• "Southern Routes" Airs Thursday

It's true! The first show airs on WKNO this Thursday, February 4th, at 8 pm.

So plop yourself in front of the television, set your TIVO, or just wander around the appliance section of your local Target store. If you still miss it, the show will repeat on Saturday, February 6th, at 2:30 pm and again on Sunday, February 7th at 12 noon. After that, well, I really can't help you.

I won't tell you what topic I'll be discussing on the premiere episode; you'll just have to watch. I guarantee you it will be a good show, since it's produced by a super-talented gentleman named Kip Cole, and the "Ask Vance" segment (no, the whole show isn't about me — not yet, anyway) will be produced by my pal Bonnie Kourvelas, who has produced and hosted many of WKNO's wonderful Memphis Memoirs specials. If you saw "Beyond the Parkways" or "At the Movies" — well, that was some of her fine work, so I'm in good hands.

Don't worry; I'm not leaving the world of magazines or blogs or books or calendars; I'm just spreading out a bit, that's all.

Of course, this is only the first step. Next: Billboards, iTunes, and podcasts. I'm trying to get some of my colleagues to wear those old-timey sandwich boards — adorned with a stunning portrait of me, of course — and walk up and down the Main Street Mall. So far, no takers, even though I've offered them a fistful of nickels. How lazy can you be?

(And yes, that IS me on the TV screen in the photograph here. Don't squint at the image; click to enlarge it, for goodness' sake. Gosh, what a cute tyke! I think I was only 35 or so, singing in the school play.)

• Dec. 11, 1947, newspaper coverage

Here's the story:

20 Die in Crackup of Big Army C-47 Near Memphis
MEMPHIS, Tenn. Dec. 11 (UP) — A C-47 transport plane carrying 20 Army officers and men dived to earth as it came in for a landing at the Memphis airport tonight and exploded with a flash that turned night into day. All aboard were killed instantly.

Captain Charles Carmichael, public relations officer for the 468th Air Base unit here, announced that all 20 bodies had been accounted for. The plane was en route here from Biggs Field, El Paso, Tex., on a training flight. Its home base was Aberdeen, Md.

The bodies and fragments of bodies were taken to the veterans hospital here. Several of the victims were decapitated and arms and legs were found amid the ribboned wreckage.

On Training Test
The two-engined transport, the Army's version of the DC-3 commercial air liner, crashed without premonition of trouble. It was learned, however, that the flight was an instrument training test and the pilot may have been coming in blind although visibility was good for 500 feet.

The plane crashed, exploded, and burned in a fiery shower of sparks in an open field three miles short of the airport at a spot near the Mississippi state line. Tilgham Taylor, a county penal camp guard, had just come home from work around 6 p.m. when he saw the blinding flash. He ran a mile through the woods and tried to put out the fire enveloping the broken bodies.

Well, I've done it again. Remember Hart's Bakery, Anderton's, Shifty Logan, the Bitter Lemon, the original Skateland, the notorious Whirlaway Club and their sexy dancers, and other people and places from the past? They're all featured in the 2010 Ask Vance Calendar, along with dozens and dozens of other rare images of our city. Just look at the cover! Fancy, huh?

Now I know you'd like to hang on to that old calendar forever. But it really won't do you much good after the end of the year, so it's time to buy a new one — AND GET A 12-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION TO MEMPHIS MAGAZINE AT THE SAME TIME. A tremendous bargain, if I do say so, for just $12. Heck, that's only half what we used to charge for tours of the Lauderdale Mansion, and all you saw was the basement, crawlspace, and cesspool (where I spent so many happy, happy hours).

You can also order a gift subscription for your friends, while you're at it. Remember, if you like reading "Ask Vance" and also enjoy the weird posts I put on this blog, you'd better keep those subscriptions coming in, or Vance Lauderdale hits the streets, looking for another job. One with dignity, I mean.

And just think of the poor children! No — not MY children. Just bratty children in general.

So call 901-575-9470 or go HERE to order a calendar and keep me employed. It's a win-win situation for all of us.

But the art academy (now known as Memphis College of Art) wasn't the only victim of this outrageous behavior. You know the graceful statue of the three female swimmers that stands as the centerpiece of the garden by the west entrance to Memphis Brooks Museum of Art? (The actual location is called the North Holly Court.) Lovely, isn't it?

Well, sometime during the evening of August 9, 1976, somebody must have thought otherwise, because they hacked the thing to pieces.

Here's the photo of the ruined sculpture that ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Quite a mess. The newspaper reported, "The statue has a history of controversy. When it was first put in place, critics objected so strongly to the nude figures that the sculptor, Frances Mallory Morgan, was required to put a suggestion of bathing suits on the figures."

Apparently that was not enough. Luckily, the artist was able to repair the damage, and it's hard to tell the piece ever looked like this.

But sometimes you just come across things that are a bit unnerving. Like THIS display in the living room of a sale last weekend. Man, that gave me the shivers. I snapped the picture and scampered out of the room in a hurry, because if that unusually lifelike doll — if it WAS a doll — moved even a fraction of inch, I knew my heart would stop, and that would be the end of "Ask Vance."

In fact, as I turned to leave, I'd swear the little creature whispered, "Mister, can you please find my Mama"? but I don't want to think about it anymore.

But this Thursday evening, September 24th, you can — and should — go to Elmwood Cemetery to attend the book-signing for Veiled Remarks, a really fine book produced by my friend Melissa Anderson Sweazy, a super-talented writer and photographer.

Subtitled "A Curious Compendium for the Nuptially Inclined," the book is a nice collection (hence the word "compendium" you see) of all sorts of historical tidbits and oddities relating to marriage, such as: an Old English rhyme for predicting the best day to marry, Charles Darwin’s pro and con list concerning marriage, etiquette expert Emily Post on how to handle broken engagements, notable figures in history who suffered cold feet on their wedding day, and — my personal favorite — “a brief history of the syphilis test required by most states in the early twentieth century for a marriage license.”

Not that those test results had anything to do with the Lauderdales' many broken engagements, I assure you. What ARE you thinking?

Now why would Melissa hold this event at Elmwood? Well, she'll tell you all about that when you arrive. At least I hope she will.

The book signing begins at 5 p.m. in the Elmwood Chapel (just inside the main entrance) and will last until the hundreds of thousands of people who read this blog have gone home. I myself may make a rare public appearance, which is reason enough for you to attend.

For more information about the book, go here.

For 15 years, Benjamin Priddy had been driving a Shelby County school bus, picking up and dropping off students at the little schools in the Eads, Arlington, and Collierville areas. During that time, his driving record had been impeccable.

But on October 10, 1941, Priddy made a fatal error that would result in the worst school tragedy in Shelby County history. That afternoon, he picked up a busload of kids from the George R. James Elementary School, a little schoolhouse that once stood on Collierville-Arlington Road, just southwest of Eads. Driving along the two-lane county roads, he had dropped off all but 17 of his young passengers, when he made a sharp turn to cross the railroad tracks that once cut through the heart of the little farming community. Although he had a clear view of the tracks at the crossing, for reasons we will never know he pulled directly into the path of an N.C. & St.L. passenger train roaring towards Memphis at 50 miles per hour.

The tremendous impact almost ripped the bus in half, tumbling the wreckage into nearby woods. Priddy was killed instantly, along with seven of his passengers; many of the other children were horribly injured. In those days, few families in the county had telephones. News of the tragedy spread by word of mouth, and frantic parents rushed to the scene, piled the little victims into cars and trucks, and rushed them to the nearest hospital in Memphis, more than 20 miles away. “It was one of those sights you never want to see again,” one father told the Memphis Press-Scimitar. At Baptist Hospital, other parents found themselves “in a madly revolving world suddenly but surely spinning off its axis.”

On those nights when I find myself alone in the Lauderdale Mansion (that would be Monday through Friday, plus Saturday and Sunday), I often amuse myself by digging through the trunks in the attic, looking for loose coins and poring over the old scrapbooks compiled by my ancestors. Sometimes those contain the most fascinating stories — such as this account, reported in a December 1941 issue (I don’t have the exact date) of The Commercial Appeal, about the life-saving exploits of a mutt named Poochie.

Poochie, according to the paper, was a mongrel, one of seven puppies born to a mother who was a rat terrier and whose father was a German shepherd, so it’s safe to say he was not a particularly beautiful dog. His owner was a fellow named Faber Becton, who lived in north Memphis on King’s Road, and he gave away the other pups, keeping the ugliest for his own. The newspaper reported, “Like a weed in a garden, Poochie grew and thrived. The Becton children loved Poochie and he returned their love.”

Well, one day Becton took Poochie with him to the Mississippi River, just above Memphis, to train him as a pointer. Just as they arrived at the banks, they encountered a tragedy: A group of men and boys who had foolishly tried to swim in the Mississippi were being pulled under by the strong current. Here’s how The Commercial Appeal tells the story:

A battered tombstone in Forest Hill Cemetery is the only visible reminder of one of the most notorious robberies in our city’s past.

In the early part of the last century, the Ford Motor Company operated a manufacturing plant on Union, where The Commercial Appeal stands today. On the morning of August 10, 1921, two Ford employees, chief accounting clerk Edgar McHenry and special agent Howard “Shorty” Gamble drove to a bank on Second Street to pick up that week’s payroll — a satchel containing $8,500, which was an enormous sum in those days. They were accompanied by two Memphis police officers, Polk Carraway and W.S. Harris.

They returned to the Ford plant and parked in front of the building. Just at that moment, a blue Cadillac pulled alongside. Four masked men jumped out with revolvers and shotguns and shouted “Hands up!” Before anyone could move, the bandits opened fire, killing Carraway and Gamble and wounding Harris. “They were shot down by cold-blooded murderers, who never gave their victims a dog’s chance,” said The Commercial Appeal later.

When Roller Derby came to Memphis in 2006 — organized into teams with such catchy names as the Legion of Zoom and the Priskilla Presleys — lots of fans thought it was a reincarnation of the matches they watched on television back in the 1960s. But it turns out the sport is actually much older than that, and the Lauderdale Library has recently acquired a souvenir program for a 1939 event with the long-winded title of Leo A. Seltzer’s Trans-Continental ROLLER DERBY or Coast-to-Coast Roller Skating Race.

This is a pretty amazing document, because Seltzer, it seems, is the fellow who pretty much invented roller dergy. I have no idea how this particular race could take place “coast-to-coast” since the participants, then as now, raced around in a circle. But that’s how they promoted it, anyway. And this entertainment spectacular took place here in Memphis every night from 7 to 11 p.m. for two entire months — January and February 1939 — at the Municipal — better known to Memphians as Ellis — Auditorium.

For reasons that only my team of highly paid psychiatrists, psychologists, venipuncturists, and ventriloquists can explain, I’ve always found these dire warning signs amusing. Not because of what happens to the people (if you can really call these “people”), but by the sort of noncommittal, unemotional way these tragedies are depicted.

Most of them are found around industrial or construction equipment, and — without saying a word — they warn that your hands could get cut off, your feet could get smushed, you might get electrocuted (usually by lightning bolts!), you could get bonked on the head, and all sorts of other hazards. Why, it’s enough to make you just stay in the house all day. Which probably explains why I do just that.

But this sign is one of my favorites, because it shows the awful fate that awaits anyone who — get this — doesn’t get out of the way of the gate of a certain parking garage downtown. My, that is one deadly powerful gate! Seems to me they might adjust the spring tension on it, so it wouldn’t just crush the life out of you, as it has done with this nameless (and footless, handless, and neckless) fellow.

Poor dumb bastard. What a way to go.