Dad takes on poster board lobby; next glue stick magnates

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 27, 2014

Words of scholars writ large on poster boards

It seems as though all of the homework my kids have been assigned this year requires poster board.

Has anyone else noticed this? I think you have because when we arrive at school in the mornings, I see all the other kids with their own homework. It looks like an armada of tiny clipper ships, their blue, red, black, white and yellow sails billowing and blown off course.

Social studies, science, math, history — it’s all being done up in 84-point type to fill these 28-by-44-inch boards. Some recent projects have included a report on Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche, geometric shapes and book reports. One poster, inexplicably, was about commas.

Why? To negate a teacher’s failing eyesight? To encourage kids to think outside their crayon boxes?

I bring the conspiracy theories outside of the comments section and right here to blame the poster board industrial complex. Those barons of wood pulp who eschew the standard 8½-by-11 sheet of copy paper, the college-ruled and three-hole-punched notebook pages of my youth. They’ve weaseled their way into the schools, probably at the legislative level in Nashville, to ensure that all assignments everywhere require an enormous, difficult-to-carry stock of lightweight cardboard.

It’s the controversial move over to common foam core curriculum in our public education system.

Perhaps this column should be completed and submitted to my editor on a poster board. I’ll type parts in varying fonts, print it, cut it all out and paste it on the slick side of a piece of poster. I’ll make notes on index cards and glue them on as well. I will utilize a vast array of Magic Markers.

I don’t normally do my work on poster board because I’m an adult and it would be a silly way to complete an assignment. I probably haven’t created a poster in nearly 30 years.

In an increasingly digital world, these assignments appear downright analog with their scribbled-out mistakes, torn edges and curled corners. Hasn’t everything moved to PowerPoint presentations? Aren’t they the poster boards of the future?

I don’t recall Steve Jobs, in his theatrical releases of new hardware and software, ever gesturing toward a poster he made in his dining room the night before the presentation was due. There is no iPosterboard. Is there? Jobs would have seemed a relic of the past; he would have appeared to have caught Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

As our world shrinks — global industries and networks a click away, communication devices held in the palm of our hand — my kids’ homework is getting larger. It’s taking up vast resources of paper, poster, glue, scissors, tape, crayons and time. It’s not a 19th century slate, but neither is it a 21st century smart board.

It is tactile, I’ll give educators that. It’s hands-on. For many of us, I think we’ll agree, it’s the parents’ hands all over it. It’s a scramble to get these projects completed and in some sort of presentable order. For some it’s hassle; for others it’s a nostalgic turn to youth when a poster was the best means to reach a lot of people about civil rights or anti-war sentiments. Now, though, it’s all math equations and Oxford commas.

OK, this rant is over. I have to run up to the Walgreen’s for more supplies if I’m going to finish this column — poster board, index cards, construction paper, glitter … don’t even get me started on the glue stick cartel.

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Ellen Roberds, creative placemaker

High Ground News

March 27, 2014

ioby is the online “crowd-resourcing” platform that has been used to fund more than 280 projects nationwide with more than $700,000 since its launch in 2009. The successful Hampline funding in Memphis is one such success story; ioby collected over $75,000 to create a dedicated, protected bike lane in Binghampton.

The site has become a phenomenon of today’s virtual village, existing in cyberspace at the click or swipe of our fingertip. In Memphis, though, there is now a face to go with those pixels. Ellen Roberds is the only ioby “creative placemaker” in the country, working to inform the public and see that projects find enough traction to become success stories of their own.

The year-long, grant-funded position is in partnership with the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team, Livable Memphis and ioby. Roberds will seek out those with ideas and help to get those ideas clarified and onto the ioby website. Many may be in disadvantaged areas of the city, and those without the critical wi-fi or technological savvy to bring the idea to the public. The projects targeted will be limited to those of $3,000 or below.

“This is not a Hampline project,” Roberds says. “We’re looking for very small projects.”

This isn’t to say those with the grand ideas aren’t welcome, but ioby and Roberds preach baby steps. “Let’s say they want to turn a lot into a playground, but they don’t have the capacity at this point to raise $60,000, so you just kind of start with something small,” she says. “Why don’t we raise $100 and buy some soccer balls and some soccer goals, and a lawnmower to mow the lot and have a place to play outside of the street?”

Past performance shows that if you do well with a small project, that more money can be raised with ioby the second time around. The Hyde Foundation is one potential funder that might be looking at that performance, Roberds says  . . . (read more)

Myriad choices send dad home empty-handed

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 13, 2014

Myriad Choices send dad home empty-handed

Given the choice of grocery shopping or working, I’m lying on the couch right now with a legal pad and pencil, coffee by my side, and writing this column.

In the meantime, my wife is being faced with choices — paste or gel toothpaste, shampoo for body or curls or dryness, the small, medium or large jar of peanut butter, and round-top vs. whatever that other kind of bread is.

All of the choices make me crazy and indecisive, which is why I’m on the couch. It’s also why I’m given only limited access to Kroger. I can stand in front of 20 linear feet of lunch meat for a half-hour and leave empty-handed.

America is the land of choice. In this country, you can choose to be a surgeon or a house painter, a musician or CPA, Muslim or Catholic, live on the West Coast or East, write in cursive or print. The grocery store is like a tiny democracy with its myriad options and possibilities from the land of milk and butter, to the shores of poultry and pasta.

It is overwhelming. And more than our founding fathers, such choice is a testament to those who have chosen marketing as a profession. Ever since hometown hero Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly at 79 Jefferson in Downtown, putting the product at the fingertips of the customers, marketing geniuses have scrambled to help us choose which bottle of ketchup is better than the next (hint: They’re exactly the same inside; the only difference is which end you rest the bottle on — top or bottom).

When my kids were babies and up all night afflicted with mucous and fever, I would invariably be sent on a midnight errand to Walgreens for something liquid and pink and age-appropriate. I would invariably forget exactly what it was I’d been sent to retrieve. Those were long evenings spent reading the backs of bottles and boxes for anything that would trigger my memory.

I would return home with something purple and highly narcotic. Inundated with options, I’d chosen poorly. My wife and baby displeased with my choice, I spent the rest of those nights in a hazy fog of sleep brought on by whatever pediatric elixir I’d bought.

Could there be that much difference between this toothpaste and that? This bottle of shampoo with guava and that one with avocado? Probably not.

I have a brother-in-law who once refused to shop at a certain store because they carried only three types of grits. That’s not so far-fetched, though. One of the reasons we choose to live in the South is for its variety of grits.

It isn’t even limited to what goes into or on our bodies. Bathroom cleaners offer the same array of variances. Scrubbing bubbles or foam? Blue or clear? Pine scent or no scent at all? It makes no sense to me.

Packaging, pennies and peer pressure are what drives us at the store. I find the options silly most times, frustrating at others, yet it beats the alternative.

In Memphis these days, on any given weekend, we have a choice of sporting events, outdoor festivals, music shows and places to gather. These are options unavailable decades ago. Even if those choices confuse and confound, and I end up lying on this couch all weekend because I just can’t make up my mind, it’s nice that those choices exist.

And you really can’t go wrong with a Grizzlies or Tigers game, with dinner at Local Gastropub or Tsunami, a stroll around the Memphis Zoo or the Memphis Botanic Garden. The wrong choice there doesn’t carry the same weight as, say, a gel toothpaste when your wife specifically said paste.

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What smart cities can learn from Memphis

High Ground

March 12, 2014

What smart cities can learn from Memphis

With recent successes in battling urban sprawl, Memphis is demonstrating creative ways to foster neighborhood revitalization. Memphis now has lessons to share with others on urban planning, neighborhood involvement and ‘bootstrapping.’

The story of sprawl in Memphis begins as early as the 1950s and with one of the first suburban shopping centers in the country, Poplar Plaza, built at the edge of the city’s eastern limit. The sprawl continued in earnest throughout the ‘70s, cutting into the surrounding county with the deliberateness and tenacity of a Mississippi River current as developers gobbled up land further and further east. An interstate loop was built around the city, then another. Eventually a third offshoot would break off to wend its way around single family homes, malls, soccer fields, movie multiplexes and car sale lots.

While the city hasn’t actively worked to abort the sprawl, the flow is beginning to abate as more and more entrepreneurs, planners, consumers, families and government itself looks inward, back to the city and its neighborhoods.

This is We mural on Broad Ave.
Photo by Andrew J. Breig

The idea that other smart cities may have something to learn from Memphis is a new one, a radical one, yet completely plausible given recent successes.

The first such lesson is to not let the rigidity often associated with planning get in the way of progress.

“Local government here is learning to be flexible, learning to be nimble, learning to reorient and be able to respond more quickly to these neighborhood-driven efforts,” says Tommy Pacello, project manager for the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team. Incidentally, another lesson for cities might be to get yourself such a team. This one, funded by the Bloomberg Foundations beginning in 2012, has worked to reduce gun violence and restore economic vitality to core neighborhoods within the city.

Giving in to Community-Driven Growth

The neighborhood efforts Pacello references are epitomized by the creation of theBroad Avenue Arts District along a once-forgotten street in the nearly forgotten neighborhood of Binghampton in Midtown. The district is a half-mile revitalization project realized by a few key players in the neighborhood. Through a series of festivals, pop-up markets and the unwavering dedication of a handful of restauranteurs and retailers – and one gutsy action of citizens hand-painting bicycle lanes and head-in parking spaces along the street – the stakeholders proved to the city what could be done and made clear what it was they wanted to see in their neighborhood.

And, to its credit, the city listened. Not only listened but, with the adoption of the 500-page Unified Development Code in 2010, “there is now a codified process by which the neighborhood associations are brought into the discussion sooner and the goal is … that if we bring in the neighborhood sooner, then they can be more instrumental on the design of the project,” says Josh Whitehead, planning director for the Memphis & Shelby County Office of Planning and Development. “What they wanted it (the UDC) to be is more flexible to allow, and to make easier, redevelopment inside the city.”

“They’re thinking about creative placemaking, and thinking about this concept of lean urbanism, which is this whole idea essentially about how do we build great places out of baling wire and twine and not thinking about over-engineering projects,” says Pacello.

As counterintuitive as it may seem coming from a planner, long-range planning may not be in the best interest of a city. Whitehead, instead, makes the case for looser land use control and points to Portland, Oregon, as example. That progressive city has a state-implemented “urban growth boundary,” a line in the sand dictating that no development occurs outside that line until the density within reaches a certain threshold.

It is an effective impediment to urban sprawl. But in an older area of town, industrial makers and manufacturers are being encroached upon by residential and commercial retail concerns, Whitehead says. “Only the city of Portland can rezone your property and they do that comprehensively as a big neighborhood … it’s so restrictive.”

His suggestion: “The language of code needs to be as freewheeling as possible.”

Thinking small in the beginning, starting off manageably with pop-up shops and temporary green spaces or street festivals, solidifies a neighborhood’s vested interest in its area of town. The analogy is of a parent and child. The child decides she wants to play trombone but, instead of rushing out and paying hundreds of dollars for an instrument that may be left behind in short order, the parent rents one. The budding musician gets a feel for the instrument, shows a willingness to practice and the responsibility of it. Once the parent is convinced, something more permanent is considered.

And once it’s considered, the parent – or city – must act quickly and in similar, responsible fashion. This may include reworking sewers, adding or doing away with street lights, or knitting those neighborhoods together through pedestrian and bike-friendly right of ways, as is the goal of the Mid-South Complete Streets and the Mid-South Regional Greenprint initiatives. Both work to, in essence, bring the city together through a network and patchwork of pedestrian-friendly streets, roadways, pathways and green spaces . . . (read more)

Burch, Porter & Johnson

“Foundations” in MBQ Magazine

February/March 2014

Striving to better the community through social and cultural endeavors

If the measure of a business is in its revenue and assets, output, production, and what it provides to consumers, then Memphis has had its fair share of successes throughout history. From cotton to lumber and the means to transport it all, the entrepreneurs and visionaries of this city have excelled.

But how does one measure the success of a law firm? Its assets are in the men and women who people its paneled offices and lively conference rooms, in the thousands of hours spent with law books and in hushed libraries, in the ideology and vision of its leaders. To this end, Memphis is rich with the likes of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz; Apperson Crump; and Wyatt Tarrant & Combs, to name just a few: all have storied pasts that stretch back more than half a century.

Another measure of a business’ success might be in how that company betters its community when it comes to social and cultural issues, and in this respect Burch, Porter & Johnson dots the timeline of Memphis history like few others.

Founded in 1904 by Clinton H. McKay, H.D. Minor, and Charles N. Burch, the firm has long had an active hand in progressive issues. McKay served in the Tennessee Legislature; Minor was president of the Lawyers Club of Memphis, the predecessor to the modern-day Memphis Bar Association, which was later founded by Burch among others.

In the 1940s, following the deaths of the three founders, the firm was run by Lucius E. Burch Jr. (nephew of Charles), John S. Porter, and Jesse E. Johnson. Today, overlooking Court Square from his office on the first level of the iconic turret of the Burch Porter building, Charlie Newman, an attorney with the firm since 1965, remarks that the namesakes of the firm looked upon the practice of law as a calling and “not primarily a business and pursuit of money.”

It was with these leaders that the ideology of the firm as it’s now known began to assert itself.

Edward H. Crump had been elected mayor in 1909, and, though he would serve only until 1915, he had a politically charged puppeteer’s reach. And though his accomplishments were legion — improving public health, beautifying the city to national acclaim, extending roadways east into burgeoning suburbs, and improving communications throughout the city — his ways were less than democratic.

Lucius Burch brought to Memphis from his hometown of Nashville a political connectedness and an unwavering sense of right and wrong. An enthusiastic outdoorsman with a passion for adventure, he hunted and hiked the mountains of the West and flew his own plane to work from his home in what was at the time the far outskirts of Memphis.

Member Charlie Newman. On the wall are portraits of Charles N. Burch (1868-1938) and H. D. Minor (1868-1947), founding partners of the firm.
Photo by Brandon Dill

Burch’s passion for social justice ran just as deep and wild. As the post-World War II generation began to question dictatorial leadership, whether an ocean away or in its own City Hall, the lawyer was able to rally prominent Memphians Ed Meeman, editor of the Press-Scimitar newspaper, and hardware magnate Edmund Orgill. The three were immediately viewed — and rightly so — as adversaries to political machines in general, and Crump’s in particular. The culmination of the men’s work was the 1956 election of Orgill as mayor, flying in the face of Crump’s own candidate and marshaling in the end of Crump’s nearly 50-year reign . . . (read more)

Hitting a high note

“Foundations” in MBQ Magazine

December/January 2013

Amro and Memphis: In tune since 1921

It was 1921 and everywhere in Memphis was the sound of jazz and blues music mixing with the music of travel — train whistles and the riverboats’ calliope. Enter into this symphony Mil Averwater and Frank Moorman, passing through on the way from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. They must have heard it all, and seen the throngs of people shopping, working, eating, and playing downtown.

In a time when bigger began to be better — Clarence Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly chain of grocery stores was bagging revenues of $60 million — Averwater and Moorman had simpler dreams. They were musicians with an urge to teach others.

The partners opened Amro Studios — the “A” of Averwater and “M” of Moorman with an “RO” as a fill line — in October 1921 on the second floor of 166 South Main Street. On what is today’s Tri-State Bank’s parking lot at the corner of Main and Peabody Place, the two would open the windows wide to play piano and, when the inevitable passerby wandered in to see what was going on, they would offer a 30-lesson course.

C.J. & Nick Averwater
Photo by Jonathan Postal

Business grew, built on diversification and immersion into the popular music of the day. Averwater wrote and copyrighted the book The Amro System of Popular Jazz in 1923. When WMC Radio went on the air that same year, he played and arranged talent for the city’s inaugural waveband.

When cotton prices plummeted in 1930, the Great Depression struck Memphis like a mallet. People did what they could to stay afloat as jobs were lost and families condensed into single, bulging households. Nonessentials were cut from budgets everywhere, and music lessons, it would seem, would be doomed. Frank Moorman had left the business early on to return to Cincinnati, but Averwater remained committed to the notion that music is good for the body and soul. Over much of those depressing years, he worked with a system of bartering. He traded a lesson in scales for a basket of eggs, a medley of standards for a gallon of milk.

In 1927, the big band leader Jimmie Lunce-ford came to Manassas High School and began what would become the first public school band program in the city. As the popularity of school bands grew, so did Amro’s business, and the two would meld when Averwater, who had begun offering instruments for sale, would eventually begin supplying those programs in the 1940s and ’50s.

The work consisted of putting boots on the ground then, with Mil and his staff traveling the dirt and gravel roads of Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Missouri. It was a familial industry, with the salesmen often staying overnight in the band directors’ homes.

Today, Amro supplies instruments to nearly all the schools within a 250-mile radius of Memphis, and the Averwaters are still conducting the show with Pat Averwater, Mil’s grandson, as president, and great-grandson CJ Averwater as vice president. Great-grandson Nick Averwater who recently graduated from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, has joined the business as well.

It’s a multi generational business serving a multigenerational clientele, CJ Averwater says. “One of the coolest experiences working the floor is when someone comes in and says, ‘I got my first instrument here.’ That’s touching, that lets you know you’re doing something that benefits the community.”

Over time, Amro has grown and contracted with the city. Locations have included Madison Avenue, Monroe, Union, Austin Peay, Elvis Presley Boulevard. and near the corner of Poplar and Highland where Buster’s Liquor now stands. In the 1970s, the operation was moved to its current location at 2918 Poplar, with an addition to the west of the original building in the ’90s doubling the space to its current 25,000 square feet. Housed within are showrooms, repairs workshops, executive and accounting offices, and an auditorium that seats a hundred.

“As business has grown, we’ve been more successful out of one location because a lot of our operation is not necessarily retail itself but in the service we provide outside of the city,” CJ says . . . (read more)