Richard J. Alley

Centerpiece feature for The Memphis Daily News

May 6, 2013

Memphis institution Corky’s publishes cookbook

For 29 years, Corky’s Ribs & Bar-B-Q has been serving up pulled pork and ribs with a side of beans, slaw and innovation.

In 1984, founder Don Pelts, who owned The Public Eye in Midtown at the time, was waiting patiently for the location at 5259 Poplar Ave. in East Memphis to come available. When it finally did, he found himself surrounded by fast food joints, so he added his own drive-thru.

When devotees in other states called clamoring for the smoked pork in their own kitchens, he shipped it to them via FedEx.

When Pelts thought not enough food lovers knew the name, he began selling his wares on QVC.

Another milestone in the Corky’s empire happened last week when the cookbook “Cookin’ With Corky’s” went on sale.

“He would tell you right now, all he was hoping for was that he would make enough money to pay his bills; he is a pessimist by nature,” Barry Pelts said of his father, who has retired and passed the business down to his son and son-in-law, Andy Woodman.

The 240-page book, with 165 recipes and 200 photos that include vintage pictures from the Corky’s collection and new from local photographer Jay Adkins, is published by Favorite Recipes Press of Nashville. The publisher works with nonprofits, companies and individuals, and has published 1,500 cookbook titles since 1961.

The local representative for Favorite Recipes Press, Sheila Thomas, has worked on specialty cookbooks for the Junior League of Memphis and the Women’s Exchange, and has sold cookbooks on QVC for years. It was in the green room at the station one day that she sold the idea of a Corky’s cookbook to Jimmy Stovall, purveyor of barbecue on the home shopping channel.

“He really saw the vision for it,” Thomas said.

Stovall has worked for Corky’s for 15 years, beginning in the drive-thru line and working his way up the ladder. He now manages the Cordova restaurant as well as spending about 100 days per year in West Chester, Pa., working on-air with QVC.

Stovall’s longevity with the restaurant is not a fluke; Barry Pelts said the average employee has been with the company for 18 years. It’s a family, and that is the primary theme of the book, which took about a year to put together … (read more)

Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

July 5, 2012

On a recent summer day, it came to my attention that my children were bored. This alert was not a subtle one; these are not subtle kids. The two syllables of “I’m bored” came out in the droning, whining tone of one of those French police sirens: “I’mmm bored … I’mmm bored.”

Because the temperature was creeping up toward 100 degrees, I packed up my two daughters and took them to the coolest place I could think of: the public library. Once there, I filled out enough paperwork to either get them their very first library cards or to buy a whole other child.

The proud girls were handed their new cards to sign on the back, and then each stared at the shiny rectangle of plastic as if wondering how to turn it on and download something. I told them that with those cards they could take any book in that building home with them.

And that they could now drive a motor vehicle within the city limits. “Really?” they said, wide-eyed and expectant. No, that’s fiction.

Is there anything we can give our children that is more exciting, more educational, more free than a library card? It is Alice’s rabbit hole, Dorothy’s yellow brick road, a winged Pegasus. That little piece of plastic can teach them how and where to satiate their curiosity, the responsibility of keeping up with the card and borrowed books, and that if they sound the alarm “I’m bored” within earshot of me, that they will be forced to better themselves.

Through the colorful forest of trees, we went into the children’s section of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, that gleaming glass and steel lodge of literature. The girls perused titles, pulled out some books to get a sense of them, put some back and found a few to take home. My youngest, Genevieve, leaned toward oversize picture books with their tales of tigers, bugs, little boys and girls, and fables from far away. Nine-year-old Somerset focused on her folded-up summer reading list from Richland Elementary School.

During summer breaks when I was a child, my mother would stop by the main library when it was at the corner of McLean and Peabody to pick up a stack of books recommended for a boy my age. It was like a 100-degree Christmas for me. I would make my way through the pile, and she would then return them for another. I don’t remember my first library card, but it must have been like being given a license to the world.

Watching my daughters and their growing excitement was especially heartening in today’s world of the Internet, Google and the immediacy of knowledge — some good, some bad.

As they walked among the rows of books, their heads crooked slightly to read the spines, it was like the slowest web browser imaginable. Yet it was a great way for me to learn of their interests and to see where their curiosity, if unleashed in a room full of history, science and stories, might take them.

Will there be other milestones as exciting? Sure. They will both one day receive a driver’s license, be accepted into college and get married. Those will be days of triumph and of excitement, days when boredom will be as forgotten as that overdue library book underneath Genevieve’s bed.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

May 30, 2012

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 … (read more)

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 29, 2012

I’m in the minority in my house in that I don’t read young adult fiction. The kids read it. My wife, an English teacher at Central High School, reads it. I think I can’t get into it for a couple of reasons. First, I’m a not-young adult. Second, I don’t really go in for fantasy and science fiction and the lot. This may put me in the minority of all of today’s readers, come to think of it, but I need the action to take place in real cities and countries; I need the plot to twist on something other than time travel, wizardry or the backs of sparkly vampires.

Regardless of my views on young adult literature, there is no escaping the latest craze, “The Hunger Games.” There are more than 20 million books in print, and the film adaptation opened last weekend with a record-breaking box office. Well played, author Suzanne Collins.

It seems that quite a bit of such books has to do with a postapocalyptic world, a dystopian future where a person relies on wits and cunning to survive against roving bands of marauders, dictatorial and all-seeing governments, or zombies. My family wouldn’t make it very far in such a world. I hope they’re learning survival skills by reading these books and watching these films, but if it comes down to who can get to the dwindling food supplies first, we’ll starve waiting for 5-year-old Genevieve to find her shoes so we can leave the house … (read more)

Feature lifestyle story for The Commercial Appeal

March 15, 2012

When “The Hunger Games,” the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling young adult novel, is released on March 23, 16-year-old Destiny Crump is sure to be one of the first in a theater seat.

The junior at Central High School read the book as a summer reading assignment last year, but was caught up in the suspense and drama regardless of the homework label attached to it.

“I didn’t think I would like it at first, but it turned out to be really, really good and interesting,” she said. “It put me in a different mindset, like it could possibly happen.”

Jimmie Tashie is excited about the movie as well. The vice president and general manager for Malco Theatres Inc. said his company is “happy to have another series coming out; they’re talking about this like perhaps it’s another ‘Twilight’-type series. With the end of ‘Harry Potter’ and some of the long-running sequels, the idea of a new one coming along is pretty exciting, because it usually means there’ll be as many movies as there are books.”

The Hollywood Reporter reported last month that anticipation for the movie set a new record for advance ticket sales previously held by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” in May 2010. Malco Theatres is planning for a huge weekend of sales and is beginning it as early as possible, with 12:01 a.m. showings at a number of theaters around the area on March 23.

In the dystopian future of the novel, with more than 23 million copies in print, Collins has woven a tale of class struggle, dictatorial government, survival of the fittest, the human instinct toward fight or flight, and fierce familial loyalty … (read more)

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 15, 2012

What we create with a large family, other than a large mess and a lot of noise, is our own little society within a society. It has its own rules to be broken and its own hierarchy to be either respected or usurped. It has its own ways of operating to ensure that the machinery of family and home run smoothly.

The best way to keep things operating evenly, of course, is for all of the cogs in the machine to work together, for these brothers and sisters to come together and work as a team, all with the same goal of cleaning the kitchen, agreeing on what will be watched on television or simply passing the potatoes down the table at dinner.

When there is discord, factions develop, and strife becomes the norm; war breaks out over an otherwise peaceful land, and no one is happy. Happiness, and quiet, are the overarching goals every day.

I’ve been reading “The Saturdays” by Elizabeth Enright to my 9-year-old daughter at bedtime. It’s the story of the Melendy family with four children that mirror my own — two boys, two girls — living in a Manhattan contemporary to the time of the book’s first publication in 1941. Lamenting not having enough money to do what each really wants, the siblings agree to pool their weekly allowance (a total of $1.60) and take turns privately doing what each likes on Saturdays. By the end, they realize they don’t want to go off on their own for a day, but decide instead that it will be more fun to have their adventures as a group. It’s the story of working together for a mutual cause and respecting each others’ wants and dreams … (read more)

Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

Feb. 16, 2012

I’ve lately been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” to my 9-year-old daughter at bedtime. Chapter by chapter, we’ve sailed into the world of buccaneers and squalls, nameless islands and chatty parrots. And night by night, Somerset has pleaded for just 30 more minutes to stay up. The thought of sleep to her, to most kids I would imagine, is akin to walking the plank.

A whole day’s worth of fun, hours’ worth of television, video games and arguing with siblings, she seems to think, are to be found in that final half-hour before lights out. The unfairness of being forced to her bunk at a reasonable time is quite apparent to her.

Like the characters of Long John Silver, Captain Flint and young Jim Hawkins, Somerset schemes and plots nightly to uncover the treasure of consciousness past the 9-o’clock hour. What fun must take place from then until morning with adults eating ice cream as though it were good for us, drinking a cask of rum, or watching television and movies with explosions and expletives.

Sure, all of that happens, but it’s our right … (read more)

Discovery 901 feature for The Downtowner magazine

Feb. 2012

Feature article on the Shelby Foote collection of papers, manuscripts, notebooks, artwork and ephemera now housed at Rhodes College in Memphis. (read more)

The Downtowner, Feb. 2012

Contributor of copy and editorial direction for Memphians coffee table book

The Nautilus Publishing Company; Oxford, MS

ISBN 978-193694603-7

2011