Friday, December 4, 2009
Lost Memphis Joe Canepari and Southern Motors
Posted by Vance Lauderdale on Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 2:49 PM
Well, it turns out that information about Southern Motors really wouldn't have been that hard to obtain. All I needed to do was open up the pages of the telephone book, because Joseph Canapari Jr. —Â yes, the man's son — lives in Memphis, and he sent an email telling quite a bit about Southern Motors. Here's what he told me:
"As I remember it, Southern Motors was started sometime after the repeal of prohibition by my uncle, Lawrence Canepari, an immigrant from Bassignana, Italy. He made his money during prohibition by — guess what — the production and sale of illegal whiskey. The company sold Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and LaSalle automobiles. Lawrence died in the mid-fifties and my father, Joe Canepari, bought the dealership. At the time he had Oldsmobile and Cadillac, and later dropped Oldsmobile and became exclusively Cadillac.
"I have a company photograph from 1955 showing 88 employees. I remember when the new models were shown for the first time each year. The flower arrangements that accompanied them were breathtaking by anyone's standards. The company sold to a lot of the rock-and-rollers of the day: Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Mr. Sam Phillips from down at Sun Studios, but by far our most famous client was Elvis Presley. His 3:00 a.m. shopping sprees many times left the new car department empty, and likely as not you'd read a few days later where he gave them all away.
"He, like my Father, apparently never forgot his roots. All the major car companies were 'down on Union' back then: Hoehn Chevrolet, Hull-Dobbs Ford, Chip Barwick Chevrolet, and Schilling Lincoln-Mercury. I believe Pryor Olds was on Poplar, maybe in the 400 or 500 block. Everything was downtown. It was a very exciting time. All the dealerships brought a tremendous amount of traffic down there and they stayed open until 9:00 p.m. All the car lot lights lit up that whole end of the city."
Thanks for the information, Joe. Yes, I can definitely remember all the car dealerships along Union, and the strings of lightbulbs that sparkled over the rows of new cars.
I managed to find this advertisement for Southern Motors in the back of a 1948 telephone directory, back when they were still selling Oldsmobiles. I've asked Joe Jr. if he has any photos of the dealership; if he does, I'll post them as well.
PHOTO OF JOE CANEPARI COURTESY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS LIBRARIES
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My grandmother is related to Joe Canepari by marriage. She has a photo of him as a young man with about 30 other family members at a birthday party in about 1925.
Oh_Possum, in some previous posts under other topics, we — and I — pretty much decided that photo was NOT of the Luau. It just doesn't have the cramped and cluttery feel to it that the Luau had, though of course it was always so dark in there it was hard to really see anything.
My father worked as a top salesman for Southern Motors at 341 Union Avenue, for 16 years. Joe Canepari then decided to cut salesmen's commissions to almost nothing. My father and most of the other salesmen quit because they could no longer make a decent living there. My father said all the salesmen were saying that Joe Canepari was a greedy bastard that wanted it all for himself and didn't want to share it with anyone. I remember his greed created an awful hardshilp on my family in the early 1960s. B. Anderson
