Tag: Clarence Saunders

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News News Blog

Renovated Pink Palace Mansion to Open in December

CREDIT: Pink Palace

Pink Palace

Rending of proposed exhibits


After close to two years of construction, the Pink Palace Mansion is set to re-open December 8th, the museum’s officials announced Wednesday.


Relocated and refurbished exhibits in the mansion will include a Piggly Wiggly store replica, a rural early 20th century country store, and a restored Clyde Parke Miniature Circus, which will be displayed on the second floor of the mansion — a section that has been closed to the public for 40 years.

Bill Walsh, marketing manager for the Pink Palace said opening up the second story of the mansion will “will be a great opportunity for many visitors to see a side of the mansion they’ve never seen.”

Pink Palace

Rending of proposed Clyde Parke Miniature Circus exhibit.

The revamped Piggly Wiggly exhibit will be recreated based on patent drawings and photographs of the original store. There will also be space dedicated to Clarence Saunders, the founder of Piggly Wiggly, who first began building the mansion in the 1920s, but had to turn the house over to the city for a museum after declaring bankruptcy. 

The renovated mansion will also house new exhibits like the Cossitt Gallery, featuring more than 600 artifacts from the city’s first culture and history museum. The museum was set up in a room in the Cossitt Library in the early 19th century. The new gallery will aim to recreate the look of that first museum.

Other new exhibits will include a Memphis streetscape meant to depict the symbolic intersection of black and white culture and history from 1900 to 1925.

The mansion will also have “plush new event rental facilities, state-of-the art lighting and a refurbished grand staircase,” Walsh said.

Walsh said construction is slated to wrap up soon and then the process of installing the exhibits will begin. “The exhibits are going to be spectacular. We’re excited that it’s re-opening during the holidays too. It’s sort of a holiday gift for Memphians,” Walsh said.

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Opinion

Wharton Speaks to Friends, Employees, and a Stuffed Polar Bear

polarbear-sideview.jpg

How many times do you get to write a headline like that? Not many. Mayor A C Wharton gave his state of the city speech Friday in the foyer of the Pink Palace mansion where he stared down a snarling stuffed polar bear along with a bunch of television cameras.

Wharton, a master of such occasions after a decade of city and county mayoral years, managed to give an upbeat speech despite the bear, the rain outside, the cramped venue (the closet must have already been booked) and the crummy headlines about Pinnacle Airlines and police shootings in the morning paper. He talked for 36 minutes, or twice as long as President Obama last week in his inaugural address. He tempered that factoid by noting that his wife reminded him to slow down.

Wharton got his biggest round of applause when he appealed for a cease fire on gun crimes. “We won’t rest until gunfire is no longer the accepted sound track for far too many of our citizens,” he said. The mayor and Police Director Toney Armstrong scheduled a press conference Friday afternoon to tout a new program.

He didn’t mention Pinnacle and the as many as 500 jobs that will be leaving downtown Memphis for Minneapolis. Instead he plugged Electrolux, Mitsubishi Electric, and “jobs coming on line this year.” He said they were “real jobs for real people located in the real city of Memphis” lest there was any confusion.

“The best is yet to come when it comes to jobs for the people of our city,” he said.

He also gave props to the City Council for reducing the city tax rate without going into the messiness of overdue bills to the former Memphis City Schools or the impact of shifting the city payment to county government after this year. As he has said many times, he supports a half-cent increase in the city sales tax if it goes into a trust fund for pre-K and property tax reduction.

His second-biggest applause line, by my unscientific estimate, was a pledge aimed at the airport authority, on which his wife serves as a board member, that “we will succeed in bringing in other carriers and bringing down the cost of flying.”

The rest of his remarks were about such chestnuts as Bass Pro (attention shoppers, half the space will be devoted to conservation exhibits), bike lanes, conventions (“our facilities are inadequate”), the river (“we need to reconnect”) and job training.

As for the bear, it has dual significance as a big-game trophy and a reminder of the fate of Clarence Saunders, the entrepreneur who built the Pink Palace. He went broke after betting the wrong way in a big stock-market bet but his fame endures as one of the inventors of the modern grocery store and such names as Piggly Wiggly and Keedoozle.

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Special Sections

Clarence Saunders’ Amazing KEEDOOZLE Stores

Clarence Saunders Keedoozle

  • Clarence Saunders’ Keedoozle

Most people reading this blog probably know quite a bit about Memphis history, and that means they also know quite a bit about Clarence Saunders, founder of Piggly Wiggly, the world’s first (well, maybe) supermarket. But for some reason, their knowledge of grocery-store history often doesn’t extend much farther than that (I did my dissertation on it at Heidelberg), and what some of you may NOT know is that, after Clarence lost his Piggly Wiggly stores, and his fortune, and his Pink Palace, he started over with something entirely different.

In the late 1930s, he came up with the world’s first fully-automated grocery stores. No carts or baskets, no lugging heavy groceries around the store. You just carried a “key” and picked out your items, which were then whisked by conveyor belts, bagged and tabulated, to the front of the store.

He called the new stores “KEEDOOZLE” and you can learn the whole amazing story by watching the July episode of WKNO’s “Southern Routes.” The show airs Thursday, July 9, at 8 pm, and repeats Saturday, July 10 at 2:30 pm, and again on Sunday, July 12, at 12 noon. For all you folks with more channels than I have, it also airs on WKNO-2 on Saturday, July 10, at 9 pm.

It’s a truly fascinating Memphis business story. That episode also includes a nice feature on my pal Tad Pierson, owner and operator of the American Dream Safari, and a piece on a local piano prodigy (the kid’s only 6 years old). Don’t miss it, or you will hurt my feelings.

PHOTO COURTESY MEMPHIS ROOM, BENJAMIN HOOKS CENTRAL LIBRARY.

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Special Sections

Clarence Saunders’ Colors??

One of my readers recently sent an interesting query: What were the colors of Clarence Saunders’ football uniforms?

Now, if you don’t even know what I’m talking about, that hurts my feelings, because I’ve written many, many times in Memphis magazine about the semi-professional football team that the grocery store magnate fielded here in the 1920s. In fact, as recently as April, I mentioned it AGAIN, when I complained that his decision to turn down an offer to join the NFL was a really, really bad decision.

Here’s what I said, in our cover story called “April Fools” (go here if you want to read the whole thing.)