Central Station Is Back On Track Memphis christened a reinvigorated Central Station last weekend with two days of events. On Friday night, several hundred people attended a $250-a-plate costume ball in honor of the refurbished station, and on Saturday organizers threw a free street festival that showcased not just the station but the whole South Main Historic District. Mayor Willie Herenton and Rep. Harold Ford Jr. were among the dignitaries on hand Friday night. Despite the air of exclusivity surrounding the formal party, the train station remained open to the public, and people arriving on Amtrak's City of New Orleans were invited to join the party. "I'm supposed to be picking up some people from New Orleans," said Tad Pierson of American Dream Safari, the tour operation that drives visitors around in a classic '50s Cadillac. "And they don't know anything about this." Following a dinner in the station's main terminal, which was dominated by officials from Amtrak and MATA delivering speeches, the party moved upstairs to the train platform where Swingtime was playing for partiers decked out in tuxedos and costumes from the station's heyday in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. George Blansett, dressed as a World War I doughboy, was part of a group of 27 Juvenile Court employees and their families who drove down to Greenwood, Mississippi, to catch the City of New Orleans into Memphis. "We just read about the party in the paper, and we all thought this would be a fun thing to do," he said. Meanwhile, downstairs from the platform at least one person was celebrating the station's reopening in a more understated manner. Claude Broker, an insurance salesman whose father used to work on the old L&N Railroad, was one of the dozen or so members of the Mid-South Rail Runners, a group of miniature train enthusiasts, who manned a toy train set-up all weekend. While champagne uncorked around him all night, Broker soberly looked after his train, frequently pulling out a screwdriver to tweak a tiny track. "I loved trains ever since I was a little boy, but father didn't want me to work on the rails. He wanted better for me," Broker recalled. "He said later, 'After I'd known you were so passionate about it I would have let you.' What's been great about this weekend has been seeing the looks on people's faces as they've been coming by, looking not just at the big trains but our little ones, too. I guess trains make big men small and little kids big." -- Mark Jordan MLGW Employees Complain About Pension Costs Rick Thompson, a Memphis Light, Gas and Water employee and president of the Coalition of Black Employees of MLGW, was concerned that the utility's pension plan didn't seem to be performing as well as it should be. So he requested information from the pension board about pension gains and losses in the last seven years. He got no response. "They said they couldn't find my request," Thompson says. Then Coalition board member Michael Jones requested pension board meeting notes -- for the past 22 years.Until a few months ago, board meetings had not been open to the public, and Jones and Thompson figured if they knew what went on at the meetings, they would know where their money went. MLGW's response? Pay $5,000 and we'll let you know. The fee is necessary to cover the cost of researching the information, according to the company, and half would need to be paid up front. There are 2,225 pages of minutes and 375 tapes involved. Thompson doesn't think employees should have to pay to find out how their money is being invested and has contacted members of the Memphis City Council for help. He says his concern was prompted by talk that the pension had suffered serious losses on a fund named Clearwater. The pension board provides periodic information to employees about how much the pension fund is worth, but doesn't tell them how or where the money is invested. Thompson also believes the way employees vote on their two representatives on the pension board should be changed. "Now we call on the telephone and vote," Thompson says. "There's no way of checking the results." He believes this method is easily manipulated by the pension board, as well as an inconvenience for employees who work on crew trucks and don't have access to a telephone during the day. -- Heather Heilman EDUCATION Council Mulls Daytime Curfew Policy for Kids Would a daytime curfew keeping kids off the streets between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. prevent truancy? Memphis city school board Dutch Sandridge thinks it would help, and has asked the city council's Public Safety Committee to consider an ordinance to that effect. The school board received a $200,000 community development block grant to open a new truancy center on Poplar. The trouble is, the center is going virtually unused. Police are laying off truants after getting in trouble for picking up a home-schooled boy who was riding his bike in the afternoon. The city settled a lawsuit with the boy's parents for $8,000. Sandridge said home-schooled and private-school students could have identification to show police if they were stopped.But councilman Brent Taylor doubts home-schoolers would go for that. "They don't want government interference," he says. "I think they would resent carrying I.D.'s." Chairman of the committee E.C. Jones worries that making kids go to school "is not a police department function. They're busy with drug dealing and carjacking." But a lot of crime is committed by kids who should be in school, Taylor says. In general, the committee seemed receptive to the idea of a curfew and asked proponents to come back on October 26th with a workable plan. Besides the fact that truancy leads to suspensions, dropouts, and --to make up for lost days -- the misery of summer school, the school district loses federal and state funding when daily attendance goes down. -- Heather Heilman Council Considers Billboard Ban Visualize world peace. We know it's hard, so we'll give you a few minutes. Got it? Okay, now try something harder. Visualize Memphis without billboards. That strange vision may eventually become a reality if the city council passes an ordinance sponsored by council members John Vergos, Tom Marshall, and John Bobango. The ordinance would allow Memphians to vote next year on whether they want to halt the construction of new billboards and remove all existing billboards over a 10-year period. The 10-year grace period would allow owners to recoup their investment, according to Vergos. He says there might also be some leeway for billboards to remain along the interstate. "I feel confident we'll have the seven votes to pass the ordinance," Vergos says. But if that happens, be prepared for billboard companies to fight back. To charges that this would kill an industry, Vergos counters that Eller Media, the biggest billboard company in town, only employs about 70 people. "We're not talking about shutting down FedEx here," he says. The council has already passed a 6-month moratorium on the construction of new signs to prevent a forest of billboards from going up at the last minute. -- Heather Heilman City Lights New Welcome Mat On Saturday, October 2nd, city officials will switch on the city's new "welcome mat" -- a huge neon sign mounted on top of the Lone Star Concrete silos at Poplar and Riverside Drive. In flashing red-and-blue neon letters, the sign will identify Memphis as the "Home of the Blues and Birthplace of Rock-and-Roll" for some 18 million travelers on the adjacent Interstate 40. According to Dawn Looney with Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout's office, the idea for the sign came from Rout, whose downtown office overlooks the Lone Star plant. The mayor contacted Louis Gunn of Lone Star Industries and asked him to remove the Lone Star name from the silos and replace it with the neon welcome sign. The concrete plant not only donated space for the signs but also made a "sizable contribution" to the project. The neon and painted signs, mounted on four sides of the building, are designed to be visible as far as a mile away. Rout will flip the switch on the new sign at 8 p.m. sharp, as part of the Bluestock event taking place that evening at the Mud Island Amphitheatre. -- Michael Finger Inventors Offer "Electricity" Machine "No more electric bills!" a group of so-called inventors screamed at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel Tuesday night. Representatives from Better World Technology, Inc., raved about their new machine that "makes free electricity by capitalizing on the Fourth Law of Motion to utilize energy previously thrown away." This discovery of "counter rotation technology" can power a car using hydrogen from water and run a "one horsepower electric motor using a 9-volt battery," they claim. The organization's Web site, www.earthenergy.com, boasts a 43-city national tour to show off the electricity machine, which resembles a steamboat engine. It also promises a Y2K lamp "that will not go out all night long in a power failure" and "live electricity that can be harmlessly transferred through the air without using any wires at all." Their boldest promise is to create 200 percent efficient energy. And at a price of only $275, it can all be yours! On their Web site, Better World Technology proposes to "bring out the truth about real science," blaming high electric bills on corporate conspiracies. "This stuff is purely science fiction," says Scott Southall, of the University of Memphis engineering technology department. "There are some forms of energy that you can convert to low waste heat but you can't go the other way. To create energy, you have to invest energy. There is no such thing as 200 percent efficient energy." Such an invention would be a perpetual motion machine, something that has baffled the greatest scientific minds for centuries. "If these people have created that, then why isn't the National Science Foundation backing them up?" Southhall asks. "They would be wealthy and famous by now. A lamp that doesn't go out could be a candle, and the wireless claim -- that's any broadcast mechanism. I think the term, 'There's a sucker born every minute,' applies nicely to this situation."-- Ashley Fantz Love in Action Group Celebrates Two Years It looked like an elaborate wedding reception. Decked out in tuxedos and elegant evening wear, more than 300 guests packed a ballroom at the Adam's Mark Hotel to celebrating the second anniversary of a ministerial organization called Love in Action. The evening was also meant to stir interest in private donations for the group, which promises to turn gay people straight through "lifestyle therapy." "We're here to help lead people to the right way of life," says John Smid, Love in Action's director. "This is for people who feel that because of their homosexual tendencies, their life is out of control." Spewing Biblical references and equating homosexuality to prostitution, pedophilia, depression, and promiscuity, members of Love in Action pay $950 a month to go through the "cleansing" program which involves staying at one of the several houses that Love in Action rents around Memphis. Members go through five phases of "renewal," in which they analyze themselves and their relationship with their family and God. They are not allowed to leave the house without at least two other members to monitor their behavior "in a world filled with temptation," according to some of the group's literature. John Poulk, who recently published an autobiography titled Half the Room: One Man's Remarkable Story of How He Overcame Homosexuality, spoke at the banquet. Poulk went through the program in 1989 and there met his current wife, who joined Love in Action to "correct" her lesbianism. "It's going to be so inspiring to listen to Mr. Poulk," gushed 20-year-old Wade Richards, who says he wasn't born homosexual but encouraged to adopt the lifestyle because his father left him at an early age. Former Love in Action member Scott Hobbs, however, calls the organization "a cult." "I felt so manipulated because I thought no one else could help me," he says. "I was suicidal. When you're brought up Christian, you just want to fix it if you're homosexual. At Love in Action there are rules six or seven pages long. The whole thing is so far-fetched. It's taken me so long since leaving to get back in touch with reality. Since I've spoken out against them, they treat me like a leper." But Smid says Love in Action is harmless in its efforts to "correct" homosexuals. "This isn't prejudice," he asserts. "There's nothing like that here. That would be counter-productive, wouldn't it?" -- Ashley Fantz Waterworks Still Stands . . . For Now A deadline in August to save the Memphis Artesian Waterworks buildings on Auction has come and gone. The pair of red brick buildings, which are owned by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, is still standing, but the hospital has received no proposals from anyone who wants to restore and use the building, according to spokesman Dick Hackett. Memphis Heritage, which halted the planned demolition of one building after a rear wall was pulled down, has been kept out the decision-making process by St. Jude, says executive director Judith Johnson. But she's still hoping something can be done with the building. "The waterworks is a symbol of Memphis' rebirth in the 1890s," she says. "That's worth more than 12 parking spaces." Built in 1890, the Romanesque Revival complex housed the city's first artesian water wells, providing Memphis with its first source of clean drinking water. The property was donated to St. Jude in the mid-1980s. -- Heather Heilman Making A Difference In Millenial Memphis - 18 With Memphis' rich cultural history including everything from the mighty Mississippi River to the blues, there's hardly been a lack of inspiration for the local arts community. But now, one area dance troupe has found a new source of inspiration: Memphis' growing Latino community. The Memphis Dance Group, which was founded last year and resides at St. Mary's Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center, has decided to perform a new 20-minute modern dance piece inspired by the Argentinean tango. The dance, which will showcase the movement, music, history, and traditions of the Latino culture, will be performed at the Arts in the Park festival October 16. Drawing dancers from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, even different ages, the Memphis Dance Group is dedicated to celebrating the city's diversity and helping bridge the gaps that separate its citizens through modern dance. For its worthwhile project, the Memphis Dance Group will receive the 18th Making a Difference in Millennial Memphis grant, which the group plans to use for dance shoes, costumes, and lighting expenses. As part of its 10th-anniversary celebration, The Memphis Flyer is giving away $50,000 in grants of $1,000 each. The money is provided by an anonymous Memphian who hopes to encourage what might be called "good works" -- little things that improve the quality of life in Memphis. The grants are disbursed by the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis. Grants are available to any nonprofit in the Memphis area. To apply, send a proposal on the organization's stationery to: Making A Difference The Memphis Flyer, P.O. Box 687, Memphis, TN 38101

			Fly on the Wall The Sporting Life University of Tennessee fans showed what true champions are made of Saturday when they booed their Volunteers because of a lackluster performance against the University of Memphis Tigers. Never mind that the defending national champs were playing against one of the top-ranked defenses in the country or that the Vols showed incredible poise and moxie in pulling it out in the final minutes for a thrilling one-point victory. No, the people who find the most garish uses for orange this side of a Florida strip joint booed because the win wasn't pretty enough for them. It reminds us of our favorite little piece of bathroom-wall wisdom from Huey's East: "Rednecks turn orange in the fall." Radio Days We admit it, we're ingrates. Imagine our self-disgust when we received an e-mail recently from Germany chiding us -- and indeed the whole city -- for letting Tom Prestigiacomo's 20th anniversary at FM-100 on September 3rd pass without notice "I did report on him in an article I wrote for Der Tagesspiegel Berlin/Germany and was surprised to learn that Memphis did not take notice of the fact that Mr. Prestigiacomo has done such a good job for the public all these years," wrote Dr. Michaël E. Rodger of Berlin. We would like to second those sentiments to Prestigiacomo, one of the truly nice guys not just on the radio dial but in Memphis. And, Tom, since you're so big in Germany, we were wondering if you could introduce us to that other über-star David Hasselhoff. The Sporting Life, Part II If the Vols were a little lackluster last Saturday it would be nice to think that it's because they've been staying up late nights studying. Alas on Monday, ESPN reported allegations of academic fraud in the UT football program involving five members of last year's championship team. Specifically, the charges, which are under investigation by the NCAA, say that tutors did academic work for players. In related news, last week Domino's Pizza workers in Knoxville reported that the strangest place they had ever delivered pizza was the UT animal lab. At press time, however, it was not clear whether any of those pizzas were delivered to football players. Flying High A new study released last week has found that Northwest Airlines passengers do not pay more to fly to hub cities as opposed to flying through a hub in transit to somewhere else. The hub system has been roundly criticized for giving the dominant airline at certain airports a virtual monopoly capable of raising prices without fear of competition. Northwest operates hubs in Detroit, St. Paul, and Memphis. The study, conducted by professors at George Washington University and Northwestern University and funded by Northwest Airlines, did not address whether customers leaving from hub airports paid more. Furthermore, the study found that all Northwest customers were equally likely to be cramped into tiny, ugly seats, be served warmed-over crud to eat, and have to put up with a teenybopper from Nebraska with a ponytail like a cockatoo's crest bouncing up and down in her seat for three hours completely blocking our view of the movie. Sorry, we were venting a little there. The Sporting Life, part III Former University of Memphis point guard Bill Laurie is on a spending spree. Just weeks after poneying up $100 million for the National Hockey League's St. Louis Blues and their arena, the Kiel Center, Laurie last week paid $200 million for the NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies. Though Laurie, a native of Columbia, Missouri, who played on the Tigers' 1972 Final Four team with Larry Finch, has long coveted an NBA franchise and he now owns a spanking new arena in which to put it, under NBA rules he could not move the Grizzlies until the 2001-2002 season. But of more pressing importance is the Laurie family finances. After spending approximately $300 million in a month, we're concerned that Laurie, who came about his money through his wife Nancy's share of the Wal-Mart inheritance, has whittled away the family fortune to just $692 million. How will they get by?