Month: November 2013

School board races, most of them uncontested and all of them drawing ight turnouts, were concluded Thursday in the six incorporated municipalities of suburban Shelby County which intend to operate independent school districts beginning in 2014.

In GERMANTOWN, focus of controversy these days because three of its schools are slated for use by the existing unified Shelby County Schools district, there was one contested race out of five. In that Position 1 encounter, Linda Fisher, with 1,094 votes, defeated opponents Paige Michael (877) and Edgar Babian (616).

Other elected Germantown school board members were Mark Dely, Natalie Williams, Lisa L. Parker and Ken Hoover.

BARTLETT had two contested races — one for Position 2, in which Erin Elliott Berry (1.487 votes) won out over Alison Shores (415); and another for Position 5, won by David Cook (1,552) over Sharon L. Farley (365).

Unopposed for the Bartlett School Board were Jeff Norris, Shirley K. Jackson and Bryan Woodruff.

In MILLINGTON, there were three contested races — Cecilia Haley (306) defeating Oscar L. Brown (236) for Position 2; Jennifer Ray Carroll (394) winning out over Tom Stephens (113) for Position 6; and Donald K. Holsinger (289) besting Charles P. Reed (235) for Position 7.

Unopposed winners in Millington were Gregory Ritter, Chuck Hurt, Cody Childress and Louise Kennon.

In LAKELAND, the top 5 finishers of 7 contenders become the board. They are: Kevin Floyd (642); Laura Harrison (639); Kelley Hale (610); Matt Wright (556); and Teresa Henry (475). Also running were: James Andrew Griffith (288) and Greg Pater (94).

ARLINGTON, which plans to consolidate its school efforts with those of Lakeland, elected five board members without opposition. They are: Danny Young, Barbara Fletcher, Kevin Yates, Kay Morgan Williams and Dale A. Viox.

COLLIERVILLE also elected five board members without opposition. They are: Kevin Vaughan, Wanda Chism, Mark Hansen, Cathy Messerly and Wright Cox.

Radio talk show host Michael Reagan regaled a packed Life Choices audience at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on Central Thursday night with stories about himself — and about his father, the late former President Ronald Reagan.

One tale he told, chronicled in the video above, concerned his father’s morning-after preoccupation in 1981 with the fate of the brown suit he had been wearing when he was shot by the would-be assassin John Hinckley — and the then President’s unusual suggestion as to how the Hinckley family might make amends.

Lamenting that his new brown suit had been cut away from his body and shredded at the hospital, the stricken President said he’d been told the Hinckley family had lucrative oil interests and wondered, “Do you think they’d buy me a new suit?”

The occasion, sponsored by the group’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, was a fundraising dinner for the organization’s Pregnancy Help Medical Clinics. The clinic promotes adoption as an alternative to abortion and provides medical and counseling support toward that end.

Another affecting story told by Michael Reagan concerned the affectionate relationship he developed with the affable but famously remote President relatively late in his adoptive father’s life and how that relationship continued even into the final stages of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s condition.

That story concluded with an account of how the former President, unable to speak and with his ability to recognize kith and kin long gone, still retained enough memory, as his son recalled, “to know that I was the man who gave him hugs” and, by taking “baby steps” toward the door and miming, insisted on one as Michael Reagan was leaving the Reagan household one day after a visit with step-mother Nancy Reagan.

The thrust of Michael Reagan’s remarks, in support of the host organization’s goal, was to emphasize that he, at least one sister, and both of Ronald Reagan’s wives, Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis, had been adopted children and were thus enabled to achieve productive lives. “We were a family put together by adoption,” as he put it.