Contemporary-Media – Memphis Flyer

Ira A. Lipman, longtime Memphian and founder of Guardsmark, an international private security firm, died Monday in New York City, where he had lived for some time. Lipman was also a board member of Contemporary Media, Inc., the parent company of the Memphis Flyer, Memphis magazine, and Memphis Parent.

Chip Pankey/Memphis Magazine

Ira A. Lipman

Lipman, 78, had recently been diagnosed with cancer.

Lipman grew up in Little Rock and founded Guardsmark in 1963. He sold the company in 2015 to Universal Protection Service. Guardsmark’s headquarters were in Downtown Memphis for many years, and it employed 2,000 local residents at one time. The company had 17,000 employees in four countries when it was sold.

While in school in Little Rock as a teenager, Lipman was a source for NBC reporter John Chancellor while he was covering the unrest surrounding integration there in the 1960s.
Thereafter, Lipman was known for his love of the free press and supported it throughout his life. In 1995, he established the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University.

Lipman was also a lifelong activist in service to human rights, including terms as chairman of the National Conference of Christian and Jews and the United Way of America’s ethics committee. He was also on the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and New-York Historical Society.

His wife, Barbara — for whom the University of Memphis Barbara K. Lipman Early Learning and Research Center is named — survives him, along with his sons Gustave, Joshua, and Benjamin Lipman.

A friend and I were having lunch … he’s a restaurant owner, and he was picking my brain about the best ways to get media coverage.

“I see stories all the time about new places, new chefs,” he said. “I’ve been here 16 years, and I feel like I get ignored.”

“You need to give the media an angle,” I said. “Last year would have been perfect: You had a 15th anniversary. Now you have to wait until your 20th.”

I was being facetious, but it’s also undeniably true that anniversary years divisible by five are seen as more note-worthy — by the media and everyone else. Twenty trumps 19 or 21. Twenty-five years? That’s a biggie. A quarter-century! Break out the bunting and fireworks.

Which is what we’re doing around here this week, as we celebrate 25 years of the Memphis Flyer with a lollapalooza of an issue, filled with nostalgia and looks back at the paper’s early days. Much of it is pretty funny stuff. And much of it provides the kind of perspective that only comes with the passing of time: seeing some of the issues that once seemed so important, and now thinking, “What was the big deal about that?”

You’ll see lots of familiar faces in this issue’s story “25 Who Shaped Us,” a roster of folks who’ve left an indelible mark on us in the years since 1989. And you’ll see lots of familiar advertisers — Doug Carpenter, First Congo, Outdoors, Inc., TJ Mulligan’s, Wizard’s, Shangri-La, Otherlands, the Beale Street clubs, to name a few — who have been with us from the start.

And though I can’t name-check them all here, we also owe thanks to the dozens of folks who’ve passed through these offices since 1989, and to the many who continue to work here. It’s always been a great place to come to work every day.

And I believe — as all here do — that we’re fortunate to have this city to call home. Memphis is full of energy and spunk and opportunity, an outlier, an American original, a place where individuals can still make a difference. There’s no other place like it. Really, there isn’t.

Memphis has changed and Memphis hasn’t changed at all. It’s like the Mississippi: never the same river twice but always there, always familiar, a big messy, sprawling force of nature. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

So here’s to Memphis, here’s to the Memphis Flyer, and here’s to us — all of us. Onward.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com