Richard J. Alley

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

May 23, 2013

Good seats are still available on ‘Believe Memphis’ bandwagon

I was born and raised in Memphis, weaned during the 1970s on a steady stream of negativity flowing through a city whose dreams had slipped into the river and whose borders had become porous. Everyone, it seemed, wanted out. The grass must have looked greener in the next county over, a neighboring city, any other state.

But things have turned, haven’t they? Negativity is passed from generation to generation like a bad gene, and the only way to arrest it is to flip the off-switch in our DNA. My children are being raised in a new Memphis, one with possibilities imagined from the uppermost reaches of government down to the teacher in the classroom, from the 7-foot-1 defensive player of the year to the CEO to the waitress serving sweet tea.

And it’s borne upon one word: Believe.

It’s a directive being spread around these days on billboards, the airwaves and a little yellow towel, but the attitude has been growing in us all along. We have flipped that switch and begun believing in ourselves and our city, and to proudly share the stories that make us who we are.

Believe Memphis. So powerful is this simple command that it isn’t just for those born and raised here. It’s for everyone everywhere. We are all of Memphis. If you have a favorite pop star and dance to your radio, if you’ve stayed in a hotel, shopped in a grocery store, shipped a package or tasted the perfect pulled pork sandwich, then you are of Memphis. And we’re glad to have you. We welcome you.

The term “bandwagon” gets used in a negative way, but I say come on board. Ours is a wagon that has been hitched in the past to teams of Tigers, a couple of kings, two pandas and a Redbird. It has been loaded into the belly of a purple and orange cargo plane. More recently, it has been pulled behind a 400-passenger paddle wheel steamboat, a fleet of food trucks, and bicycles along a 7-mile Greenline, through a revitalized park, and eventually, it will cross the river over the Harahan Bridge. When there was no one to pull it, we stoked its steam engine with issues of Forbes magazine and the words of bitter columnists from afar. Currently, it’s being pulled by a grizzly bear. So climb on: It’s a bandwagon with an actual band led by Booker T. Jones fresh from a concert of American soul music at the White House.

My children already have their own memories of Memphis to share, their own stories of visiting the Memphis Zoo and the Levitt Shell, of standing riverside to gaze at the water, exploring Midtown’s cafés and riding the trails at Shelby Farms. They’ve visited the farmers markets and Botanic Garden, caught movies at the Summer Twin Drive-In and danced at the Stax Museum. They’re old enough to understand the news they see and hear, and open enough to understand that it’s not all perfect. But they have the sense that it can be changed for the better, and that is a brand new sensation.

I’ve loaded my family aboard this wagon, and I’m stopping the cycle of negativity for my own children. I am of Memphis, and my children believe because they’ve never known any other way.

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“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

May 9, 2013

Wanted: a second chance to be a band geek

The story was all over my social media feeds last week. The principal of a low-performing school in Roxbury, Mass., let his security staff go to help pay for more arts teachers. It was another of those stories I ignored at the time, knowing that if I found I was interested in reading it later, then it would be there; stories have a way of circling around and coming back to us. And this one did just that as I sat in the audience twice in the past week for my sons’ band concerts at White Station Middle and High Schools. It’s the type of setting where a story on the importance of funding arts programs in schools might be set to the music of Gershwin.

If you’ve never been to a concert at that level, it is nothing less than extraordinary. I wasn’t in the band in high school. Band geeks, that’s who was in the band. It turns out there is no shame in that. Just the opposite: It’s a moniker worn with pride. There may be no other instance of students working so closely together with their teachers than in a school auditorium as they give a performance everything they’ve got. They all have a stake in it. They’re all trying to make this thing — this arrangement — sound as whole and as perfect as possible. To do such a thing takes more than mere talent: It takes teamwork.

Many of the professional musicians I know all came to their instruments through their secondary schools’ band programs. How many adults today do you know who can show a direct line from middle school to their careers? The conductors on stage this past week — Mr. Wright, Mr. Guinn and Mr. Scott — are the Pied Pipers of our children, leading them into something that, even if they don’t make a job of it, they will use in some way or other their entire lives.

In a recent conversation, Dru Davison, performing arts coordinator with Memphis City Schools, hit on the ability of music to facilitate all learning when he spoke of the many jazz ensembles in the schools and the art of improvisation.

“You can recite someone else’s piece of music, or you can take everything you know about music and create your own, and that kind of creativity and innovation is really what employers are looking for,” Davison told me. “It’s about being college- and career-ready, and if you have kids in a jazz band, you know that they’re showing up on time for every rehearsal or else they can’t perform.”

That school in Roxbury, Orchard Gardens Elementary, has shown a vast improvement in its test scores, in its morale and in its security issues even without the aid of a police force. They’re working as a team now — students, teachers, administration — to make their arrangement the best that it can be.

If I had it all to do over again, would I be a band geek? You bet I would. I would be awful, mind you, but I would try my hand at the saxophone or the clarinet or maybe even the tuba. In lieu of talent, I sit in the audience as a music lover.

I’m a proud parent of public schoolchildren, and I’m with the band.

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“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

April 26, 2013

Schoolkids are uniform enough in any old thing

The new unified school district has asked parents to imagine how next school year might look. Specifically, how our children might look, whether dressed in uniforms or just any old thing. Currently, Memphis City Schools students wear uniforms, and Shelby County students do not. An online survey has been circulated asking the input of parents.

Uniforms. No uniforms. Neutral. Those are our options.

I can’t pay attention to the minutiae of the goings-on within the battle for supremacy over the schools next year. There are budget concerns, building concerns and personnel concerns ad infinitum. But the debate over uniforms caught my eye. It’s a very real, very practical issue for parents who will need to gauge their mornings and budgets come August.

I attended private Catholic schools through the ninth grade and was made to wear a uniform that included dress shoes and a tie. Nothing amuses my kids more than picturing their scrawny 8-year-old father with a tie cinched up beneath his chin. When, in the 10th grade, I switched to a public county school and was allowed to wear anything — anything at all — it was as though a veil was lifted. It was a denim veil, and a freedom I had not known before.

As a parent, I see both sides of the issue. I know how much simpler mornings are when there are no questions as to what to wear to school. Arguments are limited to where shoes might have been left or who has overslept, while what to wear is a nonissue. I appreciate both the individuality and personality expressed by a wardrobe, and the one-size-fits-all ease of uniforms.

I don’t know whether this survey will be considered, or whether it will become just one more sheaf of paper in what must be a Jenga-like stack of paperwork the new unified board must consider. But just in case, I took the debate straight to those most affected: my own kids. No surprise that they were overwhelmingly in favor

of no uniforms. When I tried to explain to them how much easier it is when you just wear the same thing every day, my preteen son put it best, I think, when he shouted, “I’m going to wear the same thing every day, anyway!” Indeed, I’ve been that preteen when laundry day consisted of a favorite T-shirt being pried, and peeled, from my body.

Our kids are currently immersed in the one-size-fits-all week of TCAP tests. They’ll be tested to find out how they measure up with the students in the seats next to them, an adjoining classroom, a school across the city and one on the opposite side of the state. Sameness. If our children look the same, perhaps they’ll learn the same.

There will be time enough as adults to wear the uniform of the banker, the doctor and policeman, the Windsor knot and pantsuit of the lawyer. They’ll be uniformly kept within the gray fabric of cubicles and tagged with the ID badge of an employer. So in the end, I suppose I sway away from the idea of uniforms. Kids will find their own uniforms to go along with their own groups and their own personalities. They may not look exactly the same, but they are more alike than we realize. They, more than we, realize this as well. They’re kids. They’re the same as the kids in the next classroom over, the school across the city and the one across the state. We don’t need them to act just the same, or look just the same, to see that.

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Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

April 11, 2013

Keep your ‘Welcome Back’ sign at the nest

My youngest daughter found a bird’s nest on the ground the other day and collected it. I can see it from my office window where she left it on the front porch. It puts me in mind of the term “empty nest” as it pertains to a house whose children have left, flown off into the world to make their own lives in their own way.

I wonder if that nest on the front porch would hold me and this computer.

There must be a thrill that comes with standing at the door and waving your child goodbye, his car laden down with furniture and books and clean laundry on his way to college, or a second marriage, or for whatever reason it is that children leave home. Don’t get me wrong, I want them to visit, and often, but I wonder about that sensation of seeing them go and then turning back to your empty nest and breathing air that is all yours, tasting the food in the fridge that is all yours and knowing that if you turn off the television, it will stay off. Does Nickelodeon even exist if there are no children to watch it?

We get a taste of such solitude early on. It’s called the sleepover, and it’s a rite of passage as meaningful as anything else — driver’s license, graduation, that first marriage. My youngest daughter, Genevieve, the nest collector, had her very first sleepover a couple of weekends ago. It did not go well. She was excited, of course; sleeping at a friend’s house is an adventure. It might as well be a trip to the moon with new foods and sounds, a different place to watch television and way of doing things.

Somewhere around 10 p.m., though, there was a text followed shortly by a knock on the door and there was Genevieve, standing where that empty nest rests. Her friend’s parent was kind enough to bring her home, and kind enough to comfort her before that. Sometimes, these rites just don’t take the first time.

I told her not to worry, that it happens to all of us. At least you made it past dark, I said. I was in the first grade as well for my first sleepover. The boy lived in a large home in Central Gardens and I couldn’t have been more excited about the chance to stay in such a grand palace overnight. I remember little of it, other than he had a dozen or so siblings if memory serves, and they were a rambunctious bunch who, I see now, loved their little brother. They chased him around and grabbed him up by his ankles, lifting him as high as they could. I might have been next and it terrified my 7-year-old self. My mother pulled back onto that tree-lined street before darkness fell.

We give our children the things they’ll need in life — manners, confidence, a sense of right and wrong, a toothbrush wrapped in a baggie they’ll probably never use and then leave behind. After that, all we can do is stand on the porch beside whatever trash they decided at one time to collect and wave goodbye, knowing that, if things get rough, they will be back and they will be welcomed.

© 2013 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 

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“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 28, 2013

Teach kids to enjoy city with family

The week before last, for about half a week, it was springtime in Memphis. Remember that? Temperatures in the 70s, sunshine, the saucer magnolia in my front yard even dared to show its colors. Luckily for my kids, that was during their spring break, and we took full advantage of it.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art held a chalk art festival with folks creating their own works of art on the plaza in front of the museum. Kids got into the act as well and turned the concrete into a rainbow of butterflies, puppies, squiggly lines and shapes. It looked as if spring had fallen upon Midtown alone and blossomed in chalk dust.

From there, it’s only a hop and a skip to the Memphis Zoo. A short trip unless it’s 70, sunny and spring break. The line of cars waiting to get in snaked through the park and down Poplar. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see the snakes. Or, more accurately, they wanted to touch a stingray. We never did make it into that exhibit; the lines there were too overwhelming for impatient children (and adults). We’ll make a special trip for the rays.

The highlight of the week for me was a visit to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. The museum is a treasure trove of soul, blues, styles and grooves. My kids laughed at Isaac Hayes’ hats and boots; they dug his car with its fuzzy floor and gold detail. They swayed and strutted on the dancefloor in front of a floor-to-ceiling episode of “Soul Train,” and they marveled at the display of black Frisbees. “Those are records,” I explained.

My favorite part is the short film shown at the beginning of every visit. I’ve seen it before, and it never fails to bring a lump to the throat. Stax, in its heyday, rode a wave of hits, fame, funk and, most inspirational, family. Steve Cropper, legendary guitarist for Booker T. & the MG’s, says in the film that when you walked into Stax, you were family. Color did not matter. Until it did. When things turned after that tragic April 4 in 1968, a day we’ll commemorate next week, neither Stax nor the city of Memphis would ever be the same.

In the 10 years since the museum opened, though, that tide has turned again. I saw it two weeks ago in a museum where black and white, young and old, all studied the rise and fall of a great American sound. We laughed at the size of the collars, wiped a tear at the story of a plane crash and danced to the same beat. In a park across town on another day, my kids sidled up to others from throughout the city to revel in color. At our world-class zoo, where there was once a day of the week set aside for black-only visitors, multitudes of all ethnicities wandered.

Last week saw the official first day of spring, though the predicted snow the following day said otherwise. Either way, the long winter hibernation is over. It’s time to get out and visit your city, wherever you live; learn what it holds, its history good and bad, and enjoy time with family that you know, and that you have yet to meet.

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“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 14, 2013

History lesson for kids to include what Klan does not stand for

It’s been all over the news lately that at the end of this month the Ku Klux Klan plans to march on Memphis. Like any good civic organization staging a rally, or a circus, they’ve applied for and received a permit from the city. And they have presumably tidied themselves up with Tide and some Snuggle fabric softener. It’s always important to make a good first impression.

But this is not their first impression, is it? They’ve been around for far too long. In 1923, my great-grandfather, J.P. Alley, was editorial cartoonist for The Commercial Appeal, and he, along with editor C.P.J. Mooney, used their respective talents to speak out against the KKK. They won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that year.

And now, 90 years later, we’re still talking about this gaggle of radicals? It’s the sort of news story I ignored for a while, hoping it might all just go away, thanks to good, common decency. But it looks as though this stain just won’t wash out.

I enjoy teaching my children about their family history, about the good that their great-great-grandfather did, but in this context it seems a bit ridiculous. As far as civil rights has progressed — right here, in this city set as a stage for the world — to have a conversation about a group of misanthropes hiding cowardly beneath cowls in this day and age is surreal.

This needs to be a time, not to teach children what such a group stands for, but what it is they don’t stand for. Equality. Decency. Common sense. Good, Southern manners.

And then there’s the irony that this current brouhaha is over a park. If there is one place in society where we should be teaching our kids to play fair and get along, it’s in the park. Games of freeze tag and kickball, waiting in line for the slide or a turn at the swing, making friends with strangers so there will be enough for a proper game of flag football. This is what should be happening within our parks.

For this discussion, our opinion on what that specific park on Union Avenue should be named is irrelevant. We’ve progressed a lot in 90 years and there are more civil and expedient ways to debate such a subject than with robed anachronisms.

Living in a house with many children, I’ve learned that lines of communication must be left open, that there are ways to work through any disagreement of territory and ownership. Even the newest parent learns quickly that tantrums are ineffective.

As a parent with some years under my belt, let me assure you that a kid wrapping himself in a bed sheet and shouting his misguided tenets at me would land that kid in time out and not upon a pulpit in front of the courthouse.

On the day of the Klan’s proposed rally, we’ll stay away; there’s no reason to poke a hornet’s nest. Perhaps we’ll take the kids to another park where they can run and play and get to know kids of varying ethnicities. Perhaps there will be a history lesson so that, hopefully, we’re not doomed to repeat our mistakes.

I’ll include a chapter on cowardice and one on standing up for your ideals, and that some clans who claim to be better than others because of the way they look are merely cartoons of themselves.

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

© 2013 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

Feb. 28, 2013

Memories of baby held in phone, not in an album

The wall over the desk in my office at home is hung with snapshots of family and friends, inspiration for when I need a little push to write this column or anything else I might be working on.

The pictures have been culled from years of going through the photo albums of grandparents and parents. Many have been taken from place to place with moves over the years, tucked into books, shoeboxes and desk drawers.

Actual photo albums on my shelves, however, are few and far between. There are gaps in the years to be filled in by imagination. During a recent visit with my grandparents, my kids and I flipped through plastic-coated pages brittle with age, and took a trip into the distant past. Each leather-bound book was a time capsule filled with faded images from a camera, a contraption from the past that Jules Verne might as well have imagined.

These days most of us don’t carry cumbersome cameras that require a flashbulb, batteries and a roll of film. We have a phone. And that phone is, more than likely, equipped with an application that will make the snapshot you just took of your kid on a swing at the park look like it was taken in 1978. Or, if you prefer, 1928.

When I look at my own baby pictures, the washed-out tones and white, tell-tale borders help place the time firmly in the 1970s. The Instagram app does that for us now. Other than the electronic tablets in their hands, a picture of my kids last Christmas morning might just as easily have been taken four decades ago. It is a way for us to force nostalgia upon something witnessed only moments before.

Within our phones is where these photos will reside; a collection of ones and zeroes zipping through circuits and saved somewhere in a cloud. Something as precious as a baby book is quickly becoming an anachronism.

What seasoned parents know is that, with each child, the chances of putting together such a memento becomes slimmer and slimmer. When my oldest was born, I wasn’t snapping pictures with a telephone and texting them to family three states away. Had anyone suggested such a thing in 1998, I would have looked as confused as I was anyway standing there in the labor and delivery room at Baptist Hospital. Instead, I held up my 35mm Pentax and documented Calvin’s arrival into what now seems a low-fi, analog world. Those precious memories were entrusted to Walgreen’s and a day or two later I retrieved an envelope of glossy photos to tape into his book.

My 6-year-old, by contrast, pressured us for her book only last year. We were woefully short on actual, hard-copy photographs. What I did have was a phone full of her face. And some dinners I’d prepared. And quite a few of a recent show at the Hi-Tone, some plumbing that needed to be repaired and a particularly picturesque sunset.

What do we picture for the future? A set of hard drives arranged on the bookshelf by year? A lone smart phone hung on the wall above my desk? Document childhood well because it is fleeting and the memories captured will evaporate over time; gone, it seems, in an instagram.

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“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

Feb. 14, 2013

Can a dad take a personal day off?

Despite the ease with which this column must seem to be written, each verb and subordinate clause just rolling off the tongue, there are those weeks that I don’t feel like writing it at all. I just want to ignore it the way my kids ignore their mess, their homework and my good advice.

These are weeks when little of note is going on in my house or with my kids, so I’ll call each of them into my office one by one and ask a series of questions, have them tell me a story, or amuse me with a joke like I’m a talent agent on the vaudeville circuit. They aren’t much for auditions these days, though, so there are weeks when I think, like many a vaudeville agent must have, of firing these four kids and hiring four more; four kids with pizazz and some stage presence, kids who will heed my advice and clean their rooms.

But maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s me. We all get a little burned out, don’t we? On our jobs, our routine, the television shows we watch and food we eat. Even the Pope knows when to say “enough is enough.”

Sometimes we can even get burned out on being a parent. It’s OK, you can say it. We all need a break sometimes, though it’s never quite that easy. You can’t just tell your baby you’re taking a personal day and leave a stack of diapers where they can be reached, a dish of baby food on the kitchen floor. Hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign around your neck is often met with even more questions you aren’t in the mood to answer.

I know people without children who consider their pets to be kids. They’ll even sympathize, shaking their heads and saying, “Oh, I know what you mean, I have a Labradoodle and a Whippet.” But I can’t leave my kids in the backyard with a bowl of water and a rawhide to chew so that I can have a quiet meal out and see a movie. They find their way back inside the house every time.

Enough times of this and I’m pretty sure the neighbors would call child protective services to come take them away. I wonder if they’d take them just for the night and have them back around lunchtime the next day?

I’m not looking for a permanent vacation. This isn’t a resignation letter to be taped to the television for my kids to see and, most likely, ignore. I still need this job; it makes me whole, completes me, all of that sappy stuff that makes up a good parenting column.

All jobs should have personal days built into the time off schedules; a day here and there to wander off alone and read a book, see a movie, shop or visit the zoo. Being a parent is work — hard, demanding and unpaid work — and some days I just don’t feel like doing it.

So I’m calling in sick, giving myself a time out, and I’ll ask that someone come by this afternoon to toss a tennis ball to my kids in the backyard and refill their water dish.

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Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

Feb. 7, 2013

On a recent cold and rainy early morning, an Australian film crew worked setting up lights and testing microphone levels in Phillips Cottage at Elmwood Cemetery. They were in search not of ghosts, but of the story of Alma Theede, prostitute and notorious murderer of three men, also known as Vance Avenue Alma.

Alma Theede was married seven times to six different men in the early to mid-1900s, and was charged with the murder of three of them.

This photo of Alma Theede appeared with the 1970 obituary that ran in the Commercial Appeal. Theede died in a Millington nursing home at the age of 75.

Interviews were being recorded that day for a show called “Deadly Women” on the Investigation Discovery Channel. The show is produced by the Australian company Beyond Productions, which specializes in factual and documentary-style programs and is best known for the “Myth Busters” series. The Memphis segment is scheduled to air this fall.

“It explores the psychological motivation behind why some women commit homicide,” producer Dora Weekley said of the show. “We hope to create a greater awareness and understanding of the effects of such crimes, both on the individual and larger society.”

To tell their story, the team, which also included cameraman David Maguire and sound man Phillip Rossini, call on people involved in the cases, from police and prosecutors to journalists, historians and the victims’ families. The production crew went to Elmwood to see Theede’s final resting place and to interview staff historian Dale Schaefer, assistant cemetery director Jody Schmidt; and board president Dan Conaway.

“We do a mix of stories from way back in the late 1800s to last year,” Weekley said. “Anything where, obviously, the case is closed.”

Alma Herring came to Memphis from Mississippi with her sister, brother and mother, Nettie Green Herring, who worked for the American Snuff Co. By age 16, Alma was frequenting an area of Downtown known for its more lascivious businesses.

“South Main and Vance, it was known for the gambling, the brothels and the bars, and she appeared to be attracted to that,” Schaefer said. This proclivity garnered her the name “Vance Avenue Alma.”

At age 17, she married Charles Cox, only to divorce him and elope to Little Rock with Roy Calvert, Schaefer said. In 1919, she was charged with Calvert’s murder with a verdict of justifiable homicide returned. Back in Memphis, she remarried Cox, who later died in a car wreck … (read more)

‘Because I Said So’ column for The Commercial Appeal

Jan. 31, 2013

Names not so important if you can’t recall them

The best part of having a baby isn’t its cherubic smile or the smell of the top of a newborn’s head. That’s all myth, anyway. No, the best part of having an offspring is getting to name it.

I’ve had four, and they never really smelled all that good. So, for me, bestowing a name upon each of them has been the best. It’s an opportunity to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald as he put Gatsby into the vernacular, or Mario Puzo with Don Corleone. Penning that first and middle name on a birth certificate must be what Stan Lee felt like when he first inked “Peter Parker” and “Spider-Man.”

The names we give our children come from different sources: literature or film, ancestors, geography. We might take the name of a favorite aunt or a distant relative, one we later learn is somewhat of a family pariah. It happens. There are names biblical, musical, nautical and foreign.

It’s an awesome responsibility, saddling a brand new person with a handle he’ll carry around for life. Up until that moment a tiny human person makes her appearance, the only experience most of us have had with names is in naming a pet. Such a thin line between Fido and Katherine.

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. Not for me, anyway, as I can’t remember my own kids’ names from minute to minute. Oh, I can list them if asked: Calvin, Joshua, Somerset and Genevieve.

But when they’re standing right in front of me, that’s a different matter. I cannot seem to say the name of whoever is there, and it amuses them to no end. Most of what I do distresses them, but they take great pleasure in pointing out my mistake.

“You called me Somerset,” Genevieve says.

“Yes, I know, but whoever you are needs to pick that ice cream up off the floor.”

There is something triggered in my mind in those moments, synapses not fully bridged. What I’ve begun doing is to just say both of their names to cover my bases so that my daughters, despite whichever I’m looking at, become “Somersetgenevieve” and the boys, “Calvinjoshua.” When I’m angry, forget it; any combination could issue forth from my mouth, some unprintable in a family newspaper.

I don’t know why this happens with my children, because it doesn’t happen with anything else. I don’t walk into the kitchen and refer to the refrigerator as a microwave oven. I don’t hold a meatloaf I’ve made and tell Somersetgenevieve that we’re having tuna casserole for dinner. I don’t refer to our mail carrier as Margaret because that is not his name.

It may be genetic. When I visit my mother, I share a name with my brothers as we morph into “Johndavidrichard.”

It’s a mystery, one I will contemplate while I go into the kitchen to take the tuna casserole from the dishwasher for little Doncorleonepeterparker and Gatsby-what’s-his-name to eat.

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