Live and let live. Mind your own business. Your work speaks for itself. There's a lot to be said for printed books and newspapers, a reliable old car, a black blazer, and cutting-edge retro. And that Madonna gal is something, isn't she?

Needless to say, I don't know much about Facebook. I tried it half-heartedly out of professional curiosity and a desire to "friend" my children in Montana, who, having better things to do, soon stopped posting things. To me, a friend is someone who will take you to the airport at 5 o'clock in the morning or let your dog out.

Facebook is a big deal though. It is getting ready to go public, which means selling stock, monetizing its 845 million members, and raising as much as $100 billion. Snoops must be ecstatic.

That's a lot of money any way you look at it, so I called someone who knows a lot about entrepreneurs, stock offerings, connecting the world, turning a brand into a household word, and the future: FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Smith, 67, conceived his big idea when he was a student at Yale. Mark Zuckerberg, 27, founded Facebook with three classmates at Harvard in 2004. Federal Express, as it was called then, began operations in 1974. Smith and believers had raised $72 million in venture capital. "Never in American business history had a newly-formed corporation raised such an enormous amount of venture capital," wrote Kenneth Neill, publisher of the Flyer, in Memphis magazine in 1978. These days, $72 million gets you Rudy Gay.

Federal Express went public in 1978 at $24 a share, which rose to $42 within two months. Morgan Keegan made the first trade and rode the wave. The stock has split several times since then and is now around $94. FedEx, with all its airplanes, trucks, hubs, and 290,000 employees, has $41 billion in revenue and a market capitalization (shares times stock price) of $30 billion.

Facebook, whose offering price has not been set, has no fleet of airplanes or hubs and its 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion.

On why he's watching: "One, social media is a huge phenomenon that is important to FedEx in many ways. Two, as best I can tell, my kids are around half of Facebook's traffic — just kidding. And, three, I have met [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg at their headquarters, and it is a fascinating thing that is going to have a huge impact, on marketing in particular."

On the Federal Express IPO price: "I don't remember it."

On going public: "We were run with the discipline of a public company. My guess is that it will be more of a culture shock for Facebook just because of the nature of the entity. Their headquarters is more of a campus. It is a publicly held company in name only. The majority of voting shares are held by Mark Zuckerberg. He can run it pretty much the way he wants to run it."

On Zuckerberg: "My impression is that he is a very bright guy, obviously a technical genius. Sheryl Sandberg is a very experienced executive. She is terrific. I think they will hit the ground running, because they have been preparing for some time."

On capital expenses: "What Facebook is doing would be impossible without the enormous networks and capital expenditures in servers of companies like Verizon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Sprint. Like most things in the history of the industrialized world, several parts and pieces come together, and somebody realizes what they mean in the aggregate if you put them together to do something nobody has ever done before."

On communities: "The Internet gives you the ability to aggregate a community of interest, for good or bad. Long before 9/11, it was a command-and-control system for people who wished the world ill. In the case of FedEx, it allows us to see the wares of the world. If you are interested in buying sprockets for a racing bike, you can look at every one in the world and say 'this one.'"

On new entrepreneurs: "There are people sitting around campus rooms right now, and the Internet allows them to come up with great ideas that don't need a lot of capital. The capital was put up by all those other people. And they're not going to get a $100 billion market cap."

On using Facebook: "FedEx is a very big user, and I am sure we will be a bigger user in marketing and advertising. If you live on Facebook, we want to be a part of that too."

The Battle of Gray's Creek: It sounds like a Civil War story. Consolidation, school system merger, financial obligations of municipalities, and annexations. It sounds like a graduate course in public policy or a stimulus bill for lawyers.

click to enlarge

Actually, it's the Memphis news agenda for the last two years. And, this week, suburban lawmakers are threatening to undo a 1999 annexation deal, and Mayor A C Wharton and the Memphis City Council are up in arms.

Don't you miss the narrative plot and drama of Tennessee Waltz? And the finality? I do. Trials end. There are bribes and mysteries. Annexations go on for years. There are consultants, planning teams, and 100-page studies.

A short history lesson is in order.

"The annexation of surrounding areas has long been a significant component in the racial politics of Memphis," wrote Rhodes College political scientists Marcus Pohlmann and Michael Kirby in their 1996 book Racial Politics at the Crossroads.

Memphis annexed Frayser in 1958, Parkway Village in 1965, Whitehaven in 1969, Raleigh in the 1970s, and Cordova and Hickory Hill in the 1990s. All of them were majority white at the time the annexations began, and their completion helped preserve a white voting majority in the city until the 1990s.

In 1999, Memphis and the suburban municipalities in Shelby County signed an annexation reserve agreement, divvying up territory like Indian tribes splitting ancestral hunting lands.

"We were the only county in Tennessee that had to develop an annexation reserve area plan," said Louise Mercuro, former deputy division director of the Office of Planning and Development. "I wrote the Shelby County plan and the Memphis plan."

The agreement was hailed by then-mayors Willie Herenton and Jim Rout as "historic" and a "backbone for the growth plans" for the next two decades.

Not quite. After 2000, annexation pretty much ran off the rails. The city council took aim at densely populated southeast Shelby County just about the time the housing market crashed in 2007. Developers pleaded to be left out. Maps were redrawn. The annexation is pending. Memphis took in some commercial strips but not the residential areas of Southwind and Windyke, where property owners got a city tax holiday until 2013. Or Southwind High School, which remains a county school.

No matter how hard it tried for 50 years, Memphis could never catch up with white flight. Tens of thousands of people moved out of the city's grasp to DeSoto County, Mississippi, or to Germantown, Bartlett, and Collierville. Between Census 2000 and Census 2010, the population of Memphis fell from 650,000 to 647,000. In 1970, before several big annexations, it was 624,000.

So which city is bigger? Memphis, St. Louis, or Atlanta? It's a trick question. In land area, Memphis, at 315 square miles, is bigger than St. Louis and Atlanta put together (195 square miles). The people just keep slipping away.

The wedge of unannexed Shelby County between Bartlett and Germantown that is at issue is called the Gray's Creek Basin. Around 1997, Memphis, after years of resistance, agreed to extend the city sewer into it, which opened it up to development. Suburban developer Cary Whitehead Jr. used to say "he who controls the sanitary sewer rules the world." Mercuro says the area has more than 50,000 residents.

When the Memphis City Council meets this week, it will revisit annexation and the 1999 growth agreement. There will be some outrage, some speeches, and some unity among black and white council members and the mayor around the positives of local control and the negatives of state interference and racial politics. Memphis can possibly win the coming battle over the legality of the 1999 agreement and the efforts in Nashville to undermine it.

But it can't win the war for the hearts, minds, tax dollars, and school-age children of suburbanites determined to live outside the Memphis city limits and send their children somewhere other than Memphis City Schools or the future Shelby County merged school system. That has been proven again and again.

The muni mayors and their friends in the General Assembly have their sights on unannexed populations on their borders, just as Memphis did for more than half a century. For Memphis, the name of the game used to be Capture the White Voters. For Bartlett, Collierville, and Germantown, the name of the game now is Capture the Children, to support their future school systems.

Where there's a will there's a way. Maybe not this year, maybe not 2013, but some day.

For months, Bartlett mayor Keith McDonald and Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy watched and waited.

In 2010, a referendum on general Memphis and Shelby County government consolidation passed in Memphis but was soundly defeated in the suburbs. In 2011, the focus shifted to the school systems as the Memphis board of education surrendered its charter and voters approved the action in a Memphis-only referendum. In August, U.S. District judge Samuel H. Mays laid down the law on a joint school board, and a transition planning team was appointed to oversee the merger in 2013.

That leaves 2012, and McDonald and Goldsworthy and their suburban counterparts are passive spectators no more. The game has shifted to their home field as they move to establish municipal school systems. Now, they're the ones holding the meetings, hiring the consultants, and sitting behind the microphones and dictating the action.

"I probably didn't think Memphis City Schools would give up their charter," McDonald said last week. "They did. They probably didn't think we would start our own municipal school system. We might."

Get ready for the Revenge of the 'Burbs. No need to rush out and see it. This blockbuster will run for years.

The Big Three are Germantown, Collierville, and Bartlett. All of them are at least 79 percent white, with a retail base to generate local sales taxes and a strong property-tax base — the two ways to fund municipal school systems if voters approve them in a referendum.

"The town that has the good school system is the town that is going to grow economically," said former Shelby County commissioner Charles Perkins, an attorney who has advised local school systems and mayors over the years. "If you ask people to vote on raising taxes, they're usually going to vote it down. Schools are one of the few things that could get it passed."

Germantown has 38,844 residents and a median home value of $281,000. Collierville has 43,965 residents and a median home value of $273,100. Bartlett has 54,613 residents and a median home value of $169,700. Arlington is the fast-growing up-and-comer, with 11,517 residents, a median home value of $219,000, and a high school built in 2004 that pulls students from Bartlett High School, which was built in 1917 and is 600 students below capacity.

The subject of school ownership dominated meetings last week of suburban leaders and their hired consultants led by former Shelby County Schools superintendent Jim Mitchell.

Students and school buildings are the chess pieces in this game. Students ought to have a bounty on their chests, because they bring with them state and local funding that allows the system to operate. School buildings were paid for by all residents of Shelby County (the exception is Arlington High School, paid for by a tax on residents outside of Memphis), but Mitchell told suburban mayors and aldermen that a legal case can be made for municipalities getting them for free.

Leaders of the Big Three happily accepted Mitchell's report and its hopeful prognosis and set about scheduling public meetings in February and referendum dates this spring. There was not a word about the Transition Planning team, which is early in its work but, at this point, might as well be selling "Herenton For Mayor" T-shirts in the suburbs.

The suburban votes have not yet been taken, but the road map is pretty clear. Barring court intervention, Germantown, Bartlett, Arlington, and Collierville aim to have their own municipal school systems in place by 2013 and will stake a claim on their current buildings and sports facilities at no charge.

If this were to happen, the future county school system would look pretty much like the current Memphis city school system, with different boundaries and a new school board and possibly a new superintendent.

The municipal systems would compete for students with private schools, charter schools, the county system, and home-schoolers. And they might well wind up competing with each other if they can't come up with cooperative agreements for divvying up thousands of students who attend suburban schools but live outside their municipal boundaries.

Such students account for a large percentage of the black student population, especially in Germantown, which is 3.6 percent black but its schools are 25 percent black. There was some wishful thinking among aldermen at the Germantown meeting about forming a joint system with Collierville, but Mitchell shot it down.

"You're going to have to create your own district," he said.

Mitchell is an old hand at this game. He worked with the Shelby County school system and suburban developer Waymon "Jackie" Welch when Cordova and southeast Shelby County were booming. Schools such as Cordova High School and Southwind High school and some of their feeder schools were built with sharing agreements between the city and county school boards. Welch was the county schools' preferred school site vendor.

"I kind of had the franchise for a while," he once told me.

The city of Memphis and Shelby County provided the roads and the sewer extensions, developers and homebuilders flocked to the suburbs, and the families provided the students that filled the schools. Cordova High School was turned over to Memphis, but Southwind High School — the only county high school that is almost all black — is in Memphis annexation limbo. It is a county school for now.

Mitchell and the suburban mayors say the munis should get the schools for free because they already paid for them. It is more accurate to say that, with the exception of Arlington High School, the residents of Shelby County, 74 percent of whom live in Memphis, paid for all of the city and county schools through their county property taxes. The county issued the bonds.

The suburbs (except Lakeland, which has no property tax) used their local taxes to pay for municipal buildings, police forces, and, in some cases, sewer systems. If they become municipal school systems, they will, as Mitchell acknowledged, have to pay for future school construction, which could push the extra tax levy above the projection of 15 cents per $100 of valuation. McDonald has already said a commitment to a new $26.5 million high school is needed "day one" in Bartlett. As part of Shelby County, suburban residents could also be subject to tax increases passed by the Memphis-dominated county commission.

Memphians are now taxed twice for schools, including a "one-time assessment" of 18 cents on their 2011 tax bills. Lowering property taxes is on the Memphis City Council's agenda. Memphis has a combined tax rate of $7.21 cents, compared to a rate of about $5.50 in the Big Three suburbs.

Watching all this play out, we can be sure, is the learned and inscrutable Judge Mays. As author John Updike wrote about baseball immortal Ted Williams, gods do not answer letters. Nor do judges answer letters or give interviews on active cases.

In his August ruling, Mays said the former county school board's electoral districts were unconstitutional because they excluded Memphis. That resulted in the new 23-member board.

Mays put much faith in the separate transition planning commission to submit a plan to the board "for consideration and approval, as it deems appropriate."

Mays hung fire on the issue of municipal school districts. In legal language, the issue was not "ripe."

Any harm, he wrote, "would not occur until an attempt was made to create a municipal school district or special school district. Nothing in the record suggests that such an attempt has been made or will be made in the future. Any harm depends on contingent future events."

That was then, this is now. Either Mays was using an awfully cloudy crystal ball or the issue is about to achieve "ripeness" if it hasn't done so already.

There is one more bit of unfinished business by the court.

In his acceptance of the terms of the new joint school board on September 28, 2011, Mays said "the court will appoint a special master to assist in implementing the consent decree and to resolve disputes among the parties as to any aspect of the transition to a combined school system or the operation of the separate school systems."

The time for that appointment also seems ripe.

For the first time since 2006, Memphis and Shelby County had a net increase in jobs and reaped nearly $1.2 billion in new capital investment by private businesses in 2011.

Mayors A C Wharton and Mark Luttrell, along with Greater Memphis Chamber president and CEO John Moore, made the joint announcement Tuesday.

"We're not in the red zone any more," said Moore.

Which sort of added to the confusion. The red zone, you see, is good in football, at least for the offense, but bad in economic development. Moore said the eight-county Memphis metro area lost jobs every month from January 2007 to June 2011. But a corner was turned in 2011, when there was a net increase of 15,000 jobs.

Speaking specifically about Memphis and Shelby County, Moore said that in 2011 there was $1,184,098,514 in capital investment and 3,709 new jobs. In recent years, the chamber has focused on Memphis and Shelby County instead of the region, but some government statistical reporting on jobs is still done regionally.

But wait, it gets a bit more complicated. Those are only projects on which the chamber was involved and only projects announced in 2011. So, for example, Electrolux isn't counted because it was announced in 2010. And Bass Pro doesn't count because it is a city deal, not a chamber deal. Job fluctuations at FedEx and AutoZone and Morgan Keegan don't count. And job cuts at Delta Airlines and other employers don't count against the 3,709 new jobs, which is an estimate that could be higher or lower when the projects come on line in 2012 and 2013.

Anyway, no one was in a quibbling mood Tuesday. The bottom line is, well, let's let Wharton do that:

"The bottom line is, Memphis is open for business," said Wharton, adding, "what part of a billion is it that you don't understand?"

"We've seen a huge comeback all of a sudden," said Mark Herbison, senior vice-president of economic development for the chamber.

The total includes 28 projects landed in 2011. The biggest catches include Mitsubishi Electric Power Products (300 jobs), Blues City Brewing (500 jobs), Flextronics (600 jobs), Kruger (100 jobs), and the Great American Steamboat Company (300 jobs).

Mitsubishi got a tax abatement, but Herbison said the company will make $28 million in payments in lieu of taxes over the next 15 years. The city guaranteed a $9 million loan for the Great American Steamboat Company and is building Beale Street Landing and its boat dock, largely with public funds.

But city and chamber officials differentiated those deals from the Electrolux deal, which includes $40 million in incentives from the city and county and $95 million more from the state. Following the announcement, they passed out mock $1 billion bills with the names of 22 expanding companies, few of which are household names.

"The small businesses are the backbone of our growth," said Luttrell.

Electrolux was the topic of an earlier press conference Tuesday at Wharton's office. The Memphis mayor said he is confident that the Canadian transplant, which makes kitchen appliances, will honor its commitment to hiring locally based women- and minority-owned businesses — an issue near and dear to many Memphis City Council members. This week's council agenda includes a "resolution to evaluate economic development using Memphis tax dollars."

Electrolux intends to spend more than 50 percent of the $80 million construction contract locally. To date, $15.3 million worth of work has been awarded, including $14.5 million to local companies. Of that amount, $6.3 million went to firms owned by women and minorities. Contract awards are expected to continue for four months. The plant will be fully operational in 2014, with 1,200 employees. The contractor is Yates Construction.

Asked to explain the scoring system for evaluating favored companies — a black female, for example, could count twice — the mayors ducked it with a joke about not wanting to get into higher mathematics.

Actually, the math is not that complicated, but the politics is. The main thing is to get a black or female representative on your company's list of officers if you want to get some business and stay out of hot water with the council.

As Wharton, an old hand at such matters, put it, "If you wave your hand about working with Electrolux, somebody is going to find you."

I live in an old neighborhood in Midtown. Nicer, more community-minded neighbors and prettier old homes and streets you will not find.

On Saturday night, there was a neighborhood progressive dinner, and, as often happens, the state of the neighborhood came up in conversations. What have you heard? What do you think? What do you know?

And what about blight?

Blight is tough as rusty nails, iron pipes wrapped in asbestos, and old concrete.

Blight, by definition, doesn't care.

Blight just is.

Blight is impossible to ignore, like Sears Crosstown in Midtown and the Sterick Building downtown. Blight gets a nice seat at the table or in the living room and just sits there and makes rude noises and doesn't say anything.

Blight can be cool, like the Tennessee Brewery, with a foundation stone that says 1890 and lots of black-and-white pictures of beer trucks in better days. Or the Sterick Building back in the days when men wore hats and drove Dodges and Oldsmobiles and Packards.

Blight can be a charmer, with nostalgic tales of the days when Dad and Grandpa and Mom used to live or work there.

Blight doesn't have to be old. The Horizon on the south end of the skyline is less than 10 years old and isn't even finished and has never been occupied.

Blight is connected. There are historic tax credits out there to fix up blighted properties. There are people who will buy and hold blight in hopes that someone will come along and buy them out. There are people of good will who will defend blighted property in the name of preservation.

Blight has all the time in the world.

Blight is hard to pin down. Owners change hands, live out of town, can't be reached, don't want to be reached, have phones that are disconnected, and the letters LLC after their name.

Blight is a freeloader, relying on good neighbors to pay the carrying costs by fixing up their places and paying taxes and mowing yards and planting trees and picking up trash and preserving some shred of value and hope in blight's own sorry self.

Blight is cynical, like a guy who comes up to you and says, "Hey, Mac, wanna buy a wallet cheap?"

Blight knows the game of catch-me-if-you-can.

Blight laughs at fines.

Blight would look good in a disaster movie about a cataclysmic earthquake in a fairly large Southern city on the Mississippi River with a $100 million demolition fund.

Blight can be invisible like that old spot on your couch that you have been living with so long that you ignore it.

Blight has good intentions and will get around to doing something next year when this, that, and the other fall in place.

Blight always needs more time.

Blight knows that bigger is better. Demolishing an old mule barn to build AutoZone Park is one thing, but demolishing a multistory building with enough concrete to fill a lake or build a pyramid is something else.

Blight hasn't lost a big one since Baptist Hospital on Union Avenue in the Medical Center was demolished in 2005.

Blight has friends and relies on them to clean up the mess someone else made and abandoned.

Blight is contagious as a bad cold in January and a street full of rotting roofs and broken windows.

Blight is expensive. Big Uglies cost too much to tear down, and they cost too much to fix up in the building era of seismic codes and ADA regulations.

Blight is us, from the downtown skyline to historic Midtown to battered Frayser to disposable suburbs.

It's the extended bowl season once again: three weeks down, one more to go before the national championship game.

There are 35 bowl games this year, including the AutoZone Liberty Bowl in which Cincinnati beat Vanderbilt. The announced attendance was 57,000, and even if the actual crowd was several thousand less than that, it was still a good day for Memphis.

"At Blues City Café, we had our biggest New Year's Eve ever," said Kevin Kane, head of the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau and part-owner of the restaurant. "It was a perfect storm: Saturday night, New Year's Eve, and spectacular weather. It was huge for Beale Street and the Peabody."

With or without a football playoff, bowl games are also huge for the people who run them and earn mid-six-figure salaries in many cases. The bowls operate outside the NCAA, unlike all other college championships. They are run by nonprofit organizations in cities such as Memphis and Nashville that fancy themselves tourist destinations. Promoters work with sponsors, universities, and media to create the best match-ups and drum up as much holiday enthusiasm as they can over five days of events. As nonprofits, the organizations must make their federal tax returns public.

On GuideStar, an organization that reports on U.S. nonprofits, I looked at tax returns for a sample of 10 major and mid-level bowl games. Although the returns are the most recent available, they are one or two years old, and this season's numbers may be different. As a benchmark, University of Memphis athletic director R.C. Johnson's salary is $316,725.

Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: a major bowl with $17 million in revenue and a $9.7 million payout. John Junker, CEO, earned $673,888 in 2009. But Junker got caught with his hand in the Tostitos jar. He was fired by the Fiesta Bowl in 2011 and the bowl was fined $1 million after an investigation of inappropriate spending.

Allstate Sugar bowl: $12.5 million in revenue and a $6 million payout in 2009. Paul Hoolahan, CEO, earned $593,718.

Bridgepoint Holiday Bowl: $10.8 million in revenue in 2010 and a $4.2 million payout. CEO Robert Binkowski earned $283,095.

Cotton Bowl: a golden oldie with $10 million in revenue, $6.75 million payout. CEO Rick Baker earned $470,147.

Outback Bowl: $9.6 million in revenue, $6.6 million payout. CEO Jim McVay earned $615,840.

TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl: $8.7 million in revenue and a $4.5 million payout in 2009. CEO Richard Catlett earned $348,629.

Hyundai Sun Bowl: $6.5 million revenue and a $4.1 million payout in 2010. Executive director Bernie Olivas earned $170,423.

Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl: $6.8 million in revenue, $3.6 million payout. CEO Scott Ramsey made $310,715.

Alamo Bowl: $4.3 million in revenue, $3.6 million payout. President Derrick Fox earned $419,000.

The Liberty Bowl is unusual. Its financial reporting is the least transparent of the bowls I checked. Executive director Steve Ehrhart and associate director Harold Graeter are not paid by the nonprofit Liberty Bowl Festival Association. They work for businessman Billy Dunavant. Ehrhart is on the tax form as an unpaid board member.

The 2010 form lists revenue of $6.23 million, mainly from ticket sales ($2.5 million), television and radio rights ($2 million), and sponsorships ($1.2 million). The "management fee" was $2.357 million, nearly as much as the team payout of $2.65 million. In 2009, the payout was $3.65 million, and the management fee was $2.37 million. In 2008, the payout was $3.5 million, and the management fee was only $1.23 million.

The Liberty Bowl Festival Association describes its charitable purpose as "promoting the social and economic welfare of the Mid-South and its citizens" along with American universities.

Ehrhart said his compensation is included in the management fee, but he declined to say how much it is. He said the Liberty Bowl was restructured in 1994 when "it was struggling to make ends meet" and several expenses were lumped together. He said payouts declined when the game fell in the pecking order for team selection. This year's payout will be roughly $2.8 million.

Under Ehrhart's leadership, the Liberty Bowl has enjoyed good games, good crowds, good ratings, and good weather that would make Bear Bryant roll over in his grave at the memory of his last game on that icy night in Memphis in 1982.

Ehrhart came here from the Colorado Rockies to work for Dunavant and the Memphis Showboats in 1985. Whatever the sport, he knows the score. The trend in any business these days is pay what you will, but you must have transparency. The Liberty Bowl needs to get with the program.

This was the Year of the Big Idea in Action: The idea was consolidation of Memphis and Shelby County schools, a process that was set in motion a year ago by a 5-4 vote of the Memphis City Schools Board of Education to surrender its charter. That decision was reaffirmed by Memphis voters by a 68-32 margin in a referendum. The merger will take place in August of 2013, with or without suburban schools, which could become separate systems.

• School Choice by the Numbers: Charter schools have enrolled approximately 5,000 students in Memphis. The Memphis City Schools Optional Schools program has more than 13,000 students. Both charters and optional schools recruit students. But the most popular choice in Memphis City Schools is traditional schools, which have more than 80,000 students.

• The Most Eventful Weekend of the Year: It started on Friday the 13th of May, when the Memphis Grizzlies won Game Six against the Oklahoma Thunder. Two days later, President Barack Obama visited Memphis and Booker T. Washington High School for its graduation ceremony. In between, the Mississippi River rose to a near-record crest, drawing national news media and thousands of visitors.

• A Good Company: That's one that creates jobs, provides a useful service or product, and creates value for shareholders. That would be AutoZone. Its stock is up 20 percent this year and 100 percent in the last two years. Discount auto parts have been a recession fighter, and AutoZone's hundreds of employees in its corporate headquarters are crucial to the health of downtown, especially at a time when Morgan Keegan and Pinnacle are struggling.

• The Mystery Tax: In June, the Memphis City Council seemingly raised property taxes by 18 cents to pay for schools, but you won't find it on 2011 tax bills, which put the Memphis property tax rate at $3.18, a penny less than the 2010 rate. The tax rate includes what council members called a "one-time" levy of 18 cents for Memphis schools, which Superintendent Kriner Cash and board members threatened to keep closed in August if they didn't get their money. Will the "one-time" tax be back next year? Stay tuned.

• The Most Overpaid College Football Coach in America: It is Larry Porter, recently fired head coach at the University of Memphis, who will get $1.2 million per win in his two seasons.

• Surprise Story: The controversy over bike lanes. Bicycles are #61 in Christian Lander's book Stuff White People Like —between "Toyota Prius" and "Knowing What's Best for Poor People."

• Memphis Dubious Honors in 2011: Highest air fares (Bureau of Transportation Statistics); poorest urban area (U.S. Census Bureau); Top 20 in Fattest (Men's Health magazine); Top 10 in Most Dangerous (FBI crime statistics).

• Elvis Would Be Proud: The top-selling Krispy Kreme in America is on Elvis Presley Blvd. in Whitehaven.

• It Came From Memphis and Went Straight to Walmart: That would be bacon jerky from Memphis-based Monogram Food Solutions.

• Valentine's Day Special. The city, the governor, and the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce rolled out the red carpet for Mitsubishi Electric, which is coming to Memphis and bringing 275 jobs. Does anyone remember what Mitsubishi Electric makes? Answer: power transformers.

• Best Quotes: "When you shave that skanky face of yours in the morning, you need to say, 'Dude, you're gonna rock the world today.'" — motivational speaker James Smith at the "Get Motivated" business seminar at FedExForum in March.

"All people can do now is watch, wait, hope, and pray." — ABC's Diane Sawyer, reporting in fishing waders from Memphis as the river reached 47 feet in May.

"I want to say that Graceland is safe, and we would charge hell with water pistols to keep it that way." — emergency preparedness director Bob Nations at a press briefing as the river rose to 44 feet.

"The person introducing the keynote speaker usually has to give a lot of statistics about the speaker no one knows, like where he works — everyone knows that — or to whom he is married — everyone knows First Lady Michelle Obama — or where the speaker was born." — Booker T. Washington student Christopher Dean, introducing President Obama in May.

"It does." — federal judge Samuel H. Mays ruling in August that the lack of Memphis representation on the Shelby County Board of Education violates the one-person, one-vote principle.

• Waiting Game: 1,255 days since Beale Street Landing construction began. And 1,155 days since Bass Pro Shops signed a development agreement for the Pyramid.

The last time that Memphis and Charlotte were mentioned in the local news together was 1993, when Charlotte and Jacksonville scored NFL expansion franchises and Memphis got snubbed.

This week, Memphis took another look at Charlotte, but the focus was schools, not sports. The new Memphis and Shelby County School Board and the Transition Planning Team met for two hours with emissaries from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) that made busing an American household word.

Coincidentally, it was almost one year from the day since the Memphis school board voted to surrender its charter, setting off the long march to merged schools in 2013. Since catching the consolidation bug in 2010, Memphis has friended Jacksonville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Chattanooga in search of Things That Might Work Here.

As such visits go, this one was pretty good. The four wise men from the East included a former superintendent, the current board chairman, a former school board member, and a former principal. CMS won a national award this year for excellence in urban education, but this was not a butt-patting session.

"Progress has been painfully slow, and at the rate we are moving in Charlotte, it will still be 15 years before the achievement gap is closed," said former Superintendent Pete Gorman, who resigned last summer after closing some schools, a job he said cannot be done well and was physically exhausting.

The Charlotte Observer said "the closings mostly affected low-income and minority students." Two blacks replaced two whites on the nine-member board after an election this year. The newspaper says only one member of the CMS board has more than two years' experience.

In public education, Charlotte Mecklenburg is famous as the school system that gave America busing for desegregation after a series of court cases culminating in a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1970. Today, the 136,000-student system has a diverse population that is 41 percent black, 33 percent white, and 16 percent Hispanic. Forty magnet schools attract 25,000 students, and the rest attend neighborhood schools, Gorman said. The graduation rate is 73 percent, about the same as Memphis.

As for the city of Charlotte, the grass really is greener. It is the home of Bank of America, the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and an NFL team. The population (731,424) grew 35 percent between 2000-2010; 40 percent of adults are college graduates; per-capita income is $31,839; and only 12 percent of the population is poor. Memphis lost population during that time, per-capita income is $21,293, and the poverty number is 24 percent.

Gorman and friends urged the Memphians to "build a bench" of future principals and assistant principals from among promising young teachers. Move good principals and assistants along with five teachers as a group to the toughest schools, but not against their will. Give them three years to turn around a school. Give affluent schools less money and poor schools more money — as much as $7,000 more per student. Make even top schools show year-over-year gains. Pick a superintendent for the consolidated district sooner rather than later. And expect to move on if you are the superintendent who has to close schools.

The overriding message was "freedom and flexibility with accountability."

Heads nodded at that something-for-everyone maxim, but in the question-and-answer session, the differences between Charlotte and Memphis became apparent, and so did some of the fault lines on the new Shelby County school board.

Charlotte's downtown is its biggest economic engine, much more than the suburbs. The North Carolina legislature blocked efforts of municipalities to set up separate school systems, and the number of school districts in the state has shrunk from 175 to 115. The cap on charter schools has been lifted. Twenty applications were approved, and Gorman expects "a glut of them" to come.

Joe Clayton, the senior member of the Shelby County board and a veteran of the busing years, said there is fear in the suburbs that "when the dust settles, the principal and the lead teachers will be moved to an inner-city school or some other school." Eric Davis, chairman of the CMS board, said working at tough schools and "playing the toughest opponents" can become "a point of pride." Brave words, but if you can imagine flight to Frayser, then you can do something I cannot.

Friending other cities is a good way to start a conversation and get some fresh perspective. But it's superficial. Every city is different. So go ahead and click "accept." But don't expect answers.

Hurray for Atos, a company I never heard of until I read about it in The New York Times this week.

According to the Times, the international information technology services company is phasing out office emails because its chief executive, Thierry Breton, "considers 90 percent of them a waste of time." He suggests employees spend more time talking to each other in person or on the phone and switch to "real-time" messaging tools like text messages or social media. And they can start by limiting the use of the "reply all" option.

How welcome that would be. Few businesses benefit more from direct communication, either by phone or face-to-face, than journalism. But journalists are also surrounded by technological temptations to take shortcuts via email.

I was reminded of this last week when I interviewed Rajiv Grover, the dean of the Fogelman College of Business at the University of Memphis, for a future magazine article. Born and educated in Calcutta, he's a small volcano of interesting ideas on marketing, business education, Silicon Valley start-ups, Facebook (he's not on it), job readiness, and collegiate athletics, among other things. We spent a few hours talking in his office over two days. Had I opted to do the interviews by phone or email, I would not have gotten to know him nearly as well, and neither would our readers.

We talked a lot about diversity in India, in Memphis, and at universities. Two phrases Grover likes to use are "ideas having sex" and "the strength of weak ties." He is not the author of either of them. The former was coined by author Matt Ridley, the latter by a sociologist named Mark Granovetter. You can look them up on YouTube or Google. Grover provided links. I watched a few minutes, read a few entries, enough to get an attribution and a general sense that sameness can cause stagnation and redundancy.

But if I had spent a whole day reading their books and papers — which I did not — I would probably not have understood those concepts as well as I did after talking to a stranger from India for a couple of hours.

If you're a careful reader of newspapers either in print or online, you've noticed many of us are reporting more and more that so-and-so "wrote in an email response" or "replied by email" rather than simply "said" something, either in person or on the phone. It's part convenience, part management on the part of both parties. An email can be crafted, and spontaneity, candor, and context can be lost.

Whatever you may think of the Memphis City Council, the Shelby County Commission, and the new joint school board, there is something to be said for people of different colors, genders, ages, neighborhoods, and viewpoints hashing things out face-to-face. Ditto for public comments. Name and address, please; you have three minutes. It may be boring, maddening, or bizarre, but it's ideas having sex and the strength of weak ties in action. And it's usually more constructive, responsible, and civil than an anonymous Internet message board, where it's easy to hate or belittle someone you can't see.

An old friend and journalist, Michael Rubenstein, died last week. He was director of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and former sports anchor for a Jackson television station, but he didn't have a cell phone because "nobody told me they can't find me." He was a face-to-face guy and probably knew as many newsmakers as anyone in Mississippi.

Very retro and dinosaur behavior and all that, but worth remembering.

The best advice to people in new media and old media is still some of the oldest advice. If you want to find out more about something, whether it's the city council, the new skate park, suburban sprawl, black churches, white churches, or Tiger basketball, or understand someone on the other side of the room or the other side of town, the best way is to get away from your desk, your phone, your computer, and talk to people face-to-face and go have a look.

When Tommy West was fired as football coach at the University of Memphis in 2009, he predicted that "history will continue to repeat itself."

He was right, except that things got worse than they were under West and his two predecessors, and the decline happened sooner than almost anyone thought it would.

Memphis athletic director R.C. Johnson fired his third football coach this week. Larry Porter completed two years of his five-year, $3.75 million contract. His record was 3-21. By the time he gets his buyout, Porter will earn $1.25 million per win, part of it paid by boosters. Only banks get better bailouts. Johnson and president Shirley Raines will hire a search firm to help find the next coach.

"I'm not going to give you a dollar figure," said Raines. "But we are committed to getting the best possible coach for this community."

Two years ago, that was Porter, a former Memphis player with no head-coaching experience. Nevertheless, he was hailed as the right man to turn the program around after West was fired.

Porter was "the obvious guy" for the job and "makes all the sense in the world" because of his Memphis connections and recruiting record, wrote Commercial Appeal columnist Geoff Calkins.

After firing Porter, Johnson praised him.

"I can't thank Larry Porter enough for the time he gave us, the energy he gave us. It didn't work out but it wasn't because he didn't give everything he had."

Here's how Porter's predecessors did.

West coached for nine seasons, compiling a 49-61 record. He won nine games in his best season but did not win the Conference USA championship. The last straw was a televised home loss to East Carolina in front of 4,100 fans, which seemed as low as a crowd could go until Porter's team finished this season in front of fewer than 3,000 fans. West was fired with three years left on a contract that paid him $925,000 a year. In his farewell press conference, he made his prediction and let his anger out about the program.

"Put something in it or do away with it," he said.

West replaced Rip Scherer, who was fired by Johnson after six seasons. His record was 22-44, including a win over the University of Tennessee and Peyton Manning. Scherer had two-and-a-half years left on his contract and got a $485,000 buyout.

"Put more money in the budget," Scherer said after being fired. "Do it for the next guy so that you are not sitting here five years from now with the same kind of meeting. That's the only way this cycle will stop."

Scherer replaced Chuck Stobart, who went 29-36-1, including wins over USC, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. He was 6-5 in each of his last three seasons in the days when that didn't qualify a team for a bowl bid. He was blamed for being boring and unable to excite fans.

"I never turned down a speaking engagement," said Stobart, who had two years left on his contract. He was 60 years old, and Memphis was his last head-coaching job.

So Memphis has tried the old guy, the nice guy, the tough guy, and the alumni guy. Four coaches in 20 years is about par in college football. Ole Miss and Alabama have each had five and Vanderbilt six. How can Memphis thwart Tommy West's prophecy?

Some say by hiring a big-name coach with lots of experience. Two such coaches fired this year are Houston Nutt at Ole Miss, which lost 31-3 to Mississippi State last week, and Rick Neuheisel at UCLA, which lost 50-0 to USC. An alternate approach would be to go after an up-and-comer such as Hugh Freeze at Arkansas State, which beat Memphis 47-3 this year. Freeze makes $210,000 and has won nine games with a much smaller budget than Memphis.

Two options that are not under consideration and were not even brought up at Monday's press conference are moving to a lower division or building an on-campus stadium as Central Florida, Louisville, Houston, and UT-Chattanooga have done. The 62,000-seat Liberty Bowl is too big to fail, and Raines has other priorities.

Memphis isn't getting out of football, but it isn't going all-in either. By its own measures, the university is doing well academically and in other sports. Enrollment has grown to 23,610 students, and the footprint has expanded to the law school downtown and the Lambuth campus in Jackson.

With three wins in two years and 7,000 fans total at the last two home games, football has nowhere to go but up.

Sometimes government makes it easy for people who think government needs to go on a diet. Case in point: the Metropolitan Planning Organization's (MPO) Regional Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan.

After I read its hundreds of pages of observations and recommendations, I felt a little like a Rush Limbaugh fan, which I definitely am not. Still, I had to conclude that this report and this agency are as bloated as Rush himself.

I have watched with interest as Memphis adds bike lanes to Madison Avenue, North Parkway, Front Street, and other streets. I thought it would be simple, but I was wrong. People were passionately for it and against it. This week, Mayor A C Wharton announced that he couldn't find a consensus so he is forming a Madison Avenue committee, a sure sign that this is a big deal.

I have a bike. I like to ride it once in a while. I rode it for fun 60 miles last weekend. It was harder than watching football, and I won't do it again soon. I drive to work. It takes me eight minutes. I like having heat in winter and air-conditioning in summer, and I need a car to get to appointments. I would drive about as much even if gas cost $5 a gallon. Whether or not you ride a bike is, needless to say, up to you. It's no one else's business.

I like to walk. I don't need signs to point me toward the sidewalks. I know what a sidewalk looks like. I appreciate crossing signals. Beyond that I don't need much help, thanks.

The MPO, however, has other ideas. Biking is a learned behavior. Government is the teacher and motivator. How to convert drivers to bikers and walkers? The answer is invest in bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, coupled with education programs, public service campaigns, and policies that support and encourage safe and efficient biking and walking.

A few excerpts from the report:

"The intent of the plan is not to secure funding for every project, but, instead, to identify the opportunities that are available." Sure.

"Census data show that less than two percent of work commute trips in greater Memphis were made by bicycling or walking." I bet it's more like point-two percent.

"A 15-minute bicycling or walking commute can provide the physical activity that is necessary to remain healthy. You can lose 13 pounds, reduce the risk of heart disease 50 percent, and burn 508 calories in an hour if you peddle 14 miles an hour." Which is a pace that only the fittest cyclists can maintain.

"By simply replacing an automobile with a bicycle to conduct a four-mile long round trip, approximately 15 pounds of pollutants can be kept out of the air." The appeal to guilt.

"Every street should accommodate bicyclists, pedestrians, motorists and transit users of all abilities and ages." Madison Avenue multiplied by 1,000.

"Support National Bike to Work Day and National Walk to School Day. Have the mayor and county commissioners proclaim May as Bike Month and October as Walk Month." Only if they wear biking shorts to work, I say.

"All development plan submittals and future transportation plans should be reviewed for compliance with the plan." Says who? And if they are not in compliance?

"Develop a GIS-based inventory of all existing pedestrian facilities including, but not limited to, sidewalks, curb ramps, overpasses, off-street connectors, parks, recreational walkways, and hiking trails. Once the data is collected and a thorough analysis is completed ... ." We can retire on a pension.

"Address the issue of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act." Simple? See Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.

"Expand end-of-road facilities." Also known as bike racks.

"Increase the amount of way-finding signage around the community."

And so on.

Once again, I like to bike. I love the Greenline. Bike lanes on some streets are worth a try. I'll believe we need them when I see more bikes and fewer cars at hospitals and college campuses. Exercise is good. Health is good. But so is common sense.

Being a functioning citizen means taking responsibility for your choices and learning how to cross the street. You can't choose your parents, but you can make a choice to be fit or fat, to walk or ride, to find your way. It requires a little effort. If you don't know that by now, it won't do any good for government to tell you.

It's been ugly, uglier, and ugliest in sports this month.

The hapless University of Memphis football team lost again in front of a few thousand people at home Saturday. The fourth-quarter collapse was as alarming as the attendance, raising again the question, "Why bother?"

Ole Miss, winless in the Southeastern Conference, fired Houston Nutt and is ready to lavish millions on a new coach.

The NBA season is in doubt, and some Grizzlies players are talking about playing overseas. So much for that love affair with Memphis and those "Believe Memphis" T-shirts and towels just six months ago. Business is business.

Then there is Penn State. Enough has been said about that.

To get some perspective, I went to Mike Clary, athletic director and former football coach at idyllic Rhodes College, where sports are just for fun, right? Not exactly.

Small colleges are by no means immune to the pressure and influence of sports. From his office, Clary can look out the window and see millions of dollars of improvements to the Rhodes football, baseball, tennis, track, and soccer facilities in the last 20 years. Rhodes is one of 400 schools in NCAA Division III. Approximately 400 of the 1,750 students play a varsity sport. There are 11 sports each for men and women. The newest addition is lacrosse, a response to interest from feeder private high schools.

"That 400 is probably more than any Southeastern Conference school," he said. "There are far more students participating in sports on a non-scholarship basis than on scholarships."

The football team has 70 players — 10 percent of the male enrollment — and Clary wants to increase that to 85.

"Tuition at Rhodes is $35,000," he said. "After academic scholarships and need-based financial aid, your net tuition revenue per student is about $20,000. At Rhodes, we can likely replace those 80 male football players with other students. What we likely can't do is replace them with males. The culture and the ethos and the makeup of our student body would change drastically."

Football is still seen as the key to school spirit even at a small liberal arts college that grooms future doctors, lawyers, and professors.

"As much as you would like to have a homecoming weekend around soccer games, traditionally schools that do not have football do not have great fall homecoming events."

Small Southern colleges such as Hendrix and Birmingham-Southern are adding or recently added football to boost male enrollment above the 40 percent considered the "tipping point."

"The start-up costs for a football program including stadium and dressing room is probably $3 million to $5 million," Clary said. "You need some big gifts to take care of that, but on an annual operating basis, football will be a money-making proposition."

And winning matters.

"When I was football coach, I went 8-1 three or four years and I was 1-8 one year," Clary said. "It's a lot more fun to win. We want to teach success and we want to win, but it's not the bottom line. We will not have a coach whose program is losing year after year even if that person is the finest person in the world."

Clary is watching the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) and conference realignment story closely. Revenue from BCS bowl games is shared among BCS schools. The NCAA gets nothing. But in basketball, revenue from the multi-year contract with CBS is shared by all NCAA schools. Clary fears that the football power schools will use their leverage to get the lion's share of basketball revenue in the future or start their own organization.

Division III schools now get three percent of the roughly $700 million a year contract to run their national championships. That sent the Rhodes field hockey team and coaches to New Jersey this year.

"To be honest, we do nothing for it," Clary said. "It's not like we're on TV. So we are happy to get it."

As he watches the Penn State story unfold, he finds it "mind boggling" that the school's human resources department did not contact police and reach out to victims.

"The hardest part as an administrator is asking yourself what you would do if a month or six months went by and your organization did not act," he said. "That appears not to have happened at Penn State."

The federal government has a new way to measure poverty.

According to the Census Bureau report that came out this week, 49 million Americans, not the previously reported 46 million, are living in poverty. Sixteen percent of the total population, and 25 percent of black Americans, are poor.

Bad news, but if you measure poverty the way Memphis City Schools, Shelby County Schools, and the state of Tennessee measure it, you could conclude — mistakenly — that the poverty rate among black Memphians is three or four times that. Here's how:

Start by taking out all the people who live outside Memphis but in Shelby County, even if they grew up in Memphis, work in Memphis, and have family in Memphis. This, of course, is what we do now with our separate school systems that will stay in place until 2013.

Next, take out all the people who live in Memphis but don't have children in Memphis public schools, the families with children who go to optional schools or private schools, and the families with school-age children who are not poor by any definition.

Define "poor" as a family of four with an annual income of $41,348. Classify a school, and by extension its neighborhood, as poor even if only 40 percent of the families fall below this standard. When federal funds are at stake, it pays to look poor.

Define "black schools" as all-black schools, not schools with 70 percent or 80 percent black majorities.

This is how you get to "Memphis: America's Poor Black Racially Torn City." This is how you get to the Memphis City Schools and Tennessee Report Card finding that 89,784 of the 103,500 students are economically disadvantaged and that the whole system is Title 1, which is government-speak for poor.

And this is how you could conclude, by reading an article last week in The New York Times on the schools merger that Memphis has no black middle class and an impoverished central city and is doomed to repeat the white flight of busing and 1973.

Like it or not, the schools merger is the window through which America is going to view Memphis and public education for a while. As the Times noted, it is "the largest school district consolidation in American history."

For all its problems, however, Memphis is not as poor as it looks in school stats. Nor is it necessarily doomed to repeat the past, as some of those quoted in the story believe it is, including Joe Clayton, the 79-year-old Shelby County school board member and former principal who left MCS for Briarcrest Christian School in 1974.

"There is the same element of fear," Clayton told the Times.

Also interviewed was Marcus Pohlmann, a political science professor at Rhodes College and author of books on racial politics and school integration in Memphis.

"There are no middle-class black schools in Memphis," Pohlmann said in the story. "They're all poor."

I know Clayton and Pohlmann and respect both of them. Their statements are right, as far as they go. I have a quibble with them, but I think it's an important quibble.

You can kill a city with statistics, and you can kill it by tying it to its past of racial separation and strife. I'm not crazy about Memphis being America's "civil rights city" in pro sports and national journalism and literature.

It isn't forever 1974, even though city schools are more segregated now than they were then. The separation of county and city school data makes Memphis look worse than consolidated districts in Tennessee and other states. The buildings and the books are newer. There is an incoming corps of young teachers, principals, and foundation money. The school boards are at least meeting together now, which, as their colleagues in Hamilton County and Chattanooga suggested, may be the main thing.

Black doesn't equal poor. There are middle-class schools in Memphis that are majority black. The 7,800 white kids in MCS can't skew the data that much. The black poverty rate here is not three or four times the national rate. You only get there by using different methods and data. And with all due respect to Joe Clayton, he is not the future. The future is Kenya Bradshaw, who was also quoted in the Times article. I asked her what she thought of it.

"Overall, I thought it was a good story, but I thought the call to action for the community was missing," she said. "The story portrays the challenges, but I think we need to seize this opportunity and challenge our community to come together."

The Occupy Wall Street protest has spread to Nashville and Memphis, among other cities, and shows signs of having staying power and, perhaps, picking up steam. The Memphis protest on the plaza across from City Hall began October 15th, or 17 days ago as I write this.

How long will it last? Who knows? But take note, occupiers and city officials everywhere. The mother of all occupations of public spaces began in Memphis 23 years and 293 days ago, give or take a month or two, at the National Civil Rights Museum at the other end of downtown.

I stopped by the other day to visit with Jacqueline Smith at her solo sidewalk vigil on Mulberry Street. Considering what she has been through, she looked and sounded remarkably like the thin, articulate young woman I interviewed on January 12, 1988, when the Lorraine Motel, where she worked at the time, was shut down. She was evicted, literally kicking and screaming, on March 2, 1988.

Since then, she has been encamped, more or less continuously, on the sidewalk with her blue tarps, desk, posters, worldly possessions, and well-worn books, including Martin Luther King Jr. conspiracy theorist William Pepper's Orders to Kill. Her occupation is older than the museum itself. After efforts to persuade or force her to leave failed, the city and museum officials reached a live-and-let-live standoff, and Smith became a sort of unauthorized adjunct exhibit, part living history, part protest. In addition to her books, snapshots, and laminated copies of news articles, she has a website, fulfillthedream.net.

I wanted to find out what she thinks about the current occupation movement and what advice, if any, she might have for the protesters about logistics, determination, publicity, or anything else. The day before, I briefly visited the Occupy Memphis site, sprinkled with tents and tarps, and asked a woman how long she planned to stay. "Until things change," she said. Well, I thought, the weather will change for the worse a lot sooner than the distribution of wealth in the U.S.A., and that will test the resolve of the protesters.

But Jacqueline Smith didn't want to talk much about that. She is, as political consultants say, relentlessly on message.

"I really haven't given any thought to what they're doing," she said. "I have to stay focused on what the issue is here."

The neighborhood around the museum has gentrified somewhat, but there are still blighted areas nearby. The museum is in the midst of a campaign to raise $40 million for a major renovation. Last month, Mulberry Street was taken over for the River Arts Fest. There were bands, dancing, and beer vendors, and the stage was sponsored by a casino. Smith was dismayed.

"This is sacred ground and should be respected as such, like Ground Zero," she said. "There is no room for festivals and alcohol on the property. That is not being done in Washington where you go to pay respects to Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Or Graceland. Those places insist upon silence and respect."

Has she ever thought about packing up and moving on?

"Absolutely not. I feel this is the least I can do because of all that Dr. King did for us."

What's it like living alone on the street?

"I won't make any comments about that. The issue is that there is not affordable housing in this area on Mulberry Street."

Does she get hassled or urged to move?

"I make no comment on that either. I have no problems with the people working at the museum. I am here because of the system."

Does she get help with the website?

"I will not make any comment on that. It has been up for years. It is a homemade website."

And with that I gave her a cup of coffee and some chocolate rolls and said good-bye. A short while later she called me to add a comment on the protesters outside City Hall.

"They are doing what Dr. King was doing back in the Sixties. Their right to protest is guaranteed under the Constitution. As far as their issue, I don't know, but they have a right to raise their issue, the same as I do and as Dr. King did."

If I am still around 10 or 23 years from now, I fully expect to see Jacqueline Smith at the corner of Mulberry Street, behind the fire station and across from the National Civil Rights Museum, with her tattered books, blue tarps, winter coat, and her undying resolve.

They were two famous and famously private men with no intention of moving to Memphis until illness and opportunity brought them here from California later in life.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs got a life-saving liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital in 2009. He stayed three months. Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs adds details to the story, including a touching anecdote about Jobs visiting Sun Studio and helping his tour guide get a job at iTunes.

NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West came to Memphis in 2002 as general manager of the Memphis Grizzlies. He stayed five years, during which time the Grizzlies made the NBA Playoffs three times and West was named Executive of the Year in 2004. That was "the proudest moment in my long career as an executive," he says in West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life, written with Jonathan Coleman. But West was not a happy guy, as this dreary tour de psyche makes clear, and even walked out of his own surprise farewell party.

Two books on two legends, published in the same month. Let's start with Jobs.

As he told the nation on CBS' 60 Minutes Sunday, Isaacson interviewed Jobs 40 times with the understanding that he would write a warts-and-all biography. The subchapter on Memphis is only six pages of the 571-page book, which is scant, considering the medical, ethical, and financial issues in saving Steve Jobs, who would live 30 more productive months.

"There is no legal way for a patient, even one as wealthy as Jobs, to jump the queue, and he didn't," Isaacson writes.

Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell, got him on the organ recipient list in Tennessee and California at the same time.

"Such multiple listing is not discouraged by policy, even though critics say it favors the rich, but it is difficult," Isaacson says.

Jobs flew to Memphis on March 21, 2009. Dr. James Eason transplanted the liver of a man in his mid-20s who was killed in a car crash, but Jobs developed pneumonia and nearly died. Eason took complete charge of his care and recovery. Jobs would eat only fruit smoothies, sampling seven or eight of them at a time.

Before leaving Memphis (and selling his house in Midtown to Eason for $850,000), Jobs and a small group of friends made an after-hours visit to Sun Studio. Their guide did such a good job that Jobs suggested he be hired at iTunes. Friends identified the guide as David Brookings, a musician and songwriter who moved to San Jose in 2009. He declined to be interviewed for this column.

Steve Jobs came to Memphis to save his life. Jerry West came to Memphis to save the Grizzlies. His presence gave the team and its adopted hometown instant and badly needed credibility at a time when FedExForum was still on the drawing board.

West asked owner Michael Heisley "for an amount of money that I was sure he would find unreasonable, but he didn't."

He was "shocked" to find the poverty in Memphis even worse than his native West Virginia or Los Angeles. And he was treated "as if I were Elvis, back from the dead, though people in Memphis are convinced he is still alive."

West By West lost me long before I read this hokum. Like millions of mediocre athletes in the Fifties and Sixties, I dreamed of shooting jump shots like Jerry West or hitting baseballs like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. By the time we were in college, it had dawned on most of us that our heroes screwed around, drank, had egos, and knew despair and discrimination. We were not clueless.

West's demons included depression, a temper, stalkers, and shyness. He made a pact with the volatile Heisley that if the owner raised his voice to him "I will be out the door before it has a chance to shut."

The marriage lasted five years. West lived in the Southwind gated community and has kind words for James Davis clothing store and Ronnie Grisanti's, his favorite watering hole. West watched the home games from his suite, to which, a friend said, he "basically invited the world and made it into America's living room."

What? You say you weren't invited?

West has a way of telegraphing his punches. He "liked Sidney [Lowe] very much" but fired him as head coach. He "always liked Mike [Fratello] personally" but hated his coaching style. He "liked Geoff Calkins personally" but felt he should have been supportive.

He should talk to R.C. Johnson about that.