MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1996
Memphis area stage productions took top honors at an American Association of Community Theatres state contest in Cookeville over the weekend. Theatre Memphis won first place with Nicky Silver’s Pterodactyls and will take it to a regional competition in Miami, Fla., in March. Pterodactyls is about an AIDS patient who comes home and wreaks havoc with his family. Kim Justis, who played the man’s sister, was named best actress in the contest. Germantown Community Theatre won first runner-up with a Tennessee Williams one-act, The Long Stay Cut Short (or The Unsatisfactory Supper). The theater is now entitled to take the production to the 1998 Southeastern Theatre Conference in Birmingham, Ala. Executive producer Joanne Malin said the board of directors hasn’t decided whether to go. The state contest is usually limited to eight entries. 50 years ago — 1971
Plans for a four-million-dollar, seven-story addition to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital were announced yesterday. The proposed expansion would add 21 inpatient beds to the present 25 and accommodate increased basic and clinical research activities, according to Edward F. Barry, chairman of the hospital’s board of governors. The 112,000 square feet of new space would be in seven floors plus a basement, to be constructed at the rear of the center wing of the present star-shaped facility at 332 North Lauderdale.
75 years ago — 1946
America must steer clear of the politics, theories and ideologies of authoritarian states and solve its own problems “in the light of our own democratic principles,” His Eminence, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, Archbishop of Chicago, said here yesterday. Paying his first visit to Memphis since his elevation to the cardinalate, he brought the message: “We must remember, with all our faults, we have been able to give more to our citizens than any other government in history.”
100 years ago — 1921
DETROIT – Married women on the city’s payroll whose husbands are employed are asked to resign their positions to make way for men out of work, Mayor James Cousens announced last night. The mayor’s decision was in line with a recommendation by the local unemployment committee. Women in virtually every office at city hall will be affected. Numerous factories recently have dropped married women employees whose jobs were not necessary to their support.
125 years ago — 1896
Senator E. C. Walthal and Mrs. Walthal of Mississippi are in Memphis today, guests of Mr. and Mrs. J. B. Ross on Bellevue.