Tag: Herenton

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton to Break Bread with New Council at Wednesday Lunch

CREDIT: jb

In what would seem to be a precedent-setting move, Mayor Willie Herenton is sitting down with his newly elected 13-member council for a get-acquainted lunch on Wednesday at the downtown Rendezvous Restaurant. The luncheon, arranged by former councilman John Vergos, the Rendezvous’s owner, is co-hosted by Vergos and former councilman and mayoral intimate Rev. James Netters.

According to a source, the luncheon is meant, among other things, to be a clear and obvious call for public peace on the part of the mayor, who famously has quarreled with council members over the years and strongly condemned the council at a memorable New Year’s Day prayer breakfast in 2004.

–Jackson Baker

Categories
Living Spaces Real Estate

Yea-sayers

CREDIT: Artist Rendering Courtesy of the Bryan Company

They said it couldn’t be done: a high-rise condominium development in downtown Memphis? Two towers, 300-plus units, 16 floors? World-class amenities, unparalleled views, big bang for the buck? Not gonna happen, they said, because who’s gonna buy it?

Well, what do they know?

That was the message at the recent groundbreaking ceremony for phase one of the Horizon, Memphis’ newest upscale condominium development. Gary Garland, president of the Garland Company and the Horizon’s development manager, summed up a common response over the last couple years to the project’s prospects: “There were naysayers in Memphis, Tennessee, who said, ‘Y’all will never get this done.'” And yet, there Garland stood on Novermber 8th, along with Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, Shelby County commissioner Mike Ritz, the Horizon’s developer Steve Bryan of the Bryan Company, Center City Commission president Jeff Sanford, Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau president Kevin Kane, and other local heavy hitters.

Artist Rendering Courtesy of the Bryan Company

A Rendering of the downtown high-rise.

Celebratory and a little defiant, Garland, Bryan, Sanford, and Herenton each took the podium, the golden shovels waiting nearby to make action verbs out of the promises touted by developers since the Horizon was first announced. “You’ll be able to watch this thing come up,” Garland said, his words reinforced by the sound of construction vehicles and a giant hole in the ground a couple dozen yards away. (The Horizon actually broke ground a few months ago.)

Herenton put his imprimatur on the event. “This is a great day in the history of the great city of Memphis,” he said. “This is an exciting time in the evolution of downtown for a great Southern city.

Developers and city officials, including Mayor Willie Herenton, break ground for the Horizon.

“I know a little bit about development, and this was a great risk,” Herenton said about the Horizon. But he added that the groundbreaking was a lesson about not listening to naysayers. He admitted he’s had his share over the years.

“We will make possible what you, naysayers, have said wasn’t possible,” Herenton added.

Sanford looked into his crystal ball, saying, “The Horizon will be the queen, I predict, of this terrific downtown neighborhood.”

The development’s amenities certainly sound royal: a private movie theater, a climate-controlled wine cellar with space for personal storage, indoor and outdoor pools, a putting green, a fitness center, a party and activity room with a fireplace, a 24-hour doorman/concierge, a business tech center, a tennis court, and a rooftop patio with views of the Mississippi River. And those amenities are just for the Horizon’s common areas.

“We decided we wanted to raise the level, and we’re doing it,” Bryan said of the vision for the Horizon. “We’re not finished,” he continued. “We have a long way to go.

“We’re going to change the horizon of the Mississippi River and downtown Memphis in a very positive way.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Q&A: Jerry Collins

Willie W. Herenton kicked off his fifth term as mayor with a surprise, announcing his decision to forego a national search for a new Memphis Light, Gas, and Water division president and to nominate interim MLGW head and director of public works Jerry Collins instead. The City Council approved Collins, 53, a longtime city employee, November 6th.

Collins was born and raised in Memphis, graduating from White Station High School and the University of Memphis. An engineer by training, Collins began his service to the city 28 years ago.

At the time, the city’s “two wastewater treatment plants were fairly new,” Collins says, “but on many days, the effluent leaving the plants was dirtier than the influent coming into the plants. EPA was having a fit. They threatened to put Mayor Wyeth Chandler in jail.” Public works hired the then-25-year-old Collins to run the facilities.

— Preston Lauterbach

Flyer: Do you see similarities between your start at public works and at mlgw?

Jerry Collins: The public perception [of the utility company] may not be what we want it to be. Finishing last or next to last in the J.D. Power [2007 electric utility residential customer satisfaction] poll is not good. In a sense, there may be a parallel.

How do you restore public confidence in MLGW?

We have to take care of problems on the first call. We have to make sure that MLGW is not the subject of headlines and TV news pieces. We’re preaching that we want to be dull and boring. If we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing, there’s no reason that MLGW should be in the limelight.

What have you learned in going from public works to MLGW?

It’s more similar than you might think. The same factors that affect wastewater rates affect electric rates, gas rates, and water rates. … They’re all basic public services that rely on a web of in-place infrastructure and charge a dedicated fee for those services.

What lessons can you take from your predecessors?

We want to enlarge our role in the community, and build our relationship with the union that represents MLGW employees, which Joseph Lee did. Cost control was important during Herman Morris’ tenure, and cost control is something I value at public works and will continue to value at MLGW.

Will you maintain a VIP list?

There is no list. I have no intention for there to be a list. Every customer is of equal value to MLGW.

One last thing: knowing what you know, would you purchase gas or electric appliances for your home?

I would probably purchase electric. It’s more likely that, long-term, the price of gas will escalate faster than the price of electricity.

Categories
Opinion

Batteries Not Included

Consolidating Memphis and Shelby County is the government equivalent of changing your phone service, Internet service, credit cards, bank, checking account, brokerage firm, home mortgage, termite contract, doctor, car insurance, utilities, club memberships, billing address, will, and marital status.

And it gets really hard if you have children.

Now that Mayor Willie Herenton has been reelected to another four-year term, consolidation is back in the news.

“We need to consolidate,” Herenton told a Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce audience last week. “We’ve been singing that song, and we’re going to open that hymnbook again.”

In 1993, two years after he was first elected, Herenton floated the idea of consolidation by surrender of the city charter. The New York Times even did a story about it. The mayor appointed a committee to look into it. The committee included some familiar names. The chairman was Mike Cody, a Memphis attorney, former candidate for mayor, and former Tennessee state attorney general. Members included Herman Morris, who ran against Herenton in the 2007 mayoral election, John Ryder, who managed the Morris campaign, Charles Carpenter, who managed Herenton’s campaign, state senator Steve Cohen, who is now a member of Congress, Shelby County attorney Brian Kuhn, and others.

Their conclusion, in short: no way.

“You can say I’m in favor of it,” Cody said in a telephone call from Boston this week. “We tried to find some ways.”

There were 14 pages of analysis, to be exact.

The Tennessee General Assembly would have to pass an enabling law. If the law was amended to apply to the Memphis city charter, 10 percent of the residents of the city could petition for a referendum. The committee noted, however, that the state constitution apparently only envisions dissolving cities with a city manager and commission form of government.

“No dissolution method is provided by the General Assembly for cities organized as is Memphis,” the committee concluded.

As for legal and practical problems that might arise from charter surrender, the committee suggested a few: Suburban cities such as Bartlett, Collierville, and Germantown might use annexation to cherry-pick prime neighborhoods and pick up residents and/or retail. Or residents of a defined area in the suddenly unincorporated Memphis could hire a smart lawyer, incorporate, and invent a new city.

“Any contracts of the city of Memphis would survive a surrender of the charter and could be enforced,” the report said. Joint boards and commissions “would require some degree of restructuring.” Consolidation “would be further complicated for those authorities with holdings in their own names.” The city board of education would be abolished unless provisions were made to create a special taxing district. Both MATA and MLGW “would cease to exist.”

The committee fell back on the old, safe standby of “functional consolidation” of certain departments, which has been dusted off several times since then.

In 2002, Cohen requested an opinion on charter surrender from the state attorney general. The answer was no way once again.

“The General Assembly may not revoke the charter, the Memphis City Council is not authorized to surrender the city charter, and no statute authorizes the Memphis city charter to be revoked by a referendum election of the voters,” the opinion said.

Case closed? Not quite. Lawmakers can do almost anything if they put their minds to it, witness those lottery tickets on sale at your neighborhood convenience store. But the lottery had popular support, and other states had shown the way.

The city most often mentioned as a model for consolidation is Louisville, which has some similarities to Memphis: river city, big college-basketball town, long-serving mayor, air-cargo hub. The big difference is that Louisville was 65 percent white before consolidation and more than 80 percent white after consolidation, which took effect in 2003 after voter approval in 2000.

You don’t need 750 words to figure out that one.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

“I Need You to Help Me,” a Restrained Herenton Tells Chamber Audience

CREDIT: jb

In a conspicuously low-key but resolute appearance before a
Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce audience at the Memphis Marriot East
Thursday morning, a newly reelected Mayor Willie Herenton proclaimed a broad
agenda for his fifth term and declared, “The next four years I’m hitting the
ground. I’m hitting it hard. I’m going to let it all hang out.”

Appearing subdued and almost somber at times, the mayor
laid before the packed audience at the Chamber’s “Breakfast Forum 280907” a wish
list of key objectives — prominently including city/county consolidation;
Fairgrounds and riverfront development; and resolution of issues involving Beale
Street and the National Civil Rights Museum.

“We need to consolidate. We’ve been singing that song, and
we’re going to open that hymnbook again,” Herenton vowed. He went on to note
wryly, “I’m not without bold ideas. I just don’t have the support.”

Acquiring such support on this and other issues would be a
major objective, he said, clearly striving to avoid a confrontational tone, “I
can’t do it by myself. I need you to help me,” he acknowledged, going so far as
to strike an accustomed note of modesty. “I’m just an average person,” declared
the man who on other occasions has seemed to profess divine sanction for his
actions.

Continuing in the conciliatory vein, he mayor said somewhat
pointedly, “I don’t want to be accused of bashing the media.” Nor did he, though
he ran through a laundry list of public concerns vented by the media (among them
Iraq, global warming, demographic shifts locally) and lamented, “We function on
negatives rather than positives.”

Though his remarks were largely cast in generalities, the
mayor seemed to take sides in the currently percolating controversy over
community-versus-corporate control of the Civil Rights Museum. “Without private
philanthropy and support, there is no museum,” he said emphatically.
That, he said without elaboration, was “more important” than feuds or the wishes
of individuals.

In introducing Herenton, Chamber president and CEO John
Moore had been at pains to credit the mayor with numerous positive achievements,
mostly in the sphere of economic development. This was a seeming response to
campaign rhetoric in which Herenton had frequently challenged the Chamber to own
up to his accomplishments.

In his own summing up Thursday, the mayor ticked off some
of the city’s blessings. Memphis possessed affordable housing and an inviting
tax base. It was “the largest air-cargo destination center in the world…the
largest mail-processing center in the United States… the second-largest
manufacturer of orthopedic-device medical devices in the United States.”

And, he said, Memphis was the smallest city to have both a
major airline hub (Northwest) and a National Basketball Association franchise.

“This city’s best days are ahead of us,” Herenton
concluded. “Let us embrace change and diversity. Let us be one city. I want to
be a part of that.”

In a brief
Q-and-A session with reporters afterward, the mayor attempted to minimize the
brewing argument between himself and the city council over who gets to appoint
council staff. “I never have selected anybody,” he said, stressing that his
mayoral prerogative to make such appointments was largely a formality – but one
he was prepared to litigate in order to preserve.

Categories
News

Ernest Withers Goes Home: “He Saw the World Through Our Eyes”

CREDIT: p.l.

Mourners of Ernest Withers filled the Pentecostal Temple Institutional Church of God in Christ downtown Saturday afternoon to celebrate the home-going of the world-renowned photographer who died Monday at age 85.

A celebratory tone prevailed among the many friends, family members, and public officials who spoke at the funeral. Eulogists represented the many facets of Withers’ life.

Afro-centric spiritualist Ekpe Abioto assured the crowd that “death is a fulfillment of life.� Trumpeter Mickey Gregory, a former Stax Records session player and Beale Street club entertainer represented Withers’ rhythm and blues associates, though he performed the popular gospel composition “Take My Hand Precious Lord.�

Mayor Willie Herenton called Withers a “giant and a genius,� expressing his gratitude to God “that I Willie Herenton had the privilege of kneeling at [Withers’] feet.

“They don’t put just anybody’s obituary in the New York Times,� he reminded the audience.

Reverend Samuel “Billy� Kyles, said that like the drop of water that knocks holes in stone by oft-falling, Withers “camera knocked holes in the stones of ignorance one click at a time.�

Beale Street developer John Elkington promised “there will always be a Withers gallery on Beale.� He added that he once asked Withers if he’d been afraid photographing civil rights era riots and episodes of police brutality.

“No,� Withers told Elkington. “I was too busy working.�

Finally, a family member evoked tender personal memories of Withers playing on the floor and watching cartoons with his grandchildren. “He saw the world through our eyes,� Withers’ granddaughter Esi Sawyer recalled.

Those gathered would agree that we’re better for having seen the world through his.

A procession down Beale Street and interment at Elmwood Cemetery followed.

###

Categories
News News Feature

Pay For Grades

It was like old times, in more ways than one, at an assembly at East High School this week. On stage, U.S. senator Lamar Alexander sat next to former Grahamwood Elementary School principal Margaret Taylor, who sat next to Mayor Willie Herenton.

Alexander gave a heartfelt speech about his long friendships with West Tennesseans Herenton, Taylor, and the late Alex Haley, author of Roots, which became a television epic before today’s students were born. Taylor unabashedly hugged Herenton, whose support for optional schools and Grahamwood in particular was vital when he was superintendent 25 years ago. And Herenton, who was greeted with a standing ovation, talked inspiringly about the importance of education to the 900-plus students in the audience.

The man of the hour, however, was another Memphian who’s been around a while — businessman Charles McVean, a 1961 East High graduate and benefactor of the Greater East High Foundation to the tune of approximately $2 million. A few years ago, McVean had an epiphany: He could give $1 million to his college alma mater, Vanderbilt University, which has an endowment worth over $1 billion. Or he could give it to East to pay for extra support teachers, facility improvements, and direct payments to students who make good grades and tutor other students.

Pay-for-performance was the most interesting new wrinkle. The idea was to pay students up to $10 an hour for tutoring and as much money as they could make working at McDonald’s for working harder on their homework instead.

On a modest scale, it appears to be working. A total of 110 students are involved as either tutors or “scholars” who make a commitment to good grades and good behavior in exchange for some of McVean’s cash. A similar program, with a different benefactor, Dr. Jerre Freeman, is being implemented at Whitehaven High School. And on Monday The New York Times reported that 25 public high schools in New York City are paying up to $1,000 to students who do well on Advanced Placement exams. Philanthropists are funding the program.

Alexander, a Vanderbilt graduate who was governor of Tennessee and U.S. Secretary of Education before winning a Senate seat in 2002, likes McVean’s merit program and doesn’t mind seeing his gifts staying in Memphis instead of going to Vandy.

“Charles can see every day real results from the way he spends his money,” said Alexander, a proponent of merit pay increases for teachers when he was governor. “Our biggest challenge in American education is kindergarten through 12th grade.”

Cash-for-performance, so long as it isn’t paid for by government, is “a terrific idea,” said Alexander. “I’m for what works.”

Alexander met Taylor during his first term as governor. He wanted to visit a Memphis public school, and Grahamwood was so popular at the time that parents, most of them white, camped out at the Board of Education offices to get spots in the optional program. Taylor said Herenton suggested Grahamwood even though “it was controversial” because every other school coveted such attention. Taylor, who is in her 80s, works as a tutor and support teacher in algebra classes at East five days a week.

In the movies, there would be hundreds of East students and tutors earning college scholarships each year, but reality is not like that. East is as racially segregated as it was 40 years ago, but now there are almost no white students. There are actually slightly fewer tutors this year than last year due to graduation losses and the commitment that is required. “It takes a while to train them,” said Bill Sehnert, a McVean hire who works full-time at East. And tutors are now starting to work on ACT preparation and in classes besides algebra, in effect plugging one leak only to find another one somewhere else.

“It doesn’t do any good to pass algebra and flunk English,” Sehnert said.

McVean, a commodities trader who has seen his personal fortunes rise and fall many times, is undeterred. The Greater East High Foundation got off to a rough start when it came out of the gate a few years ago and basically had to start all over. A less determined person might seize upon the program’s partial successes, claim a victory, accept some applause, and bow out. Instead, McVean wants to focus attention on the large number of less-motivated students who aren’t buying into the program and being served.

“The secret to success in any business,” he said, “is to find a good idea and leverage it.”

Categories
Opinion

One Vote at a Time

There is always a grain if not a rock of truth in everything Mayor Willie Herenton says, no matter how unpopular. He’s right about this: If you are going to stay in Memphis for a while — and not everyone is — then you will have to look at things differently.

Last week, I became a big fan of the Memphis NAACP. They lost but they looked good doing it, and they showed class. No organization or individual had more reasons to be partisan in last week’s election. The NAACP was co-plaintiff in the 1991 lawsuit that abolished mayoral runoffs. Not one but two favorite sons were in the race for mayor: Herenton, a trailblazer since he was a school principal in the 1970s, and Herman Morris, NAACP chairman from 1992 to 2000. Both are black. Carol Chumney isn’t.

But the NAACP’s election-day efforts were all about turnout, not any particular candidate. They lost only in the sense that turnout in the 54 precincts they targeted was not as good as they hoped it would be. In fact, it was dismal — 38 percent overall and in the teens in some target precincts.

Spartan simplicity is not always the rule at local nonprofits, but it is at the NAACP. Their little office on Vance is right across from the Cleaborn Homes housing project. On a day of excess, partisanship, and pack journalism, what better place for a reporter to view the election than a place with no cameras, no candidate signs or leaflets allowed, no bar, and no buffet? And no big screen. The only television was a 12-inch model with an antenna. Lean too close to read the numbers, and it stuck you in the eye. Move it, and you messed up the picture.

Beneath portraits of local NAACP heroes Maxine Smith, Vasco Smith, Benjamin Hooks, and Jesse Turner, volunteers worked on three clunky Compaq computers that were probably rejected by E-Cycle Management. Others worked the phones, reading from a printed script (“We’re calling on behalf of the Memphis branch NAACP to encourage you to vote today for the candidate of your choice”) and offering a ride to the polls. Forget public-service announcements and editorials; in the trenches, turnout means one vote at a time.

By mid-afternoon, the numbers coming in were not good. Wearing a yellow T-shirt that said “Lift Every Voice and Vote,” NAACP executive secretary Johnnie Turner looked worried. With five hours to go until the polls closed, nearly every precinct was hundreds of votes short of its turnout goal.

“Last year, we made almost all of our goals, but the way this is looking, people are not turning out,” said Turner, who has run the Voter Empowerment Project since 2000.

She was writing down numbers and doing the arithmetic, which was considerable. The goal was a 5 percent increase in each precinct. The 1999 election was chosen as the benchmark because the 2003 election was a Herenton blowout with a 23.7 percent turnout. That bar was too low. Or so Turner thought. Now, Asbury, Alcy, Glenview, Gaston — site after site — wasn’t coming close to the 1999 turnout, much less the hoped-for increase.

“We’ll have to regroup,” Turner said. “This election has been strange. I started to say divisive, but maybe it’s kind of polarized. Anytime the community sees discord, they take the attitude ‘I don’t want to be part of this mess.'”

When I went out to eat, I got to watch my first live shooting in a while. At Cleaborn Homes, a young man in a white T-shirt was running between the buildings. Another man with a pistol was chasing him and firing several shots from about 30 feet away, all of which missed. A minute later, the guy who’d been shot at walked past my car with the nonchalance of someone who had just missed getting sprayed with a water hose.

When I came back, Turner had made an executive decision. The original goal had been “overly ambitious.” The new goal would be the 2003 turnout plus 7 percent. In effect, the former teacher was lowering the grading curve.

“Now this is more like it,” Turner said as the polls closed and new numbers came in. “We’re going to make it.” As it turned out, however, the 1999 standard may have been unattainable, but it was not unrealistic. The overall turnout for the election was higher — more than 165,000 voters last week compared to 163,259 in 1999.

At 9 o’clock, when the first returns showed Herenton far ahead and Morris in third place, there was no cheering at the NAACP. And no booing. Soon after that, everyone left, except Turner and a few others.

Nice effort, I said on the way out. “Yes,” she said. “Honest.” And it was.

Categories
Cover Feature News

From the Victory Podium

CREDIT: Preston Lauterbach

The song “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” blared over the public address system in a Cook Convention Center ballroom Thursday as supporters of Willie Herenton pushed toward the stage where the mayor delivered his victory speech.

The emcee barked “he shook the haters off” into the microphone, as the jubilant crowd roared its approval.

Campaign manager Charles Carpenter set, or at least reinforced, the celebration’s defiant tone in his introduction to Herenton’s comments. “Reporters ask me, ‘What’s the difference between this race and 2003?’ In 2003, the mayor, who had been doing an excellent job at that time, had business community support and white community support. But this election, he had little of either,” Carpenter said.

Herenton took the microphone on a stage crowded with familiar faces, including former Memphis Light, Gas & Water head Joseph Lee, blogger and former Herenton-hater Thaddeus Matthews, attorney Robert Spence, Memphis police director Larry Godwin, and former councilwoman TaJuan Stout Mitchell.

“I’m in a very serious mood,” he told the crowd, before thanking God for his favor. “It is out of this favor that we received this victory tonight. I now know who is for me and … who is against me. I thank God for discerning.”

Herenton thanked the friends who he said had supported him unconditionally. “I appreciate loyalty,” he said. “This election was hard for me. There were people [who] I thought were with me, and I found out, they weren’t.

“I’m going to be nice tonight,” Herenton continued, “but there are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis. These are the haters. I know how to shake them off,” he said, his next words lost in the applause.

“Memphis has some major decisions to make. Memphis has to decide whether or not we want to be one city, or … a divided city,” he continued.

He mocked the “haters,” anticipating their criticisms of him: “He didn’t get many white votes.”

The mayor recalled two incidents in which he perceived racism. He said that a “90 percent white” crowd at a University of Memphis basketball game booed his honoring DeAngelo Williams with a key to the city. “I know the haters are going to say I need to pull the races together — I didn’t separate us.”

He then told of his television appearance with Justin Timberlake, remembering the audience as “95 percent young white kids who booed me on national television. The white citizens of Memphis were not in outrage. Nobody wrote letters and said that was shameful.”

Herenton did single out his “few white brothers who have stuck with me,” including developer Rusty Hyneman and used-car salesman Mark Goodfellow.

Returning to whites other than those few, Herenton warned, “If you’re not careful, they’ll work a game on you. They have psychology.”

Categories
Cover Feature News

What’s Next?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The press had it all wrong. So did the pollsters. I said all along it was mathematically impossible for either Chumney or Morris to beat me.”

That was Mayor Willie Herenton on Monday afternoon, holding court in his outer office and still basking in a fifth-term victory that was all the sweeter because it exceeded expectations. Everybody else’s expectations, that is. “I knew I won early voting,” Herenton said.

And he had another theory about the mayoral voting that ended with him on top with 70,177 votes, some 13,000 more than his closest competitor, Councilwoman Carol Chumney. The mayor thought that too much analysis had been wasted on the battle for white votes between Chumney and third-place finisher, former Memphis Light, Gas & Water head Herman Morris. Pundits and reporters alike had neglected to factor him into that contest-within-a-contest, Herenton insisted.

Yes, on election night Herenton had inveighed against “haters” in a euphemistic way reminiscent of former congressman Harold Ford Sr.’s condemnation of “East Memphis devils” from his own post-election platform in 1994.

To be sure, whites had been virtually absent from Herenton’s victory celebration at the Cook Convention Center, and no one was likely to forget the mayor’s frequent campaign references to conspiratorial “snakes” and past trickery by the white power-establishment, nor his persistent declarations that the 2007 mayoral contest was about “race and power.”

Yet, he was now willing to insist that he had been a serious contender for the white vote all along. Nay, more — that his success with white voters is what made the difference in this year’s race.

“I’ve been analyzing the returns,” the mayor said, “and I don’t think I got 70,000 African-American votes. I think 10,000 whites voted for me.”

If that was true, and had the lion’s share of those 10,000 votes gone instead for Chumney, she might indeed have won — an argument that might fuel a conspiracy theory about managed polls that the runner-ups’ camp seems to be taking seriously. (See this week’s Viewpoint)

Herenton himself has an eye for conspiracy. He sees the aborted visit by Ford Sr. to a climactic Herenton rally — one that ended in a widely publicized no-show by the former congressman — in that light. Having missed the rally, Ford might at least have made a public endorsement of his candidacy. “But he couldn’t even do that!” Herenton said.

Noting that longtime adversary Ford had made an early-voting trip into Memphis on the eve of that rally, the mayor said, “I’m convinced he came down here just to cast a vote against me!” And he promised: “I’ll have some things to say about him [Ford] later on.”

The Drug Test Issue

Another sore point with Herenton was Morris’ frequent challenges for the mayor and the rest of the field to join him in taking a drug test. The mayor vanished into his inner office temporarily and returned with several pages showing the results of a test, taken for insurance purposes back in June, that demonstrated negative findings in such categories as HIV, cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco.

He asked me to withhold specific figures, and I will. But it was clear — on this medical accounting, at least — that the mayor had earned a clean bill of health, in every sense of the term. As he said, he looked to be in terrific shape for a 67-year-old man. Even his blood pressure, as he pointed out, was within range. “See?” he said, smiling. “You people in the press can’t even give me high blood pressure!”

The mayor made a special point concerning when the report had been done. “Look at the date: June 26th! That was before [Morris] started that nonsense about drug tests. Some people advised me to show these results, but I had no intention of dignifying him with a response, as if I owed him an answer on something like that!

“Nothing goes in my body stronger than aspirin. Oh, I’ve admitted I like a red wine — a Merlot. But that’s it,” he concluded.

On Fixing the City

Jackson Baker

The newly reelected mayor posed this week with his grandson Adrian Herenton.

By now, Herenton had been joined by former city CAO and current MLGW overseer Rick Masson, who, like his boss, seemed to be floating on the kind of post-election high that needs no drug to activate.

Masson said nothing, but his facial expression alternated between the watchful attentiveness required of any good subordinate and the kind of smirk that ought to be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

Herenton turned to the issue of his election night remarks, the bitterness of which had been unmistakable. “I’m okay now. I got that out of my system,” he said.

He recalled being at the airport recently when a white man came over — strutting, to hear the mayor tell it:

“He said [Herenton imitating a peremptory voice]: ‘Mayor! When are you going to start trying to fix our city?’

“I looked back at him and said, ‘And when are you going to start helping me?’ He didn’t have anything to say to that.”

The mayor’s message seemed to be that he’s ready to listen whenever his critics want to start talking — so long as it’s a real dialogue.

Winners and Losers: Field Notes From Election Night


From the Victory Podium by Preston Lauterbach

Chez Chumney by Derek Haire


Herman Morris’ Last Dance by Bruce VanWyngarden