The 2-year-old with pigtails thrust a handful of animal-shaped crackers toward Ms. Karen and smiled big.
"Are they turtles?" she asked. "Is that what they are?"
The toddler nodded.
"Or are they fishees?"
The toddler nodded again, and Ms. Karen smiled big.
In the nursery, Karen Stump, at 69, got on her hands and knees to bop the nose of a 3-month-old.
"Hi Jack. Hi Jaaack," she said, her Chicago roots showing in the flat A sound in "Jack." "Whacha doin'? What you doin'?"
Stump, director of Holly Street Daycare in East Nashville, has been through decades of heartbreak. For eight seconds, though, a cooing baby on a blanket was the center of her world.
"When work is stressful, I go into the classroom, and they come up and love on you and hug you," she said.
"It's the best."
The pint-sized huggers have carried her through a lot of trauma, including two tornadoes, COVID, the deaths of her daughter, her husband, and a grandson.
Through the anguish, Stump has built and nurtured a loving village of parents, kids and teachers at Holly Street Daycare, a treasured East Nashville institution since it opened in a house at the corner of 14th and Holly streets in 1983.
"There are many times she could’ve hung up her hat with the disasters and tragedies," said Nick Mattick, a lifelong East Nashville resident who went to Holly Street Daycare as a child.
"She was able to weather the storms, not because she had to but because she wanted to," Mattick said. "Karen, I’ve never seen her give up on anyone."
"Karen shines in spaces of crises and pressure," said Nashville business executive Carolyn Bush, who has two children at the daycare.
Holly Street Daycare hasn't just survived, though. Stump has grown and modernized the facilities while creating a climate in which children, parents and staff form powerful connections. Dozens of children have stayed in touch with each other into adulthood. Several teachers were once children there, plus parents have found longtime friends, employees and clients through Holly Street.
Stump built this community with a combination of Midwestern straightforwardness, strict boundaries — parents are fined $1 a minute if they're late to get their kids — and genuine concern for everyone passing through the daycare, her admirers said.
"She’s the heartbeat, the soul, the drive, the tenacity and the care of that place," said Kay West, a former Nashvillian who sent two children there. "Everything Holly Street is and has been to the parents and children is an expression of Karen."
A nonprofit since 1991, when Stump and six other parents bought it from Stump's sister-in-law, the daycare hosts its annual dinner/auction fundraiser Sept. 19. Stump and more than 10 parents and former students talked to The Tennessean about overcoming adversity and building community in advance of the Holly Street Rocks! event.
She sobbed when she found out she was pregnant
She grew up in Chicago, but Stump always wanted to be a forest ranger. Even went to a small college in bluff country in rural southeastern Minnesota to study environmental biology. Fell for a flannel-shirts-and-jeans-wearing fisherman in her philosophy class, and she married the guy.
Stump liked children well enough, but she said she never thought about having her own.
When the doctor told her she was pregnant in 1981, she burst into tears and walked out of the office.
"I cried and cried," Stump said, smiling. "I thought, how could that be? But it was great."
She and her husband, Rick, had two small children when they moved to Nashville in 1986 in part to be near his sister, who owned a daycare in a house at 1401 Holly St. The neighborhood, like much of East Nashville, saw drug trafficking and other crime.
Karen Stump started working there, for $4.25 an hour, because she needed childcare and a job. She remembers checking the playground daily for used needles, usually finding a few, and once chasing a man down the street after he walked in and grabbed a money pouch from a desk.
"People say it was scary in East Nashville back then," Stump said, shrugging.
In the next five years, Stump fell in love with the kids. She appreciated that Holly Street Daycare was a safe, loving place for all the families, about one-third of whom received state assistance for childcare.
"At the beginning, it was a job; I didn't think it was a mission," she said. "But it is."
When her sister-in-law wanted to sell the daycare in 1990, Stump recruited several parents to form a nonprofit to buy it. She started serving as executive director, started making improvements to the aging house, started being more intentional about connecting parents with each other through phone lists and events.
Stump replaced half of the teachers, hoping to grow more professionalism and kindness among the staff.
She opened her door and her heart to parents and teachers, spending hours listening one-on-one about deeply personal issues, marriage difficulties, work conflicts, finances, abortions.
"I somehow became a counselor," Stump said. "I must've presented a certain aura."
As those connections grew, the daycare had to start a waiting list to get children in. That list is "very lengthy" today, Stump said.
The first tornado hit Holly Street Daycare in 1998.
'Cry and walk and cry and walk'
The tornado ripped through in a few minutes, ripping some gutters off the daycare buildings, destroying the playground, knocking down a tree and knocking out power. The kids were safe, and teachers kept them calm by singing songs and playing games.
Some parents panicked, though, after hearing reports that the daycare had been evacuated.
"One mom drove through everyone's yard to get here, and some parents came in hysterical," Stump said. "I had to say, 'Stop! We have calm kids and I don't want to upset them.'"
A few of the parents had a hard time getting through storm damage to pick up their children that day. Stump stayed until midnight for the last child to reunite with her parents.
Many community members and a dozen or so Metro Jail inmates, accompanied by an armed guard, helped clean up the area and repair the playground. Stump bought Mrs. Winner's chicken for the inmates.
By that time, her husband started doing maintenance at the daycare, and the kids also fell in love with Mr. Rick. The Stumps' kids also started working there part time when they got older, adding to a literal and figurative family feel.
Her second child, Jamie, started working full time in the 2000s, showing particular skill working with children with mental and physical challenges. And all the children loved Miss Jamie's silly voices, especially her British accent.
On Aug. 6, 2012, Jamie Stump died in a car crash in Kentucky while driving to meet the rest of her family at a lake home in Michigan.
Karen Stump took some time for herself before returning to Nashville for the funeral.
"I stayed in Michigan and walked, walked, walked," she said. "I had my dog and my brother's dog, and I would cry and walk and cry and walk."
Hundreds of Holly Street parents and former students send cards and messages. Several parents named an online fundraiser for Jamie Stump, and it raised thousands of dollars for daycare tuition assistance for at-risk families.
Hundreds of people crammed Holy Name Catholic Church for the Aug. 15 funeral.
Within days, Karen Stump and her staff were back at Holly Street Daycare.
"For Karen to be able to compartmentalize that part of her life and still take care of business, her tenacity in her work, is incredible," said Jessica Wilmoth, who has had two children attend the daycare. "Her drive to do right by families of Holly Street is a major part of her."
There was a similar outpouring when Stump's husband died two years later.
"Holly Street rallied around her hard," said Janet Stump, one of Karen Stump's twins, who also worked for years at the daycare.
"I was at both of their funerals around people I didn’t know; that’s how many people care about her."
Only two years after her husband's funeral, Stump faced loss again. Her grandson was born in Hawaii with severe heart issues, and the Holly Street community rallied again, raising $30,000 to help get Stump's son and daughter-in-law from Hawaii to Nashville to get the baby treatment at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. The baby died at 19 days old.
A tornado and a pandemic within two weeks
During a walk-through of the daycare in July, Stump made a beeline for a baby crying on the floor.
"What's wrong, Theo?" she said, lifting the baby while letting the classroom teacher know what she'd just washed her hands in another classroom.
"What's wrong?" she said, turning her attention back to the baby and rubbing his back.
The baby stopped crying in six seconds and started to point at the other babies before cooing and stuffing his chubby fingers in his mouth.
There's no challenge, big or small, Stump hasn't handled with quiet confidence and empathy, her supporters said.
That includes the double tragedy of the pandemic and a second tornado in March 2020.
This time, no one was at Holly Street when the tornado hit March 2, but the winds damaged the playground, the daycare's bus and the toddler house. Power went out, and trees and trash cans littered the neighborhood. The daycare reopened quickly, but COVID kept students home soon afterward.
Community volunteers worked to clean up the playground and put up new fencing. Stump quickly found government aid to keep paying all her teachers for the first year, making Holly Street one of the few daycares in the area to keep its staff intact. It reopened June 1, 2020, months ahead of other childcare facilities.
Many parents said there are many ways Holly Street stands out from other childcare providers, the biggest being how well Stump and the teachers get to know children and their parents.
"It’s not like factory childcare, it’s a lot more personal," said construction project manager Clay Gilmer, who has a 2- and a 3-year-old at Holly Street. "You get the sense that they generally care. And Karen's day-to-day seems to be, what can I do to better the experience for the kids?"
The other way Holly Street stands out is the parents' engagement with the daycare and with each other, and not just after tragedies.
Wilmoth, the mother with two children there, is a tax accountant who has found clients, one employee and some of her best friends in the Holly Street community.
"Holly Street has lots of opportunities for parents to meet each other, and I'm so thankful," Wilmoth said. "I feel like that’s rare."
Stump said she has given little thought to retirement because she loves the children and she loves the supportive and engaged community she has built around them.
"I love coming to work," she said. "We all really are family."
Do you know of another person or nonprofit that drives connection in the community? Reach out to Tennessean Heartbeat columnist Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com.
Holly Street Rocks!
What: Annual fundraiser with live auction, snacks and drinks for nonprofit Holly Street Daycare in East Nashville
When: 6 to 10 p.m. Sept. 19
Where: Center 615, 615 Main St., Nashville
Tickets: The $75 tickets are available online at hollystreetrocks.org
"She went above and beyond to make sure my daughter felt cared for in the moment, so she didn't feel abandoned by her parents," Bush said.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: She's the heartbeat of an East Nashville daycare that has survived it all
