Author: Lindsay Jones

Finding a good job or even renting a decent apartment can be tough for someone with a felony background. But DeAndre Brown with the Frayser-based outreach LifeLine to a Dying World Ministries helps ex-felons ease back into society.

The problem, Brown says, is many felons have made criminal or immoral behavior a normal part of their lives. Everything from smoking while pregnant to not batting an eyelash when a friend or neighbor ends up in jail might seem like regular behavior to someone with a criminal past.

That’s what Brown, himself an ex-felon, hopes to change. He spoke with the Flyer about why he feels his work is an antidote to crime. — Lindsay Jones

Flyer: How did you get into this type of ministry?

Brown: I’m an ex-offender. When I got home from prison, I did not find any programs for ex-offenders. That’s when I started with the prison fellowship. They focused more on re-entry.

What did you do to end up in prison?

Identity theft and bank fraud. I was in for 25 months [six years ago]. It was actually forging checks. We stole checks and then forged the information on them.

So you weren’t acting alone?

I had a co-conspirator.

What turned your life around?

Being in prison, I actually started reading the Bible. I started preaching in prison. And after I came home, I didn’t want to do the stuff I [had done] anymore.

How old were you when you went in?

I’m 36 now, so I was 27.

How did you fall into a life of crime?

[I liked] the challenge of attempting to get around the system. I attended Rhodes College when I graduated high school. I had a full scholarship, the whole thing. But I quit after two years. The checks came later. I wasn’t living the lifestyle I wanted. After leaving Rhodes, I made crime my lifestyle. I came from the country and a house with no running water. I saw people in the big city doing big things. So I thought, enough of this.

do you address different issues, or do you focus on ex-offenders?

Our program is focused on ex-felons, but our main issue is dealing with the criminal culture.

What parts of the city do you work in? Is it mainly Frayser?

Frayser’s our target, but we do work in all areas.

What do you think sets Frayser apart?

One, I live in Frayser, and when we started, this is where we began. It’s what we’re familiar with. And Frayser is highest in all of the columns you don’t want to be in [i.e., crime, infant mortality, foreclosures].

How do you measure your success? Are you looking for a sea change, or are you making changes incrementally?

We gauge it basically on the individual, when men and women no longer find crime attractive, when they want to volunteer and give back to the community, and when they [go and recruit other volunteers]. I would say that’s an improvement.

Anyone who wants in on ECOtality North America’s Electric Vehicle Project needs to get the lead out.

“I would encourage any business interested in having a charging station to do it now to take advantage of the grant dollars,” said Rick Bowker, electric vehicle project manager for Memphis Light, Gas & Water.

The electric vehicle project, partially funded by a $114.8 million stimulus grant through the U.S. Department of Energy, establishes a network of commercial and residential charging stations for electric vehicles. It includes parts of Tennessee, Arizona, California, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and Washington, D.C.

Originally, the Memphis area was excluded from the project in favor of cities in Middle and East Tennessee, but Memphis was added in February following objections by local officials.

“There’s no reason why Memphis shouldn’t be at the forefront of this,” said Mayor A C Wharton.

Potential host sites are encouraged to apply to San Francisco-based ECOtality, the project’s manager, for a free public charging station, Bowker said.

Grant funding is set to run out by the end of the year, and most of the high-voltage, Blink-brand charging stations will be installed in the local area by September. Sites are vetted mainly on location and access.

“These public charging stations need to be where people are going to spend an hour and a half to three hours,” Bowker said. “ECOtality wants to make sure the charging stations are placed where people are going to use them.”

Once a potential host signs a letter of intent, ECOtality asks MLGW to conduct a site survey. That includes looking for likely places to mount the stand-alone chargers and understanding what it might take to get them closest to a power source.

The high-voltage stations are similar to a slender gas station pump. They’re Internet-capable to collect usage data and can interact with smart phones and other electronic devices.

Last week, Wharton’s office announced that 69 public charging stations are being proposed in Shelby County to coincide with sales of vehicles such as the all-electric Nissan LEAF.

More than 40 of the zero-emission cars have been ordered in the Memphis area since their release in December, and about 800 potential customers have expressed interest in the cars, Bowker said. People who buy the LEAF are eligible for a $2,500 rebate and a free residential charging station. The LEAF retails for about $22,500.

Meanwhile, the hybrid Chevrolet Volt is not included in the project.

“The Volt is not being released in this market until the mid-third-quarter because of the lack of infrastructure,” said Barry Carver, a dealer at Serra Chevrolet.

By then, ECOtality’s charging stations should be up and running in Memphis. Part of the group’s urgency with the electric vehicle project is to provide the missing infrastructure needed to make electric vehicles more viable.

An electric car can travel 100 miles between charges, so people who travel a lot must have regular access to charging stations. Carver said LEAF owners’ biggest complaint so far has been getting stranded.

Proposed charging locations in Shelby County include high-traffic areas such as Collierville’s Town Square, the Bartlett Schnucks, the Germantown Performing Arts Centre, Tiger Lane, Shelby Farms Park, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Proposed sites also include the Frayser branch public library and the Lichterman Nature Center.

Ultimately, it’s up to ECOtality to decide which locations offer the most benefit for the greatest number of users. Then it’s up to individual host sites to charge for usage or simply allow data to be collected for a longer-range study set to begin in about a month.

It may take from one and a half to three hours to charge a vehicle at a Blink station with the average cost per charge ranging from 20 to 30 cents.

A set of abandoned rails in North Memphis may soon become trails if Greater Memphis Greenline gets its way.

To build on the momentum of the successful Shelby Farms Greenline, Greater Memphis Greenline executive director Syd Lerner is now focusing on 2.3 miles of unused rail line in North Memphis’ New Chicago community for a greenline separate from the Shelby Farms path.

Owned by Union Pacific Railroad, the New Chicago line runs along Chelsea Avenue from McLean Boulevard west toward Uptown and ends on Second Street at downtown’s Washington Park.

“If you put these amenities near people, good things happen,” Lerner said, not the least of which is higher property values.

Although neighborhood residents often fear an increase in crime near trails, it doesn’t usually materialize, Lerner said.

“What are [burglars] going to do, carry a television on their back?” he asked. “Ultimately, what makes a trail safe is usage.”

In the case of the Shelby Farms Greenline, close management by the Shelby Farms Park Conservancy and a consistent police presence during daylight hours help maintain the trail’s safety. Once the New Chicago greenline is up and running, it will pass by a new police precinct on the site of the former Manassas High School.

Like similar greenline initiatives, the New Chicago segment would be among a network of interconnected trails that eventually will provide a way for citizens to travel from one end of the city to the other without ever stepping foot in a car.

The hope is not only to tear down barriers between neighborhoods and ethnicities, but also to help spur economic development and improve public health. Eventually, greenline advocates want to have a trail within three miles of every person in Memphis.

“It changes the dynamics and demographics of the whole community,” Lerner said.

Although negotiations are still under way with the railroad, which abandoned its right-of-way and removed rails from the Chelsea line in 2009, the hope is to have a walking and biking trail in the North Memphis area by 2013. The railroad wants $1.5 million for the land along the line, although an independent appraisal placed its value at about half that amount.

Right now, greenline supporters are working to obtain grant funding from the Tennesee Department of Transportation and are actively promoting the idea of a greenline in New Chicago, an area plagued by a 30 percent home vacancy rate, persistent poverty, and gang activity. They’ve begun surveying residents to gauge receptiveness. University of Memphis anthropology students are in the process of tabulating the responses.

Joyce Anderson, principal of Klondike Elementary School, which sits about a mile from the proposed trail, said she thinks a greenline is a fabulous idea.

“There are some vices in this community, but sometimes things like [a new trail] can help turn things around,” Anderson said. “I think a walking trail will bring a sense of pride, and there will be families who will utilize it.”

Some graffiti that recently sprang up on the proposed trailhead closest to Evergreen captures the area’s need. The spray-painted message on a retaining wall reads, “Beggin’ for change.”

Lerner said he fully intends to work that message into a May 14th Zumbathon fund-raiser kick-off on the Chelsea greenline. The event, to be held at the intersection of Chelsea and Evergreen from 10 a.m. to noon, will host booths and vendors promoting healthy living.

When I was little, I lived in my grandparents’ house on Long Island. On the staircase leading up to my bedroom, my grandmother proudly displayed a plaque that read, “Never judge a man unless you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”

I’m often reminded at the strangest times how universal that message continues to be. It surfaced again last Saturday during a “Fire Ops 101” event at the Memphis Fire Department’s Chester Anderson Training Center in Frayser.

Held by the department and its union, Fire Ops took a motley assortment of media representatives and politicians, such as City Councilman Jim Strickland, State Representative Karen Camper, and State Senator Brian Kelsey, through a gauntlet of exercises designed to make them understand what firefighting is really like (translation: difficult, dirty, and downright exhausting).

The department and its union have been in the news lately because of a conflict over buying new vehicles for emergency needs, and they wanted to help decision-makers and media types understand their requests to Memphis City Hall or to state legislators.

Our first order of the day was to don about 80 pounds of gear. Our heavily padded jackets and pants were more palatable on a rainy day with temperatures in the 50s, but I can’t imagine how miserable they would have been in summer.

We also donned protective hoods, helmets, oxygen tanks, masks, reinforced rubber boots, and gloves so thick they seemed to impede the process of hauling, pulling, pushing, and climbing. But I guess being clumsy is a lot better than being burned.

Next, we headed to the training areas where we put out car fires, pried off car doors with the jaws of life, performed CPR, and dragged our ponderous, plodding selves up flights of stairs into the simulation of an apartment fire. And then we tottered down a fire truck’s aerial ladder with friendly handlers at our backs.

The simulated apartment fire was particularly surreal. Imagine lugging a heavy water hose with one hand while groping the walls as a guide through darkened hallways filled with smoke. The oxygen tanks on our shoulders and the helmets on our heads pressed down like thousand-pound thumbs.

We were slow. We were clumsy. And it became exceedingly clear that victims would have died had this been a real-life emergency.

We learned about something called the “golden hour,” that window of time between when an emergency occurs and when a victim is beyond help. Usually, firefighters have about 10 to 15 minutes to stabilize patients to save their lives. Being slow is not an option.

At one point, as I dragged back to the main building for rehab — Gatorade and rest — Memphis Fire Services director Alvin Benson asked if I might be considering working for the fire department.

After a brief eye roll, all I could say was, “No, I’m too much of a wuss.” A skinny twit who can’t even drag a hose for 10 minutes without getting winded probably doesn’t need to be on the front lines.

But I suspect, like me, plenty of other wusses out there are only too glad to relegate such hair-trigger heroics to the pros.

As for the Fire Ops training class: We came. We saw. We wilted (at least some of us did). And in our carefully controlled environment, we were reminded exactly what it means to walk in someone else’s mocassins.

Now that another Midtown landmark has closed, its empty building needs a new tenant.

Barkley’s Stem Shop, at 1939 Madison, has been sitting vacant for the past few months, waiting for a new business to fill the void left by longtime tenants Nat and Alice Barkley.

Although neither Barkley could be reached for this story, neighbors say the mom-and-pop proprietors couldn’t justify their business’ existence any longer.

“They couldn’t compete with places like Kroger,” said Robert Smith, a bartender at the adjacent Huey’s, which owns the vacant building that operated under the Barkley’s banner since 1988.

Steven Levy, chief manager of Levy Commercial Realty, is tasked with finding a tenant for the 1,400-square-foot retail building. He said he has two possibilities so far — another florist or a business he declined to reveal.

However, Levy said any potential business would have to accept overflow parking from Huey’s in the former Barkley’s lot during lunch, dinner, and on weekends. Rent and other terms are more favorable because of the parking issue, he said.

Levy declined to discuss the reason for the Barkleys’ departure.

“They were a complementary tenant for all these many years, but what their long-term plans are, I can’t speak to that,” he said.

Nicole Blaylock, a loyal Barkley’s customer, said she thought the florists’ closure was “just weird” because of its abruptness. Her husband discovered the shop had closed when he stopped by for some flowers. The couple often bought roses there to celebrate family milestones.

“The flowers were beautiful,” Blaylock said. “They lasted long and they were very inexpensive.”

Before the business closed, an online reviewer on Yahoo said, “I left Memphis in 1993 and still continue to use them every year for family birthdays. [This is] the best florist in Memphis as far as I’m concerned.”

The former Barkley’s building is not far from Overton Square, which has been struggling for several years to reemerge as a retail and entertainment hotspot.

Most recently, Loeb Properties hinted that a 53,000-square-foot grocery store could open along Cooper as early as next year.

At the same time, improvements might be made to parts of Cooper, Trimble, Florence, Monroe, and Madison. All of the changes would comply with the Midtown Overlay that governs new construction and renovation projects in the area.