An Autobio look at life in my neighborhood growing up. We lived among truly awesome adults in our childhood days. On the north end was a =n orthopedic surgeon with a long history of remarkable deeds in WWII, and a bunch more later on. Coming down the street on the same side was a judge who raised 2 daughters and sat on the state Supreme Court of Tennessee. He was one awesome gardener as shown in his garden that sat like a colorful necklace in front of his house.
Going two houses south was a mechanical engineer and oilman who ushered the era of rock and roll by pressing all of its 45 rpm records! His mechanical genius led him to design and create machines that could cut grooves into the plastic on a large scale. He had all the Memphis area recording studios coming to him to make records, and pretty soon record labels were coming to him.
Crossing the street, we arrive at a home designed by its owner, who used 8 x 10 glass windows on the front of her house. She was one awesome lady! She also started and operated a dress shop and turned it into THE place for women and girls to find fashion in Memphis.
Next door to this lady was a member of a family that created large, 30000sf grocery stores and created the mega-grocery store. The concept was his father’s, but he got in on the game while it was smaller and ran by a different name than what it all became.
Hop across the street, and you arrived at the home of a multi-theater owner, whose father had originally built and run a chain of theaters, an early model of another concept group that grew to multiple theaters in multiple cities.
All of this awesomeness right here on my street, but I didn’t know much of this at the time I lived there.
The doctor was Dr. Marcus Stewart, who, at the time I met him and his family, was an orthopedic surgeon working at a famous clinic in the Medical Center. Campbell Clinic had a worldwide reputation as a foremost of its type. When a major regional university went looking for a team doctor for its football team, they went to Campbell. They approached Marcus Stewart for the role, which put him on the road when the team ended up in a bowl game. At the Sugar Bowl, he’d been given a room at the Sheraton Charles Hotel in New Orleans. More famously, he was the one putting in a plate in the arm of the injured quarterback named Archie Manning.
Coming south on Lombardy, two doors, was a judge living in a big important-looking house on a hill from which we neighborhood kids rode our sleds to the street. Then, in the spring, the judge, meticulous gardener that he was, had a garden that sat on the front of his house like a beautiful necklace. And his judicial skills were at least as good as his gardening skills, because he’d gotten to the position of a judgeship on the Tennessee Supreme Court!
Going three doors south, you arrived at an equally impressive residence, that of an oilman, mechanical engineer. This was the home of R.E. “Buster: Williams, a family man with 1 son and 2 daughters. Buster had Williams Drilling, but even more importantly in music history, Plastic Products. He engineered and developed a lathe that could make 45 rpm records in massive quantity, an ability crucial for making the records of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and other Sun Studio artists. Not only did Sun Studio give him business, but American Studios, and eventually, major national labels were coming to him to make their records, and LP record albums. Vinyl media was surpassed in ease of use, but not sound quality. People who know sound quality in the 21st Century STILL choose vinyl, over cassette, cd’s and DVDs. Played on equipment using tubes, instead of solid-state parts, it has a warmer sound!
Hopping across the street from Buster’s landed you in the front yard of another true genius, Betty Schopfer. She started out with a dress shop on Union Avenue. Betty had many great ideas for doing retail, one most noticeable was taking dresses and other items, and pinning them to boards, with burlap on them. This gave a shopper some idea of what dress, top or coat, looked like in action. Everywhere you looked in a Mam’Selle shop, you saw the outfits pinned on burlap over wood, on the walls. It was part of the scenery. Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson called her a genius, and she was!
Next door to Betty Schopfer was Joe Montesi, the son of a local grocer. Joe was quite a part of the Fred Montesi empire, a local grocery chain that redefined the concept of a grocery store by putting it in a 30,000sf building! He had a store in every major area of the city by the late 60’s. Thus was born mega-retail, a concept copied in other types of retail stores nationwide.
Across the street to the north was the owner of a group of movie theaters around town. His dad had built them and handed them to him. The theater nearest me, the Poplar Plaza Theater was a neighborhood magnet on the weekends. People from all over town were watching movies there. Also getting going was a church which held services on Sunday morning, Christ Methodist Church. It eventually grew out of the space and bought land further east on the same street where it built and became a large church in the city.
Well, that about does it for my street, Lombardy. Now tell me about yours!
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