What's In A Name?

There was much more to naming the Flyer than meets the eye.

ver the past nine years, we’ve covered a lot of ground in the pages of this newspaper. There is one subject, however, that we’ve apparently never covered. Despite the fact that several of us who have been here “since the beginning” swear we must have done this early on, the hard evidence suggests that we’ve never once explained in print how The Memphis Flyer got its name. Since it was basically my idea, the staff here thought it might be a good time to commit an explanation to paper, lest I forget how it happened. None of us are getting any younger, you know.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, I’m sure, think the origin of the Flyer’s name is, well, kind of self-evident. It’s free, it’s on paper, it’s got advertising, right? It’s a flyer, right? End of discussion.
Not exactly. Would you believe the Flyer is actually named after a street-car line?
That’s not exactly correct, either. Truth is, we picked the name Flyer back in 1988 in honor of an earlier, defunct publication whose spunk and funkiness seemed a good model for what we hoped to achieve with our own little venture.

This internal prototype of the Flyer was produced in 1988, before the city’s name was attached to the name of the paper.

Some of you may in fact remember a newspaper called The Dixie Flyer, a monthly rag that came out not so often during the late 1970s. That Flyer really did take its name from the streetcar line that ran from downtown to Raleigh Springs, around the turn of the century, back when Raleigh was an actual spa. And despite its limited resources – the paper was published, apparently, only when the staff rustled up enough money to pay a printer – The Dixie Flyer made a real attempt to be an alternative news voice in the city.
If you’re old enough, you might remember bohemian papers of the Sixties and Seventies like The Phoenix in Boston or The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta. The Dixie Flyer was cut from the same cloth, full of pontification and silliness along with the occasional good idea. It was a classic “underground” paper, with the kind of political and social agenda one would expect from a newspaper published out of an office on the Highland Strip.
Nearly a decade had passed by the time our Flyer came on the scene. Nevertheless, we felt some kind of spiritual kinship for what those folks had been trying to do. We were “bold, sassy, and irreverent,” as we used to say in our early press releases. And silly, too.
We never considered using the “Dixie” part of the name, although we did play around internally with the idea of calling our newspaper The Delta Flyer. But that suggested something we weren’t. Somebody here with more sense than I kiboshed that idea, and The Memphis Flyer was born. If you’re looking to mark the date on the calendar so you can send gifts, the first issue was published on February 16, 1989.
That seems an incredibly long time ago now. More than a little water has flowed under the bridge, and the newspaper today bears hardly any resemblance to that fragile, silly creature we birthed back in 1989. But I hope the paper you read today still has a goodly share of funk and spunk in its pages. Hopefully as well, we’ve done a few things over the years that might make those Dixie Flyer folks proud of the name we chose. n– Kenneth Neill, Publisher