MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1996
Sure, the odds are long, but ”I will be in a feature film this year, one way or another,” African American actor Markhum Stansbury Jr. says. ”I guarantee you that.” ”I tend to focus on the positive,” the former Memphian said in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles Wednesday. ”My personal motto is you don’t stop, you keep going.” Stansbury moved to the West Coast to pursue a career in the film industry four years ago. He has appeared in small-venue live theater productions such as Raisin in the Sun and Blues for Mister Charley, has done advertising spots for Nike and Honda, and published a book of poetry, “Strugglin’ 2 B Free.” The son of Mark Stansbury, interim president of Shelby State Community College, Stansbury moved to California after winning an acting award at Georgetown University. He said the dearth of Oscar nominations for Black actors doesn’t surprise him. ”If you make 100 pictures, maybe 15 or 20 of them will be good,” he said. ”If you only have three or four out of that 100 with Black stars and Black supporting actors, their chances are lowered right from the beginning.”
50 years ago — 1971
A skink is a strange little fellow with a splendid little trick. Grab him by the tail and he shucks it off, scampering safely away leaving the tail in your hand. He comes from a large family — perhaps 400 members — of small lizards that constitute the family Scincidae: There are blue-tongued skinks and fire-tailed skinks and White’s skinks and King’s skinks, and major skinks and tree skinks and Yakka skinks, and even in Germany as apothecary skinks. All of which leads into the announcement that the Overton Park Zoo has just received two new skinks, a Cunningham’s skink and an Australian skink. They arrived along with a shipment of snakes and lizards for the new reptile house.
75 years ago — 1946
The little girl with the sunny smile who always waved to the trains from her wheelchair on the front porch of her farm house is leaving tonight for the hospital thanks to the kind-heartedness of Memphis railroad men and the Shrine. This passenger will be a 14year-old girl who will be lifted in her wheelchair, from a farm wagon and carried aboard the train, where a drawing room will be waiting for her in one of the Pullman coaches. The child, Minnie Rose Webb, is being taken to the Shrine’s Hospital for Crippled Children at St. Louis, one of the 15 free institutions of its kind the fraternity operates.
100 years ago — 1921
In a signed statement, issued yesterday, Mayor Paine denies the story which has been circulated, that W.J. Hayes, former chief and later inspector of police, has been in conference with him at any time. The first story published in regard to the matter followed a brief visit recently paid by Mr. Hayes to the mayor’s secretary, Clifford Davis, from whom he sought to ascertain the date of the approaching referendum election involving a number of bond issues. The visit occurred at a time when John B. Edgar’s resignation as commissioner had been received, but before it had been acted upon.