Writers I know

It was just a few years ago, it seems, that I didn't know any writers. Or maybe I just didn't know I knew writers. Or perhaps my idea of a writer was different then than it is now. It was a narrower definition, if anything. A writer was one who had written a novel and had it published; someone who traveled the world and answered to no one, drinking with empresses and wretches. Writers were named Hemingway and Salinger and Vonnegut and Maugham.

But now I know quite a few. They're an average lot, you might see them at a local café or walking around the grocery store, bicycling through your neighborhood, walking a dog and picking up its poop. Certainly you'll see them at a local bookstore. These writers I know, they aren't tortured souls, for the most part; or alcoholics, that I know of. They're teachers and reporters and business owners. They're husbands and wives and fathers and sisters. They have names like David and Jeffrey and Courtney and Andria. And they inspire me every day.

There are a few who are well-known, and a few more who will be soon enough. What I've found over the years is that writers are accessible. They aren't big time actors, untouchable behind handlers and agents (unless, maybe, their name is King or Crichton or Clancy or Grisham). Many of them are on Facebook and give their personal e-mails right there on their personal websites. I am a friend or two removed from some really, really big-time authors, though I'd never contact them for folly. It's just nice to know that they're there, on the opposite end of the internet, probably goofing off on Twitter like I am.

I was recently asked to join a writers' group that's been together for quite a few years. It's a group that came together during the Moss Workshop in Fiction with Richard Bausch, of which I am an alumnus, though my session was a few years after theirs. As it happened, this group had a member or two leaving for various reasons and they were kind enough to ask me to be a part of their reading and critiquing (and drinking). Within this group there are several winners of the Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest and several with published books or books on the way. It's a good group to be associated with because they take their writing, though not themselves, seriously, and appear to be endlessly encouraging. I hope I am able to hold my own within these ranks.

One member is David Williams, who has a novel, LONG GONE DADDIES, coming out with Blair Publishing in 2013. Another is Courtney Miller Santo whose novel, THE ROOTS OF THE OLIVE TREE (William Morrow), will be released in August. I wrote a feature for The Commercial Appeal on Courtney for yesterday's paper. She grew up just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, OR, the oldest child of two sisters and four brothers. It was a raucous household where, she joked, "it's a good thing we all converted to be Mormon because otherwise we would be Irish alcoholics and we wouldn't have done anything with our lives." Imagination in the Miller household was fostered early through reading and plays and storytelling. There was no television in the house until Courtney was in high school and, she told me, "I used to pretend I knew what 'Family Ties' was about. I'd go to school the next day and say, 'I love Alex, he's the best!' but I had no idea what I was talking about for years until I saw it in syndication."

I had a great time sitting with her in her tiny office on the University of Memphis campus and hearing how she began writing, how she made it to Memphis, how her book came to fruition and how it was ultimately sold. The publishing world is fascinating and fickle and evil and wondrous. Courtney has done well so far and I wish her, and all of us, the best of luck going forward.

Writer's first novel followed storybook path to publication

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

"My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book," Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as "chaotic," yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, "The Roots of the Olive Tree" (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family's olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It's a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, "ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots."

It's a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that's only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo.

It is on the West Coast where olives grow and fantasies are realized, and it was there in summer 2011 that Santo's life changed. "I was in the middle of this cross-country vacation that had been planned forever ... and the day after we get home to my grandmother's house in Vancouver (Wash.), she (the agent) calls me and says, 'Sit down, I have an offer, and it's a really good offer,' and she told me the offer, and I was glad I was sitting down because I did not believe it."

That offer was that the book, along with an unwritten second book, would be sold to William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, for six figures. Foreign rights for "The Roots of the Olive Tree" have already been sold to Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland and Turkey.

Santo doesn't downplay luck in this adventure. "It just doesn't seem real; it didn't seem real for a very, very, very long time," she said. "This is the dream; this does not happen that you get a company that is so excited about a debut novelist that they put this much publicity and effort into it. I feel crazy lucky."

The women of her novel might be illustrated by a photograph Santo keeps in her office, a tiny concrete bunker on the University of Memphis campus. It's one of her and her daughter flanked by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Santo is a collector of stories. "My mother is a storyteller," she says. "I come from a long line of storytellers on both sides." Some she recalls verbatim in her fiction, those from decades of family lore, and others from time spent as a journalist, and others she presses like olives for the oil and essence that add flavor to her characters.

Though her love of reading and the idea of writing began in the Pacific Northwest, at the age of 18, she "decided to get as far away from home as possible" and went to school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She met her future husband, Charlie, there and studied journalism. "I'm very practical, so to say something like, 'I want to write a book' seemed very stupid; it's like saying 'I want to be an astronaut.' Whereas being a journalist, you get your name in print every single day and you automatically get the title of writer. I think sometimes writers have a hard time owning that title."

She worked for the Roanoke Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. From those days as a journalist, Santo learned to love fact-checking and says that when she gets writer's block now, she does research. "Whenever I would get stuck, I had this huge stack of books that I checked out from the library about olive cultivation, and if I got stuck writing, I would just pick it up and start to read about how to take a branch from one olive tree and splice it into another olive tree, or about blight."

She would eventually end up in Memphis, where her husband took a job as associate professor of city and regional planning with the U of M, and it was here that she really began to own that title of writer. She worked as the editor of The Lamplighter, the newspaper of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, and was accepted into the Moss Workshop in Fiction, a community writing workshop with novelist Richard Bausch. "Once I got into his class, I realized all kinds of things, like there was such a thing as an MFA program," she said, laughing. "So Richard encouraged me to apply, and I got in and I got serious about writing."

The Moss Workshop took the idea of being a writer, in her mind, from being "abstract and foolish, to something that seemed plausible. But even though it seemed plausible, it's still not something I ever expected to happen in the way that it did." Through the MFA program, she met and worked with mentors such as Tom Russell and Cary Holladay.
"Cary really taught me that if you're going to write for somebody besides yourself, it comes down to revision," Santo said. "You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the prose and redo it, it's never perfect the first time out."

"She really listened, and she can recognize a good suggestion, and then she can just tear into it," Holladay said of her student and friend. "She's a very aggressive reviser of her work and, of course, it helps that she's got terrific talent and she's extremely well-read."

Last year was a good year for Santo, who also won the 2011 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for a short story that will appear in the upcoming June issue. "Her stories are just fun to read," Holladay said. "They're rich, and they're revelatory in terms of human character and experience."

Santo has her hands full with two children, Sophia, 9, and C.J., 7, and the writing of her second book as she anxiously awaits the release of "The Roots of the Olive Tree." But she loves teaching and intends to continue doing so with her undergraduate fiction and literature classes, saying, "I'm a better writer because I teach; it keeps me honest. It's very difficult to critique a student's work and see an error, or a way that it could be written stronger, and then not go back to your own work and recognize every single mistake that you've made."

Says Holladay: "I was eager to get her in the classroom, and right away I saw how comfortable she was as a teacher and how much her students liked her."

Though she writes these days in a place far from the Pacific Northwest, it's a land fertile with writers, where the streets teem with character. It's where her family has put down roots and made a home. "I feel like if you're on the right track, you get little nods along the way," she says. "So I feel like we made the right decision to move to Memphis as a family, and it's been the best decision we've made personally and professionally."

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Farewell

On that August day in 2010, I'd gone out for a lunch with Andria and wasn't gone for much more than an hour. I came home to find the back door kicked in and a lot of valuable and sentimental items gone. It's an awful, sinking feeling. Among the missing were two laptops, but we were left with a large, prehistoric desktop computer and later that evening I checked my e-mail from it to find that I'd been accepted into the Moss Workshop for Fiction with novelist Richard Bausch. It was a bittersweet day. It was a whirlwind year for my writing, one in which I was assigned my first cover story for Memphis Magazine and The Memphis News, accepted into the fiction workshop and won the Memphis Magazine short story contest. The workshop itself was a roller coaster of excitement and apprehension, fear and confidence. To sit quietly while Richard reads something you've written, and then listen as 10 people dissect it, praise it, trash it and question it, is a test in resolve.

Richard Bausch is moving on to Chapman University in Orange, CA. It's a huge loss for the University of Memphis and a boon for Chapman. He gave a farewell reading last week and I was fortunate enough to be asked to stand up and say something about Richard in lieu of any formal introduction. I was told I would be one of a few. I found I was one of seven, one for each year he was at the U of M. Had I understood beforehand that I was there to represent my group of Mossians, I would have been even more terrified than I already was. I hope I did them proud.

I'm not a public speaker. My heart races in anticipation, my mouth grows dry from anxiety, and I feel I can't concentrate enough to stand on my own, much less recite a prepared speech. But it's something I wanted to do for Richard, to give a little back to him since he's given so much to me.

Several people have paid tribute better than I - David and Maria, to name a couple - but this is what I said, or what I wrote and meant to say out loud. I'm not really sure what I said when I got up there, but I meant every word of it, or of this, at least.

My wife is not a fan of Richard Bausch. It has nothing to do with his writing, she likes that just fine. But on those workshop nights in the fall of 2010, when I'd stumble in from R.P. Tracks well past midnight on a school night, I had to blame the late hour on someone. And that someone was Richard.


I'd explain that it was all part of the instruction. And it was, too, because Richard's teaching is so wrapped up in who he is, in his stories, his examples, his experiences, his voice and his mannerisms that all we, as learners, have to do is open our minds up wide like a catcher's mitt and absorb what he says. I was determined to stay in that crouch for as long as possible.

The hell of it was, though, that the next morning I could remember little more than a stanza from a filthy limerick he'd recited or the punchline to a story about a car-driving monkey. An entire evening spent with a successful novelist spouting words of wisdom and I couldn't remember a thing.

But there is one thing I remember and it happened on one of the first nights at Tracks after a class. As we all got ourselves situated around a little table, and in the course of ordering a lot of drinks, Richard told the waitress that we were all writers. And he said it just like that, with no qualifier: we're writers. He didn't say we were student writers or novice writers or writing hopefuls. That night, around that table, we were a community of writers.

I must have laughed or made a snide comment because, even though I'd been a freelance writer for a couple of years by then, I never would have referred to myself as such in front of someone so successful doing exactly the thing I wanted to do. Richard must have picked up on this because he got very quiet, and he got very serious, and he assured all of us around that table, again without qualifier, that we were writers, and that we should never think of ourselves as anything less. I think it may be one of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me.


Thank you, Richard.

Behind The Wheel: The Rude One

This is another part in my ongoing series about the time I spent as a chauffeur in Panama City Beach, FL, in the mid-90s. Because he's made the news in the past couple of days for some asinine remarks, I thought I'd write about the time I drove Mark Wahlberg. Actually, "drove" should be in sarcastic quotes and "Mark Wahlberg" should read "Marky Mark," because that's who he was at the time.

Almost 20 years ago Panama City Beach used to host MTV for a week-long spring break festival that was taped and aired to the world. They may still have such programming, I don't know, I'm not even sure if MTV is still on the air. But back then it was a big deal and we were contracted to handle all of their transportation. Marky Mark showed up and did his little song and dance number or whatever it was he did back then and on the day he was to fly out I showed up at his hotel to pick him up and drive him to the airport. I was in a 15-passenger van because Marky Mark didn't travel alone. No, he had a whole group of lackeys and hangers-on, enough to fill up a van. So I stood outside the hotel and waited. And waited. And waited. I went back into the hotel to discuss his absence with the front desk several times. I called my boss, who called Marky Mark's handlers, and they searched the grounds for him. After about an hour of this, word came down that he was on the 11th hole of the hotel's golf course and had decided to leave the next day. He just didn't bother to let anyone know. Asshat.

It's pained me over the years to enjoy the movies he's made and to almost - almost - become a fan. I like a lot of the movies, and came close to putting his rudeness of two decades ago to rest. But then he goes and comments on being a real-life vigilante and I'm reminded that he's really just a big, goofy face on screen. Or on MTV, if it still exists.

I wasn't much of anybody back then. I'm still not. My time wasn't worth as much as Marky Mark's time was, but it was still something to me, and to my boss and his small business. Yet Marky didn't take that, or anything, or anybody, into consideration.

I drove a lot of celebrities back then and, while most were aloof and needed to be pointed in which direction to walk, they were at least cordial. When I returned to pick up the Marky group the next morning, there was no mention of the previous day, just a bunch of kids in long shorts and backwards ball caps. I got back at him though. I snubbed him, I didn't even tell him, as he exited the van, to have a nice flight as I normally would have. That'll show him.

The word today is that Mark Wahlberg, the movie star, apologized for his recent statements, which is big of him. After all of these years, I haven't received an apology, and I hope my snub still stings.

Behind the Wheel: The Legend

As a chauffeur based out of Panama City Beach in the mid-1990s, I met some celebrities. Some were big, some were just rising, some were little-known or on their way out. None had the talent, though, of Dave Brubeck. And I didn't even drive him! He was playing a concert at the Marina Civic Center and staying at the Marriott at Bay Point where I came across him in the lobby and stopped to say hello. He was very gracious to take a moment (to take five) and talk with me.

He was old then and today is his 91st birthday. Happy birthday, Dave Brubeck!

Because I Said So: Big, beautiful Memphis has vibrant past, bright future

When was it we all stopped taking Memphis for granted and started appreciating what and who we are? (I'm saying "we all" and ignoring those who don't share this view because I don't have the time or inclination to try and change their minds.) Was it while driving along Riverside Drive with the Mississippi River to the left and the iconic M in the distance? Was the change of mind backed by Booker T. & the M.G.'s? Did it come with the rapid idea sharing via social networks? Maybe it was served with a side of barbecue.

Whatever the impetus for this change of heart and broader view, it had to have happened on a Fall day, perhaps while in Overton Park or staring into the rushing water and rushing color of the Wolf River like in the photo above.

Memphis is known for a lot of things - blues, soul and rock-n-roll; medicine, shipping, markets and motels. Are we known for the Fall reds, oranges and yellows? Or the greens of Spring? We should be. Is that greedy? Do we have to have all the good music, all the innovators of business, and more than our share of authors and philanthropists?

It does seem greedy, but so be it. They're ours and we should be proud of them.

Most of these folks are in a book, too, for easy reference and with fascinating bits of information about each. The book is called Memphians (Nautilus Publishing) and it is being launched into the world today. I wrote a few of the bios for the book and filled an entire "Because I Said So" column in today's The Commercial Appeal with glowing praise for the book and Memphis itself.

Please pardon the gratuitous marketing, but I am a Memphian and showing off is what we should be doing.

Big, beautiful Memphis has vibrant past, bright future

I am a Memphian. I was born here and raised with the identity crisis and low self-esteem that have mired our city for so long. Adults I looked up to put down the city and seemed to ache to live someplace else, anyplace else. It's been a difficult mental cycle to break, but I have for my kids and because, despite what Forbes Magazine and some other national publications print, we are a city moving forward with a past vastly more interesting than most cities.
This is the pride I want my children to grow up knowing.

To that end, I'll be at Burke's Book Store with my kids this evening for the launch of "Memphians" (Nautilus Publishing), a coffee-table book that highlights the well-known, and lesser-known, great personalities of our city. Along with several other local writers and editors, I am a contributor to the book, and was asked to research and write bios of authors, surgeons, attorneys, peddlers, musicians and entrepreneurs.

Characters all of them.

The new book contradicts the negative asides and outright diatribes I heard as a child. At 250-pages, it's a big, beautiful book in full color because Memphis is a big, beautiful city with some of the most colorful personalities the world has ever known. Our little hamlet on the Mississippi has been called home by forward thinkers past -- Kemmons Wilson, Ida B. Wells, Estelle Axton, Lucius Burch; and present -- Charles McVean, Jackie Nichols, Gayle Rose and Micah Greenstein.

These are all people my kids need to know about, whether they choose to stay here in Memphis for college and career, or move away to become ambassadors for the city. They'll need to know about Stax and the Memphis sound, the role of Memphis in shipping and transportation, great strides made in medicine, the arts, business and sports. They'll need to know the good and the bad, the ugly and the truth.

A handful of our local innovators and visionaries, icons, musicians or actors would be bragging rights for any single city.

We have them all and in droves.

The history of our city and people that will be told by our kids is rooted in tales of commerce and conflict, philanthropy and film, and with the best soundtrack in the world. The characters will have names as iconic as Shelby Foote, E.H. Crump, William Eggleston and Jim Dickinson.

Perhaps one day our generation's children will be side by side with the likes of Sam Phillips or Danny Thomas in a similar book. Childhood cancer could be eradicated here, the next great technical advance might happen down the street, the legions of philanthropic organizations could become the benchmark for other cities or the latest sound may pour forth from Beale. And it may be our kids at the microscope, the piano, the helm.

These are heady, progressive days for Memphis, unlike any I was aware of as a child. This is not a bad place to raise children, it's not even a tolerable place; it's a good place for kids and becoming better all the time. There are leaders, activists and everyday people seeing to this. They're the kind of people who make a city great, the kind of people who could one day fill a book.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg. 

© 2011 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Join us for the launch of Memphians!

Thursday, Nov. 10

5:30 p.m.

Burke's Book Store

936 So. Cooper Street

(in the heart of Cooper-Young)

Memphians

Earlier this year I had the privilege of being asked to contribute to a new book about some of the well-known, and lesser-known, personalities in our city. The book is called Memphians (Nautilus Publishing) and it is being launched this Thursday at Burke's Book Store.

It's a big, beautiful book at almost 250-pages with large photos and bios written on folks such as Shelby Foote, Isaac Hayes, Charlie Vergos, Clarence Saunders, Charles McVean, Jim Dickinson, Justin Timberlake, Furry Lewis and many, many more. There are those you'd expect to be in here, and some you might not have.

It was a lot of fun researching and writing these pieces, and fun working with the other writers and editors - Dan Conaway, David Tankersley, Dennis Phillippi, Richard Murff and Neil White. I hope you'll come out and join us all this Thursday at Burke's. We'll be there, as will a whole lot of other Memphians.

Thursday, November 10

5:30 p.m.

Burke's Book Store

936 South Cooper St. 

(in the heart of Cooper-Young)

Like the Weather

I began the story in yesterday's The Commercial Appeal on Dave Brown (For decades, TV meteorologist Dave Brown has served as reassuring presence to community; Nov. 6, 2011) by talking about how all Memphis kids know he hates snow. This is a detail straight from my childhood. I can remember being a kid in the 70s and 80s, and watching Dave's weather forecast when it was cold enough, and cloudy enough, to snow. I'd watch in anticipation of his saying just how much we could expect overnight and then segue into which schools would be closed. It seems like it never happened the way I wanted, and it was all Dave's fault.

My friends and I joked then that he was probably in charge of the salt trucks as well as whether or not it snowed. We all joked that he hated snow. And then I found out it's true. Dave Brown hates snow, though he was quick to point out to me during an interview that he wouldn't ever let that color his forecast.

It was with this memory of childhood that I took the assignment to profile Dave last April during the non-stop tornadoes, storms and floods we were having. It seemed timely then, yet it was put on hold for some reason that didn't include me. My editor brought it back up more than a month ago, a deadline was set, an interview completed and then that deadline kept getting pushed back week by week.

My plan was to keep to what has gone into making Dave Brown DAVE BROWN. For many of us, he was the first connection between the fantasy world inside the box in our living rooms and the real world. We'd see him driving down the street or at the grocery store. I remember him coming to speak to my fourth grade class and it was surreal, as a kid, to see someone from television in my classroom.

I figured I would cursorily mention the tragedy of his daughter, granddaughter and unborn grandson. It's an important story, of course, but I didn't want it to be the focus, partially because I'm not that kind of reporter and I respected, before I even went in, that he may not want to talk about it. But then he did. He was very open about that time, how it affected him, his immediate family and his family at work. There is still a lot of emotion in his voice when he talks about those days and weeks following the crash. I'm sure it's a difficult thing to talk about and it was a difficult thing to listen to. I told him my wife was pregnant with our first child when it happened and those first strains of fatherhood I was having made the news that much sadder to hear. I remember watching a Channel 3 newscast around then and that Jerry Tate broke from reading the news to offer his condolences to his good friend Dave Brown and his family. Dave told me that after that newscast, Tate went to LeBonheur Children's Hospital where the baby was clinging to life at the time, and how much it meant to him.

Finding people to talk with about Dave was difficult. Not in who to talk to, but who to leave out. I could've asked anybody what they thought of Dave and gotten pages of quotes. Thanks to everyone who took the time to talk with me. People like Dave, or the idea of him. Even the comments in the online edition of the story are nice, save for the few from people who are going to be asses regardless of the topic.

It was a fun story to research and a fun one to write. Enjoy!

A fact that thousands of schoolchildren in Memphis already know is that Dave Brown, chief meteorologist and weather director for WMC-TV Channel 5, does not like snow. He loves, as he says, "quiet weather, I love sunny days with highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s."

But there's a backstory to his disdain for the flurries; it began when he was 16 years old. "I went to work one Sunday afternoon in my mom's brand new '63 Plymouth, and five hours later when I'd left work, it had gone from a cloudy day to 14 inches of snow on the ground. The trip, which normally took about 10 to 12 minutes for me to get home, took 41/2 hours. I have not cared for snow since that time. I was a nervous wreck by the time I got home."

Tim Van Horn was one of those kids of the 1970s watching the news in hopes of school closings, and would later find himself working as an intern under Brown. Van Horn has been an on-air meteorologist with WMC-TV since 1999.

"When you see someone on TV, you think you know them, and watching Dave on television, and then working for him, he's pretty close to what you see on TV. He's about as genuine as they come," Van Horn said. "It was pretty incredible to be able to spend that time with him during the internship."

Brown grew up in Trenton, Tenn., almost 100 miles northeast of Memphis, with a dream, not of being a weatherman, but of playing rock and roll records on the radio. "I was always fascinated by weather but had no designs to get into meteorology."

That dream was realized early when, as a 15-year-old high school sophomore, he became a disc jockey in Milan -- the closest radio station to Trenton -- and then on WIRJ in nearby Humboldt. He attended then-Memphis State University and worked at WHBQ radio with friend Jack Parnell, the top morning jock at the time.

In 1967, Lance Russell, program manager at WHBQ-TV Channel 13, asked Brown to help with the wrestling program. "He said, 'I don't know if you like wrestling or not, but if you ever had any thought that you might want to get into TV someday, then you should take this job because you'll find out if you like TV and if TV likes you,'" Brown recalls.

Though not a wrestling fan at the time, Brown took the job and stayed with it for 35 years.

"It didn't take long of being associated with him to know that he was my kind of guy and, regardless of what he didn't know, it wouldn't be long before he did know it because he didn't mind working hard and he was determined on whatever he set his mind to," Russell said recently by phone from Atlanta.

Television liked Brown, and he liked television, and in 1968 he was hosting a morning movie and "dialing for dollars" promotional campaign. Bob Lewis, production manager at the time, suggested he put together a weathercast in his downtime, and "that way when they have a weather opening, they'll think of you."

"It was great advice," Brown said, "and I did, and, sure enough, they started asking me to do a little weather fill-in on rare occasions."

When Channel 13 started a noon newscast for the first time in 1972, Brown was asked to do the weather.
Channel 5 acquired the wrestling program in 1977, and Brown was hired away from Channel 13 to be a host as well as the main weathercaster. For a young man who grew up watching Dick Hawley do the news and weather on Channel 5, the move to WMC was a sort of homecoming.

"It's a very good place to work, and we've been blessed my entire time here with a good team," Brown said. "People talk about the WMC 'family,' and there are a lot of elements of family that are here; that's more than just words." He now heads a weather department that features Van Horn, Ron Childers and John Bryant.

Weather forecasting and broadcasting have changed dramatically over the years. In the beginning, when weather became its own segment with its own headlines and headliners, there was a simple map on the wall as might be seen in any school's classroom.

"In those days, doing the weather was a magnetic board. It was basically a glorified refrigerator magnet; you'd stick a sun up there," Brown said. "And all that was done in those days was whatever the National Weather Service put out on a little simplified weather forecast; that's what you'd stick up there and go with. There was no five-day or seven-day, just tonight and tomorrow."

Weather forecasting became more exact as satellite images became better and more prevalent. Forecasting now is powered by computer models, and it is these models that give Brown and his team the greatest platform for what Brown calls their "heightened responsibility" during severe weather. "I'm a techie; I love gadgets," Brown said.
As last spring in Memphis proved, potentially dangerous thunderstorms and tornadoes can come at any time and anywhere across the region.

"One of the former general managers here said we're a 'first responder,'" Brown said, and it's a role he takes seriously. "We're often going for hours, often uninterrupted, with no breaks. ... I think perhaps our most important days are severe weather days."

It is during those days and nights of tornadoes and flooding that Van Horn has learned much from his mentor, "not necessarily just the X's and O's and the numbers of forecasting, but the artistic side of it as well, and how to treat people that are watching, and how to have more of a calming, reassuring presence on television."

Though the method and ability to predict weather in the future have changed, one thing that has not changed has been the sense of community that Brown has found in Memphis. He never considered moving to a larger market, though he was offered jobs in Los Angeles and Buffalo, N.Y. Brown decided at the beginning of his career that he "could bounce around the country going from job to job, or I could try to build a career here."

It was a conscious decision, Brown said, to mirror the Memphis-centric career of Hawley. In fact, one of the stipulations the family man made in his move from Channel 13 to Channel 5 was that he would be able to go home -- barring severe weather -- between the early and later broadcasts, allowing him to see and eat dinner with his kids.
Anyone growing up with a television set knows the face. For many, seeing Brown in a local restaurant or grocery store is their first celebrity sighting. He also lectures in schools on weather and a matter closer to heart -- a topic that has confirmed his faith in the closeness of his community.

In 1997, his daughter, Stefanie Brown Kuehl, 6-month-old granddaughter Zadie and an unborn grandson were killed by a drunken driver. It's an unimaginable pain, difficult enough to cope with in private and without being a prominent TV personality. Though one may never totally recover from such a tragedy, the pain was eased for Brown and his family by the outpouring of support from the community and the help of WMC.

"I was blessed to have a general manager at the time, Mason Granger. Mason came to the wake and I told him, 'Mason, I will be back, but it's going to take weeks, not days.' I said I'm just pretty well destroyed by this. He said, 'Take whatever time you need.' So I was off for four weeks, and they didn't charge it against my vacation or my sick leave. It was just, 'Do what you need to do and then come back.'"

During his time away, a videographer would stop by the Brown house several times a week with a box full of letters and cards from viewers. "We literally got thousands of them," said Brown, still finding it difficult to speak through the emotion.

Granger, now director of grants for the Hearst Foundations in New York, said, "When that happened, I don't think there was a person in the television station who knew Dave in any fashion who didn't feel very much a part of the sadness and the horror and the tragedy of it all and didn't have a sense of supporting him in a very personal and very meaningful way because that's the way we felt about him, and I know that's the way he would've acted if the same thing had happened to one of us."

The support from the community helped him in his time away and with the decision to come back. He has seen it as imperative, in the wake of such grief and outreach, to reach out himself and speak out at civic clubs, churches and high schools during prom season about the dangers of drunken driving.

Brown's days are consumed by work, giving back, cheering on his beloved St. Louis Cardinals and spending time with Margaret, his wife of more than 40 years, and their two daughters and four grandchildren, who are "all different and all wonderful," he said.

He has been in television more than four decades and still enjoys his work, a fact that is "no surprise me at all," said his old boss and co-host, Russell. "He just is that kind of guy."

© 2011 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Death of the Icons

I was barely 7-years-old in 1977 when Elvis Presley died. I remember sitting in the back room of my Aunt Jeannie's house, we were living there for a few months at the time between houses and this was my bedroom. While playing with a friend, the television was on and a newscaster announced that Presley had died. I wasn't sure why at the time, but I knew this was significant. Perhaps the news broke into a television show or the broadcaster seemed more grave than normal, or maybe they showed footage of the mass of people that had begun to collect outside the gates of Graceland. Whatever it was, I ran to the front of the house to tell my mother about it.

The days that followed were full of news footage of those crowds that refused to leave and a funeral procession miles long. There were editions of The Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar with bold headlines another mile high. It was as though royalty had died because, frankly, it had.

Being from Memphis, it's almost blasphemous to recognize August as the death month of anyone but Elvis Presley. But he does share it, and the worldwide news of this icon being taken at so young an age must have overshadowed the death of another icon of entertainment. On Aug. 19, 1977, only three days after the passing in Memphis, Groucho Marx died in Los Angeles at the age of 87.

Has there ever been anyone funnier? As much as Elvis did for music, surely Groucho and his brothers did the same for comedy; for Broadway; for film; for television. Is there anything more iconic than the swiveling hips, the hair, the sneer of Elvis? Sure: the greasepaint eyebrows and mustache, the cigar, the rolling eyes, the duck walk, the wisecrack of Groucho.

I began watching Marx Brothers films as a kid whenever I could catch them on television and I now own all of them on DVD. I still love them and my kids do as well. Growing up, we had a vinyl record of Groucho at Carnegie Hall telling stories and singing songs accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch. I wore that record out as a kid. Groucho could tell a story as well as he could impart a bawdy line to Margaret Dumont.

I don't mean to say one should be celebrated over the other. This isn't Elvis vs. Groucho. Just a way to remember both and thank them both for what they meant to pop culture, entertainment, joyous rebellion and my childhood.

[Stay tuned, 1977 and the death of the icon isn't over yet. Charlie Chaplin died in December of that year ... ]

Love, Frank