Tag: Jackson Baker

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Joey Hack’s post, “Questions Raised by Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man'” …

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is that in 1974, Prozac had only just been invented. It wasn’t until years later that it went into wide circulation.

OakTree

He should be wearing a piano key necktie in that photo. And why is Billy Joel brandishing a Telecaster, anyway?

Packrat

I love that moment when he hits that soaring final chorus in “Piano Man,” and dozens of catheters come flying onto the stage.

Mark

Who cares about all the damn metaphors in “Piano Man”? I understood what he was saying. I also remember when Billy and his small group played to a packed house at the old Lafayette’s Music Room at Overton Square in the early 1970s. I listened to it live on FM-100. Billy loved Memphis, and Memphis loved Billy. He became a superstar almost overnight after that show.

Paul Scates

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Another City/Suburban Battle” …

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but did the city not determine that South Cordova was going to lose money for the city immediately after annexing it? I’ve been saying for a while that the annexation strategy is and has been failing.

If you were to do a postmortem on the annexations, I believe you’d find that even the ones that at first were profitable for the city likely are no longer profitable.

The big problem the city has is that the minute it annexes an area, property values in the area drop. So any business case the city did based on the potential tax revenue of the annexed area was wrong if they didn’t assume that the pool of funds would be reduced after annexation. Knowing how most governments operate, I doubt that kind of analysis was ever done on any of the annexations.

GroveReb84

Mark Luttrell: 26%; George Flinn: 11%; Brian Kelsey: 9%; David Kustoff: 8%; Tom Leatherwood: 7%; Steve Basar: 1%; Undecided: 38%.

Given the choice of the above, it’s easy to see why Undecided is winning.

B

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “Medium Cool” …

Maybe the Flyer is too “cool” to educate themselves on Trump’s policies, but you can read them here if you can find time between comparing IPA’s: donaldjtrump.com/positions.

Clyde

Dubya was cool to a certain segment of the country — largely the same segment that loves Trump, and for many of the same reasons. The difference is that many of the people who voted for Dubya but weren’t fond of his cool trusted that his handlers would actually run the country for him. They don’t have the same trust with Trump. They know he’ll surround himself with yes-men and do whatever he damn well pleases, and that’s what scares them.

Hillary Clinton’s cool is 10th-grade math teacher cool — the teacher everybody hates after the first day of class, but toward the end of the year decide she’s all right, and by the time they graduate, remember her quite fondly as one of the best teachers they ever had.

Jeff

Bruce, you’ve gone too far. How dare you insult the noble brotherhood of “Siding Salesmen.”

I prefer to think of Trump as more like the guy who owns a bunch of sleazy and failed businesses and has the audacity to show up uninvited to the party, referring to himself as a “Business Genius, and VERY, very rich to boot.”

Oh … Wait a minute. Never mind.

So maybe we can just call him what he is: the turd in the punch bowl of the 2016 election year. And that’s not cool.

John Shouse

I dunno, I have sat in a bar with John Kerry and voted for him anyway.

CL Mullins

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

State Senate Puts Off Action on De-Annexation Bill, Sends It Back to Committee

State Senator Lee Harris arguing for bill’s referral

Nobody’s going anywhere just yet. The bill (HB0779/SB074) pending in the General Assembly that would allow de-annexation by any area annexed by Memphis since 1998 has been referred back to committee.

Several factors combined to produce that result on Monday — including reservations about the bill expressed by Lt. Governor Bill Haslam and Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey) and phone calls to legislators by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, abetted by on-site lobbying in Nashville on Monday by Memphis Chamber officials and City Council members.

But the actual mechanism that took the bill off the Senate floor and staved off a floor vote came on a motion by Senator Ken Yager of Kingston, chairman of the body’s State and Local Committee, who found the version that passed the House last week to be “totally unacceptable…bad law and bad policy.”

Yager based his objections mainly on the bill’s singling out a five cities (including Memphis) out of the 350 or so muinicipalities in Tennessee and its use of the hazy term “egregious” to describe annexations by those cities.

After the Senate sponsor, Bo Watson of Hixson, quarreled with that judgment and after a good deal of ensuing to and fro in debate, the Senate agreed to suspend the rules and refer the bill for reconsideration to Yager’s committee, which will hear it during a specially called session on Wednesday at noon.

Mayor Strickland and the Council and legislators representing Memphis itself have opposed the bill for numerous reasons, including the fact that, they say, it could cost the city $28 million annually in revenue and the loss of some 110,000 inhabitants, wreaking unintended consequences and havoc overall.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Jim Eikner

Memphis lost one of its finest citizens last week — Jim Eikner. Lawyer, onetime prosecutor, actor, singer, painter, wit, public speaker par excellence, he was, among many other things, the on-air presence and golden voice that sustained WKNO, Memphis’ public broadcasting station, for decades. He was a blend of dignity, service, and wit who, even before his ascension in the current year to the presidency of the Rotary Club of Memphis, was the embodiment of the club and its motto, Service Before Self. And no Memphis Rotarian can forget — or emulate — his erstwhile weekly news reviews that for years, faithful to Aristotle, always both amused and instructed.

Jim’s death was attributed to heart failure, though it is misleading to leave it at that, since his heart — in the metaphorical sense, anyhow — never failed us. Indeed, as we learned, even after he was disconnected medically from his artificial life supports, his heart kept beating for some time before subsiding into its final, reluctant rest, as if to remind us that he intended to remain with us in spirit.

We learned upon his death that Jim was 82, and, as we thought about that, it certainly made sense. He had the gravitas that comes with such age. But in another sense, he was still Jimmy Eikner of Messick High School, a youth who was equal parts sober-sided and impish. He stayed that way throughout his time at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) and at the University of Tennessee Law School and throughout his adult career as a full-time Renaissance man.

It was ironic that Jim Eikner should leave us on the very cusp of spring— he whose wardrobe and manner always distilled the essence of that season. But it was appropriate that, after one of the bleakest local winters on record, the weather should relent this week after his death, enough so to allow several of us to fetch our own cords and seersuckers from their hiding places, in his honor.

One of Jim’s memorable roles as an actor was that of Norman in On Golden Pond, the octogenarian who in the course of the play comes to terms with the generations that are preparing to succeed him. Eikner himself never had to play catch-up with anybody of any era. He was a man for all times and an inspiration to them, as well, and will not stop being that.

The one thing we will miss the most about Jim Eikner is that voice of his, something that he himself was so dismissive about, referring to it as mere nasality, but which we knew to be an uncommonly mellow instrument, whose silky baritone expressed all the tones and nuances of life like nobody else’s. But it will still be there, in the mind’s ear, to fill such uncomfortable silences as come along.
These remarks were given at Tuesday’s Downtown Rotary Club by Jackson Baker.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Trump Day in Millington

The approach to the Millington Jetport Hangar, where Donald Trump was to speak on Saturday evening, was a long, slow crawl for miles of automobiles bumper-to-bumper. It had the look of Woodstock to it, and, at 5:45 p.m., the car queues were being diverted away from the main approaches by uniformed local officers of various kinds and onto a back road that emptied directly onto the tarmac. From there it was a not-too-longish trek by foot through a gated area where peddlers a-plenty were selling Trump paraphernalia and finally, through metal-processing points into the hangar.

Uncharacteristically for the presidential campaigns in this election year (and unlike Trump’s once or twice in New Hampshire when the snows fell hard), this event conformed fairly closely to the advance schedule. At roughly 6 p.m., the appointed time, Trump’s big private jet taxied up close to the massive hangar’s open area, where a speaking platform had been set up, and the huge crowd inside the hangar, easily numbering several thousand, let up a roar, simultaneous with the raising of a host of cell-phone cameras to capture the event.

There had been rumors that Trump would have a surprise guest, and, sure enough, down the ramp, along with Trump came New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the recent presidential-campaign dropout whose endorsement of Trump on Friday had somewhat offset that day’s other big news meme, his brutal tag-team mugging by opponents Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in Friday’s Republican debate in Houston, broadcast by CNN.

Even as Trump and his new bromance bud strode up to the speaking stand, the continually building roar gave sufficient proof that The Donald had lost no luster among these masses, a packed-in assembly of just-folks Americana, largely white to be sure, but otherwise running across various class, gender, and age lines, from cap-and-jeans blue-collarites to a generously sized section for people in wheel chairs to the likes of Steve Ehrhart, the dapper Liberty Bowl exec who pointed out that he had grown acquainted with Trump in New York, presumably in the course of some deal that must have redounded to the benefit of both.

Christie spoke first, issuing some preliminary blasts at Rubio and Cruz and making it clear to the crowd that his endorsement of Trump was something more than that, it was an enlistment in the same cause that had attracted the thousands of attendees.

And then there was Trump. It was the usual philippic, mixing boasts, such as a claim that “every poll” had shown that he had won “every debate” with his rivals with familiar insults of those rivals, especially of “little Marco” — depicted by Trump as a quivering, sweaty-wet about-ready-to-pass-out “choke artist” whom he had spotted overtly leaguing with Cruz in a conspiratorial handshake before Thursday’s debate — and a distancing of himself from the rest of the field, too, indeed from the whole of the GOP establishment, with a claim that he was ever “the nicest person” on any stage with any of them and proudly boasting that he was creating a new Republican Party, indeed a new American consensus, including Democrats and independents as well.

The crowd, which was plainly not the usual muster of political junkie-dom (though any number of local GOP regulars could be spotted here and there) was uproariously with him on all of this, chanting “Win! Win! Win!” along with Trump and delighting also in his disparaging of the ex-Mexican president Vincente Fox who had famously said on Fox News that Mexico would not pay for the “faw-king” wall Trump says he’ll build on the border. The crowd rejoiced at Trump’s mockery of Fox and his tut-tutting at the “f-bomb” usage, and it suddenly became possible to imagine this and future such crowds hailing threats against uppity nations, near and far, that might go beyond the employment of bricks and mortar and electric wire.

Not that Trump, who for the record is much more non-interventionist in a military sense than his fellow GOP contenders, sounded any violent note per se. Indeed, when, as often happens at one of his rallies, a protester began to chant against him from inside the hangar, he calmly directed the crowd to “get him out” but “don’t hurt him.” And so the crowd did, with its counter-chant morphing from “Trump! Trump! Trump!” to “Win! Win! Win!”And finally to “U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A!”

Call it what else you will, but this is a movement.

Meanwhile, Rubio and Cruz, building on what they must have imagined to have been the great gains of the debate, were releasing their tax returns over the weekend in the apparent belief that they could shame Trump thereby and embarrass him in the eyes of the American electorate.

It was hard to imagine such a thought crossing the minds of those in these approving multitudes. In fact, it was absurd to think they would side with the battling Mambo Brothers or the IRS against their new idol — or hold him blameful for possibly gaming a system that has done them no favors.

Could Trump, as he had boasted, actually get away with shooting someone at high noon on Fifth Avenue? With these supporters, he might. Not with the law, but — to say it again — Trump is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it.

Finally, there was the after-speech rope line, with Trump spending serious person-to-person time with each beseecher that handed him a cap or a poster or even an American flag to sign or smiling for the inevitable selfie. All the while there were desperate cries of “Mr. Trump! Mr. Trump!” from people trapped behind secondary rope lines further back, still hopeful, despite evidence to the contrary, that they, too, might get close enough to touch or be touched.

 

And then, finally, he was aboard the plane and gone, off on his quest to Make America Great Again, no doubt secure in his conviction that the minions he left behind in the Memphis area would go to the polls on Super Tuesday, just three days away, and do the right thing by him.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Local Reactions to Passing of Justice Antonin Scalia

CREDIT: Antonin Scalia, 1936-2016

Antonin Scalia, 1936-2016

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a behemoth of the “originalist” or conservative persuasion, died Saturday in Texas, where he had gone on a hunting trip. He was 79.

Justice Scalia addressed a luncheon at The Peabody and an assembly of the University of Memphis Law School in late 2013; at both sites his comments were characteristically pithy. From the Flyer‘s review of that occasion:

“Every banana republic, every president-for-life could boast a bill of rights,” Scalia said at the luncheon. “The former Evil Empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had a wonderful bill of rights.” It is the “distribution of power” which is the genius of the American system, he said. Again: “Gridlock is what the system is designed for, so that only good legislation can get passed.”

Local figures whose careers have intersected with law and politics have begun to comment on Scalia’s passing:

Former Shelby County Commissioner and assistant dean of the University of Memphis Law School Steve Mulroy:

Justice Scalia was one of the most influential Justices of the last century. Agree or disagree, his brilliance was beyond dispute. His passing will leave a large ideological hole on the Court.

Because he was a member of the conservative majority, his passing may prove to be truly momentous, giving a Democratic president a chance to change the Court from majority-conservative to majority liberal. Whether the GOP-controlled Senate would allow President Obama to appoint a successor in an election year seems doubtful. If not, it dramatizes the high stakes in the upcoming presidential election.


Former state Senator and current Shelby County Chancellor Jim Kyle:

Since his appointment to the Supreme Court Justice Scalia played an important role in the most important issues of his day. His passing will change the Court for the next generation of Americans.

State Senate Majority Leader and constitutional lawyer Mark Norris:

It’s a tremendous loss. He wasn’t politically correct, but he was constitutionally correct. He was blunt and insightful and just what
jurisprudence needed as a reign on judicial activism.

He was an original and an originalist. He had a great sense of humor and a uniquely fine sense of culture. When it came to the Constitution, he believed in original intent, construing it reasonably “to contain all that it fairly means.”

He was also a heck of a duck hunter. I miss him already.

Former Republican chairman, long-termRepublican national committeeman, and general counsel of the RNC John Ryder:

He was larger than life, an intellectual and legal giant whose views, even in dissent, influenced the direction of the Court. His impact on constitutional law will be felt for many generations. Jstice Scalia restored respect for the meaning of the words of the Constitution and the intent of the Framers. His advocacy for originalism has reshaped constitutional thinking over the past thirty years.

I have to note that he was a great lover of opera, and when he visited Memphis a few years ago those of us on the board of Opera Memphis presented him with a CD of our greatest hits, which he greatly appreciated.

9th District congressman Steve Cohen:

It brings the appointment of Justices to the forefront as to what is most at stake in the November election of the next President, as the Supreme Court is where long -time power resides in our system.

There are three remaining Justices who are in their late 70’s or 80’s, and the next President’s appointments will determine what the future of our nation will be more than anything else she or he does or the Congress does.

State Senator Brian Kelsey, chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee:

Justice Scalia did more to uphold the original meaning of the constitution than any other justice in history. Our country lost a true patriot today.

We currently have a balanced court. A judge with a liberal interpretation of the constitution could undermine our system of government for a generation. Leader McConnell and the Senate should stand strong for the appointment of a constitutional conservative.

Former Shelby County Chancellor and current Judge, Tennessee Court of Appeals, Arnold Goldin:

Justice Scalia was a
charismatic and provocative individual and you always knew where he stood on issues of constitutional law.

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Former Democratic chairman David Cocke:

The Republicans may be missing an opportunity to force the President to nominate a moderate Democrat. Their current 8-vote majority in the Senate is very likely to erode substantially in the upcoming election, and if a Democrat wins the presidency, they face the prospect of a much more liberal justice being appointed and approved by the Senate next year.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The True Story of Truth

When you call your movie Truth, you’re setting a pretty high bar —especially if your setting is a time when truth was in short supply.

Truth is based on a memoir by Mary Mapes, a CBS news producer who was instrumental in breaking two stories of the Bush era: the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the so-called Killian documents scandal, where she and Dan Rather uncovered letters proving that then-president George W. Bush had gone AWOL from his Air National Guard unit during the Vietnam War. The former story got her a Peabody Award. The latter got her fired when it turned out the documents were fake. Maybe. That’s the rub in Truth and the source of the possible unintentional irony of the title.

The film is a bit of a throwback. The story is told primarily with dialogue, and it expects the viewer to bring a little knowledge of recent history to the party. It’s kind of like All the President’s Men, only the good guys lose. The cast is killer: Cate Blanchett stars as Mapes, Robert Redford plays Dan Rather, and the supporting cast includes Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and, best of them all, Stacy Keach as Bill Burkett, the ultimate source of the controversial letters. The story opens with Mapes and her team, fresh off the prisoner abuse story, which put the Bush administration on the defensive and eroded public trust in the team running the Iraq War, contemplating what to do next. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are in the process of undermining Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam military record. But Mapes has heard Bush never even showed up for much of the stateside Air National Guard duty he pulled to avoid being deployed, and so she goes searching for proof, which is too-conveniently delivered to her.

In the film, passing reference is made to Mapes hearing rumors about the story during the 2000 campaign. But in fact, the story came from work done by Memphis Flyer political reporter Jackson Baker, who wrote about it in these pages in February, 2004, seven months before the ill-fated 60 Minutes report aired. Baker quoted Memphian Bob Mintz, a FedEx pilot who had flown in Bush’s Air National Guard unit in Alabama, who claimed that he had never seen the future president on the base. Baker confirmed the story with fellow pilot Paul Bishop. The Flyer story was ignored for months until The Boston Globe and The New York Time‘s Nicholas Kristof interviewed Mintz, setting the CBS investigation in motion. But Baker’s role in uncovering the story has gone unremarked until the website Raw Story reprinted the original column last week.

 “It used to piss me off. It’s probably a good thing for my piece of mind that I’d stopped thinking about it long ago,” Baker says. “There’s a sequel to this unjust oversight that’s almost too much! In those days I was a regular stringer for Time magazine, and, when the Rather debacle occurred, the magazine’s New York office delegated me to try to track down the source of the information that the ill-fated but well-intentioned (and well-aimed) CBS anchor had acted on in his late-campaign Bush story of 2004. I checked back through various layers of the likely daisy chain and finally got in touch with a Texas media guy who played a key role in getting the story to the national sources that ended up with it, including Rather. And where did this guy get his info? ‘Why….’ he sputtered, in obvious confusion. ‘Why, from you! It was your story in The Memphis Flyer!’ (SIGH!) I had found the mysterious Ur-source, and it was me. It’s worth noting, by the way, that my account relied totally on Mintz and two other first-person National Guard witnesses on the scene in Alabama—no documents, suspect or otherwise. If the big boys had restricted themselves to the information in my story, Rather and Mapes would have kept their jobs, and Bush might have lost his.”

Truth is ultimately about old-guard media giants ambushed by the Bushes’ ruthless black-propaganda operation. Even at this late date, it never seems to occur to anyone involved that the story might be true, but the letters they were using for proof might be fakes planted to destroy their credibility. It’s a solidly-made movie, but you may come away from it wondering who, if anyone, has a claim on truth in the 21st century.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Was Bush on Guard or AWOL?

Editor’s note: Jackson Baker’s 2004 story of George W. Bush’s failure to report to National Guard duty is the basis for ≠events portrayed in the new movie Truth. This is an edited version of Baker’s original story. It was recently cited, as noted below, in a Buzzfeed.com story about the movie.

“In February 2004, the alternative newsweekly The Memphis Flyer published extensive interviews with guardsmen who served with Bush and said he went AWOL. Mainstream media, for reasons still inadequately explained today, sat on that information for 7 months.” — RawStory.com, October 29.

Two members of the Air National Guard unit that President George W. Bush allegedly served with as a young Guard flyer in 1972 had been told to expect him late in that year and were on the lookout for him. He never showed. Of that, both Bob Mintz and Paul Bishop are certain.

The question of Bush’s presence in 1972 at Dannelly Air National Guard base in Montgomery, Alabama — or the lack of it — has become an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. And that issue, which picked up steam last week, continues to rage.

Recalls Memphian Mintz, now 62: “I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with.” But, says Mintz, that “somebody” — better known to the world now as the president of the United States — never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember.

“And I was looking for him,” repeated Mintz, who said that he assumed that Bush “changed his mind and went somewhere else” to do his substitute drill. It was not “somewhere else,” however, but the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly to which the young Texas flyer had requested transfer from his regular Texas unit — the reason being Bush’s wish to work in Alabama on the ultimately unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of family friend Winton “Red” Blount.

It is the 187th, Mintz’s unit, which was cited, during the 2000 presidential campaign, as the place where Bush completed his military obligation. And it is the 187th that the White House continues to contend that Bush belonged to as recently as last week, when presidential spokesman Scott McClellan released payroll records and, later, evidence suggesting that Bush’s dental records might be on file at Dannelly.

[But] the mystery of the young lieutenant’s whereabouts in late 1972 remains.

“There’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed a strange rooster in the henhouse, especially since we were looking for him,” insists Mintz, who has begun poring over such documents relating to the matter as are now making their way around the Internet. One of these is a piece of correspondence addressed to the 187th’s commanding officer, then Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, concerning Bush’s redeployment.

Mintz remembers a good deal of base scuttlebutt at the time about the letter, which clearly identifies Bush as the transferring party. Formerly a registered Republican, Mintz confesses to “a negative reaction” to what he sees as out-and-out dissembling on President Bush’s part. “You don’t do that as an officer, you don’t do that as a pilot, you don’t do it as an important person, and you don’t do it as a citizen. This guy’s got a lot of nerve.”

The actual flying squadron of the 187th numbered only “25 to 30 pilots,” Mintz said. “There’s no doubt. I would have heard of him, seen him, whatever. … And if he did any flying at all, on whatever kind of craft, that would have involved a great number of supportive personnel. It takes a lot of people to get a plane into the air. But nobody I can think of remembers him. I talked to one of my buddies the other day and asked if he could remember Bush at drill at any time, and he said, ‘Naw, ol’ George wasn’t there. And he wasn’t at the Pit, either.'”

The “Pit” was The Snake Pit, a nearby bistro where the squadron’s pilots would gather for frequent after-hours revelry. And the buddy was Bishop, then a lieutenant at Dannelly and now a pilot for Kalitta, a charter airline that in recent months has been flying war materiel into the Iraq Theater of Operations.

“I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush,” confirms Bishop, who voted for the current president in 2000. “In fact,” he quips, mindful of the current political frame of reference, “I saw more of Al Sharpton at the base than I did of George W. Bush.

In Air National Guard circles, Bishop, who now lives in Goldsboro, N.C., is something of a legendary figure. Known to his mates as “Papa Whiskey” (for “P.W.”) Bishop, he is a veteran of Gulf War I, a conflict in which he was the ranking reservist. During the current conflict, on behalf of Kalitta, Bishop has flown frequent supply missions into military facilities at Kuwait.

“I think a commander-in-chief who sends his men off to war ought to be a veteran who has seen the sting of battle. In Iraq: we have a bunch of great soldiers, but they are not policemen. I don’t think he [the president] was well-advised; right now it’s costing us an American life a day. I’m not a peacenik, but what really bothers me is that of the 500 or so that we’ve lost almost 80 of them were reservists. We’ve got an over-extended Guard and reserve.”

Part of the problem, Bishop thinks, is a disconnect resulting from the president’s own inexperience with combat operations.

“It bothered me that he wouldn’t ‘fess up and say, Okay, guys, I cut out when the rest of you did your time. He shouldn’t have tried to dance around the subject. I take great exception to that. I spent 39 years defending my country.”

Like his old comrade Mintz, Bishop, now 65, was a pilot for Eastern Airlines during their reserve service in 1972 at Dannelly. Mintz then lived in Montgomery; Bishop commuted from Atlanta. Mintz and Bishop retired from the Guard with the ranks of lieutenant colonel and colonel, respectively.

“Unless he [Bush] was an introvert back then, which I don’t think he was, he’d have spent some time out in the mainstream, in the dining hall or wherever. He’d have spent some time with us. Unless he was trying to avoid publicity. But he wasn’t well known at all then. It all seems a bit unusual.”

As Bishop noted, “Fighter pilots, and that’s what we were, have situational awareness. They know everything about their environment — whether it’s an enemy plane creeping up or a stranger in their hangar.” [If Bush had been there], said Bishop, “… there would be documentation of the fact in point summaries and pay documents.”

And that’s another mystery.

Yet another veteran of the 187th is Wayne Rambo of Montgomery, who as a lieutenant served as the unit’s chief administrative until April of 1972. That was a few months prior to Bush’s alleged service, which Rambo, who continued to drill with the 187th, also cannot remember.

Rambo was, however, able to shed some light on the Guard practice, then and now, of assigning annual service “points” to members, based on their record of attendance and participation. The bare minimum number is 50, and reservists meeting standard are said to have had “a good year,” Rambo said.

“The 50-point minimum has always been taken very seriously, especially for pilots,” says Rambo. “The reason is that it takes a lot of taxpayer money to train a pilot, and you don’t want to see it wasted.”

For whatever reason, the elusive Lt. George W. Bush was awarded 41 actual points for his service in both Texas and Alabama during 1972 — though he apparently was given 15 “gratuitous” points, presumably by his original Texas command, enough to bring him up from substandard. That would have been a decided violation of the norm, according to Rambo.

Bishop raises yet another issue about Bush’s Guard tenure: the cancellation after 1972 of the final year of his six-year obligation — ostensibly to pursue a post-graduate business degree at Yale.

That didn’t sit well with the veteran pilot. “When you accept a flying slot with the Air National Guard, you’re obligated for six years,” Bishop said. “Maybe they do things differently in Texas. I don’t want to malign the commander-in-chief, but this is an issue of duty, honor country. You must have integrity.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Politics as Seen From Afar

SPA, Belgium — In the last four days, I have experienced: 1) Oktoberfest in Munich; 2) a half-day tour of the concentration camp at Dachau; 3) a lumberjack contest in Luxembourg; 4) a tour of the Battle of the Bulge sites, focused on the Belgian town of Bastogne; and 5) immersion in Fort La Ferté, a key component of the Maginot Line, the series of French fortifications which were meant to halt the German invasion of France in 1940, but failed to do so.

I have also, through the miracle of modern science, been able to kibitz via the internet Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission, which, at 10:40 p.m., Spa time, had really just gotten started. 

As we speak, they are about to deal with zoning regulations applicable to private sex clubs. One of the clauses of a new ordinance being proposed by Josh Whitehead of the Office of Planning and Development will read, “A private sex club shall not be considered a place of worship.”

Commissioner David Reaves asks to be excused from voting. “I just can’t vote on something involving sex clubs,” he explains. The item, a compendium of several zoning matters, still passes with 12 votes.

Did I mention that I experienced Oktoberfest in Munich?

I’m on a bucket-list trip to Europe. Still to go, before I return for the final few days of the city election, are trips to Normandy, where the group I’m with will spend a couple of days looking at the D-Day landing areas, and then to Paris (briefly) before coming home. 

If the Normandy tour is anything like those we’ve been through so far, we’ll learn one hell of a lot that you can’t get from books. We’ll also work hard at it. At one point in going through the Maginot fortifications, where passages were sardine-can-size cramped, we had to troop up 167 steps of a winding stairway. Huff and puff doesn’t begin to describe it. The 140 or so defenders of Fort La Ferté died from smoke asphyxiation under bombardment in those claustrophobic confines.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, audience member Jane Pierotti is inveighing against a proposed commission rules change that would drop the number of votes required for a rules change from two-thirds of the membership to a simple majority. She quotes Lord Acton and notes that Darth Vader did not start out on “the dark side” but sure as heck ended up there.

This item passes with 12 votes as well.

I cannot pretend that I know everything that has transpired in the city election since I wrote last week’s cover-story roundup of the various races. The trend lines seem to be still in place, however, and, as far as I can see, will continue all the way through early voting and right up to the final October 8th election date.

The mayoral debate that WMC anchor Joe Birch and I co-moderated last Tuesday at the Rotary Club of Memphis was so even-keeled and impressive that almost everyone, including a key supporter of Mayor A C Wharton who normally spins with the best of them, concluded that all four participants — Wharton, Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association director Mike Williams — had demonstrated they were capable of running the city.

Part of that has to do with the fact that frequent interchanges with each other and with the public have made them all conversant with the issues of importance — a process that, as we noted editorially last week, just can’t, or shouldn’t, be skipped or foreshortened.

That all of them, after that dignified affair, went after each other, slugfest-style, at the University of Memphis the same night, doesn’t contradict that fact; it just indicates that they all are aware of the importance of the stakes.

Meanwhile, the commission is announcing plans to go into budget matters with an intensity and thoroughness that have not previously been the norm. “It may not be to the advantage of the administration,” opines new chairman Terry Roland, “but it will be to the advantage of the people.”

The commission, says Roland, will also look into EDGE, the joint city/county industrial development board, with the idea of making some serious changes.

Meanwhile, through the auspices of Education First, on an itinerary planned by former Shelby County Schools chairman David Pickler, I’m getting lessoned up on other, more historic battlefields.

Back at you next week before the final vote.

Categories
News News Feature

Remembering Pierre

When I first met Pierre Kimsey I had no idea what to make of him.

It was an era when it seemed everyone in the television industry was trying to find the elusive magic formula that would capture viewing audiences in whatever media markets we were in. The “happy talk” format, which often painfully forced interactions between news anchors, was just starting to become a trend. I could imagine to uncomfortable viewers it verged on the voyeuristic. Here were people in a previously one-dimensional box suddenly sharing snippets of their personal lives when they were on camera in an attempt to humanize themselves with a strained 30-second exchange of conversation.

But I knew, when Pierre and I watched in disgust — at the now defunct Fort Pierce, Florida, television station WTVX — while two of our anchors feebly struggled to talk to one another, I’d found a kindred spirit. What I didn’t know was it would be the beginning of a 30-year bond between two people who saw an opportunity to explore television as the free-form medium we thought it was meant to be.

WTVX, a UHF start-up, was the perfect testing ground for us. Pierre was hired as feature reporter and film critic. I reported and anchored sports, but was pressed into service for news stories, as well. Our station struggled to find an identity in one of the fastest-growing television markets in the country. Since we had to fill hours of news time with a small staff, it was imperative that on occasions, we would stretch the envelope of creativity.

I specifically remember when, in his role as film critic, Pierre came up with the idea of doing a review of one of the original trilogies of Star Wars movies. He enlisted my help as co-starring in a four-minute piece in which he portrayed Han Solo and I was his nameless co-pilot. I was nameless because Pierre, long before such concerns existed, worried that casting me as “Chewbacca the Wookie” might come off as racist.

In true Pierre form, the preparations and logistics were meticulous. We commandeered station owner Frank Spain’s twin engine plane, which was parked in the station’s lot. Our fellow employees came out and rocked the plane as if it were undergoing an attack. The finished product was seamless. With his usual unselfish nature, Pierre gave me all the laugh lines while he played the foil. It was brilliantly edited and produced … and when the ratings came in, it was stunningly obvious, almost nobody watched it. Thus was life at X-34!

After working together for a couple of years, Pierre took a job in Detroit and became a sensation. We kept in touch through the years as I eventually landed in Memphis, and he fell from the stars in Detroit as a feature reporter to be resurrected in Huntsville, Alabama, as a producer of award-winning documentaries.

We eventually reunited at WHBQ to work together on investigative stories. It was during that time I came to fully recognize the talent and caring for the human condition Pierre had behind his cultured and sometimes distracted demeanor.

As I related in a recent WKNO tribute to Pierre with my television colleagues Jackson Baker, Bill Dries, and Andrew Douglas, issues such as the depth of poverty and racism in Memphis truly angered and befuddled him. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that every man could be transformed into a foot soldier for change. However, unlike many of us, he was willing, until proven otherwise, to give everyone he met the benefit of the doubt.

Pierre’s unmatched body of television work was reflective of his attempt to reach the core of people’s feelings. He assumed a life’s mission to make that one-dimensional box come alive, not through idle chatter but by producing thought-provoking weekly programs and thoroughly researched documentaries for WKNO.

My biggest heartbreak is in knowing that for all the lives he may have unknowingly touched and motivated, Pierre died alone. The circumstances of his death will haunt me for the rest of my life. Why didn’t I ask him about his health? Why didn’t I have him over to the house just to talk with him about whatever was going on in his life? Why didn’t I know there might be something amiss?

The answers to those questions were just a phone call away. Yet, it was a phone call I didn’t make.

Decades ago, I didn’t know what to make of my first meeting with Pierre Kimsey. But I learned, as so many viewers also did, to appreciate his creative genius. He will be sorely missed.

Les Smith is a reporter for WHBQ Fox-13.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Remembering Marion Barry

Sometime in the spring of 1990, I had lucked into a gig in Washington, D.C., speaking to a meeting of the National Association of Counties about the relationship between public figures and the media.

The meeting was in the Washington Hilton, and, after our session was through, I lingered a while and found myself in another ballroom of the hotel, rubber-necking the conclusion of a dinner that was being addressed by the mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry.  

Barry had been the target of an F.B.I. sting operation in January of that year. The feds had videotaped him in a Washington hotel room, allegedly in the act of soliciting both sex and cocaine from a woman who was not his wife. This was almost a full generation before YouTube, but the clip showing him lighting up on crack just before being busted had played on TV for days and had the same kind of universality. 

The mayor would subsequently be tried — and convicted — in federal court on the cocaine charges and do six months in jail. But on this night in early April he was still a free man, having just emerged from several weeks of self-committed seclusion at a drug rehab center. He looked surprisingly fit and unworried for one presumably so weighted down. Indeed, even with his legal situation at that point unresolved, his remarks at the dinner had been clearly focused on the prospect of a mayoral race scheduled for later that year. 

Somehow we ended up in conversation after the dinner, and, to my surprise, having found out where I was from and that I was connected with a paper in Memphis, he began suggesting that we should do an interview — part of it right there in the hotel ballroom and the rest of it via long-distance telephone when I got back to Memphis. 

For all I knew, it was to be Barry’s first post-arrest, post-rehab interview, or among the first, anyhow, just as the speech to the AFL-CIO was his return to the world at large.

I was grateful but curious. There were no votes for him in Memphis, after all, but, before our two-pronged interview was over with, I would come to see just how important Memphis, his point of personal and political origin, must have been to him psychologically and how, just by introducing myself, I had given him an opportunity to touch base. 

“I’m just trying to get out from under all this bad stuff and turn over a whole new leaf,” Barry told me at the Hilton. 

He had just made a pointed reference in his speech to the AFL-CIO crowd of redefining himself vis-à-vis his Maker, defining the word “ego,” anagrammatically, as meaning “Easing God Out,” and saying, “When that happens, you ease yourself out.”

This wasn’t the stereotypical case of a man in trouble finding God, he would tell me. “I already knew Him. I’ve always been a Christian. I didn’t get up on any mountaintop or get knocked off a donkey on the road to Damascus or anything like that. [pause] But I’ve had a spiritual awakening, yes.” 

Barry had come to national prominence through several stages — as leader of student sit-ins in Nashville, where he’d gone to graduate school at Fisk University, as an up-front operative of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later as its national chairman. By then a resident of Washington, he served several terms on the D.C. Board of Education and the Washington City Council, and he was shot and almost killed by a radical Muslim gunman while in the latter role. 

Elected mayor of Washington in 1978, Barry was in his third term and was virtually assured of winning a fourth at the time of his drug bust. The D.C. media had begun referring to him as “Mayor for Life,” a sobriquet that, interestingly enough, would later be applied to a friend from his Memphis days, Willie Herenton, who this week was among those being called on for recollections of Barry. 

Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, in 1936, Barry was raised in South Memphis, where he attended Florida Elementary School, Booker T. Washington High School, and LeMoyne-Owen College. It was in Memphis, he told me, where his political awareness and public career actually began. 

From the 1990 Flyer interview: “Yeah, hell, yeah!” he affirmed, recalling such indignities as having to wait until Thursday to visit the Memphis Zoo or getting a cheap bicycle for his 20 new subscribers to The Commercial Appeal when his fellow white carriers were rewarded for the same feat by an annual pilgrimmage to the glittering city of New Orleans. “That didn’t make any sense … so some other black carriers and I talked them into giving us a trip to St. Louis, which was, unlike New Orleans, an unsegregated city back then.”

But the galvanizing event, that which definitely pushed the bookish former Eagle Scout and would-be scientist [Barry was a chemistry major] into politics as a calling, came during his LeMoyne years, when ex-Mayor Walter Chandler undertook a legalistic defense of segregated busing.

“It was very insulting to me,” recalled Barry. “It just struck me as wrong that Chandler, who was on the Board of Trustees of LeMoyne, would actually be opposed to the interests of black people.” So the unheralded student then wrote a letter calling for Chandler to resign from the board. 

And quicker than you could say “ex-laboratory lizard,” he found himself celebrated. This was the mid-1950s — about the time, after all, that a young minister named Martin Luther King was coming to public attention as the leader of a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Marion Barry was taking his first deep breaths at just the right time.

 

All that was in the beginning. By the time I encountered him in that ballroom of the Washington Hilton, he had not only enjoyed a zenith-like political career in the nation’s capital, he had encountered his Icarus moment, had let the bright light of heedless ambition scorch his wax wings and plummet him downward.

Although Barry would claim entrapment during his trial later in 1990 and beat all but one of the charges against him, that of simple possession, he was kept from running again for mayor and even lost a race for city council.

Before all that, he was making an effort to take stock. There had been women, too many. There had been drugs. There had been booze. Too much of all of that. Even his young son had reproached him, post-arrest, for always having a drink in his hand, he told me.

“I realized I’d lost control of things. It takes that for a lot of alcoholics, some dramatic realization like that in the family,” he said.

I asked: Might he fall again? “I don’t intend to. Who’s to speculate on what you do in the future? I want to be the best mayor I can possibly be, the best husband, the best person.”  

He could not help expressing some bitterness, even some self-pity, about his predicament. “Who’s concerned anymore about homelessness and discrimination and poverty? I dedicate whole working days to those areas, and all some people are concerned about is what happens between 10 o’clock and midnight!”

Barry would rise again in subsequent years, going on to run for mayor again and winning several more terms. And he would fall again, as well, succumbing to numerous other documented bouts with drugs and alcohol. There were tax problems. And health issues. He was out of office and a worn-out case when he died on Sunday in Washington of cardiac arrest, at age 78.

But, for all his mortal frailties, he was still respected and claimed by many as an inspiration. Ninth District Congressman Steve Cohen, who stayed in touch with this fellow son of Memphis, issued something of an epitaph, saying in part: “Marion Barry was always gracious and full of information when we talked, and I am saddened to hear of his passing. … As Maya Angelou once said, he ‘changed America with his unmitigated gall to stand up in the ashes of where he had fallen and come back to win.’ He was beloved by many in our nation’s capital and around the country, and he will be missed.”