Junior jubilee
25 years ago — 1993
The year was 1927, the same year of the first partially talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer. In an empty store in Sheffield, Ala., M.A. Lightman Sr. set up rows of metal chairs, turned off the lights and switched on his destiny. Regular movie watching in the South was only a shadow of what it would later become when Lightman launched his business, Malco Theatres Inc., even though it had been 31 years since the first showing of a motion picture in a theater, in New York. Today, the Memphis-based, family-owned company operates 143 movie screens in five states and controls the majority of ticket sales in the Memphis area with its 61 screens at seven theaters and two drive-ins. Malco employs 800 in full-time and parttime jobs at its headquarters and 42 theaters in the MidSouth.
50 years go — 1968
Increased salaries and fringe benefit payments for the city’s 9,026 employees are the biggest items in the $7,248,000 budget increase requested yesterday by Mayor Henry Loeb. The two items total $4,400,000 or 60 per cent of the total increase. An additional $300,000 is provided for new personnel. Pay raises won recently by the city’s sanitation workers are expected to total $558,000 in the new fiscal year. Another million dollars is sought for 5 per cent raises for other city employees, except firemen and policemen who are scheduled to receive 10 per cent raises. Those will cost about 2.1 million.
75 years ago — 1943
Allied Headquarters, North Africa — The British Eighth Army has captured Takrouna, German stronghold, in a hand-to-hand bayonet fight in which German troops were hurled to their deaths from cliffs. The British have now driven a deep wedge into the Axis mountain defense ring. To the northwest the British First Army has driven to within 23 miles of the city of Tunis.
100 years ago — 1918
Thousands of Memphis children, doing their bit for the war, marched down Main yesterday in a stirring appeal for the Liberty Bond drive. A special place of honor in the parade was held by a company of Confederate veterans. The drill of the Central High School cadets was so good that spectators showered them with $387 in coins.
125 years ago — 1893
The Republican newspapers in the North have heaped much unkind criticism on the first annual Southern Governors’ Convention, held last week in Richmond, Va. They are calling our governors the “new rebels” and one newspaper warns its readers “the South is on top.” Twentyseven years ago the South was bankrupt, her fields laid waste, her homes burned. Today she pays 50 million dollars in federal taxes annually to keep the northern editors in paper. If we are on top it is because the Southern people are the most courageous and resourceful people in history. Our governors met to promote our advantages to the world. Let the North tremble.