Tag: Memphis Flyer’s 25th Anniversary

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s article, “The Origin Story” …

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer. Congratulations. However, I have to say, as a founding staff member of the Dixie Flyer, that I highly resent editor Bruce VanWyngarden’s reference to our publication as “a hippie paper that was published in Memphis for a time in the 1970s.”

It wasn’t a “hippie” paper, the inference being that it was an inferior product put together by a bunch of pot-smoking losers. In addition to myself as music editor, executive editor Sara Van Horn, and art director Eddie Tucker, we had many other talented people working very hard to produce a paper of which the community could be proud. And none of us got paid a dime. Contributors included Joe Mulherin, John Fergus Ryan, David Less, Phyllis Tickle, Gordon Osing, and many other fine writers, as well as photographers Ebet Roberts, Richard Sidman, Elbert Greer, and other talented people.

I would venture to say that a lot of our features and commentaries were much superior to anything the current Flyer had in its infancy. “Hippie paper” indeed. The truth is that the Flyer put big bucks behind our idea and, 25 years later, they are doing quite well. A little respect for the Dixie Flyer, Bruce. We blazed the trail in the 1970s and your organization turned it into an eight-lane expressway.

Gordon Alexander

Greg Cravens

About the article, “25 Who Shaped Memphis” …

I can’t believe you left out Adrian Rogers, given the religious and political effect that Bellevue Baptist Church has had and continues to have on many Memphians — religious, nonreligious, straight, gay, etc.

Brunetto Latini

Bellevue Baptist is emblematic of why I and so many others have disdain for the suburbanite mob. They hit that sweet spot between ignorance and righteous indignation.

MidtownOnly

You left out Jesus.

CL Mullins

About Chris Davis’ post, “Commercial Appeal Metro Columnist Wendi Thomas Has Been Reassigned” …

Perhaps we can now have a more balanced approach to race relations in the CA. The divisiveness that was Wendi’s M.O. was particularly unsettling to this northern transplant.

Smitty1961

Since when is pointing out the obvious being “divisive”? Oh, that’s right, when you want to pretend that we are in a post-racial world, got it! Oy.

LeftWingCracker

There is much prejudice in the hardcore white commenters in the CA, and it is hard to go against that tide. She will probably go and make an impact somewhere else within the next couple of years. What I can say with certainty is that she always treated me with respect and she helped me in my time of need. Wendi has helped Memphis in many ways and I hope one day she will be more appreciated in the community than she has been.

TruthBeTold

Every kid will be named “Trevon” in Wendi’s articles.

HomerSimpson

Is this only being posted to attract the CA comment trolls?

Nobody

About a visit to Memphis …

My wife and I, with our daughter and son-in-law, visited Memphis to celebrate my 70th birthday with a visit to Graceland, as I have always been a big fan of Elvis. While we were there, we decided to go to the BBQ fest. Having never seen it or even heard about it before, we didn’t know what to expect, but what a surprise! The contestants made us feel really welcome and even gave us T-shirts to remember them (along with a few beers and food). So, we would like to say a very big thank you to all the friends we made in Memphis that day. We truly have never met more friendly people.

Jack, Cindy, Mandy and Choo

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: The Flyer’s 25th

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

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Okay, I have a big, fat knot in my stomach. A knot the size of a Burger King Double Whopper with cheese, although I haven’t had one of those in about four years. It’s a knot the size of West Memphis, but more about that later. It’s a knot the size of a pie at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, although I’ve never been there to see how big that theme park really is. I have a very strong and dramatic dislike of theme parks and basically will not go to one for any reason. I visited Opryland once when I was in probably the seventh grade, and I vowed never to go to one again. Well, I guess I did go to Libertyland a time or two over the years here in Memphis, but that’s neither here nor there and has nothing to do with the big knot in my stomach.

I think I have this knot, this pit, this twisted, gurgling thing in my gut because this is officially the 25th anniversary issue of the Memphis Flyer, and I feel that I should be waxing nostalgic and retelling all of the many things that happened in the early days when I helped get it started and served as its founding editor. The only problem is that the more I think about it, the older I feel, and it is making the knot grow bigger and more volcanic.

I’m sure lots of the early days of this paper will be covered elsewhere in this issue, so that eases the pressure some. But I still feel like I should give an account of what it was like in those days and, well, at this point, I think I’m going to throw up the knot. But here goes with a few highlights from the decade that the first cell phone hit the market and believe me, back then they were bigger than this knot in my gut.

The personal ads: Oh, yeah, the personal ads. I guess every other alternative paper in the country contained personal dating ads, but to my knowledge no other paper in Memphis had ever tried it. Remember, this was before we had internet access, much less match.com, eharmony.com, gay.com, christiansingles.com, farmersonly.com, or any of the other niche online services to introduce strangers to each other for the purposes of dating or whatever.

It was scandalous to some, welcomed by others. I remember one ad from a woman who described herself as having a “Ruben-esque” figure, attempting to equate herself to the rather fleshy subjects in the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens. Unfortunately, she spelled it “Reuben-esque,” equating her figure to a corned beef and sauerkraut sandwich on rye. Among our tiny staff at the time, there were some who ran personal ads for co-workers as a joke. I don’t even remember how one answered a personal ad back then, as we didn’t have email or passwords or any other real form of communication other than the phone. So I guess we called each other to set up these outings? All I know is that I tried it a couple of times just for fun and ended up having a bird almost peck my eyes out in Bartlett after a stroll through the Raleigh Springs Mall and attending Graceland’s Candlelight Vigil after consuming far too much alcohol.

The way we got the editorial content together. Yes, we did have computers. They were little beige contraptions that were foreign to me at first and used a floppy disk so that some of the freelance writers could supply their copy on a disk, and it could be copied to the computer. However, most people back then still had typewriters and would simply type their various columns and articles, and I would either have to go to their homes to fetch the copy or have them bring it to the office, where I would have to key-stroke them into the computer. Some people actually hand-wrote their prose. And goodness knows we did not have spell check programs back then.

Once the articles and columns were typed up, I somehow got them to the people in the back of the room who were called typesetters. I think they had to retype the copy so that it would come out on long sheets of shiny white paper, which then had to be proofread and sent back for corrections until the copy came out clean and ready to go. Then, it had to be run through a machine that coated the back of it with wax and then cut up with a knife with a sharp little blade and then pasted to big sheets of cardboard, which were then taken to Mississippi on Tuesday afternoons and somehow would come back the next day as a newspaper.

Every Tuesday afternoon, after this race to the finish line, when the box finally went out the door, the staff would all go to the P&H Cafe to decompress, or something like that. And the next day, it all started again.

Twenty-five years of the Memphis Flyer. It is something to behold.