Month: March 2001

Secret on Stage Road

Dear Vance: Next to the empty Home Quarters hardware store on Stage Road is a patch of woods with a “For Sale” sign out front, and deep in those woods are many abandoned cottages. Most have caved in or burned. There are also stone walkways, one leading to a bridge by a pond, another leading to an outdoor fireplace surrounded by fancy concrete benches. Who once lived here, and when? It’s quite a mystery to my friends and me. – J.H., Memphis.

Dear J.H.: I stumbled upon this place by accident many years ago, when I noticed a long-abandoned concrete driveway leading into that patch of woods, and – nosy parker that I am – instructed my driver to steer the Daimler-Benz down it, while I huddled in the backseat for protection. There was indeed something spooky about these dark woods, and our car crept past a muck-covered pond, crumbling stone bridge, and finally pulled up at the tumble-down ruins of several stucco cottages. I didn’t tarry long. The whole place just seemed like it would be a-crawling with snakes and chiggers and other pesky creatures, and in fact a hive of bees swarmed around the entrance to what must have been the main house, pictured here.

At one time, though, this was a pastoral wonderland. I happen to know this, because a few years ago I chatted with well-known Memphis artist Burton Callicott, who actually helped build the place and told me quite a lot about it (thanks, Burton).

I’ve mentioned Mike Abt’s name in this column a few times, but never devoted much space to him, and that’s a shame, because he was an interesting fellow indeed. Born in Hungary, he came to the U.S. in 1913 and attended the Cleveland School of Art. In Ohio, that is, not on Cleveland Street here. During a sketching trip down the Mississippi, he happened to stop in Memphis and, being just about broke, landed a job here designing department store windows. Precisely which ones, I can’t recall. Anyway, within a few years, he had established himself so well that he became head of Tech High School’s art department and also began designing floats for Memphis’ Cot-ton Carnival and Christmas parades. Those are two separate events, understand.

But back to your query, J.H. In the 1920s, Abt purchased 11 acres of land along Stage Road, which was waaaaay out in the country then, and began transforming the wooded property into a personal fantasyland. He built a Mediterranean-style main house, studio, garage, greenhouse, and lots of other buildings. Over a period of 24 years, he added the fancy barbecue pit you saw, along with a goldfish pond, tennis court, and lots of other stuff, with stone walkways looping through the woods connecting everything.

Callicott, who just happens to be Abt’s stepson, lived there from 1925 to 1932. “Mike Abt just loved to build things,” he told me. “My brother and I helped him dig the cellar by hand. The barbecue pit by the road is reached by stone stairs. I did all that stone work, all the walkways, and most of the stucco on the house.”Ê

Abt died in 1952 at the age of 55. His wife lived there another 10 years, and when she died the family put the place up for sale. But it never sold, and over the years, an interesting assortment of people called the old Abt place home. Among them was puppet-master and Eads Gallery owner Jimmy Crosthwait, who lived there for 20 years.Ê

“I always felt blessed to be out there,” Crosthwait recalls. “It gave you the illusion of seclusion, even though you were between Raleigh and Bartlett. Sort of The Land That Time Forgot.”

In the early 1990s, developers built a Home Quarters and a Target right next to the property, and everyone moved off, thinking the bulldozers were on their way. But they never came, and the old place slowly crumbled into ruins, with considerable help from local vandals and the Memphis weather. “I haven’t been back there,” Callicott told me. “It’s just so depressing that I hate to go. It makes me sad, but we had lots of good times there.”

He’d certainly be sad to see it now. On my last visit to the place in December, bulldozers were knocking down the trees and clearing the land. All the houses are gone. Only the little stone bridge remained – and probably not for long.

Ohman hamburgers? Oh man!

Dear Vance: Many years ago, I remember some of the best hamburgers in town could be found at a place near Madison and Cleveland called the Ohman House. When I came back to Memphis recently, it had disappeared. What happened to the Ohman House? – J.R., Memphis.

Dear J.R.: It closed, and that’s that.

Hmmm – my editor told me that answer, though admirably concise, won’t quite fill up the rest of the column this month. Though I suggested that perhaps we could just run the photos really large, he thought it might be better if I tried to say just a bit more. Okay, then.

The first Ohman House opened at 1358 Madison, just east of Cleveland, in the late 1940s. The odd name suggests it was family-owned, and it was indeed – operated by a fellow named William L. Ohman.

The first restaurant was a rather plain little drive-in, but in 1948 the family opened something considerably more original, called the Ohman Ranch House (below). “An atmosphere of the Old West permeates the place,” said a newspaper announcing the opening, and they were right. You entered the Ranch House by pulling the trigger on an old six-shooter mounted on the front door, and once inside, patrons found themselves in a rustic saloon, complete with rough wood walls and kerosene lamps (actually, they were electric lights that just looked like lamps). Hungry diners chomped on barbecue sandwiches, hamburgers, and steaks. Outside, a gold neon wagon wheel “turned in the direction of Texas,” whatever that means – after all, if it’s spinning, how does it point to anything?Ê

I can’t say for sure if Ohman offered some of the best hamburgers in town, as you claimed, J.R. Even if I could, I won’t. Vance does not endorse, you see.

In the 1950s and 1960s, other Ohman Ranch Houses sprang up all over town. The fanciest one stood at 2439 Summer, near Hollywood. When it opened in 1952, the Memphis Press-Scimitar enthused about the “Spanish mission-style building with a courtyard walled in brick and cypress and planted with yucca and tiny palms.” Inside was the same rustic Western motif, with lots of cactus and rope designs, and again you yanked on a revolver to get inside. The distinctive red tile roof came from the Woman’s Building that had burned some years ago at the Fairgrounds, and the little cupola was surmounted by “a weather vane pointing to Texas.” A weather vane that points in only one direction isn’t much of a weather vane, if you ask me, and . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.

The grandest Ohman House of all didn’t serve hamburgers, though. “You can’t get back a $90,000 investment on 35-cent sandwiches,” Ohman told reporters. Well, you can if you sell – let’s see – more than 257,000 burgers, but I imagine that would take quite a while, so the Summer Avenue location offered considerably more upscale fare. In the early 1950s, in case you were wondering, you could enjoy a tasty T-bone for just $2.85 or a nice filet mignon for $2.15.

The Ohman Ranch Houses thrived during the 1950s and 1960s, but one by one they closed, and the company filed bankruptcy in 1970. The Ranch House site on Madison is today a parking lot. The big place on Summer, now painted a bright shade of orange that even UT fans would hate, today houses an antiques/junk store called the Trading Post.

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Have a question for Vance? Drop it in the mail to “Ask Vance” at:

Memphis Magazine, 460 Tennessee Street, Memphis, TN 38103.

[ÒAsk VanceÓ appears every month in Memphis Magazine]

Well, I am terribly bored with the news. I keep waiting for someone to dig up Clinton’s dead mother and try to pin some controversial might-be crime or misdeed on her, but so far she’s being left alone. I’m sure sooner or later it will come out that our ex-prez pardoned one of Chelsea’s classmates who was suspended for tardiness, but so far Chelsea has been able to keep things quiet. Robert Downey Jr. hasn’t been arrested. We still don’t know the real story about Michael Hooks Jr. and Michael Hooks Sr. and the crack lab– details of which I would love to know. Not that I care, but it would be nice to add that to the list of “hobbies” of our city council members. Elizabeth Taylor hasn’t dislocated anything or married anyone. There’s just not much happening. I did, however, find out that you could be killed for not putting enough money in a parking meter. Yes, the other day I was downtown, and we all know how easy it is to park there. But I did manage to find a spot very close to my destination: a church. Yes, I went to church. Don’t freak out. I was working on a volunteer project and needed to meet with the rector of a certain church that finds itself embroiled in controversy from time to time because its members happen to, for lack of a better term, think outside the box. The said rector happens to be a friend of mine and invited me to stay after our meeting to hear a guest speaker, which sounded like a fine idea to me. So after the meeting and before the speaker, I went back to the car to put more money in. I had put in the maximum amount the meter would allow, plus some that didn’t count because I didn’t know the meter would only register a certain amount. How stupid am I? And how stupid is that whole concept? At any rate, when I went back to the car to put in more money– walking in the rain– it was too late. I had been ticketed and the officer was driving away. So I stuck the ticket in my pocket, put in more money, and went back into the church to hear the speaker. And he was great. Basically said that Jesus was a laid-back kind of hippie with a small group of people around him and he was all about trying to get people to be nice to each other. Simple as that. Just a very cool guy with good ideas. Unfortunately, because of all the zealots out there, that message has been very skewed over the centuries and some people use it to incite hate and even kill each other in the name of religion, which makes absolutely no sense to my simple mind. Nor does the message I finally read in the fine print on the parking ticket. For one thing, there are typographical errors in the type. Sentences end with no period and new ones just start. I’m sure my tax dollars helped pay for this. But the best part is this: On the ticket for parking at an expired meter, it says: AS PRESCRIBED BY ORDINANCE, FAILURE TO RESPOND MAY RESULT IN IMMOBILIZATION OR IMPOUNDMENT OF THE VEHICLE. EXECUTION WILL FOLLOW. Great, I’ve tried to help a volunteer project, I’ve listened to a visiting priest and liked what he had to say, and it’s costing me more than $20– if I don’t forget to pay the ticket, in which case I’m going to be executed. I think I’ll just wait and see what happens.