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Shelby County Election: The Partisan Snare

CREDIT: Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

The weekend imbroglio resulting from the publicizing of the involvement of a nominal Republican primary candidate for assessor with a racist and anti-Semitic hate group, and his subsequent shunning by the local GOP, illuminates several issues pertaining to our current system of electing public officials.

The most obvious is the simple fact that we are insisting on selecting  people for countywide offices — including several ordained by the state constitution — through a process that requires them to profess loyalty to one of two political parties and to pass judgment by that party’s voters in a primary before gaining eligibility to run in the county general election.

Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

Yes, yes, we know that technically that’s not the case. We know that no aspirant for county office is mandated to wear a party label. Lots of independents declared for county office this year, and they will be on the general election ballot of August 2nd, right along with the candidates nominated by the two major political parties in the primaries that ended on Tuesday of this week.

But let’s face reality. These independents are on a course to lose en masse. To run for office without a party label in a partisan election means to run against what has become an ingrained tradition. It means running without the resources and network of supporters that are built into the party system. It means to attempt the near-impossible.

It was not ever thus. There was a time, through the early 1990s, when all candidates for Shelby County office ran as independents, even if they were well-known activists in the Republican or the Democratic Party. It was not uncommon for major candidates to have prominent members of both parties in their support networks; in fact, to have good, bipartisan, across-the-board backing was the rule for a successful campaign, not the exception.

All that changed in 1992, when the Shelby County Republican Party petitioned the Election Commission to hold a partisan primary for the two county races being run that election year — those of assessor and General Sessions Court clerk. The Democrats found it necessary to follow suit in 1994, when the next fully rostered county election took place. Veteran public servants, in jobs that had little to no bearing on specific political philosophies, were put in a squeeze. Experienced clerks who had always run as independents either had to choose a party or risk losing to candidates who did.

Meanwhile, the two parties attracted members whose sole interest was in the protective political cover these organizations provided at election time, not anything to do with their governing philosophies. (To resort to an old saw, what’s the Democratic or the Republican way to register deeds?)

Keith Alexander actually became the Republican nominee for assessor four years ago, and his attempted use of that disguise again in 2018 — with the prize at stake being the ancillary advantages, financial and otherwise, of major-party backing — is all the warning we need to abandon the current treacherous and needless partisan structure for future local elections of all kinds.

We can’t say we don’t know better.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tennessee’s Waffle House (and Senate)

The odyssey from his home state of Illinois to Tennessee of Travis Reinking, the armed assailant who killed four people at a Nashville-area Waffle House early Sunday morning is instructive, especially considering information given to the media from Nashville police chief Steve Anderson after a manhunt resulted in Reinking’s capture on Monday.

As Anderson explained things, Reinking had been violating no Tennessee laws until he started pulling the trigger in the wee hours of Sunday morning. This was despite the fact that Reinking was on record as having violated firearms laws in his home state of Illinois and had been dispossessed of four different weapons after a series of misadventures both there and in Washington, D.C.

On a visit to the nation’s capital, the obviously disturbed young man had been arrested by secret service agents when, bearing the aforementioned firearms, he attempted to enter the White House for a “meeting” with the president.

After the White House incident, Illinois state police revoked Reinking’s license to own firearms and confiscated his four weapons. They were turned over to Reinking’s father, who seems to have compounded the prior violation of Illinois law by returning the guns to his son. They were in young Reinking’s possession when he subsequently moved into Nashville, the capital city of a state whose legislature has in the last decade struck down virtually every known and every possible restriction on possession and use of firearms.

Most recently the General Assembly, where the National Rifle Association’s word is the closest thing to holy writ, has given serious consideration to a “Consitutional-carry” bill that would allow any citizen to carry weapons about his person at will, and, failing that, to legislation that would recognize as valid in Tennessee such gun-carry rights as may have been granted an individual by the laws of any other state. As of now, however, if Chief Anderson is correct, transgressions of law in other states seem not to be honored within Tennessee’s boundaries.

Whenever gun violence erupts somewhere, opponents of gun regulation legislation, in Tennessee and elsewhere, have learned to shift attention away from such sensible restrictions as strengthening background checks and, in particular, closing the infamous gun-show loophole, which allows unimpeded over-the-counter sales of firearms. One of the gun lobby’s favorite diversionary tactics has been to change the subject, usually to pretend grave concern for the mentally ill, blaming all eruptions of deadly violence not on the weapon that accomplished them but on the mental state of the perpetrator.

After the Waffle House shooting in Antioch, Democrats in the Tennessee legislature called this particular bluff, attempting to offer legislation in the closing days of the current General Assembly that would make it difficult-to-impossible for someone diagnosed as mentally ill to possess a deadly weapon. Did the Republican majority, many of whose spokespersons in office have invoked “mental illness” rhetoric whenever a gun is fired in anger, consider the legislation? They did not. Instead they blocked any such legislation from consideration as the legislature prepared to adjourn for the year.

The site of the shooting in Antioch is not the only place where the word “waffle” deserves to be in the title.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Herenton’s Choice

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The re-emergence of former Mayor Willie Herenton as a candidate for Memphis mayor again in the city election of 2019 was a genuine surprise from the MLK50 week of events and  — in Herenton’s telling, anyhow — was a direct outgrowth of the re-arousal of progressive hopes that came with the kindling of Dr. King’s memory.

Justin Fox Burks

Willie Herenton

Herenton set himself forth as someone who could lift up the martyr’s fallen standard and take the stranded mission to completion. We harbor no disrespect for Herenton, who — before and after his 18 years of service as the city’s chief executive — was a schoolmaster, first and foremost, and who has, publicly and often, expressed the hope of being able to resume that highly useful trade at the charter level. And, in fact, we have vivid memories of our former mayor’s abilities, strength of personality, and determination to succeed.

After the stealth passage of the iniquitous “toy towns” bill in the 1997 legislative session threatened to hem in Memphis’ possible expansion within a ring of under-populated MacMunicipalities, it was Herenton and Herenton alone who resolved to fight a long-odds battle against the powers-that-be in state government to turn back the measure. Almost no one expected him to prevail, but prevail he did, when the state Supreme Court found the toy towns bill to be unconstitutional, in that it had sneaked by unsuspecting urban legislators in the form of a misleading bill caption.

Herenton’s triumph was the city’s — and that of all Tennessee municipalities potentially affected by the city-killing bill — and it led to a new, duly considered and less Draconian revision of cities’ annexation privileges and to a long overdue reform of bill captioning in the General Assembly.

All of this is to say that the man had his moments, and, of course, the mere fact of his ascension as Memphis’ first elected black mayor was historic and then some. But, especially given the careless hand and outright boredom with the job evinced by Herenton during the latter years of his mayoralty and his one-sided defeat by Representative Steve Cohen in an ill-advised Congressional race in 2010, we fear he’d be wasting his time and risking further embarrassment with another mayoral race at the age of 78.

And there’s another matter: with apologies to then Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s rebuke of Dan Quayle in a 1988 vice-presidential debate: Mayor, we knew Martin Luther King; Martin Luther King was a friend of all mankind’s. Like yourself, we just got through venerating his memory; and you are no Martin Luther King.

That’s not the put-down it may seem, because the fact is, Dr. King had no peers. The surest proof of that is that no one else, in or out of his circle, was able to revive the planned revolutionary Poor People’s Campaign that was disrupted by his murder.

We thank you for your past work and for your offer of new service, Dr. Herenton, but, as we look to the future and its challenges, we’d prefer that you’d join with us in looking for and developing the new blood that will guide our destiny in decades to come. You can do that as a teacher and guide, as you have been planning up until now.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

King’s Incomplete Mission

So MLK50 has come and gone, and the city, by and large, managed to acquit itself well with its advance preparations, its attention to the occasion, and the meaning of that occasion to history and the world at large, as well as with the welcome provided to the numerous visitors, distinguished and otherwise, who came to pay homage to the great martyr who fell here half a century ago.

It is an awkward thing to construct an anniversary ceremony out of what, by Greek or Shakespearean or any other standard, is a tragedy, as the vocabulary used by those who covered the various events indicated. “Commemoration” was the word most often used, though here and there, from the lips of the most well-intentioned commentators, would come variations on the word “celebrate.” Clearly, in such cases, it was Dr. Martin Luther King himself, not the ill fate of his assassination, that was being celebrated, but there were still twinges that came with hearing the word or its derivatives.

Nevertheless, there are indeed things to celebrate in the wake of MLK50. The various commemorative marches, of sanitation workers and others, came off with a respectful dignity that reminded us why it was that King was in our midst on the fateful day of April 4, 1968. He had come with a high-stakes task — to lead a nonviolent second march on behalf of the striking sanitation workers to prove that the unruly one — sabotaged by vandalism — that he had attempted a week earlier had been an aberration and that his presence and leadership could still guarantee a nonviolent mass demonstration. King was committed to what he saw as the most transformative mission of his life, a Poor People’s March scheduled in the coming week for Washington, D.C. — one intended to begin a months-long assault on the reality of poverty in the United States. So long as the memory of his original violence-tainted march in Memphis was not offset by a successful second one, people’s trust that his methods of peaceful nonviolence would prevail in the nation’s capital was at serious risk.

After King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign, lacking another leader of equivalent stature, moral clarity, and charismatic appeal, was doomed to failure and, essentially, was abandoned. In that sense, the aborted second march by King in Memphis had been the last best hope for the revolution in national consciousness he had hoped to bring about.

Maybe it is true that, as the proverb says, the poor will always be with us. The much-vaunted War on Poverty launched by President Lyndon Johnson only three years earlier had begun to fizzle out, undermined by the pull on national resources of the Vietnam War (opposition to which had also become a central tenet of the civil rights leader’s mission). King had meant to test that thesis of intractable poverty, and no leader, religious or political, has emerged since with sufficient empowerment and wherewithal to pick up the standard.

So it is that, for all the local triumphs that can be justly attributed to Memphis for its handling of the the 50-year commemoration, the fact remains that the city, reckoned by so many measures as the most impoverished urban clime in the nation, is an ironic example of the incompleteness of Martin Luther King’s mission.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Jesse Jackson on MLK: “He Has Left This Place”

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As the events and speeches and remembrances of this week have reminded us, it has been 50 years since the death of the great civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He came to Memphis on a mission of social justice and redemption, on behalf of sanitation workers who were striking not just for better working conditions or on behalf of a union, but for simple human dignity and the right to say, in the famous words of signs carried en masse by the strikers and their supporters: I AM A MAN. 

Jackson Baker

Jesse Jackson

Those 50 years ago, a young African-American minister named Jesse Jackson was with King on his mission here, as he had intended to be on King’s forthcoming Poor People’s March in Washington, for which the sanitation strike had come to serve as something of a warmup. Jackson was with King also at the Lorraine Motel when he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet, to become a martyr to the various causes of compassion and Christian justice implicit in the mission of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It was only appropriate that one of the first acts of commemoration in Memphis of King’s sacrifice should come on Easter Sunday, in a homily delivered by the Rev. Jackson, who in the intervening 50 years came to be a major avatar of social justice in his own right. And it was further appropriate that, bowed somewhat by advancing years and a newly diagnosed case of Pakinson’s disease, he should be delivering his message of remembrance and redemption to a predominantly white congregation at St. John’s Methodist church, symbolically bridging the racial gap that King had sought to eradicate and simultaneously expressing the sense of unity of blacks and whites and all human kinds that King thought belonged to his last mission to eradicate the ultimate injustice of poverty.

At the conclusion of his homily, Jackson pointed out the resemblance of King’s fate in his last days to that of the Christ of the gospels. Memphis, he said, was where the great martyr found his Calvary. Foreseeing the crowds that were expected to be in attendance this week at commemorative ceremonies at the site of the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, Jackson said, “But he is not there. The stone has been rolled away.” The lies, animosities, jealousies, and attacks King endured in his life, not only from white racists but also from ambitious militants impatient with his nonviolent means, could no longer touch him in his resurrected state. “He has left this place.”

All of us, said Jackson, all who would dedicate themselves to justice, must go through a ritual crucifixion of sorts, followed by a triumphant resurrection of spirit. He led the congregation at St. John’s in a litany in which they repeated his words, which recapitulated a necessary cycle: “We must go through Friday to get to Sunday. We must go through suffering and doubt and fear and make tough choices. … In the tug of war for the soul of our nation, we must not go backward to hurt or hate. Thank Jesus. Long live Martin Luther King. God bless you!”

All things considered, and regardless of the various faiths of the attendees gathering here in Memphis, it was hard to imagine a more appropriate message to initiate this week of remembrance.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Calling B.S.

In the wake of the tragic shootings at Parkland, Fla., student Emma Gonzales famously called B.S. on some of the evasive pseudo-solutions to gun violence being talked about. So did this week’s Flyer editorial about the absence of serious proposals on the subject from a debate for GOP County Mayor candidates. Go here to read.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Calling B.S. on Fear of Gun Regulation

Surely even the most recalcitrant and reactionary of persons on the issue of gun violence had to be impressed by the energy and commitment of the young Americans involved in last weekend’s March for Our Lives. Hard as it might have been to imagine it in advance, the entire extravaganza — in Washington as well as in most of the several score other American cities with mini-marches — was planned, staffed, and executed by persons aged 18 or under. (The only exceptions were some of the entertainers who took part, who tended to be oldsters in their 20s.)

Yet it may also have been true, as the 68-year-old 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen said in a luncheon address to the Rotary Club of Memphis at Clayborn Temple on Tuesday, that the majority of the throngs gathered to watch were “kids my age or older.”

We can only hope that the middle-aged and elderly among us are indeed not too jaded to have understood the message of those representatives of the younger generation who had personally endured the terror and risk of over-lenient gun trafficking, as those kids from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, surely had.

And that clear and obvious message was quite simply: Do something! Unfortunately, the power and reach of the NRA and other parts of the gun lobby are such that, as a pained Cohen had to inform Rotarians, the governing Republican majority in Congress has no appetite to do anything at all.

It would be comforting to believe otherwise, yet this reluctance to act on an obvious problem was also reflected as recently as Monday night, two days after the march, at a forum of county mayor candidates right here in Memphis. Three Republican candidates — County Commissioner Terry Roland, Trustee David Lenoir, and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos — participated in the forum at Rhodes College and, for the most part, they acquitted themselves remarkably well.

It was only on one subject — that of gun violence — that they drew a blank. Lenoir’s solution to the specter of gun violence was to recap his major campaign themes — “good jobs, great schools, and safer neighborhoods” — along with an exhortation to “prosecute criminals to the full extent of the law.” Touliatos, who cited her penchant for taking crackers out to the hungry among her Juvenile Court charges, advocated showing children “that somebody cares for them.”

Only Roland, emphasizing his membership on the board of a mental-health agency (who knew?) came within a country mile of any solution that is part of the current national dialogue, and he undermined his call for more attention to the mentally ill with the over-flip remark, “When you show me a gun that goes off and kills somebody by itself, then I’ll support gun laws.”

All in all, that part of the Republicans’ mayoral debate was exactly the sort of thing that Emma Gonzáles meant when, in the aftermath of the gun-murder of 14 of her classmates and 3 faculty members, she made a speech dismissing any and all evasive pseudo-solutions to the tragedy with the words, “We call B.S.!”

So do we, and we can only hope that something more substantive emerges from exchanges between mayoral candidates in the forthcoming county general election, after the primaries.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Penny Hardaway Returns

Sports may be, as the late Howard Cosell used to say, the toy department of life. But it was still the basis for the caustic but candid lawyer-turned-sportswriter’s livelihood, and, for most people, sports may in fact be the vehicle for doing what art is alleged to do — i.e., hold a mirror up to life.

Many of us remember the irony of the giant billboards that appeared over major thoroughfares in Memphis during the last months of John Calipari’s tenancy as basketball coach of the University of Memphis. It was 2008, the Tigers had just played in the finals of the NCAA basketball championship, and the billboards boasted somewhat giddily of the respect and attention Tiger basketball had earned for the city during a run of years in which the team had figured as a contender for the NCAA’s highest honors.

Well, as it is said, pride goeth before a fall, and when Calipari zipped off to Kentucky, taking his latest prize recruiting class of one-and-done future NBAers with him, the billboards came down.

During the next few years, when former Calipari assistant Josh Pastner was at the helm of the Tigers, the team’s fortunes hovered between mildly successful and mediocre. And there was a counterpart to that in the attrition that sapped the self-esteem of the city, or at least of the Memphians, of whom there were many, who lived vicariously with the fortunes of the Tigers. Things were not helped in that regard by the University’s sagging football program.

The University and its boosters resolved to dig deep and pay what it took to get both major athletic programs up to snuff. In football, that resulted in the hiring, successively, of coaches Justin Fuente and Mike Norvell, whose successful teams have brought the football Tigers up by several levels of respectability.

In theory, something like that was supposed to happen as well with the hiring of Tubby Smith, a former NCAA tournament winner with Kentucky, to coach the basketball Tigers. Under the circumstances, Smith didn’t do badly in his two years here, but the circumstances included his inability to recruit and hold local talent, which had been the basis of the program’s original successes pre-Calipari.

Enter this week a new coach: Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway, the former NBA star who had been one of the University of Memphis’ own certifiably great players in the 1990s and who, moreover, has just won a state high school basketball championship as coach at East High School. Hardaway has the name, the zeal, no doubt the coaching ability, and, just as importantly, the local standing to attract local recruits again and bring the fans back into FedExForum and, who knows, to get those billboards back up.

Toy story or not, it is a source of much local hope this week.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

How ’Bout Them Apples?

CREDIT: Richard Murff

Let’s just start with the meat-hook reality that anyone who starts a conversation with, “Hey gang, let’s drive out to the country and get some cider!” is going to sound a bit daft. However, if your aspiration is to out-hipster the craft beer crowd, it may be your only course. And cider is really old school. Even if you don’t care about any of that and just want something a little different, it’s still a pretty good option. The Long Road Cider Company in Barretville, on the slightly far side of Bartlett, is worth the drive.

And that drive is long enough for you to contemplate America’s protracted history with cider. The settlers of Jamestown planted an orchard in 1607. The Mayflower had in its hold apple tree saplings, as well as a cider press for its 1620 voyage to the New World. The press was dismantled en route after a rough storm damaged the ship and they used its giant screw to keep the ship from breaking apart — thus, ensuring that America’s first batch of well-armed religious lunatics arrived safely.

The true-life legend Johnny Appleseed wasn’t planting orchards everywhere because frontier moms needed something to wrap up with the kid’s lunch. He was planting apples because our Founding Mothers (and Fathers) — just like their descendants — need a drink sometimes. John Adams, for example, was noted for quaffing two tankards of cider a day.

Cider remained a common drink in the U.S. until prohibition was established in 1920. The legal dry spell lasted until 1933, and liquor and beer bounced back immediately after repeal. But it took wine until the 1970s or so to really re-enter the American mainstream. Cider never seemed to find its legs again. (And to be honest, I’d always mentally put it in the same category as those god-awful wine coolers.)

Richard Murff

The Long Road Cider Company

Long Road Cider Co., Tennessee’s first, wants to change that. And there is a decidedly old-school method to their madness, a “Methode Champenoise” to be exact. Which means that there is a third fermentation in the bottle, creating a natural carbonation. (Like champagne, if you hadn’t guessed.) All the ciders are made in-house, as is the non-alcoholic root beer. The suppliers are family-run businesses, and they add nothing artificial; what happens in their barrels and bottles is just the product of Mother Nature and time.

Long Road is located in an old general store. When you first enter, you think: “Well, of course, this is a cidery.” What you notice after you’ve ordered a flight (because you know nothing about cider) is how light they are. In a world of double and triple IPAs and chocolate coffee stouts, there doesn’t seem to be much heft to it. I think this is what makes the ciders so refreshing. The folks at Long Road are mercifully unpedantic about this: There is always a local beer on tap, in case you simply don’t care what the Romans do.

It is a drive, but not that long, and worth more than one trip to sample the revolving selections. We had the Bourbon Slingshot, which is made like any other cider, then stored in used barrels from the Jack Daniel’s Distillery. It works well. The cider starts with a light taste, and the whiskey barrel storage gives it an interesting bite. We also tasted a very dry and tart number called Applerater, and a subtle Rhonissippi — a traditional cider that tastes exactly like you imagine that stuff John Adams was knocking back must have tasted like.

Be warned though, even though the cider is very light tasting, these drinks have plenty of alcohol. The “lite” cider, for example, is 5.8 percent ABV. The others run around 8 percent. (In a world before modern sanitation and heavy machinery, our forebears would put away a lot of alcohol.) Fortunately, it’s easy to remember to eat something while you’re there. The menu is solid. I “split” the Ploughman’s Plate — a board of nuts, olives, meats, and cheeses — with the short-changed Mrs. M.

John Adams could relate, no doubt.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Stormy Weather Ahead

CREDIT: Starstock | Dreamstime.com

Lord knows, it’s hard to keep up these days. There’s an information overload from our information overlords. So much distraction, so little time to process change before more change happens. Mostly forgotten in all the daily chaos coming out of Washington, D.C., is the mid-February repeal of net neutrality by Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission.

Net neutrality rules instituted during the Obama administration basically classified high-speed internet as a public utility, meaning all broadband consumers have equal access to all content from the internet — and at the same access speed. It’s similar in concept to MLGW, which, as a public utility, can’t charge more for water usage for some customers than others. Nor can it decide to provide electricity only to certain neighborhoods, based on profitability concerns. When it comes to broadband providers, all the rules are about to change.

The repeal of net neutrality is another example of the Trump administration’s push to privatize pretty much everything, including our public institutions and properties. They’ve opened up thousands of acres in national monument lands to oil and timber companies. They’re pushing to allow offshore drilling in sensitive coastal waters. They’ve incentivized for-profit prison systems, turning them into a mega-billion-dollar industry.

And now they’re coming for your porn.

Now, that probably got your attention, but it’s true: Repealing net neutrality means that high-speed internet companies like Comcast, AT&T, and others will be allowed to block or throttle web traffic or offer priority to certain websites and services. Essentially, the providers can charge you different rates for specific content, based on profitability. And what’s more profitable than porn? On the internet? Literally nothing.

Even more troubling, the net neutrality repeal also allows for increased meddling from state legislative bodies. Which is where the porn issue is likely to, er, arise. Rhode Island legislators, for example, have proposed a law, contingent on the implementation of the repeal of net neutrality, that would require content providers to block most “adult content.” In order to visit their friendly neighborhood PornHub, Rhode Islanders will be required to request in writing that they want their broadband provider to disable the state-imposed block. They’ll have to present identification verifying they are 18 and acknowledge receiving a written warning regarding the “potential danger” of deactivating the content block. And they’ll be required to pay a $20 “digital access fee.”

In short, if this bill passes, the state of Rhode Island would charge residents to view adult content and create a registry of those who’ve paid to do so. And this is in Rhode Island, one of the bluest states in the country! Just imagine what our gun-loving, non-fun-loving, evangelical Nashville Hillbillies will come up with. They don’t want a gun registry, but they’ll sure as hell want to know if you like to watch Busty Milfs on Broadway.

In fact, 44 states are preparing one sort of legislation or another to deal with the consequences of net neutrality repeal. The possibilities are mind-boggling. Providers could charge extra for to you to watch presidential debates or the Oscars or the Super Bowl. Political content could be amplified or throttled, based on profitability or a corporation’s preferences.

Most broadband providers have a monopoly already, and they have insatiable stockholders to please and profit margins to enhance. Throw a bunch of ideologues from various legislatures into the mix and what could go wrong? Better to ask, “What won’t go wrong?”

The good news is that dozens of lawsuits against net neutrality repeal have already been filed by states and by private companies. A recent New York Times story reports that there may be enough votes in the Senate to repeal it, but that a House majority still supports the FCC rollback. It’s expected that the various battles over net neutrality could stave off implementation for as much as a year,

It’s easy to lose track of everything that’s being sold off to the highest bidder with so many other distractions grabbing our attention, but it’s important to keep our focus on the real issues. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for Stormy Daniels.

Bruce VanWyngarden
brucev@memphisflyer.com