Who’s the patsy?

Delta Air Lines’ scandalous price gouging in the Memphis market is nothing short of criminal. Legendary investor Warren Buffett is credited with saying, “If you’ve been in the (poker) game for 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

Six weeks ago, WMC-TV reported that “Memphis Mayor A C Wharton and Delta CEO Richard Anderson have known each other for years.” And they meet periodically, the mayor added. “Wharton says Delta’s top dog assured him the airline is committed to Memphis,” the report said.

In reference to a recent meeting with Anderson, the mayor said, “If there’s one thing we get out of this interview (it) is that this boils down to economics and competition.” The article fails to reference who the “we” might be, but we the customers of the Memphis airport consider Wharton the real patsy in this game.

What a simpleton the mayor is to compare Delta’s outrageous fees to the “which came first” analogy of the chicken or the egg. He asks, “Are people going to Arkansas because of the high fares or are the fares high because people are going elsewhere?” It’s neither. The fares are high be- cause you are holding us (the customers of the Memphis airport) out as the patsy. A July 4 article in this newspaper quoted Warton as saying, “I’m not permitted to give many details. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be able to speak in more detail.” We’re still waiting.

Meanwhile, here are the details for the mayor. A current search on Delta’s website reflects the roundtrip airfare from Nashville to Dallas as $473.10 with layovers in Memphis each way. However, if you were to only use the Memphis segments of this exact same trip, your airfare skyrockets to $971.10. Excuse me?

Customers of the Memphis airport need a new deck. These cards are marked. The chicken or the egg? What a patsy. icon Marguerite Piazza at the age of 86 (Aug. 3 article). The New York Times, in their obituary on Marguerite, said it best: “Marguerite Piazza had a voice that could pack a concert hall and a figure that transfixed television audiences; she was a pop star, in other words, just one among the ever-changing panoply that graces the glossies — except that she gained fame for singing opera.”

I had the privilege to have known Marguerite going back to childhood, and what a privilege it was. Her “God-given” voice, musical and artistic talents charmed and entertained many in Memphis, across our country and around the world.

Through my St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital board membership I got to work with her for a number of years in helping raise funds for our great hospital through the gala that she started in 1975; as all of the gala chairmen who worked with her quickly found out, no was a word that did not exist in Marguerite’s vocabulary; her determination, grit, generosity and grace were indeed part of what