) (static hissing) (upbeat music) - Every once in a while, the "Crossroads" crew has been known to cross the border and do a segment that is not actually in Tennessee.

I know you've done one.

- I have, one or two.

Yes, we do travel out of state for a story that deserves it, and if a story ever deserved it's this one.

Joe Elmore went all the way up to Kentucky for a party.

Well, I'll just let him explain.

(slow tempo horn music) - It was a beautiful Kentucky Afternoon.

The air was crisp and cool, a perfect day for a celebration.

Old timers came to swap stories, so to spell and reminisce.

Youngsters came to play and tempt themselves with mud puddles and the centerpiece of the celebration was this gem of Southern Americana Penn Store, an old community fixture about to officially receive a brand new addition.

Penn Store sits smack dab on the line between Boyle and Casey counties.

A few miles from Gravel Switch, which is several miles from any place you've ever heard of.

Other than being older than antique, it has the distinction of being the oldest, continuously operated family store west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Outside dogs sleep by the porch while inside local men chew the fat by the stove.

Amazingly little has changed since Hack Pen took it over from his dad in 1933.

The signs are original.

There's still no phone.

A cigar box serves as the cash register, and this, believe it or not, still serves as Hack's Chair.

The store has been a gathering spot for more than 140 years.

Although the owner is modest about its legendary status.

Why do you think they come here?

Why is it so special?

- Oh, just a place to go, I think, for sure.

- [Joe] What do people come here and buy 'em mostly?

- Oh, just a little bit everything.

Pork and beans, gasoline.

- [Joe] Hack's sister Alma Lang remembers the days when their grandfather, Dick Penn, was the original owner.

- He was a drugist, dentist, surveyor and a merchant.

He was granted a grant from the governor to do this.

- [Joe] Well, I guess there's no teeth pulling around here now, is there?

- No, it's been a long time.

- [Joe] Hack's niece, Gene Lang has chronicled the history of this American original, which seems to attract visitors like a magnet.

- I think it strikes a chord in in the heart of people for some reason.

I think everyone has a different little story that they tell about it.

- [Joe] People come to relive the store's history and to remember stores like it from their youth.

Of course, all this company has led to a serious dilemma.

Lots of people, not one bathroom.

- Oh, they going behind the bale, back up on the hill.

- Well, fortunately to the relief of many visitors that problem's about to change today when Penn's Privy is officially dedicated at the Great Outhouse Blowout.

(upbeat country music) Country Music Hall of famer Chet Atkins headlined a four hour concert.

Chet had performed for Princess Margaret just before coming here.

So I had to ask how the last gig would compare with an outhouse dedication.

- I like this a lot better.

(laughs) - You do?

- I really do.

Yeah.

The Princess Margaret thing was kinda like when I started years ago, about 100 people in the audience.

Small room, you know?

So I'd rather be here with a lot of people.

It's a beautiful day for it, isn't it?

(country music) ♪ Well Imogene she never took her hair down ♪ ♪ She said you better off ♪ - [Joe] Singer songwriter Billy Ed Wheeler was appropriately another headliner.

You see, he had a hit song about an outhouse several years ago.

- Well, our outhouse looked a little bit like this.

It really did.

I was born, raised up in West Virginia, and we didn't have indoor plumbing until I was about 16.

Really.

So I did a lot of research.

- [Joe] Of course, the real star of the celebration was Hack Pen, a man besieged this day with fans and admirers.

- We couldn't get in to see you.

- We wanna shake your hand?

- Yeah.

(group laughing) - [Woman] You gotta turn around, smile.

- [Joe] I got the feeling that Hack Pen would just as soon do without all this celebrity attention.

- You thank me.

(laughs) - [Joe] Finally, after an afternoon of food, music, and memories, it was time for the finale.

A special moment in the history of a special store.

(man vocalizing) (audience clapping and cheering) - And we're gonna go dedicate right now.

You better hurry.

I'm gonna be first.

(audience cheering and clapping) - [Joe] And so it was official, the dedication of Penn's Privy at the Great Outhouse Blowout.

Of course, it was only fitting that the namesake got to be one of the first occupants.

You think having an outhouse here is gonna change things too much?

- (laughs) It might make it look a little too modern.

Might be.

(laughs) No, I don't think it will.

(gentle country music) - Well, that was quite a potty.

- (laughs) It was a great story.

A lot of windbreakers in that story.

Did you see?

A lot of, we fought the wind hard back in the nineties.

- Yes, we did.

Well, from one quirky story to another this week.

- Yes, Laura, they sure were adventurous in those first few seasons.

And this story is no exception.

Jana Stanfield took a risk and popped into a store most people would just drive right by.

And it just proves that old saying, don't judge a book by its cover.

(upbeat piano music) - If you're looking for the Z Store, start here and follow the sound of the Cajun piano.

As you get closer, you'll find yourself at the gateway to Cheatham County.

It's the only spot in the universe that can say it's on the outskirts of Joelton, Whites Creek, Ashland City, and Nashville.

Specifically, the Z Store is at the crossroads of Old Hickory Boulevard and Eaton's Creek Road.

When you get there, you'll know you've arrived.

In addition to the skeletons making music on the wall of the Z Store, you'll also find a historical marker.

A lot of people call it a hysterical marker in the shape of an unknown animal wearing a stocking cap.

The marker states that on April Fool's Day 1785, nothing at all happened on this site.

But on April Fool's Day, 1985, all hell broke loose because that's when the Z Store opened.

The owner and chief proprietor of the Z Store is Gean Dunlap.

Gene is a professional musician who started out in a band with his brothers at age 14.

Since then, he's played with everyone from Loretta Lynn to Dean Dillon.

In '78, he wrote a number one, Mel Tillis hit called "I Believe In You".

Now, Gene plays piano with Far and Young, but when he's not on the road, you'll find him at the Z Store.

How did you get started here?

- I got off the road in '85 and just looking for something else to do for a while instead of playing for a living.

I just was gonna do it for a little while till I got bored and wanted to go back on the road or something and liked it.

It's a lot of fun.

So ended up being here seven years so far, and I still like it.

- I understand.

The question most people ask at the Z Store is, how did it get the name?

- I'm from Louisiana originally and I thought just add a little French touch to it and call it Z Store.

(laughs) Of course, nobody calls that.

They call it the Z Store now.

(Gene and Jana laughing) - [Jana] The name is not the only thing that's unique about the store.

Inside you'll find displays of art by neighborhood children and by neighborhood adults.

Lying somewhere near the door, you'll find the Z Store mascot, a dog appropriately named Dog.

There's a bulletin board full of photo entries for the Miss Z Store pageant, which was won last year by a local man in his sister's clothes.

Madam Zula and her dog Zenith are entering in the human and pet categories.

Undoubtedly, the most unique thing at the Z Store is the tick collection.

Hundreds, yes, hundreds of ticks on display.

- (laughs) Oh yes.

But as you know, there's a lot of ticks out in this area.

They're just everywhere.

And so every year, the best way to get ticks off is take Scotch tape and especially little seed ticks and just tape 'em off.

And so looking for a place to put 'em.

So we just got a big white board and started sticking the scotch tape on the board and became a tick collection.

This wasn't really planned.

It just happened.

- [Jana] Is it famous?

- Would be now.

(Gene and Jana laughing) - [Jana] Speaking of collections, Gene Dunlap never has any trouble collecting When customers buy on credit.

If the signs around the cash register aren't enough to bring the money in on time, Z Store supporter, Marc Gullen says he makes house calls.

- Well, actually, I'm a professional wrestler and I'm a longtime friend of the owner here and I'm in charge of crediting collections here at the Z Store.

- [Jana] Yeah, and what do you do to collect?

- Well, I show up, usually works pretty well.

Stand there and say, do you realize how big your bill has gotten at Z Store?

And I want the money now.

(Jana laughs) It works every time.

- [Jana] Marc Gullen is one of the many neighbors in the area who help with the Z Store.

Local artist Diane Patrick contributed the colorful artwork that makes the Z Store so eye catching.

The day we visited Linda Gray and her daughter Amanda, were helping out inside.

The man who made the hysterical marker is Duck Proctor.

He says, neighbors are glad to run the store for Gene when he travels.

- Oh, well, we all just pitch in and help everybody around neighborhood.

I've been there 7 to 6 years.

I know just about everybody in the country.

So I've been knowing old Gene since about 1953.

And we just all like him and everybody just pitches in do what they can for, you know.

- [Jana] Gene Dunlap returns the favors whenever he can.

When Duck Proctor wanted to make a record, Gene and Marc put together the Z Store band to back him up.

♪ I just wanna be alone with no one else around ♪ ♪ Then I thought ♪ - [Jana] It's hard to tell whether neighbors come to the Z Store because they like to see each other or because they like to see Gene.

Either way Gene Dunlap appreciates all the people in the area who help make the Z store the one of a kind place that it is.

- In Louisiana, we used to, they have a word for it, called coup de main means like a helping hand, like neighbors, helping neighbors, like somebody gets sick and everybody in the neighborhood would chip in and help.

And there's been one big long coup de main here for me.

All my neighbors have chipped in, helped me ever since I've been here.

And I wanna say thanks to all my neighbors.

(upbeat piano music) - [Jana] During our afternoon at the Z Store, one neighbor said, "She was afraid that if we showed how nice their little community is, too many people would want to move there."

She said, "To be sure to mention that in addition to having a lot of ticks in the area, they also have really big rattlesnakes."

- Thanks Jana.

Wonder what happened to those ticks now in the tick collection.

I don't wanna think about it.

Well, next we have another story from Jerry Thompson.

And it's a gem.

- That's right now, they were mostly gems, but every once in a while you get a special treat.

It is not every day you get to watch a "Crossroads" producer do his best goat call.

Is that a thing?

Well, whether it is or not, here's Jerry doing whatever Jerry does.

- You know, most of you know I grew up in the country and I still live in the country.

I choose to live there because it reduces my stress level.

It gets me away from city traffic, noise, and all in all, in short, it makes me less nervous.

Now, while country living does that for me, it doesn't necessarily do that for all things.

Take these goats, for instance.

(metal banging) (birds chirping) It only took a loud noise for three of the goats owned by Dr.

Virgil Laquire to stiffen and fall to the ground.

The goats are commonly referred to as nervous goats or fainting goats.

But in reality, they're neither.

They suffer from myotonia, a form of muscular dystrophy, a form that also affects humans.

- That one is too.

- And while certain forms of the disease can be painful to humans, the form that affects goats is painless.

Dr.

Jim Atkinson of Vanderbilt University has done an eight year study of the goats.

And research is currently ongoing in several universities trying to determine the cause of myatonia in the goats.

Once this mystery is unlocked in the goats, there's real hope for duplicating it in humans.

What, what do you think about these goats?

- Well, they're a good animal model for a human muscle disease called myotonia.

In fact, they're the closest known animal model for a human disease.

Not just muscle disease, but human disease in general.

And their idea for, ideal for trying to gain insight into what underlies these various muscle diseases.

- [Jerry] Well, for many years it was thought that these goats actually suffered a nervous disorder.

- Right.

- But you all found out now that it's strictly a muscle thing.

- Right.

It was actually early or in the 1930s, Dr.

Sam Clark, who was here at Vanderbilt, was the first to determine that the disease was localized only to the muscle.

Didn't have any involvement with the nervous system, but farmers still like to call 'em nervous goats.

- Here goatie, goatie.

Here goatie, goatie.

I was fascinated by the goats and their reactions, but they were a little shy.

So I used my best goat calling technique.

Come on.

Obviously honed to a fine edge by my many years on the farm to see if I could coax 'em back out into the open.

Come on out and talk to me.

Hello Billy.

How you doing, Old Billy?

Come on.

Here goatie, goatie.

These two goats seem to fall out just because of my presence.

Oh.

I still insist they had a myotonic seizure.

However, Susan Allen, a member of the Channel Eight crew, says they were only overcome by laughter.

They were laughing at my goat calling.

Okay, Billy boy.

Hey Billy boy.

Well, from what little I know about 'em, all the goats in existence now can actually be traced back to Middle Tennessee.

- That's right, that's right.

In the late 1800s the myotonic goats appeared in Middle Tennessee.

And all goats that have been found in other areas, other parts of the country have always been traced back to this area.

- [Jerry] A moment I thought the disease might be catching, possibly even spreading to the family dog.

As it turned out, the dog was just playing.

Fellow that allegedly brought these goats to Middleton, he was kind of a mysterious fellow, wasn't he?

- Right.

Apparently, from what little documentation we have, there was a strange appeared down in Marshall County in the late 1800s and he had with him three or four goats and a cow.

He was thought to have come from Canada, but it wasn't really sure he was a quiet person.

He settled down there for a year or so, worked on a farm.

And then as mysteriously as he showed up, he disappeared one day.

But in the meantime had had sold his goats to one of the local farmers.

And again, that that seems to be the first description of myotonic goats.

- Nobody's ever heard of him.

- No one ever heard of him since.

- [Jerry] That strange man left as mysteriously as he appeared.

But he left behind an even bigger mystery, the nervous goats of Middle Tennessee.

- Okay, I actually learned a few things in that story.

- I did, I did too.

I'm gonna be very calm around goats.

- Same.

- You don't wanna scare 'em.

- Same.

- You don't wanna scare 'em.

- Okay, onto our final story this time.

- Yes, and it is another great one from the great storyteller All Voecks.

"Crossroads" has always featured lots of artists doing lots of different things.

And way back in 1988, Al found a couple perfecting the age old art of stained glass.

- There are many ways an artist can create a masterpiece.

Some use a camera, others use a canvas and a brush.

Some with oil, some with watercolors.

Some people can take a chunk of wood and a chisel.

Others use a pocket knife.

There are artists who work with clay, with metal, or even with grapevines.

An artist is anyone who can take just about anything and create something of value.

The material Jan and Drew Trahan use is glass.

Their classic glass studio is located about five miles north of Smithville on Highway 56.

With roots in Florida and Missouri why locate their studio in DeKalb County?

- I had started looking to move out of Fort Lauderdale two years before I moved.

And we had looked through Missouri, we'd looked through Northern Georgia, we'd looked through the Carolinas 'cause I was looking for something with relatively mediocre weather.

Not real cold, not real hot.

When we were in north Georgia in the Carolinas, we saw nothing but Broward County license tags.

One of our retired captains asked us to stop in Smithville to visit a friend of his.

And we fell in love with DeKalb County while we were here visiting his friend.

- [Al] You were at the time a firefighter.

- Right, I had been for 12 years.

And when we moved here, I could not find a job on the fire department and I could not find a job in the sign paying field that I had also apprenticed in before I left.

And Hartsville had just laid off, so there was no carpentry work available.

So we turned to the glass and this is where we stand today.

- [Al] Let's turn to the glass.

You get an idea what happens from that point?

- I get an idea.

I usually make a few notes on a piece of paper.

The idea usually comes driving down the highway, usually late at night.

I come back in the studio and we start making sketches.

We've been wanting to do a jukebox for quite a while, and the jukebox has been in the drawing process for four months now.

That's not to say that I work on it every day.

It just means that we've been wanting to do one for about six or eight months and it's finally, it's gotten to be four months to where it's actually, I think you can see what this perhaps is gonna look like.

I don't think, I think we're gonna put this all, it won't be flesh.

This is just gonna be a shadow.

- Okay, it's gonna be a silhouette.

- It's gonna be a silhouette.

- A silhouette.

Okay, great.

- [Drew] I've got a pretty good idea of what I wanna do with the jute box.

I'm not sure what I wanna do with the girl that's in the jute box.

Until I find the right piece of glass, we will not execute the jukebox.

- [Al] And then each piece is individually cut?

- [Drew] Each piece will be individually cut.

(knife scraping) The edges will be ground.

(toll whirring) The piece will be foiled.

And then soldered and then framed.

We use a 50/50 lead tin solder and a 250 watt iron.

And what we'll do we, we use a copper foil, which is what the solder is adhered to, and we actually run a beat of solder on each side of the piece of glass and it forms an I beam.

And that's what holds all your glass together.

- [Al] I would imagine when most people think of stained glass, they immediately think of a church.

And yet you have piece here that you have done that are absolutely clear.

- [Drew] The same process is used.

It's just that we're using clear textures to convey the idea rather than stained glass to convey the idea.

Even in the, even in the stained glass that we use quite a bit of it is what we call cathedral glass.

In that although it's colored, it is not opaque.

You can still see through it.

That's a custom beveled flamingo.

The bottom glass we were hoped would depict kind of a water.

It's a, it's what they call a heavy ripple.

It's manufactured by spectrum.

Just above that we've used a clear baroque, which to me looks like sky.

And where the flamingo, the round circle part is flying into is an English Flemish glass.

- [Al] You have a floral design that can go beside a door.

- [Drew] The main background glass is a glue chip glass.

And we have used that specifically in the sidelight because it would convey the idea to our customer that if they can still have a lot of light come through, yet they can have privacy from somebody seeing in.

- [Al] You are an artist with glass.

- Yes, I, I suppose you'd say that.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) (upbeat jazz music) - Okay, Laura, that will do it for this week, another episode of "Retro Tennessee Crossroads".

- Be sure to check out our website to watch these and many more of your favorite stories.

Thanks for joining us, everyone.

We'll see you next time.

(gentle music) (upbeat music)