Category: Flyer Flashback

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Flyer Flashback News

Looking Back at the “Best Of Memphis” List That Started It All

In 1994, five years after the first issue of the Memphis Flyer hit news stands, we launched the first “Best of Memphis” poll. Back then, votes were cast on paper ballots, and each and every vote was counted and tallied by hand, which was a lot of work considering the first poll had 72 categories.

Some things haven’t changed since we started the poll; Huey’s, Rendezvous, Seikisui, Buster’s Liquors, and even WMC-TV news anchor Joe Birch have reigned supreme as the “gold medal winner” in their respective categories since day one.  

To prep readers for the first poll, an editor’s note read: “We thought it would be fun to do a ‘Best of’ Issue. Our friends at Memphis magazine do one every year. Weekly newspapers from Los Angeles to the East Coast have been doing them for years. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it? We’d get about a hundred or so ballots back, count them, and put together a story.

We miscalculated a few things, not the least of which was the incredible volume of returned ballots. They came in boxes — hundreds per day. Tabulating the results took much longer than we had planned. And while we were very specific about our ‘one ballot per reader’ rule, we were still surprised at the number of businesses that tried to stuff our ballot box. Bars and restaurants were the main culprits. There was even a vain attempt made by a local deejay.”

The staff must have had their hands full with all of those ballots, but luckily the tradition, however tedious, carried on. The very first “Best of Memphis” Ballot also featured a Staff Picks section, complete with categories like: Memphian We’d Like to See Go Out In Drag (Mike Ramirez, George Klein, Bud Dudley), Most Overrated Memphian (Cybil Shepherd), People We’d Like To See Leave Town (“the pitchwoman for Hank’s 1/2-Price Furniture; the waving street corner anti-abortionist; the nut who put up those ‘Tobacco Kills’ signs all over the place; anybody who has ever spray-painted or has uttered the phrase ‘Meat Is Murder’), and even Worst TV Hairdo (Jerry Tate of Channel 3).

While some reader categories have remained a constant throughout the history of the “Best of Memphis,” others didn’t stand the test of time. In 1994, we had now-defunct categories for Best Fast Food (Wendy’s) and Best Place to Celebrate Divorce (Tiffany’s Cabaret). In 1996, we asked readers to rank the Best Place To Use Your Dog As a Chick/Dude Magnet (Overton Park) and Best Place to Cure a Hangover Without Alcohol (“my bed,” with CK’s Coffee Shop in a close second).

Twenty years later, the “Best of Memphis” poll is our biggest issue of the year. Local businesses proudly display their rankings, and readers argue over who should or shouldn’t have made the cut. It’s safe to say that the list has become an important part of local culture celebrating all the good things about life in Memphis. Except of course, Jerry Tate’s poor hairdo.

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Flyer Flashback News

The Best of an Interview with LeRoy Best

Next week, the annual Best of Memphis issue hits the stands. In a happy circumstance, Best of Memphis marks its 20th year during the Flyer’s 25th year.

The early ballots included such categories as Favorite Airline, Most Unusual Atmosphere, and Best Smell in Memphis. The mail-in ballots invited a lot of stuffing and a lot of silliness. I miss dearly the ballots where the sole answer for every single category was “in my pants.”

Back in 1999, the Flyer received a “Best of” ballot from Osama Bin Laden, of which we quipped, “As much as we like to think otherwise, we flatter ourselves if we actually believed that Bin Laden would take time off from his busy international-terrorism schedule just to let us know that he thinks El Porton is the best meal for the money and that Jiffy Lube is the best place for an oil change.”

Back then, the Flyer‘s Best of Memphis issues, working off the acronym “BOM,” used a lot of bomb imagery. One year, we even gave winners a heavy trophy fashioned to look like one of those old bombs from cartoons — black and round with a fuse. Of course, two years later, such things were unthinkable.

As it happens, the 2001 issue of Best of Memphis remains my favorite. For that year’s theme, we asked a person with the last name of Best to give us his or her thoughts. The Best we had was LeRoy Best, a character, to be sure.

From that issue: “In a recent interview, the Flyer asked Mr. Best only two questions, the first of which was, ‘”Are you really all that?

“‘Am I really all that?’ he pondered for a moment. ‘I’m all that and a bag of chips. Cow chips but still a bag of chips.’ At this point a runaway train of a monologue took off. ‘I just live and breathe Memphis from the git-go,’ LeRoy said, swatting the air with a jovial fist. ‘And I may be known covertly to a lot of people and their children. You see,’ he said, as the trilling, thrilling strains of some romantic ballad filled the air, ‘I first met my wife Mary Beth while working at a tour company here in Memphis. We were in the basement of the Fontaine House. I was making mint juleps and julies (for those who don’t drink alcohol). She made gingerbread for all the tourists who would come in from the riverboats to catch a glimpse of the pretty little girl with the hoopskirt on. Anyway, love blossomed in the basement of the Fontaine House, and we got married. We got married on Thanksgiving morning, and the very next day Santa Claus had to be at the mall. That was my job. That is a rewarding job, let me tell you. He’s not a buffoon in a red suit. You have to have a certain rapport with kids. There are a lot of kids who won’t come to Santa, but they were coming to me. I was also the volunteer Santa for the 7th Precinct. That’s kind of a heartbreaking job. You go to the cancer wards and such. I believe you teach by example. You show by example. For example, I’m the assistant scout master of one of the oldest troops in town, Troop 40 at St. Luke’s. And we’ve got a large number of boys that really appreciate the woods. And dawgone it, that’s really getting to be a problem. The woods are getting chopped down and buildings are going up. We really are going to have to become more of an activist group. I always thought there would be woods to camp in. And the troop does flag ceremonies all over town. We even do a flag ceremony for Cinco de Mayo, which we consider an international holiday. We open the flags for the Mexicans and they really like that. Last year we followed Nathan Bedford Forrest around. We went to Fort Pillow, went out to Shiloh, Brighton’s Crossroads. It’s the Civil War. They say he who forgets history is destined to repeat it. God bless America.”

And God bless, Best.

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Flyer Flashback News

Craig Brewer’s Big Break

“Hollywood is like a stick of chewing gum. The flavor is refreshing — for a minute — but once all the sweet has been sucked away, what remains is a gooey, spit­slick blob even the most befouled degenerate would be loath to touch. Nevertheless, if you are a dreamer who wants to make movies, you might as well plan on getting Hollywood stuck to your shoe for a while. There is just no avoiding it.”

That’s how Chris Davis began his September 7, 2000, cover story about Craig Brewer’s trip to Hollywood to premiere his first feature film, The Poor & Hungry, at the Hollywood Film Festival. Then 28, Brewer was hoping his little $20,000 movie, shot in black-and-white and in a then-­revolutionary digital format, might create some buzz and get him a movie deal.

The film was named for the P&H Cafe, then as now, a venerable Midtown beer joint. It told the story of a reluctant car thief who falls in love with one of his victims, a sensitive soul who happens to be a cellist. It was a blue­-collar Romeo and Juliet tale that starred Eric Tate and Lindsey Roberts and a host of other Memphians, many of whom had never acted before. Wanda Wilson, who at that time was the flamboyant owner of the P&H, also had a meaty role.

The Poor & Hungry had been nominated for Best Feature and Best Digital Feature at the fest, and Brewer was taking most of his cast and crew to Hollywood for the award ceremonies. Davis went along to chronicle the trip, and Flyer readers got to witness Brewer, a Memphian who has since become a bona­fide Hollywood film­maker with such films as Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan, and Footloose, making his first tentative foray into the shark­-infested waters of Los Angeles’ movie-­making machinery. Davis accompanied Brewer to a big­-time producer’s office, followed by a golf­cart tour of Paramount Studios; he hung out at the hotel as the Memphis cast and crew readied themselves for the big night.

“The hotel room seems to shrink amid the hair brushing, tooth brushing, lint brushing, shirt buttoning, drink pouring, and occasional raucous laughter. Various cast members wander in and out. John Still, the rough-talking actor who plays a rougher­talking car thief in the film, enters with a bang, eyes bugged out and talking a mile a minute.

“‘Guess who I saw today while I was driving? Heather Locklear! Boy, I thought really hard about just running into her car just so she would have to stop and exchange information with me.'”

In the end, The Poor & Hungry lost in the Best Feature category to a $35 million bio­pic about Marlene Dietrich, but Brewer’s film won Best Digital Feature. Brewer gave a touching speech about his father, who’d first suggested that he shoot in video and who’d passed away before the film had gotten made.

After the trip, Brewer, his cast and crew, and Davis returned to Memphis. But Brewer would never be Poor & Hungry again. His world had irrevocably changed.

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Flyer Flashback News

Myron Lowery Makes a Terrible Joke, All Hell Breaks Loose

To this day I feel like I owe Myron Lowery an apology. I tweeted the tweet that launched Fistbumpgate. It’s true. Back in 2009, when Twitter was only three years old, I unintentionally lit the fuse on the doomed mayoral candidate’s 15 minutes of international fame. And once it was lit, I couldn’t unlight it.

I know it’s big news when a high-profile mayoral candidate does something stupid in public. Somebody else would have reported the incident. How could they not? But before the Arab Spring of 2012, this was my first real glimpse of just how fast news can spread across social media platforms. The meme was loose before the ink had dried on other reporters’ notepads, and I can say without too much fear of reprisal that all hope Lowery had of succeeding W. W. Herenton as mayor of Memphis withered on that windy September day when he decided it was a good idea to teach the Dalai Lama how to do a Memphis-style fist bump.

A C Wharton, Myron Lowery, and the Dalai Lama

Worse, he had the audacity to make a “Hello Dalai” joke, something area voters simply could not abide. It was a deeply weird and superficial scandal, and it all started with 140 characters, launched from my iPhone.

Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden was the first to retweet. In a subsequent online column, he joked that Lowery had been considering a chest bump but had reconsidered and was saving that one for the Pope. Flyer writer Bianca Phillips reported that the Dalai Lama didn’t give her a fist bump, but did surprise her when, out of nowhere, he reached out and jiggled her lip ring at a media meet-and-greet.

Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas was appalled. In a blog post titled “Fist Bump Fail,” Thomas called Lowery’s shameful transgression, “The Fist Bump Heard Round the World” declaring “Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery’s mayoral campaign is done.” She wasn’t wrong about that, but she wasn’t done either.

“According to news reports, the Dalai Lama wasn’t comfortable with the greeting, saying it reminded him of violence,” Thomas continued, followed by virtually every other news story about the now legendary meeting.

Flyer political columnist Jackson Baker, after reviewing the video I posted, took a dissenting view, advising critics to lighten up: “Instead of acting like offended self-righteous elders or, alternatively, scornful cynics whom nothing can please, why don’t we take our cue from the Dalai Lama himself?” he wrote. And he was right.

“We both committed violence,” the Dalai Lama said, just as writers from coast to coast and around the world had noted over and over again. But what they didn’t report is just as important. Turning toward Lowery, the Dalai Lama’s very serious glare evolved slyly into wide-mouthed laughter.

“But the expression of violence is special,” he said, acknowledging Lowery’s warm, silly intent, and embracing it. Then the Tibetan spiritual leader pulled back his own right arm and sent a much more energetic fist bump flying toward Lowery. It landed with a loud, fleshy smack, and more laughter. It was a beautiful moment, twisted into something awful by repetition on the internet. Like that ever happens.

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Flyer Flashback News

Texting While Driving Remains a Problem Despite Law

CREDIT: Forestpath | Dreamstime.com

In July 2009, a law prohibiting texting while driving went into effect in Tennessee. The law’s passage was profiled in the July 2009 Flyer article, “Driving While Intexticated,” by Bianca Phillips.

Although the state law was in effect, a local ordinance hadn’t been passed by Memphis City Council at the time the story was published. It did, however, pass a couple months later. Sponsored by City Councilman Jim Strickland, the ordinance went into effect September 2009.

Under the law, a person is prohibited from texting while operating a motor vehicle. And anyone who is caught in violation of the law can receive a maximum fine of $50. The violation is a Class C misdemeanor and doesn’t appear on a person’s driving record.

Sgt. Michael Pope of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department’s Reduce Impaired and Distracted Driving Unit said texting while driving is “a growing problem.”

Forestpath | Dreamstime.com

“The trends in Memphis statistics have shown that DUI fatalities have gone down and a great increase of people who are actually killed texting and driving,” Pope said.

Distracted driving is the number-one killer of teenagers in the nation. According to the Tennessee Department of Safety, in 2013, there were more than 5,000 accidents involving distracted drivers and only about 730 accidents involving drunken drivers in Shelby County.

Similar to drunken drivers, law enforcement looks for signs like swerving, constant acceleration and braking, and other moving violations to help determine if a person is texting while driving. An officer normally follows the driver for a couple minutes to see if the erratic behavior continues and scopes the activity inside of their vehicle.

“The first indicator is when we see someone holding their cell phone up,” Pope said. “We can see through the side view mirrors or rearview mirrors [or we] can see the electronic device being illuminated. Once we see a person with the actual device, it gives us the probable cause to stop their vehicle.”

Seth Abrutyn is a Memphis driver who supports the ban on texting while driving. He thinks by prohibiting the activity, streets will become safer.

“Banning it reduces the number of people doing it and makes people more wary. And it increases revenue for the police department and city,” said Abrutyn, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Memphis. “Let’s face it: Memphians are terrible drivers. Everyone has witnessed the guy or girl in the far left lane make a right turn across three lanes without any warning and very rapidly. So, anything that helps the rest of us is a good thing.”

Pope agrees with Abrutyn. By penalizing people for texting while driving, he thinks accidents will be lessened and more lives will be saved.

“A lot of people know that we’re out looking now, so they’re starting to obey the laws and put their phones away,” Pope said. “We do a lot of campaigns in schools for teenagers and tell them not to text and drive. If somebody is texting you while driving, just put the phone away, because your response is not that important. You can call that person when you get to a place where you can park your car. And be mindful that your texting and driving not only puts your life in danger, but the lives of other citizens in danger. It’s a crucial thing that we all need to be mindful of. Just don’t text and drive.”

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Flyer Flashback News

Looking Back at the Flyer’s Elvis Coverage

Elvis Presley is alive, and he works at the Memphis Flyer.  

The King has been one of the hardest-working, most-productive characters in the pages of the Memphis Flyer since its beginning.

Google “Elvis” and “Memphis Flyer” and you can feel the internet slow down, sucking bandwidth from Vegas to Tupelo as it thinks of all the times the King has appeared here. 

The Flyer was launched in 1989. Presley died in 1977. So our coverage of the man didn’t begin until a full

12 years after his death. But that barely matters. 

If we could get an accurate count of the names most mentioned in the paper and digital pages of the Flyer, Presley’s would either be high on the list or at the top. No politician — no matter how powerful or impactful or colorful or corrupt or wonderful — has been able to draw the ink in Memphis like Elvis.    

And no one at the Flyer loves Elvis (or Elvis stories, at least) more than Chris Davis, our own Fly on the Wall columnist. Elvis stories fall from the sky across the globe and our Pesky Fly catches them and pools them together in an infinite well of words tagged “Neverending Elvis” 

Here’s a taste of his collection from Britain’s Daily Mail: “A party of friends have admitted they were all shook up when the King’s face appeared in the ashes of a garden fire.” 

Also, the King allows for amazing headline writing: “Elvis is Alive and Living With Tupac and Bruce Lee,” “Elvis vs. Guns,” and “Happy Chinese Elvis, Memphis.”

One of the most-viewed, most-shared Flyer stories is Presley’s fictional obituary written by Chris Herrington and Greg Akers in 2007, the 30th anniversary of his death. Presley didn’t die in 1977, the story said. No, he “died Monday, August 6th [2007], of cardiac arrest, at his Horn Lake, Mississippi, home. He was 72 years old.”

Presley barely survived his near-fatal overdose of drugs in 1977, according to the obit. He fired his longtime manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker and bought a ranch in Horn Lake. He opened and closed a fast food chain called Gladys’ Kitchen. He turned Graceland into a Cadillac dealership. He bought the company that made Mountain Valley Spring Water. He recorded duets with Dolly Parton and Tina Turner, and he reunited the Million Dollar Quartet. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, landed an NFL team in Memphis, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and returned to music and the movies. Only after that and more, as our obituary read, did Presley die.

Presley’s spirit has survived in Memphis thanks in large part to his home, Graceland. His real story has been preserved and told there to hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the home each year. They come to Memphis just to walk through the gates of Graceland, to play Elvis Bingo, hear lectures, or hold a candle in the annual graveside vigil that officially closes out Elvis Week. 

Leaders of Elvis Presley Enterprises hope that a $76 million planned facelift and upgrade of the amenities and facilities around Graceland will keep Elvis tourists coming back to Memphis for years to come.

Keeping that flame alive will hopefully keep Elvis taking care of business right here in the pages of the Memphis Flyer.

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Flyer Flashback News

Looking Back at a Time When We Cared About Your Dreams

When you approach a bridge, just make a sign against the evil eye. It’s that simple.

Readers of the Flyer got such awesome advice from a syndicated column called “The Dream Zone” that ran in the back of the paper in the early 2000s.

The Dream Zone was the work of two leading dream experts, Lauri Quinn Loewenberg and Dr. Katia Romanoff.

While the Dream Team (I apologize) split up in 2012, they fielded some wild stuff from the minds of sleeping people. All you had to do was write a letter about your confusing dreams, and these two would tell you what it really meant.

For instance, Shelly from Prophetstown, Illinois, had a scary recurring dream about her dad driving over the top of a bridge and almost wrecking his car into the river.

That one is pretty obvious: “The fear of crossing bridges is an ancient one. Our ancestors feared there were trolls and other nasties under bridges. This was really just a fear of the unknown. Just cross your fingers before you move onto the bridge. Crossing your fingers is also a practice used by our ancestors to ward negativity and nasties in general. It was called ‘making the sign against the evil eye,’ and may indeed have a calming effect on the often-fearful subconscious. Try it some time for your bridge fright and rest assured you are using an ancient tried and true technique of your foremothers and forefathers.”

There you go. Problem solved.

Today, Loewenberg, a “certified dream analyst,” appears on all sorts of television programs and holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. She was formerly a student of Dr. Katia Romanoff, who leads the Esoteric Theological Seminary from which you can get ordained in a boatload of priesthoods — the Chaldean Patriarchate of Babylon at Baghdad, for example — and sign up for the New Order of the Knights Templar or third Millenium Angelic Alliance, which works “hand in hand with the angelic-warriors and divine messengers.”

These days, your weird dreams are your own damn problem. But back in the days before the internet could interpret your dreams with some fancy computer program, newspapers were full of syndicated columns of every variety. Columnists and cartoonists were pooled into services that papers could license from the syndicate.

According to a recent article in Editor & Publisher magazine, in the 1930s, there were 130 syndicates offering features and columns to more than 13,000 newspapers throughout the country. That number has dropped precipitously since then with the 2011 merger of United Media and Universal Uclick resulting in a single large syndicate offering some 100 features.

Everyone remembers News of the Weird, which we stopped running about two years ago. As if Memphis wasn’t weird enough. You don’t need to import weird to Memphis. Right next to the Dream Zone is Advice Goddess, whose face will be familiar to readers of a certain age.

Public-radio car gurus Click and Clack had a syndicated column, which I assume was 90 percent just them laughing.

But let’s return to the Dream Zone.

Carol, 43, from Ohio, wrote in June 2004 to complain about her dream in which she was house-hunting and almost got it on with the devil. To her chagrin, she woke up before things got properly sinful. Loewenberg told Carol that if she were really on the right track in her life, there would have been consummation. So, by logical extension, you’ll never know you’re on the right track in life until … oh dear.

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Flyer Flashback News

Looking Back at an Archeology Dig at Gibson Guitar

CREDIT: Chris Shaw

In 1997, the Hard Rock Café came to Memphis, the Tennessee Oilers pro football team played their only season at the Liberty Bowl, and a new guitar plant was about to open downtown.

But before bulldozers could move the earth at the future site of Gibson Guitar, archeologists with tiny trowels and picks did some preliminary digging. What they found offered some interesting insight into Beale Street’s historic red-light district.

Because federal funds were being used in the development of the property, regulations required that archaeologists assess whether the construction would have any impact on the area’s cultural deposits and historic artifacts. Flyer reporter Elizabeth Lemond had the story:

“‘Before we ever start digging, we do a literature and records search where we check archival records for events, people, and buildings that were on the site,’ explains archaeologist Guy Weaver, field director and principal investigator for the Gibson site.

Chris Shaw

Gibson Guitar factory

“‘If you look at these old insurance maps from 1907, there are all these shacks marked ‘F.B.’ for ‘female boarding.’ That’s a code name for brothels,’ says Weaver. “There were just lines of brothels.”

“Weaver spent the past few weeks in a trench six-feet-deep looking for what turn-of-the-century prostitutes may have left behind — clues about their lifestyle. ‘We’re looking at how these men and women associated with this business lived, what kinds of conditions they were working in, and what kind of material possessions they had,’ he explains.

“For Weaver and his colleagues of Brockington and Associates, Inc., unearthing artifacts — bottles, ceramics, animal bones — is just a first step. Once an object is recovered, it must be cleaned, cataloged, and analyzed in the Brockington office downtown.

“‘Basically, we separate everything into different artifact classes, and catalog them — but first we have to wash them,’ says lab director Alison Helmes, sifting through dirty clumps of soil like a miner panning for gold.

“‘What we’re looking for,’ explains Weaver, ‘is a statistical analysis of many different bones. Were these prostitutes eating expensive foods? Were they expressing status through the food they were eating?’

“By exploring the deposits in about 20 trenches, Weaver and his colleagues are attempting to determine whether the remaining artifacts have any historical importance on a scale that would merit the preservation or excavation of the area. The archaeologists then determine if the site can be safely built over or sealed without disturbing the deposits below or whether it must be excavated further before construction can begin. According to Weaver, this decision will be made in a few weeks; at present, not enough information has been gathered to assess the importance of the remains.

“Some intriguing developments have taken place at the site in the past week.

“‘What basically has happened,’ says archaeologist Brian Collins, ‘is that they hit some intact deposits. We think it might be the base of a privy. They also have found some brick building foundations, but we’re not sure when those date from yet.'”

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Flyer Flashback News

Looking Back at Flyer Story About a “Religious Freedom” Protest in Mississippi.

A young citizen solemnly intones, “I believe if you’re a born-­again Christian, then there should be no issue against prayer.” An aging church patriarch explains that all of this discontent wouldn’t happen if we could only return to “the morals and ethics of the 1950s.” People wear T­-shirts touting “Religious Freedom” and hold signs proclaiming “It’s God’s Way or No Way.”

No, it’s not a story about a Tea Party rally last week. Nor is it the minutes from a meeting of the board of Hobby Lobby. It’s from Chris Herrington’s 1999 Flyer review of a PBS documentary called School Prayer: A Community at War.

In 1994, Lisa Herdahl, a transplanted Californian (naturally), discovered that Christian prayers were being broadcast daily over the intercom at her child’s Pontotoc, Mississippi, public school. Herdahl objected, saying that such compulsory or captive-audience prayers violated her constitutional right to freedom of religion. She was on firm legal ground, of course. But in Pontotoc, she was seen, as one local minister says in the program, as “a lady that’s controlled by Satan, with many demonic spirits.”

The show focused on the battle that ensued in Pontotoc. “Portions of School Prayer play like a live-­action episode of The Simpsons,” Herrington wrote. “Tortured reasoning and inane sound bites adding up to an accidental satire on quintessentially American know­nothingism.”

Nailed it.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) comes to town to defend Herdahl. They are seen, literally, as agents of Satan. The locals try to a) discern whether the ACLU attorneys are Jewish; b) decide whether Herdahl could possibly be an ACLU plant sent to stir up trouble; c) describe the ACLU as being “to the Christian belief what the Nazi was to the Jew.”

The Simpsons or South Park: Take your pick.

And in a twist that could have been taken from last month’s Mississippi Senate run­off election, this mutual enemy of Christianity brings blacks and whites together to fight Satan and protect the “right” to broadcast Christian prayers in school. For religious freedom.

An African-­American minister, Anthony Collier, says that “the prayer case [brought] Pontotoc together like nothing else had. I don’t recall ever being invited to a white church before this happened.”

The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

The Herndahl case was eventually heard in an Oxford courtroom, where it was decided — not surprisingly — that Pontotoc’s broadcasting of prayers over the intercom was a violation of federal law. Doh.

But, as Herrington concluded: “In Pontotoc, where God is a Republican, Old Glory is waved, and the town leadership (much less the typical high ­school student) lacks an understanding of basic civics … easy solutions are hard to come by. For a small, religiously homogenous community with a deep­seated skepticism toward outsiders, Herdahl’s insistence on a strict legal reading of separation laws amount[ed] to an attack on a whole way of life.”

One can only imagine what the current Supreme Court would do with this case.

Amazingly, 20 years later, the program could probably be replayed as a documentary about a current situation and no one would be the least bit surprised, which is one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever typed.

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Flyer Flashback News

Looking Back at the Flyer’s $50,000 Giveaway

Over the course of several months in 1999, Flyer staffers were more than simply newspaper reporters, designers, and ad salesmen. They were also philanthropists.

For the paper’s 10th anniversary, a donor known only as Mr. Anonymous gave the Flyer $50,000 to dole out to nonprofits in the form of $1,000 grants. The “Making a Difference in Millennial Memphis” contest was announced, and nonprofits were encouraged “send a proposal on the organization’s stationery.”

“The whole idea was to encourage ‘good works’ — little things that improved the quality of life here. The program was open only to nonprofit corporations within Shelby County, which were invited to submit applications for projects that needed funding. Once a week, the Flyer would announce which grant had been approved,” read Michael Finger’s first story on “Making a Difference in Millennial Memphis.”

The first $1,000 grant went to Park Friends, Inc. to help produce a self-guided trail brochure for the Overton Park’s Old Forest. The brochure “would locate about 20 stations along the dirt trails that run through the interior of the forest. These would point out record-size trees, wildflowers, plants to avoid, signs of forest animals, climate and drainage features as well as historical features within the forest. Also highlighted would be the dark side: intrusive plants that crowd out the native plants and damage done by humans, intentionally or not.”

Other grants recipients included:

* Crime Stoppers of Memphis, Inc. to purchase 100 rolls of crime-scene tape.

* Voices of the South theater troupe to create a scenic design for their production of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans at Theatre Memphis.

* Vollintine-Evergreen Community Association Community Development Corporation to build a bridge across two creeks along the V&E Greenline.

* Memphis Symphony Orchestra to pay for materials for its ART ATTACK! campaign, which provided six free symphony programs at popular locations visited by Memphians during their day-to-day activities. (Wrote Finger: “We don’t usually think about the arts in connection with our daily lives — we think it’s a pursuit for rich people with too much time on their hands. The Memphis Symphony Orchestra wants to change that perception through a new program called ART ATTACK!”).

* The Lamplighter, Cooper-Young’s community newspaper, to expand its coverage to include more young adults and minorities and to publish a neighborhood history.

* The Overton Park Shell (now the Levitt Shell) to allow artist Dan Zarnstorff to airbrush portraits of Memphis musicians, such as Furry Lewis, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Sid Selvidge, and Lee Baker, over the shell’s five windows.

* Germantown Performing Arts Centre (GPAC) to create a public art project in which the “gardens of colorful flowers on the GPAC property will be cleverly juxtaposed with enormous paintbrushes, paint rollers, and paint cans to create the illusion that some giant hand was responsible for such beauty.”

* Elmwood Cemetery to display flags representing every United States war since the Revolutionary War for their Veterans Day observance.

* MIFA to recruit “an army of volunteers to install storm doors and windows, patch roofs, caulk holes, insulate homes, and distribute new blankets and hats to [elderly and low-income] people in qualified homes.”