Contributor vendor Dr. John Holder dies at 66

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

Contributor vendor and longtime Nashvillian John Holder died in early February. He was 66 years old.

Everyone called him Dr. John. He was skilled at chess and loved to fish. He said he loved to sell the paper so he could meet good Christians. He started selling the paper in 2009.

In 2020, Dr. John lost the spot where he sold his papers and his favorite place to eat: Demos in downtown Nashville. The restaurant closed as it lost customers during the pandemic. He had recently secured housing — Executive Director of The Contributor Cathy Jennings said she was feeling like things might finally start to work out for Dr. John.

“His death is sad for me because I had hope that he had a chance,” she says.

Jennings spent a lot of time with Dr. John recently — his new home was close to hers and they had developed a system when she came to the door so he knew it was her, three short knocks and one long one.

“He was a chess player,” she says. “He knew the Queen’s gambit and the Kings. He earned money in prison by hustling chess matches and told me he’d teach me for $20 a game.”

He liked cheap menthol cigarettes, cherry beer and scratch offs and enjoyed listening to B.B. King and other “old school music.” He always wanted to visit Guam, where a friend of his lived.

Director of Vending for The Contributor Tom Wills remembers Dr. John as a “fiercely independent man” who took pride in and loved being a vendor for the paper.

“He camped off some railroad tracks, if memory serves me correctly, and was haunted by vendor Billy White who was hit by a train nearby in 2014,” Wills says.

When The Contributor asked him what his pet peeve was, he said, “people dying on the street from freezing or heat exhaustion.”

Arrangements for a memorial for Dr. John have not yet been made.

DEATH

Dr. John Holder submitted this poem in 2015. It’s based on a passage from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Cowards die many times. But the valiant taste death but once.

Of all the things, it seems most strange to me that man would fear death, a necessary end. It will when it will.