A Tale of Two Cemeteries

Back in September, I took C over to Elmwood Cemetery where he and some friends, having read The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby, were making a documentary on the Yellow Fever Epidemic for school. I stopped in the main office to get a map of the grounds and take my other three kids on a tour of Memphis’s past. I’d been there as a kid many times but it had been a while since my last visit. I was immediately impressed by the offices, the architecture, the old-world feel and the contemporary use for such a space. I asked a few questions of a staff member and later pitched Phillips Cottage as a Hidden Memphis story to my editor at The Commercial Appeal.

The idea was for a story, to run the Sunday before Halloween, not on Elmwood itself, which has deservedly received much press over the years, but on this one, 146-year-old, continuously used structure within the cemetery. She liked the idea, but didn’t think there would be enough for a whole feature and suggested finding something else to go along with it. My immediate thought was the Crystal Shrine Grotto in Memorial Park, the elaborate, cave-like shrine built in 1938 by Mexican artist Dionicio Rodriguez. It’s another place I visited as a kid.

Grave of cemetery founder Rev. Morris Henderson

As I sat around searching the internet from home, I came across this great story on Zion Christian Cemetery by Paulene Keller in the October issue of The Downtowner magazine. Surprisingly, I’d never heard of this cemetery on South Parkway founded by a group of former slaves in 1876. The more I read, the more intrigued I became.

I spent a morning interviewing Kim McCollum, the executive director of Elmwood, complete with tour of Phillips Cottage and the cemetery, then I drove over to Zion, not far away, and was struck by the stark difference. Elmwood is orderly in its own way, historically cited everywhere you turn and seems intent in its orderliness on preserving and educating. Zion, on the other hand, is overgrown, unwelcoming, mostly neglected and, well, sad. The headstones, where they still exist, are crumbling or leaning or have fallen over. They bear names and dates of death, but in many cases there are no dates of birth or, if anything, only a year. I walked the grounds, interested in the gravesite of Dr. Georgia Patton Washington, one of the first female African-American physicians. She died in 1900 at the age of 36 after giving birth to a son. She asked that a magnolia tree be planted to mark her grave and it towers now, surrounded by other markers, and its growth and size has knocked to the ground an ornate obelisk marking where she, two of her young children who died within their first years, and her mother, all lie. Looking back at my notes from that day, I wrote that “much of the 15-acres is unused” but that is a misconception as I later learned. While there are relatively few grave markers, there are nearly 40,000 buried there. Elmwood holds 75,000.

I visited Memorial Park that day as well and toured the Grotto, and I spoke later with Ken Hall and Rhodes professor Milton Moreland, both of whom have worked extensively on the Zion Community Project and were enormously helpful. As I began writing the story, it quickly became unwieldy. Our initial thoughts were wrong and it turns out there was enough for a feature on Phillips Cottage alone. There was more than enough for a feature on Zion, and all of these places deserve their own write up. I decided to focus on the Cottage and Washington’s magnolia, and to save the Grotto for another day. (During the time of the initial story pitch and near-publication there had been some upheaval at the CA and my longtime editor had, unfortunately, been one of those laid off. My new editor, understandably, had a full plate made even more so and this confusion is in no way her fault.)

 I sent in my 1,500-word story and had to leave town unexpectedly the next day for a family matter. I returned on a Saturday and the next day opened the newspaper to find a shortened, 600-word, single-source feature on Phillips Cottage alone (Hidden Memphis: Elmwood Cemetery's caretaker cottage endures as treasure-trove of history, Oct. 28, 2012). My editor was out of town so I couldn’t find out what happened until today. Turns out there were only photos of Elmwood to run with the story, so they went with that portion instead of both. Any issue with a story I’ve written has had to do with photos and never with the copy I’m hired to write.

But these things happen. I just hate it for Zion which deserves some recognition. The  40,000 souls there, many of them former slaves themselves, deserve their dignity. To learn more about the Zion Community Project, visit zioncommunityproject.org.

Below is the version I wrote.

The Cottage and the Magnolia

There are 95 acres in the heart of Memphis, two disparate plots of land that are nevertheless equally important to the city, reverent to the families of those entombed there and meaningful to any who seek to understand how a city is built and nearly destroyed, who its staunchest defenders, outlaws, leaders and healers were, and how such information might be saved or lost over time. 

Elmwood Cemetery was founded in 1852 and has maintained Phillips Cottage on its grounds as a memorial to its history, and the history of Memphis, for nearly that long. Zion Cemetery was founded in 1876 and has deteriorated over time through neglect, lost records and a lack of attention, its greatest monument now a towering magnolia tree planted at the grave of a forgotten, though remarkable, woman.

Phillips Cottage - Elmwood

A picture tells a thousand words, and the black-and-white images decorating the interior of Phillips Cottage in Elmwood Cemetery are no exception. But the plaster walls of the cottage have more stories to tell than just those captured in the earliest days of photography; stories of grieving loved ones remembering their dead, of a fever that spread and threatened to eradicate the population of Memphis, of generals, mayors, and the men and women whose final journey, whether on horse-drawn carriage or by automobile, passed by its front door.

Phillips Cottage was built as a one-room structure for Samuel Phillips, the cemetery’s second superintendent, in 1866, 14 years after the founding of the cemetery, as a place to conduct the business of overseeing funeral arrangements and tending to the grounds. Despite its utilitarian use, the cottage was designed in the ornate Victorian Gothic Carpenter style, popular at the time with its gingerbread trim and church-like windows. A steeple-shaped finial decorates the northern peak of the original standing seam metal roof.

Phillips Cottage has been used consistently since its construction, but is much more than mere office space today. It is a living, working museum with records and artifacts dating back to the 19th Century. The small staff welcomes the public to peruse and take a trip back to that Victorian era when the cemetery itself was outside the city limits and only the first of its 75,000 bodies were interred. “We are a repository of historical information,” said Kimberly McCollum, executive director of Elmwood. “We have lot books that go back to the founding of the cemetery, we have an amazing collection of archives. Anybody is welcome to come inside the cottage and look at it. In fact, we encourage people to.”

In those first years there were two entrances to the cemetery – one at the south end and the second, the only entrance still used today, at the north end of the 80 acres just off of Dudley St., is where Phillips Cottage stands.

Circa 1900, a second room and a walk-in vault were added to the existing cottage, as was a full-length front porch, altering the shape of the original gothic-style windows along the front. The added room is now an office and communal space with worktable, furnishings and floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with volumes on Memphis history for use by genealogists and researchers. The vault, brick-lined and left open to the public, holds old city directories, more photographs and a small gift shop.

In 1998, more space for offices and an archival-grade vault to the east was added. “We are interested in historic preservation and keeping everything with the same feel, and Jack Tucker was very specific that he wanted to honor that tradition,” McCollum said. To that end, the late architect Jack Tucker kept strictly to the design and style of the original cottage so that no matter where a visitor goes, the woodwork and sense of the old is seamless.

Above the 1900-era vault, attached to the roof and hung from scaffolding, is a bell that was used to call the students to class at the State Female College on McLemore, donated in 1885 after the school’s closure. That bell has rung for every funeral procession that has passed over the narrow entrance bridge for the past 127 years.

Inside, one will find the cottage’s cat, Howard, with its half-tail, walking among a hall tree once belonging to Robert Church, landowner and Memphis’s first black millionaire, donated by his family in 1983; a desk that once belonged to Alfred Jefferson Vaughan Jr., confederate general and Shelby County criminal court clerk in the late-1800s; and a refurbished sofa once owned by Mayor E.H. Crump.

“I think that I might have one of the most beautiful offices in Memphis,” McCollum said. “I am very fortunate to be surrounded by this beauty, and this history.”

Washington’s Magnolia - Zion

Just over two miles from Phillips Cottage and Elmwood, on So. Parkway East, there is no ornamental bridge leading to ample parking. There is no parking at all to speak of. Arching from stone feet, a metal, paint-flecked sign above the rutted entryway reads: Zion Christian Cemetery. A nearby historical marker denotes its importance as having been founded in 1876 by a group of former slaves known as the United Sons of Zion Association, as “ … a respectable burial site for African-Americans.”

For decades, the private cemetery, inherited by descendants of the founders and eventually given over years later to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, has languished in disrepair and neglect, at the mercy of the elements, vagrants and crime in the neighborhood. At one time, though, “it was by far the most active African-American cemetery in Memphis during the postbellum period, the period of Reconstruction and so forth,” said Milton Moreland, Chair of the Archaeology Program and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College.

In recent years, a group of individuals and organizations, including Rhodes, has begun the Zion Cemetery Project, leading tour groups and volunteer clean-ups to restore the cemetery itself and to instill pride in the surrounding neighborhood. “If we can revive that cemetery as a major tourist destination, then that helps the community,” Moreland said. “The success of Zion will also be the success of the South Parkway and South Memphis community along with it.”

“The first day I stepped foot in there in 1999, the brush and bushes were six or seven feet tall all the way up to the fence at the road,” said Ken Hall, who, as executive director for the volunteer organization HandsOn Memphis at the time, was contacted by neighbors to the cemetery tired of the rodents and crime the lot harbored. “We’ve gone in foot by foot, yard by yard, with machetes, axes, hoes and knocked that back.”

On a recent crisp, fall day when the leaves were turning from green to gold, and beginning to cover the plots, a crew worked to clear weeds and brambles, to tend to the resting place of those who tended to others while alive. The most notable detail in the cemetery, other than the headless angel leaning over the grave of Rev. Morris Henderson, one of the founders, and the myriad other toppled stones, is the lack of exact birthdates. In some cases there are only birth years given to further infuse the facts with uncertainty, but in most cases, there is only a date of death.

Dr. Washington's magnolia

A ledger full of those buried there, as well as the records of T.H. Hayes Funeral Home, closed in 2010, but which conducted some 5,000 funerals at Zion, have been obtained and scanned by Rhodes College. The ledgers can be viewed at zioncommunityproject.org, a site built and maintained by the school.

It is difficult to believe there are upwards of 40,000 buried underfoot as you walk among the 1,000 or so markers still standing. The last burial in Zion Cemetery was in the late 1960s, Hall said, though most of the plots were filled by the 1920s.

The scattershot and weather-worn headstones are monuments to history and, among the sweet gum trees, oaks and vine-choked maples, on a rise midway within the cemetery, soars a stately magnolia. It’s not a man-made, chiseled monument yet it marks the resting place of Dr. Georgia Patton Washington, born in 1864 and died in 1900, who was one of the first female African-American physicians. “She’s talked about extensively in Ida B. Wells’s Memphis Diary,” said Moreland. “In her day, she was quite an active person, missionary and practicing doctor.” Washington asked that a tree be planted at her grave and now, in the shade of those waxy leaves, her official obelisk lies on its side, still readable, yet marking little.

While Elmwood has been a resting place for well-maintained and detailed records since its beginning, Zion is having to play catch up to cobble its history together. Any cemetery, first and foremost, should be a dignified place for those laid to rest there, a place where family can visit to remember and pay homage, but it also acts as a city’s memory where the names and dates act as plot points on the timeline of our people’s history.

“You kind of forget what was happening in the 1880s or 1890s unless we can memorialize them in one way or another,” Moreland said. “Cemeteries really are part of a living community, and when you have a vibrant cemetery, you actually have a vibrant living community.”

For more information on these cemeteries, Phillips Cottage or Dr. Georgia Patton Washington, visit elmwoodcemetery.org and zioncommunityproject.org.

  
All photos by the author

Hidden Memphis: Lloyd T. Binford

For almost two years, every other month, I've written the series "Hidden Memphis" for The Commercial Appeal. It's a lot of work, which is probably why it hasn't become a monthly series. Coming up with story ideas, researching them, locating experts or descendants or anyone who might have a connection to a 60-year-old building or industry or individual takes a lot of time and research. Looking at it as a freelance writer, it probably takes too much time when you get down to dollars per hour. But I love it. I love learning about little-known characters and finding images from our city's prodigious, notorious, colorful, shameful, hopeful, ill and progressive past, and sharing what I learn with others. And, to be truthful, the amount of time spent on any one story is probably, in large part, my own fault. When I get into the Memphis & Shelby County Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library and the helpful librarian brings me a stack (it's always a stack, if not a truckload) of newspaper clippings, scholarly papers, letters, photos or marginalia from early last century, I just can't help but read through it all. And when Wayne Dowdy, resident historian and manager of the room, happens by, I can't help but pick his own gray matter file for information and perspective.

Such was the case with the story that ran in yesterday's paper on Lloyd Tilgham Binford, the chairman of the Memphis Censor Board from 1928 until just before his death in 1956. I'd heard bits and pieces, anecdotes, about Binford over the years as I researched Film Row or the long-gone movie theaters of the past, but he was never a major subject in either of those stories so I just filed his name away for later. When my editor suggested Binford for a "Hidden Memphis" topic, I somewhat reluctantly agreed. It seemed to me that everyone already knew about him, how hidden could he be? And how much information could there possibly be on one man who wasn't a mayor or civil rights leader in this town? So I put out a call to all of the usual suspects, and some unusual suspects, that I look up for such stories, packed up my legal pad and pencils and headed to the Memphis Room. And, of course, they had everything I might need: pages and pages of stories and obituaries on Binford. He was quite notorious in his day, and quite often quoted. Perfect.

I pieced a story together through the voluminous wordage published on the commissioner, and talked with his great-granddaughter, Tamara Trexler, and grandson, Fred Trexler. I picked the brains of movie house historian Vincent Astor, University of Memphis professor Danny Linton, film directors Willy Bearden and Craig Brewer, film commissioner Linn Sitler, Malco magnates Michael Lightman and Nancy Tashie, Google and Dowdy. I sent the story in and, as I am wont to do, spent the rest of the week rewriting it in my head. The only problem with newspaper writing, I've found, is the limited space available; this story could have easily been twice as long.

I wanted to be fair to Binford, although being fair to someone when all evidence points to the fact that he banned films from the viewing public for racial reasons, or kept adults from seeing movies he felt to be too racy, both in image and language, is difficult to do. Government censorship doesn't deserve a fair shake. But Binford's background is interesting – a self-made businessman who grew his company from nothing, built an iconic home office that is a treasure in downtown Memphis today, and all with little more than a grade-school education. He also headed the Mid-South Fair from 1928-1931, and gave more than $10,000 to farm youth organizations. He was active in politics and acted as campaign manager for E.H. Crump. He was vice president of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, a member of the board of trustees of the National Council and YMCA, on the board of Baptist Hospital; he was a Mason, Shriner and an Elk. And, according to newspaper accounts and Tamara Trexler, because of his charitable works here and in his hometown of Duck Hill, MS, there were over a hundred children throughout the south who had been named for him.

But then again, he banned movies from being seen because they deal " ... with social equality between whites and negroes in a way that is not practiced in the South." And in an attempt, seemingly, to reclaim - or dispute - his reputation, he was quoted in the Memphis Press-Scimitar on Sept. 26, 1947: " ... I'm one of the few white men in Memphis that got a six-pound fruit cake from negro friends last Christmas. I also received 18 Christmas cards from colored folks – and sent out the same number."

Does that help or hurt his case? Wayne Dowdy and I had discussions theorizing that Binford banned all-white or mixed-race audiences from seeing all-black or mixed-race casts for fear that the white audience members would riot and not for any danger from the black viewers. I looked for any evidence of this, for Binford simply mentioning it in one of the copious interviews he said he disliked to do, yet gave at the drop of a hat, apparently. I couldn't find anything concrete, so it remains a theory.

Regardless, it's the perceived fairness held in his own mind that makes Binford a complex and fascinating person; a real-life movie character himself who was, perhaps, stranger than fiction. The very fact that Memphis had a Board of Censors is strange enough until you place it in context, in a time when blacks and whites couldn't use the same water fountain or bathroom, when people were openly discriminated and physically assaulted for their beliefs. Strange times, indeed, and worthy of study so that they are never, ever repeated.

Banned or 'Binfordized

"Brazen." "Rowdy … unlawful … raw." "Salacious and risqué."

All adjectives that might be used to sell a movie to today's viewing audiences. You can just imagine such adjectives in big, bold letters plastered beneath the title or across the screen of a coming attraction. From 1928 until 1956, however, these were scathing words used by Lloyd Tilgham Binford as he edited films or banned them outright from being shown in Memphis.

Recently retired from the company he founded, Columbian Mutual Life Insurance Co., Binford wasn't looking for work in 1928 when he was appointed chairman of the Memphis Board of Censors. He awoke one morning to learn from the newspaper that he'd received the appointment from newly elected Mayor Watkins Overton. Binford accepted the position on a temporary basis for only 90 days "as a favor to the mayor," his obituary reads.

It was a title he would hold for 28 years, retiring at age 88 in 1956.

Born in Duck Hill, Miss., where he would eventually have a high school named after him, Binford had a simple, religious upbringing that would one day help to inform his decisions when it came to film censorship. He quit school at 16 and went to work as a railway mail clerk for the Illinois Central Railroad. As a clerk, his train was once held up by the famous train bandit Rube Burrow; as a film censor, he would outlaw films depicting train robberies and the like, including "The Outlaw," the serial "Jesse James Rides Again" and "Destry Rides Again." Though opposed to violence of any sort in films, he did allow that "if we stopped every movie with a murder in it, there wouldn't be any left."

Lloyd T. Binford

He went to work for various insurance companies, eventually starting his own in 1917. That company was moved over the course of a weekend from Atlanta to Memphis, where Binford would build a new headquarters, an iconic monument on the Downtown skyline, the Columbian Mutual Tower on the northern edge of Court Square. It was one of the first skyscrapers in Memphis; Binford ran his insurance and censorship empires from a top-floor office. The building would be sold years later and renamed the Lincoln American Tower, but the visages of Binford's children can still be found carved into the building's facade.

A millionaire when he retired from insurance, he accepted the chairman position for $200 a month. As a civil servant, he upheld the standards of the state, the city and the Hays Code, a set of guidelines used to govern studio film releases from 1930 to 1968, and named for Will Hays, a Presbyterian elder enlisted by Hollywood to improve the image of its studios. The Hays Code, also known as the Motion Picture Production Code, was used until 1968 when the Motion Picture Association of America adopted the rating code in use today.

As chairman of the Memphis Censor Board, Binford enjoyed free rein to edit films — known as having been "Binfordized" by Hollywood — or ban them outright. A moral gyroscope in the Crump political machine, he passed judgment on pictures that were "immoral or inimical to public safety, health, morals or welfare."

"The Little Tramp" did not pass muster with Binford. All Charlie Chaplin films were banned from Memphis theaters, Binford telling The Associated Press upon banning "Monsieur Verdoux" in 1947 that "we don't have to give our reasons" before adding that "(the film is) a comedy that makes murder a joke."

But the reasons weren't always found within the frame of a particular film; the character of the actor or actress mattered to Binford as well. He thought Chaplin a "London guttersnipe" and expounded to the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1952 that "America has been good to Chaplin and has made him rich, but he has not been a good American … (Chaplin) is a traitor to the Christian American way of life, an enemy of decency, virtue and godliness in all its forms, a reputed endorser of the Communist Party."

Ingrid Bergman fell into his cross hairs as well with 1950s "Stromboli" being banned from cinemas. "It would be inimical to the public morals and welfare to permit the public exhibition of a motion picture starring a woman who is universally known to be living in open and notorious adultery," Binford told The Commercial Appeal in February of that year. Bergman was having a public affair with the film's director, and married man, Roberto Rossellini, at the time.

Binford's reach and notoriety stretched as far as Hollywood and New York, and screenwriters would send him scripts and scenarios ahead of time to get his approval and keep their product from being "Binfordized" after the fact.

In an era when movie theaters were segregated between the races with balconies reserved for African-Americans, if at all, or special days when they could attend movies, Binford sought to ban those movies with all-black or mixed race casts. Famously, Binford banned Hal Roach's "Curley" — a re-imagining of his "Our Gang" series — in 1947 for depicting white and black children in school together. United Artists would appeal and the case would ultimately make it to the Tennessee Supreme Court which, in 1949, stated that "the Memphis Board of Censors has no authority to disapprove a picture because there are Negro actors appearing in it."

"We'll just have to pass these pictures," Binford told The Commercial Appeal, though that same year he banned "Lost Boundaries," stating, "It deals with social equality between whites and Negroes in a way that is not practiced in the South. We banned it for that reason."

These are reasons that Binford's great-granddaughter, Tamara Trexler, wishes had not been. A film producer herself ("Charlie's War,"2003; "Dear Mr. Cash," 2005), she also was the Nashville Film Commissioner from 2000 to 2002, and would begin speeches in that capacity with anecdotes of her notorious ancestor. Her great-grandfather was an intelligent man who, though he left school as a teenager, wrote several volumes of his own encyclopedia with information on science, philosophy, religion and politics. And though she might agree with his notion that there is too much violence in films, on the racial issue, she says "that hurts that he did that."

Binford married Hattie Nelson of Memphis in 1895, and the couple had four children listed in his obituary as Mrs. Tom Thrash, Mrs. Fred Trexler, Mrs. Elizabeth Moon and Lloyd T. Binford Jr. Hattie died in 1927, and he married Jennie May McCallum in 1937, living at 1723 Peabody.

Trexler's father, Fred Trexler, is a Southern Baptist minister who recalls visiting Binford in his Midtown home. He remembers his grandfather as "very much an individualist with a very strong personality, that's why he did what he did." More exciting than those home visits, though, were the perks that went along with being Binford's grandson. "My mother and I would be invited on occasion to the Paramount where he previewed his movies."

Though movies might be banned from local theaters, it didn't mean they escaped the eyes of film buffs completely. "His iron thumb saw plenty of movies miss the Memphis market altogether," said Daniel Linton, a professor with the Communications Department at the University of Memphis. "Some of the 'scandalous' movies he banned were screened in West Memphis instead, and so a little booming film market was created in a place that doesn't even have a theater these days."

"It was the Joy Theatre in West Memphis, so I've been told, that showed the movies he wouldn't let play in Memphis," said local movie theater historian Vincent Astor. "It made lots of money."

Linton says: "Many major cities had similar boards, though they weren't always known as 'censor boards' per se ... This all sounds like ancient history, but actually the last one finally disbanded in Dallas in 1993."

Binford died on Aug. 27, 1956, and is buried in Elmwood Cemetery. His legacy lives on in a city that has struggled with issues of equality and acceptance, and has, in recent years, seen a burgeoning film community take shape. From 1928 until 1956, however, Binford always had the last word on the town's big-screen culture.

"I have no regrets about the movies I've banned," he told the Press-Scimitar in 1947. "Take 'Duel in the Sun.' It was unquestionably the dirtiest movie I've ever seen. And I can't say anything too bad about that Charlie Chaplin."

Some Films or Stage Productions Banned or ‘Binfordized’

“Rope” (1948): Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; “brazen and immoral … revolting and repulsive.”

“Annie Get Your Gun” (1947): A Broadway stage musical with a mixed-race cast; the show “is not being allowed to play anywhere in the South, except Texas, and whatever those folks in Texas do doesn’t surprise me.” In addition to the cast’s ethnicity, “the musical score is suggestive, salacious and risqué.”

“Bamboo Prison” (1955): “Unpatriotic”; was to be exhibited by Malco, decision to ban later reversed after suit brought by Columbia Pictures.

“Forever Amber” (1947): “Entirely filthy.”

“Stromboli” (1950): On star Ingrid Bergman: “It would be inimical to the public morals and welfare to permit the public exhibition of a motion picture starring a woman who is universally known to be living in open and notorious adultery.”

“Lost Boundaries” (1949): “It deals with social equality between whites and Negroes in a way that is not practiced in the South.”

“The Wild One” (1954): “That was the worst, the most lawless bunch I ever saw and the most lawless picture I ever saw. There was nothing immoral in it, it was just rowdy and unlawful and raw.”

“French Line” (1954): Binford called police to keep the uninvited from entering a private preview of the movie at Malco Theatre.

“Miss Sadie Thompson” (1953): Banned for a dancing scene by Rita Hayworth; “The whole picture is a travesty on religion and everything in it is raw.”

“Tragic Ground” (1953): Play banned in Memphis that played at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis.

“Monsieur Verdoux” (1947): “a comedy that makes murder a joke.”

“A Song is Born” (1948): “inimical to the public welfare”; cast includes a “rough, rowdy bunch of musicians of both colors … there is no segregation”; “The musicians are raising the dickens … Jazz and the blues were actually born in Memphis anyway, down on Beale Street. There is too much French in New Orleans for jazz. It’s a rough, bawdy, noisy picture dealing with band musicians, in general a mixed-up jamboree.”

“Wedding Rings” (1930): “… the absolute violation of the sanctity of marital relationships …”; Shown at the Orpheum with a stretch of film bearing only the words “Cut out by board of censors.”

Others, banned unless otherwise stipulated:

“The Southerner”
“Brewster’s Millions”
“The Outlaw”
“Duel in the Sun”
“Jesse James Rides Again” (serial)
“Destry Rides Again”
“Jesse James”
“The Return of Frank James”
“The Daltons Ride Again”
“The Macomber Affair” (Hemingway novel, banned until deletions were made)
“Pursued” (censored)

HIDDEN MEMPHIS
This occasional series profiles people, places and things, past or present, that are quintessentially Memphis. Do you have an idea for someone or something for this series? E-mail Richard Alley at richard@richardalley.com.

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

The Boost of the Olive Tree

Okay all you bookish people out there, it's time to rally the troops. My good friend Courtney Miller Santo has a major book release next Tuesday, Aug. 21, with The Roots of the Olive Tree (William Morrow). She has a lot of author events upcoming in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Portland, Oxford and Asheville, so if you're in any of those cities, get out there and support her. And tell your friends!

Courtney also needs some reviews circulating out there, so give the book a read and tell the world what you think. Doesn't have to be long, just a few sentences, a paragraph or two, on your connection to the characters and stories. Now, we here at Urf! are big on books - paper, binding, covers, the whole package - but for those of you who like to download a novel and read it on your computer phones, the publisher has a great deal for you. For the rest of this week only, you can download The Roots of the Olive Tree eBook for only $4.99. You can do that right here. So go do that, I'll wait ...

Now, once you've read it, say something about it at the following sites (your review can be copied and pasted into each site to make things simpler):

Barnes & Noble (Scroll to the very bottom of the page to review)

Amazon (You can review the electronic copy now, but not the hardback)

Books-A-Million (Scroll to the lower third of the page, account creation required)

Reviews are also accepted at the Apple Store if an iPad or iPod are your preferred mediums

I was lucky enough to read an advanced reader's copy back in the spring and said a little something about it here.

I also wrote a feature on Courtney for The Commercial Appeal that ran in the paper on May 31, 2012. I'll copy that below so you can get a feel for where Courtney's story began and how it evolved. If this isn't enough, you can read her winning story for the 2012 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest right here.

Thank you all for your help!

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."

On Cotton Row

From Peter Taylor's short story "A Friend and Protector":

I stood at the top of the stairs watching the three old people ascend the two straight flights of steps that I had come stumbling up half an hour earlier – two flights that came up from the ground floor without a turn or a landing between floors. I thought how absurd it was that in these Front Street buildings, where so much Memphis money was made, such a thing as an elevator was unknown. Except for adding the little air-conditioned offices at the rear, nobody was allowed to do anything there that would change the old-fashioned, masculine character of the cotton man's world. This row of buildings, hardly two blocks long, with their plaster facade and unbroken line of windows looking out over the brown Mississippi River were a kind of last sanctuary – generally beyond the reach of the ladies and practically beyond the reach of the law.

From my piece on unique museums found within the Mississippi River Corridor of Tennessee for the River Times magazine:

Cotton Row in downtown Memphis was the hub of worldwide cotton trading in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Cotton Exchange – at the intersection of Union Avenue and Front Street, firmly in the center of the Row – was a place for sellers, traders and buyers to meet, discuss the issues of the day and industry, and keep track of the most up-to-date pricing. "A lot of our history, art and culture comes to us as a result of the people who gathered here," says Melissa Farris, special events coordinator for the museum. That exchange floor now is home to the Cotton Museum and welcomes those interested in agriculture – and the Southern way of life – from around the world.

Visit the Cotton Museum on Front Street and at memphiscottonmuseum.org.

Read Peter Taylor's story in his fine collection, The Old Forest and Other Stories.

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.

Bird Man

A year ago tomorrow I had a story in The Commercial Appeal about Gordon Hall (No adversity could keep flying man Gordon Hall on ground; April 24, 2011). Mr. Hall began flying airplanes at the age of 17 after flunking out of high school because, as he told me then, “I had no desire to learn algebra, chemistry, geometry and physics, all the stuff they were trying to jam down my throat."

Instead, he wanted to fly. And fly he did.

In 1946 he joined the Air Force but was found unfit to fly because of a lack of depth perception. He spent the next 18 years as a radio controller and air traffic controller. They couldn't keep him down and he continued to fly on the side as a charter pilot and instructor. When the Army came looking for those with commercial pilot ratings who wanted to transfer and train to fly helicopters, Mr. Hall jumped at the chance.

The only catch? Passing a Class 1 physical, including an eye exam and depth perception test requiring him to look into a viewfinder and pick out one circle of five that appeared to stand out among five separate rows.

Photo by Dave Darnell

He told the story: “As I started to look into the viewer, the phone rang, and the flight surgeon picked up the phone, smiled, turned around and engaged in the conversation, so I read off fictitious numbers," Hall said. "And then I just sat there trying to look bored because I was worried sick that he was going to ask me to repeat. So I just sat there, and he turned around and said, 'Well, that's about it.'"

He flew supply missions in Vietnam, at one point rescuing two downed pilots in the Gulf of Siam as North Vietnamese sped towards them in boats. It was his “greatest accomplishment and adventure in Vietnam.”

Mr. Hall lost all vision in his right eye in 1966, yet continued to fly charters and as instructor until 1996. I got word over the weekend that he passed away Friday evening at the age of 84.

I had a great time getting to know Mr. Hall and hearing his stories. He kept a map in his home office with red pushpins in the location of every airport in the country he’s landed in. The entire thing was a sea of red.

He wrote in his memoir, "Tiger Lead, Your Flight Is Up," published in March 2011: "Ever since third grade, I used to lie on an incline in the grass during the lunch break and I would spend time looking up at the beautiful, soft, billowy, white cumulous clouds as they floated with the wind. I was absolutely entranced at the thought of being a bird or perhaps a bird man or even being able to fly an airplane among those puffy white clouds floating in the blue sky."

Fly on, bird man.

No adversity could keep flying man Gordon Hall on ground

Gordon Hall dropped out of high school because he found its pace too slow, too rooted in the ground, and he needed to fly.

"I had some hard times in high school," said Hall, who lives in Bartlett. "My mother wanted me to go to college prep school, but I had no desire to go to college, and I flunked out of high school. I had no desire to learn algebra, chemistry, geometry and physics, all the stuff they were trying to jam down my throat."

Ten days later, in 1946, he was in the Air Force training to be a Morse code radio operator, eventually being sent to the Aleutian Islands for 14 months. The northern Pacific Ocean, he said, was a place that "impressed me more than any other place I've ever been."

Growing up in Connecticut, his father worked as a fireman or engineer on steam locomotives during the Depression to support Hall and his five older sisters. But while his father was moving across the terrain at ground level, his son had dreams of soaring.

Hall writes in his memoir, "Tiger Lead, Your Flight Is Up," published in mid-March: "Ever since third grade, I used to lie on an incline in the grass during the lunch break and I would spend time looking up at the beautiful, soft, billowy, white cumulous clouds as they floated with the wind. I was absolutely entranced at the thought of being a bird or perhaps a bird man or even being able to fly an airplane among those puffy white clouds floating in the blue sky."

In 1945, after VE Day, flying restrictions were lifted on the East Coast and the chamber of commerce sponsored 40 hours of ground school for kids. After ground school, Hall bought a block of flying time and began training, soloing only two months after his 17th birthday.

Despite his love for flying and his early training, he was unable to fly in the Air Force because of his lack of education and a deficiency in depth perception. Instead, he spent the next 18 years as a radio operator and air traffic controller.

The Army came looking for those with commercial pilot ratings who wanted to transfer from their current branch of the service to train as helicopter pilots. From 1960-64, Hall had been flying on the side as a charter pilot and flight instructor, building his time in the air. He qualified for the chance to join the Army, but he had to complete a Class 1 physical.

On the day of his physical, the final exam was the depth perception test requiring him to look into a viewfinder and pick out one circle of five that appeared to stand out among five separate rows.

"As I started to look into the viewer, the phone rang, and the flight surgeon picked up the phone, smiled, turned around and engaged in the conversation, so I read off fictitious numbers," Hall said. "And then I just sat there trying to look bored because I was worried sick that he was going to ask me to repeat. So I just sat there, and he turned around and said, 'Well, that's about it.'"

Hall was accepted into the Army as a warrant officer aviator in June 1964 and was sent to Fort Rucker for helicopter school, where at 36 years old he had the most military and flying time, and was the oldest of 16 students learning to fly the Bell UH-1Y or "Huey," as it was known.

"While these guys were starting out, I already had 2,200 hours (of flight time)," he said.

Bryce Haugsdahl first flew with Hall after moving to Memphis from Los Angeles in 1984 to work as a charter pilot and flight instructor.

"He gave me my first ride as a co-pilot in a jet," said Haugsdahl, the current president of United Way of the Mid-South "It was a real thrill for me; that was the first jet I'd ever flown. Gordon was one of the first guys to help me get my career in Memphis off the ground as far as flying."

Hall finished school in 1965 and, he said, "45 days later I was in Vietnam."

"We were the first company to pioneer air mobility, carrying troops into combat by helicopter," Hall said. "If we weren't flying combat, we were doing support for little detachments or units in our vicinity."

He took his tour in the southern part of Vietnam, mainly ferrying South Vietnamese troops into combat. On Dec. 15, 1965, while returning from a resupply mission, Hall and his crew of co-pilot and gunner were told a Navy plane had gone down in the Gulf of Siam (now the Gulf of Thailand) and the pilots had ejected. Being in the closest aircraft, Hall was asked if they were able to help with the rescue effort. He turned around and headed out over the water, spotting two crewmen in life boats not far off the coast and two hostile boats on the way to the scene. With no hoist or harness on board, Hall had to make the daring rescue of putting the helicopter's skids into the water so his copilot could pull pilots John Sutor and George Dresser aboard.

"It was my greatest accomplishment and adventure in Vietnam," Hall said.

He left Vietnam credited with 940 hours of combat flight and combat support time, was awarded 27 air medals, including two with a V for valor, and was recommended twice for the Distinguished Flying Cross in only 101/2 months.

He lost all vision in his right eye due to histoplasmosis, a fungal infection, in 1966, the same year he retired from the Army, and eventually had that eye removed. Despite this infirmity, he continued to fly as an instructor and for corporate charters, a job that brought him to Memphis to fly for the Murff Cotton Co.

When asked if the incident over the Gulf of Siam was the closest he has come to any real trouble in the air, Hall produces a sheaf of papers listing problems he's encountered as a pilot, mostly alone, though some were with student pilots. The emergencies include dropping oil pressure, stalled engines and engine fires.

"I was so impressed: Here was a guy who only had one eye, and yet he had a waiver to fly and he was so smooth on the controls, a very accomplished precision instrument pilot," Haugsdahl said. "He had the basics and fundamentals down so well that he was very comfortable in the airplane. ... He performed just exactly as I would expect him to perform without a ruffled feather."

Hall retired completely from flying in 1996 at the age of 68, having been an active pilot for more than 51 years -- 30 of them with an artificial eye -- and with 18,603 hours of flight time in his log books. A map of the United States in Hall's home office is riddled with dots, 528 of them marking every airport where he's made a landing. In his career, he's had the privilege of flying 66 different types of aircraft into those fluffy clouds he gazed upon as a young man.

"It was a challenge and a sense of satisfaction; that's the whole key," he said of learning to fly and maintaining such a long career. "I've had a great life, and I've been a lucky boy."

"Tiger Lead, Your Flight Is Up," is available online and locally at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

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

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."

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