As the saying goes, you can win a battle and lose a war. That adage also works in reverse. Opponents of the proposed Byhalia Connection pipeline ultimately triumphed at Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission, but only after an early defeat.
The first vote took on the pipeline matter broadly, via a resolution requesting “that the Federal Government review the Byhalia Connection Pipeline permit.” At this point, the would-be partners in the pipeline, Valero Energy Corporation and Plains All American Pipeline, still possess a go-ahead from the U.S. Corps of Engineers.
Invited to make the case for the pipeline, Katie Martin, a spokesperson for Plains, attempted to defuse criticism about environmental hazards and potential dislocations of the low-income area of southwest Memphis the proposed pipeline would pass through. She said the project had experienced “unconscionable bullying” by an unfriendly and biased media.
Justin Pearson, the youthful leader of anti-pipeline activists and founder of MCAP (Memphis Community Against the Pipeline), responded with warnings about the very matters Martin had attempted to debunk.
Commissioner Michael Whaley, co-sponsor of the measure with fellow Democrat Tami Sawyer, focused on “risks that exist with this pipeline” — alluding to one of pipeline opponents’ main fears, the threat of potential pollution of the Memphis sand aquifer, source of Memphis drinking water.
“I have yet to really hear a truly compelling reason why we need it,” said Whaley, who argued “that it would be more beneficial, for the sake of the community, to build climate-friendly infrastructure instead of additional fossil-fuel infrastructure.” And, he said, “Quite frankly, climate-friendly infrastructures could also be drivers of the economy, drivers to create jobs — but not at the expense of quality of life for people in the field.”
Mick Wright, a Republican commissioner, described himself as “torn” by the issue, seeing both sides of it, but said he wasn’t totally convinced by opponents’ arguments. “I’m just not ready on it. We obviously still rely on oil-based transportation, and oil-based transportation has provided a huge benefit. I certainly have benefited from being able to have a vehicle and have traveled throughout the county and throughout the country. I definitely agree that we want to get to a place where we have fuel sources that are there possibly cleaner. So I struggle with this. But I’m just not there yet.”
Nor, on the general case at hand, was the commission. The resolution seeking federal scrutiny needed seven votes to pass but went down by a vote of five to six, with all five GOP members of the commission voting no. They were joined by Democrat Van Turner, who made it clear that he was joining the prevailing side in a tactical maneuver that would enable him to call for a parliamentary reconsideration of the matter at the next meeting.
Things went differently on the more concrete matter that was actually key to the resolution of things on Monday. This was a vote on whether to sell two properties, owned by the county as the result of tax defaults, which the pipeline proprietors need to pursue construction. That vote failed by the overwhelming vote of nine votes against and only two votes for, those of Republicans David Bradford and Amber Mills, and that was the ball game, though the pipeline companies have not yet formally surrendered. (Yet another resolution to remove a small portion of the 38109 ZIP-code area from a moratorium on property sale had lost much of its relevance and passed easily, eight to two, Commissioners Sawyer and Whaley voting no.)
Rangers Jessica Gossett, Jimmy Warren, and
Decoda Muller
(Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
“Who cooks for you?” might be the number one question asked at T.O. Fuller state park in South Memphis. It won’t be asked by visitors. It will be asked of visitors — from a resident barred owl, aptly named Hero.
Barred owls are indigenous to this area and have a distinctive call that sounds like a question to many, specifically the question, “Who cooks for you?” This inquisitive bird found a place at the park’s interpretive center, formerly the golf clubhouse for the old course that closed in 2012. Four years later, this state-of-the-art nature center opened, where injured animals are nursed back to health and released back to the wild.
Who cooks for you? Ranger Decoda Muller and Hero the owl. (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Hero sustained injuries that would not allow him to be released. He shares the center as his home with a screech owl, a turtle, and a corn snake with similar stories. To earn their keep at the center, the resident animals are employed by park rangers for teaching opportunities on and off the park grounds.
Also earning his keep is the fourth park manager in the history of T.O. Fuller State Park, Jimmy Warren, who took the reins from Ranger Calvin Robinson in March 2017. Nearing his four-year anniversary as park manager, Warren, a retired Memphis police officer, talks about park features, activities, and possibilities. He has a personal vested interest in the park, as the first park manager with roots in the area.
Ranger Jimmy Warren poses while holding a terrapin. (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
“This state park was built in 1938 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and was the first state park opened for African Americans east of the Mississippi. It was named after Dr. Thomas O. Fuller in tribute to the man who was an African-American educator, leader, and pastor for our community,” Warren says.
“After 30 years as a community officer, I wanted to come back to my neighborhood and do what I could for my park, my neighborhood, and my community,” Warren continues.
Warren grew up one block from T.O. Fuller Park and attended nearby Mitchell High School. The park was his backyard, the place where he and his family enjoyed all the amenities it had to offer.
His memories include a classmate who lived in the area where the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa stands now. The area was called Chucalissa Village in recent history while Native Americans still lived on the property. The Choctaw Nation tribe, led by Chief Grady Jones, made their own clothes and jewelry, among other things. Warren remembers the daughter of Chief Grady, Mitchell High School classmate Sandra Jones. Her family gifted Warren some bowls made by their tribe. He laments that after seeing an Antiques Roadshow episode where similar bowls were appraised at a high value, his gifts were long gone.
After four years under his leadership, what has Warren done with the park? And what does he have planned? Increasing foot traffic was a goal at the top of Warren’s list.
At the interpretive center, a program has been implemented called Conservation Consequences. It serves the students in local public schools — specifically those in the 38109 ZIP code and Whitehaven. Topics are focused on preservation (including the resident critters) and life skills. Rangers talk about conservation and preservation, while community leaders engage students in conflict resolution skills — and the consequences of not using those skills.
A Tires to Trails grant was recently awarded to the park. It combines efforts to clean up the area with creating ADA-compliant usable trails by recycling old tires that were gathered during a recent MLK Day of Service. A company in Bristol, Tennessee, grinds them to concrete consistency for usable trail-building material.
Current park amenities include a baseball and soccer field, basketball courts, a swimming pool, and tennis courts. Where the golf course used to be is now open grassy and hilly land, an area perfect for watching wildlife.
Aerial views of T.O. Fuller State Park show acres of fields and forest. (Photos: Justin Fox Burks)
Warren says that when he was a kid, he used to watch Eddie Payton — the brother of the former Chicago Bears great, Walter Payton — play golf where the grassy area is now. He vividly remembers Eddie running around the golf course to intimidate his opponents. The intimidation tactic, Warren says, was due to the fact that Payton liked to bet on his golf game but was really bad at golf.
“He [Payton] had these huge legs like tree trunks and wore shorts, so he could run around the course and try and scare his opponents,” reminisces Warren, with a chuckle. “The end result is that I witnessed him lose money, a watch, and various other personal items. He was just bad at golf.”
Warren is happy that the public can now enjoy watching eagles, deer, ducks, and numerous other wildlife species where Eddie used to run.
Many of the plans to increase park traffic have been put on hold or have been transformed to fit current health mandates. Ranger Jessica Gossett is tasked with maintaining and implementing evolving programs as the pandemic rules and regulations wax and wane.
Snake charmer? No, that’s Ranger Jessica Gossett. (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Leaning on her educational background through AmeriCorps and substitute teaching, Gossett says, “Through play, children learn about the environment. Play is learning. Programs focus on hands-on and recreational play. Sometimes that means I just go out there and play games, have fun, and run around with young park visitors.”
Some programs Gossett has in the works, awaiting relaxed health mandates, are a program teaching about light pollution, a weather teaching program (developed by a University of Memphis intern), and a geology teaching program. Future activities she hopes to initiate as more people get vaccinated, include LARPing, yoga, and fieldwork.
Look for tree-planting opportunities in April and a program in development called Backyard Greens that showcases plants at the park — and in your backyard — that were brought by settlers to our area. These include purple deadnettle and henbit, two very similar plants in the mint family. One is invasive. Both are edible. Participants will learn to identify and use these plants, as well as other common weeds, in salads and for medicinal purposes.
For now, most programs are still virtual or on-demand. Gossett recently initiated some virtual programs on T.O. Fuller Park’s Facebook page, which include a Black History series, a Living History series about enslaved and free women, and a Black Women’s Suffrage in Tennessee presentation, in honor of the centennial of the 19th amendment.
Gossett says he has noticed a drop in park visitors who may not know that the day-use area is open. “The day-use area is great to view wildlife. If you are still and quiet, you’ll meet great blue and little blue herons, as well as the occasional beaver.”
Catching a beaver at play one day in the day area, Gossett videoed the semiaquatic rodent and posted its activities on the park’s Facebook page. She’s also come face-to-face with a beaver during a survey of the wetlands.
“Beavers are territorial. While surveying the wetlands for an upcoming wetland hike that is in the works, I was stopped by beavers. By ‘stopped,’ I mean they rammed my kayak. Earlier that same day, I accidentally scooped up a diamondback water snake in shallow waters with my paddle.”
Rangers Jessica Gossett, Jimmy Warren, and Decoda Muller (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
In case you are wondering, Gosset said that the beaver was more concerning. Diamondback water snakes are non-venomous.
Ranger Decoda Muller works in tandem with Gossett but uses a different skill set. Muller, who has a carpentry background, has designed bat boxes with donated supplies. While there are many bats who call the park home, Gossett says she wants more, because she was bitten by a mosquito recently. She hopes to find students or scouts who want to put together, paint, and install more bat boxes throughout the park under Muller’s direction.
Muller is currently presenting the birds of prey and reptile programs on demand. Weed wrangles, traditional hikes, kayaking, plant programs, tree-planting, and birding programs will be scheduled in the near future.
As of now, the pool and basketball courts will be closed this year. Other areas that host low-contact sports are open, including soccer fields, baseball fields, and tennis courts. Reading programs that can be accessed virtually and that feature park storyteller Mother Wit (Joy Scott) and the rangers will be added, as well as prerecorded Native American history presentations.
The 1,138 acres of parkland have lots of self-guided activities, Gossett says, especially after a rain, when the ephemeral creeks (temporary creeks) are flowing.
“Along the Discovery trail near the visitor center, these creeks pop up after a rain. At this time, visitors can find crawdads in the muddy silt and see raccoons who come out to feast on them. Native American homestead features like brick and ceramic remnants can be found while the creeks are running,” Gossett says.
T.O. Fuller is the only state park within the Memphis city limits. The park protects and showcases a unique natural habitat while offering a wide range of outdoor recreational assets. Rangers Warren, Gossett, and Muller invite you and your group to come out and experience the magic.
Cassie Hay and Amy Winston’s Queens of Painfollows the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league.
A year ago, Melanie Addington, executive director of the Oxford Film Festival (OFF), was faced with a terrible choice: cancel the annual festival, throwing away months of planning and jeopardizing the survival of the 17-year-old Mississippi cultural institution, or go ahead with the event as planned, which would pack people from all over the country into movie theaters and risk spreading a deadly disease about which very little was known. Thanks to the timing of the spring festival, Addington was among the first people in America faced with that decision, but she wouldn’t be the last. Days after she announced Oxford’s postponement, the gargantuan South by Southwest festival followed suit.
OFF would go on to become one of the pioneers of the virtual festival, teaming up with the Memphis cinema services company Eventive to stream the films online for a quarantined audience later in the spring. Hundreds of other festivals followed, to varying degrees of success, including Indie Memphis and Sundance.
Now, a year later, with the pandemic still dangerous but the vaccine campaign going full steam, OFF is back in hybrid form for its 18th year. Films will screen in three outdoor locations on March 24th-28th. “We want to be very clear about the aggressive steps we are taking in order to make our film festival safe so our patrons can begin to get back to enjoying the movie-going experience in the company of other people again,” Addington says. “Therefore, we are being very careful with a measured approach utilizing the open-air theater we have designed specifically for this purpose, with safety always first, so we all can enjoy one of the best groups of films we have ever had this year.”
In Jake Mahaffy’s Reunion, a pregnant woman returns to her recently deceased grandparents’ family home.
Opening night films will screen at the Oxford Commons lawn tent, located across the parking lot from the Malco Oxford Commons Cinema Grill. The Passing On is a documentary by director Nathan Clarke about the tradition of Black funeral homes in San Antonio, Texas, and the conflict that breaks out when embalmer James Bryant taps a gay man, Clarence Pierre, to take over his business.
A short drive away, the Oxford High School will host a pop-up drive-in theater in the east parking lot. There, the festival opener will be Drought, directed by Megan Petersen and Hannah Black. Set in 1993, Drought tells the story of Carl (Own Scheid, who is on the spectrum in real life) who, during the historic North Carolina drought of 1993, discovers his uncanny ability to predict the weather. The third screen, located at the Oxford Conference Center, will open with Murder Bury Win. Writer/director/producer Michael Lovin’s film takes place in the world of board games, where three young men have created a game whose object is to get rid of a body. Then, when they are suddenly involved in a freak accident, they try to apply the corpse disposal methods they learned while researching their game.
“The events of the past year have required that filmmakers and festivals alike find creative and innovative avenues for storytelling,” says OFF programmer Greta Hagen-Richardson. “With a narrative feature lineup composed almost exclusively of filmmaker submissions, we spent the year truly embracing our role as a discovery festival. Our filmmakers have taken limited resources and made exciting, fresh, and compelling work for our audience. The unique perspectives presented speak to who we are as a community in a time when circumstances have forced us to exist separately.”
Among the documentaries that will screen throughout the weekend are Queens of Pain by Cassie Hay and Amy Winston, which follows the women of the Gotham Roller Derby league through a season of wheeled combat, and Bleeding Audio, director Chelsea Christer’s portrait of pop-punk band The Matches, who achieved cult success in the ’00s, only to get lost in the transition between the CD era and streaming music.
On the more experimental side, Oxford’s Powerhouse venue will play host throughout the weekend to a series of video projection installations. The program includes 5000 Space Aliens by animator Scott Bateman, a feature-length experimental film that promises some eye-popping visuals that will have its world premiere at the festival on Friday night.
After the in-person weekend, the festival will continue online for the entire month of April, with films streaming on the Eventive platform. The kickoff party for the virtual festival will be held on Friday, April 2nd, with a pop-up drive-in at Cannon Motors with Labyrinth, the fantasy film starring David Bowie considered by many to be Muppet creator (and Mississippian) Jim Henson’s masterpiece.
Check memphisflyer.com for ongoing coverage of OFF throughout the in-person weekend and continuing through the month of April. Tickets and passes are available at oxfordfilmfest.com.
Bob Cooke, Teresa and Reginald Dalle
(Photo: Michael Donahue)
So, how did La Baguette French Bread and Pastry Shop come to be?
The iconic bakery, recently sold to Tashie Restaurant Group, was the brainchild of Reginald Dalle.
Dalle, who is from near Lille, France, got the idea for the bakery while he and his wife, Teresa, were graduate students at the University of Arizona. A French bakery was located around the corner.
“It’s like a dream for every French person to have a bakery,” Reginald says. “So I was really intrigued. Of course, I started to befriend the owner. He was French, from Paris. He had a bakery there.”
The baker said he’d help Reginald learn the business. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come in nights and I’ll show you the job and we can talk about the machinery and how it works?’”
The Dalles planned to move to Memphis, where Teresa is from. Reginald thought about opening a bakery here if he didn’t land a teaching job. In 1975, Reginald got a job teaching French at Memphis State University, now University of Memphis.
But, Teresa says, Reginald “loved that idea of the bakery. He started getting information on equipment, and he made contacts in Paris.”
The Dalles and their friends Bob and Brenda Cooke, Memphians who were at the University of Arizona when the Dalles were there, formed the group of five people interested in investing in a French bakery. They moved into the current location in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza in 1976.
Some equipment was handmade, including a huge marble-top table, still at the bakery, which was “perfect for making pastries and croissants,” Teresa says. The late Guy Pacaud, a French baker who moved to Memphis, was head baker. “He was the one who started the bread.”
The group chose the name La Baguette. In addition to being the little diamonds on rings, “baguette” is the “famous bread. It just rolled off your tongue.” The French word for bread is “pain,” which didn’t sound like a great name for a bakery, Teresa says.
La Baguette was an instant success. “There was a line out the door. We had no clue it would happen. People were walking out the door with a baguette under their arm for the first time.”
Pacaud brought in a chef and other bakers from Paris, so all the pastries were done by French bakers. “All the recipes were from the number-one bakery in Paris, Lenotre, which is really famous for all its pastries. In order to be true to Lenotre’s recipes, we had to follow exactly the correctness for good pastries. So … natural butter, natural ingredients. Everything was really well studied.”
The pastries included croissants, pain au chocolat, Napoleons, and the still-famous almond croissant. “They take older croissants and put a custard in it. It’s the way French were able to use up croissants that didn’t sell the first day.”
When they opened, there was “no French bread, no baguettes, no authentic pastries” in Memphis, Teresa says. “People are used to it now.”
The bakery became a “cultural phenomenon,” Teresa adds. “We had friends who wanted to come down and work there. They thought it was a privilege to be able to sell some of these goods. It was just a really nice happening at the time. Those first few years were a lot of fun. Then it got to be a lot of work.”
La Baguette opened “satellite stores” in Memphis. The bakery also began serving soups and sandwiches.
Reginald taught French and Teresa taught in the English department at Memphis State. In the early ’80s, Reginald took a job teaching French at Memphis University School, where he stayed for 30 years. “He loved the school and realized his true vocation was teaching.”
The Dalles sold their share of La Baguette in the mid-’80s. Paul Howse, an investor, became sole owner in 1987.
“We really felt like we left an institution,” Teresa says. “I felt like we left something good for Memphis.”
La Baguette is at 3088 Poplar Avenue in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza.
We’re a band that likes to rehearse. We like to get together and play.” Guitarist Joe Restivo is telling me about The City Champs, and what makes the soul-jazz trio unique. “We’ve had that chemistry from day one. We just have. It’s easy when we play. In some cases, we haven’t played together for years, but we get together and it’s just like the first day.”
For the Champs, that first day was some 15 years ago, but now, listening to Luna ’68 (Big Legal Mess), their first album in over a decade, that chemistry is as palpable as when they started. One reason they continue to inspire each other may be their determination to keep things fresh. Although their stock-in-trade has been a sound that could easily become formulaic — the organ-guitar-drums trio in the groove-heavy Jimmy Smith vein — they’ve never been constrained by it. Though even that sound is hard to pull off well, the group has brought a more venturesome, explorative approach to that basic foundation from the beginning.
Now, on their long-awaited third album, their explorations have taken them to stratospheric heights. This January, fans got a taste of this from the title track and lead single, which evokes the space-bedazzled “futuristic” sounds of a half-century ago. The same goes for the album closer, “Voyage to Vega (For Felix).” Yet there are no rockets or radio telemetry sounds in evidence: The group creates such otherworldly atmospheres in their own minimalist way. In the right hands, even cymbal rolls and a Hammond B3 organ can sound futuristic. And sitting comfortably in this minimalist mix is a new sound for the Champs: a synthesizer.
It’s used sparingly, a perfect complement to the combo’s core sound. And it’s a flavor keyboardist Al Gamble has grown increasingly fond of in recent years. As drummer George Sluppick notes, “We always bring the influence of whatever other projects we’ve been doing. So Al, playing with St. Paul and the Broken Bones, gets to play synth in that band.” After Restivo brought the title track to the Champs, Sluppick recalls Gamble saying, “‘Man, what if I put some synth on this tune?’ And Joe and I were both like, ‘Hell yeah! Please!’ It’s an analog thing anyway. So to any of the traditionalists who say, ‘That’s not traditional soul jazz,’ well, we’ve never been a traditional soul-jazz band. Even though we leaned farther into that than anything else, we’ve always had our own voice. The fact that Al wants to play some synthesizer, I think is great.”
Gamble’s newfound love of old-school analog textures dovetailed nicely with Restivo’s musical interests. “I’m really into Piero Umiliani, an Italian film composer, a piano player, and synth player,” the guitarist says. “The stuff he did in the late ’60s, early ’70s had a futuristic sound to it. And he definitely had a funk thing, and a jazz context, and kind of a bossa nova context. Really pretty themes. And Al and George are just really open to working on things, so when I bring in original stuff that is not in the Jimmy Smith vein, they’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it!’”
None of which is to say that the City Champs have abandoned their fundamental love of soul-jazz boogaloo. Hearing tracks like “Mack Lean” or “Skinny Mic,” you’d think these astronauts had re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down into a plate of fried chicken. In some ways, these tracks expand the band’s sound as well, with Restivo’s guitar tone sporting more grit than ever. And on “Freddie King for Now,” Gamble’s organ is served with a huge dollop of glorious distortion.
“We made sure the organ was just screaming,” says Restivo. “We developed that song years ago and just kept it around. That song’s like going 100 miles an hour with the top down kind of vibe. A total face melter. Which is not really on any of our other records quite like that. Aggressive. We do that live and we go crazy. We go for it.”
Fossil Fest is on!
(Photo: Markus Spiske | Unsplash)
It’s not every day you have the chance to dig for fossils millions of years old like a real paleontologist. This weekend is your opportunity to try your hand at paleontology — the study of life on Earth based on fossils. This bone-rattling festival will feature intriguing stations, talks, games, and hands-on activities inside and outside the Pink Palace Museum.
Stations include the pewter casting activity station, where the kids can cast dinosaur teeth while you watch master metalsmiths forge a variety of bones and claws and create archeology tools. Dig for fossils and shells at the Coon Creek Science Center station. Don’t pooh-pooh the next activity at the Lichterman Nature Center station, where there will be an owl pellet dissection activity and plant fossils.
Check out fossil tables hosted by the museum’s collections department and discover specimens like a 400 million-year-old fossilized trilobite from Morocco. Compare the teeth of the mammoth, mastodon, and saber-toothed cat. At the Dino Walk, see how their footprints measure up to prehistoric giants. Speaking of giants, the unveiling of a new giant metal mosasaur sculpture created by the Memphis Metal Museum will be big fun.
“It’s a great chance to experience prehistoric times through demonstrations, videos, exhibits, and talks,” says Bill Walsh, the museum’s marketing manager. “Plus, your ticket includes admission to all our exhibits inside the museum.”
If you are aged 21 years or older and enjoy something from a time more recent than the Jurassic period, try something from a two-week fermentation period. The new Museum of Science & History (MoSH) beer made by Ghost River Brewing Co. pairs perfectly with food trucks that will be on-site, including Mempops, Moe’s/Humdingers, and Cousins Maine Lobster.
Make no bones about it, this weekend’s festival will be fossil colossal.
Fossil Fest, Memphis Pink Palace Museum, 3050 Central, Saturday, Mar. 27, 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, Mar. 28, noon-5 p.m., $20 members, $25 nonmembers.
Warren Buffett is known as one of the great investors of all time. At the end of 2020, his 55-year record at Berkshire Hathaway was an annualized 20 percent return per year exactly.
Redditors chasing after crypto and meme stock returns might scoff at 20 percent a year — or 1.53 percent a month — but they’re wrong to laugh. Anyone can earn 1.5 percent or even 100 percent in a good month, but consistently solid returns over years and decades without big drawdowns is the real magic that identifies world-class investing.
I once attended an evening golf workshop where I struggled on the fairway with about 10 other students. The instructor correctly sensed we weren’t PGA tour material and said something I’ll never forget: “I hereby grant each of you lifetime permission to pick your ball up off the fairway and put a tee under it, now and forever.” He sensed that the minor accommodation, though against the rules, would greatly improve our experience and might make us more likely to enjoy a lifetime of golf. He was right. In golf, holes-in-one are like big wins in crypto and meme stocks: celebrated but not reliable or repeatable. What matters is boring, consistent, long-term performance, with as long a time in the market as possible.
Sooner is usually better in investing, but it’s never easy to get motivated. So I have something to offer you: I hereby grant you the right to count contributions to your investment accounts as part of your performance, now and forever.
For example, if you have $5,000 in your Roth IRA, decide to contribute $5,000 throughout the year (that’s just a little more than $400 a month), and at year-end see $11,000 in the account, don’t try to figure out whether you earned 10 percent or 20 percent — give yourself credit for the full 2.2x or 120 percent increase.
Averaging 20 percent returns each year — like Buffett — is not likely in the future, but it’s much more likely to happen when you count the money you put in as part of your returns. Growing your account by 20 percent a year means it will double every four years, regardless of where the money came from.
Just as a real golfer eventually stops using tees on the fairway, over time the impact of new money will be crowded out by actual investment returns as the driver of your account’s increasing size. Keep at it, though, and someday you’ll see the real magic: returns on an investment portfolio in a typical year that rival your annual expenses and even exceed your salary. At that point the idea of financial independence comes into sharp focus, maybe years before you otherwise might expect. Thinking about contributions as returns has helped me build up my own investments through some discouraging times — it turns out markets go down sometimes, too! Counting contributions as part of returns might sound like a gimmick, but if it nudges you in the right direction, your future self will thank you.
Who knows? Thinking this way might help you retire early and take up golf. Just don’t use tees on the fairway until you get permission from my old coach.
Gene Gard is co-chief-investment officer at Telarray, a Memphis-based wealth management firm.
Photographer Russ Schaffer took and posted these amazing photos of a Memphis sunset last week, which he tweeted “stayed for six minutes.”
Posted to Twitter by @russtoday
Baker/Isbell
Posted to Twitter by @julienrbaker and @JasonIsbell
Memphis-based singer-songwriter Julien Baker had a “massive honor” of singing “some Georgia music” with icon Jason Isbell last week. In a tweeted photo, “You can’t see how hard I’m cheesin’ but trust,” Baker said.
Neon Grammy
Memphis bassist and true original MonoNeon got big ups last week for playing on two Grammy-recognized songs. King’s Disease by Nas won and Djesse Vol. 3 by Jacob Collier was nominated.
Did you read the online Vanity Fair article about a few Memphis Country Club types who supposedly took a private jet to Washington, D.C., on January 6th, to help “stop the steal” and participate in that day’s fun-filled and riotous activities at the nation’s Capitol building?
The story, by Abigail Tracy, was called, A PRIVATE JET OF RICH TRUMPERS WANTED TO “STOP THE STEAL”— BUT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO READ THIS. Not exactly a subtle headline, or even a good one, but it got circulated like the hot gossip it was, fueled by viral Memphis social media reposts and tweets.
The story was classic “helicopter journalism,” in which an out-of-town reporter touches down (in the land of the Delta blues, in this case), scrapes together a little history, (shaky) local geography, racial demographics, some socio-economic tropes pulled from helpful local academics, and uses them to underpin what is basically an anonymously sourced story about something possibly outrageous that may have happened.
Can you get Bluff City Bingo? (By Gary Bridgman)
What we do know — and VF reported accurately, via flight logs — is that a jet owned by wealthy Memphis businessman John Dobbs flew to D.C. and back on January 6th. A photo of Dobbs and a group of seven others posing beside that plane was posted for a brief time on an Instagram account of one of the alleged passengers under the tag @memphispatriots.
It quickly spread in certain circles. The presumption being that these eight Memphis bluebloods boarded the plane and flew to D.C. to participate in the insurrection promoted by former President Trump. Within a few days, the photo had been anonymously leaked to local media, including to me. I’m assuming other editors in town did the same thing I did: look to see if we could create an accurate, factual story around the photo. It proved a tough task. Nobody wanted to talk to us. One person did tell me the names of four of the people. She didn’t know the others. Calls to the individuals did not get a response.
So, we had a photo of eight people standing beside a plane. We had an identification of four of them. (A couple days later, we IDed two of the others; none returned calls.) The photo would indicate that these people were about to board the plane. Whether they did, we didn’t know. And if they did go to Washington, D.C., we had no way of knowing if they marched on the Capitol and assaulted cops or spent the day in the hotel bar. Presumably, if they were active participants, the FBI would come calling at some point.
But we didn’t have a story, just rumors and gossip, and media outlets that run unverified photos and unsourced gossip about the people in them often end up in court answering tough questions from libel lawyers.
Vanity Fair has deeper pockets, but they encountered the same stonewall. Then the VF reporter got very lucky. When she called Dobbs, he denied any knowledge of the incident, but he accidentally left his phone on for seven minutes after talking to Tracy, during which time he was heard to say: “Well, I told ’em, I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. … You must be talking about my dad or something. … God, the last thing I want to do is talk to them.”
Busted. The magazine had enough verification that it felt it could run the story, such as it was: Some rich Memphis people probably flew to D.C. in a private jet on the day of the Capitol riots. Also, they participate in the annual Cotton Carnival, a putrid vestige of white male privilege and mock-royalty silliness for millionaires.
Tracy did get some good background quotes from local historian and professor Charles W. McKinney of Rhodes College (who expounded accurately upon the racial inequities in the city), and other academic types. But there were a lot of unnamed sources quoted and the usual pantheon of Memphis tropes used by drop-in reporters were trotted out: Sun Studio, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Stax Records, Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum.
To which I guess we can now add: rich white guys who cosplay revolution, then fly home and don’t want to talk about it.
Nashville jurists — members of the Chancery Court there, especially — have been good to Memphis plaintiffs of late, and Tuesday saw another instance of that.
Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal reversed a prior decision by the Administrative Law Judge, a functionary of the Tennessee Secretary of state’s office, who had summarily dismissed, for alleged lack of legal standing, the plaintiffs’ petition in 2019 on behalf of several then City Council candidates as well as nd Ranked Choice Tennessee. The plaintiffs had sought to have Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) declared consistent with state election laws and implemented on the Memphis city election ballot that year.
The Memphis City Council had rejected IRV as a ballot format, though the process, which allows for successive resamplings of votes cast until absolute majorities are obtained, had been approved in several referenda by the city’s voters.
The Chancellor remanded the case back go the ALJ for review — not a final victory as such for the plaintiffs but a bona fide second chance. Should the Administrative Law Judge rule against the IRV after review, the plaintiffs would then have the opportunity to appeal the case further within the legal system.
All this was noted in a reaction to Moskal’s decision by Steve Mulroy, a University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner, who had represented several of the plaintiffs. Said Mulroy: “The litigation is by no means over, but this is a significant step forward for us. We look forward to the day when a court rules on the merits of our claim, because we are confident that IRV is indeed legal under Tennessee law. Memphis voters supported IRV in three different referenda in two elections, and have been waiting for 13 years for it to be implemented.”
Mulroy was also an attorney for plaintiffs in a previous case heard by another Nashville Chancellor, Ellen Hobbs Lyle, who granted a widening of Tennessee voters’ opportunity to apply for mail-in ballots last year in view of the ongoing pandemic. The Secretary of State’s office was on the resisting end of that case, as well
