Flyer books editor Leonard Gill chats with Memphis author and artist Rob McGowan.
Categories
Month: June 2010
- JB
- State Representative Jeanne Richardson and John Farris share a memory
It was a modest ceremony but a star-studded one. A largish crowd of attendees across the span of the lives of Bill and Jimmie Farris showed up Monday afternoon for the dedication of a Farris Room in the campus administrative building of Southwest Tennessee Community College.
The building itself already bears the name of the Farris Building in honor of Bill Farris, the late philanthropist, patriarch, and ultimate mover and shaker who dominated local politics for at least two generations and had enormous influence on state and national government and politics as well. What the Farris Room does is house some of the extensive memorabilia that attached to the lives of Farris and his immediate and extended family, who still make a difference in what goes on.
The eminent personalities who joined the Farris family for Monday’s dedication and ribbon cutting were illustrious to the point of confounding any attempt to list them all. But among them were U.S. Appeals Court Judge Ron Gilman, a former Farris law partner; Rita Clark, who with Farris’ blessing went from homemaker and political activist to become one of the longest-serving Shelby County Assessors; Bobby Lanier and Bobby Bowers, influential behind-the-scenes agents of local government both; serving state legislators galore; and academics like Victor Feisal and Charles Temple, and former state Board of Regents chancellor Charles W. Manning, and Nathan Essex, current president of Southwest Tennessee Community College.
That Southwest exists today as a thriving multi-campus entity is very largely the work of Bill Farris, who did so much to endow it and to unite the former institutions of Shelby State Community College and State Technical Institute so as to create it.
Bill and Jimmie Farris, a community activist and political power in her own right, will be remembered for many things, most of them on evidence in the artifacts of the Farris Room, but the institution itself is an enormous part of their legacy.
- JB
- Members of the Farris clan after the ribbon-cutting
- jb
- Memorabilia on one of the walls of the Farris Room
Categories
Tiger Trivia Tuesday
Six members of the 1984-85 Tiger basketball team that reached the Final Four were drafted by NBA teams (between 1985 and 1988). Name the players and the teams that picked them.
Scott Bomar produced Cyndi Lauper’s new Memphis Blues CD. Read all about it.
Frank’s Market on South Main at Vance may be home now to a convenience store and popular sandwich shop, but once upon a time it was known as Frank’s Liquors, a place for Phillip Sands, an art-history student gone “haywire,” to work. Upstairs, in one of the building’s second-floor apartments, it was also a place for Sands to call home. The derelict South Main neighborhood surrounding it: a place for the young man to take photographs and, in so doing, picture his damaged self.
Today (June 28th) marks the 41st anniversary of the Stonewall riots, a series of demonstrations held after an early morning police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar. The uprising is often regarded as the kick-off to the modern-day gay rights movement. It’s the reason most cities hold their gay pride events in late June.
A new documentary — Stonewall Uprising — chronicles the 1969 raid and subsequent demonstrations as told by Stonewall patrons, journalists, and a cop who led the raid. The film opened in limited release to select cities, like New Orleans and Atlanta, this past weekend.
Memphis wasn’t chosen for the limited release kick-off, but a Malco representative informed us that Memphis may get the film when it becomes available to other cities. Currently, there are no scheduled screenings here for Stonewall Uprising.
Categories
Is BP’s Dispersant Killing Crops?
Reports of mysterious crop damage in Mississippi and Tennessee have some wondering if BP’s dispersant is the cause.
Categories
R.C. Johnson: “We’re Not Done Yet.”
Tiger athletic director R.C. Johnson hosted a “State of the Tigers” luncheon Monday for media and Tiger boosters. Frank Murtaugh has a report.
This report from Mississippi is suspiciously similar to this report from WREG Channel 3 on crop damage in the river bottoms in Tipton County.
Are we going to see massive inland damage from the BP oil spill and the extensive use of the chemical dispersant Corexit? I am reminded of canaries and coal mines. And I am hoping for the best, but this is scary stuff.
UPDATE: After a closer reading of the infowars.com story, it appears the site is using WREG’s footage of crop damage in Shelby County as evidence of crop damage in Mississippi. Which makes this post sort of pointless. Sorry, peeps. Move along. Nothing to see here. Yet.
- Corexit being dispursed in the Gulf of Mexico
Categories
R.C. Johnson: “We’re not done yet!”
Tiger athletic director R.C. Johnson hosted a “State of the Tigers” luncheon Monday for media and Tiger boosters, an enthusiastic endorsement of his program both from a fiscal standpoint and on-the-field developments.
Johnson began by highlighting the academic success among Memphis athletes. The 2.94 GPA average for all athletes establishes a new record at the U of M. Both the football team and men’s basketball team established new standards for their respective programs. Fifty-one percent of Tiger athletes in 2009-10 achieved a 3.0 GPA. “The academic progress we’ve made over the years has been phenomenal,” said Johnson.
- Memphis Athletic Director R. C. Johnson
Johnson applauded both the men’s and women’s basketball program for exceeding expectations in 2009-10, and he noted the three consecutive conference titles won by the women’s soccer team. (“And the entire team is coming back,” said Johnson.)
Johnson presented a series of display boards with pertinent figures, both GPA numbers and fund-raising totals. When the topic of Memphis and a BCS conference came up, the board was filled with a giant question mark.