Susan Komen – Memphis Flyer

Michael Donahue

Jerry “The King” Lawler and his fiance, Lauryn McBride, were in the audience at the Kings of Leon show Saturday May 6 at the Beale Street Music Festival.

Jerry recalled the time the band members wanted their picture taken with him. “They were first getting started,” Jerry said.

He was in Arlington making an appearance at the time. The Kings of Leon also were at the venue with their amps and musical instruments in a trailer, he said. “They saw that I was there and they came out and said, ‘We want a picture of you with your crown.’ I took the picture with them. I never thought anything about it until they became famous.”

Michael Donahue

Rick Gardner and Dike Bacon at HBG Design

HBG Design (formerly Hnedak Bobo Group) showed off its newly-designed office space at a reception May 4 at 1 Commerce Square.

The architecture and interior design firm invited friends to see the new offices, said HBG Design marketing manager Dana Ramsey. The firm moved from its old offices at 104 Front Street on Nov. 1.

“Along with our new office space, we also rolled out our new brand – a new logo, our new name and branded information,” Dana said.

Grinder, Taber & Grinder construction worked with HBG Design to create the new space. The closed office and workstations on the 23rd and 24th floors were demolished to create an open floor plan. The 23rd floor ceiling was cut through to create a stairway to connect the two levels.

Star & Micey provided music and Another Roadside Attraction prepared hors d’oeuvres for the reception, which drew about 120 people.

Michael Donahue

Marcus Bell and Romeo Khazen at Susan B. Komen

The 2017 community health care grants were announced at the Memphis-Mid-South affiliate of Susan G. Komen annual grant reception May 4 at The Westin Memphis Beale Street. “We have 10 community health care grants,” said executive director Elaine Hare. “We presented $402,000 to eight health care providers and two support groups.”

The recipients provide breast health and breast cancer services in the Mid-South.

The money for the community grant recipients is from the 2016 Race for the Cure, which was held Oct. 29.

About 75 people, including grantees, Race for the Cure sponsors and winning team captains, attended the reception.

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Best line of the week: “Burger King,” by developer Henry Turley to the ambulance crew member who asked which hospital he wanted to be taken to after he passed out while chairing a board meeting for Sun Trust Bank this week. He blamed his fall on cold medications and a lack of breakfast and declined an overnight stay in the hospital. He is doing fine.

The CEOs of two of our biggest companies were in the news Thursday. On CNBC, FedEx CEO Fred Smith said the U.S. economy is growing but not at a rate high enough to absorb the increase in population. He recommended that the government enhance capital investment, keep exploring fuel sources not dependent on Middle Eastern nations, and change the tax code provisions that penalize profits made abroad. Smith said 43 percent of FedEx world management team is minorities and women. And he said the Post Office “is run by a very competent man who was in Memphis last week to talk to our managers.” That would be Patrick Donahoe.

An hour later, International Paper CEO John Faraci was on a web conference for IP’s fourth-quarter and annual financial report. He said IP had its “best financial results in almost two decades.” The company, which has some 2,400 employees in the Memphis area, transformed itself in 2010, selling its land portfolio, cutting costs, and preparing the way for $1.5 billion in capital investments in 2012. I interviewed Faraci later that day for an upcoming story in our MBQ magazine. Things I didn’t know until this week: IP’s North American mills get 73 percent of their energy from renewable sources and IP is the recycler of 12 percent of all paper that is recycled.

Egypt has raised the standard for violence at sporting events with a riot that killed 74 people. My friend Mohamad Elmeliegy, who came to Memphis from Cairo, told me he was saddened but not surprised by the bad news. In a column in September he said Egypt is new to democracy and “has been governed by the military since the pharaohs.”

Don’t put your sponsors in the position of having to talk about abortion. That’s the lesson of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure turnabout this week, according to a colleague in our marketing department who is familiar with the Memphis Race for the Cure in Germantown every year. Komen had said earlier this week it would cease to fund grants for breast cancer screening to Planned Parenthood under new rules to tighten eligibility. “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives,” Komen said in a statement on Friday signed by its board of directors and its founder Nancy Brinker.