Goodbye to Memphis? Jimmy Ogle is history
Mike and Marc might leave. Sad, but not unimaginable. Professional athletes are professional vagabonds. But Jimmy Ogle? Can the creator of 32 distinct Memphis history walking tours walk away from his hometown?
Can the official Shelby County Historian leave Shelby County? Can The Peabody duckmaster take flight? Jimmy Ogle is the man who identified 157 distinct designs for manhole covers in Downtown Memphis. That’s the type of hometown commitment that a recruiting basketball coach can only dream of.
Jimmy Ogle leaving Memphis — where he was born on Nov. 14, 1952, in the old Baptist Memorial Hospital on Union Avenue — is like a fish leaving water.
Which actually is not a good analogy, because Ogle, apparently, doesn’t need to breathe.
Ask Ogle a question and then lean back because the answer will become the conversational equivalent of one of Ogle’s guided tours: a ramble through the byways, alleyways and thoroughfares of Memphis history, with stops on the deck of the Sultana or in the old Pop Tunes record shop on Summer Avenue or beneath the window Tom Cruise jumped through in “The Firm” or alongside whichever other celebrated landmark, vanished hot spot
or overlooked architectural curlicue hooks itself to his train of thought.
Although he stands 5-foot-9, Ogle was a basketball star at Memphis University School and at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), where the 29 points he scored in a game as a freshman is a record that still stands. He was a ubiquitous presence at Memphis sporting events, but his passion for local history eventually overtook his obsession with sports — a twist even he can’t quite explain.
“I had one history course in my life, and that was with Dr. Crawford over at Memphis State, and he’s still over there,” said Ogle, 66 (“that’s in years, not mileage, pal”). “History just became interesting to me.”
“It’s been good having Jimmy with us,” said the aforementioned Dr. Crawford — Dr. Charles Crawford, who has taught at the university since 1962 and written 20 books on Tennessee history. “He has stimulated interest in Memphis history, and the encyclopedia of facts he shares with tourists does nothing but good for the city.”
Added Ogle: “Everybody has an affinity, whether it’s quilting or being in a motorcycle gang or SEC tailgating. This is mine.”
Ogle doesn’t like the negative connotation of the word leaving. “I’m not leaving Memphis, I’m going somewhere,” he said. Whatever the verb, Ogle is moving from Memphis to Knoxville to be near his son, Jim Ogle Jr., and grandchildren, “so I can watch them grow up.” (He has no plans to become Knox County Historian. “I’m not trying to learn Knoxville,” he said.)
By a twist of fate, this relocation — the moving van arrives at Ogle’s High Point Terrace-area home on April 2 — comes just as Ogle’s hometown is gearing up to celebrate its bicentennial, as measured by its founding date of May 22, 1819. This means that Ogle has a lot more on his mind than packing a suitcase.
Over the next few weeks, there are awards to be won, honors to be acknowledged, and, especially, tours and lectures to be presented. Foremost among the latter is a free series of hourlong bicentennial talks at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum. Dubbed “Making Memphis: Storytelling with Jimmy Ogle,” the talks will take place at noon every Monday and Thursday, Feb. 4 to March 14; topics will include “Memphis in the Roaring ’20s,” “Women in Memphis History” and “Historic Tall Buildings,” to name a few. (For a full schedule, visit memphismuseums.org.)
On the way to becoming Shelby County’s most ubiquitous autodidact, Ogle held a series of jobs that encouraged and even inflamed his passion for history. (They also allowed him to save a little money, which is fortunate: All his tours and programs are free to the public, and he doesn’t get paid for doing them.)
After studying parks-and-recreation management at then-memphis State University, Ogle worked his way up to the position of deputy director of the Memphis Park Commission (now the Division of Parks and Neighborhoods) in 1984. He followed that with management or program positions with the Mud Island river park, the Memphis Queen Line riverboat company, the Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, the professional golf tournament, The Peabody (where he has been chief or associate duckmaster for years), Beale Street, and so on.
Naturally curious and gregarious, he began learning as much as he could about all these things, not only through research in various archives but through personal contact with such fonts of knowledge as Sam Phillips and Ernest Withers.
Meanwhile, he recognized what he called “a void” in Downtown tourism and education, and began collating his encyclopedia’s worth of scholarship and trivia into the form of various public tours and programs.
Such devotion could not go unappreciated. On March 24, 2014 — Ogle, of course, remembers the date — the Shelby County Commission named Ogle official Shelby County Historian, a post that pays “zero dollars a year,” Ogle said.
“And the rest is history,” he added, apparently not joking.
Still, he took to the title like a Peabody duck to Italian travertine marble lobby-fountain water. The “Shelby County Historian” designation adds an imprimatur of authority to Ogle’s highenergy renditions of history lessons, which currently take the form of 32 walking tours and 36 Powerpoint presentations on different aspects of Memphis past and present.
Whether the subject is odd (”The Great Union Avenue Manhole Cover and History Tour,” which launched his tour career in 2008) or undeniable (civil rights), Ogle warms up each audience with the same monologue, which he delivers in his signature Southern-accented rat-a-tat-tat.
“There’s no city in America that tells the story of American history better than Memphis,” says Ogle (who will have you convinced he’s right by the end of any of his tours).
“From early Native Americans and European explorers to 20th-century entrepreneurs; Civil War to civil rights; music to medicine; transportation, distribution, logistics... There’s about 468 good years of history here and I got about 150 hours in my head and I got about 40 minutes to talk to you about it, and that’s why I talk real fast.”
Says Ogle of this spiel: “You’d memorize it, too, if you said it 200 times a year.”
Ogle tries not to editorialize. “I’m a generalist, for sure,” he said. “I’m not a politician, I’m not an activist. My approach to history is ‘Just the facts, ma’am.’”
Even so, he realizes that the significance of certain facts changes over time. Memphis has a lot of history — in fact, the city is No. 6 in the nation in listings on the National Register of Historic Places, behind Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston and New Orleans. But only recently has Memphis begun to reckon seriously with the contributions of women, people of color, Native Americans and others, through such projects as the Women’s History Trail that Ogle is helping to develop.
“Half of our community is not talked about enough, except for music,” he said. “We stop at slavery and pick it up again at the sanitation strike, but there are a lot of accomplishments of lawyers and teachers and ministers and business people that are never talked about.”
Ogle said he plans to share as much of his expertise and as many of his files as possible with potential successors, including the members of the Downtown Memphis Commission’s hospitality team, the Blue Suede Brigade. But his self-motivation, motor mouth and overall pizzazz are probably irreplaceable.
In any case, Ogle said he will remain “valuable” for Memphis, even in Knoxville.
“All they talk about there is East Tennessee and Middle Tennessee,” he said. “But they are going to hear a lot about Memphis once I get there.”