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)

Small Business Spotlight for The Memphis Daily News

April 8, 2013

In 2007, Sean Faust and business partner Brad Ellis came together with Memphis music icon Doug Easley to create a company offering full-service audio and video recording and mixing services.

Both Faust and Easley had recording studios that burned in 2005 and New School Media is the Phoenix that has risen from those ashes.

“We had all the ingredients,” Easley said of their new project.

And indeed they do. Easley has recorded music heavyweights from Sonic Youth and Wilco to Jack White, Loretta Lynn and Jeff Buckley.

Faust earned degrees in theater and documentary film production from Syracuse University, has more than 15 years of experience and grew up running sound with his father, saying that his Saturday mornings were full of cables and amplifiers as opposed to cartoons.

Ellis is a writer and director with 10 feature films under his belt, including “Act One,” which claimed Best Narrative Feature, Hometown Award in the 2005 Indie Memphis Film Festival.

The studio is a 3,300-square-foot complex swathed in grass cloth walls, swag lamps, retro seating and original Lamar Sorrento artwork. To take a tour of the facility is to walk through a museum of vintage styles and scenery, ending in a top of the line, 5.1 audio mixing suite, something more akin to mission control at NASA with dim lighting punctuated by bright LEDs and computer monitors … (read more)

Standout Profile for The Memphis Daily News

March 29, 2013

Willy Bearden is a local filmmaker best known for works such as his 2010 feature “One Came Home” and the Memphis Memoirs series on WKNO-TV.

He produced the video exhibitions for the Cotton Museum and has produced the New Year’s Eve telecast from Beale Street as well as the Blues Music Awards for the Blues Foundation.

The bearded and bespectacled Bearden is a renaissance man with a down-home flair whose talents extend far beyond any single medium.

“I’m a filmmaker, a writer and a storyteller, and I think all of these things are connected, at least as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I couldn’t be a filmmaker if I weren’t a writer, and I couldn’t be a filmmaker if I didn’t know photography.”

And it’s his photography that will be in the spotlight during an opening reception Friday, March 29, at 6 p.m. at the Leadership Memphis Gallery 363 (365 S. Main St.) during the South Main Art Trolley Tour.

For the show, Bearden culled 10 years of photographs for the 20 or so to be edited, printed and framed.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into it,” Bearden said. “I’ve had a good time going through and choosing things, it’s been interesting to kind of walk back through the thousands of things I’ve shot.”

Ken Hall has partnered with Michel Allen in Allen Projects, a gallery and consulting firm, to curate shows for Leadership Memphis. The Bearden photography installation marks one year for such shows.

Hall has known Bearden for several years and was familiar with his video and production work, but when he saw the still photography for the first time, he wanted to showcase it to the public.

“I was just mesmerized by his great work in still photography,” Hall said. “So immediately – I think the next day – I called him for an exhibition at Gallery 363.”

Bearden, a Rolling Fork, Miss., native, spends a lot of time in the Delta and his photography represents this … (read more)

Cover story for the Rhodes Magazine

Winter 2013

In the 1920s, the college published a code for athletes. Heading the list:

“As an athlete I am determined to play the game to the limit of my capacities, giving each detail the greatest care and attention.”It holds true today, as then, at play and in the classroom.

At the far north end of the Rhodes College campus stands a citadel of sweat, an acropolis of aches and a fortress of fortitude. The Bryan Campus Life Center (BCLC) is where the athletic administration offices can be found, past fitness rooms and down long hallways adorned with trophies and plaques and photos of athletes who won them for the college.

The tradition doesn’t stop with photos, though; it is also in the air, mixed within the mortar and stone and on polished woodwork. The William Neely Mallory Gymnasium, built in 1954 and dedicated to the 42 alumni who perished in World War II, is where the men’s and women’s basketball teams tip off, and the volleyball team rallies, atop the Lynx paw at mid-court. If nearby Paul Barret Jr. Library is the brain of the campus, then the BCLC is its muscle, flexed daily and stretched with dedication and passion by the student-athletes within. In its shadow, a bright light in its own right, is Crain Field, which was refurbished with state-of-the-art synthetic FieldTurf, a gift of Brenda and Lester Crain Jr. ’51 in honor of his father, J. Lester Crain Sr. ’29, at the start of the 2012 football season … (read more)

Annual “20 under 30″ issue highlighting 20-somethings making great strides in the city for The Memphis Flyer

Jan. 24, 2013

These young people have graduated from their teens with a sense of responsibility beyond their years, and it is driving them to do good, to leave Memphis a better place. Within their ranks, there are advanced college degrees and long hours spent learning and perfecting a craft. The members of this group can dribble a ball, carry a tune, cook a meal, tell a joke, take a picture, book a show, raise money, raise awareness, and raise us all up if we put ourselves in their capable, young hands.

Each is an ambassador for our city. They are giving their best to make themselves and their community a better place to live and to visit.

News of violence and scandal can make the future seem bleak, but we can rest easier knowing that these 20 men and women are a part of that future. Keep an eye on them and watch what they can do when they put their minds and hearts to it … (read more)

Flyer cover 2013

Centerpiece feature for The Memphis Daily News

Nov. 27, 2012

Memphian gives back to community every day in November

Sarah Petschonek grew up with the importance of volunteering instilled in her by her parents.

As children, she and her two younger siblings would pull a wagon around the Jacksonville, Fla., neighborhood where she grew up, handing out fliers and picking up canned goods for food drives.

“I think there’s an important lesson there, it’s not just that we did it but that they took the time to tell me why we were doing it,” Petschonek said. “When you’re 8 years old and you go to a private school and everyone around you has everything that they need, it blows your mind when you realize there are 8 year olds that don’t have food every day.”

It’s a revelation that has stuck with her and shaped her. It compelled her to volunteer throughout her years at Houston High School once her family moved to Memphis, and through college at the University of Memphis where she attained undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees.

At 30, having left a job in Nashville to move back to Memphis, Petschonek found herself looking at several months without work and was searching for ways in which to fill the time.

Volunteering, reflexively, was part of a plan that would grow into what she calls “Mission Memphis: 30 Days of Volunteering.” The idea was to volunteer with a different organization every day for the month of November … (read more)

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

Sept. 20, 2012

In the early 20th century, those needing to call a friend across the city might have been discouraged, when lifting the receiver of the phone to their ear, to hear someone else speaking on the line. That someone else could have been next door or a neighbor down the block. This was the party line, and it was the predominant way residential phone service worked before World War II.

There was one simple rule if you wanted to maintain privacy: Stay off the line.

In today’s world of e-mail, Twitter, private messages, blogging and texting, the expectation of privacy may not be as simple or as guaranteed as it was 80 years ago. How many of us have been the recipients of unwanted information — or inflammatory remarks — because someone clicked “Reply all” instead of the safer, solitary “Reply?” Clicking “Reply all” to an e-mail may be our century’s party line, and there is very little option to stay off the line.

Memphis-based Accredo Health Group felt the sting of a missent e-mail last month when a private note regarding possible job cuts — and meant for executives’ eyes only — went public to a larger number of employees … (read more)

“Hidden Memphis” feature for The Commercial Appeal

Sept. 9, 2012

“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.”

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.” … (read more)

Learn more on Binford and my story here.

A publication of the Mississippi River Corridor – Tennessee

Summer 2012

Project writer responsible for all editorial content of this 32-page magazine. Stories written include: the Memphis Blues Trail; American Queen Steamboat Company, Ingram Barge, Buckaroo Hatters, Unique Museums of the Corridor, Sustainable Shelby, the Hatchie River, Mississippi River Trail and Chisholm Lake Store.

River Times 2012

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

July 29, 2012

Historic-memphis.com began its cyber-life as a website for the alumni of Memphis Tech High. Begun by Gene Gill, a 1951 graduate of the school, the content soon outgrew the parameters of its yearbook-like platform. More specifically, the historical aspect of the high school, which dates to 1913, took on a life of its own, and with it, an interest in all manner of Memphis history.

“I called Gene and said, ‘The Tech site is dying on the vine … but we’re getting all these hits on the little portions that we have regarding the historical side of Memphis,’” said Dave French, a co-founder of the historic Memphis site and a 1969 graduate of Tech High.

The school site (memphistechhigh.com), while still active but no longer updating, is the dusting of ashes out of which arose a Phoenix or, more precisely, a Memphis, in all of her past glory. On the new historic-memphis.com site, there are photos and a wealth of information accompanying them on movie theaters, schools, restaurants, hotels, parks, entertainment venues, department stores and train stations, among many more. Yearbooks from area schools, event programs, diplomas, postcards and other marginalia can be found as well.

French recruited longtime friend (and 1969 Immaculate Conception graduate), Maureen Thoni White, to help with the research and scanning of photos and books. For the three admittedly novice historians, the site is a labor of love; there is no money made from it, nor are there any plans to monetize it.

“It’s full of useful information and is well done,” said G. Wayne Dowdy, manager of the history department at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library and author of several books on Memphis history, including “A Brief History of Memphis.” “It may not be a ‘scholarly’ website, but then again it doesn’t pretend to be. In my opinion, having a group of passionate collectors post information on Memphis’s past is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the city’s history. Plus, it’s valuable when history is presented in a fun — even when the subject itself is not fun — and accessible format, rather than a stolid, academic one. In many ways, history, particularly local history, is too important to leave solely to historians.” … (read more)